Work was completed collectively on zoom (Ailee, Joe, Jerome)

Introduction 

In March 2020, the Louisville police department made headlines when 26-year old Breonna Taylor was shot and killed while asleep in her own home on a no-knock search warrant- the first of many incidents of police brutality that would spark national, even global outrage against systematic oppression of the American justice system. For millennials & Gen Z’ers, these incidents- one by one- came as a shock: is this really what our country stands for? It seemed as if all the past horrors of slavery and discrimination that we had read about in history textbooks were playing out before us in present, real life. But for those who had lived through Rodney King, The Danziger Bridge shootings, Eric Garner, and Michael Brown, the public outcry for police reform after Taylor’s death was in fact nothing new. The only difference this time around? The explosive potential harnessed by millions of thumbs scrolling on social media to carry out the momentum of a global movement. 

Admittedly, it feels like we are living in some extraordinary anomaly of a year: there’s a deadly and unpredictable pandemic going on, and racial injustice issues are at the forefront of national news with every new horrifying video that surfaces on Facebook or Instagram Live- all the while a rather dramatic presidential race has also took place. In an age where every new day brings an avalanche of “breaking news” and quite literally everything in popular culture- meditation apps, rap song lyrics, portable WiFi, Amazon Prime deals- is telling us to live in the “now,” it has become increasingly easy to fixate on isolated incidents and headlines without contextualizing them in a larger cultural history.  

Since the death of Breonna Taylor and many others- George Floyd, Jacob Blake, Rayshard Brooks, to name a few- in what felt like a spring of unending violence and tragedy, popular media outlets such as Buzzfeed have used their prominent platforms to educate mass audiences on the broader topic of racial injustice as it has existed and transformed across American history. These platforms have released articles, videos, interviews, and further educational resources with aims to reconcile the nation’s history of police violence with current events. 

Linked above is an example of these efforts: created and published onto YouTube by Buzzfeed on July 6, 2020, this video takes on the widely popularized “crash-course” format to outline a century of past police reform efforts in the US in just 12 minutes, arguing for “why police reform doesn’t work,” as indicated by its title. The video is co-narrated by Khalil Gibran Muhammad, a professor at Harvard Kennedy School, and an unnamed female voice, and it features a series of images overlaid with text- stock photos, newspaper clippings, occasionally short archival clips- as its visual component. 

Our Mission 

Buzzfeed is a “mainstream” news and entertainment company that is best known for its online quizzes and its Tasty video series…in other words, it never had any reason to engage with heavier, more serious social justice issues in its content. 

Buzzfeed primarily attracts younger, school-aged audiences with its short-form, interactive videos and content. We want to take apart and to analyze how it approaches engaging and educating these audiences on racial injustice and police reform by observing specific narrative choices made to represent- or to simplify such a complex, loaded topic. 

1. What voices, images, and historical events are privileged, and how do these choices shape the message of the video?
2. How does Buzzfeed imagine their audience?
3. Is this educational video ultimately doing the work its creators intended for it to do?

Our aim is to take you through a series of deconstructions and reconstructions that might not only help contextualize the video and its intentions in a tumultuous arena of media-making, but also give insight into what values and principles structure modern popular media consumption. 

Project Overview  

Our project is pretty simple: 

1. We’ll “deconstruct” this 12-minute video into its constitutive parts- visuals, audio, narrative structure (how they’re pieced together- as if we’re working backwards from the final product to a “bare-bones” outline. 
2. We’ll discuss what we find in our deconstruction, bringing in some course themes such as subjectivity/objectivity, methods of truth and order, and imagined audiences to help us contextualize some of the deliberate- perhaps more importantly: the non-deliberate- choices made in presenting this history. 
3. Using the same starting materials, we’ll “reconstruct” our own video in order to understand and to experience for ourselves the specific ways in which media production, even with the most “objective” intentions, is inherently a social storytelling process. 
4. Finally, we’ll extend the ideas we find in deconstructing the video to making comments on the data that likewise provides a basis for understanding racial injustice.

Our reconstruction will hopefully speak back to and supplement the fundamental aims of the Buzzfeed video, which is to show that: although it may seem like everything right now, the rise in police brutality cases isn’t something we can blame on 2020 being “a year from hell.” Mainstream news these days has a way of making every incident seem outrageous and extraordinary, but racial in justice in America- when you look across decades- is sadly, pretty ordinary. This video suggests to its young audiences who feel shocked and betrayed that these cases are actually part of a greater ongoing narrative, and it won’t stop unless we address it that way.

The “Bare-Bones” Deconstruction

We’re starting with the final product. This is the entire Buzzfeed video as it shows up on an iMovie (or any editing software) timeline. It is 12 minutes and 41 seconds long in duration, and the audio is indicated in waveforms in blue below the picture frames.

Now if we zoom this out even further onto one continuous timeline, we can start identifying and labeling all the points at which a significant date/event is introduced by the narrators of the video.

You’ll notice that these dates are not chronological. The different colors indicate the three different “time periods” that the narrators have pieced together to structure their narrative.

1. Purple indicates the video’s “starting time period,” where they introduce The Civil Rights Movement as their narrative grounding point. Kenneth Clark’s testimony in 1967 and the investigations that he references will dictate which events are mentioned in the following video.
2. We jump back to 1919. Red indicates the incidents and subsequent investigations that Kenneth Clark references in his testimony.
3. Blue indicates where we somehow make it all the way to 1991 and continue moving into the present.

Here we break it down even further by rearranging the dates and events mentioned into chronological order. The light blue arrows indicate how the video navigates them. We start right in the middle of “the century” in 1967, go back in time to the beginning in 1919, and then skip into the present.

Although it seems a little strange to structure the video in this way, we did some research on Clark’s testimony and found that it has been popularly remembered as the “Alice in Wonderland speech,” which the Buzzfeed video also references:

Although we cannot be sure, the video seems to mimic the temporally disorienting, yet repetitive nature of failed attempts to enact change over the past 100 years; no matter where you are on the timeline, you see the same thing.

What did we find? 

When looking at Mitchell’s Media world reading, it allows us to understand the BuzzFeed organization’s ideas and goals behind making this video. Mitchell writes, “media enable or challenge the workings of power and the potential of activism; the enforcement of inequality and the sources of imagination; and the impact of technologies on the production of individual and collective identities.” Buzzfeed is mostly popular with the younger population, which they realized and planned for when making this video. They took advantage of the power that technology has nowadays to inform the younger audience on the past and current racial inequalities in America. Prior to making the video, Buzzfeed had to account for the short attention span of the younger population since “the idea of the audience must also be located in the production process.” (Mitchell) This results in the short twelve-minute video have to summarize years of racial inequalities jumping and often leaving some holes in the timeline. 

Let’s go back to out old friend Geertz and paper on “thick description”. As we know, context is always extremely valuable but also very malleable. The original BuzzFeed video sets up the historical context in order to explain racial injustice events over a long timeline. Yet, since this video is trying to explain and expose many events in a short twelve minute video, there are some holes in the context and explanations (like a huge gap between 1960 to 1991). As Geertz writes there are “multiple layers of meaning” and together, they help contextualize the video. (Geertz, 9) But what if we could focus on one event mentioned by BuzzFeed and cut up the video in a way that we could change the context?

Our Video Reconstruction 

For our reconstruction, we thought: What if we took away the “Alice in Wonderland” effect? 

We created a video that would focus on only one (in this case, two) event(s) by splicing together the video’s introduction, the section about the Harlem Riots of 1935 & 1943, and then the conclusion. We wanted to see how privileging or “zero-ing in” on a headline- much like how media outlets do and how we’re used to receiving fast news- affects or distorts the overall message of the video.

While this was far from any sort of revolutionary re-cut, it answered for us- on a very rudimentary level- what choices and intentions drove Buzzfeed’s production of their educational video.

1. Already, there was a choice made not to include live footage and to instead just present a string of stock photos and headlines as the visual component of the original video. No one was trying to win an Oscar here. Between the narration (audio) and these visuals, the creators seemed to privilege the audio by putting in visuals that would supplement it as well as emphasize some important phrases by adding in text. It was clear that the audio came first.
2. We think it’s safe to go ahead and say this video is “simple.” Although objectively judging the level of appeal or catchiness is a little bit of a stretch, it seems like, for a brand that has mastered the art of hooking audiences with quiz titles and 15-second cooking videos, getting the most “clicks” was not their intention with this video. Rather, providing a clean visual aesthetic and easy-to-follow narration to signal the graveness of the topic as well as to make it comprehensible for all audiences remained their top priority. People generally feel intimidated by educating themselves on racial injustice issues because they don’t know where to start or who to ask. This video, in its simplicity, seemed to target those who needed a starting point. (To provide a counterexample: If you watch any video on the “Crash Course” YouTube channel, you’ll see that their aim to make dry school subjects entertaining is executed through brilliant animations and funny-looking cartoon characters.                                                                                                   
3. Finally, the re-cut allowed us to see how Buzzfeed, like many other media outlets, is trying to restore the narrative of police brutality in America in a way that subverts its usual, punch-line oriented media production processes. 

Watching our re-cut, it is pretty obviously and unappealingly bare. Because it’s only 2.5 minutes long, a lot of information and facts seem to be missing in describing these two historical events. When we put the section back into the original video, we see that “getting all the details about each event” came second to “showing how all these events relate.” In this case, simplification was a tool- not a shortcoming, and that isolating and dissecting a single event doesn’t get the same, urgent message across: you have to look at the bigger picture to understand racial injustice.

Exploration of Data 

We wanted to extend the idea of the “Alice in Wonderland” effect to the realm of data. How many data points are needed to substantiate a compelling narrative? This question could be asked of time-series data, where we would be interested in the range and number of historical observations included in a sufficiently convincing dataset. It could also be asked of data that only describes one moment in time by compiling a number of related statistics, in which case the question would be about the necessary breadth of the data.

Data analysis has a number of statistical tools for grounding these questions in a standard—confidence, statistical significance, correlation and regression. However, in this project we are interested not in these theoretical (albeit useful) measures of persuasiveness, but in the ways humans, without reference to these statistical tools, become convinced or unconvinced by a set of data. It seems likely that the precise dimensions of significance of a dataset do not directly decide whether the typical consumer is persuaded.

We saw that media accounts of social phenomena like racially-motivated police violence require a more than just a few isolated incidents to effectively make a case for a pattern. Now, taking a look at the datasets we typically have for understanding this phenomenon, we will see that it is no different: with data acting as a similarly representational way as media, there may be a threshold of data points beyond which the consumer will be able to accept the implied narrative.

Our analysis will also reflect on the shortcomings of currently available data for helping make compelling narratives against racial injustice.

Let’s take a look at a time-series dataset:

One of the most comprehensive datasets cataloguing police misconduct is made public by the Philadelphia Police Department, in the form of a five-year compilation of complaints against Philly police. If we do a quick visualization of the trend over time of volume of complaints…

we can see that the immediate takeaway is probably that the trend is steady, the implication being that, despite years of heightened national awareness of police violence, policing has not become any less violent, if Philadelphia is any indication.

However, if we were to imagine ourselves as a researcher in the middle of a turbulent 2020 reflecting on a year of police misconduct, our chart might look like this…

in which an observer would take note of the rough halving of complaints against Philly police in the year of 2019. This observation could, in fact, lead one to accept a different, contrary narrative than that implied by the “full” 5 years of PPD data.

Or, if a researcher neglected time-series analysis of the PPD data and focused instead on describing the dataset holistically, as this analysis does, an observer might have a difficult time generalizing the findings to a conclusion about the systemic nature of police misconduct.

These are illustrative examples of the same phenomenon we explored in video—that the success of a representation is over-determined by its bounds and inclusions.

Note that our analysis of data is itself based on a very limited range of data, that is, only the last five years of complaints, and this is practically the furthest-reaching dataset for police misconduct that we could find. This motivates the question, with what frame of reference can we even make statements about the necessary range of data to make a narrative compelling? We assume that the five years of PPD data, visualized as needed, are compelling to the observer, but does this hold when we consider the century of history for which we have little to easily interpretable data? To connect back to the Buzzfeed video, we have something of a textual history of consistent, systemic police violence in America. If the data does not exist to quantize this history, is it less compelling?

What did we find?

The bigger picture in this anthropological analysis of data as it appears in this context of racial injustice has to do with methods of truth and order. Robert Graves knew he was in the East because his friend began talking about Kipling; (Mitchell 313) similarly, we know we are in the business of rejecting or accepting pattern-based narratives when media and data organize themselves so that these patterns define their structure. A Buzzfeed video situates itself on top of a visual timeline. Datasets substantiating the patterns of racial injustice require visualization for public interpretation, which necessarily involves representing the data in a form in which a trend or pattern is easy to spot. Everywhere we look for insight into our own society, patterns meet our gaze.

References

Buzzfeed. (2020, July 6) Why Police Reform Doesn’t Work in The U.S. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DsPZCyHi1JQ

Geertz, C. (1973). The Interpretation of Cultures (pp. 1-30). New York, NY: Basic Books.

Learner, S. (2015). How officer complaints are investigated: A case study of Philadelphia police. Retrieved December 08, 2020, from https://pudding.cool/2020/10/police-misconduct/

Mitchell, Timothy. “Orientalism and Exhibitionary Order.” Colonialism and Culture, edited by Nicholas B. Dirks, University of Michigan, 1992, pp. 289-317.

Police departement, P. (2017, November 01). Complaints Against Police. Retrieved December 08, 2020, from https://www.opendataphilly.org/dataset/police-complaints