Rewriting Racist Headlines

(chimes)

(upbeat music)

I think everything's about race.

Black communities, gay communities, immigrant communities

feel a lot of media representations

to be inadequate, biased.

There's a lot of reporting around police violence

and black men.

And I realized a lot of the arguments

that we were having were about depictions.

I started to wonder, how different would it be

if I swapped images or if I changed some of the text.

And so that was the first time I physically

started playing around with the words.

This isn't a grammar exercise.

I'm really trying to see if I can disrupt

subliminal messaging about who should be valued.

I needed kind of one of the most respected institutions

that kind of prides itself on getting this right

to kind of say, Actually nope,

you're not getting it right.

The counter narrative series,

the primary way you see it is in public on the streets.

We went to four locations,

between Bed Stuy and Crown Heights area and hung 'em up.

You imagine who might be moving in.

And like the height of gentrification

in many of these neighborhoods.

And you're putting this print up of this dead black kid.

So the title's Two Lives at the Crossroads,

equating these two lives as if they're neighbors.

The Times layout to me perpetuated the subtly there

is that these people are on equal footing.

They have equal responsibility

in this event that took place.

And that's not true, I don't believe that.

You have a cop and you have a kid

and there's a responsibility here.

And it lies with one person more than the other.

I know he was 18, I feel like maybe if he wasn't black

we would be calling him a kid.

There's a lot of what in journalism is key information.

He'd sometimes use drugs and he rapped.

And I just don't think that that's necessary information.

So I blacked it out.

Like, oh that's what you do when you're 18,

you do drugs and you drink and you rap

and you curse, 'cause like really,

did you just write in here that he cursed.

It just goes to show how important images are.

It changed the way I viewed the text.

Now you know he's a kid right?

During the Olympics and the Ryan Lochte scandal,

you have this headline about these swimmers

and then there's this big photo of Usain Bolt.

And I remember just being like, What the hell?

There's no way the track team has done

that they wouldn't have been on the front page.

People felt like I caught the Times making a mistake.

And maybe willfully using an image

of a black man under a crime.

I found a very good image of Ryan Lochte

that was just him alone in the pool.

I redacted most of the article.

But I also inserted White-Americans into the title

to categorize it in a way

that other races were categorized.

I guess it's something restorative about it.

A kind of restorative justice.

You know, online the hashtag was like,

white crime, white photo.

And that was really funny 'cause people were like,

Yeah, that's actually a really good hashtag.

(crowds yelling)

I'd never, I mean I'm 35, I've never seen a torch rally.

Like this is some shit I feel like

I would read about in a book.

It was a riot by white nationalists.

And I was like they're gonna get it wrong.

And they got it so wrong.

(dramatic music)

It was a side piece.

It had two columns out of the five

on the front page that day.

If you have a white torch rally,

this is a major event, this isn't a sidebar item.

For the most parts, I keep the layouts how they are

but the problem here was the layout.

That's the journalistic hiccup here,

is the layout doesn't speak to the severity

of these issues.

What you give space to

and what you allow people to see says a lot.

The Tulsa hate crime was a really interesting one

because I didn't really make an image swap.

Vernon Majors was this white guy

and he lives next to this Lebanese family

and he'd harassed them for years.

And eventually and unfortunately

he kills the son, Khalid Jabara.

It runs with this wonky headline

that says he's a Tulsa man

and accused of harassing

this Lebanese family charged with murder.

Huh, that's interesting.

The Lebanese family has been there

for 30 something odd years, since '83.

And this guy had been there like seven years.

So I'm trying to figure out why he would get that title.

If anybody was to get it,

it's Jabara who should get that title.

And I removed Lebanese.

And I also inserted White-American.

I was really interested in the way the news

can slight the other people.

And I used the word racism as well.

'Cause he called the family dirty Arabs.

But then it just says harassing.

And I'm like, I don't understand

why we can't just say racism?

Like the just didn't want to use the word racism.

(dramatic music)

The news cycle moves so quickly

that we're all kind of skimming through things

and we're just kind of accepting narratives.

It's not always this bombastic and in your face.

There are these subtle ways that racism works

in the oldest of institutions.

If it's not this egregious thing coming at you

I think it's so easy to ingest.

You might not print Mexicans are rapists,

what other ways do you contribute

to the thinking about minorities?

You have to be able to look in the mirror

and go, you're failing in these ways.

And if you don't see yourself as maybe just as much

of problem in some ways as Trump,

then what work are you doing?

What's important about counter narratives

is that it's not meant to be like

an indictment of news media.

I could almost say that it's just as much an indictment

of the reader, now I don't know what impact

that will have with the papers,

but I definitely know people are saying to me,

When I'm reading now, I'm saying to myself,

why is this photo here?

There's something about seeing a different image

about shifting the size of a photo, it gets at a feeling

that people have but they don't know how to explain it.

Where I'm situated as a person in the margins,

I think I can see where there are gaps

in ways that other people may not.

I'm a black gay woman, that goes very much

into kind of how I see the news,

how I interpret what happens.

What I believe might be an angle that's overlooked,

doesn't necessarily mean I'm more right,

it just means I have a different vantage point.