Thank You Thursdays: Ruthie Ackerman

Ruthie Ackerman has written a lot of amazing work about Liberia–both past and present–as well as Liberian immigrants in the U.S. I had the good fortune of having coffee with her a month or two ago and was so struck by what a committed, courageous journalist she is, but even more, a truly incredible person. In her bio she explains:

It was following my second trip to Africa that I decided I had to do something. I could no longer just write and photograph people in communities far away from my own and then slip back into my comfortable life as if nothing ever happened. There had to be a way to show the world what I had seen, and that is when I made the decision to pursue a career in journalism. After one year in Cape Maclear and countless stories of adventures and hardships traveling in the region, I applied to New York University’s Master’s program in journalism and received a full scholarship. But before I left I promised myself that I would return to Cape Maclear someday to write stories that mattered about the women and people I encountered.

Ruthie has a sophisticated understanding of the complexity of telling others’ stories (she and I hashed this out at length), and a real commitment to vivid reporting that reveals something about human nature, war, gender etc. She’s actually in the process of working on a book about a group of Liberian immigrants in Staten Island, and meanwhile, is managing a really interesting blogging project that involves those folks–as well as a whole crew still in Liberia–to create their own content, use their own voices, tell their own stories. It’s called Ceasefire Liberia.
It’s exciting to see a forum where Liberians are speaking on their own behalf, instead of having their stories told through the lens of a white, Western journalist. I appreciate that while Ruthie is working on her own version of this story, she’s inspiring her subjects to develop their own work as well. It’s the kind of model I’m interested in following as journalism, as a field, starts to acknowledge the fallacy of objectivity and the intimacy (for so many) between writing or documentary work and activism.