It started a few years ago when Juliana Pache got stuck on a crossword puzzle.
She was unfamiliar with the clue. It got her thinking about what a crossword puzzle would look like if the clues and answers included more of some of the topics she Was familiar with black history and black pop culture thanks to their own identities and interests.
When she couldn’t find anything like that, Pache decided to do it herself. In January 2023, she founded blackcrossword.com, a website that offers a free mini crossword puzzle every day. And on Tuesday, her first book, Black Crossword: 100 mini puzzles celebrating the African diaspora.
Nearly 111 years after the first crossword puzzle appeared in a New York newspaper, the timing is right. In recent years, there has been increasing debate about the presentation of crossword puzzles, from who creates them to the words that can be used as answers to how the clues are worded. There have been efforts to expand the notion of the kind of “general knowledge” players need to complete the puzzles.
“I had never done a crossword puzzle before,” says 32-year-old Pache, laughing. “But I thought to myself, ‘I can figure it out.'”
And she did.
“Made for black people”
Each puzzle on Pace’s website contains at least a few clues and answers related to black culture. The site’s slogan: “When you know, you know.”
The book is packed with puzzles that she estimates about 2,200 people solve on her website every day – squares made up of five lines with five spaces each. She wants at least three of the clues to reference aspects of black cultures from around the world.
Pache is from Queens, New York, and has family ties to Cuba and the Dominican Republic. She started out with several goals in mind. Most importantly, she wanted to create something that would bring joy to black people.
“I do it with black people in mind,” she said. “And if someone likes it and learns something from it, that’s a bonus, but that’s not my focus.”
Through the references and words she uses, she also tries to showcase the diversity of black communities and cultures and encourage people from different parts of the African diaspora to get to know each other.
“I also want to make it challenging, not just for people who are interested in black culture, but for people within black culture who are interested in other regions,” she said. “Part of my mission in this is to highlight black people from all over the world and black culture from all over the world. And I think … that keeps us learning about each other.”
What exactly is “general knowledge”?
While it may seem like a game on the surface, the knowledge base required for crossword puzzles says something about what kind of knowledge is considered “general” and “universal” and what is not, says Michelle Pera-McGhee, a data journalist at The puddinga site focused on data-driven stories.
In 2020, Pera-McGhee launched a data project in which she analyzed several decades of crossword puzzles from a handful of the most popular media outlets. The project evaluated clues and answers that used the names of real people to determine a breakdown by gender and race.
Not surprisingly, the data showed that men were disproportionately represented more often than women and that white people were also more likely to appear in the images than members of racial and ethnic minorities.
It’s “interesting because it’s supposed to be simple,” Pera-McGhee said. “You want to … ideally point to things that everyone knows because everyone learns about them in school or wherever. … What are the things that we decide we should all know?”
There are efforts to make crossword puzzles more accessible and representative, including the recently launched fellowship for puzzle constructors from underrepresented groups at The New York Timesone of the most popular crossword puzzles ever. Puzzle writers have created puzzles aimed at LGBTQ+ communities and women, using a wider range of references, as Pache does.
The bottom line is, “it’s really cool to see our culture reflected in this medium,” Pache said.
And, Pera-McGhee said, it can be cool to learn new things.
“It’s kind of rewarding when there are things in the puzzle that you don’t know about,” she said. “It’s not that the experience of not knowing is bad. It’s just that maybe it should be distributed along with the experience of knowing. Both are kind of good in crossword solving.”
