Reparations Daily (ish) Vol. 22
What are Media Reparations? A Conversation with Alicia Bell.
Happy Wednesday!
Today’s newsletter features a conversation with Alicia Bell, Director of Media 2070. Media 2070 is a growing consortium of media-makers and activists who are collectively dreaming up reparative policies, interventions, and futures.
I strongly urge everyone to read the 100-page essay they’ve published examining the history of anti-Black harm in the U.S. media system. Alicia also published this brilliant piece on the legacy of Ida B. Wells last week that I urge you to read.
A few things that I picked up on in our conversation:
The media has always played a role in stoking the flames of racism in the United States, and they have never been close to being held accountable. Alicia gets into it briefly in our conversation. Still, the essay by Media 2070 is so detailed in its accounting of the harm the media has had on the Black community and how the media has profited off of racism and white supremacy. The most surprising fact in the essay for me was that George Washington placed a runaway slave ad in The Philadelphia Gazette & Universal Daily Advertiser WHILE HE WAS PRESIDENT.
Media 2070 has been able to have such a large impact in a short amount of time on a small budget. I hope that philanthropy will step up to the table and fund organizations like them and others who speak truth to power.
There is so much more to dig into on media reparations and what Media 2070 is planning next. There should definitely be a part two to this conversation because 30 minutes was not enough.
With radical love,
Trevor
National News
Media 2070: An Invitation to Dream up Media Reparations
Free Press: The Legacy of Ida B. Wells
The Hill: The faith community can help pass a reparations bill
Fox News: Reparations legislation advocates push for new government commission, but short on specifics
Jezebel: There Are No Reparations Equal to the Trauma of Forced Sterilization
TIME: How Far Has America Come Since the George Floyd Protests?
New York Times: Black Unemployment Matters Just as Much as White Unemployment
CBS: Bezos space flight relaunches longstanding gripes about Amazon business practices and the wealth gap
New York Times: Bezos thanks Amazon workers and customers for his vast wealth, prompting backlash.
Washington Post: The U.S. is growing more unequal. That’s harmful — and fixable.
Regional News
HuffPost: Texas Senate Bill Drops Teaching Requirement That Ku Klux Klan Is ‘Morally Wrong’
Austin American-Statesman: Did Texas lawmakers remove classroom requirement to teach KKK as 'morally wrong'? Here's what we know.
Washington Post: Proposed D.C. Council budget would fully fund trust accounts for low-income children
Washington Post: D.C. Council votes to raise taxes on the rich
The Detroit News: Detroit City Council votes to add reparations committee question to November ballot
ABC 7: Evanston parents, students stand up for critical race theory after lawsuit
USA Today: As elders call for promised repair, Evanston, Ill., plan doesn't fix harm, it adds to loss
WFPL: Ky. Commission Studying Racial Disparities Meets For First Time
WION: Statue of Confederate general removed in Louisiana
International News
ACLU: The UN’s George Floyd Resolution is a Vital Step Toward International Accountability
Caribbean Life: UK owes Jamaica $13.5 B in reparation for slavery – apology not enough
The Guardian: The Guardian view on Britain’s wealth divide: a gap becomes a chasm
Hot Takes
The following conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Tell me a little bit about yourself and how you came into this work?
I came into this work because I saw a breakdown in communication between what was happening when people were protesting in the streets and making attempts at social change and what people understood to be true who weren’t present in that work.
I really saw that clearly in my work in Charlotte when there were some uprisings and protests and organizing after the murder of Keith Lamont Scott. There was such a different understanding from folks on the ground and what folks were getting from television news. I would see it in my own family. I would go out organizing and see what was happening on the ground and then go back to my family, who would be like, ‘is this happening, is this true?’ There was such a disconnect.
News Voices (another project of Alicia’s) started to transform power dynamics in journalism by figuring out who gets to decide editorial decisions and making it more community-centered. Doing that work, though, I always heard in different communities about the relationship with local news, it was either they had none, they had been harmed, or they didn’t trust it. They may trust specific individuals, but they didn’t really trust the entire sector, and this was true not only in North Carolina but in other cities and states.
I started to look into that more and try and figure out why. My colleague Joe Torres had written a book called ‘News for all the People: The Epic Story of Race and the American Media’ that documented that harm. So I started to really look into the history, and it started to make sense why there was no relationship between communities and the media.
So for us, reparations seemed like the right next step. There was a problem, the problem needed to be repaired, and it disproportionately affected Black people. The essay documents a lot of harm, and instead of being really prescriptive on what media reparations could be, it’s more curious to serve as a conversation starter. A conversation should happen among journalists, activists, tech people, and folks who are constituents of media and news.
Since launching, we’ve been getting really clear on acknowledging the harm, and now we are getting more clear on what media reparations could be.
Why the year 2070?
2070 came about because every few years; there is some racial reckoning that happens. Every time that happens, there is also a federal call naming media as one of the primary causes behind the racial animosity.
In 1921, with all of the race riots that were happening, the Chicago commission said that journalism played a role in perpetuating racial unrest. Then, when you fast forward 50 years to 1967, you have the Kerner Commission saying almost the same thing.
Fast forward another 50 years, and we see the same thing. A lack of ownership, a lack of representation, and similar calls for transformation. We launched in 2020, and we chose 2070 because we can’t keep having this conversation. There is no reason we should go 100 years with documented recommendations of transforming journalism in pursuit of racial justice and there being nothing done.
This is a 50-year mark to say that we don’t need to have this conversation in 50 years to begin building what we need, and by 2070 this conversation is old news.
How big of an organization is Media 2070?
There are six of us. We are housed as a program of Free Press, and among the six of us, only one of us works full-time at Media 2070. So it’s something that we want to transition because this work needs more than 6 people.
What role can philanthropy play in securing media reparations? What role can corporations play?
We saw a lot of in corporate settings last year when there was a peak moment, and you saw some white leaders step down. Alex Ohanian stepped down from Reddit, and they got their first Black board member. As much as news leadership is in a place of scarcity, there is a lot to remember — that there is power there. So, there is an opportunity to transition leadership. Those who have the most positional power, whether they have a board set or are a publisher, can do that, and one of the things we need to see is the leadership within organizations be more reflective of the demographics of our country.
When it comes to philanthropy, it’s two-fold. On the government funding side, we are figuring out what is possible with their civic engagement consortium, where a board will redistribute money to address news deserts across the state. This can and should be done in a reparative way that goes toward historically underfunded communities.
When it comes to private philanthropy, I think it’s similar. When we are thinking about how money is redistributed, it can be done fairly. It can disproportionately affect Black folks who have been underfunded. Michelle Morales at the Woods Fund in Chicago started to divest from white-led organizations, even if they were serving Black communities, because there was no adequate effort to transform the organizations themselves. She got pushback from that, which makes sense, but we need that kind of bold thinking. It can’t just be program officers who want to do that; it has to be the Presidents and the Board.
When it comes to representation, should we try and integrate places like CNN, or should we try and own our own media corporations?
It’s a little bit of both. It’s about transforming institutions that are white-led and also owning our own. There are a ton of great black journalists working in white-led organizations right now. When I think about those folks, I think about creating reparative justice, care, mental health resources, better salaries for them.
It gets back to the abolition of chattel slavery, where we had people who were doing the work of self-defense and figuring out how to care for people to get through this horrible system. When I think about self-defense today, I think it looks like caring for and trusting Black journalists to transform these systems. That can either mean having Black leadership or Black ownership.
What does narrative change mean to you, and is that something that Media2070 will be doing?
A narrative is the main thing for material change and material shift. So it makes 100 percent sense to me that folks would be upset with something like the 1619 project because it’s a more accurate narrative of our nation’s history. I am reminded of around the anniversary of the Tulsa massacre because Black journalists have always upheld the tenets of journalism — accountability, decreasing distance between government and community, and getting information out there — that has always been done by Black journalists. They have told stories accurately; they have pushed back on authority and held those in power accountable.
Color of Change did a story on media coverage of crime, and they found that Black crime is being represented in the news at a much higher rate than what was happening in real life. Another study found that when it was time to create a budget, there was an uptick in coverage around crime because the police would push stories out there because they want a larger budget.