Unpacking the Complex Roles of Media Makers of Color
Five Media-Makers of Color Speak Out, Part IV
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 III, and Part V here.
Michèle: At every stage of the creative process I’m asking myself a series of questions like:
- What conversations do I need to have with the editor around character development to avoid stereotypes?
- How can I create a communal space for assessing and validating the story?
- How can I be creative in terms of compensating historically marginalized subjects for the labor they are expending in sharing their stories?
At every stage of the creative process, I’m asking these kinds of questions and making corrections when needed. This is what is required for disrupting traditional extractive models of storytelling — to be more of a partner with subjects and communities.
Thomas: Yeah. I just want to say that I watched my stepfather, who was part of the African National Congress, and my biological father, who was unable to be present for his family, both die of alcohol-related disease. And so, healing is a part of my co-creation process. I’m not trying to heal a particular person, but healing in the sense of inviting participants to engage in a healing process that I journey along with them.
My projects, like VINTAGE — Families of Value, E Minha Cara/That’s My Face, Twelve Disciples of Nelson Mandela, or Through A Lens Darkly: Black Photographers and the Emergence of a People, are all very different formally. But there is a unifying theme in terms of engaging community in the co-creation process. Whether it’s a community of LGBT siblings, a South African community where people are not talking across generations, or my current work where I’m asking people to look at each other through our family pictures as opposed to our racial phenotypes — my co-creation work has to do with truth and with healing as a kind of a modality of practice and empowerment through the act of storytelling.
Maria: For me co-creation can also be the practice of self-reporting when we’re making films about our own communities. Sometimes this is implicit and other times it’s explicit because we are so connected to the subjects. And in communities of color, we are likely to have blended families that represent all walks and classes in life because we know we live in a biased system punitive to communities of color. Yes, today I am a brown US citizen filmmaker and professor, but I have undocumented family, I have family that has been in prison, as well as having professionals in my family, including a NASA scientist who sends his experiments to Mars.
There are so many stories and worlds that I can explore from inside my community, but sometimes to dare to do that is very challenging and painful and work that is personal and makes me vulnerable. As filmmakers in our communities sometimes in the co-creation process to tell an important story we must choose to expose ourselves within the work.
For example, I get so tired of hearing people from outside our communities tell the stories of the undocumented, with so many gaps and errors. Filmmakers from outside the community might say that this is the direct and authentic testimony of this experience, because for example, they “let them speak for themselves.” But we know filmmakers cut and edit and frame these stories and so they may ask the wrong questions or cut the wrong answers.
The stories told by outsiders are mediated stories, through an outside lens. I decided to tell my story of growing up undocumented and I’ve been surprised when I’ve been met with resistance. Perhaps it’s too raw, or too painful, or not framed by the familiar master narrative created by outsiders. Perhaps when we use a different frame carved out of our own experiences it doesn’t fit their vision of our truth.
I’ve been told by funders that they just funded an immigration story, as if the subject had been exhausted, or there is only one story and one truth about the immigrant experience. I have had mentors from outside my community tell me that my own mother’s character wasn’t believable because she did not save her daughter when she was being abused by the stepfather who was the key to their citizenship. That kind of story does not fit conveniently into the simple victimhood framework for immigrants portrayed by some, nor the story of the criminals and the drug dealers that others might prefer.
To many outsiders, “the undocumented” means men standing on corners near Home Depot or the male day laborers on the road to a farm. “The undocumented” has not, until fairly recently, meant the mothers and children living here for years that make up half the eleven million undocumented in the US. Our media focuses on the stories of undocumented children who just arrived and are placed in cages, but doesn’t want to hear about the millions of undocumented families already living in the US who shake the bars of their virtual cages of systemic oppression. They often lack basic human rights and legal protections as a silent and powerless minority and are an easily exploited workforce for America.
As someone who grew up undocumented in America, I see the focus on the attention-grabbing headline, on the horror of children separated from parents and stuck in cages. To me, there is also a deeper question: What chains must these children rattle for the rest of their lives as long as there is no immigration reform but market conditions encourage this underground exploitation of a labor force? I know that ahead for those children, and those families, may be even greater horrors, of living in a country that criminalizes your very existence, that will not allow you to work, to study in a state university, to have a driver’s license, to move freely across borders, to earn a living wage, to seek civil and judicial protections from the many predators that prey on the undocumented.
As a person who grew up undocumented, I choose a different frame for these stories. I choose different questions. I may start by looking at the cage, but the longer story of living in that limbo hell for a lifetime feels like such a horror unexplored in the media. That is the story I choose to tell. That’s the difference I think between telling community stories from the outside and telling them from the inside. It is that complexity, that refusal to conform your story to the convenient political agendas or boxes, that the power structure needs us to fit into. Our authoring our truths is dangerous to the status quo, it is our greatest weapon for breaking the grip of our own oppression.
Michèle: I just want to add one thing to this very important point in terms of these microaggressions that happen in the very pitching of your story — being told your own mother is unbelievable or doesn’t exist. Your legitimacy as a filmmaker and a person is questioned and again this goes back to the idea of power. Who was on the other side making those determinations validating what stories? And so, it leads to all kinds of things around just our own personal health and personal questioning. I’m sure the other side doesn’t even realize they’ve done something wrong.
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.
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