On Tuesday, August 11, 2020 Al-Bustan Seeds of Culture, the Arab American National Museum, and the National Network for Arab American Communities co-hosted the fourth conversation in the summer-long series, Creating a Culture of Change: A Series of Conversations on Race and Community Building.
Documenting Community through Film & Journalism brought together journalists and filmmakers whose work on race and community in the Arab and Black communities in America embody the important anti-racist role documentation and participatory media can play in society: Louis Massiah, filmmaker and director of Scribe Video Center in Philadelphia; Assia Boundaoui, filmmaker and journalist; Yawu Miller, journalist and senior editor at the By State Banner. The discussion was moderated by Nareman Taha, Co-Founder/Director at the Arab American Family Services in Worth, Illinois.
The three panelists bring together a diverse array of experiences in journalism and documentation from across the country ranging from film, radio, and print media. Together they spoke about the need to build power through participatory community media and co-creation.
A full recording of the event can be viewed below:
Moderator Nareman Taha launched the conversation by stating that the need to document our communities “is something that is dear to our hearts, something that really speaks to owning the narrative, communities telling their own stories, and finding and creating space.”
Louis Massiah spoke first to the deep sense of commonality he felt with the other panelists through their shared work in participatory media;
“where the subject has authorship, and where the analysis of the work comes from the people most affected by the issue.”
He believed it was this shared approach to narrative and the understanding that greater insight and understanding of issues is possible when told by the subject community. “That knowledge of issues and understanding enriches all of us.” Louis went on to suggest that it is through this process of reclaiming, re-contextualizing, and representing the subject by the subject that we can help democracy, because “when people are able to define their own issues… we make decisions based on how people see their situations” not simply as others see them.
Louis’ early experiences with participatory media took place in Boston with the Eyes on the Prize project about the Civil Rights movement. This project was the first time on television that the story of the Civil Rights movement had been told by the participants and those effected by the Civil Rights.
“There is a power when the witnesses to history and people who are participants in history are able to tell their own story” Louis stated.
He believes archival footage shot for commercial purposes, the FBI, or otherwise as evidence, that has been traditionally used as a tool of oppression can instead be used to empower communities if they can re-contextualize the archive.
In 1982 Louis founded Scribe Video Center as an attempt to explore the modes and ways of engaging in participatory media by making space for communities to tell their own stories. Before then there really was not a place for people to learn or share with one another in Philadelphia. His project Muslim Voices of Philadelphia attempted to give visibility to the large African American Muslim community of Philadelphia who had long experienced “visible invisibility” in society.
Assia Boundaoui, is an Algerian American journalist raised in Bridgeview, Illinois and best known for her award-winning debut film The Feeling of Being Watched, which documents the decades long FBI surveillance project of Arab Muslims which traumatized her community. After playing the trailer of her film, Assia described the difficult 5-year process of filming in her own Bridgeview community and her intention to tell a story about the place she grew up “where as long as [she] could remember everyone warned about the FBI.” It was her deep personal connection with her subject that drove her to get to the bottom of what happened and to document the paranoia and “deep fragmentation of trust in the community between people” that resulted from surveillance, informants, and the toxic environment the FBI created.
“I wanted to trace a particular line from the effect that we were feeling, that we were living with to the cause – and the cause was this decades long domestic terrorism investigation run by the FBI in Chicago.”
Assia went on to describe how the closeness she felt with the community at first felt like an obstacle she needed to overcome because “as a journalist I swallowed whole the ideas of objectivity” as a prerequisite to gain the credibility to tell this story. It took two years for her to unlearn this perspective and “stop telling the story rooted in the colonial idea of objectivity that a person on the outside has more authority than a person standing really close to it,” a process she describes as untangling herself. It was only then that she felt she could bring her whole self to the project and confidently root herself in the community. “My positionality was within a community looking around.”
Assia describes the experience of making the film was both empowering and transformational which shifted “who am I speaking to and where am I speaking from.”
“I learned how to create in community and with community. There were a lot of things that are different about making film from where you are positioned. You can’t be parachuted in and get airlifted out. You are responsible for the community that you are in, you are responsible for the work after its done, and you are responsible for creating a benefit to the community. Totally different than any of the stories I had told before.”
Assia’s hope is that her work and that of participatory media has the power to “facilitate a process of healing as we together collectively as a community co-create an artistic treatment onto the secret archive how we as a community can collectively create something and reclaim an archive and reclaim the narrative that’s been told about us.”
Yawu Miller, the discussion’s last speaker, began by talking about a recent experience a few weeks ago when he was stopped by the police. He jokingly stated that of course he tweeted about it because that is what we do now, even as journalists. As a Black journalist and the senior editor of the oldest Black owned newspaper in New England, the Bay State Banner, the expectation might be that Yawu would explore the injustice and trauma of his experience. Instead he stated that he was “thrilled he had the encounter” because he was entered into the FIO (Field Intelligence Observation Database) and that this gave him the opportunity as a journalist to interact with police officers and observe them firsthand. His matter of fact disposition demonstrated the constant nature of such experiences in his life and for many POC in Boston.
Next, Yawu told another story of being stopped by police in Boston when he was ten years old riding his bike in the predominantly white neighborhood of Brookline. He went on to state that throughout his reporting he has come back to experiences like this and the many similar experiences like it throughout his life to remind himself about the importance of the 4th Amendment (illegal search and seizure) and the 14th Amendment (equal protections under the law) and how often those laws are violated.
Yawu explained that in Boston the Black population is currently approximately 23% but Black people make up 70% of police stops.
Reflecting on his fellow panelists, Yawu described Aasia’s film as “heartbreaking” both because it strongly parallels the Black experience in America and because he acknowledges the difficulty of understanding the Black and Arab experience for many. The prevalence of the idea that “we’ve done nothing to worry about, I’ve done nothing wrong” and how that clearly reflects a very different world and relationship with law enforcement is both interesting and disturbing to Yawu. He went on to describe the almost tragic disconnect between Black, and his own, self-perception and the way Black people are perceived by others. He offered an example of the shockingly common question from law enforcement, “when was the last time you were arrested?”
As a law-abiding citizen and professional with no arrests or convictions such questions led him to describe “Not so much an emotional shock, as a sudden realization that people see you in a different manner than the way you see yourself.”
When the Bay State Banner was founded in 1965 Yawu remembers that there was no Black owned newspaper and Black people were not represented well. Coverage centered around crime and poverty but the “Banner has consistently sought to write about people of color in a more positive light, to show them going about their business,” and living their lives. In this way the Banner attempts to “unpack those myths and present a different side of the story”
After all three panelists spoke, Nareman posed questions asked by the audience and herself regarding
“how can we as a community strengthen and build on this partnership with our African American brothers and sisters?”
Louis spoke about the ongoing need to
“interrogate whiteness and really think about what whiteness is and not to exempt whiteness.”
Yawu added such acceptance leads society to see white as the neutral default. Assia emphasized earlier themes regarding the need for Black, Arab, and Muslim communities to stand in solidarity with each other against systems of oppression and to interrogate the lie of respectability politics built into the immigrant experience.
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