Media 2070 FINAL - Flipbook - Page 10
While this essay makes the argument for media
reparations for Black people, any group that has been
harmed by our government or by corporations has the
right to demand reparations to reconcile and repair
the injuries caused to their communities. Colonialism,
capitalism and imperialism have been destructive forces
for people of color in the United States, starting with our
nation’s Indigenous communities.
We named this essay — and the larger project we’re
launching — Media 2070. And for the purpose of Media
2070, we define “Black” as the identity lived by people of
the African diaspora.
Over the past century, there have been multiple
commissions that have investigated the root causes of
racial-justice uprisings — and examined the news media’s
role. The 2020 uprisings have resulted in Black journalists
and other journalists of color publicly challenging racism
within their own newsrooms.
This essay — and project — is an invitation to dream of
the media we want to see 50 years from now. It is a call
to reconcile and repair the harms that institutional and
structural racism have caused.
We have to imagine this new world, specifically a new
democracy, because there’s nothing certain about a
democracy in this country, now or in the future —
especially when those in power feel threatened by our
nation’s demographic shifts and by growing resistance to
the notions of power set by the colonizers of this land.
Tarso Luís Ramos, who studies white nationalism and
authoritarianism, put it this way:
In the short human history of the modern
nation state, it is hard to identify an example
of when a democracy survived the transition
in which the dominant racial, ethnic
or religious group became a numerical
minority. More typically, democracy is
sacrificed in order to maintain the cultural,
economic and political dominance of that
class.7
As people of color are expected to make up the majority
of the U.S. population in a little more than two decades,
our racist president is encouraging the rise and further
normalization of white nationalism.8 And as we look to our
future, we must grapple with the question of whether it is
possible to achieve a multiracial democracy in the United
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States when democracy has never been fully realized for
Black people.
What we do know is that a sustainable, multiracial
democracy will not happen without a struggle. And it
will not happen until we address our nation’s shameful,
racist legacy and imagine that transformation is necessary
and possible. But that transformation will not take place
without reconciliation and repair.
And media reparations are central to achieving a fully
realized, multiracial democracy since our nation’s news
media have historically weaponized narratives to further
the political goals of protecting and preserving a whiteracial hierarchy.
We recognize that there are many people who are
the keepers of our stories — elders, activists, artists,
technologists and more. It will take all of us to collect
a more complete record that documents the history
of harms our nation’s media institutions and policies
have inflicted. At their best, policies determine whether
institutions operating within a media system (or industry)
are accountable to the communities they serve. And like
other systems that exist in our country — from education
to criminal justice — the media system was not designed
to help or uplift Black people.
What kind of media system does our community deserve
once we reconcile and repair the harms caused by media
companies and policies?
Before we can achieve the transformation we need, we
have to dream of a world we deserve that does not yet
exist.
That is why with the release of this paper, we seek to work
in a Black-led coalition that is abundant with journalists,
technologists, artists, activists, policymakers, mediamakers, organizers and scholars, including those who have
long fought for reparations. Together, we can advocate
for media institutions to make reparations to the Black
community and for regulators and lawmakers to make
reparations for policies that have baked inequities into our
media system. Together, we can win cultural, corporate,
philanthropic and governmental media reparations.
•••
The people must know before they can act,
and there is no educator to compare with
the press.9
—Ida B. Wells
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