I am sorry for the long absence. Going back to in person work and then starting the semester with mostly in person classes, helping a lot of people who haven’t been on campus before, adjusting to a number of changes on campus in leadership, staff, etc. has been a time. I am seeing some glimpses now, not of “a new normal” — I don’t think I believe in normal anymore — but of a less frenetic pace.

So in the last day or so I was able to revisit an article I read in August in the relative calm just before the pre-semester rush on campus: “Tell Me Sweet Little Lies: Racism as a Form of Persistent Malinformation” by Nicole A. Cooke, a librarian whose work I very much admire. Cooke’s article is part of the Project Information Literacy Provocation series. You may recall I shared in earlier posts Barbara Fister’s essay on information literacy in a time of QAnon, and Alison J. Head’s essay on critical reading in college. I can’t say enough good things about the series and how it’s influenced my own work this year. In fact, an English professor colleague and I are working closely with one of her classes this fall on critical reading as a result of these essays so far.

Cooke reminds readers that approaching information critically is not enough; she came to see that the racial malinformation our culture is steeped in, “the phenomenon of how we are conditioned, socialized, and repeatedly bombarded with racist and negative images and stereotypes,” requires a different kind of literacy that considers not only what is untrue, but how. She says it so brilliantly, I will quote her:

“Critical information and media literacies address relational structures and power dynamics, which is crucial, but that wasn’t enough. Even more context and a holistic lens was needed in order to truly understand the convergences that create racial malinformation. We need to understand history, politics, design, emotional intelligence, cultural competence, and racial dynamics. We need critical cultural literacy.”

Cooke gives examples of this kind of literacy in her essay. I’ve been trying to practice it more intentionally — emphasis on practice. Here is a very recent example of this practice: reports of the protests outside the Met gala a few nights ago in New York City. First, I hadn’t heard about the protests until my daughter mentioned them this evening. I get my news primarily from headlines from the local paper my college library subscribes to (I rarely have time at work to go beyond the headlines), and the New York Times app on my phone, and had not noticed this story ineither place.

When I searched online, I initially only found reports on the protest and arrests from Fox News, email providers (MSN, Yahoo, AOL) whose stories came from various news services that relied heavily on social media accounts, and British papers. Digging deeper, I found the New York Times‘ mention — buried in an article that focuses on other details about the gala — and then an article on The Advocate‘s website by Mikelle Street, and another on The Root by Maiysha Kai. If you aren’t familiar with these, the first is an LGBTQ magazine and the second is a media website whose tagline is “The Blacker the Content the Sweeter the Truth.”

Quick aside: Kai’s story is also the only place I saw Jeremy Pope’s ensemble, and two of us in this house stayed up way too late on the 13th dissecting the gala ensembles — mainly on Vogue‘s website. Pope is black, and his”all-white ensemble was a tribute to the legacy of enslaved and exploited African Americans and the ever-lucrative cultivation of cotton on the country’s soil—the foundation of the same fashion industry being celebrated on Monday night,” writes Kai, who also notes Pope’s ensemble was “largely overlooked” in reporting. Sit with that understatement. Even the fashion press did not note what was clearly a very aesthetically interesting and thematically spot-on outfit, worn by a black man, that included a cotton picking sack that looked a little like a train.

Back to the protest coverage. In reading these accounts here is what critical cultural literacy tells me: only Fox and the British papers ran stories entirely about the protest and arrests, while other sources mentioned the protests within articles about the gala. Both The Advocate and The Root commented on the injustice of the protests. The others either reported what the police said the protestors did wrong (disorderly conduct, according to the Fox story — which by the looks of the eyewitness videos, is an apt description of the police themselves, who tackled people), or what bystanders posted on social media. So most major news outlets did not really cover the protests as a news story. They covered the wealthy attending the gala. And as noted by Kai’s article in The Root, only the wealthy who did not remind them too blatantly of America’s slaveholding past.

That’s what I noticed about the press coverage. As for the event itself: one report noted this was a peaceful protest, that protestors were speaking out about police brutality and promoting abolitionist views such as using what protest fliers claimed is an $11 billion New York police budget to care for people who need housing and other basic needs. I live in a white town, and a few years ago, when I worked close to the state capitol, I attended some rallies and protests to support an end to homelessness, a more just budget, etc. Never was a single (almost all white — I live in NH) peaceful protester arrested let alone wrestled to the ground. Also, as Cooke herself notes in the beginning of “Tell Me Sweet Little Lies,” about the summer 2020 protests, “Despite the fact that 93% of these Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests were peaceful, they were labeled as violent, destructive, unnecessary, and unproductive.”

I see this reproduced in both the assertion that the Met gala protestors were “disorderly” and the lack of attention that most of the media gave the protest or its causes. This was according to many reports on social media (mentioned in the news reports) a large crowd outside an event that was widely covered, and the protest was aimed at drawing attention to that eye-popping police budget in a city where the police have a long track record of discrimination, abuse, and murder. The same city where police used violent tactics to disperse protests in summer 2020 after George Floyd’s murder. Why? Because in America’s dominant culture, Black lives don’t matter as much as money. The major media companies’ context is that dominant culture, and they told the story of the gala, from that context.

So what do I do with this information? Talk about it with the same people I talked about the gala fashion with, seek what’s missing from stories I see in the future, try to understand whose stories aren’t being told (arguably harder than skimming headlines), find alternative sources of news that do tell those stories. Remember, as I learned in my science communication studies, that all information is mediated through various lenses, and in many cases, it’s the dominant (or hegemonic, to use the more academic term) culture’s lens. And, heed Cooke’s very wise conclusion:

“CCL requires critical self-reflection and the desire for equitable information and non-racist perceptions of others. We have to reexamine and reimagine everything we’ve been taught and ask ourselves “What perspectives and voices are missing from what I think I know? How can I do better and learn more?” When we examine our own identities, privileges, and disadvantages, we are better positioned to have empathy for others and do the work of dismantling racist malinformation with CCL. Part of this work involves pushing back against the media, publishing, and other entities that produce racist malinformation and are chronically resistant to change (because change typically involves a loss of revenue and power). But if we are diligent and take the time to explode siloed echo chambers of racist malinformation, we can slow and maybe even reverse this crisis.”

I will end on that hopeful note, and Cooke’s words. Go read the rest here.