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Crystal
abolition is for everybody is a podcast that tackles the sometimes-difficult conversations around prison abolition. I’m Crystal.
Graham
And I’m Graham. This season is about the media’s involvement in carceral or abolitionist thinking.
Crystal
How it uses narratives to impact, radicalize, and shift culture.
Graham
Just a reminder friends, though the title of this episode may give you some warning, remember that harm itself tends to create situations of alternate harms.
Crystal
There will likely be other painful topics brought up too. Take care of you.
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Crystal Welcome, everyone. Today we will be talking about protests. And for this topic, we are joined by Alec Karakatsanis. And Alec, can you please go ahead and introduce yourself to the listeners? And let us know what comes to mind when you think about protests and the media?
Alec Hi, I’m Alec Karakatsanis. I’m a civil rights lawyer and former public defender. And I’m the founder and executive director of an organization called Civil Rights Corp that does big picture systemic civil rights litigation, challenging the injustices of the criminal punishment bureaucracy. So when I think about protests, when I think about the role of the media, I think about how the media tends to distract people from the truly important things that are going on in our society, and tends to try to preserve status quo distributions of wealth and power by minimizing the importance of or effectiveness or urgency of various social movements and mass protest movements, and to normalize injustices that should be shocking, that should shake us to our core, but really desensitize us to them. And I see the media as playing a really important role in doing that, and I’d love to talk more about it with you all.
Crystal Well, thank you for joining us. And right off the bat, one of the first things that, you know, Graham and I have talked about in our previous conversations, is the differences between using the language of protests and riots. So I was wondering if you had any thoughts about how the media uses those words, and who they typically associate that language with.
Alec The language that the media uses to describe what people do affects how we think about those people and about the causes that they’re fighting for. So obvious examples throughout history, some media call a given group of people terrorists, while other media organizations with a different political sort of outlook, call those people freedom fighters. And that kind of dynamic reproduces itself across cultures, societies. The words we use to describe people have a very important role to play in how we think about people. So for example, whether you call someone a protester or a rioter or a looter, you know, changes how you think they should be treated, and changes the extent to which you think that the cause that they’re, first of all changes, whether you think that they’re mobilizing for a cause, or just to commit random acts of violence. But second of all, it changes our impression of whether the cause that they’re fighting for is a just one or not. And I think that’s really important. And so you can see throughout the last 20 years, the media consistently uses different words to describe group-based behavior of wealthy people, of white people, of conservatives, of leftists, of union laborers, of non-union laborers, there’s different terminology that’s used to describe many different mass protest movements, depending on who they are. And that’s a really important way in which the media controls what the general public thinks about a given group of people.
Crystal Yeah. And another thing that comes to mind is that a lot of the time communities get blamed for, you know, what it is that they’re protesting about, you hear words and language like, you know that “its gotten violent”, “this should have been more peaceful”, “we had no choice but to send the police.” I remember one time, I had a friend who went to the protests, you know, when George Floyd was happening, and he wore basketball shorts, and he got shot with a BB gun on his inner thigh and left a massive bruise and a permanent scar. And his friend that went with him told him “Oh, well, you should have known better. You wore basketball shorts to a protest, obviously, the police is going to shoot at us and going to use physical violence.” And I remember him saying, “oh, yeah, she was right. I shouldn’t have worn basketball shorts.” So when you talk about the language that the media uses, and how folks should get treated, you can also see that in our communities, unfortunately. And it’s just a long history of that being so intentional, and how the community gets treated when we get angry and upset about the injustices that are happening to us.
Alec Yeah, I mean, I think this is a really important point to make. But the types of behaviors that are called violent are also dependent on these same background political assumptions and political perspectives. The concept of violence itself is heavily politicized. So for example, the underlying structural violence of our society is often not referred to or called violent in the media. So you could have the foreclosure of a family’s home, and the use of armed sheriffs escorting a family out of their home because they didn’t make a rent payment, because the landlord didn’t fix something, or there’s mold everywhere or because the family couldn’t afford to pay it. And somehow living in a society where if you can’t afford to pay for a shelter over your head, armed government agents come and remove you from your home at the behest of a corporate landlord. That whole interaction at gunpoint is not called violence. But a group of people standing outside the house, prevent, as Muhammad Ali used to do famously in Chicago, preventing a poor family from getting evicted by sheriffs — that is now called an act of violence. And there’s a couple of really profound examples of that, over the last few years, in Oakland when the private landlord had the cops and the tanks come to remove the “Moms for Housing” women and children, and in Philadelphia, similarly, and sometimes these things are actually caught on tape, but so people can actually see the violence. But I think what’s much more profoundly true is that it is an act of violence, for example, for someone who can’t afford diapers or food to eat, you know, to go to a grocery store and be threatened with physical arrest and punishment for taking the food that they need. Now, some people might say that that type of violence, armed agents guarding large stores of food in the midst of a starving public, that’s an acceptable form of violence. That’s a separate discussion, I just think we should be clear about the fact that it is violence. And there are certain types of violence that we as a society are willing to accept, and certain kinds of violence that we aren’t. But I think one of the roles that the media plays is, it ignores or doesn’t talk about or portrays as non-violent, a lot of things that actually are very violent, and it sort of puts it’s thumb on the scale in that moral and political discussion that we should be having as a society about, do we want to be the kind of society that uses armed government agents to enforce the extreme levels of inequality that we have? Or do we want to be a kind of society that doesn’t do that?
Graham That’s a really great point. I really appreciated everything you just said. And I was thinking of a conversation that Crystal and I’ve had, and I’ve had with other people around, like the historical perspective on riots, and like, it really roots to a public on riots and protests, it roots to a public that feels unheard. So like, it’s oftentimes a symptom of disenfranchised people that feel unheard. And that’s when it’s occurred historically. And obviously, emotions are high and things take place. And, you know, like what you just said, in terms of what can be considered as violent, it oftentimes just is an expression of amplifying your own voice when you feel like that’s not being heard. And so it can be done through a, what would be called a peaceful protest. And sometimes things escalate and actions are taken. But I think that it’s really important to, like, to take note of the way that it’s referred to in the media. Oftentimes, like, if there’s a basketball or a sports event, a basketball game or a sports event, and it’s in a white area, and it’s predominantly white public that goes into riot mode, if you want to call it that, afterwards it’s referred to by the media as something very different, as during the BLM protests that took place during the George Floyd protests, it’s referred to very differently and with racial undertones and overtones.
Alec Yeah, I mean I was posting on Twitter last week about there was a horrific, violent brawl between two predominantly white fraternities at University of Mississippi a few weeks ago at a football game, and people are just beating each other up and, you know, engaging in rampant felony crimes, aggravated assault, physical assaults, right? And everyone in the media and on Twitter is just laughing about it, you know, they’re making fun of the frat boys, and they’re, no one is talking about like a crime surge and a riot, you know. You can only imagine what would have been the case if it were predominantly Black students or non-students engaged in that kind of brutal behavior, it would have been framed totally differently, of course. I think it’s important to go back throughout our history. Sometimes we have trouble seeing the truth of these things in our own moment. But if you just go back to like the civil rights movement, for example, and you look at the protests that took place throughout the civil rights movement, and a lot of what was being protested against, were daily acts of violence. So a family trying to eat dinner at a restaurant, escorted out by security guards, escorted out by police and sheriffs enforcing laws that said that you couldn’t eat in certain places because of your skin color, right? Or you couldn’t sit in a certain place on a bus. Or protesting lynchings and brutal beatings and all kinds of deprivation throughout employment, school, every quarter of life, there were discriminatory practices enforced by armed government agents at the end of the day, right? There was the daily violence, of course, of police in Black communities, etc. You get the point. When protests broke, break out against those daily acts of violence, it’s the protesters that were portrayed as violent rioters. Back then you saw police responding with dogs, with water cannons, etc. And still in the media of the day, it was the protesters that were portrayed as violent. And so it’s really important to understand that like, oftentimes, where you draw the line, where you begin looking at a problem. Do you look at the violence that led to a protest? Because another way to think about a lot of those protests is acts of self defense. These are communities that are saying, we have to come together to stop the daily violence that’s happening against us. And that tends to be a problem that conservative and white and moderate Americans see really easily in, say, for example, the military context: they believe very strongly that if the United States feels some kind of a threat to itself, it has the right to go invade another country, or drone kill people in other countries, or overthrow their democratically elected government. Right? They even seem to believe that if the United States could make a lot of money off of oil or other sort of corporate endeavors in those countries, that the United States has the right to engage in violence there. We saw that throughout the CIA and the military’s role in Latin America. Those are portrayed, were portrayed, and defended to the public by mainstream media as acts of self defense. And, in fact, the government even renamed the Department of War to be the Department of Defense. And that was done as an act of propaganda, because it became not as cool to like start declaring war on other countries; they needed to reframe what the US was doing as acts of self defense. But the civil rights protests were not framed as acts of self defense. Obviously, there’s many differences. I’m not making a perfect one-to-one analogy, but what I’m sort of teasing out is a very general point that like, the violence that poor communities engage in, in response to systemic structural violence, is often called violence and is not viewed in the same way as acts of violence that are committed by wealthier interests in our society.
Graham I was thinking also of the, like, the televised response to January 6, and how different that response would have been, Crystal and I were talking about this yesterday, how different that response would have been if it was BLM on the steps of the Capitol, how the police response would have been different, and the media representation of what happened would have been completely different. It certainly wouldn’t have gone on for four hours, that I know. It would have been quelled probably very violently, and it would have been portrayed, just as you said, as a justifiable response on the part of the police, the Capitol police, etc. So I think that’s really interesting. Thank you for saying that.
Crystal Alec, one of the things that we talked about in season two, was the different things that we can keep in mind when we are consuming this media. Do you have any, you know, advice or guidance on what folks can keep in mind when they are consuming media in regards to protests?
Alec I think the first thing is to learn about, historically, how this stuff has been portrayed and distorted. Because it’s one thing to notice it happening a few times in our current times and looking at how the media covers things now, but you can’t really grasp it until you see the relentless historical way in which wealthy and powerful interests have consistently tried to turn the, you know, sort of middle-of-the-road people in our society who don’t pay much attention to this stuff against left wing movements by using language, characterizing it as violent, etc. So I think, studying some of that history. One of my favorite books about this, in general, I think, is Our Enemies in Blue, which is a particularly important study about the history of US policing and has a lot of examples about about this kind of thing as well. But I also think it’s important to develop political education around –for your friends, your family, your co-workers –around critically reading the news, about how to engage in, like, understanding the biases that the news has. There’s an organization called Interrupting Criminalisation, which is now putting out a variety of materials about how not to be a “copagandist” , which is really, really useful. I, myself published a substack newsletter that’s free, called Alec’s Copaganda newsletter, which is all about how the media covers, not just protest, but issues of safety and crime and justice in a way that is an attempt to justify and preserve status quo distributions of wealth and power. Another great book I love is We Do This ‘Til We Free Us by Mariame Kaba, which is, has lots of great anecdotes and stories that I think are really important to understanding the vital role, not just of protest, but of broader organizing generally around a shared abolitionist politics. And I think what’s really vital about this is, none of these problems are solvable alone. We have to come together with other people in our communities. We have to build networks of mutual aid, and solidarity. And only by coming together and reading together and studying together and organizing together are we going to be able to change some of the narratives about what these movements are doing. And I think that’s, like, absolutely vital.
Crystal I, like, I read some of your work and I was at the copagandist webinar last week. And I’m curious to know how you prevent from doing these things when you’re writing your own work, like how do you not fall into the same things that a lot of the media is doing?
Alec Well, let me just say that as a creature of our culture, I’m not immune to this stuff. We are living in a really violent, really unequal culture. And in order to create a society with this much inequality, this much suffering, this much violence, our society has to, has to cultivate in all of us certain myths, and certain assumptions and certain attitudes and certain beliefs that, if they don’t make us okay with or even celebrate our society, they make us desensitized to how bad it can be for so many people. And a lot of that is a colonial project and was a colonial project. So one of the big, hardcore underlying injustices in our society is that our news media cares about the wellbeing of American citizens more than everyone else in the world. And so it ignores a lot of the violence and suffering that are caused around the world for people in the US to live a certain lifestyle. And it ignores a lot of the ecological violence that we’re doing to our world, in order to live a certain lifestyle, and in order to extract profit from the natural world and from communities across the world. So I’m not immune to it. All of us are engaging in it every single day, even by omission. So I don’t want to make it sound like I perfectly avoid it. I think the best that we can do is try to understand as much as we can our own role in these systems, try to understand what assumptions, attitudes, intuitions, beliefs were cultivated in ourselves by these systems from conceptions of race, right? So there’s an incredible book called Racecraft by Barbara and Karen Fields, which I highly recommend to you all. They also did a podcast version of the arguments in the book on The Dig, which is the Jacobin’s podcast, which I really highly recommend. And Barbara and Karen Fields are writing a lot in that book about the construction of race. And, but similarly, gender, right? There’s all kinds of social constructions that are really historically contextual, and not in any way, kind of like objective or correct or exclusive ways of seeing the world. So we’re all subject to various constraints based on where we live, and how we grew up and what we’ve been exposed to, and so there’s no way to be perfectly objective when writing about this stuff. What I personally tried to do is understand that at a really deep level, the criminal punishment bureaucracy, and the people who are profiting and benefiting from it, are constructing that system in a way and talking about that system in a way to create and justify massive inequality. And so I try in my own writing to think about whether anything I’m saying is furthering that system, or whether it is expressing appropriate skepticism of it. And that applies to the words that I use, to the topics that I discuss, to the people that I quote, to the things that I support or the things that I critique. And, you know, my basic sense is, I try in everything I do to advocate for reducing the size and power of the criminal punishment system, and promoting attitudes, narratives, and assumptions and beliefs that are skeptical of the way in which elites have used that system to extract from the rest of the population.
Graham That’s great. I, I’m thinking just in reference to the idea that the media pushes out like, of problem/solution , like they really base it as problem/solution. So you have something that the media would classify as a violent protest, they’ll classify it that way. And the public will digest that. And they think the problem is the violent protest. Right? And the solution is punishment, because for whatever reason–patriarchy is what I’d say — but our culture loves punishment, love the idea of punishment. So it, digests it and automatically comes up with the solution, which the system which you’re speaking of– the policing, the oppressive policing system– like, utilizes, and says, Oh, well, this is obviously the solution, punish these people for violent prison. But really, the police are the problem. The police, the way that they’re policing and the way that the policing system is used to oppress people, is the problem. That’s really, really powerful. Thank you. So what did we miss? Is there anything that we missed that you think we should share with our audience?
Alec I think that one of the things that is overlooked, it’s not just the words that the media uses, like rioter, and looter or protester or patriot, right? It’s much, much broader. It’s what kinds of stories is the media telling? And what kinds of stories is the media omitting? So for example, the media publishes nightly news stories on every local news station around the country, daily newspaper articles about so-called crime. And the crime that it’s writing about that make it into the news every night, often with mug shots of poor people and Black people, immigrants. The crime it’s talking about are low level crimes by the poor. It’s almost never talking about wage theft, which is 5x all the property crime combined, or tax evasion, which is 63 times all of our property crime combined, or civil forfeiture theft by the police, which is more than all burglary combined in the US. It’s not talking about the several 100,000 clean water and clean air act crimes every single year that killed hundreds of thousands of people in this country, orders of magnitude more than all murder combined. Right? So what kinds of crime and what kinds of safety threats is the media reporting on? That’s a really central component of copaganda, it’s really a central component of how the media concocts a faux sense of urgency around some issues, and completely, I don’t know, papers over or ignores or kind of muffles conversations about things that are actually much more profound threats to our health, wellbeing, and safety. And then when it covers issues of safety, the media is talking about them in ways that don’t, that promote the viewpoint of police. Like you suggested Graham, it’s constantly suggesting that if there’s this crime, then the solution is police and prison and jail and prosecutors. Because it talks about a crime and then interviews all the cops and prosecutors and, or it talks about a politician as being tough on crime, if they’re like, in favor of more punishment, even though the scientific consensus is that more punishment doesn’t make us safer. If more punishment made us safer, the US would have the safest society in world history. And yet we have a very violent society. That could be a fact that’s put in every single news article about these issues. The media could just say, as a fact at the end, “by the way, the US has the highest rate of incarceration, the most money spent on police, prosecutors, prison, probation, parole, surveillance, etc. And yet we have one of the most violent societies in the world.” But they don’t. They omit that fact. And it’s that, sort of those big, significant omissions that are, I think, often much more important than even the words the media is using.
Crystal That’s something that stood out to me during the George Floyd protests. Looking at the news, I remember they talked about all of the damages that had happened to, like, property when people were protesting and how much it was going to cost to fix it. But then they didn’t talk about the violence from the police to the people, and how long George Floyd had a knee to his neck. And I remember watching that over and over, it clicked. That part of the media clicked for me that they were omitting what happened to this man, but they wanted us to know how many fires were set, how much, how many windows were broken throughout the city. And I remember noticing that for the first time and watching it happen.
Alec And by the way, a lot of, throughout American history, a lot of the damage that’s done during riots–not all of it, but a fair amount of it, an unknown really amount of it–is damage that’s done by infiltrators and right wing forces and police themselves. It’s a common tactic, because it’s very, they know how the media is going to cover that kind of thing. And so they deliberately engineer that kind of behavior in order to try to turn ordinary people against a righteous protest. And that’s, that’s another thing that’s like not really, there are investigative news articles over the years about that problem. But it’s not something that the media is consciously talking about when it’s reporting on protests like that, usually. And so that’s another real failure, I think, because you have to be really naive to think that right wing forces and the police are not instigating and engaging in a lot of that stuff and, and these narratives of, like, outside agitators, which you see people in power and police spewing every single time there’s violence. And now you see people in other countries, like you saw a few weeks ago the Iranian government was basically adopting all of Eric Adams’ talking points, about the Iranian protests, blaming everything on looters and rioters and, and outside agitators, and, you know, criminal elements, etc. These are common tactics. They’re not unique to the United States. These are tactics that police and authoritarian governments employ all over the world. And the media in the United States is just particularly credulous, you know, about like, what’s really going on in some of these protests.
Crystal Yeah, I also read your essay on, you know, when they cover when the media covers protests, and there’s a lot of videos and pictures and stories about the one cop who decided to put his big gun down and walk with the protesters. And when I was reading that essay, I was like, “oh, Alec is so right.” You know, they stop talking about all of the people that the police beat up and left bloodied or arrested during this protest. But we are plastered with, with the video of the officer putting down his gun, his big gun, and walking with these folks to supposedly protest something that he is a part of, you know, that violent system that he is a part of. So I really enjoyed reading your work, Alec. And before you go, is there something that you would like to share with the audiences? Any projects you’re working on? Or any essays you think they should read after listening to this episode?
Alec Yeah, I mean, I’ve written a few things about this, that might be interesting to people. The essay you were talking about, I think, was called “What Does it Mean to Be a Good Cop,” which I wrote in 2020, after there were a lot of police, like, kneeling down with protesters and giving them flowers and things like that. And you have to understand, these are highly coordinated and sophisticated public relations strategies that, police pay millions of dollars in public relations to come up with this stuff. It’s not just like, individual cops thinking of this stuff on their own. These are things that we saw in city after city after city coordinated, right? And police departments spend tens of millions of dollars on this kind of stuff. And so that’s very important.
Crystal I didn’t know that. I did not know that.
Alec Yeah. I mean, just the Los Angeles Sheriff’s department alone has 42 Public Relations employees full time. And it’s a very sophisticated operation. And so we have officers doing social media, officers making films. The San Francisco Police Department has a full time videographer making propaganda videos about the other police officers. And this year, they put in the budget request for a second full time videographer. So these are these are happening all over, I just happen to know that because I testified at the San Francisco Board of Supervisors about this stuff. When they uncovered this–they didn’t even know about this. And they got it, the supervisors got the documents from the police departments themselves. So I think another article to start with really, I think is maybe the most comprehensive one that I’ve written about all this stuff, which is called “The Punishment Bureaucracy.” And that’s really an attempt to describe how this system really works, and what interests really underlie it. And it’s the first essay in my book, Usual Cruelty, which might be of interest to people. And if you’re a teacher, or a professor, we have free copies of the book for you to give to all of your students. And we also send a matching free copy of the book to people in prison for every student that gets one. So if you’re a teacher or a professor, high school, college, law school, grad school, whatever, you can send me a note on Twitter, and I’ll make sure to get you boxes of free books.
Graham That’s amazing. I, for another leg of my work I go into prisons, and it’s shocking. I mean, I was, I was also in prison for a large part of my life. And it’s shocking to me just how few of us realize, like, how entrenched we are, like, the belief is, “you do the crime you do the time” and that’s what everybody goes into, even if you feel like they’re innocent or wrongfully convicted or sentenced to too much time, well, I did the crime, I do the time. And so they don’t even understand the depth and the breadth of, of what is actually taking place. I’d love to reach out to you for that for my participants. Thank you.
Alec Absolutely. One of the most beautiful things that’s happened in the last few years for me is I get a lot of emails and notes from people in prison, who have read the book, who’ve been passing it around, who’ve been doing reading groups on it, and who have really enjoyed, like, the analysis that it provides. And it’s been really useful and helpful for folks inside and that’s been really incredible. So yeah, feel free to reach out to me we can get you as many free copies as you want.
Graham Thank you.
Crystal Thank you so much, Alec. We really enjoyed having you and really learned a lot from you. We appreciate it.
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Crystal
You’ve been listening to abolition is for everybody. Be sure to follow us @abolitionIs_ on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook for regular updates.
Graham
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