This is meant to be humorous. It’s an Italian advertisement (:41)….for laundry detergent (via Matt Stroud at Next American City, and Feministing before that):
The mind boggles.
The United States government has officially sanctioned itself as in the business of human trafficking. Like the international sex trade, the federal and state governments attach monetary value to bodies: they sell lives and futures for profit. Unlike the sex industry and the adoption hierarchy, however, this form of human trafficking privileges the bodies of Black, Brown and poor youth. The business is the prison-industrial complex: an entire economy and industry based upon “putting people in cages.”
Books Not Bars is a documentary that is a digital media advocacy project that documents the activist responses to California’s Proposition 21, in which the state would have built a “superjail,” a structure that was to be the largest per capita juvenile detention center in the country. This superjail, Van Jones, National Director of the Books Not Bars Campaign, calls a “monument to racism.” But I would extend this brilliant phrase even further: we have merely replaced slavery, an institution of racism, with its contemporary form—prisons—which are simply another institution and economy of racism.
And like the photographs of lynchings discussed by Smith, the criminalization of youth of color terrorizes both Whites and communities of color—further reifying the hegemonic social order. As the lynching photographs did at the turn of the twentieth century and as current images of murdered and tortured Iraqis do, the prison-industrial complex and the media’s visual construction of it, say more about whiteness than they do about those being warehoused, disposed of, erased and silenced. Importantly, the media also plays a “doubleness” in the case of the prison-industrial complex, where it both constructs this issue at the same time as it provides a format for introducing to the public at large information that the mainstream either warps or silences while also serving as a successful medium for resistance; as is the case with Books Not Bars. Regardless: race is visible.
Costing over 10 times as much to keep a young person in a juvenile justice facility then it does to educate them, the prison-industrial complex and the school-to-prison pipeline are current tentacles in a long history of America’s war on youth, and they offer a way to traffic and warehouse poor, youth of color. This documentary critically contributes to this conversation. As James Bell, Staff Attorney at the Youth Law Center remarks in Books Not Bars, the U.S.:
“is a society that does not like teenagers and likes to keep them at arms length. And when you add coloredness to it, it leads to fear.”
Public knowledge is, inherently, the sum of what the public knows. And what the public knows is a direct result of what the media tells it. Given that the majority of the U.S. receives its information through major media outlets—which are structurally and systemically raced, classed and gendered—the public is grossly, “profoundly, exponentially misinformed” by the media about the accurate account of youth crime, and therefore the “public has little context to judge” this issue other than what the media, or news, constructs and disseminates. Media is involved in the business of “the production of unreality.” For example, only 15% of all violent crimes are committed by youth, and yet the public thinks that 60% of violent crime is committed by youth. Yet this misimpression is also racialized: with African American adolescents being arrested at rate 48 times their White counterparts. The message is clear: we are not only pervading our war on youth, but as Vincent Schiraldi, President of Justice Policy Institute reminds us:
“Black kids matter less than white kids.”
Books Not Bars also delicately challenges society’s fear, distrust and dislike of youth, where they are the problem, by offering a perspective of youth as the solution. (For a discussion of the historical roots of the racialized construction of youth delinquency, see “Tracing the Historical Origins of Youth Delinquency & Violence: Myths & Realities About Black,” by Dr. William Cross). The message of activism in Books Not Bars is also achieved through its macro stance, locating the problem in systems, and not on individual bodies. It asks not about what youth behaviors are, but instead about what the structural arrangements are facilitate the proliferation of the prison-industrial complex.
Despite the prison-industrial complex and the criminalization of youth being an issue that invades the social, political, economic, historical, and human rights fabric of our society (or as James Bell says, “the civil rights, human rights issue of the 21st Century), Books Not Bars does not steer us into believing we are in imminent social doom. Effective for its use of a variety of visual and audio imagery, Books Not Bars weaves together a fine balance of information and history with a variety of successful, current activist campaigns and, most importantly, with a persistent theme of the way that the audience can get involved in fighting this issue; this documentary creates—as the finest of digital media advocacy does—“a space for action.”
It is worth mentioning, that as a result of the Books Not Bars Campaign and the Youth Force Coalition’s work, they were able to force a withdrawal of the $2.3 million dollars the state had earmarked to build the superjail.
~ Jessica Ruglis, PhD Candidate
CUNY-Graduate Center
I admit it. Trolling for news about racism can be a bit of a downer. And, when I first heard what happened on the Q train on the local television news last night, I was braced for the usual ka-thud of ‘bummer’ that runs through my head when hearing yet another news item about racism, hate crimes and anti-Semitism. I know, not very intellectually sophisticated, but there you have it.
And then, the story took an unexpected, Capra-esque, turn.
Short clips (2:40) from local tv affiliates are already up on YouTube. It’s definitely worth watching to the end for the redemption:
For those who’d rather skim than watch and listen, a young Jewish couple, Walter Adler and Maria Parsheva, got on the Q train and said “Happy Hanukkah” to the folks on the train. A group of white christians took exception, started getting aggressive, and one guy lifted up his shirt sleeve to reveal a tatoo of Jesus and said, “you killed him.” Very original. Then, the “Caucasians” (as they’re referred to throughout) started beating the crap out of the Jewish couple and no one did anything….until a Muslim guy from Bangladesh, Hassan Askari, stepped in, stopped the fight, and took a beating for his trouble. And, now Adler and Askari are friends (or, at least friendly); Askari attended a Hanukkah celebration with Adler. There are a number of memorable quotes, but this one, from the NYPost, sort of tickles me:
“A random Muslim guy jumped in and helped a Jewish guy on Hanukkah - that’s a miracle,” said Adler, an honors student at Hunter College.
There was no information included in the report about whether or not Adler had ever taken a sociology course. The other favorite quote from the clip is when Adler says that this is a “tragic step for New York City because we’re like the Mecca or the Jerusalem of multiculturalism.” I don’t know whether or not it’s a miracle, but it’s certainly an example of some pretty powerful individual agency to confront a decidedly nasty situation. As an act of resistance, it reminds me of the response in Billings, MT. to anti-Semitism, or, more recently, the pink t-Shirt response to homophobia from Nova Scotia. There are lots of lessons to be taken from this incident on the Q Train. And, since it’s finals week and the holiday season, I hope you’ll indulge me a little Capra-esque analysis and say that the lesson I’ll be taking away is this: it just takes one person, standing up and saying, no, not here, not in my town, not on this subway car, to make a difference.
Awhile back, I mentioned the good work that the folks at Ella Baker Center are doing to shift us from a Gulag to a green economy. And, just the other day at Orgtheory, Teppo mentioned TED Talks, which reminded me of one of my favorite TED Talks by Majora Carter, MacArthur-winning urban activist from the South Bronx (18:41):
On Sunday, I caught one of the featured panels at the Margaret Mead Film Festival, which I wrote a little about here. The panel featured several people involved creating “user-generated content” including the engaging cultural anthropologist Michael Wesch (from Kansas State University), who created the mesmerizing and wildly popular Web 2.0 video; Sara Pollack, YouTube’s film manager; Sameer Padania from Witness, introducing the new participatory online video site for human rights organizations The Hub; and Michael Smolens, founder and CEO of dotSUB, a sort of wikipedia-like translation site for films; and, Jenny Douglas, introducing her new site called KarmaTube. While the panelists tended to focus on the democratizing and emancipatory potential of digital video and video sharing sites, in the Q&A afterward there seemed to be some desire to talk about the negative potential of the medium. For example, Sameer Padania screened a horrific video of police brutality from Egypt that is intended to highlight human rights abuses and prompt action by people opposed to such abuses. I wondered about the people who click on such horrific videos to enjoy them or laugh at them; and, I wondered about the ways that seemingly straightforward “video evidence” like the Rodney King video, get discredited by oppressive political regimes, like the Egyptian police or LAPD. This view was certainly not well-represented on the panel, but to be fair, that wasn’t the intention.
Despite the up-with-people quality of a lot of discussion about digital video, the reality is that there’s no shortage of people using these sorts of digital video sharing sites for nefarious ends, among them neo-Nazis, skinheads and white supremacists who want to use digital video to spread racist propaganda. For example, CurrentTV (Al Gore’s venture and my current default cable channel) is running a video “pod” (their term for a short digital video segment) called “From Russia With Hate,” about neo-Nazis in Russia who are filming racist attacks on immigrants, then posting these digital videos online. (I’m posting the link but not the video because it contains violent scenes that I don’t want to reproduce here.) This is a well-done bit of investigative journalism by the reporter Christof Putzel, and while these are quite disturbing to watch, the intention of the filmmaker is clearly to be critical of the neo-Nazis. The CurrentTV site shows that approximately a month after posting, the video has received 3,844 views and there are 32 comments. All the comments are supportive of the filmmaker’s point of view, and several even remarking on their “unease” with voting “for” the video on the website as they fear this implicates them somehow in the neo-Nazi violence.
I raise this example here to address some of the nuances of online video for addressing racism in the digital era and offer some complexity to the panel presentation from Sunday. On the one hand, Putzel’s investigative journalism and digital video distributed through cable networks and online via CurrentTV offer support for the argument about the democratizing and emancipatory potential of online digital video. This approach both highlights the problem of racist violence and offers people an opportunity to take some, albeit limited, action by posting comments in support of the critique of neo-Nazism. And, as Putzel mentions near the end of the report, one of the central figures he interviews is later arrested for “inciting ethnic hatred,” so there is some material result of his reporting in the effort to stop neo-Nazi violence.
On the other hand, there is a way in which the very possibility of digital video and the presence of digital video cameras gives rise to racist violence. Several of the scenes that are shown in Putzel’s piece have clearly been staged for the (neo-Nazi’s) digital camera. In one scene of racist violence on a train, the digital camera operator is already in place near the (eventual) victim of the violence, and stands waiting, filming both the unsuspecting victim and the approaching gang of neo-Nazis. While it is possible that this violence might have happened without the presence of the camera (or the potential to upload it), the fact that the violence happens in such a seemingly staged manner implicates the digital video in the violence. And, in the gravest negative consequence, after the arrest of one of the figures in Putzel’s piece, another neo-Nazi video is released in which two immigrants are killed on camera and this is uploaded to the web. No one has been arrested for these murders; and, to date, no one knows who made the digital video of these racist murders.
Several of the panelists on Sunday mentioned that we are still in the early days, indeed “way before the beginning,” of the convergence of digital video, Internet and television. I couldn’t agree more. And, what this means in terms of racism, and resisting racism, is still unfolding.
I’m composing a longer post (maybe up this weekend) on the Kara Walker exhibit I saw yesterday at the Whitney Museum here in New York. If you’re in the general vicinity, or plan to be before February, I strongly encourage you to see this exhibit.
In the meantime, here’s a link to a videoblog interview with the curator, Jasmil Raymond, with a preview to the same show when it was in Minnesota. Compelling, provocative, interesting use of visual images to challenge our thinking about racism. More later.
I’ve been writing and thinking about the potential of digital video at places like YouTube for subverting dominant, controlling images over at my personal blog, Thinking at the Interface. I also use a lot of documentary films and videos in my teaching. I’ve been experimenting with how to include digital video here at Racism Review. Originally, I’d wanted to include a separate video blog here, but the blogging software won’t allow me to do that (and I don’t have the coding chops to hack the software and bend it to my will). So, I’m just going to do what everyone else does, and periodically include a digital video here (via YouTube) as I run across them. And, on the additional page called “Videos” linked above, I’ll keep a list of documentary films and videos that are useful for teaching and learning about racism. I’ve got a few up there now as a preliminary list. If you’ve got a title, please drop a comment here and I’ll add it to the list.