 Well, welcome to Media Justice Fundamentals, the Spring 101 series. As my colleague, Doulani, has already mentioned, this is a kickoff to a series of workshops that's produced by Media Justice. The workshop today, facilitated by me, Steven Renderos, is a kickoff for a series of four workshops that we're doing this spring. And I'll put the schedule here behind me and I'll disappear for a moment so you can check them out. Here's a listing of the programs and topics that are coming up. I'm, of course, hosting today's part one discussion on Media Justice 101, but don't forget to join me again on April 6th as we pick up on part two. I'll go into details later about what to expect for that workshop. If this is your first ever event with Media Justice, welcome and a quick word on Media Justice just so that for those that are not familiar with us, Media Justice is an Oakland-based black and brown led organization that fights for the media and technology rights of people of color in the United States. We believe that the right to communicate and therefore the right to transform our society belongs to everyone. We're also the host of a national network called the Media Justice Network. And if you're a member of our network, welcome and during these pandemic times when we haven't had a chance to see you all, I know at least for myself and for the rest of my team, we miss you all. So again, I'll come back on screen. I just wanted you to see our beautiful team. So again, today's topic is titled Media Justice 101, part one. Because like a good movie, we're already thinking about the sequel. In today's workshop, we're going to go back to the past and understand the roots of our media system and we'll be focusing on one of the earliest forms of media in the United States, the newspaper. So we'll be studying some of that history of the newspaper and the legacy of that history which is still present today and is fundamental to why Media Justice as an analysis, as an organization and as a movement exist, we're going to explore racism in newspapers, where people of color fit into that history and how the history of newspapers gets repeated through other media, including radio and TV. Before diving in, I'd actually be remissed if I didn't give some shout outs to organizations and groups that have been very inspirational in my thinking. And so I want to give some acknowledgments here. The first two, and I'll get myself out of the way again or let me actually make myself a little smaller. So the first two that I wanted to lift up is one global action project. They're a youth media organizing group based out of New York City who produced a groundbreaking political education curriculum called Media and Action. This was one of the earliest curriculums when I was getting involved in the media justice world that I looked to that helped to inform my own political analysis. Global Action Project was also a member of the Media Justice Network for many years until recently when they closed their doors after many years of incredible leadership in this field. We missed them terribly but their work is gonna continue to live on in many of the youth that they impacted. I also wanna shout out the Youth Media Council which is what Media Justice was originally called this organization that I work for. Because we're a national organization, before we were a national organization, I should say, we were an Oakland group that organized youth of color to challenge media representation in the Bay Area. YMC back then actually published a toolkit called Communicate Justice 101, an organizer's guide to strategic communications. If folks wanna search for this toolkit, it's still available actually on the Media Justice website so you can go to mediajustice.org and search our resource library and you'll find it there. It's a ton of great tools, framing tools, analysis on how to view media. The other kind of two inspirations for this workshop, one is a book that was written by Juan Gonzalez and Joe Torres called News for All the People and actually chronicles the history, the racial history of media, both where, you know, how media has been used as an instrument to, you know, foment racism but also where people of color's history lives within that. A lot of the stories that you'll learn here today were in this book. Lastly, Media 2070, which is a project of free press but also a research essay that details the history of US media participation in anti-black racism and issues a call to action to repair the harm media institutions have caused. I would invite you all to check out this powerful essay, Dream Up Reparations with us at media2070.org. Media Justice is a group that's been supportive of this project and this was an essay that was brilliantly written by some of the black staff at free press, including at an organization called Free Press, including Alicia Bell, Joe Torres, Colette Watson and many others. So, you know, a lot of the content that you'll see here today is in many ways repurpose from some of these other sources of inspiration, which they themselves have their own sources of inspiration and that's just the way whenever we're in a moment of teaching, I think it's important to just acknowledge that there isn't really necessarily anything new that we're putting out there in the world. A lot of this knowledge has been cultivated and passed down from one generation to the next and I'm really grateful and appreciative for the people that have been immensely influential to me. All right, so one last bit of housekeeping before we get into it, I wanna make sure that you all are familiar with the tools that we'll be using in today's workshop to make your experience as interactive as possible because me talking for an hour and a half would not be fun for anyone, least of which me. The first tool we'll be using is the one that you're already on, which is Zoom and I wanna kind of draw your attention to two features in particular. The first is the, I'd like to encourage folks to watch this workshop in speaker view and many of you probably already are but one way to tell if you're not is if you see a Brady Bunch kind of view where you see multiple videos or multiple boxes, you'll wanna be in speaker view because most of my slides as some folks can already tell are just living in my background so you don't have to look anywhere else. To ensure that you're on speaker view, this is what it should look like and you can just check out on your Zoom screen on the top right hand side. You'll see either something that says gallery view or speaker view. You just wanna make sure that you're in speaker view. The other thing I wanna draw your attention to is the chat box and you may already actually be able to see it from within this screen if you go towards your bottom of your Zoom screen you'll see a little icon that says chat. If you can click on that if you haven't already, that's the place where I'll be asking you to put in your thoughts in the chat box. So please feel free to make sure that that's open. And while you're there, why don't you go ahead and take a moment to say hello right now. All right and here's a little zoomed in view of what it looks like. Cool. The next tool that we're gonna be using for this workshop here today is Mentimeter. We'll be using Menti to collect responses from you all throughout the workshop. This helps us kind of create an environment in which it's a little more interactive and you all also get to engage with the content. There are two ways for you to get to Menti. You can either use your cell phone and you can do this the entire time you can just have your cell phone open with you. And if you pull out your cell phone you can open up your camera and just point your camera at this QR code that's right next to me. Your camera should automatically take you to a website where you'll have a chance to engage with the content for today. So that's one option of getting there. But if you prefer to use your computer you'll be receiving a link with the code to enter in the chat box. So please keep an eye out. I think my colleague Delaney is gonna be the person posting into the chat that link. Either way works both ways will lead you to the same place I promise you. So just feel free to use whichever one works for you. So while you're there let's actually test out Menti to see if folks can have gotten there. So I'd love for folks to go to Menti right now if you haven't already. And just a quick kind of icebreaker question here your name, your pronouns and your location. And I'll get out of the way here. So folks can see just who's with us, who's in the room. Awesome. I see some familiar names. So that's wonderful. Thank you all for being there. And just a reminder you can use the link in the chat box to get to this screen where you can enter your answers. Cool, well welcome everyone. We have a wonderful representation of folks coming in from a lot of places that I'll be talking about today. Wilmington, Baltimore, New York, Minneapolis which holds a special place in my heart cause I lived there for many years. Cool, all right. There's likely more responses that have started coming in but you all are in there and are working it. So that's wonderful. Let me go ahead and just there we go. And I can see here some of the more responses that have come in, San Jose, got folks coming in from Kentucky, from Urbana, from Richmond. Well, welcome everyone. This is so wonderful to be here with you all. Cool. So let's move on to a little bit of an icebreaker. We're gonna stay in mentee. So you can keep this screen open. You don't have to shift away from it. If you're on your cell phone, you can just keep it open. If you're on your computer, you can just keep the tab open cause we'll be jumping back in here from time to time. But I wanna warm us up with a little bit of an icebreaker and I want to start out by getting to know you all a little bit better and we'll start first by unpacking the word community. So in the chat box, please go back to the Zoom chat box. Please type in some words that come to mind for you when you hear the word community. All right, I see belonging, I see group of folks, I see people, common location, I see support, I see togetherness, trust, honesty, I see safety, I see strength, I see love, I see stability, diversity, dance, I love to be part of the dance community for sure. Power all capitals, that's right. Resilience, complexity, yeah, that's right, love. Those are all great responses to this question. You can keep populating them in there. You know, for the purposes of today, I wanna give you just a finer point on the definition, but a quick definition around this is, you know, community is a set of people who share a common experience, identity, practice or values. Everything you all shared is 100% right on. So I wanna get a sense, given that, what communities do you all belong to? So I'd love for folks to go back to Menti and that'll be the next question that we ask you to answer. What communities do you belong to? So again, you can use your camera to get to Menti, you can also use the link in the chat box, but you'll start seeing responses populate here in Menti as soon as folks jump in there. But the next question in Menti that I'm hoping folks can answer is just what comes to mind when you hear the word community? And it's probably a lot of the same things that folks have already said. Yeah, that's right. You'll see some of those responses start to immediately come in. I see black women, I see media artists, strength, connection, love, support. Yeah, I see history, I see bedrock, I see queers, I see queer joy, I see QBIPOC, I see family, intergenerational, I see togetherness, accountability, connection, immigrant community, care, that's right. I see church, I see radio, all right. Love radio, I see team, I see artists. Yeah, those are all incredible responses to that question. And I think it's incredible that within this virtual space that we're holding that so many of the communities that we come from are represented here just in this space with however many of us are in the Zoom. So I'm just gonna invite you to keep those communities in mind as we talk about our media system. And what ways are they reflected in media? And what ways are they not? So let's dig a little bit deeper here into this word media. In the Zoom chat box, I'm hoping folks can just type out what comes to mind when you hear the word media. So the word now for the chat box is media. Type in some of those responses. All right, I see platforms, communication. I need to catch up here. Radio, message, power, civic engagement, confusing, yeah. Bias, I see books, narratives, power, powerful narratives, calm discourse, libraries, opportunity, storytelling, truth, yep. Yeah, now to give you kind of the too long don't read definition of media. You know, media for us is just a vehicle to communicate to lots of people. And when you think of some of the more predominant forms of media like TV, radio, newspapers, even online, how have you seen your communities represented in the media? So I'd love for you to go back to Menti where we're going to answer that question just around how you've seen your community represented in the media. What does representation in the media look like for the communities that you come from, from the BIPOC communities that you come from, from the communities where you're trying to foster connection and relationship, the intergenerational spaces that you're coming from. You know, how are you seeing those communities reflected in the media? So I'd encourage folks to go back to Menti and I'll share my screen here too so that you can see some of those responses. Yeah, so I see white, straight, cisgendered. I see scary, to be feared, untrustworthy, whitewashed. There is not much representation. I'm Venezuelan. I'm Salvadorian and I feel you. Racist stereotypes, that's right. See West Side Stories, right? That's not all musicals. It's some of the criminality, the laziness, the uncivilized, yeah. A lot of those images pop through in mainstream media for folks. Women are not respected, inaccurate and harmful. We're seeing queer representations that are still stereotypical, that anarchists burn everything down. Seeing hippie stereotypes, hypersexualized, unintelligent, two-dimensional, backwards, behind. You're either violent or perfectly good, right? The both extremes, yeah. Very poor representation of black women, angry, hurt, struggling at the same time, always working harder than everyone. Yeah, biased. Some folks are saying there's little to none representation. Yeah, that's right. All right, let me come back in here. So, some of the questions I'd love for you all to reflect on as we move forward in this conversation here. And I think some of the answers to this are obvious. Like, do these representations focus on strength? When we think about representation in TV, radio, newspapers, of the communities we come from, are those representations that embody the strength and the good of our communities? And a lot of the stuff that you all are populating as answers here is giving us a sense that, no, it's not. But there are some glimpses of hope. And a question here is like, do different mediums have different representations? And frankly, who is producing the media about the communities you come from? So, as we move forward in the conversation here today, it's something I'd love for folks to just be thinking about, yes, like all those hurtful images keep being perpetuated in media, but why are they there? So, I'll just close out by saying that, you know, the media system is not like this by mistake. It is very much by design. And it might surprise you to learn that some of the media representations you all have pointed out were a fundamental part of the very first white-owned newspaper in the United States, even before it was the United States, pre-colonial times. So, here's a little quote, I'll get myself out of the way by George Clinton. If folks are musicians here, you all know George Clinton from Parliament Funkadelic, but he had a really insightful quote about media. He says, whoever controls the flow of information dictates our perceptions and perspectives. Whoever controls the news shapes our destiny. So, that's what we're gonna dive in a little bit deeper around. Let's talk about the news. And to do this, we're gonna start by playing a game. You all are gonna be involved in this game and we're gonna be going back to Menti for this, but it's a game I call the headlines game. And so, I'd invite you folks to go back to Menti and we'll jump into the headlines game. We're gonna have five questions that we're gonna be running through and we'll be using Menti for this. You'll be prompted basically with a real newspaper headline and your job is gonna be to try to guess what year this headline is from. If you have any questions, please feel free to post them in the chat box and I'll make a point now to take a quick look before I dive in, but we're gonna be using Menti for this. You'll see a headline, you'll have to guess which year this headline is from. But let me check Zoom to see if there's any clarifying questions there. We do want the funk, that's for sure. The funk is within you, I love it. All right, so jumping back to Menti, if folks are ready, we are gonna keep track of score here, Menti helps us do that and I see a bunch of folks are already in here so that's awesome. But get to Menti.com, you'll see in, let me actually move to my screen so that you can see this. You'll see in my screen that there is the Menti.com and there's the code in case you need to refresh it. But I think we got a good concentration of folks in here so let's go ahead and jump forward and here's the first headline. All right, now it says here answer fast and you get more points. So here's the headline, new rioting stores looted, cars destroyed. Is this a headline from 1965? From 1992 or 2020? All right, so most folks seem to think that it was from 2020. So actually this was a story from the Los Angeles Times back in and I'll bring myself back on screen. This was from the Los Angeles Times, this is a story from 1965 and it was covering the Watts uprisings where a rebellion was triggered in a predominantly black neighborhood following the violent beating and arrest of black folks by a police department with a long history of brutality and abuse against black people. Of course, this could have been a headline describing events in the LA uprisings in 1992, which similarly was triggered by a case of police beating and the subsequent acquittal of cops caught on tape beating Rodney King. It also could have been a headline, ripped from this past summer where uprisings emerged after the killing of George Floyd by the Minneapolis police department. Stories covering uprisings have tended to frame these events as riots, first of all. And second of all, most of the attention is being drawn on the loss of property while really ignoring the loss of life or the impact to life. So that's an interesting example there. Let's jump back into the next one. Now that folks have gotten warmed up. Next headline and question two, let's see. And I'll press enter to start the countdown. And the headline is this, two patrolmen are shot. Is this a headline from 1922, 1969 or 2020? What do you think? Two patrolmen are shot. And let's see what y'all thought. All right, so folks are catching onto my game here. All right, cool, cool. So 10 folks answered correctly here, that's wonderful. It is from 1922. Let me show you that headline and it's here. So it's a little bit small and what you see here is actually two different newspapers. But this was a story that was published in 1922 in the Kansas City Star, also republished in the Kansas City Times. And it detailed an incident where police officers entered the home of Frank Elliott, a black man who was shot and killed by police. Now, according to the Star's article, the police were there in search of whiskey. This was during prohibition, when the sale of alcohol was illegal. The story focused on the officers with one of them, Charles Barger, labeled as the World War I hero in the story. Now, of course, this could have just as easily been the way that newspapers covered the killing of Fred Hampton, where the police barged into his home and shot him while he slept. It could have just as easily been a story from this past year where Breonna Taylor was shot and killed by the Louisville Police Department, who were in search of someone accused of selling drugs, a different type of illegal thing in our times here today. So you see kind of these cycles of history repeating itself through these headlines. And I think you're probably already getting the point of what I'm trying to get at. But let's jump into the next headline. Let me see if I can get to back to Menti and let me make sure that folks can see it on the back of my screen, cool. And all right, next one. Oh, here's the leaderboard. Okay, well, just in case folks were wondering where you're at. All right, Luis is in the lead. Teresa is up there too and Amanda is right there with them. Wow, we got some stingilishes. We got some work to do stingilishes. All right, so let's move forward and get into the next question. Question three of five. All right, here's the next headline. Slave becomes master. Is this the headline from 1868, 1958, or 2014? And you've got about five seconds left. Slave becomes master. All right, we got a split. Okay, if you guessed 2014, you are correct. Yes, this was a headline and let me pull it up from The Daily Breeze, which is a newspaper in Los Angeles that was published the morning after 12 years as slave won Best Picture at the Academy Awards. The film, of course, was the story of a freed black man from the North who was kidnapped and taken to the South where he spent over a decade as a quote unquote, you know, spent a decade enslaved. This was a film that was directed by Steve McQueen, who is in the image here that we see next to this headline. That's wild that no one was like, that's not a good look. But this is what happens. But it also could have very much been a headline at another point in history, which, you know, I think the split that we have here among the crowd demonstrates that. All right, cool. We've got one more headline to go through. All right, and let's see where we're at. Question four of five. And here we go. Guarding America against plague ravages. Guarding America against plague ravages. This is a headline from 1793, 1914, or 2020. Guarding America against plague ravages. What do y'all think? Okay, a lot of people thought this was 2020. A lot of people thought it was 1914. If you guessed 1914, you are correct. So this was a story published in the Ogden Standard, in Ogden, Utah. And it published a story about health officials who were fighting the spread of the bubonic plague. And here we see similarities in how Asians and in particular the Chinese were assigned blame for the spread of this disease. And in the article, it actually states, quote, America is a land practically free of free from disease. Seldom, indeed, do the terrible Asiatic scourges across the ocean and invade our shores. So there's a lot that's being said, even in just those two lines, the rest of the article is not any better. But here you get a bit of everything. From the way immigrants are blamed for the spread of disease, to how non-whites entering the country are described as invaders, to how the US is somehow exceptional and these diseases never emerge from here, even though that's not factually true. This sort of treatment of Asians in the US in moments of pandemics has repeated itself over and over again. And it's largely been perpetuated through a very harmful narrative known as yellow peril. And I'll put up an image here. This is like an image that was published in an Australian newspaper of the quote unquote, Mongolian octopus. And each of the tentacles, you might not be able to see it 100% well, but each of the tentacles has like a different kind of symptom or name attached to it. And in each tentacle, it kind of represents each of the societal ills that these quote unquote, hordes of people bring into white countries. This is imagery of the octopus and the use of phrases like Mongolian hordes would be repeated across in newspapers in the US. And I think a good example of that is the previous headline we just worked on. But we saw this in the San Francisco Chronicle and how they depicted the spread of the bubonic plague which not only was like terrible representation of Asian folks, but it also led to some really harmful things like quarantining and shutting down parts of Chinatown in San Francisco in the early 1900s. So it makes the events of this past year and in particular the rise of anti-Asian violence less of a surprise and more of a natural outcome of a media system that has systematically perpetuated these harmful images and stories about our communities. News headlines along with the images associated with them convey messages about a topic even if it's not explicitly said. One resource that my colleague Doulani is gonna drop in the chat is an art project called Counter Narratives by Alexandra Bell. And Alexandra Bell is a Black queer artist based in Brooklyn. And here let me get out of the way. And one of the things that Alexandra Bell does is remixes headlines to change the focus and meaning of stories just by tweaking things like the actual headline to the images associated with those stories. And here's an example of some wheat pasting Alexandra Bell did in Brooklyn comparing an original story by the New York Times with a remix version that Bell did to change the focus around the killing of Mike Brown. So there's a link to it. There's a New Yorker video that I would highly encourage folks to check out. It's really incredible. All right, so moving us forward and let me see if I have, if we have leaderboard updates here because I'm sure y'all are curious. Let's see, where are you? And yeah. All right, we have some leaderboard updates here that I'll bring up my screen again so you can see it. So Teresa definitely jumped in front here. Well, wonderful. Cool. Great, so we are going to jump back into my screen. So Teresa's in the lead. I see Amanda there second, Benjamin third. Y'all are hanging in. So thank you all for hanging in with this. Cool, jumping back into the story here. Let's talk about, now that we've talked about news headlines let's go back to the earliest days of the newspaper and you can just focus your attention on me. We won't be going back to Menti for a little bit. We've, you know, what we see in the earliest in newspapers is we start to see some of the seeds of some of the terrible representations that you all have pointed to and some of the terrible patterns we see in these news headlines starts to happen from the very first newspaper. In the very first newspaper in, you know, pre-U.S. and kind of colonial, you know, pre-U.S. was the public occurrences printed by Benjamin Harris and the Massachusetts colonies back in 1690. Now, from the very first edition, there were several stories describing indigenous folks using dehumanizing language. So one example of this is through the use of words like barbarous and here you see kind of an excerpt of this story and in this kind of paragraph they're comparing the barbarous Indians and associating it with the story of two missing children, two missing white children in the colonies and obviously assigning blame on the indigenous folks. Something else we see kind of planted in this very first edition is the use of the word savages which as we think about representation of indigenous folks in media, this is the standard that we've seen so often throughout history, you know, and the public occurrences became, you know, an essential kind of guide for how white settlers should deal with these tribes. Indians were described as invaders to lands that were inhabited by white settlers, which is wild to me that these newspapers would have the audacity to claim that Indians quote unquote were the invaders. Another of the early newspapers was the Boston newsletter which was published in 1704. It was one of the first newspapers that was involved in the slave trade and I don't think I have an image of it because I didn't want to actually show you the slave ads just because I don't think it's not any fun to look at, but this newspaper in Boston when it was published in 1704 within the first month ran its first slave ad. In all 18 years of its publication, there were over 60 slave ads that they ran which we believe likely accounted for at least as many as 100 people who were enslaved, you know, being sold. You know, another newspaper that profited even more from the slave trade was the Boston Gazette which published more than 1,100 slave ads. The Pennsylvania Gazette, which was owned by Benjamin Franklin, one of the quote unquote founders of the United States published hundreds of slave ads which led to the direct sale of hundreds of people. You know, runaway slave ads were lucrative business and some data found in the media 2070 essay I referenced earlier, estimate that there were over 200,000 runaway slave ads published during this time seeking to help white slave owners recover human property quote unquote. The point is this, not only did the early days of newspapers profit off of slavery, but newspapers became the sort of de facto surveillance system. And here you see history repeating itself with the way that social media companies perform in our society today, both the way that they amplify hate speech and dehumanizing language, profit off of our data through targeted advertising, while also collecting and sharing our data with law enforcement. It's an interesting parallel to draw. Another element that defined media in its early days was its role in inciting mob violence. All of us recently witnessed what happened on January 6th when a white supremacist attempted to overthrow the government fueled by their belief that the election had been stolen, a belief stoked by a media system that perpetuated what's now known, come to be known as the big lie. Well, it wasn't the first time white people have tried to overthrow a democratically elected government. You know, and they did so at the behest of a newspaper who riled them up. Now I'm going to dive a little bit deep into the Wilmington race riot of 1890, 1898. But while I use this as an example, there were countless examples of where media has been used to rally up white supremacist violence, like the Camp Grant Massacre of Apaches in 1871, the Los Angeles Zoot Suit Riots in 1943, the violent response to the admission of James Merritt as a black student at Ole Miss University in 1963. So there's multiple examples of where this has happened. During Reconstruction, the period directly following the Civil War, cities across the South saw major sweeping changes. Black folks, newly freed, engaged in the political process for the first time. In Wilmington, North Carolina, a city that became predominantly black during this time elected its all black, first all black mayor and black city council. Now they did so through like a multiracial coalition of poor black and poor white voters, which led to this kind of sweeping political change in Wilmington. They were called fusionists and they ran on a platform of economic justice, of public education, of equal voting rights, a lot of stuff that's still relevant today. But back then there were white supremacists groups like the Red Shirts and the White Government Union who launched the campaign to drive all black elected officials from office. They represented the interest of white planters and local business elites that saw a multiracial coalition of poor folks as a threat to their bottom line. Newspapers actually became a really effective tool of these white supremacists. And one of their largest bullhorns was the News and Observer, which was a newspaper that was run by a person by the name of Josephus Daniels. The newspaper was used to mobilize white supremacists to violently intimidate black neighborhoods across North Carolina. Josephus Daniels himself described the newspaper in this way as the quote, militant voice of white supremacy. In regards to Wilmington, his News and Observer published articles about the quote, unbridled lawlessness and rule of incompetent officials. And he wrote about quote, incidents of housebreaking and robbery and broad daylight, all of which he attributed to the fact that Wilmington was run by an all black city council. Now, the incident that led to the Wilmington race riot involved the black-owned newspaper in Wilmington, The Record, which published an article that questioned whether some incidents of alleged rape of white women by black men had actually been consensual relationships. This, of course, was a common allegation levied against black men and children, in the case of Emmett Till, that were used to justify lynchings by white mobs. Josephus Daniels' News and Observer responded with an article calling for white supremacists to shut the paper down. The next day, a white mob gathered outside of The Record, a black-owned newspaper, and burned it to the ground. And actually, the image that I had here before was the image of where that newspaper was located. You know, the several days that followed a violence, 60 people died, 60 black people died, and all of the black-elected officials were driven from office. All that to say, the Wilmington race riot was the first successful armed overthrow of a democratically elected government in U.S. history. And it's hard to ignore the parallels we see with what happened in Wilmington and the events leading up to January 6th. A media system alongside politicians with access to large bull horns like Donald Trump and his Twitter account perpetuated this idea that the 2020 elections were stolen. They called on, quote-unquote, patriots to surround the Capitol and protect democracy. And here again, we see this parallel where we see history repeating itself. All right, so I know I just probably depressed you all with a lot of bad content, but let's take a moment to actually go back to Menti if folks can. And I'll jump into just a reflection question to see a temperature check. In a word, how are you feeling after this last section about the early days of newspaper? And I'll share my screen so you can also see it here on my end, what the responses are. And again, to get to Menti, you can click on the link in the chat and hopefully Delani has pasted that in there. But in a word, how are you feeling from this last section? So I'm seeing some responses here of disappointed, angry, sad, shocked, ashamed, tired, I feel that. Not surprised, yeah. Motivated, that's a good one. Well, let's pick up on that feeling there. For sure, crushed, exhausted, heavy. Yeah, yeah, I feel that. And I think it's important to kind of acknowledge this because I think it's important to understand this context. We don't just get to the media system that exists today without some context. And you can see from the very first newspaper, a lot of the seeds being planted for what would define racialized narratives for generations to come. But in all of that history, it's not like people of color were simply passive. We weren't just passive victims. Things didn't just happen to us without us trying to wrestle the story away as well. So in this next section, that's some of what I wanna get into. Is how people of color have kind of been reflected in that history. So before we dive into it, I have one more mentee question to ask you. And that's going back to the quiz. Question five of five, which is what year was the first Black-owned newspaper founded? And you can take a guess what year it was and all responses accepted. I'm not giving you multiple choices here. I'm just curious to get a sense of where you all think, when in history it happened. Did it happen in the 1700s, in the 1800s, in the 20th century, what's your best guess there? All right, coming down towards the end of time. And I saw some, yeah, we've got a little wide representation here of responses, but the correct answer is 1827. So if folks wanna jump back to the Zoom and pay attention to me, we'll keep moving forward. All right, so to kick off this section, I wanted to lift up a quote from someone that has been influential in my life, in the way that I think about culture. And Bertolt Brecht, who was a Marxist playwright from Germany, said this thing once, that art is not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer with which we shape it. And in the media justice sector, this has come to also kind of apply to other functions of creating culture. Art is one means to create culture, but so is media. So I often think about this a lot, like media is not just supposed to be a mirror that reflects reality, but it really is a tool for us to shape the kind of world we wanna live in. And that's really the function of a lot of POC-owned media during this time period. The first black newspaper, and I'll come back on screen, was the freedoms journal founded in 1827 in New York City. And in their first edition, they wrote, I think, a mission statement that I think is still applicable to this day. They said, we wish to plead our own cause. Too long have others spoken for us. From the press and the pulpit, we have suffered much by being incorrectly represented. Now, while white-owned newspapers thrived during colonial times, black and non-white newspapers didn't fall too far behind. The first indigenous-owned newspaper, the Cherokee Phoenix, started publishing in 1828, so a year after a freedoms journal. One of the earliest Spanish-language newspapers emerged out of Philadelphia, El Abanero, founded by a Cuban priest named Reverend Felix Varela in 1824. The Golden Hill News became the first newspaper published in Chinese in the United States when it was founded in 1854. These newspapers spoke to an audience of people largely ignored by white-owned newspapers, and in many cases, shined a light on atrocities that were being committed against black people and people of color. Let's dive into an example that I raised earlier, the Kansas City Call, which was a black-owned newspaper in Kansas City. You'll remember earlier in the headlines game, we used an example from the Kansas City Star slash Kansas City Times of the two policemen who were shot. The calls coverage of that incident was completely different. They centered the story of the victim, Frank Elliott, who was killed by the police. They questioned the version of events the police officers told the white-owned newspaper. You could see a difference in coverage as well with how they covered lynchings as opposed to their white counterparts. In the killing of Emmett Till, the young child from Chicago who was beaten and lynched down south by a white mob who accused him of whistling towards a white woman. Again, we see that kind of charge being raised again in the context of racialized violence. We see a stark difference between media representations there. While the black-owned newspaper, the Kansas City Call, chose to publish the images of Emmett Till, both him alive, but also images of his funeral, like many black-owned newspapers across the United States did, the star ran with a front-page story centering the white men who were acquitted for Till's murder. It actually had images of both of the white men smiling and laughing and hugging their wives. A complete stark difference in what stories the white-owned newspaper chose to focus on versus the Kansas City Call, the black-owned newspaper here. The black press played an important role in humanizing the countless victims of white supremacy in contrast to white-owned newspapers, which often went out of their way to humanize the white perpetrators of violence. And it's hard here again as we think about drawing parallels to our world today not to think about the events of last week, the Atlanta Spa killings, where... Or frankly, any number of white killers who have been afforded a bad day, quote-unquote, or been humanized by their friends and loved ones as a good person, I can't believe that he would do something like this. Those are the kinds of comments we see often in the aftermath of these atrocities. The media do a really good job of humanizing white killers and yet often fail us in really telling the human stories of the people who are affected by this violence. The black press in the 19th and 20th century played a vital role in resisting media coverage, but how were black newspapers able to reach their audience? So I'm gonna talk about two key government interventions using things the government did to facilitate the distribution of black newspapers. You know, one was the Postal Service, and the second is transit, including railroads and roads in general. The Postal Act of 1792 as Juan Gonzalez describes in News for All the People, he describes it as the United States birthing the first internet. The government subsidized the delivery of newspaper, and for much of the early days of the Postal Service, it was largely dedicated to the delivery of newspapers. That subsidy today called, you know, second class mail privilege is still a thing that exists. The Postal Act also prohibited government surveillance of the mail or the denial of delivery to any newspaper. Although throughout history, this hasn't always held up, particularly when it came to distributing newspapers that were abolitionists, so anti against slavery and for the abolition of slavery or against content that was owned and created by black folks and people of color. Now, one such case happened in 1835 in Charleston, South Carolina, where a group of white men who creatively called themselves the Lynch men stormed into the post office and stole, oops, sorry about that, let me go ahead and cancel that, stole a group of white men who stormed the post office and stole an abolitionist newspaper that was published by this group called the Anti-Slavery Society, which was actually a white abolitionist group. And they stole it from the post office, they built a huge bonfire and publicly burned the newspapers. And this incident actually sparked other places across the South to monitor their local post office to prevent the spread of abolitionist newspapers. There were also a lot of white-owned distribution companies in the South who would refuse to carry black-owned newspapers and distribute them for fear of letting black folks organize. But even as the structural challenges presented themselves to prevent the distribution of newspapers, we saw other creative models emerge. At its height, the black-owned Chicago defender had over 130,000 subscribers. Now, more than 75% of them were subscribers that were based in the South. Now, how could that be? Well, when the Postal Service wouldn't distribute their newspaper, they used the railroad. Newspapers like the Chicago Defender, the Pittsburgh Courier, the Afro-American from Baltimore, used black Pullman porters or railroad workers to distribute their newspaper in predominantly black towns along railroad routes, which took them down deep into the South. In addition to the railroads, a lot of these black-owned newspapers would use entertainers. So as musicians who travel throughout the Chitlin Circuit down South to perform, they'd actually bring these newspapers with them to distribute. And that kind of community-owned model of distribution allowed the Chicago Defender to reach as many people as it did in the South. And as Chicago Defender today is widely credited for helping to spark the great migration or the relocation of black Southerners to cities above the Mason-Dixon line where they could escape a lot of the racialized terror of Jim Crow. So keep that in mind as we think about what it takes for us to not only control our stories, but also reach the audiences that we're trying to reach. Sometimes when there are institutional barriers in the way, there are alternative models of us reaching the communities we wanna reach. And I think there are some incredible parallels to that today. Now let's talk about social justice journalism. And I'll start with talking about IW Wells in a bit. Actually, I'll probably talk about Jose Marti first, but in the United States, when we think about investigative journalism, the kind of journalism that exposes corruption, people often credit the muckrakers from the early 20th century as the earliest form of this type of news. A good example of this that's popular is Upton Sinclair who wrote The Jungle, a book that exposed the terrible working and sanitary conditions of the meatpacking industry. And now while muckrakers deserve their part in history, I actually think it ignores many of the black and brown journalists who were pioneers of investigative journalism well before this. So decades before, and I'm gonna hone in on two examples. The first is Jose Marti. Now, some of y'all, if you're a student of Cuban history and the Cuban Revolution, will recognize this name as one of the intellectual leaders that inspired Fidel Castro and many others to fight for Cuban independence. Well, Jose Marti actually spent some time in the United States in the late 1800s and wrote for many newspapers in the United States, including The New York Sun, as well as in papers throughout Latin America. His articles from this time went in depth into what life was like, you know, for non-white people living in the United States in the late 1800s. This included writing stories about racialized violence, including an in-depth article he wrote for Argentina's La Nación, documenting the 1885 killing of 28 Chinese workers in Rock Springs, Wyoming. A white mob, furious about job competition, descended on a Chinese neighborhood and forcibly drove out hundreds of Chinese, setting fire to their homes, killing 28 people, displacing hundreds of people. It's still among the worst incidents of anti-Chinese violence in U.S. history and was actually followed by the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which banned people from China from entering the country for 10 years. You know, this act led to this pattern of xenophobic violence against Chinese people all across the U.S. And we've already spoken about earlier how racist kind of narratives about Chinese people contributed to some of that violence. Marti would go on to write about other forms of racialized violence from the forced relocation of indigenous communities by the United States, as well as lynchings across the South. One prominent feature he wrote about was the lynching of a black man Ed Coy in Texarkana, Texas in 1892. Coy was brutally killed for allegedly assaulting a white woman. Absent the writings of Marti and our next pioneering journalist, these forms of racialized violence would not have been as well documented with the level of detail that today really helps us understand what truly happened. You know, I started here by saying we're gonna talk about Ida B. Wells and I'm wearing a shirt that says Ida B. And that's our next pioneering journalist. You know, Ida was a school teacher turned journalist who became the editor of the Memphis Free Speech in 1889. Her writings were an instrumental piece of the puzzle in documenting the scale of lynchings all across the South. Her pathway towards this form of writing was actually incited by the lynching of three of her friends, all owners of People's Grocery Store, which was a black-owned grocery store in Memphis, Tennessee. They were lynched after a white-owned newspaper published a false account of an unprovoked attack by the black men against the owner of a white grocery store that was down the street. The truth was actually the other way around the white grocery store owner had instigated violence over at the black-owned grocery store, People's Grocery, but the newspaper published the false story and what it led to was mob violence as we've come to see repeated over history. So Wells was so enraged by the failure of government in protecting her friends' lives that she dedicated the rest of her life to exposing the scale of lynchings and really trying to understand what contributed to that, you know, phenomena. She wrote extensively about the pattern of accusing black men of raping white women as a justification for lynchings. And as she wrote in op-ed, no one believes these old threadbare lies that black men rape white women. She believed many of these incidents of alleged rape had been in fact cases of consensual sex and lynchings from her view were a way for southern white men to prevent interracial relationships and keep black men subjugated. A lot of Wells's investigative writings would actually be published into a book called Southern Horrors in 1892 and would offer one of the first deep explorations of lynchings and explore the reasons behind it. One of the cases she investigated was the lynching of Ed Coy, the same lynching that Jose Martí wrote about for La Nación. In Wells's investigation, one of the things she found was that the white woman Coy was accused of assaulting, had generally been known to have been, quote unquote, intimate with Coy for more than a year and had been compelled by threats to make the charge against the victim. Both of these writers, Jose Martí and Ida B. Wells were pioneers of investigative journalism and predated by at least a decade if not more and likely inspired the muckraking era of journalism that followed in the early 20th century. And here we have a moment in which not only are people of color using media to expose racialized violence but are also innovating what that media can do. This is a pattern that will repeat itself throughout history where we as people of color are always on the cutting edge of the latest innovation in media. All right, so we're doing a deep dive. I'm not gonna go super deep in other forms of media but I did wanna go a little bit deeper in newspapers because a lot of that history I think helps to inform the history that followed. And let me see what I've got here for images. So I was gonna do a mentee check in here but I don't think we'll do that. I don't think we have time for it. But that kind of history repeating itself with other media was certainly true with the early adopters of radio during the 1910s like the Woodlawn Radio Association which was a black radio club in Chicago, Rowling Carrington, a black man from Baltimore started what was probably one of the earliest if not the first ever youth media groups in 1916. He actually recruited young people and taught them how to produce radio. In San Antonio, John Rodriguez would launch the first Mexican-American owned radio station in the early 1920s. And much like black newspapers, radio would be a key tool in the struggle for civil rights and there's some really great stories and news for all the people that I would encourage folks to check out to learn more about that history. Now with TV, the first Latinx owned TV station would be in San Antonio again where Raul Cortez would launch KCOR TV in 1955. While black ownership of TV stations would take longer due to institutional racism that excluded black people from ownership, this would start to change in the mid 1960s when the NAACP challenged the TV licenses of a lot of the most racist TV stations in the South. One of the prominent leaders and one of the prominent leaders in that fight was Medgar Evers and that's one of the other names that I've got here on my t-shirt. The last is Frederick for Frederick Douglas. But, you know, Medgar Evers challenged the Federal Communications Commission for equal air time to combat the segregationist views of Alan Thompson, who at the time was the mayor of Jackson, Mississippi. He won his petition and got on air in May of 1963 on WLBT to share a riveting speech calling for an end to segregation. In that speech, he noted that media helps people see a different world. And I'm gonna paraphrase some of what he said in that speech. Tonight, the plantation worker in the Delta knows from his radio and television what happened in the world. They know what black people are doing and knows what white people are doing. They can see the six o'clock news, screen the three o'clock bit of a police dog. They know that Willie Mays, a black man from Birmingham is the highest paid baseball player in the nation. The Leon Tine Price, a native of Laurel, Mississippi is the star of the Metropolitan Opera in New York. They know about free nations in Africa and know that a Congo native can be a locomotive engineer but in Jackson cannot even drive a garbage truck. They see a city where black residents are refused admittance to the city auditorium. Children refused a ticket to a good movie in a downtown theater. Refused service at a lunch counter in a downtown store. Now, Medgar Evers was assassinated about a month after that TV appearance. His death would trigger further challenges of white-owned TV stations and eventually through lawsuits forced the sale of these TV stations to black folks. And the bigger point for me is this. Media justice, while at term as you're about to learn is less than 20 years old, the movement itself has been around far longer. In that history, people of color have not been passive victims of media. No, pioneers like Ida B. Wells, Jose Marti, Robert Cunnington, The Freedom's Journal and Medgar Evers were building this movement long before us. And it's thanks to the ground that they laid that we do our work today. So I'd love to, before we transition out because we've got about 10 minutes left, I wanna make sure that folks walk away with the clear definition of how we think about media justice and then we'll close out with a little eval and get you all off on time. So first off, this term, media justice was coined at a gathering of media activists at the Highlander Center in New Market, Tennessee and Highlander Center is a wonderful member of the Media Justice Network, the network that we host. People at this convening included Media Justice's founder and let me get out of Malkeah's way here, Malkeah Searle. But there were also other prominent media activists like Janine Jackson, Nan Rubin, Mark Lloyd, Cheryl Lianza, McConny Thambon Nixon, among so many others. And it was at this convening that these folks conceived of a need for a national movement to transform our media system on behalf of people of color. This organization today, known as Media Justice and our network, the MJ Network, were outcomes of that gathering. Now, we define media justice as the transformation of media, both visual and structural for the purpose of social change. In this definition for us, this echoes the quote from Medgar Evers that I read a bit ago, which recognizes that media has the power to shape our society, going back to the quote from Bertolt Brecht, a hammer with which to shape it. Now, it can do that for the side of evil as we shared various examples of newspapers that profited off of the slave trade, perpetuated harmful narratives that justified racist systems of social control. Or it can do that for good as we saw with the examples of the black press. But merely telling more diverse stories is not enough. And I'll come back on screen. We believe that in order to transform media, you have to address power at three fundamental levels. So we have to focus on, yes, representation. We need to tell more diverse stories from diverse storytellers. And I think the history here of the early newspapers tells us that when we're in control of our own stories, we can tell more accurate narratives. That's critical. But we also have to not forget about distribution. We need to have the power to reach our audience. Now, in the 1800s and the early 1900s, when white distributors stopped distributing black newspapers in the South, folks found another way. But we need the power to actually control the means of distribution for our stories to reach the audiences that we're trying to reach. And lastly, we need rules. We need laws that actually democratizes who can own and control our media system. And that's pretty much where we're going to pick it up in part two. We spent a great deal of time here today learning about the early days of media through the history of newspapers. And next time we're gonna flash forward to understand how the media system got to be what it is today. How is it that a handful of corporations own the vast majority of all the media that we consume? How is it that we have a handful of tech companies that actually dominate the internet space in a way that is hard for us to not interact with the big giants like Facebook and Google and Amazon? So we're gonna talk about how the internet age and the digital age has changed the movement for media justice. So I wanna close this out by actually running through a couple of evaluation questions that will help us hopefully improve that next workshop and improve this workshop. So I'd love for folks to jump back into mentee and let me go ahead and make sure I get you all to the proper screen. There we go. Let's see. So here we go. In your screens, you should see this screen that says evaluation of today's workshop. So I'd love for folks to jump in there. There's three statements to give us a sense of what you think. Did you learn a lot today? Was the workshop interactive? And did the workshop meet my accessibility needs? We'd love to get some feedback from you all and the way to provide feedback is just scrolling along those statements, farther to the left means you strongly disagree and strongly to the right means you strongly agree. And again, this will help inform future workshops and making sure that we can make them as incredible as possible for you all. So I'll give you all a moment to respond to that before moving on to the next question. Give it about another couple minutes or not even a couple minutes, probably another minute. Wonderful. Great. All right, another five seconds, then we move on. Cool. Thank you so much for that feedback. Super helpful. Next question we wanna run through is what's one thing we could improve next time? And you can populate your answers in here. This will help me as we think about, as I think about the next workshop but also help us as we think about the subsequent workshops that will be coming up in this series. And then after this, I promise I've only got one more question to go through. I will for sure streamline the shout outs. Great. Yeah. Video clips, I was thinking about it. I was about to play some videos but I'll probably include some videos next time. Thank you for that. Cool, I can definitely do some talking points. Awesome. More time. Don't we always need more time? We for sure do. Yeah, this is incredibly helpful. Give it about another 10 seconds before I move on to the last slide. Awesome. All right, so let's go ahead and jump into the last slide which is what would you like to learn about in part two of this workshop? So I said, we're gonna talk about how we got to this place where we're at today but quite frankly, if there's a particular topic you're interested in, feel free to put it in here. I'll figure out a way to work it in. I'll give folks just another minute in this. Yes, we will talk about corporate media. We will for sure go deep on corporate media. Yeah, that's a good one. Yeah, okay. Hearing from more people we haven't heard of. Cool, I can do that. Yeah, how did effect change? That's right. Yeah, how would we value a modern day Aida today? That's a good question. And I'll figure out a way to kind of speak to that next time because I think there's actually a really good response to it. Yeah, what can we do? Yeah, media and its role in social justice movements. Yep, yeah, distribution strategies. We can definitely talk about all of those things. It's super helpful and I really appreciate this feedback. And that's I think part of what I'm hoping to accomplish in part two is to really get at a lot of what you heard me say today is we're repeating the same kind of cycles, right? History repeating itself. And we're in that moment today where I think we can foment a type of intervention that really changes the course of the trajectory of history of how media and technology have evolved. We've seen the same kind of patterns emerge and we need a different way to move forward. So thank you all for that feedback. I'll just remind folks as we close out that one just wanna thank you all for taking the time to hang with me today. I also wanna especially thank the staff of Media Justice who put in a ton of work to produce the Media Justice Fundamental Series. So again, let me get myself off screen. Don't forget to join us for part two of this workshop on April 6th. And I highly encourage you to check out the racialized to SINFO session that our field organizer, Aaron Shields, is leading on April 20th, as well as the E-carceration 101. If you don't know what E-carceration is, you gotta come to this workshop, which will be led by our fellow James Kilgore on Tuesday, April 27th. I'm sure there are links going around for where folks can check that out. But it's been a pleasure to hang out here with you all today. I will let you go so that we can close out on time. And with that, have a wonderful rest of your day. Thank you.