The Movement Beyond Media Representation: An Online Docuseries Shows us Why Visibility is Not Enough
TV Features
If you want to make a human being into a monster, deny them, at the cultural level, any reflection of themselves. —Junot Díaz
The public conversation about media representations of marginalized people has been ongoing for as long as I can remember. If underrepresented folks are not decrying the terrible and ceaseless failures at achieving adequate diversity behind and in front of the camera, we are lauding limited successes and celebrating those finally breaking through glass ceilings in their artistic fields. 2016 has already been both the year of one of Hollywood’s whitest major awards shows as well as the racial “revolution” that is one of Broadway’s biggest hits.
This is also the year that Mic News premiered its groundbreaking internet docuseries, The Movement, which professes to be “about—and for—the invisible heroes making a difference” within their communities. Boasting the youthful energy of the hyper-connected world with echoes of Vice, the series, hosted by activist, writer, and Mic Senior Correspondent Darnell L. Moore, goes out of its way to highlight the stories of marginalized people we probably would have never heard about otherwise; from an Indigenous chef working to reclaim native food histories outside of “oppression food” in the Bois Forte reservation in Minnesota, to a coach running a small boxing facility for young people who’ve declared that he saves lives in Detroit, Michigan. These are not your typical documentary subjects, and The Movement embraces them as being anything but.
Media representation of marginalized people is important for so many thoroughly explored reasons. Often lost, though, is a true interrogation of what it means to be “seen” and who is the unspecified person doing the seeing we so desperately need. Diaz’ sentiment as expressed in the epigraph has been echoed in various iterations by countless different people to emphasize the very real significance of everyone having the opportunity to witness themselves in society. But there’s a question we often fail to ask: denying a person a reflection may turn them into a monster, but in the eyes of whom? And, if a person’s kin are all around him, what does it take to convince a person that his sister isn’t a reflection of himself?
The Movement is one valiant response to these questions. Many of the people we follow on the show, who admit to violent and criminal pasts—like the outreach counselors for at-risk youth in episode one (and especially Lamar Noble, to whom we are introduced while he is still in the midst of fighting serious charges for drug possession and resisting arrest—do not generally have light shed upon them by the media. And when they do, it’s certainly not in a positive way. In The Movement, they are heroes. More importantly, we are reminded that, in their families and communities they have always been heroes, without a camera to tell everyone else of their heroics.
The importance of this perspective should not be understated. It begs us to consider whether the problem isn’t just that marginalized people aren’t represented, but that the only representations that we allow to matter are those recognized by a wider society. And indeed, it is in those moments when it seems to try to speak to that amorphous larger community that The Movement loses its footing and power. In “This Is What Can Happen When Black Teens Are Allowed to Lead in US Cities,” we are introduced to Steve Olson, a police lieutenant who works with an organization called the Inner Harbor Project alongside community activists to tackle issues of policing in Baltimore, Maryland—the site of Freddie Gray’s death and subsequent violent protests. Olson explains to us how black inner-city children were often referred to as “those kids” to him—kids whom he should be wary of—and we watch as he tells his story of overcoming this conditioning.
But The Movement works best as a story told to and by people who know of this conditioning and have always rejected it. The power in what it does is felt in what happens when we know “those kids” are always “our kids”—kids whose humanity was never up for question. The addition of Olson’s tale into the narrative only takes away from the effect of the narratives of the teenagers at the heart of this story, who tell us how they “didn’t want the protests (after Freddie Gray’s death) to stop: “We don’t need to stop. We need to push and we need to push and we need to push until it’s equal.” It is in these moments, when the protestor who has been labeled a thug everywhere from Fox to CNN, might see himself reflected back. It is in these moments that he is not a monster.
When the narratives fly directly in the face of anyone needing to see black children differently and instead affirms those of us who already do—who already believe in their struggles and protests and who already reflect these children back—The Movement is able to effectively expose who the monsters really are: those participants in the systems creating the conditions being tackled by our heroes.
In most media documentations, these conditions are often represented primarily in order to elicit empathy. But eliciting empathy has always been a fool’s errand for marginalized people. As I wrote last year, “Relying on empathy almost always places the onus on the marginalized. They must reiterate how they are—and then be—much more like those who are not marginalized in order for their causes to matter. They must prove their pain in a way that their oppressors are willing to acknowledge.”
It makes for an empathetic story to see black people working against “black-on-black violence” in Camden, New Jersey, as those from Cure4Camden might appear to be doing in the first episode. It may even prompt a donation or other vague forms of support from the audience. But it’s something different entirely to have one of the people fighting in the city remind us that “Once people stop (the violence), they need something to do,” pushing us to address the more difficult systemic problems at the root.
It’s even more powerful to follow the Camden episode with an installment exploring how drug decriminalization, which so many champion as an answer to the cyclical problem of crime that is responsible for the violence in Camden, is primarily for the benefit of wealthy white men. The series becomes even more brilliant when it follows this up with the only black female marijuana distillery owner in Colorado, Wanda James, posing the question, “How does this industry pay us back for the hundred years of destroying generations of [black] people? That’s the next battle.” In The Movement, these communities aren’t just being granted visibility for their problems, and they aren’t just eliciting empathy, they are challenging the very notion that simply being seen or eliciting empathy from a wider audience is enough.
One of the most recent episodes of the show focuses on the vogue scene in New York City (a scene that centers on a performance style originating within the black LGBTQ community) and HIV. Fresh off the heels of a CDC report predicting 50% of black gay men will acquire HIV within their lifetime, black LGBTQ folks are finding themselves desperately bombarded by the same HIV awareness and prevention campaigns that have already proven not to be enough. With behavioral discrepancies already ruled out as the cause of the massive difference in HIV contraction rates between white and black communities, The Movement rightly focuses on the structural issues at the root of the black queer HIV conversation, issues that cannot be addressed with visibility alone—cannot be fixed by merely being seen through the eyes of others.
What voguing has done since its inception is create spaces where young black queer youth could find guidance, sanctuary away from drugs and other violence, and the community support which has always been necessary in order to address any health issues specific to their experience, not just HIV. These are things that can only be discovered when black queer folks are able to turn to each other and embrace their own narratives. Perhaps we don’t just need more TV shows, we need more opportunities like the ones The Movement provides, which allow us to turn toward each other in a similar way.
Hari Ziyad is a Brooklyn-based storyteller and the Editor-in-Chief of RaceBaitR. Their work has been featured on Gawker, Out, Ebony, Mic, The Guardian, Colorlines, Black Girl Dangerous, Young Colored and Angry, The Feminist Wire and The Each Other Project. They are also an assistant editor for Vinyl Poetry & Prose and a contributing writer for Everyday Feminism.