Post by Ashley Hinck, University of Wisconsin, Madison.
On April 12, 2015, Freddie Gray was arrested, and on April 19, 2015, he died in the hospital from severe spinal injuries. While it is unclear just how Gray sustained spinal cord injuries while in police custody and why he was arrested in the first place, it is clear that Baltimore police officers failed to get Gray the medical care he needed. Freddie Gray’s death has sparked protests in Baltimore as people question, critique, and protest the continued killings of unarmed black people at the hands of police in Baltimore and across the US.
But what has emerged differently in the protests and discussions around Baltimore is the contradiction between The Wire’s widespread popularity (1.8 million likes on Facebook) and the comparatively small support for the protests in honor of Freddie Gray (thousands protesting in the streets of Baltimore).
In other words, why hasn’t The Wire, which showed us how structural racism and an abusive police department defines black life in Baltimore, translated into collective social action? Why are there only thousands in the streets? Where are the millions of fans of The Wire? And why aren’t they supporting black folks in Baltimore?
My dissertation research provides at least a partial answer to that question. Examining cases of fan-based citizenship (including activism, volunteerism, and political participation), I investigate how we connect popular culture to political participation in a way that invites collective action. Through cases across television, movies, books, and sports, I find that fan-based civic appeals take significant community work and rhetorical work—that is, popular culture media almost never leads directly to collective action on its own. Like any social activism and community organizing, it takes hard work, coordination, deliberation, and discussion. It makes sense then that without a group of fans of The Wire emerging as leaders, providing organizational groundwork and constructing arguments that invite us to see The Wire as connected to our lives today, we see little collective action emerging as a result of The Wire fandom.
Protesters and supporters have pointed out another part of the answer as to why fans of The Wire are not at the protests in large numbers. They explain how the racism of our media industry and culture discourage audience civic action:
As audience members, we are invited to consume a narrative of black suffering. The show invites us to be consumers first and foremost, complicit in the structural racism that undergirds the media industry and our own everyday lives. The bad news is that this is widespread. The good news is that we don’t have to accept this situation as permanent. We can change how we, as fans, engage the story of black suffering on The Wire. We can shift from consumption to solidarity. Of course, we will need to counter cultural scripts, norms, and discourse to do it. But such change is possible, and quite frankly, desperately needed.
We can find a model for this kind of work in the Harry Potter Alliance’s (HPA) Darfur campaign. Through two podcasts and a series of blog posts, the HPA argued that the Harry Potter story called Harry Potter fans to take action to end the Darfur genocide by calling government representatives, divesting from companies implicitly funding the genocide, and donating money to Civilian Protection. On the surface, the story of Harry Potter would seem to have little to do with Sudan, genocide, and geopolitics in Africa (and it would certainly seem to have much less in common with Sudan than The Wire has with the Freddie Gray tragedy and resulting protests). But through sophisticated arguments that connected Harry Potter characters and values to the crisis in Sudan, the Harry Potter Alliance made the Sudan genocide relevant for Harry Potter fans.
The HPA made this argument by drawing connections between Lily Potter (Harry’s mom) and the mothers in refugee camps. By connecting Lily Potter with Darfuri refugees, the HPA a) helped fans understand the lives of women in the camps and b) transferred importance from Lily to refugees, giving fans a reason to take action. Protecting Darfuri refugees became a way to honor and protect Lily Potter.
Andrew Slack uses Lily as a way to understand the risk and sacrifice Darfuri refugee women are taking. In the second Darfur podcast, HPA co-founder Slack says, “we’ll be talking about people like Lily Potter in our world, mothers in Darfur who continue to risk everything to protect their children.” In November 2007, the Janjaweed militia were continuing to circle UN refugee camps, killing any men and raping any women who ventured outside of the camp. The HPA explains that refugees were forced to leave the relative safety of the UN camps in order to gather firewood nearby. Slack explains that, despite knowing they will likely be raped when they leave the camp, Darfuri women choose to take the risk so that they could feed their families. The HPA compares Lily’s demonstration of motherly love to that of the Darfuri women’s. Lily too made a sacrifice for Harry, protecting him from Voldemort’s deadly power. Lily also becomes a reason to take civic action. PotterCast co-host Sue Upton says in the podcast, “What better way to show our love for Harry Potter than to stick up for the women in this world who are doing the same thing for their children just as Lily did for Harry.” Protecting women in Darfur becomes a matter of showing respect for Lily Potter and showing one’s love for Harry Potter. Through the campaign, the HPA helped fans see intervention in the Darfur genocide as a public issue that was both relevant and important.
We can never know exactly what it is like to be another person. But we can stand in solidarity with them. The HPA demonstrates how we can translate a commitment to Harry Potter to a commitment to action to intervene in genocide, and it offers lessons for how we might translate a commitment to The Wire into participation in protests in Baltimore.
Indeed, popular culture media holds great potential to show us new things. And fan commitments and identifications hold great potential to push us to take action. Fans are powerful. But failing to connect The Wire with protests in honor of Freddie Gray represents a missed opportunity—one that we, put frankly, cannot afford to miss.
Miss Packnett calls us to take action:
Freddie Gray is not Dukie. But we must love Freddie Gray like we loved Dukie. We must help write a Season 6 through our protests and actions that create a safer, fairer, and more just Baltimore for black folks. #BlackLivesMatter.
Journalists covering this story have struggled to frame the protests within a broader relationship between popular culture and politics in the real world. Elizabeth Nolan Brown at Reason.com says, “If I say the phrases Hunger Games and ‘life imitates art’ in the same sentence, you might start to worry. But this is actually an inspiring appropriation of the practices of Panem.” Ryan Gilbey at The Guardian points toward critics’ concerns that films inspire violent copy-cat behavior. Both Brown and Gilbey frame popular culture as a causal mechanism, but in doing so they undermine the agency of actors. This is particularly problematic when popular culture is connected to political action. In these cases, we ought to understand popular culture as resources. We must recognize that popular culture does not cause political action, while also recognizing the incredibly important role popular culture plays in offering up the choices we have for political resources.
Popular culture has always functioned as resources for politics. For example, Nan Enstad describes how American women factory workers at the turn of the century used dime novels, films, and fashion to come to see themselves as both ladies and workers, and thus as deserving of fair working conditions. These women staged labor protests in unexpected numbers. Today, we see examples ranging from Harry Potter to football. In January 2014, Chinese diplomats used Harry Potter metaphors to make arguments about regional power in Asia. In the fall of 2013, the TeamMates’ Coaches Challenge campaign invited Nebraskan citizens to volunteer to mentor by connecting mentoring with being a Nebraska football fan, beating Kansas, and joining the Nebraskan team. During 2012 and 2013, DC Entertainment led a campaign named “We Can Be Heroes,” calling Justice League fans to donate money to charities working to end hunger in Africa. These are just three examples from this academic year alone. Indeed, there are many more.
What I hope this contextualization provides is a framing that enables us as audience members, reporters, and citizens to take seriously the Thai protesters’ Hunger Games salutes. While not all political appropriations of popular culture are necessarily ethical, desirable, or effective, we cannot dismiss such uses of popular culture out-of-hand. Jonathan Jones at The Guardian takes this problematic approach when he asserts that the Thai protesters’ use of the Hunger Games salute “reveals something about the bankruptcy of political beliefs in the 21st century.” But Jones is missing the point because he’s got the context all wrong. The protesters aren’t claiming allegiance to the Hunger Games. They are using the symbol of resistance in the Hunger Games as their own, imbuing it with democratic meaning and critiques of the Thai government. Popular culture is a resource, combined and recombined with other resources, appropriated and changed through various performances. This framing is absolutely necessary to understanding the Thai protesters’ use of the Hunger Games salute in a complex and full way.
Over the course of the past week, I’ve been in and around the Capitol Square capturing as much of the story as possible with my camera – this is something I tend to do in most situations, but it felt particularly necessary here. For a few days, my photos went unshared thanks to a misplaced card reader, and it felt like some form of injustice – now, having found what had been lost, it’s been almost thrilling to share pictures from “on the ground” with those who may not be in Madison, or who may have seen only parts of the goings-on at the Capitol.
Admittedly, this is not quite a journalistic perspective: most of the pictures share my own experience, or the experience of those I know personally, rather than that of the thousands who have their own stories to tell. However, I feel as though the pictures were taken with an objective eye, offering a glimpse of the overall atmosphere more than any one particular point of view.
All photos were taken between Wednesday February 16th and Saturday February 19th in Madison, Wisconsin.
Inside the Rotunda: The Capitol
- A graduate student prepares to give testimony to the Democratic representatives who continued the public hearings after Republicans chose to end the hearings after a single day. Testimony only stopped late Friday night, as Democrats went home to visit their ridings.
- Protesters camped out in the Rotunda – this photo was taken at around 4:15am on Thursday, but people have been sleeping in the Capitol since Tuesday evening.
- The bust of former Governor Robert M. La Follette Sr. is adorned with a common t-shirt during the protests, a more direct example of the building’s history and meaning being co-opted by the protesters to bolster their message.
- Thousands gather on all three floors in the central Rotunda – later in the day, capacity on the bridges was limited out of fear for their structural integrity.
- The capitol was filled with signs and stray personal items throughout the week – this jacket and sign were left in an alcove on the third floor.
- The volunteer-run Information Station is part of a central infrastructure which has emerged this week – here, function mixes with comedy in an example of the high-spirited atmosphere in the Capitol.
A third floor conference room has become headquarters for the TAA (Teaching Assistants Association), which works around the clock on data entry, communication (through both traditional and social media), and general support.
Capitol Square: Marching in Madison
- While filled with people later in the weekend, the West Entrance to the Capitol was an information hub and sign-making station on Thursday afternoon.
- Although unaffected by most of Governor Walker’s efforts to curtail collective bargaining rights, local Firefighters have been a constant presence at the Capitol; here, their bagpipes lead a Saturday afternoon parade.
- While many of the coverage of the event has focused on less flattering comparisons to Wisconsin’s governor, some offer a more aspirational role model.
- Many of the meme-driven signs feel as though they are explicitly designed to try to make it into online galleries of meme-driven signs – this individual was clearly successful.
- Protests can tend to feel fairly ephemeral, but this “Wash Me” style graffiti offers a unique example of temporary expression.
- The “We” here refers to no one in particular, at least as far as the crowd was concerned – the lack of branding raises questions of who sponsored the banner (The pilot? The banner company? A local business? A local union? An out-of-state union?), but it also renders it a selfless show of support rather than a shameless bit of self-promotion, which has been common throughout the rallies.
- Young protesters may not have a full grasp of the reasoning behind the rallies, but this young demonstrator’s correlation between Wonder Woman, government, truth and justice seems to indicate that their involvement is opening their eyes to the political system (and the real world allegorical value of superheroes).
- Of the various pop culture-oriented sign trends, Star Wars seems to be the most prevalent – our own Jonathan Gray has written about the proliferation of pop culture-themed signs at the rallies, although only a few took it to the level of cosplay.
- They remain the minority, but the signs comparing Walker to Mubarak or Hitler were present throughout the week – here, a protester adds a finishing touch to their Photoshopped dictator.
- While Saturday’s rally began at 10am, thousands were still on the Capitol for a second rally as the sun began to set later in the afternoon.
- Signs on sticks were not allowed inside the Capitol, which meant that those waiting in line (as if at Disney World) could see evidence of those who went before them.
An Alternate Voice: The Counter-Protest
- While the Tea Party rally was not expected to start until noon, a small contingent were on the Capitol when the main rally against the Budget Repair Bill began on the opposite side of the Capitol.
- While most of the Walker supporters stayed on the East side of the Capitol, some mingled among their “enemies” in order to discuss the bill and its implications – heated words were exchanged, but not a single arrest was necessary to calm the crowd.
- As the Tea Party rally began, hundreds of anti-bill demonstrators moved to the other side of the capitol to attempt to drown out the much smaller group of Walker supporters (which generous estimates placed at about 2500).
- While the group was smaller, the Tea Partiers operated much the same: various different flags and slogans were common, while representatives from both genders and from many generations were present (albeit in much smaller numbers).
- As the evening waned, the Tea Party rally became considerably smaller, having not scheduled another speaker-supported rally later in the day – based on this picture, their smaller size emboldened some of Walker’s critics to wade into the fray.
Eye on Wisconsin: The Media in Madison
- As the media narrative was being formed earlier in the week, this particular pair took to the streets to try to take it back – they were seen with the same sign on Saturday.
- MSNBC’s Ed Schultz was the first major media figure to arrive in Wisconsin on Thursday, and was met with a fairly raucous crowd still finding the media’s presence novel – it would seem commonplace by the weekend.
- News crews were camped out around the Capitol, although finding a place to set up was challenging as the various rallies were still somewhat spontaneous. Here, ABC News deals with constant traffic and considerable noise, as well as concern for the safety of their lighting setup which led me to serve as a human sandbag for ten minutes.
- On Saturday, the media seemed more integrated with the protests, looking to capture the intimacy and atmosphere more than (perhaps) the scale of the proceedings.
- Another example of graffiti, although this one seems well-intentioned (and was left, fittingly enough, on a CBS News truck parked off the Capitol).
- There were a few curious onlookers later on Saturday as CNN prepared their report on the rally, but for the most part the media presence had become a non-event compared to the novelty of Ed Schultz’s presence on Thursday.
- Wisconsin Eye, the state’s online streaming service for public proceedings, was given new function and purpose during the ongoing testimony. Sitting in the room, it was always unclear whether anyone was watching from home, but even at 4am the Representatives would acknowledge their potential presence.
- While Senator Lena Taylor has received various notes of support online, through both Facebook and Twitter, her office door has also become a real-life guestbook where visitors to the Capitol demonstrate their appreciation without the use of a ‘Like’ Button.
[For more photos from the week’s protests, feel free to peruse my “Wisconsin Protests – 2011” set on Flickr]
They arrive on buses, in carpools, by bike, on foot. They hail from Neenah, Richland Center, Milwaukee, Rice Lake, Janesville, Delavan, Madison. They carry signs, push strollers, walk dogs, chant slogans, dance, sing, play instruments, and even do yoga in the rotunda of the Capitol. They are police officers, firefighters, nurses, snow plow drivers, teachers, construction workers, janitors, students, non-union members, Democrats, Republicans, Socialists, Libertarians. They are Wisconsin.
In the past six days, as I have joined in the vibrant, energetic, and peaceful demonstrations of tens of thousands of people united against the Budget Repair Bill at the Wisconsin State Capitol, I have been struck by how those demonstrating against the bill have constituted a collective identity for themselves as Wisconsinites. Rhetorical scholars, building on the work of Michael Calvin McGee and Maurice Charland, recognize that collective identities are not a given, but constituted through discourse. While rhetorical scholars often examine how individual speakers or texts create identities for their audiences, it seems the collective identity being forged in the Wisconsin protests has not come from a centralized leader or group, but has been generated through diverse and diffuse signs, chants, videos, Facebook groups, Tweets, and other rhetorical acts.
Demonstrators invoke Wisconsin’s progressive history in creative and powerful ways. Signs and t-shirts remind others that Wisconsin led the way in labor laws and organizing, with slogans such as “Like the weekend? Thank Wisconsin.” This widely-circulated clip from the Rachel Maddow show summarizes Wisconsin’s history of labor leadership, and also features images and video of some of these signs. Demonstrators in LaCrosse, Wisconsin held a candlelight vigil for “the Death of the Labor Movement” on Thursday night that connected Wisconsin’s labor history to the dire future of the labor movement if the bill passes. Invoking this shared history provides demonstrators with a larger purpose for their actions, calling demonstrators to act to prevent, as one sign declared, “50 years of labor history [from being] undone in one week.”
In the East Gallery of the Capitol, a make-shift shrine has sprung up around the bust of Robert “Fighting Bob” La Follette, the Wisconsin Governor (1901-1906) and Senator (1906-1925) who ran for President in 1924 as the nominee of the Progressive Party, which was created as a vehicle for his nomination. Signs reading “What Would Bob Do?”, “The Spirit of Fighting Bob is Back,” and “Long Live La Follette” decorate the pedestal on which the bust sits. Invoking the spirit of “Fighting Bob” may have even more meaning for the protesters, since Governor Scott Walker broke the longstanding tradition of holding the inauguration ceremony in the East Gallery, and instead held his ceremony in the North Wing, where attendees had their backs to the legendary “Fighting Bob” bust. While Walker may have symbolically turned his back on the Wisconsin’s progressive history, the tens of thousands of protesters at the Capitol and throughout Wisconsin are using it to remind themselves that they are not only fighting for their own rights, but are also fighting to carry on the tradition of the generations of Wisconsinites who came before them.
Demonstrators also invoke a more recent event in Wisconsin history that brought them together two weeks ago around their televisions and brings them together again this week in front of the Capitol: the Green Bay Packers’ Super Bowl victory. Packers-themed signs permeate the demonstrations, declaring “Aaron Rogers is a Union Man,” “The Super Bowl was Won on Union Labor,” and “I Blame Favre.” Indeed, several current and former players for the only community-owned, non-profit professional sports team in the nation issued a statement opposing the bill and expressing solidarity with Wisconsin workers. Through the symbol of the Packers’ Super Bowl victory, demonstrators create an collective identity for themselves that not only draws them together around a common love for the Packers, but also forecasts a victory for unionized workers.
On her Facebook page on Friday, Sarah Palin offered an ominous warning, “As goes Wisconsin today, so goes the country tomorrow.” In response, tens of thousands of Wisconsin residents who oppose the Budget Repair Bill are declaring: we are Wisconsin. No matter what happens with the outcome of the Budget Repair Bill, there is a united movement of Wisconsin residents and their supporters nationwide forming around the the progressive values that have propelled the State of Wisconsin “Forward” since its founding in 1848.
As we move through the 6th day of protests at the Wisconsin State Capitol in Madison, I can’t help but be extremely exhilarated about being a part of this community. As my friends will tell you, I’m not much for communities, fandom, or most conventional forms of belonging. But over the past days, over which I have spent many hours protesting, I can’t help but feel a little pride about being a newly minted Wisconsin resident. Now, I sit in a hotel room at an academic conference in Monterey, California, only having access to Madison through text message, Facebook, and occasional CNN updates. Being so far away from my community, I’m reminded of an argument made by rhetoric scholars Kevin DeLuca and Jennifer Peeples that we need to rethink the notion of the public sphere because so much of our democratic enactments happen not in a sphere, but on what they call the “public screen.” In other words, most of our most important political conversations take place over various screens, like our televisions, computers, and cell phones.
Certainly Madison isn’t the only political action occurring on the public screen, and I have no doubt that it is by virtue of watching actions on our screens take place in Tunisia and Egypt over the past several weeks that activists in Madison have felt so empowered. But what I think makes Madison very special is that, at least so far, events have remained completely peaceful. In the DeLuca and Peeples essay I mention above, they argue that, while not advocating violence, violence can be very useful during political movements because it makes it onto the screen. Then messages that may not have gotten through otherwise also get air time. Certainly their example of the WTO protests in Seattle in 2000 evidence this point, but I think Madison evidences a different point. Importantly, the government and law enforcement in Madison, unlike in these other locations, has not turned violent. Even as I have heard rumblings that Fox News reported that the National Guard was present in riot gear on Thursday, which I think was false, and they later suggested that the protests were sure to turn violent, violence hasn’t yet happened. And the message of the protesters has, for the most part, received fairly accurate representation and wide coverage in many media outlets. Certainly the fact that many of the protestors are white and representative of “middle America” has a lot to do with the way these protests have been covered, but there’s also more going on.
I think that the young people who have headed up so much of these actions have moved forward with clarity of purpose and message and they’ve been extremely proactive in disseminating it. The UW-Madison Teaching Assistants’ Association, who organized the first action on the Capitol on Monday, February 14 hasn’t strayed from its message, and it has been incredibly diligent for over a week now. Moreover, hundreds of youth descended upon the capitol Thursday to defend their teachers, their parents, and their futures. You can take a look at a group here: “This is What Democracy Looks Like”:
As I sat in the Assembly hearing for two hours today waiting to offer my testimony, I listened to angry, articulate, intelligent high schoolers explaining that unlike what Fox News had apparently said about the youth being uninformed, they were very clear about why they were protesting. Of course youth have always been important to social movement. In 2010, undocumented immigrant youth, for example, completed shifted the nature of the immigration debates and mainstream activism through their public actions and publicly naming themselves undocumented in order to advocate for the DREAM (Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors) Act and comprehensive immigration reform. The young people involved in Madison are cut from this same cloth, so to speak, and I think it is from both their clarity in message, and their mastery of social media technologies that they have so effectively and peacefully used the public screen. It’s hard to say what will happen as more national public figures and organizations continue to descend upon Madison, but for now, this first week presents some positive hope about democratic social movement possibilities in the age of the public screen.
A core principle of democracy is that decisions ought to be guided by the “voice of the people.” But what is the people’s voice? And how do the people speak? As citizens living in the United States and other democracies know well, contemporary news media present the people’s voice in a familiar form: the opinion poll. Fifty percent of the people believe this. Forty percent disagree with that. People appear as percentages, even when real live bodies beg to differ. In my most recent book, I describe how federal policymakers turned to pollsters to determine their constituents views on Social Security, even in situations where constituents packed committee hearing rooms to have their voices heard.
The protests in Madison have demonstrated forcefully the power of an alternative to the opinion poll, an embodied voice of the people. During the past week, policymakers, news commentators, and citizens alike have looked to the protests as a sign of public sentiment. And the protests are having a positive effect! I remember first hearing about the planned protests this past Monday. I was depressed about Walker’s proposals, and had resigned myself to the bill’s passage. I had planned on attending the protests out of a sense of moral obligation, but I didn’t expect any change in the outcome.
Five days later, the bill still may pass, but the possibility of its defeat has gone from non-existent to a chance—a chance that tens of thousands of Wisconsinites are fighting for. And they’re fighting by showing up at the Capitol to march, carry signs, chant, and register their dissent.
The people’s voice, resonating loudly from the halls of the Capitol and the streets outside, is inspiring their representatives to act. As readers of this blog may know, the fourteen Democratic senators who left the state Thursday to deny the Senate a quorum did so spontaneously as they gathered on the lawn of the Capitol that morning. One senator was quoted as saying that seeing so many Wisconsinites out in protests for several days convinced him that he could not abide by business as usual. In subsequent interviews, other members of the fourteen have called the protesters heroes, and they clearly seem to draw considerable energy from the people. What if no one was outside the Capitol? Or just a few hundred? What if the senators had commissioned an overnight poll showing that state workers opposed Walker’s plan, but state workers and others didn’t show up to make their dissent known? Would the senators have been inspired to such dramatic action? I don’t think so.
In my view, the reason that the bill wasn’t passed on Friday as originally expected is because tens of thousands of Wisconsinites embodied their dissent in the capital city. And their representatives followed their lead (hat tip to Sue Robinson for calling this point to my attention). By leaving the state, the Democratic senators spoke with an embodied voice that would not have been possible in their chamber. I’m a scholar of deliberation and true-believer in its transformative power. But, on this occasion, no matter what arguments the Democrats would have put forward, they likely would have been defeated on a party-line vote. Physically relocating their bodies enabled the Senators to express their opinions and to prevent a vote. And they did so, as several of them have suggested, so that their colleagues could hear the voice of the people.
To be sure, the situation bringing about these protests in Madison is depressing, since Walker’s bill seems to be designed more to inflict pain than save money. But the protests are inspiring, heartening, motivating. They are a tremendously eloquent statement about the power of democracy. Behold the voice of the people!