“You are either racist or Antiracist.” This line in Ibram X. Kendi’s How To be Antiracist, articulated something that I didn’t know I needed to hear. Some say, “‘I am not a racist, but neither am I aggressively against racism.’... But there is no neutrality in the racism struggle. The opposite of ‘racist’ isn’t ‘not racist.’ It is 'Antiracist.'”[1] Thus, you are either part of the problem or part of the solution. Kendi’s clear and accessible work has brought “Antiracist” into common parlance by providing a de facto playbook for becoming Antiracist. This text is being engaged in private and public spaces: in social book clubs and in corporate, governmental, and university symposia. And, since May of 2020, the need for discussing racism has become self-evident.

As people who are in the process of educating a new generation of media consumers, makers, and scholars, we have a responsibility to do what we are able to keep striving for equity, diversity, and inclusion in our corners of academia and beyond. We must recognize the power of racism is in its ability to shift, adapt, revise, and reimagine itself in new moments and contexts. In fighting against racism, we must learn to shift, adapt, revise and reimagine our approaches as well—and, to get out of our comfort zones. Does this mean revising our syllabi, interrogating how our personal biases effect our engagement with students, and discerning whether we are privileging those of one identity position over others? In a word, yes. Pragmatically, this is an ongoing process that requires us to reevaluate our ideas and practices—what determines “legitimate” objects of study, how to be responsive to the content created by marginalized creatives that confronts traditional notions of aesthetics, genre, and narrative and, finally, how our mentoring, teaching and writing should be Antiracist. Attending one or two or ten courses or workshops about Anti-Blackness, diversity or inclusion is a great start, but what are you going to do with what you’ve learned? Are you going to walk the talk, and be Antiracist, by making your pedagogies match your espoused ideologies?

Even as we struggle with understanding the role of media and mediamaking, it is constantly expanding in ways we did not anticipate. After all, one of the most important media texts in the twenty-first century exists because seventeen-year-old Darnella Fraiser pulled out her cell phone and documented the last tragic moments of George Floyd’s life. Fraiser posted the video on Facebook and it quickly went viral. Her footage provided an unimpeachable counterpoint to the original police narrative regarding the “incident” and mobilized hundreds of thousands of people across the world to stand against police brutality and racist violence.[2] 

We know how powerful moving images like these can be in terms of impacting hearts and minds. Whether distributed on Twitter, Instagram or the CBS Evening News, media from citizen journalists such as Fraiser, who won an honorary Pulitzer Prize for her footage, document state-sanctioned racial violence. And, sometimes, it makes a difference in terms of the legal system. One would hope that images and sounds like these once seen can never be unseen. One would hope. However, there is a sad symmetry to which acts of racial violence people choose to be outraged by. The news coverage of the Children’s Crusade in Birmingham, Alabama in May of 1963, broadcast Bull Connor’s state-sanctioned thugs using fire hoses and police attack dogs against elementary, middle and high school students. The images of the violent defense of Jim Crow entered American living rooms and, ultimately, shifted public opinion in favor of the civil right movement, for a time.[3] In May of 2020, Fraiser’s video capturing Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin murdering George Floyd by kneeling on his neck for nine minutes and twenty-nine seconds transformed perspectives on racist violence, and, arguably, brought on the current “racial reckoning.” While the footage of Eric Garner, Tamir Rice and Sandra Bland, as well as countless others, did not adequately move mainstream American audiences, watching Chauvin’s casual act of murder was hard to dismiss or ignore. This footage of these incidents, separated by over five decades, revealed the inhumanity of systemic racial violence and, for a time, shamed some white viewers for their silent complicity. The worldwide response to this murder felt promising as did the subsequent conviction of Chauvin, the former officer who already had at least 22 complaints or internal investigations regarding misconduct.[4] Watching those nine + minutes...that’s what it took. Steven Jackson, former NBA player and Floyd’s close friend, posted a clip of Gigi Floyd, on his shoulders, at a protest eight days after Floyd’s death. She proudly, said, “Daddy changed the world” and I want that to be true.[5]

So, how we do to combat Anti-Blackness? Maybe we don’t teach Birth of A Nation, DW Griffith’s racist cinematic ode to protecting white women’s virtue above all else. We don’t fetishize the technological and stylistic innovation over the fact that this was fundamentally a propaganda film for the KKK and white supremacy that mobilized (and help to codify) multiple anti-Black tropes to “document” the inhumanity and threat of Blackness. We must stop giving a “pass” to casual racism of old films because they were a “products of their time.” This undermines the clear-eyed sociohistorical contextualization of the texts, and enables abiding and enduring narratives of American racism to flourish, unacknowledged and uninterrogated. In “Why I Can’t Forgive Dylann Rouf,” Roxane Gay stated “White people embrace narratives about forgiveness so they can pretend the world is a fairer place than it actually is, and that racism is merely a vestige of a painful past instead of this indelible part of our present.”[6] So, I say to you, if you find yourself balking at the idea of calling out racism wherever and whenever it appears even in the most hallowed narratives of American cinema and television, you may need to check yourself and ask how much of a priority Antiracism is for you at this moment.

We must be aware of our own positionality, the opportunities and responsibilities we have in media instruction at all of our institutions and how the work we do can resonate beyond our individual campuses. And, we must continue to expand these ongoing and vital processes. Adopting Antiracist pedagogies and practices requires unflinching and thorough assessments of our own biases, beliefs, and points of annunciation—where we are speaking from and to whom we are speaking. How do our multiple identities influence how we make choices about what is deemed worthy of study and, by extension, determines what we teach? Revising units or modules, choosing different screenings, searching out texts that critically interrogate visual style, narrative construction and genre, and including a wide range of lived experiences is imperative, as this is what annunciates to our students what is important to us as educators and human beings.

In the past five years, the attention to Antiracism has increased because examples of racism have been both so pervasive and varied across the nation as signified by those many names we say, who fell victim to unfettered racial violence by police officers or quasi-deputized others, many of whom have not and will not be held accountable. These life-and-death experiences must be engaged in the academy. In fact, we’ve seen an increasing number of panels and workshops grappling with what it means to invest in diversity, equity, inclusion, and intersectionality, particularly at the 2021 virtual Society of Cinema Studies conference. Online public events, an inadvertent pandemic gift, deeply resonated with these issues in this sociohistorical moment, including the EDIT Media Roundtable: “Anti-Racist Film + Media Pedagogy,” which acted as the inspiration for this dossier. 

For all my enthusiasm for the growing attention to antiracist pedagogies, I remember that “denial is the heartbeat of racism, beating across ideologies, races, and nations.” As a Black American, cisgender, straight, woman and a working-class kid, who was the first generation to attend college and is a first generation academic, there was a time when I was not cognizant of all the ideological imperatives that had been packed into my way of being and thinking while Black in a predominantly white world. And, in many ways, I drank the American Dream Flavor-Aid because I wanted it to be true for those who had sacrificed for me to be where I am: my parents, who, as Black folks, failed to benefit from being in “The Greatest Generation.” As the progeny of those who came of age before the zenith of the Civil Rights movement, what predispositions did I bring to the classroom as a Black high school US history teacher or, as a Black media scholar at PWIs? How does that impact my selections of “classic” films or television programs? How do my lived experiences guide my decisions in my scholarship and teaching on Black Comedy and those I deem as purveyors of socio-political comedic discourse? How inclusive was I in selecting the readings, screenings and even guest speakers for my courses? When did I make mistakes about naming, pronouns, and trigger warnings, or make assumptions about “common knowledge” that were coded by class, region or nation of origin? I lay my issues bare because this is the kind of searching and fearless introspection and exchange that is required to not just theorize about Antiracism but to actually live with the empathy, openness and willingness to internalize that yours is neither the only story nor the only way.

While I was as conscientious as I was able to be at the time, I can make no claim to perfection. This is not about political correctness, a pejorative phrase that is meaningless, it is about adhering to my espoused beliefs about Antiracism, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. Being someone who is still learning to navigate her multiple identity positions (which include living with a deformity and, now, an impairment), I cannot let myself or you off the hook. Rigorous introspection about our positionality, privilege, and power is required.

This is more of a manifesto that I intended but, so be it: we must find and face our own biases, and begin or continue to walk the talk and fight classism, homophobia, racism, sexism, transphobia, xenophobia and all other forms of hate. Part of my job is to help future creatives and future media audiences think about the power of media and to give them tools see the stories that we tell ourselves about ourselves as well as those we tell to and about each other with intellectual honesty. In this historical moment, the stakes are extremely high. We must continue to check ourselves: “You are either racist or Antiracist,” the choice is yours.

Bambi Haggins is Associate Professor in the Department of Film and Media Studies at University of California Irvine. Her work explores race, class, gender and sexuality in American comedy across media and television history. Her book, Laughing Mad, won the Katherine Singer Kovács Book Award. Haggins wrote Showtime's Why We Laugh: Funny Women and was historical consultant/onscreen talent for HBO’s Whoopi Goldberg Presents Moms Mabley (both 2013). Her new book project, Still Laughing, Still Black examines how Black comedy, culture and reception in the new millennium reflect, refract and reveal the necessity and the power of Black comic discourse and survival laughter since 2008.

1. Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist. (New York, NY: One World Press, 2019), 9. ↑

2. Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs and Marie Fazio, “Darnella Frazier captured George Floyd’s death on her cellphone. The teenager’s video shaped the Chauvin trial,” New York Times, April 20, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/20/us/darnella-frazier-video.html?smid=em-share. ↑

3. “The Children’s Crusade,” The National Museum of African American History and Culture, https://nmaahc.si.edu/blog/childrens-crusade. ↑

4. Kim Barker and Serge F. Kovaleski, “Officer Who Pressed His Knee on George Floyd's Neck Drew Scrutiny Long Before,” New York Times, July 18, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/18/us/derek-chauvin-george-floyd.html. ↑

5. 'Daddy changed the world': George Floyd's daughter shares powerful moment, ESPN Video, May 29, 2020, https://www.espn.com/video/clip/_/id/29258095. ↑

6. Roxane Gay, “Why I Can’t Forgive Dylann Roof,” June 23, 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/24/opinion/why-i-cant-forgive-dylann-roof.html. ↑