There was a time when “Black to the Back” was an instruction. Today, the words have disappeared, and much has changed. Yet looking at the covers of our magazines, I began to wonder whether the instruction had simply become less visible.
A friend once joked that with everything I’d done—from designing the livery for an airline and training a world boxing champion to creating Meta-Age and launching the Meta-Age NHS Golden Ticket campaign with the support of NHS North West and Central London and David Lloyd Clubs—I would probably end up on the cover of GQ next.
I laughed.
The statistical chance of that happening was probably around three per cent. But given some of the odds I’d already overcome, three per cent seemed surprisingly generous.
The conversation stayed with me. Not because I expected to appear on the cover of GQ, but because it made me think about who does. Looking back over years of browsing magazine covers—GQ, Men’s Health, Men’s Fitness, The Telegraph Magazine and The Times Magazine—I realised I had begun noticing a pattern.
It wasn’t the absence of Black men that caught my attention.
It was what they appeared to have to become before they were visible.
Black cover stars certainly existed. Idris Elba. Barack Obama. Denzel Washington. Lewis Hamilton. Will Smith. Men whose achievements had already made them internationally recognised. Oscar winners. Presidents. World champions. Cultural icons.
They had unquestionably earned their place.
But as I looked through more covers, another question emerged.
Where were the Black equivalents of the successful television presenter, the respected fitness coach, the bestselling author, the entrepreneur with an interesting story, or the health expert? White cover stars frequently appeared because they were successful, influential or simply fascinating. They did not always have to be global celebrities before their stories were considered worth telling.
For many white public figures, visibility accompanies success. For many Black public figures, it appears to follow exceptionality.
The pattern was not absence.
The pattern was exceptionality.
The old instruction has gone. But perhaps it has evolved.
That matters because magazine covers do far more than sell magazines. They quietly define who society considers aspirational. They shape our understanding of success, influence and possibility. Every cover sends an implicit message about who belongs at the centre of public life.
For decades, Black excellence has rightly been celebrated. Yet somewhere beneath those remarkable stories sits another group that receives far less attention: the successful Black entrepreneur, the respected clinician, the fitness expert, the broadcaster, the academic, the business leader. People whose achievements are significant, whose work shapes lives and whose stories are every bit as inspiring—not because they are extraordinary, but because they are attainable.
When visibility is reserved primarily for the exceptional, aspiration itself becomes distorted.
The message, however unintended, is that before you can be seen, you must first become extraordinary.
Looking back over decades of magazine covers, the pattern appears remarkably consistent. British GQ, first published in 1985, featured Idris Elba on its cover in 2013—almost three decades after the magazine launched.
In September 2020, Men’s Health UK featured Patrick Hutchinson on its cover following the Black Lives Matter protests. Hutchinson was not an actor, musician or sportsman. He was a personal trainer who had carried an injured counter-protester to safety during a demonstration. His story was extraordinary—and that, perhaps, was the point. The reasons behind those editorial decisions may be debated, but they point towards a broader question about visibility rather than representation alone.
Academic research has reached similar conclusions. A 2021 analysis of Men’s Health UK found that while white men dominated representation across all categories, Black men were disproportionately framed through athleticism and physicality rather than expertise, leadership or intellect.
They were more likely to appear as bodies than as minds. More likely to be celebrated for what they could do than for what they knew.
Every society decides what ordinary success looks like.
Visibility is never neutral.
Who gets to represent success?
If one group regularly sees people who look like them celebrated while they are still climbing the mountain, while another primarily sees people who have already reached the summit, aspiration begins to operate according to different rules. For one, success feels proximate. For the other, it feels like a lottery—available only to the genetically gifted, the freakishly talented, the one-in-a-million.
That is not a message any editor intends to send.
But it is the message that lands.
Because if one group is routinely celebrated for being successful while another becomes visible only after becoming exceptional, then equality of opportunity has still not become equality of visibility.
Until success itself becomes enough, exceptional will remain the price of being seen.
