Angela Davis in Newsweek
Connecting James Baldwin to Stuart Hall
With reflection upon the pointed quote by Baldwin, I saw an opportunity to connect the idea with an important theorist. As described by cultural studies theorist Stuart Hall, the process that a media message like the Newsweek article undergoes is "a structure produced and sustained through the articulation of linked but distinctive moments—production, circulation, distribution/consumption, reproduction" (Hall, 128). In considering this moment of production, we can see that the story did not, by crystalizing the events into a tabloid article, communicate the "raw historical event" of Angela's arrest, but rather, processed the image of her arrest and the available information into a narrative limited by the "technical infrastructure" of the time, "relations of production" that the photojournalist and/or reporter were subject to, as well as the subjective "frameworks of knowledge" and "meaning structures" that a Newsweek writer/editor has with their position (Ibid, 130-132). It was then printed and distributed to an audience which received and decoded the message within their own meaning structures, and further reproduced in discourse, actions, and the formation/reification of beliefs subject to the frameworks of knowledge, relations of production, and technical infrastructure of the receiver-decoder. Thus, what might attempt to present itself as a natural image, i.e. 'Black revolutionary in chains', does not point to this image as reality, but rather, it points to "the degree of habituation produced; an achieved equivalence between the encoding and decoding side of an exchange of meaning" (Hall, 132). In other words, Newsweek's use of the image, just as Baldwin alludes to, does not only speak to their own interests and position as a for-profit media company, but also points to the American public's willingness to consume and reproduce these stereotypes.