From Ida B. Wells’s black radical journalism challenging U.S.
“lynchocracy” in the turn of the century to the Black- and Chicano-led Civil
Rights Movement’s constitutional challenges of segregationist radio and
television broadcasting policies from the 1950s-1970s to the recent Media
Justice Delegation at the 2005 World Summit on the Information Society, the
media justice movement has always understood that media access without
institutional and discursive power is a losing battle in the long-term war for
socioeconomic, environmental and racial justice. Unlike the bipartisan “media
democratic reform” movement with its’ overwhelming focus on media policy reform
(aimed at corporate-driven deregulation and consolidation), media justice
activism has couched the fight for nation-based media democracy within a larger
global-based struggle to build social movements capable of challenging the
fundamental roots of media power—namely, how the media engage and create
culture, representation, meaning, and structural, symbolic violence. According
to the Third World Majority (TWM), media justice is “a movement in which
community organizers are waking up to the media abuse that assaults our
communities everyday”; a movement that “speaks to the need for the creation of
just media structures that are liberated from corporate control and
consolidation and are accountable to our communities” (“Tell It Like It Is”: Digital Story Preparation Packet, 2011, 3). It is no coincidence that TWM
started in Oakland, CA not far from the Youth Media Council (now the Center for
Media Justice).

In this brief dialogue piece, I conduct a textual analysis of TWM’s
strategic communications training guides and communications capacity building
curricula aimed at advancing social change in criminalized communities.  Strategic communications—historically used by
the private sector, by government, and by the political Right—has been reframed
and utilized by media justice organizations to ensure a space in wider
political debates for youth and communities of color, to restore fairness in
media ownership and representation, to empower spokespeople from communities of
color to counter wedge issues, and to reverse the prevailingly negative images
of youth and people of color in mainstream media.  Instead of focusing only on doing direct
public relations—press lists, skilled spokespeople, pitch-perfect analysis of
communications outlets and their market penetration—TWM worked to underscore
the importance of long-term capacity building to strengthen the power of
grassroots immigrant-based, youth-focused, and anti-racist organizations and
social movements.

In the TWM screenplay entitled, “Chapter 1: Take the Red Pill of Media Justice” [link to “mediajustica” PDF] readers meet Ayesha who, like the
character Morpheus in the popular sci-fi film The Matrix, holds out a red pill
in her palm encouraging the audience (like Neo) to swallow it in order to “know
the truth”. Ayesha faces the audience, dwarfed by the Godzilla-like, TV-bellied
monster representing media monopoly and consolidation [link to “Media Justice
Now!” poster] and states: “We here are like Neo, taking that pill of Media
Justice. There is lots of ways to find your way to the movement. It can start
like this by a couple of folks sitting down and talking about what's wrong with
the media. And going deeper than what’s on the surface. Do you think that the
media all of a sudden became racist, sexist, and homophobic overnight?
Concentrated media is part of the larger systems of oppression that are
attacking our communities” (4). After demonstrating the various forms that
media production and media justice organizing can take, Ayesha declares: “When
I talk about media justice, I don’t want to talk about another thing I am
against; I want to talk about something I am for!” Ayesha launches into an
explanation of how the right to communicate is a fundamental human right that
is basically “F****D” when the “media is owned by and representative of the
interests of people in power”. She ends by invoking Malcolm X and declares that
she is going to “take back” her “right to communicate by any means necessary”
(4).

Ayesha’s segment is immediately followed by “Chapter 2: Bust a Frame,” a
training segment which instructs youth about media monitoring, messaging, and
framing. Connor, a homeless trans youth of color, leads this training and
declares: “life in the margins is bigger than the stereotype and defies the
soundbyte” (15). Not knowing where to start on his/their journey to “bust a
frame” and create a counter-narrative or oppositional political framework,
Connor decides to “frame the framer” and “flip the script” on mainstream
reporting of gender queer and trans communities of color.

Xochi, the renegade graffiti artist who does not abide by corporate
appropriation of public space (“I have always done graffiti. Just because
corporations have the money to express themselves doesn’t mean I have to pay…to
play in my city”) (26) [link to “Media Justice” poster with girl doing
graffiti], completes the media justice-training trilogy in “Eyes on the Prize”
by discussing the nuts and bolts of digital media pre-production and
production. For Xochi and the rest of the TWM, “creation is liberation”
especially when the ultimate goal is to activate and mobilize girls and trans
youth of color most impacted by multiple, intersecting forms of mass-mediated
violence (“Tell It Like It Is”: Digital Story Preparation Packet, 2011, 6).

TWM’s popular educational training manuals and curricula stress both the
product and process of engaging in media justice activism. As co-founder
Thenmozhi Soundarajan explained, “there’s value to movement both in terms of
the process and product” (Soundarajan interview, February 18, 2015).
Demonstrating the link between community-driven production and process is Desis
Rising Up and Moving or DRUM’s digital story entitled “Drumbeat” (Link to TWM
Metastory). Actively resisting the “Sally Struthers Missionary filter” (“Tell
It Like It Is”: Digital Story Preparation Packet, 2011, 10) in which
working-class South Asian (“Desis”), Muslim, and Arab girls and young women of
color are solely represented as willing victims of their own “backward”
communities and not of U.S.-driven hetero-patriarchal, imperialist state
violence, DRUM’s Youth Power narrators perform spoken word and tell stories of
community-driven resistance replete with action shots of protests and banner
drops against racial profiling, hetero-sexism, and U.S. foreign policy. This
film is “team building focused” and is “about going into…a shared place of a
kind of imagining and visioning” (Soundarajan interview, February 18, 2015) in
order to unite generations and various racialized immigrant and refugee
communities experiencing heightened surveillance, criminalization, and
deportation. The film effectively undermines discourses championing
state-sanctioned liberal politics of recognition as the only feasible and
pragmatic form of resistance offered to those victimized by hetero-patriarchal,
white supremacist, and neo-imperialist state violence. It resists the “language
fatigue” so common among those media makers and community organizers working
with communities already at the point of crisis who target their messages
overwhelmingly to liberal and progressive policy makers, government officials,
academics, philanthropists, and other opinion-makers. As the writers of TWM’s
“Tell It Like It Is” media training manual elaborate:

Sometimes, as organizers we get language fatigue. We get used to creating
anitiseptic narratives about our crises in our communities for the people in
power: government officials, funders, opinion and decision makers. This
language deadens our original memories of these experiences, which is ironic
because they are what moved us to action in the first place. (“Tell It Like It
Is”: Digital Story Preparation Packet, 2011, 8)

TWM and DRUM—from the pedagogy of digital media training manuals to
production tutorials—privilege a decolonial politics of self-determination and
self-recognition rather than uphold a politics of recognition that is palatable
to the “whitestream” or mainstream media and liberal consuming public. As
Indigenous activist-scholar Glen Coulthard argues, “the empowerment that is
derived from [a] critically self-affirmative and self-transformative process of
desubjectification must be cautiously directed away from the assimilative lure
of the statist politics of recognition, and instead be fashioned toward our own
on-the-ground practices of freedom” (Coulthard 2007, 456; emphasis in
original).

In 2008, INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence organized SisterFire, a
national women of color multimedia arts tour that traveled across the country
for approximately six months. TWM co-partnered with SisterFire’s national
organizing committee to publish a media training and support manual [link to
SisterFire’s Media Documentation Packet] geared to those local organizations
which demonstrated a commitment to “host an event with a larger circle of your
community members about the ways we survive the violence in our community with
sadness, hope, joy, and renewal in true revolutionary divaship” (SisterFire’s
Media Documentation Packet, 2011, 2). The SisterFire INCITE training manual
states how the collective aimed to build a new Indigenous and race-radical
trans and feminist anti-violence movement that did not rely on—that was
directed away from—the carceral or settler state to challenge intimate,
interpersonal, and sexual violence:

Violence against women affects us all, with the SisterFire tour, women of
color are stepping up and speaking about their survival in the face of this
violence and naming the cost to our society we all face when the State is
unchecked as the larger perpetrator of violence in our community. (11)

By utilizing digital media production, TWM and SisterFire participants
not only worked to raise the visibility and profile of grassroots organizations
that held a trenchant analysis of systemic violence against girls, trans youth,
and women of color, they theorized the kind of incommensurable politics that
are needed to build both a new and sustainable media justice movement and
feminist and trans of color anti-violence movement that does not rely on the
carceral or settler state.

In order to ensure that TWM’s “own on-the-ground practices of freedom”
would continue to shape and drive their curriculum and pedagogical processes,
media-makers and community organizers underscored the importance of being
mindful of the tools of media technology that were chosen to produce and
disseminate their work [link to “Radical Women of Color Media” and “Choice of
Weapons” images]. As the writers of TWM’s SisterFire media training manual
elaborate:

As organizers working for global social justice, we must be mindful of
the tools of technology that we use to disseminate the success of the work we
do. We must strive to not perpetuate and replicate the legacies that film,
video and photography have established against communities of color within the
United States, youth, peoples of the “Third World,” women and LGBT communities
(e.g. surveillance, imperial anthropology, misrepresentation, etc.). At Third
World Majority, we believe in creating media structures of self-determination
where we control and dictate how we represent ourselves and tell our stories
whether it is in the mainstream media, a local community radio station, or in
our own Sisterfire produced media pieces. In sharing your experiences during
Sisterfire, it is important to respect the self-determination of all the people
and voices that become part of your own media campaign and documentary pieces.
(SisterFire’s Media Documentation Packet, 2011, 3)

And as Thenmozhi Soundarajan shared in an interview Carrie Rentschler and
I conducted in February 2015:

You know, I think that one thing that is really important is - people
don’t ask themselves a lot - enough about - when they’re working in a digital
environment, is: where does my tool come from? What is the political economy of
my tool, and how do I relate to that as an artist interested in
self-determination and justice? A camera is not just a camera, a computer is
not just a computer - it is a set of highly precise technological components
that are put together in an ecosystem of injustice and environmental
degradation. And to understand that from the hardware up, we’re looking at the
legacies of ongoing colonialism really, I think, shifts the process and the
urgency of how we use these tools, that are kind of bloody by those
relationships, for our own self-determination. Like, in order to make that loss
of life count, we really have to make what we say matter, you know. And I think
that we assume that everything is of ease and disregard the violence around
that. So I think that, one of the things that I really appreciated about the
thinking work behind our curriculum and our pedagogical process, was to bring
that forward into our training. So our teaching story, “Who We Be” [Link to TWM
Metastory], would be the opening lecture to start putting into the context of
how do we understand what our role of story is, and going back from the history
of the camera and colonialism, … (Soundarajan interview, February 18, 2015)

TWM—from
the “choice of weapon” to the pedagogy of digital media training manuals—are
mobilizing against the multiple ways that racialized and gendered Others are
made vulnerable to premature death by carceral state violence and white settler
colonialism. Ultimately, the media justice movement co-created by the TWM
continues to challenge media necropower and the racialized gendered violence
that it mobilizes and sustains by privileging a decolonial politics of
self-determination and self-recognition.