How Can This Work Be Better Honored and Supported?

Five Media-Makers of Color Speak Out, Part III

As part of our series for the Collective Wisdom field study, we present an excerpt from a conversation between Juanita Anderson, Maria Agui Carter, Thomas Allen Harris, Maori Karmael Holmes, and Michèle Stephenson.

Read Part I, Part II, Part IV, and Part V here.

Maria: First, these three things: funding our work, exhibiting our work, and writing about our work, such as in film and media criticism and history, reviewing it in the journals and trades and news media. It is also important that editors hire and assign writers and reviewers with enough cultural, social, and aesthetic background to capture more of their nuance and context!

Michèle: I also think it’s about having the people of color in positions of power shaping co-creation conversations and processes. And I’m not sure I am entirely comfortable with this honoring idea. I believe it’s even deeper than that. I already know what we’re worth and I know what we’ve done. Honoring speaks directly to those who have ignored or been unaware of the work that has always been there. Honoring doesn’t address deep structural inequity. It’s about shifting the current power dynamics, which requires a daily practice of self-awareness by those with power and leverage. There’s a deeper dynamic that has to do with the pathology that’s outside of us and outside of our communities. I’m not sure how to do that because the problem is not here. Right? So, we’re having this conversation but this is not where the problem is.

Thomas: But I would say but we are also a part of the solution. We’re at a critical moment historically both in terms of our independent work and in terms of what’s happening within the industry. We have critical context to add to this conversation. I tell my students it’s really important to protest injustice but it’s also important for us to be aware of our power to build as honestly as we can from where we are, which is why the documentation of this conversation is so significant.

It’s actually similar to another a conversation amongst a group of queer African-diasporic filmmakers that Raul Ferrera Balanquet and I organized in the early to mid-’90s tackling issues around funding and distribution as well as marginalization and invisibility we experienced in the midst of the New Queer Cinema movement. We used our power to write ourselves into history but instead of this Google document, we used the fax machine to construct the dialogue.

This document, Narrating Our History: A Dialogue Among Queer Media Arts of the African Diaspora, was published in Germany in the mid-’90s and was recently re-published in Yvonne Welbon and Alexandra Juhasz’s book Sisters in the Life: A History of Out Lesbian Media Makers, as it is the oldest documented discussion among Lesbian media makers. I agree that it’s important to identify the problem (whether injustice or inequality) and it’s just as important to really interrogate our own power, and our relationships with like-minded or like-spirited communities, and to be responsible for historicizing ourselves as [we] make media.

Michèle: I agree with that and I’m working in universities and exploring the same kinds of ideas. However, there is a work practice of self-awareness that has to happen on the other side. That’s what has to happen. We’re having this important conversation and there also needs to be a parallel conversation in white communities about racialized power and where does co-creation practice fit into that.

Maria: Also, it’s not a question of our asking for permission as filmmakers of color, although of course we need funding. What’s happening is that audiences are diversifying in the U.S., that the balance of power in global audiences is changing. As of last year China overtook North America as the box office superpower, and American media-making will become obsolete if our cultural media stories remain provincial and focused on one white privileged storytelling mode.

Audiences want to see a reflection of themselves and are becoming more diverse and international. And in the one media system that is mission-supported, as opposed to profit-supported, in our American media world, I would love to have a more diverse public TV. I would love to have more programmers in that system who are diverse and reflect the complexion of America and who choose to air more diverse media with nuanced and complex representation. I would love more executives in the system who understand that greenlighting and funding diverse programs is imperative to serving the American public given our demographics. Unless we see representation in all aspects of media-making there will be a continued decline in audiences for this media; the field won’t be successful.

Thomas: Yeah. Work has to move beyond simply having a black face as Executive Producer, or another figurative role which looks good on paper, which is sometimes what is passing as co-creation in mainstream circles right now. There needs to be more investment in communities as well as the next generation of filmmakers connected that have a deeper level of connection to these communities.

This article is part of Collective Wisdom, an Immerse series created in collaboration with Co-Creation Studio at MIT Open Documentary Lab. Immerse’s series features excerpts from MIT Open Documentary Lab’s larger field study — Collective Wisdom: Co-Creating Media within Communities, across Disciplines and with Algorithms — as well as bonus interviews and exclusive content.

Immerse is an initiative of the MIT Open DocLab and The Fledgling Fund, and it receives funding from Just Films | Ford Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation. IFP is our fiscal sponsor. Learn more here. We are committed to exploring and showcasing media projects that push the boundaries of media and tackle issues of social justice — and rely on friends like you to sustain ourselves and grow. Join us by making a gift today.