NEW YORK — It started a few years ago when Juliana Pache was doing a crossword puzzle and got stuck.
She wasn’t familiar with the reference the clue made. It got her thinking about what a crossword puzzle would look like if the clues and answers included more topics she WAS familiar with, thanks to her own identity and interests — black history and black popular culture.
When she couldn’t find anything like it, Pache decided to do it herself. In January 2023, she created blackcrossword.com, a site that offers a free mini crossword puzzle every day. And Tuesday marked the release of her first book, “Black Crossword: 100 Mini Puzzles Celebrating the African Diaspora.”
It’s a good time, nearly 111 years after the first crossword puzzle appeared in a New York newspaper. In recent years, there’s been increasing discussion of representation in crosswords, from who creates them to what words can be used for answers and how the clues are worded. There’s a push to expand the idea of the kinds of “common knowledge” players are expected to fill in.
“I’d never done a crossword puzzle before,” Pache, 32, said with a laugh. “But I thought, I can do it.”
And she did.
Every puzzle on Pache’s site contains at least a few clues and answers that relate to black culture. The site’s tagline: “When you know it, you know it.”
The book is filled with the kind of puzzles she says some 2,200 people play on her site every day: five-line squares, each with five squares. She aims for at least three of the clues to reference aspects of black cultures around the world.
Pache, who was born in the Queens borough of New York City to a family of Cuban and Dominican descent, had a few goals in mind when she started out. She wanted to create something that black people would enjoy, most of all.
I “make it with black people in mind,” she said. “And if someone else likes it, they learn from it, that’s a bonus, but it’s not my focus.”
She also tries to show the diversity in black communities and cultures with the clues and words she uses, and encourages people from different parts of the African diaspora to learn more about 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 here is to put a spotlight on black people everywhere, black culture everywhere. And I think … that we continue to learn from each other.”
While it may seem like just a game at first glance, the knowledge base required for crosswords does reveal something about what knowledge is considered “general” and “universal” and what is not, according to Michelle Pera-McGhee, a data journalist at The Pudding, a site that focuses on data-driven stories.
In 2020, Pera-McGhee undertook a data project that analyzed crossword puzzles from a handful of well-known media outlets across the decades. The project evaluated clues and answers that used real people’s names to create a breakdown by gender and race.
Not surprisingly, the data shows that men are disproportionately more likely to appear on the list than women overall, and that white people are also more likely to appear than people from other racial and ethnic minorities.
It’s “interesting because it should be easy,” Pera-McGhee said. “You want to … ideally point to things that people, everybody knows because everybody learns about it in school or wherever. … What are the things that we decide we all should know?”
There are efforts to make crosswords more accessible and representative, including the recently launched fellowship for puzzle creators from underrepresented groups at The New York Times, one of the most high-profile crosswords around. Puzzle creators have created puzzles that are focused on LGBTQ+ communities, on women, using a wider range of references, as Pache does.
“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 enriching to have 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 spread out over the experience of knowing. Both are kind of good experiences in crossword solving.”