In March, the dismantling of the “Black Lives Matter” mural in Washington, D.C., commenced after a Republican bill in Congress was passed which called for its removal.
The “Black Lives Matter” street mural was a notable symbol of the 2020 protests against the murder of George Floyd at the hands of a police officer with other bystanders witnessing the scene.
In 2021, Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser said the mural would become permanent to commemorate the protests. However Rep. Andrew Clyde, R-Ga., introduced a bill calling for the city to paint over the mural and rename the area “Liberty Plaza” or lose federal funding.
The Black Lives Matter movement gained popularity when Minneapolis Police Department Officer Derek Chauvin killed George Floyd by kneeling on his neck for almost 10 minutes on May 25, 2020.
The incident sparked nationwide protests against police brutality and related injustices against Black Americans such as Breonna Taylor, Roger Fortson and Tony Mcdade.
NBC4 Washington’s Eun Yang spoke with Loyola University Maryland Professor Kaye Wise Whitehead, Ph.D., founder and executive director of The Karson Institute for Race, Peace and Social Justice, and they discussed the potential impact this decision could have on the future.
Kaye Wise Whitehead is expecting many challenges to any invisible markers that relate to representation, diversity and inclusion in cities around America due to the demand from the President Trump’s administration to remove them.
Victims of police brutality
The death of Breonna Taylor happened in March 2020 in Louisville, Ky. It started with a botched raid on her apartment orchestrated by Louisville police officers executing a search warrant with a battering ram.
She was in bed with her new boyfriend, Kenneth Walker III, and law enforcement broke the door off its hinges with a battering ram. They thought someone was breaking in, so the boyfriend, Walker III, fired his gun once, which hit Sgt. Jonathan Mattingly in the thigh.
The police responded by firing several shots, which hit Taylor five times.
Contextually, law enforcement believed two men were selling drugs out of a house that was miles away from Taylor’s home but they believed that one of those men had received packages at Taylor’s address. She had been dating that man on-and-off for several years but had recently severed ties with him.
However, a judge signed a warrant allowing law enforcement to search Taylor’s residence.
According to the Courier-Journal, law enforcement had already apprehended one of the men involved which was revealed during Tamika Palmer’s Lawsuit, Taylor’s mom.
Next, U.S. Airman Roger Fortson was shot and killed by a Florida Sheriff’s Deputy Eddie Duran inside his own apartment in May 2024.
According to PBS, Duran inaccurately responded to a domestic dispute call at the wrong apartment due to the mistake of a worker at the complex.
“The deputy pounded at the door repeatedly and yelled, ‘Sheriff’s office — open the door!’ Fortson opened the door with his legally purchased gun in his right hand, pointed to the ground.
The deputy said, ‘Step back,’ then immediately began firing. Fortson fell backward onto the floor. Only then did the deputy yell, ‘Drop the gun!’”
There was no domestic dispute going on in Fortson’s apartment, rather, he was alone on a Facetime call talking to his girlfriend.
Another incident occurred when an officer responded to a fatal stabbing incident on May 27, 2020, and came across Tony McDade. He matched the description of a stabbing suspect in the area according to The Tallahassee Police Department.
Police and witnesses reported two opposing accounts of what happened as the police said McDade possessed a handgun and a bloody knife. Witnesses said he didn’t possess weapons and police didn’t use the usual phrases officers should whenever they’re in an altercation like this one such as, “Get down, I’m an officer.”
A resident witness said in a Facebook Live taken from across the street, “They said ‘Stop moving, n—-r,’ and then they shot him after he stopped moving.”
Media representation and narrative framing
To understand how media representation influences police response, we must look at how stories are told, and by whom.
According to the Pew Research Center, four in five black adults see racist, or racially insensitive depictions of their race in the news, “either often or sometimes.” Pew took a survey on black attitudes toward the media and more than half of the respondents said news about Black people is often more negative compared to other races or ethnic groups.
Charles Whitaker, Dean of the Medill Journalism School at Northwestern University, said there’s a feeling Black Americans are often depicted as perpetrators, or victims of a crime in the media when no context provided for the audience. This idea influences the public, including law enforcement.
Black people being perpetrators or victims also relates to the brutal murders of Tony McDade and Roger Fortson. Both of them fit the stereotype of a dangerous Black man in possession of a weapon in each of their situations, a concept which has been constantly reinforced in the media.
Have you heard the stereotype Black men are inherently violent? Why do you think law enforcement, in both of those situations, shot first? If those men were White what do you think would have happened?
Even Richard Prince, a columnist for the Journal-isms newsletter said that he has heard the same iterations of Black crime victims being treated like suspects frequently.
The problem is due to the media constructing narratives with selective reporting, and with the use of sensationalism and framing that often do not match reality, according to South University. These stories invoke fear and anxiety.
How many Black people represent total arrests in the U.S.?
According to Liberty Matters reporting of data from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report, Black people represent 26.6% of total arrests, including the following:
- 51.2% murder
- 52.7% robbery
- 28.8% burglary
- 28.6% motor vehicle theft
- 42.2% prostitution
- 26.1% drug
A solution to how Black people are represented in the media is for journalists to be educated on the issues African Americans face, such as poverty and systemic racism, and provide historical context around the issue.
However, my concern with this solution is the lack of motivation for mainstream media and other news outlets to provide context for issues that Black Americans face, and who more likely than not, make up a small percentage of their staff.
Also, sensationalist reporting is a huge component of mainstream media outlets and other news outlets that garner a lot of views. When they report on people who are deemed “dangerous,” they elicit the duality of good versus bad to their audience, which in turn makes for great storytelling and entertainment, compared with a story on how to improve the living conditions of different groups of people.
So, how can we make ideas like how to improve the conditions of these people engaging?
Do news media outlets need to be more diverse for these stories to come to fruition and be more frequent?
Do institutions need to be more diverse for the treatment of black people to be better?
Diversity
Diversity is the composition of different groups of people through their creed, gender, race, ethnicity or any other differences they have within a single entity.
Is diversity the solution to improving police brutality in the United States? In other words, do police forces need to be more diverse?
Do you remember when Tyre Nichols, a Black man, was murdered by five police officers in January 2023 during a traffic stop dispute?
This incident shows it is deeper than the need for police forces to be more diverse in order to prevent police brutality in America. Phrases like “All White Cops Are Bad” contradicts this incident because the officers involved in the Nichols incident were all Black.
“All White Cops Are Bad” was a narrative perpetuated by media outlets for sensationalism as it created a bad guy in those respective stories. Every good story needs a bad guy against the good guy.
Mainstream outlets often prioritize sensationalism because it attracts viewership, sometimes at the cost of depth and context.
Solution to police brutality
Yes, police forces should be more diverse for those specific police officers to be able to relate to the individual they are pulling over. These diverse police officers are aware of the treatment of their people historically and may be more fair in the punishment they would hand to the person they are pulling over.
However, we need broader diversity within more institutions in order to gain more perspectives on how we should treat each other. A significant first step is to diversify the media because of how much influence they have in how we perceive people. Then, set laws and policies for a mandate on the diversity of workplaces in every U.S. institution. This can only happen if government becomes more diverse as well.
Also, the narrative of the Black Lives Matter movement needs to be more positive universally because it is a movement that affirms the collective safety of all Black people. We don’t deserve to be judged based on our race because we are human and our skin color doesn’t define us.
Whitehead said, “We know that the Black Lives Matter movement was not celebrated across the board … considered to be something that was divisive. People thought we were saying only ‘Black lives matter,’ we were saying ‘Black lives matter too,’ in addition to other lives … Specifically to conversations around police brutality.”
All Lives Matter is a conservative reaction to Black Lives Matter allegedly started by people who aren’t aware of the injustices Black people go through everyday. The phrase has been said by prominent politicians like our president, celebrities, scholars and other figures.
Again, this narrative of supporting the Black Lives Matter slogan versus the All Lives Matter slogan does make for an entertaining narrative so it’s understandable why mainstream media doesn’t contextualize the Black Lives Matter movement.
Inclusion
Inclusion is the incorporation of people from different walks of life who contribute different perspectives, attitudes, beliefs and views in a setting. The frequency of police brutality incidents may decline if we include the public and their collective opinion on how to handle police brutality as an issue.
A reason why police brutality is such a social issue affecting the public is because of its aftermath especially during the summer of 2020. That summer involved numerous protests that were both violent and nonviolent which led to deaths and businesses being vandalized and looted.
For example, in Chicago, six people were shot and one was killed during the same night when a man was killed in St. Louis after protesters blocked Interstate 44 and set fires and tried to loot a FedEx Truck. Because of out-of-hand protests, the National Guard was mobilized in Minnesota by Governor Tim Waltz to maintain the peace.
In other words, we don’t want these incidents to happen again. Our voices should be included in how we handle policing.
Solutions to street violence
The Harvard Gazette highlighted how Sandra Susan Smith, a professor of criminal justice from Harvard Kennedy School, sees possible ways forward for the implementation of community-based approaches, such as Cure Violence and the Crisis Assistance Helping Out on the Streets, also known as CAHOOTS.
Cure Violence aims to stop violence in targeted neighborhoods by training selected partners and credible messengers to detect and interrupt conflict. This approach promotes safer and healthier behaviors among high-risk individuals and changes social norms like who to call when a dispute is going on that needs intervention.
CAHOOTS reimagines public safety. It is an innovative community-based public safety system that deals with mental health crises such as conflict resolution, substance abuse, suicide threats, trauma informed de-escalation and harm reduction techniques. The staff doesn’t carry weapons and their training and experience are the tools they use to ensure a non-violent resolution of crisis situations.
These programs are the most ethical ways to include the public’s voices on how to handle police brutality because of how non-lethal they are. We need to fund these programs so they can become more prevalent in our communities across the nation. We should write to our state representatives and elected officials about these programs too.
The path forward
Police brutality is a current issue and we need to keep talking about it. There are viable solutions to this problem in the forms of community based programs that promote public safety in combination with policies for the training of police officers to be less threatening while handling low-level offenses.
However, how could the public know about these programs to reduce police brutality if no mainstream outlets like Fox News or CNN inform their audiences?
Why don’t mainstream outlets report on these stories and how can they make them interesting enough to grab their audience’s attention? Police brutality isn’t talked about nearly as much as it was in the summer of 2020 which makes the issue seem like it’s less of a problem. There are too many other pressing issues that are being covered by broadcasting mainstream media outlets owned by white people because they don’t relate to these issues of police brutality as much as minorities do.
This brings us to another point, who are these mainstream outlets’ audience?
“…the White population continued to represent the largest racial and ethnic group in the U.S., their share of the overall population decreased from 69.1 percent in 2002 to 59.2 percent in 2022” according the American Council On Education. No reputable resource cites what the White population is today, but an educated estimate would be around 59% based on how much it has decreased from 2002 to 2022.
If the U.S. is becoming more diverse by 1% every year, imagine how diverse we would be as a nation in 10 years?
Would that change the audience’s demographics and what type of news they want to consume of those mainstream outlets?
Broadcast media is very important today because it is content that shows the audience the news that is being displayed to them. An audience member can be more influenced that way if he or she gets exposed to visuals being shown to them because of how powerful the content may be due to how they consume it.
Unlike reading print, it shows the tone of the news being broadcasted and any visually appealing or unappealing videos and pictures that evokes emotion.
Are there any Black-run mainstream broadcast outlets? TV One is an example. I call for readers to support black media entities such as USBC Network, Urban One and Black Public Media.
We commend the presence of Black media podcasts in pop culture so individuals in the media like The Stephen A Smith Show, The Joe Budden Podcast and others have free reign to cover these issues.
Here’s another reason why police brutality against Black people relates to representation in the media: The absence of diversity in mainstream outlets is a cause for why there has been no clear reason the mural was removed. This tells us how much media outlets care about why it was removed and the current perception of the Black Lives Matter movement being insignificant.
If the Black Lives Matter movement mattered at all to the federal government, then the mural would not have been removed. The mural was a stark reminder of Black Lives Matter and its significance to Black people.
President Donald Trump has said his administration “will terminate every diversity, equity, and inclusion program across the entire federal government,” and this has been seen across the country on both public and private levels.
Another example is Major League Baseball removing the word “diversity” from its MLB Careers home page after President Trump issued an executive order ending “equal opportunity” for minorities in job recruiting.
Karen Long, an Arlington, Va., resident, said “It just felt very comforting to know that somebody cared enough to give a placement to a whole positive movement. Black lives are always going to matter,” in an interview with USA Today.
“Can’t we have anything? The Black Lives Matter [Mural] was about empowering each other.” a Washington, D.C., resident, Toya Brim, said.
I agree with Kaye Wise Whitehead in her interview with NBC4’s Eun Yang. This is a dangerous precedent that symbolizes a shift in how America will perceive issues of representation, diversity and inclusion.
Does the erasure of murals like this mean people will forget victims of police brutality like Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Tony McDade and Roger Fortson? I hope not!
How can we remind people of the victims of police brutality that caused the Black Lives Matter to be mainstream on a recurring basis?
Should we have a memoriam of those victims every summer, when the Black Lives Matter movement was at its most popular?
The media’s role is to report on current events for the audience to make their own decisions on a matter and influence the thinking of their audience by interviewing experts.
The relevancy of the Black Lives Matter movement to the U.S. is very complex because of how political it is when in reality, it is not. It is a construct that evokes fairness for Black people, advocating for more support in the most accurate context for the public to consume information and then take action.
The removal of the Black Lives Matter mural is not just an aesthetic decision. It’s a statement. What kind of country are we choosing to become when we erase the symbols that demand justice for the most marginalized?
Featured image: Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash
Edited by Nancy Martin, Abbigail Earl, Steven London & James Sutton
