Right-wing
media outlets such as Fox News have long pushed
racist narratives to further their goals. And,
outlets like the New York Times—the so-called
“liberal media”—do too little, too late, to push
back; it falls to the ranks of independent media
outlets to create and promote counternarratives
based on racial justice.
This
is not a new phenomenon. Pacifica Radio, where I
spent nearly two decades as a radio programmer,
houses in its archive a
rich library of recordings of civil rights
leaders who are considered iconic heroes today,
but who, during their lifetimes, were generally
ignored or even vilified by the establishment
press.
From
talks by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa
Parks to James Baldwin and Angela Davis, and
almost everyone in between, Pacifica Radio’s
journalists painstakingly recorded speeches and
interviews featuring movement leaders and
activists of color considered too controversial
for the white-dominated press. Meanwhile, their
mainstream counterparts only found the courage
to do the same decades later, after society had
concluded that the Black Freedom movement was on
the right side of history.
That
trend continues today.
Believing
Black Accounts of Injustice
On
December 22, 2014, I invited Patrisse
Cullors, co-founder of Black Lives Matter, for
an interview on my live morning drive-time radio
show on 90.7 FM KPFK in Los Angeles (also
televised on Free Speech TV). Together with her
colleagues Alicia Garza and Opal Tometi, Cullors
had helped to coin and popularize the hashtag
“#BlackLivesMatter” in summer 2013, after the
acquittal of George Zimmerman for the murder of
Trayvon Martin in Florida.
Cullors,
now a best-selling author and a sought-after
speaker, at that time was not as well known to
corporate media outlets and was rarely offered a
platform to discuss ideas that corporate media
outlets felt uncomfortable tackling.
She told
me the origin story of
the simple, but powerful phrase “Black Lives
Matter” in the aftermath of Zimmerman’s
acquittal:
“I just lost it, I was crying
and disturbed. We have all this evidence that
this young man was hunted by George Zimmerman,
and yet George Zimmerman still gets off the
hook. So, what do our lives mean?… For me, it
was this intense amount of grief that came
over me. But I’m also an organizer, and so I
quickly moved my grief into action, and I just
started going on social media and started
writing [to] Black people and saying that I
love them and checking on other Black people.
“Myself and Alicia Garza got
into a Facebook conversation and she said this
thing—to Black folks in particular who were
saying, ‘We should have known better, of
course they were gonna treat us this way’—she
started saying to folks, ‘You know, I’m always
going to be surprised. I’m never going to let
them numb me from saying that our lives don’t
matter.’ And she said, ‘Our lives matter,
Black lives matter.’
“And then under the Facebook
thread, I hashtagged ‘Black Lives Matter.’ And
so, from there, literally in that moment, it
was like a light bulb for so many Black
people, and on social media at that point. And
I started tagging Black folks saying, ‘Your
life matters, Black Lives Matter.’ I started
tagging all my Black friends. I got on the
phone with [Alicia] that night. We said we
wanted this to be a project. And so, a couple
of days later on July 15, riKu Matsuda from
‘Flip the Script’ here [on KPFK] called me up
to be on the show and I was going to talk
about Black Lives Matter. It happened very
organically.”
When
I asked her if there was a link between the
police killings of Black people and the history
of Black people being lynched in America,
Cullors said,
“I think Black Lives Matter [activists]… are
making those connections. And I think mainstream
media is not talking about this.”
Although
most news media in 2020 temporarily and
superficially embraced
the idea behind Black Lives Matter—the simple notion that Black
people are human—they largely ignored it for
the first seven years. Luckily, in the
meantime Cullors had a platform to speak about
her crucial work: the independent press.
‘If It Bleeds, It Leads’
Cullors
had brought with her to the 2014 interview a
young woman named Jasmine Richards who had
become newly politicized that summer when a
white police officer named Darren Wilson killed
a young Black teenager named Mike Brown in
Ferguson, Missouri. Richards went on to lead a
chapter of Black Lives Matter in Pasadena,
California, where I live.
In
what was one of her first
live interviews,
Richards made
an astute observation about
why protesters had engaged in property damage
during the racial justice uprisings in Ferguson:
“They weren’t looting and messing up things to
take them. They were burning things and messing
things up so people could pay attention, so CNN
could pay attention, ’cause that’s the only way
a Black life would matter, is if you mess up
some stuff and go crazy… What you see on TV is
not really what it is.”
The
idea that “if it bleeds, it leads” has long been
a corporate media mantra, one that activists
have taken note of. But independent journalists
have generally refused to succumb to such
pressures. Freed from the yoke of ratings and
market valuations, independent journalists were
able to explore and embrace the idea behind
“Black Lives Matter” years before the corporate
media caught on.
Similarly,
independent media did not need to see videotaped
proof of racist police brutality to understand
that it was a systemic problem. In the era
before smartphones, police claims (“he reached
for his gun!”) countered those of Black
survivors, and corporate media readily accepted
law enforcement’s word. But independent media
outlets, understanding the power dynamic between
police and their victims, did not require proof
of Black people’s word. If Black folks said they
experienced racist police brutality, that was
reason enough to investigate and report.
Although
there are exceptions, the narratives at work in
independent media spaces have generally
questioned authority and been mindful of Black
people’s humanity and truthfulness, whereas
corporate media outlets have tended to reproduce
an internalized narrative that police—and all
other authorities—are almost always right.
Connecting
the Dots to Build Racial Justice Narratives
Reluctant
to connect dots and identify patterns in the
public interest, corporate media outlets have
often presented stories as if they are isolated
incidents unconnected from one another. Malkia
Devich-Cyril, founding director of MediaJustice,
noted, “In stories about people of color, about
Black people, in particular, the [media]
coverage ends up being episodic versus thematic.
History and context are lost in these stories.”
For consumers of this type of programming, the
political landscape can appear bewildering and
overwhelming, best left to the “experts” to make
sense of.
But
context matters, especially in the case of Black
Lives Matter. When presented in isolation, the
phrase can appear jarring to those who enjoy
white racial privilege. It can suggest that
Black people are asserting their sovereign right
to live in a way that’s confrontational to
notions of racial hierarchy. It should not have
surprised us, then, that the defensive
rejoinders of “All Lives Matter” and “Blue Lives
Matter” emerged soon after #BlackLivesMatter was
formulated.
When
contextualized within the historical arc of
racial violence facing Black America—tracing
back to the barbarity of enslavement, the
horrors of Jim Crow segregation, the systemic
and institutional racist structures that
persist—the meaning behind the phrase “Black
Lives Matter” becomes crystal clear. Black
Americans are demanding that the nation start
valuing their lives, history, and rights, for it
simply hasn’t done so.
It
is common practice within independent media to
invoke history, to link seemingly disparate
phenomena via common threads, to see the
patterns that emerge, and to be unafraid to
craft narratives with long historical arcs. This
is one aspect of what sets us apart from
corporate media. And it is what helps readers
and viewers of such media to make better sense
of the world and its injustices.
In
contrast, by reporting isolated stories
with
little background or historical
framing,
corporate media outlets rely on
the
internalized racist narratives
promoted
by right-wing media outlets to
fill
in the blanks for readers and viewers.
This
commentary is
an excerpt adapted
from
chapter two of Rising
Up: The
Power
of Narrative in Pursuing Racial
Justice by
Sonali Kolhatkar. Copyright ©
2023
by Sonali Kolhatkar. Reprinted with
the
permission of City Lights
Books. www.citylights.com.
It was
produced
for the web by Economy
for All,
a
project of the Independent Media
Institute.
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