Dear T—
It was great connecting with you, if only 280 characters at a time. I hope we can meet again in person, maybe at the People-Powered Publishing conference in Chicago. That one’s always a goody.
Also, I wanted to thank you for checking my privilege when I tweeted about the Black Panther Party’s free breakfast program. I wrote that the program served the Black community in general, but you were correct to point out that it served specifically low-income Black families that never would have coalesced had the Party not brought them together.
These were misconceptions that my colonized mind couldn’t discern on its own: that people with shared interests would unite effortlessly, and that Black people in the 1960s and 1970s were nothing but poor. I failed to see stigma and trauma as obstacles to forming a community, and failed to recognize my own racism as an obstacle to understanding humanity. I’m a work in progress.
Our Twitter conversation also raised something that seemed like a matter of semantics at the time: the role of journalism in building community. You suggested that journalism could build communities; I argued that journalism should only serve existing communities. The more I thought about it, the less it seemed like po-tay-to po-tah-to, though perhaps we were reaching for the same concept: space.
Space is where people feel safe to share their stories and empower each other—the nebula from which communities are born. Sometimes space already exists; sometimes trauma and stigma make that space hard to reach. If journalism and other forms of information can create space for people with shared interests, then a community can build itself. But I won’t task journalism with creating a community de novo. Community is by and for the people. I think we can both agree on that.
My concern with community building is that media professionals would treat it only as audience development, and then wonder why people distrust the news. I don’t even like the idea of news organizations being “in partnership” with a community because that implies reciprocity—some sort of transaction—and we need to move the hell away from that.
Maybe journalism ought to play the role of mutual aid: support for a community’s immediate needs while it tackles systemic issues, using what activist Dean Spade called horizontal organization. To be honest, I’m still trying to figure out how that would work. I’ll let you know what my navel gazing turns up.
Let’s get beer and pizza in Chicago soon. Until then, be well and stay safe!
Jennifer