This Week

• BLACK STUDIES IN A DARK CONJUNCTURE

• Other lectures and events this semester

• Media Coverage of Chicago ICE Raid

• Democracy-Reinforcing Hardball (ABSTRACT)

BLACK STUDIES IN A DARK CONJUNCTURE

Publish or Perish: Disseminating Black Thought in a Time of Crisis. This Wednesday from 6-8pm at Baltimore Unity Hall.

@lesterspence2

Black Studies in a Dark Conjuncture #blackstudies #afrorealism #baltimore #baltimoreunityhall

Other Events This Semester

We’re continuing the backsliding conversations co-sponsored by the Baltimore County Library. This round will be held virtually during the month of November and then pick up again during the Spring. Still looking for other partners, and may potentially expand it to include other universities. I’ll post more information when it becomes available.  

The third is a lecture I’ll be delivering in Detroit, sponsored by the Damon J. Keith Center for Civil Rights. The title of the lecture is “Cultivating Radical Imagination: Rethinking the Role of Institutional Power in Detroit and Beyond. It’ll be held right after Detroit’s mayoral election, so I’m hoping to spark conversation that can help shape the agenda for the next four years and beyond. RSVP HERE

ICE Raids in Chicago

Approximately two weeks ago,in a one am Chicago raid staged from Navy Pier, federal agents rapelled from Blackhawk attack choppers onto an apartment complex, detaining and arresting its residents, including school aged children. This was the most egregious of several raids conducted in Chicago, raids which were found last week to be illegal. The raids sparked protests across the city, and the protests included peaceful marches as well as tactics designed to make it uncomfortable for ICE agents to function in the city. 

Now the evidence of the protests is easy to find, particularly through social media. But I found myself looking for evidence that the raid actually occurred—I remember seeing information about it on Instagram but didn’t save it—and I couldn’t find any. The Washington Post has a single sentence in a larger article about Chicago. There were be more articles about Sister Jean passing away than there are about Chicago raids, much less the most egregious of them. 

I did find evidence on CNN.

And here.

But note the structure of both. 

In the first instance, we see the standard “both sides” roundtable, with two commentators suggesting that the raids violated the law, and two commentators (one, really), suggesting otherwise. In the second instance, we see what looks like a tele journalist reporting on the raids, but the skew and the comments suggest that the journalist is conservative. In neither instance are we looking at real reporting—the closest to it is when we see the CNN host presenting a second hand quote of one of the detainees, something one of the commentators implicitly blows off by noting “none of us were there.”

The second story is a relatively recent phenomenon made possible by technological advances in film tech. Setting up a relatively professional looking green room in the comfort of one’s own home is comparatively inexpensive. It’s similarly straightforward to splice clips from other media sources. Further, this second story also takes advantage of the general shift to commentary—once 24 hour news stations become possible, it becomes necessary to (inexpensively—remember the profit motive!) fill the time.  

The raid itself is a story about backsliding. A story about how the administration is actively using state power to wage war against its perceived domestic enemies, to distract, but also to normalize. One of the reasons that we don’t see more coverage is because news agencies themselves are fearful of being sued by the administration (or worse). 

However the story isn’t just about backsliding—it is also about how backsliding itself takes advantage of already pre-existing fault lines. Illinois Governor Pritzker has been one of the administration’s strongest critics, but no small number of the stories featuring Pritzker’s criticism also talk about his potential presidential candidacy, adopting the horse race frame. Obviously this frame isn’t new…but under these its problems become even more apparent.  

Great stories about the raid exist. Some of these stories are told by local news agencies (that are then posted by news personalities with their own followings).

But others are told by a combination of independent journalists who’ve been formally trained, and independent journalists who haven’t been. Not just because other entities are scared but because they’ve gotten out of the journalism business long ago.     

I noted how the horse race dynamic that infected news coverage long ago shapes current news coverage in problematic ways. 

One of the things that became apparent during Black Lives Matter protesting, was that the American mass media simply didn’t cover most forms of police violence. While it wasn’t difficult to find stories about homicide (“if it bleeds it leads”) stories about police murders were far less frequent. In fact we didn’t even have good data on the phenomenon. Similarly, if we were to compare stories about white collar crime to their blue collar equivalents, the latter would far outstrip the former, whether you were looking at papers like the Washington Post or the Los Angeles Times, or smaller papers. The stories were there if reporters cared to look, but because the people who witnessed them were deemed unreliable—who’d believe that a corner boy got robbed by the cops, or that Officer Friendly spent a bit of time everyday planting evidence on suspects—these stories were ignored. Trump is able to attack Chicago because his political base already has deep disdain for the city itself and its denizens. It doesn’t hurt that Chicago is currently led by a progressive black mayor who isn’t afraid to call Trump’s tendency what it is—a Neo-confederate tendency. 

What I’m Reading

I’m reading a hell of a lot more than this, actually. But in conversation with my friend Tamara Nopper on the “civil war” frame that many of us have used to describe the current moment, I remembered this abstract on “democracy-reinforcing hardball”:

Bateman, David A. "Democracy-Reinforcing Hardball: Can Breaking Democratic Norms Preserve Democratic Values?" Comparative Political Studies 

(let me know if you want a copy of the pdf…)

On that note, I’m out. Please take good care, and get rest. At the very least it’s very possible the leaves are changing around you. Take note.