Safe Space

I've read a few articles and comments about the MU black students' refusal to allow a reporter into the area they took over on the MU campus, and I've had mixed feelings about it. It is a public space, and reporters have, to me, a sacred right/duty to cover everything that has an impact on the public's well-being if they can get to it.

On the other hand, some have made good arguments against admitting the reporter in this instance, including the fact that, while the safe space the students created was actually in a public space, they don't have the resources to create a safe space in a private venue that others clearly have without anyone complaining (one example given was Hillary Clinton's $5,000 a plate dinner setting).  Black Agenda Report executive editor Glen Ford makes the argument that for blacks "The Corporate Media is Never Your Friend."  (To be clear, the reporter involved in the incident was going to give his pictures to ESPN.)  While these are good arguments, I was still left with my belief that barring reporters is bad for democracy.

But, after reading this Washington Post article, I think I can now be content on the side of the students. (I was always on their side in their protesting.)

That black students would be skeptical of media is understandable. We’ve already seen the kind of headlines they undoubtedly feared. In an Atlantic piece headlined “Campus Activists Weaponize ‘Safe Space’,” Conor Friedersdorf calls the protesters a mob and insists they are “twisting the concept of ‘safe space.’” [...] It was another piece centering the reporter’s privilege over the students’ trauma. Friederdorf’s piece completely ignores the intolerable racial climate that forced the students to establish a safe space in the first place.

There were other ways to cover these students’ protest without breaching their safe space and without criminalizing them.The human chain students formed provided ample b-roll and still photos. Students could have been interviewed outside of that space. I would have pitched a story to my editors with the headline, “Why Black Students Were Forced To Secure A Safe Space On A Public Campus.” But to do that requires self-reflection and not a condescending, self-absorbed soliloquy about the First Amendment.

For journalists, the Missouri protests are a big news story. For the black students we’re covering, however, it’s a fight for their humanity and liberation. Tai [the blocked reporter] is correct: he was doing his job. But in that stressful moment he may have failed to realize that the space he wanted to enter was a healing one that black people had worked to secure.

Black pain is not an easy subject to cover, but the lesson we can take from this encounter at Missouri is that our presence as journalists, with the long legacy of criminalizing blackness that comes with it, may trigger the same harmful emotions that led to the students’ protests in the first place.

  Washington Post

As Tai said in an entirely rational and reasonable tweet, "I'm a little perturbed at being part of the story, so maybe let's focus some more reporting on systemic racism in higher ed institutions." That's the thing: it is so easy to discredit a movement based on its excesses. It is far, far more difficult to take it seriously and make necessary changes. But, at the same time, like it or not, a movement like Concerned Student 1950 needs to be aware of external perceptions (or, you know, "optics," as they say in the PR business) and cognizant of when something is excessive (which, yes, is in the rage-filled eye of the beholder) and those in positions of authority need to fucking know better than the students they need to guide.

  Rude Pundit