Cover Art: Rayelle Gardner

Black Privacy collects reflections on, provocations around, demands for, acute analyses of, and uncertain futures for Black privacy in the face of anti-Black violence, surveillance, and hypervisibility. This special issue interrogates the history of Black privacy in its impossible antebellum and Jim Crow forms, its present urgency in the face of spectacular visibility, and the possibilities for futures of Black privacy that still allow for political expression.

From the stunning cover of the issue by Rayelle Gardner, Black Privacy announces its subject as the rearrangement of methods and representations of Black life. This disordering insists on revealing the mechanisms of white supremacist capture but not limiting Black study to those technologies of violence. In the powerhouse opening roundtable, four scholars of Black feminist study engage Angela Davis’s 1971 TBS essay, “Reflections on the Black Woman’s Role in the Community of Slaves,” articulating new “fictititous cliches” that append to the study of Black women under enslavement, particularly around their sexuality. Sarah Haley, Shoniqua Roach, Emily Owens, and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor write from the current explosion of work around Black women’s history even as they push the field on its continued reliance on masculinized resistance. Instead, the forum is a forceful articulation of Black femme, feminine, and feminist study of the history of Black privacy.

The questions of the issue continue on the (im)possibility of Black privacy, historically, politically, aesthetically. Christen Smith’s timely reflection on anthropological practices and global state violence against Black women focuses particularly in and near the domestic space/home (linking back to Roach’s piece in the forum). After that, Petal Samuel’s article takes us to an analysis of privacy as a (white) commodity and as a material experience in the contemporary world that relies on Black labor and the denial of Black life for its possibility.

The next two pieces are in deep conversation with each other– Roger Reeves’s provocative call against Black Twitter talk as politics, and Kevin Quashie’s unplanned for “response,” an in-depth detailing of how Black poetry can aesthetically reveal experiences of anti-Blackness while maintaining a critical privacy for emotional survival at the same time. Deirdre Cooper Owens then returns to the genealogical questions of the opening forum with a reflective essay on the enduring uncertainties of Black history and Black privacy, arcing toward the possibilities of claiming elemental, cellular life for blackness and its future articulations.

Finally, we end on an urgent, post-Covid conversation between aliyyah abdur-rahman and Simone Browne, each contemporary luminaries in the fields of Black privacy. Speaking across the humanities and social sciences, abdur-rahman and Browne question the material global reach of technology studies, of the justice brought and undone by the technological capture of Black death, and of the means of refusal– through art, faith, and sartorial practices– offered by Black women against the spectacular era of 2020. Altogether, this spread of work mines history, anthropology, Black feminist studies, sonic studies, diaspora studies, social media studies, and literary theory to ground us in crucial questions about the past and futures of Black privacy.

– Shoniqua Roach and Samantha Pinto

For a limited time, access the intro and “Confinement, Interiority, Black Feminist Study: A Forum on Davis’s “Reflections” at 50,” by Sarah Haley, Shoniqua Roach, Emily Owens, and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor for free.

Subscribe to our 51st volume here. Personal subscriptions are $44 USD. Volume 51 includes the above issue, plus Caribbean Global Movements, and more.

In our 2022 volume, keep an eye out for Post-Soul Afro-Latinidades, Black Archival Practice, Black Religions in the Digital Age, and more. CFPs for the first three 2022 issues listed here while open.

This is part two of a three part series. Read the introduction to the series and the first post here. All articles linked to in this series are free to read through 2020. To access, click on the green PDF button above the article. Publisher platform may require registration (free).

The Black Lives Matter movement has seen renewed global visibility in response to a boiling point of racial injustice in the United States: the increased visibility of police violence against Black people, the disproportionate effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on communities of color, and the recent blatant paramilitary attacks against U.S. citizens from their own executive branch — a violence that immigrants of color in the U.S. have also undergone for decades. Concurrently, this transnational “awakening” to demand racial justice has demonstrated a worrying trajectory towards corporatization: the viral spread of radical ideals on social media have given way to superficial “digital activism” where hefty marketing campaigns instrumentalize the cause without commitment to structural change, and celebrities and politicians virtue-signal without tangible action. The time for a multiethnic and multinational coalition against white supremacy is long overdue, and the articles included in “Imagining A Global Resistance” have sought to envisage the contours of such a coalition at different historical moments.^[1] Proving W. E. B. Du Bois’s assertion that the color line circles the globe, the authors here illustrate that the color line not only divides the global population in terms of race, but further creates a system of material inequity that reproduces their oppression.^[2] Together, the articles included in this bundle expose not only the shared experience of capitalist exploitation through temporal and spatial divides, but also the power of a common resistance.

In pursuit of a global coalition against racial injustice, we must be prepared to sacrifice the illusion of progress in favor of structural change. Robert L. Allen’s article “Re-assessing the Internal (Neo) Colonialism Theory” (2005) reconceptualizes Black peoples in the U.S. as neocolonial subjects via the illusory inducements of Black capitalism and Black politics.^[3] This system instrumentalizes a portion of the Black upper middle class as a buffer against insurgency and as an appeasing spectacle of Black progress. In this way, Allen identifies false consciousness as an ideology that dovetails with author Nawal El Saadawi’s observations in the second article in this bundle. Buttressing the myth of American individualism, Black capitalism allows for selective assimilation into capitalist structures of profit and exploitation; meanwhile, it obscures the enforced poverty of Black communities as a whole. This internal neocolonial system, bolstered by Black capitalism, works in tandem with the illusion of Black politics, in which representational gains are prized while Black communities remain politically and economically circumscribed by existing racist political structures. While the theory of internal colonialism Allen outlines is specific to the experiences of Black Americans, it finds commonality with the decolonial approaches of authors such as Walter Mignolo and Anibal Quijano and their articulations of “coloniality of power” to envision “the prospect of developing a global paradigm of the colonial relationship that will also provide a deeper theoretical understanding of the powerful resistance that continues to emerge in subaltern communities and nations around the world.” Yet, Allen points to a major problem in this multinational coalition building, one which remains an equally insidious threat in 2020 as in this article’s publication year, 2005: disenfranchisement strategies render these alliances weak, unorganized, and easily undermined.

El Saadawi’s “War Against Women and Women Against War: Waging War on the Mind” (2004) offers striking examples of the power of corporate interest in disenfranchising oppressed communities, specifically Arab women in Egypt and abroad. She indicts the collaboration between Islamic fundamentalism and American Neo-imperial capitalism, a collaboration that she boldly claims renders Arab women “bodies without a mind.”^[4] El Saadawi condemns global capitalism and its support of misogynistic social, political, and religious formations. She charges “native intermediaries”—members of an oppressed group who, pursuing the promise of assimilation into power, continue to perpetuate the structures that oppress and disenfranchise them and their communities—with possession of a “false consciousness.” This critique of false consciousness extends across many of the pieces offered here, from the neocolonial structures of Black capitalism in the U.S. that Allen discusses to the tokenization of Black police officers described by Edward Palmer in the third bundle of this collection. Her focus on the specific status and experiences of Arab women serve as an important reminder of the intersectional nature of systemic oppression and compel us to consider the disproportionate effects of global capitalism on women around the world. El Saadawi is keenly aware of these effects and the dangers of unchecked power, as she was imprisoned under former President of Egypt Anwar Sadat for two months in 1981 in response to her feminist publications. Sadat positioned her as an enemy of the state for precisely the global feminist consciousness she offers in this noteable piece.

In the final article of this bundle, we turn to epidemics of police violence in the United States as another iteration of the coalition between white supremacy, capitalism, and state power. Carl Dix begins “Police Violence: Rising Epidemic/Raising Resistance” (1997) by invoking October 1996: a moment he characterizes as a “unified national movement of resistance” against the epidemic of police brutality. His descriptions of this “new” and “diverse” resistance feel equally applicable to the present conjuncture: from Ferguson in 2014, to Minneapolis this year, to the numerous global protests against police violence, many of which have not entered into the American consciousness with the same intensity. Police are good at their job—they relentlessly protect the property and profits of the state and the rich elite at the expense of a racialized labor source kept in desperate conditions. Within the United States, the policing of Black Americans maintains the internally colonized proletariat of racial capitalism. The imperial U.S. further consolidates its capital power by reproducing this colonized proletariat within the Global South through the related technologies of militarism and the unchecked economic expansion of U.S. multinational corporations. Racial capitalism may take us to the boiling point but, through the redirection of corporate and governmental organizations, we are prevented from spilling over into complete revolution. While Dix’s hope in witnessing the multiethnic coalition of 1996 has not yet come to fruition, it articulates the potential for global resistance that is both anti-racist and anti-capitalist. Justice begins by cultivating a consciousness of the global majority tied to the liberation of working people everywhere.

Allen, El Saadawi, and Dix call for resistance that traverses boundaries—whether national, racial, ethnic, or gendered—to build collectivity beyond the instruments of colonialism and capitalism. With coalition comes the power to reimagine our relations in favor of justice, community, and care.

Jamiee Cook, Maria Sintura, and Maile Young

Graduate students, University of California, Santa Barbara, Hemispheric South/s Research Initiative

^[1] In his monograph Black Marxism, Cedric Robinson redefines racialism as a material force which would “inevitably permeate the social structures emergent from capitalism.” He coins the term “racial capitalism” to refer to “the subsequent structure as a historical agency” of this reconceptualization of Marxist relations (2). Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism, University of North Carolina Press, 1983.

^[2] Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk, 1902, 2.

^[3] Internal neocolonialism resignifies the formulation of African America as a “nation within a nation” subjected to a form of “domestic colonial rule” (4). This idea has been articulated by theorists and activists at different points in history: from Martin Delany as early as 1852, to W.E.B DuBois in 1945, and Kenneth Clarke and Malcolm X in the 1960’s. Robert Allen, “Re-assessing the Internal (Neo) Colonialism Theory,” The Black Scholar, 2005.

^[4]Nawal El Saadawi, “War Against Women and Women Against War: Waging War on the Mind,” The Black Scholar, 2008.

Here are our editors’ top five articles from T​BS​ volume 45 (2015). Given the abundance of great material from this year, narrowing it down to only five was near impossible. We truly appreciate all the hard work our contributors put into their articles. We couldn’t have done it without ALL of you!

Alphabetical by author:

• Translating Blackness: Dominicans Negotiating Race and Belonging, by Lorgia García-Peña (45.2)
• Why We Get Off: Moving Towards a Black Feminist Politics of Pleasure, by Joan Morgan (45.4)
• Looking Back, Facing Forward: (Re)-Imagining A Global Africa, by Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò (45.1)
• New Orleans Revisited: Notes of a Native Daughter, by Lynnell L. Thomas (45.3)
• If Loving Olitz is Wrong, I Don’t Wanna Be Right: ABC’s Scandal and the Affect of Black Female Desire, by Kristin J. Warner (45.1) [Free to access for limited time!]

For access to our upcoming 2016 content, subscribe now! For more information on subscriptions and accessing the above articles, see here.

[Reposted from The Public Archive]

July 28, 2015 marked the one hundredth anniversary of the landing of US Marines in Haiti and the beginning of a military occupation of the Black Republic that lasted until 1934 — nineteen years in total. With its massacres of Haitian peasants, its control of Haiti’s finances, its suppression of the Haitian press, and its dissolution of the Haitian legislature – all backed by a combination of Jim Crow ideology and Monroe Doctrine exceptionalism – the US occupation represents a searing annotation in the history of Haitian sovereignty. Yet the memory of the US occupation sits awkwardly in the context of the Haitian present where a new, second occupation of Haiti is currently in its eleventh year. It begs the question posed by @public_archive, “How do you memorialize occupation in the middle of occupation?”

The second occupation began June 2004 and was established under the pretext of “stabilizing” Haiti after the U.S.-sponsored ouster of the country’s democratically elected president, Jean Bertrand Aristide. During the 2003 “Ottawa Initiative on Haiti” France, Canada, and the US hatched a plot to overthrow Aristide. The following February their plan was implemented. Aristide was kidnapped by US marines and sent to a military base in the Central African Republic. US President George W. Bush announced afterwards that he was sending US forces to Haiti to “help stabilize the country.” As Peter Hallward documents, the invading “Franco-American” force targeted and killed Aristide supporters, installed a puppet Prime Minister, and enabled the formation of a paramilitary force that organized anti-Aristide death squads. The United Nations, then led by Secretary-General Kofi Annan, then cleaned up. According to Hallward, UN Security Council voted unanimously on April 29, 2003 to send, “an 8,300-strong UN Stabilization Force from 1 June, under the leadership of Lula’s Brazil.”

The United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) is a multi-billion dollar military occupation that has had in any given year between 6000 and 9000 military troops and police in addition to thousands of civilian personnel. While there is no civil war in Haiti, and while crime rates are higher in other nations in the Western hemisphere – including Jamaica and the U.S. – MINUSTAH has had its illegal mandate renewed and extended every year. During this second occupation, the US and its allies, France and Canada, have been able to install another puppet government, the neo-Duvalierist Michel Martelly. Martelly, who has been ruling by decree since January 2015, has opened up Haiti to radical economic fleecing, including the giveaway of land and the Republic’s gold and mineral resources. He has also diligently worked to reinstate the Haitian military. And in a horrific parallel to first US occupation of Haiti, MINUSTAH has committed numerous acts of violence against the Haitian people – including rape and assassination. MINUSTAH is also responsible for bringing cholera into the country, a disease that has killed more than 9000 Haitians and infected hundreds of thousands. Despite the deaths, and despite the evidence proving their culpability, the United Nations has enjoyed immunity from prosecution.

While the current occupation was initiated and continues to be largely funded by the U.S. and the United Nations, Haiti’s sovereignty has been extinguished by a multiracial coalition of Caribbean, Latin American and African countries. This may be the most sinister and least talked about aspect of the occupation, but it is perhaps the one that most requires our attention and contempt. In the first instance, there is Brazil. Brazil has been in charge of the military wing of the occupation since its inception. It has spent upwards of $750 million on maintaining military control. For Brazil, the country in Latin America with the largest Black population and a supposedly leftist government, Haiti is its “imperial ground zero.” Brazil has used its contribution to the occupation of the Black Republic to demonstrate its credentials as a regional power and to show the Americans and Europeans that it is ready for a permanent seat on the UN Security Council. For Brazil, Haiti is also a training ground for domestic security and enforcements; its Haitian forces return to the country and deploy the tactics of military terror on its own poor Black and Brown favela dwellers.

The second occupation’s new Black leadership is, however, as egregious as Brazil’s involvement. The head of the MINUSTAH mission in Haiti is Sandra Honoré, of Trinidad and Tobago. A career diplomat and former ambassador to Costa Rica, Honoré takes up the post previously held by Mariano Fernández Amunátegui of Chile. Her deputy is Carl Alexandre, an African-American attorney who previously worked as the “Resident Legal Advisor” for the U.S. Embassy in Haiti. This Black leadership is accompanied by a multinational military force made up of a number of South American, Caribbean, and African countries, including Argentina, Chile, Columbia, Jamaica, Grenada, Benin, Burkina Faso, Egypt, Côte d’Ivoire, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, Guinea, Cameroon, Niger, and Mali.

One hundred years after US Marines landed in Haiti, it seems as if the entire world is colluding to undermine the sovereignty of the world’s first Black nation. Under these circumstances, we cannot memorialize Haiti’s first occupation without rebuking those responsible for the second.

Jemima Pierre (Ph.D., University of Texas at Austin) is a sociocultural anthropologist whose research and teaching interests are located in the overlaps between African Studies and African Diaspora Studies and engage three broad areas: race, racial formation theory, and political economy; culture and the history of anthropological theory; and transnationalism, globalization, and diaspora. She is the author of The Predicament of Blackness: Postcolonial Ghana and the Politics of Race (Winner of the 2014 Elliot Skinner Book Award in Africanist Anthropology) and is currently working on a project on the racialized political economy of multinational resource extraction in West Africa. Dr. Pierre’s essays on global racial formation, Ghana, Haiti, immigration, and African diaspora theory and politics have appeared in a number of academic journals. She has also served as editor and columnist for the online news magazine Black Agenda Report.

She can be reached at pierrej[at]ucla.edu.

[Reposted from The Chicago Reporter  with permission from the author.]

Anthony Dansberry spent Christmas in prison. “Nothing special,” he would say in response to questions I had sent along with family members who made the trip down from Chicago to Danville Correctional Center to surprise him.  Two-hour drive. Four-hour visit. Two days later.  “Just the same old stuff,” Anthony told me through his cousin, Rick Dear.  “Just another day cleaning outside the prison; picking up trash and taking out the garbage.”

A plum job, to be sure.  With a title.  Lawn and Grounds Specialist.  Status for a model inmate.  “I get to be outside and look at the cars as they drive by.”  A breath of fresh air.  A flirtation with freedom.  Or, perhaps, a cruel tease.

Anthony Dansberry spent Christmas in prison.  “Same old stuff,” he said.  “I ate turkey bologna, mashed potatoes, green peas and apple pie. The only thing that was special or different was the apple pie.  They don’t give us that around here.  Only on holidays.”

In Chicago, Anthony’s family gathered around the table for Christmas dinner to celebrate the moment.  His Aunt Bernice, who has been hospitalized, suffering with bone cancer, was able to come home for the day.  The family blessing offered by Anthony’s Aunt Ollie expressed hope that Anthony, too, would come home one day soon.

Anthony Dansberry spent Christmas in prison.  “Nothing special,” he said.  Not just this Christmas.  But every Christmas for the past 22 years on a 75-year sentence, paying for a crime he did not commit.  The death of 77-year-old Edna Abel resulting from a 1991 mugging.  There was a questionable confession — with limited reading skills, Anthony believed he was signing a form for his release from interrogation.  There were forensics that didn’t add up, dots that didn’t connect.  (A palm print proved not to be Anthony’s.)  And there was conflicted eyewitness testimony: Of the six eyewitnesses, only one was able to make a positive ID. Two of them said he wasn’t the one. The only witness called to testify appeared to have changed elements of her story by the time of trial.

Lawyers from Northwestern University’s Center on Wrongful Convictions argued all this before the Illinois Prison Review Board in 2010 and in the court of public opinion since then.  Hoping to persuade public officials that Anthony’s murder conviction was tragically flawed.  Hoping to add the public voice of support for their clemency petition awaiting decision by Gov. Pat Quinn — the only person now who might free the 50-year-old Anthony.  The last appeal.  The last hope for a man who has become something of a poster child for a broken criminal justice system.  One that can go terribly wrong even while trying to right a wrong.  One that blindly allows innocent people to languish in prison, while the guilty go free.

Anthony has been riding a roller-coaster-of-a-hope for the 14 years his case has been represented by CWC, led by co-director Jane Raley, attorney of record on the 2010 Prison Review Board brief; Margaret Soffrin, of counsel; investigator Susan Swanson, who brought the case to CWC in 2000; and former Northwestern law students Rami Fakhouri and Rachel Freyman, who worked on the brief.

Even this Christmas season was marked by the ups and the downs.

The upside.  Anthony, along with other DCC inmates, heard the local television report of Quinn’s Christmas Eve decision granting 179 clemency petitions.   Hope.   Even though names were not included in the TV report, it seemed to Anthony that the CWC work on his behalf finally had paid off.  Surely he was on the Christmas list.

The downside.  This past Saturday, Anthony heard from his Aunt Ollie, and cousin, Rick, that his name was not included.  But that was not the worst of it.  His attorney of record, his advocate, his champion, Jane Raley, had died.  On Christmas Day.  She had succumbed to cancer.

“His whole demeanor changed,” recalls Rick, 51, a film set builder and Studio Mechanics Union member. “He didn’t cry or shed a tear,” because, well, you don’t do that in prison.  But the impact was palpable.  “He looked as though he’d just been hit by a truck.”

True to form, though, according to those who know him best, Anthony put aside his own concern about clemency, about how his appeal would proceed. “It’s not about the release right now.”  He only expressed concern about Raley’s family.  “It’s not about me anymore because she sacrificed so much, she sacrificed being with her family to take time out for me and to be with me.”  Of all the lawyers on his case before CWC took it on, Raley had been “the only one I could trust, who didn’t lie or do anything for their own benefit,” he said.

“When some of the things didn’t go the way they were supposed to, she always kept trying and looking for something else.  She told me not to worry.  ‘We’re gonna do this’ or ‘I need to talk to this person,’” he recalled.  Or “‘I need to look into this thing.’”  Like Edna Abel’s purse that mysteriously had disappeared from evidence for awhile.  “‘I will get you an answer,’” Raley would tell Anthony.  “And she always answered my calls.”

In his Saturday conversation with family, Anthony wanted to know about funeral arrangements.  (Jan. 3.)  He wanted to reach out to Raley’s family.  Somehow.  To let members know how much he appreciated their sacrifice.  All the hours Raley had put into his case.  An innocent man racked with a sense of guilt over what proving his innocence had cost others.  All the quality time Raley had lost with her family.  Not just in working on legal representation.  But also the time she spent in guiding him through it all.  Giving him hope.  Encouragement.  No guarantees, she had advised.  But at least “a fighting chance” that one day he might be released.

On Sunday, the day after his family visit, Anthony told his cousin Rick by phone that he had not been able to sleep after they left.  He had begun to write a letter to Raley’s family.  He had sought help from a fellow inmate.  He needed that help.  The writing part.  That literacy problem again.  The one that had led him to sign a confession believing it was a release form.  Half his lifetime ago.

In the draft letter shared with me by Rick, Anthony expresses his deepest sympathy along with his appreciation for Raley’s “caring and loving spirit.”  He acknowledges that she went beyond “what other attorneys in situations would have done for their clients,” showing “patience” in going over his case with him repeatedly when he didn’t understand.  In the letter, which he writes was “as difficult for me to close as it was to open,” he expresses gratitude to Raley’s “loving family” who “shared her with me for as many years” as they did.

Somewhere between the words, though, is something even deeper than all of the very moving emotions.  There is the sense that Jane Raley still is counseling Anthony.  Assuring him.  Encouraging him not to give up.

Anthony has learned the power of the possibility.  Of hope.  Of believing in the unseen.  With little more than the inspiration of people he has come to trust.

He has not given up any of that.  Hope that the work and the sacrifices of people like Jane Raley still will pay off.  Hope that his appeal finally will be considered.  Hope that more petitions for clemency will be granted by Gov. Quinn before he leaves office on Jan. 12.

Hope that Anthony Dansberry has spent his last Christmas in prison.

[Reposted from The Chicago Reporter with permission from the author.]

There were two things I saw in the media coverage of Ferguson, Mo., recently in the ramp up to the grand jury decision not to indict police officer Darren Wilson in the August shooting death of 18 year-old Michael Brown.

Two illustrations from different times and places, expressed with different intent, but, for me, carrying the same message: We are missing the story.

Ferguson is not just the story about last summer’s tragic shooting death of Brown — unarmed, hands up, according to some witnesses, who apparently were not credited by the grand jury. It is not just the story of the ugly images of a militarized police force pushing back protesters with rubber bullets and tear gas. It is not just about a process many people believed took way too long to decide whether a crime was committed.

The story of this St. Louis suburb is the story of power. It is power that is enforced at street level by the police and up throughout a justice system that has been engaged in the mass incarceration of people of color. It is a political system that powers the criminal justice system in this process. It is a social system that defines people, identifies them in ways that will justify their place in society — high or low, included or marginalized.

In that process, we often come to see each other, to know each other — as good or bad — through media representations. Our reality, then, is a mediated reality. And the media portrayal of African-Americans by television — where most people get their news — has been in the negative context of crime and poverty. The mediated reality is way out of proportion to the actual reality. And the public takeaway too often is that black is bad.

These points are driven home by my two illustrations. First, as I Googled “Ferguson” this past week — with anxious headlines declaring a state of emergency in Missouri and the call-up of the National Guard in anticipation of angry public reaction to a grand jury decision — I saw a photograph on the Los Angeles Times website. The focal point was a blond-haired white woman in a group of protesters. Her sign read “Thug Protestor” and had arrows pointing to herself. I was struck by that photo, and the irony wrapped in irony.

The irony she intended is based on our recognition that she obviously is not a thug, as some people have called the protesters based on the nightly images of confrontation played out on television in connection with Ferguson.

The woman’s point is that we shouldn’t assume that protesters are thugs. After all, she is a protester and, of course, she does not look like a thug. She looks like the All-American Girl. But, in recognizing that irony, we get twisted in the embedded irony. We have to know what a thug looks like in order to know that she is not one. A thug in TV representation is a person of color — black or brown.

So, in trying to deconstruct the social construct of black as bad, she wound up reinforcing it. The second illustration is a confrontation on NBC’s “Meet the Press” between former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani and Georgetown professor Michael Eric Dyson, during which Giuliani, a former U.S. attorney, engaged in reductive reasoning. “The white police officers wouldn’t be there if you weren’t killing each other 70-75 percent of the time,” Giuliani said. So, in other words, it’s your fault — black people everywhere — that your kids might get shot down in the street by police. Look at how bad things are in the African-American communities.

So what is media’s role in this?

We tell people what is important to think about and we even tell them how to think about it. We set public agenda based on what we cover, we frame the stories and we represent people within that frame. Because of this agenda-setting process, people walk away thinking crime is a bigger problem than it really is. Because people of color are more likely to be seen in mug shots than are whites — far more than the numbers would justify — people like the woman in the L.A. Times photo come to see crime in blackface. Sadly, people like Giuliani — people in positions to make a positive difference — can paint by statistical numbers without getting the full picture.

The story we are missing in this process, though, is the one that provides the full context for the story we are being told — the meaning of it all. The full picture. Sure, we get the facts. We get the who, what, where and when of it all. But not the why. The why is the context.

It starts with why there is such a wide gap in black and white opinion on the case, whether Darren Wilson should have been indicted for a crime. Why do some people accept police action while others distrust it? At bottom, why are some people angry and others afraid?

Ferguson is presented as a confrontation story. The problem with that frame is that it ultimately directs our gaze away from the underlying story, which is to say, the actual story.

Even more, that very framing can determine public opinion. In a story of confrontation between people you have come to associate with wrongdoing and the police you believe are tied to law and order, the demonstrators are going to lose in the battle for public approval. We need to know why young black people see themselves as victims of prosecutorial discretion and the police as an oppressive force in the process. We need to know why they have come to believe there is a breakdown of the law in their community by people who shoot them down in the street — hands up.

We also need to know why other people see things so differently. Television is a big part of the why. It emphasizes the visual. The immediate. The impact. The confrontation between the police and demonstrators in Ferguson will “make for good TV,” President Obama said in calling for peace following the grand jury decision not to indict Darren Wilson. Good TV. But is it good journalism?

Not without balance, it isn’t. Not without providing some deeper understanding of the meaning behind the images, the story behind the story. Otherwise, the real confrontation is a clash of perception. A racial Rorschach.

People tend to see what they want to see, what they have been conditioned to see. We have to help them see what is. To see and to understand.

That is the media responsibility—to provide the information we need to make enlightened choices about policy, about consumption, about our social interaction. We can’t get there — enlightened decision-making — without understanding the meaning of it all. The context. The why. In the many stories that have been told since last summer’s confrontations, we have learned more as the result of follow-up reporting. However, even the background stories we are getting, like the ones about the overpolicing of a majority black community by an overwhelmingly white police force, only provide part of the ultimate truth.

Even when the media begin to tell us the more nuanced stories and try to clarify that violence during the demonstrations is being committed by only a small minority of people — people who are taking advantage of the demonstration as cover — the TV images of much larger crowds and explosive confrontations tell us something different.

The tendency among many people in the viewing audience will be to conclude that the demonstrators — overwhelmingly people of color, who already are perceived to be at fault when it comes to issues of wrongdoing — are the people who are responsible when things go terribly wrong. Even when the confrontations are provoked by police. Research shows that the mere display of a gun by one person can cause the other person to be more aggressive.

So the challenge of the media is to cut through all this and to do it with careful decisions about what goes in the frame of the story and what is left out. To do it with decisions about how to balance breaking news with more background, more interpretation, more perspectives in follow-up stories.

While we want to think we are balanced in our reporting, we must consider whether we really achieve that goal. Do you really see the world in a balanced way through a gas mask, or when you are constrained by a bulletproof vest? Is your judgment guided by a sense of journalistic responsibility or a sense of threat? The answer to that question only raises another obvious one and that is, threat by whom? The police? Or the people the police are confronting? What is the perspective you get on such a confrontation from behind police barricades, in a press pen, subject to feeds by the official sources?

Without question, reporting the who, what, where and when of it all from the frontlines is tough. But if we don’t get at the “why” through more thoughtful enterprising stories, all the rest of it has no meaning and no impact in helping people move away from biases to make more reasoned choices.

If we don’t try to do that, then the question we ultimately should be asking is, “Why not?”