Communication Theory at a Time of Racial Reckoning

Abstract

In 2018, a group of leading scholars published #CommunicationSoWhite (Chakravartty, Kuo, Grubbs, & McIlwain, 2018). This article was part of a special issue of the Journal of Communication dedicated to revisiting the classic “Ferment in the Field” published in 1983. These researchers found that non-White scholars are underrepresented and under-cited in the field, even as their work often places a racial analytic at the center of theoretical and methodological approaches to communication (Chakravartty et al., 2018) Looking forward, they argue that “what is required is a collective engagement with work that addresses racial antagonisms as central features shaping modern communicative practices” (Chakravartty et al., 2018). What would it mean to take up this call and place analyses of race and ethnicity at the heart of communication theory and research? Three recent books engage in just such a fundamental rethinking of much of communication theory. Distributed Blackness, Bearing Witness While Black, and Hashtag Activism rework a number of core theoretical tenets in the field. Despite their considerable substantive, theoretical, and empirical differences, these books—all authored or co-authored by Black, U.S.-based scholars—are united in one core analytical point: that if we want to understand communication, we must account for social and cultural difference, and especially race and ethnicity. This might seem obvious in a world featuring the resurgence of explicit White racial status appeals in the US (Jardina, 2019) and the UK (Sobolewska & Ford, 2020) and subsequent democratic erosion (Bartels, 2020). However, despite the explosion of studies of race and digital media in the field more generally (Hamilton, 2020), the field of communication, and especially its social scientific variants, has simply not adequately accounted theoretically or empirically for race and ethnicity, or more broadly social identity, social difference, status, and power, in its models of communication. Placing race and ethnicity at the center of their disparate approaches, what is theoretically important about all three books is that they start from an emphasis on the analytical and empirical importance of those who stand outside of powerful institutions and dominant cultures, whether they are activists, movements, counterpublics, everyday smartphone and social media users, or generations of people with a shared history. Each of the books has a different analytical lens onto what brings and keeps these people together, and the relations they hold to others and across history. For Jackson, Bailey, and Foucault Welles, it is the “hashtags” that help collectives form, make people visible to one another, and cohere and sustain movements against injustice. For Richardson (176), it is the “shadow archive” of witnessing that connects historical injustices with present day political struggles and makes politics possible across generations. For André Brock, it is Black sociality and culture that provide the basis for solidarity. Distributed Blackness presents a novel blend of critical race theory, libidinal theory, and analytical perspectives from science and technology studies. While the origins of a dominant digital culture were White, Brock argues that the Internet is now a “Black space.” By this, Brock means simultaneously the visibility of Black identity, expression, culture, and performance, and the decentering of Whiteness. This argument challenges many narratives of things such as the “digital divide,” oft-conceived in racial terms in the US. Brock definitively shows that digital media are core to Black culture and social life, even as Black cyberculture offers an alternative to a broad, de-raced “White” Internet culture that is often held up as universal. This alternative could not be starker. Brock argues for normatively celebrating Black “libidinal online expressions and practices of joy and catharsis” (5) as distinguished from and counterposed to “White digital practices such as incivility, racism, xenophobia, misogyny, and violence,” especially in defense of “freedom of speech and property rights” (7). In this searingly insightful statement, Brock reveals how much of what researchers point to as the ills of a generalized, de-raced Internet culture, such as trolling, are not universal. They are expressions of White, Western technoculture. The alternative includes the very different Black practices of joy and catharsis. In the second half of the book Brock draws on a theory of “libidinal economy” which offers up an analysis of “mundanity, banality, and the celebration of making it through another day” (10). This approach offers a counterpoint to both “deficit” models of the digital divide and the tendency of “glorifying nonwhite capacities for resistance” (10). Brock argues that “social justice activism should not be the epitome of Black digital practice; online activism is simply the most visible and ‘appropriate’ manifestation of online Blackness to the mainstream” (226, original emphasis). Brock (227) ends on constructing the “Black Technocultural Matrix,” which brings together analysis of pathos, creative agency, the intimate, political agency, and celebration—an “Afro-optimist” stance. Brock’s (228) theory of Black cyberculture has at its core an understanding of “how information and communication technologies afford Blackness a differently circumscribed space to luxuriate and grow—never free from White racial ideology but no longer materially coerced by it.” Brock’s is a celebratory account that fundamentally reveals how the disembodiment of virtuality brings joy, honesty, bodies, sexuality, creativity, and expressiveness. In doing so, it is a markedly provocative and generative piece of theoretical work, with illuminating empirical cases ranging from web browsers, Twitter, social media, and respectability politics to online discourse more generally. The book is full of theoretical and conceptual insights—such as the discussion of “weak-tie racism” (156) that builds from classic work in sociology to theorize “racism that is indirectly experienced through digital representation and the distribution, interactivity, or algorithmic repetition of antiblackness directed toward a specific Black body or bodies but abstracted through social media participation.” This is but one example of Brock’s adeptness at reformulating concepts articulated in other contexts (e.g., the strength of weak-ties, “ratchetry,” digital “third places”) through the lens of digital Blackness—which is “sustained through intentional, libidinal, historical, and imaginative Black agency in the context of navigating America’s racial ideology” (22). To analyze distributed Blackness, Brock develops the theoretical/methodological framework of Critical Technoculture Discourse Analysis (CTDA), which is a major intervention in the field of communication. First, methodologically, the conceptual framework centers technology use by marginalized groups, crucially “within their own understandings of themselves rather than unmarked racial and socioeconomic standards of ‘modern’ technology use” (8). In this, CTDA builds on work by science and technology studies scholars such as Eglash (2004) and Fouché (2006) and theorizes the power, structures, and uses-in-practice of technical artifacts. Second, CTDA is premised on “holistic inquiry” (8) that integrates analysis of artifacts, practices, and users. In centering race, power, and holistic analysis, CTDA allows for flexibility in the development, application, synthesis, and integration of concepts, theory, and objects of analysis. It recasts theory/method as a creative practice that highlights the analyst’s interpretive flexibility in crafting cases and research objects. At the same time, it is also a fundamentally interpretative approach that requires an integrative analysis of material artifacts, design, user practices, ideology, and context. CTDA provides the analytical approach for Brock’s ending call for the field: “Imagine how much more powerful Internet studies would be if researchers were explicit about the whiteness of the online communities they study?” (242). We can read Distributed Blackness alongside earlier work on the culture of the web such as Streeter’s (2010) The Net Effect and Turner’s (2006) From Counterculture to Cyberculture. Turner’s work, for instance, showed how the early White culture of the Internet grew up alongside a very particular network of people in the Bay Area during the 1960s–1990s who saw the uptake of new technologies as a project of changing consciousness, forging new ways to live, and making the world anew through technologies. In the process, Turner shows how the “New Communalist” stylings of White back-to-the-landers helped bring us the Whole Earth Catalog, the WELL, and ultimately Wired Magazine—all projects shot through with a fundamental premise that information and technologies were helping people create new systems, new minds, and new ways to live. It also brought, as Brock (1) shows, a “universal, raceless, technocultural identity” that was simultaneously de-raced yet based on universalist White pretensions. This White dominant Internet culture elided Black histories of engagement with and participation in computing culture and software to create community, economic opportunity, and spaces for life and activism (chronicled beautifully and thoroughly in another important book published in 2020, Charlton McIlwain’s Black Software). In contrast to a raceless Internet, Brock (47) theorizes how race is both relational and infrastructural, woven into the fabric of the browsers, content, and algorithms that together “constructs and maintains Western and modern notions of race, gender, and class.” Brock’s everyday expressions of the mundane in Black digital sociality and cultural practice sit alongside other, more expressly political uses of digital media directed at White institutions of power. Allissa Richardson’s extraordinary Bearing Witness While Black takes up the political and makes a number of important theoretical contributions to the field. Foremost among them is the argument that we cannot understand “witnessing” on generalized terms independent of context and history. This is a departure from well-established approaches in communication theory that analyze witnessing as a set of abstract media processes and detail their relationship to presence. Instead, Richardson argues for an ethnocentric understanding of witnessing, building from the Jewish Holocaust to extend to “Black Witnessing.” Richardson analyzes witnessing as a social practice, renewed across history and embedded in particular social relations, which creates a “long, thematic thread of narrative that links similar human rights violations to one another throughout history, rather than regarding each new violation as an isolated incident” (8). In recovering this social and historical context as part of the social practice of witnessing, Richardson shows how media concepts that are articulated outside of things such as race and ethnicity, or other forms of social differentiation linked to historical inequalities and repression, lack analytical purchase. In other words, communication theory must account for social identity and, ultimately, social power. Richardson’s (9) analytical argument is that “Black witnessing” is linked to “long and storied legacies of persecution” against Black bodies. Witnessing connects threads of historical narratives of atrocities, which are constructed and centered around deeply resonant symbolic figures such as Emmett Till and an attendant visual culture. With the concept and analysis of Black witnessing in place, Richardson then shows us how it takes specific form as a practice, through a set of media, and constituted by various publics. It is a model that is fundamentally relational and socially and historically embedded. Richardson (21) shows how contemporary Black witnessing takes the form of an “investigative editorial stance” that advocates for civil rights, takes place in and through digital media that offer both news and community, and occurs across various publics (a typology drawn from Squires’ [2002] pioneering work). A foundational strength of this book is this framework of practice, media, and publics. Empirically, Richardson weaves together historical and contemporary Black witnessing by following activists through their practices, as they use media, and build various publics in relation to power. While the book primarily offers an empirical analysis of Black witnessing at our contemporary moment, it crucially locates witnessing—like the threads of atrocities themselves—in history as a set of practices, media, and publics. The sweeping and brilliantly creative second chapter offers a historical periodization of Black witnessing spanning slave narratives, lynching, Jim Crow, the Civil Rights Movement, and police brutality—all while analyzing the technologies and genres of witnessing during these eras. This is exactly the sort of intellectually ambitious intervention the field of communication needs: analysis that marries sociology and history and centers social power and social difference. And it does so through writing that is vivid, moving, analytical, and personal at the same time as it charts how “today’s black witnesses and their ancestors also have created an unbroken chain of brave seers that has spanned more than 200 years” (44). I am simply hard pressed to think of a better example of how to do intellectual work that blends deep knowledge of a field and histography in the service of a sparklingly clear and urgent analytical argument. Richardson (21) contends that our moment requires an “Afrocentric theory of media witnessing.” While much academic and public discourse has centered technology in practices of witnessing, Richardson provides a crucially different analytical lens through which to understand the long history of witnessing police brutality towards Black bodies. This approach offers a sense of continuity through shifting media forms, while enabling us to understand the power of the fundamental transitions that mark our own era (as opposed to the mass media era, see Lawrence, 2000): “In this new paradigm we have entered (…) news is no longer solely the domain of the elite. African Americans have seized social media platforms to elevate their discourse to the national level, and beyond” (43). This shift is fueled by smartphones. Through interviews, Richardson (82) shows how people approach witnessing from different paths and have different motivations, but in turn share in the construction of “counternarratives,” including being oriented towards holding the news media accountable for frames that perpetuate racist myths, pursuing redress, and training an “oppositional gaze” at powerful institutions (for patterns of news media coverage in a “hierarchy of social struggle” see Kilgo & Harlow, 2019). The final third of the book is focused on the visual culture of Black Lives Matter activists, detailing the semiotic structure of the act of recording and video evidence, standpoint of the “distant witness” (139) who encounters it, and the ways video evidence (or images more broadly) gets repurposed and transformed through the creation of new images in the new “black visual public sphere” (152). These ideas of Afrocentric witnessing and a “black visual public sphere” provide threads that connect to Sarah Jackson, Moya Bailey, and Brooke Foucault Welles’s Hashtag Activism, which details the work of hashtags in providing narrative arcs and networked collectivity for new, global movements for racial and social justice. This book is notable for many reasons, but I believe none more important than its central claim that digital media offer “radical possibilities for contemporary democracy” (xxxvii). It is a contention that stands out at a time of extraordinary emphasis in the field, and beyond it, on the ills associated with digital and social media and democracy. The field of predominately White scholars in communication and many adjacent disciplines, as well as policy discourse, have rather myopically developed a fevered moral pitch since 2016 over things such as mis- and disinformation and, increasingly, polarization. Hashtag Activism challenges this focus by centering analysis of power and challenges to it. To take one potent example, Hashtag Activism opens by citing the pioneering work of Black American journalist Ida B Wells. Wells no doubt would be accused of fomenting during the racial in the US are now the same discourse of and to social (a premised on White terms of racial against such as and the project as well as critical race theory as an intellectual body of Hashtag Activism us that is in part the of the are now to hold power to account through networked communicative the book reveals that this fundamentally the power of and other dominant social and Jackson, Bailey, and Foucault that the contemporary networked media has people the power to as they and to those marginalized and This book offers a powerful to perspectives that see the Internet as to democracy. it us that if the field about over racial and social justice it normatively a status on White Jackson, Bailey, and Foucault Welles’s Hashtag Activism offers a moral for a field that often over and democratic such as participation and over In doing so, Hashtag Activism makes a and intervention the field of communication and its many by centering the of Black and that often to the of the field and its and in our For example, the book is around analysis of race and ethnicity, gender, and in its empirical of how digital media have movements, narratives, and collective both by to new of and new forms of networked Hashtag Activism provides a model for a clear theoretical including a with empirical analysis. 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