Photo courtesy of Braxton Daniels/wp-json/wp/v2/article/98711/n/wp-json/wp/v2/article/98711/n/wp-json/wp/v2/article/98711/n/wp-json/wp/v2/article/98711/n Obligations of Witnesses to the Audience/wp-json/wp/v2/article/98711/n/wp-json/wp/v2/article/98711/n/wp-json/wp/v2/article/98711/n/wp-json/wp/v2/article/98711/nThe public depends on witnesses for insight into protest events. But every witness, whether a journalist, artist, or accidental observer, has to grapple with questions of positionality: how an individual/wp-json/wp/v2/article/98711/u2019s identity impacts the way they report on a given issue. /wp-json/wp/v2/article/98711/u201cWith the aims of [modern] protests, very often the protesters are demanding accountability for injustices that reporters themselves experience,/wp-json/wp/v2/article/98711/u201d Shapiro says. Whether it/wp-json/wp/v2/article/98711/u2019s sexual harassment, abuse in the workplace, or institutional racism like /wp-json/wp/v2/article/98711/u201cdriving while Black,/wp-json/wp/v2/article/98711/u201d Shapiro says reporters are increasingly finding themselves in positions where they are covering issues that they are affected by on a deeply personal level./wp-json/wp/v2/article/98711/n/wp-json/wp/v2/article/98711/n/wp-json/wp/v2/article/98711/n/wp-json/wp/v2/article/98711/n
Whereas /wp-json/wp/v2/article/98711/u201ctraditional/wp-json/wp/v2/article/98711/u201d newsroom editors have had a tendency to avoid assigning reporters to covering stories they identify with, Shapiro says a new generation of journalists is pushing back, adding to the voices that have long been insisting that Black reporters should cover Black Lives Matter protests. Over the past few years, he says #metoo and BLM have changed the nature of the debate as journalists and other public intellectuals have destabilized the assumed neutrality of Whiteness and masculinity. White people have a /wp-json/wp/v2/article/98711/u201cstake/wp-json/wp/v2/article/98711/u201d in Black Lives Matter protests just as much as Black reporters do; the only difference is that their stake is often to defend the status quo./wp-json/wp/v2/article/98711/n/wp-json/wp/v2/article/98711/n/wp-json/wp/v2/article/98711/n/wp-json/wp/v2/article/98711/nObjectivity, whether in reporting or writing, is a myth. If there are no /wp-json/wp/v2/article/98711/u201cobjective/wp-json/wp/v2/article/98711/u201d ways to cover complex social moments like protests, the conversations turn instead around ethics, fairness, and equanimity. If we admit that being an impartial witness is impossible, then we can move beyond whether positionality affects storytelling to instead think about how positionality might affect storytelling, which is a much more interesting question./wp-json/wp/v2/article/98711/n/wp-json/wp/v2/article/98711/n/wp-json/wp/v2/article/98711/n/wp-json/wp/v2/article/98711/nA witness/wp-json/wp/v2/article/98711/u2019 life experiences, training, socialization, and demographics all provide a lens through which reality is viewed. These experiences, then, filter understandings of protest events and how stories are told. For example, when does a protest become a riot? If police march in solidarity with protesters but then spray them with tear gas later, which of those images is real? In moments where police and protesters both stage media events to win the hearts and minds of the public, which versions of events are genuine? Harder still is capturing those nuances in a moment or a headline./wp-json/wp/v2/article/98711/n/wp-json/wp/v2/article/98711/n/wp-json/wp/v2/article/98711/n/wp-json/wp/v2/article/98711/n
Art, too, presents questions about impartiality and truth telling. Although the public often believes that artists who are representing protests have political biases, Daniels and Taylor push back on the idea that they have agendas. They both understand their work as part of the historical archive. As Daniels says: /wp-json/wp/v2/article/98711/u201cYou hear people saying the history books were written by the winners. You got the word of mouth, pen, and paper. How valid is that? I think raw images, raw footage, are the only true time capsule./wp-json/wp/v2/article/98711/u201d /wp-json/wp/v2/article/98711/n/wp-json/wp/v2/article/98711/n/wp-json/wp/v2/article/98711/n/wp-json/wp/v2/article/98711/n
Both artists aim to provide material for an audience to consider and to empower the audience to become more empathic and informed, and their positions more nuanced, after coming into contact with their art. And shouldn/wp-json/wp/v2/article/98711/u2019t that be the goal of witnessing at large? By putting aside the myth that witnesses can be objective, they can free themselves to tell more complicated stories, to create more complicated art. By inviting the public to reason through the complexities of a moment, witnesses can reject overly simplistic depictions of nuanced social moments./wp-json/wp/v2/article/98711/n/wp-json/wp/v2/article/98711/n/wp-json/wp/v2/article/98711/n/wp-json/wp/v2/article/98711/n
Photo by Braxton Daniels/wp-json/wp/v2/article/98711/n/wp-json/wp/v2/article/98711/n/wp-json/wp/v2/article/98711/n/wp-json/wp/v2/article/98711/n Impact on the Witnesses Themselves/wp-json/wp/v2/article/98711/n/wp-json/wp/v2/article/98711/n/wp-json/wp/v2/article/98711/n/wp-json/wp/v2/article/98711/n/wp-json/wp/v2/article/98711/u201cBlack Lives Matter might not have become the largest social justice movement in American(?) history in 2020 without the world seeing George Floyd/wp-json/wp/v2/article/98711/u2019s fatal police encounter for themselves,/wp-json/wp/v2/article/98711/u201d Richardson wrote me in an email. But she considers the impact of witnessing on the witnesses themselves to be an ethical dilemma. /wp-json/wp/v2/article/98711/u201cWhere is the line, though, between voyeurism and strategic witnessing for justice; between humanizing the victim yet recognizing that circulating their last moments is a profane act? Where is the democracy in bearing witness while Black if federal police reform is a nonstarter?/wp-json/wp/v2/article/98711/u201d/wp-json/wp/v2/article/98711/n/wp-json/wp/v2/article/98711/n/wp-json/wp/v2/article/98711/n/wp-json/wp/v2/article/98711/n
Although there are occasional /wp-json/wp/v2/article/98711/u201cvictories/wp-json/wp/v2/article/98711/u201d in the movement, such as the conviction of Derek Chauvin, the police officer responsible for George Floyd/wp-json/wp/v2/article/98711/u2019s death, the lack of structural and institutional reforms has left witnesses burned out and constantly at risk of what Richardson calls re-traumatization./wp-json/wp/v2/article/98711/n/wp-json/wp/v2/article/98711/n/wp-json/wp/v2/article/98711/n/wp-json/wp/v2/article/98711/n
Shapiro points out that journalists, too, experience post-traumatic stress disorder at the same rates of first responders. He described journalists as being /wp-json/wp/v2/article/98711/u201cconstant witnesses to the pain of others,/wp-json/wp/v2/article/98711/u201d covering car wrecks, bridge collapses, fires, deaths, and illnesses in our communities on a grand scale due to COVID-19. He added, /wp-json/wp/v2/article/98711/u201cThe last year has been a period of open-ended, unremitting stress, and protests have added a huge burden of open-ended, unremitting stress. Reporters who covered the first waves of social protests and Black Lives Matter protests with some hope are feeling exhausted like everybody else and are worried about the future./wp-json/wp/v2/article/98711/u201d/wp-json/wp/v2/article/98711/n/wp-json/wp/v2/article/98711/n/wp-json/wp/v2/article/98711/n/wp-json/wp/v2/article/98711/n
Of course, the past few years have been a particularly fraught moment to be documenting protest: Early in Trump/wp-json/wp/v2/article/98711/u2019s tenure, he declared open season on the media, endangering the lives of reporters and other documentarians. After a local Missouri newspaper covered Daniels/wp-json/wp/v2/article/98711/u2019 show of Black Lives Matter photos, he received a barrage of hateful comments online. /wp-json/wp/v2/article/98711/u201cIt was just pure backlash about how I hated cops,/wp-json/wp/v2/article/98711/u201d he says. Daniels ultimately shrugged off the comments, but they made clear the personal stakes of making political art. /wp-json/wp/v2/article/98711/n/wp-json/wp/v2/article/98711/n/wp-json/wp/v2/article/98711/n/wp-json/wp/v2/article/98711/n
The week before Black in Mayberry premiered, Taylor, too, received an anonymous threat: If she didn/wp-json/wp/v2/article/98711/u2019t stop the screening, the show would be bombed. Taylor met with the FBI and local police. The museum and film producers beefed up security and went on with the show. She is proud of the decision to move forward with the screening but is still shaken by the incident. In the end, Taylor says she was changed by the act of witnessing: She came to see her role as getting more social justice-focused art into the world. She is now starting a foundation to fund anti-racist art./wp-json/wp/v2/article/98711/n/wp-json/wp/v2/article/98711/n/wp-json/wp/v2/article/98711/n/wp-json/wp/v2/article/98711/nAcademics who study protests are often changed by their work as well. As I interviewed protesters and activists over the course of the Trump administration, I constantly readjusted my perspective as I critically reflected on which voices were allowed agency in my research and which remained silent. Providing an authoritative or objective account of a complex, multidimensional movement is impossible: Instead, providing room for multiple truths to exist within an account is a harder and more painstaking but critically important job./wp-json/wp/v2/article/98711/n/wp-json/wp/v2/article/98711/n/wp-json/wp/v2/article/98711/n/wp-json/wp/v2/article/98711/n
Whereas Taylor has decided to focus her energy on social justice, Daniels, in contrast, hopes his days taking pictures of protests are behind him. He considers the pictures he took of the Mansfield protests an important time stamp, an artifact to compare with the past, which is why he took them in black and white. One of his pictures in particular has stuck with him/wp-json/wp/v2/article/98711/u2014a young boy standing on a street corner, wearing a face mask, fist raised. /wp-json/wp/v2/article/98711/u201cI was proud to have that moment,/wp-json/wp/v2/article/98711/u201d Daniels says. The picture echoed the Black Power pose seen in countless previous generations of protesters, he says, /wp-json/wp/v2/article/98711/u201cbut once again, here we got a kid/wp-json/wp/v2/article/98711/u2014same pose, same position, just different clothing./wp-json/wp/v2/article/98711/u201d/wp-json/wp/v2/article/98711/n/wp-json/wp/v2/article/98711/n/wp-json/wp/v2/article/98711/n/wp-json/wp/v2/article/98711/n
/wp-json/wp/v2/article/98711/u201cEveryone thinks [the civil rights movement] is a lifetime away,/wp-json/wp/v2/article/98711/u201d Daniels says, /wp-json/wp/v2/article/98711/u201cand it/wp-json/wp/v2/article/98711/u2019s really not./wp-json/wp/v2/article/98711/u201d/wp-json/wp/v2/article/98711/n/wp-json/wp/v2/article/98711/n/wp-json/wp/v2/article/98711/n/wp-json/wp/v2/article/98711/n
Still, Daniels is determined to keep his critique of injustice separate from his art. He envisions a future world where Black artists can create art for art/wp-json/wp/v2/article/98711/u2019s sake without feeling the burden of having to document tragedy. For his next project, Daniels imagines taking pictures of people in his hometown and asking them simpler, more beautiful questions, like /wp-json/wp/v2/article/98711/u201cWhen did you first fall in love?/wp-json/wp/v2/article/98711/u201d/wp-json/wp/v2/article/98711/n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Witnesses, whether by accident or vocation, help to shape how societies understand social upheaval and respond to social change./wp-json/wp/v2/article/98711/n","protected":false},"author":29,"featured_media":99248,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","format":"standard","categories":[8,255,261],"tags":[695],"article-type":[],"master-category":[463],"special-series":[],"type-of-work":[942],"class_list":["post-98711","article","type-article","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-social-justice","category-racial-justice","category-activism","tag-activism","master-category-social-justice","type-of-work-analysis"],"acf":[],"apple_news_notices":[],"yoast_head":"/wp-json/wp/v2/article/98711/n
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