Reparative Journalism Archive: A Sanctuary of Black Memory
Courtney Morrison
The Media 2070 project, launched in 2020, calls on media companies, the government, philanthropy and the broader public to reckon with and repair the historical and ongoing harm our nation’s media system has inflicted on Black people. We advocate for media reparations to achieve a future where Black people have the capital and power necessary to own and control our own stories, from ideation to production, through to distribution.
As part of that work, Media 2070 exposes historical and ongoing realities of anti-Black media harm and produces media content, creative educational resources and workshops to shape methodologies for reparative-journalism practices. Our reparative-journalism work highlights and builds strategies toward sustainable infrastructure for community-centered Black storytelling that: reclaims narrative storytelling traditions, centers repair and reckons with journalism’s structural history of anti-Blackness.
Our new Reparative Journalism Archive is a living repository of reparative journalism in practice. It is a multidisciplinary database that chronicles and examines the intersections between media history, Black citizenship and identity, movement building and afrofuturist visioning. Over the next year, we’ll fill it with collaborative projects that center reparative narratives. From rewriting anti-Black narratives to embodying speculative futures, this archive will show the world of possibility available when Black people own and control our stories.
The impact of media coverage in 2020
Our first entry in our archive is Riot to Repair: Community Archives on Media and Narrative Power. Media 2070 created this collection in collaboration with Dr. Allissa Richardson and journalists at the USC Charlotta Bass Journalism & Justice Lab.
This collection was first displayed in May as part of Black Future Newsstand: Riot to Repair, in a physical space that allowed people to interact with the interviews, see related art and engage with academic programming. However, this will mark the archive’s first permanent virtual location. This online portal includes 55 audio interviews with Los Angelenos describing their lived experience of the death of George Floyd and the 2020 uprisings. The interviews uplift stories of grief, multiracial solidarity, the reclamation of our voices and the repetitive nature of anti-Black violence in the United States.
This archive can be experienced through imagery that animates the stories of community members. Viewers can explore how stories embrace repair through joy, accountability, power, solidarity, grief and care. Diamond Hardiman curated the archive, and Courtney Morrison provided creative direction and collage artwork. The team at Neta Collab used animation to weave stories together and create a collective narrative of 2020.
That year, communities were once again reminded of the outsized impact that the media have when it comes to defining liberation struggles for the broader public. Demeaning and outright racist coverage in turn impacts policy, use of force and government responses. The uprisings of 2020 were not unlike the ways we saw corporate media cover the protests of 2016 in St. Louis, Trayvon Martin’s murder in 2012 or civil-rights activists of the 1960s.
Many stories about the 2020 uprisings failed to provide context about the long history of violence Black communities have faced. Others spread false dichotomies of “good protesters” vs. “bad protesters” — a depiction that values property over people’s lives. And some of the worst offenders silenced Black voices in their newsrooms under the myth of objectivity — which centers lived experience as a form of bias rather than expertise, inherently assuming that whiteness is the neutral place from which we’re all working.
In 2020, frustrated with consistently inaccurate and oftentimes racist coverage, community members called newspapers to the mat for the anti-Blackness in their reporting. In response to the backlash, several media organizations apologized for their histories of racism and made pledges to do better. Papers like The Baltimore Sun, The Guardian and The Kansas City Star have acknowledged their racist histories. In their apologies, both The Los Angeles Times (2020) and The Oregonian (2022) acknowledged that their papers had once respectively served the goals of upholding white supremacy and maintaining white-racial hierarchies.
Accountability in the alternative
The anti-Black harm the media system has caused is deep seated and expansive. From using papers to run ads for enslaved African and Indigenous people to fanning the flames for the war on drugs, mainstream media have continuously parroted police narratives and criminalized Blackness throughout U.S. history.
Communities need much more redress than apologies. In the words of Northwestern University Professor Aymar Jean Christian, “sometimes accountability looks like building an alternative.”
Riot to Repair: Community Archives on Media and Narrative Power serves as an alternative. It’s a counter narrative to the long history of the “papers of record” systematically misrepresenting Black stories and Black freedom struggles. It’s a community-issued correction to corporate stories that center pro-police sentiments, value property over life and diminish the lived experiences of communities and organizers on the ground. Through joy, accountability, power, solidarity, grief and care, we engage in reparative journalism that confronts mainstream narratives and recontextualizes their place in history.
The Reparative Journalism Archive will highlight Black narrative power created through the stories of journalists, community members and futurists. It’s a sanctuary of Black cultural memory and a placekeeper for Black visionary stories of thriving and abundance.