One could say that, by definition, music is the most diasporic of art forms. It is movement itself. It is hybridity. It passes from place to place and from time to time, heedless of natural or social borders. Music belongs everywhere, and yet it is always from somewhere. Diasporic themes and histories have been central not only to the creation and commodification of new musical forms, but also to the emergence of global identities and solidarities.
In this conversation, recorded on October 28, 2021, the University of California, Berkeley’s Social Science Matrix, together with the Townsend Center for the Humanities, Cal Performances, and the Black Studies Collaboratory, took advantage of the precious artist-in-residency of Angélique Kidjo on the UC Berkeley campus to open a conversation about the global circulation of African musical forms and musicians, its worldwide significance, and its social power.
Angélique Kidjo was joined in conversation by Tianna Paschel, Associate Professor in the UC Berkeley Department of African American Studies; Ivy Mills, Lecturer, Visual and Literary Cultures of Africa and the African Diaspora; and Victoria Grubbs, Lecturer and Black Studies Collaboratory Postdoctoral Fellow.
Contemporary movements like Black Lives Matter and the prison abolition movement point to the long histories of police violence and mass incarceration in the United States and elsewhere, demanding new approaches to approaching the history and present of policing.
In this Matrix on Point panel, recorded on October 25, 2021, UC Berkeley graduate students were joined by outside experts in discussing the impacts of policing on the lives and health of officers and the communities they serve, as well as how contemporary policing practices are related to an unjust past.
Panelists included Kimberly Burke, PhD student in the UC Berkeley Department of Sociology and a Research Fellow at the Center for Policing Equity; Matthew Guariglia, Policy Analyst with the Electronic Frontier Foundation; Brie McLemore, PhD student in the UC Berkeley Jurisprudence and Social Policy program; and Eduardo Duran, a PhD student, researcher, and instructor in the UC Berkeley Jurisprudence and Social Policy program.
The Matrix On Point discussion series promotes focused, cross-disciplinary conversations on today’s most pressing issues. Offering opportunities for scholarly exchange and interaction, each Matrix On Point features the perspectives of leading scholars and specialists from different disciplines, followed by an open conversation. These thought-provoking events are free and open to the public.
Watch the video of this event above or on YouTube.
Recorded on October 4, 2021, this video presents a lecture by Celeste Watkins-Hayes, Associate Dean for Academic Affairs, Jean E. Fairfax Collegiate Professor of Public Policy, University Diversity and Social Transformation Professor, and Professor of Sociology at the University of Michigan. Professor Watkins-Hayes is also director of the Center for Racial Justice.
How do we remake, not simply rebuild, our lives after trauma? Rebuilding suggests a return to a prior state, where the same plans, assumptions, and visions remain in place. Remaking is much more dramatic; it is transformative and generates fundamentally new ways of navigating the world. We often think of significant life transformations as highly individualistic and personal experiences. But drawing upon findings highlighted in her book, Remaking A Life: How Women Living with HIV/AIDS Confront Inequality, Watkins-Hayes analyzes the sociological dimensions of transformative life change and the process of healing from personal and collective injuries of inequality.
Celeste Watkins-Hayes is an internationally-recognized scholar and expert widely credited for her research at the intersection of inequality, public policy, and institutions, with a special focus on urban poverty and race, class, and gender studies. Dr. Watkins-Hayes has published two books, numerous articles in journals and edited volumes, and pieces in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and Chicago Magazine. She has been widely quoted in the popular press as a national expert on social inequality, HIV/AIDS, and societal safety nets.
The release of her book, Remaking a Life: How Women Living with HIV/AIDS Confront Inequality, (2019, University of California Press) was covered by The Chicago Tribune, Ms. Magazine, EBONY, Chicago Public Radio, New York Public Radio, Detroit Public Radio, POZ Magazine, PBS Newshour, Chicago Tonight, and several other outlets across the country. Remaking A Life has won several awards, including the American Sociological Association (ASA) Distinguished Book Award, the Eliot Freidson Outstanding Publication Award bestowed by the ASA Medical Sociology Section, the Distinguished Book Award from the ASA Section on Sex and Gender, the Distinguished Book Award from the ASA Section of Race, Gender, and Class, the Betty and Alfred McClung Lee Book Award from the Association for Humanist Sociology, the Mirra Komarovsky Book Award from the Eastern Sociological Society, and the Alison Piepmeier Book Prize from the National Women’s Studies Association. Remaking a Life was also a Gold Medalist on Women’s Issues from the Independent Publisher Book Awards and a 2020 PROSE Book Award finalist from the Association of American Publishers.
Watkins-Hayes’ first book, The New Welfare Bureaucrats: Entanglements of Race, Class, and Policy Reform, was a finalist for the 2009 C. Wright Mills Book Award from the Society for the Study of Social Problems and the 2011 Max Weber Book Award from the American Sociological Association. Dr. Watkins-Hayes holds a PhD and MA in sociology from Harvard University and a BA from Spelman College, where she graduated summa cum laude. She served on the board of trustees of Spelman College for over a decade in various leadership roles, leading the search process for the college’s 10th president. She is a founding steering member of the Black Trustee Alliance for Art Museums, having served on the board of directors of the Detroit Institute of Arts from 2017 to 2021.
Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) has become increasingly popular as an online tool for conducting social science research. What are the specific advantages and downsides of using online crowdsourcing tools like MTurk for conducting research? What practical and/or moral dilemmas might emerge in the course of the research process, and what concrete strategies have scientists developed to address them?
Presented as part of the Social Sciences and Data Science event series, co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley D-Lab, a panel discussion recorded on October 1, 2021 brought together researchers from diverse disciplines, who shared their experience with the MTurk platform and discussed social and ethical aspects of MTurk more generally.
Moderated by Serena Chen, Professor and Chair of Psychology and the Marian E. and Daniel E. Koshland, Jr. Distinguished Chair for Innovative Teaching and Research at UC Berkeley, the panel featured Ali Alkhatib, Interim director of the Center for Applied Data Ethics at the University of San Francisco; Stefano DellaVigna, Daniel Koshland, Sr. Distinguished Professor of Economics and Professor of Business Administration at UC Berkeley; and Gabriel Lenz, Professor of Political Science at UC Berkeley.
“MTurk has been a huge boon to the social sciences in general, partly because along with a lot of other online platforms, it has reduced the cost, especially the administrative costs, of running experiments,” Lenz said. “MTurk has lots of issues you all should be aware of. But it’s still been a net positive and helped helped us understand real-world problems and real-world behaviors.”
Lenz said that researchers should be wary of assuming MTurk provides a representative sample of large populations, though he noted that there may be some predictability in when and how MTurk is not representative, based on what is known about the platform’s “worker” population.
“Demographically, this is not a representative sample of the US population, and you should never treat it that way,” Lenz said. “If you’re hoping to generalize your findings to the US population, don’t. But the argument for it is that it’s a more diverse sample than your typical lab sample.”
Lenz also warned that researchers should be attuned to bias based on “social desirability,” as MTurk survey respondents may not input their honest opinions. And there may also be bias due to workers’ high level of exposure to information about certain topics, such as politics. He recommended using real-world examples, rather than hypotheticals, to encourage more candid responses. “Try to use Mechanical Turk in ways that you’ll know will reflect more on the real world,” Lenz advised. “For example, we always try to ask people about their actual members of Congress when we’re doing studies on voting.”
One of the trade-offs with using a paid survey service such as Mechanical Turk, Lenz noted, is that the more you pay, the more people appear to attempt to cheat or use bots to shortcut the survey process. “You want to pay people more, but you don’t want people trying to do the study many times,” Lenz said. “Everybody struggles with this.”
In his talk, Stefano DellaVigna talked about how MTurk has made it more efficient to replicate studies without high investment. “It is wonderful to be able to have this quick access to obtain data and evaluate replicability,” DellaVigna said.
He also praised the platform for enabling research during the pandemic, and for allowing graduate students to conduct small-scale studies to gather initial results; he shared an anecdote about a PhD student who came up with a question and ran a study on MTurk in a matter of hours. “It is so empowering and lowers inequality in access to study samples,” he said.
In his talk, Ali Alkhatib from the Center for Applied Data Ethics explained that he is less of a user of MTurk than a researcher focused on understanding the workers behind the platform. “I have been studying the crowd workers themselves, and what they are experiencing as they as they engage with these platforms,” Alkhatib explained.
He noted that researchers should keep in mind the circumstances of the workers on MTurk and similar platforms, who often are struggling to make a living. He noted that, if the workers are in communication with each other, it may be because “they’re not trying to game the system; they’re just trying to not get stiffed. These workers are highly networked and and talking with each other and trying to exchange notes.”
He also explained that researchers should work to build trust in the MTurk community, and gain an understanding of how the platform works before diving in. “Mechanical Turk is very much a community, very much a culture,” he said. “Think of this as a relationship that you try to foster and build and nurture, because these are people, and as much as we would like to think that they pass through and are stateless, the reality is that they are human beings who are just as affected by the research and the treatments that we that we bring to them as as anybody else.”
Alkhatib said that researchers should be “as clear as possible” and “as communicative as possible,” while also trying to be “as humane as possible to the people that we’re working with. It also leads you to a much richer sort of understanding of why you get certain findings or why things don’t necessarily add up.”
“Mechanical Turk is not a panacea,” Alkhatib said. “It doesn’t solve all the problems, but it solves some of them, or it may ameliorate some of them. But we do need to be conscious of how it shifts other problems around as well.”
On September 21, UC Berkeley Public Affairs presented a panel discussion focused on the proliferation of disinformation and what can be done about it. Social Science Matrix helped organize this event, which featured a group of preeminent scholars from across the UC Berkeley campus. The write-up of the event below, “Can we thwart disinformation? Yes, scholars say — but it won’t be easy,” was written by Berkeley News reporter Edward Lempinen.
Rising death tolls from COVID-19, a mob attack on the U.S. Capitol, efforts to ban teaching of critical race theory — all of these recent attacks on public health and political values have been driven, in part, by aggressive disinformation. But while the costs are clear, UC Berkeley scholars said in a recent panel that there are no easy answers, even as disinformation threatens democracy.
In the latest episode of Berkeley Conversations, an elite panel of scholars described a range of potential solutions, from measures to strengthen old-school local news media to government regulation of titans like Facebook and Twitter. But there’s a critical obstacle: Efforts to directly block disinformation could challenge core American values, such as free speech and freedom of the press.
That’s the challenge facing a troubled American democracy — and that was the crux of the provocative, and sometimes impassioned, online discussion.
Erwin Chemerinsky, Dean, Berkeley Law
“The alternative to allowing the marketplace of ideas to work is to give the government the power to decide what’s true and false — and to censor what’s false,” said Berkeley Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky, one of the nation’s leading constitutional experts. “I am much more afraid of that than I am of allowing all ideas to be expressed, even in light of the problems.”
Others, however, argued the threats to democracy have grown so acute that, without action, the First Amendment could be used to undermine the Constitution.
“It will be a real shame if democracy dies on the altar of free speech,” said Susan D. Hyde, chair of the political science department at Berkeley and an expert in democratic backsliding. The increasing frequency and intensity of disinformation “is not going to fix itself,” added john powell, director of the Othering & Belonging Institute. “It’s not clear to me that democracies will survive this, unless we do something very deliberate and very robust.”
Susan Hyde, Professor of Political Science, UC Berkeley
Disinformation, in simple terms, is the dissemination of false information to shape political and social outcomes. It’s different from misinformation — and more malicious — because it is deliberately false. Not only does it contribute to our deep polarization, but, clearly, it costs lives and erodes democracy.
“I don’t think it’s hyperbolic to say these are existential threats to our society and democracy,” said Hany Farid, associate dean and head of the School of Information. “I don’t know how we have a stable society if we can’t agree on basic facts, because everybody is being manipulated by attention-grabbing, dopamine-fueled algorithms that promote the dregs of the Internet, creating these bizarre, fact-free alternate realities.”
Disinformation finds an audience — and influence — in a society that still suffers from racial and ethnic segregation, said powell. Research shows that in segregated societies, different groups don’t understand each other, powell said, and lack of understanding leads to exaggerated negative views of other group.
john powell, UC Berkeley Professor of Law, Ethnic Studies, and African American Studies; Director, Othering and Belonging Institute
Plus, he said, research shows that U.S. segregation is growing worse, not better. In such an environment, those who peddle disinformation find a receptive audience. “Fear moves faster than a positive emotion,” powell explained. “If you’re trying to create fear, you have a huge advantage. If you try to increase hate, you have a huge advantage.”
That’s a social problem, powell said, but one that’s “hypercharged by technology.”
The power of disinformation is further compounded by the steep decline of conventional news media in the U.S., said Geeta Anand, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who’s now dean of the Graduate School of Journalism.
Advertising revenue for traditional news publications dropped 62% from 2008 to 2018, Anand said. More than 50% of advertising revenue has shifted from traditional news organizations to social media. Of 9,000 publications operating in 1995, some 2,000 have closed.
“It’s expensive to train reporters to go out and report news, to check sources, to make phone calls, to check public records,” Anand explained. “Disinformation is cheap. … Social media companies are making billions, and news organizations are barely hanging on.”
Henry Brady, Dean, Goldman School of Public Policy
In their 90-minute discussion, the scholars focused on two areas for reform that might check the advance and impact of disinformation: strengthening local journalism and finding ways to moderate the influence of social media, whether through social and financial pressure or through government regulation.
For example, panel moderator Henry Brady, former dean of the Goldman School, suggested a tax on Internet companies, with proceeds used to support local journalism. He also suggested aggressive efforts to break up massive companies like Facebook, in hopes that new and more socially responsible social media platforms would emerge.
But many proposals for containing disinformation collide with the requirements of the First Amendment.
The panelists focused particularly on Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, which holds that Internet companies cannot be held legally liable for content posted on their sites by others. That protection was crucial for building the Internet and unleashing its vast power.
But changing that, and making the companies liable, would require them to review billions of posts a day, Chemerinsky said. Inevitably, they would block many more posts, with less than surgical precision.
Hany Farid, Associate Dean, Head of the UC Berkeley School of Information
On the right and on the left, “everyone wants to criticize Section 230,” Chemerinsky said. “I don’t see a better alternative.” Instead, he said, social media companies should be pressured to change practices and algorithms that lead them to allow and promote communication that is harmful, hateful and threatening to democracy.
Other panelists challenged that reasoning.
“The problem with disinformation on social media today is not primarily one of technology, but one of corporate responsibility,” Farid said. “We have been waiting for now several decades for the technology sector to find their moral compass, and they have not seemed to be able to do that. They continue to unleash technology that is harmful to individuals, to groups, to societies and to democracies.
“Left to their own devices,” he added, “that will continue.”
Farid and others acknowledged the need to balance interests and to work within the Constitution — but also argued that the moment requires urgent action.
“What we’re talking about is continuing to sort of dance the tango on a sinking ship,” said Hyde, co-director of the Institute of International Studies. “It’s just not working. … The Constitution is not going to matter on some level if we get to this really extreme worst-case scenario.”
Geeta Anand, Dean, UC Berkeley Journalism
Anand and others suggested that Berkeley could help to convene other universities and scholars to focus on solutions for disinformation and the challenges to democracy.
“I think Berkeley can do that,” she said. “We have the most incredible brains — legal brains, technology experts, public policy, government, belonging experts, journalism experts — right here on our campus. … There cannot be any area that we refuse to consider, or reconsider. We have to think outside the box. And we have to include the industry in helping us understand where the solutions lie.”
On September 7, 2021, UC Berkeley’s Social Science Matrix and the Institute of International Studies (IIS) hosted a panel discussion, “Matrix on Point: Leaving Afghanistan,” that featured a group of scholars examining the geopolitical and humanitarian consequences of the end of the 20-year war in Afghanistan.
“‘Leaving Afghanistan’ refers to the withdrawal of the remainder of US troops from the country, as we approach what would have been a 20th anniversary of a long war and military presence on the ground,” explained Marion Fourcade, Professor of Sociology at UC Berkeley and Director of Social Science Matrix, in an introduction to the event. “More tragically, ‘Leaving Afghanistan’ evokes the thousands of people who have departed the country in recent weeks, under tremendously painful, chaotic, and dangerous circumstances, and the many more who might still be trying to leave at this very moment, or will in the near future.”
Daniel Sargent, Associate Professor of History and the Goldman School of Public Policy, moderated the panel, which featured a series of presentations followed by an open discussion. The event was presented as part of the Matrix on Point event series, which features focused, cross-disciplinary conversations on today’s most pressing issues.
Omar Sharifi, Assistant Professor of Social Sciences and Humanities, American University of Afghanistan, and Country Director of the American Institute of Afghanistan Studies, led off the presentations. Sharifi explained how Afghanistan was transformed by 20-year war. “For a lot of Afghans, it was not simply a war, it was also an age of transformation, and it exposed Afghanistan for the first time to what we today call ‘international community’,” Sharifi said. “And with the international community comes a lot of rules and regulations, and new concepts for how we have to organize ourselves to conform to this image that the United States and the world want us to be.”
The United States failed in part because of a lack of strategy and understanding of the Afghani people, Sharifi said. “Nobody understood Afghanistan — as a country, as a people, and as human beings — because Afghanistan has never been part of some major colonial power,” he said. “When the United States and the world came to Afghanistan, there was a gap in understanding. There was no Afghan voice in the whole international intervention in Afghanistan. The major question in the minds of a lot of us is, what was the purpose of the entire enterprise?”
Despite the gravity of the situation, Sharifi expressed optimism that the new generation of Afghanis will be less tolerant of a return to strict Taliban rule. “One thing that we’ve learned is that we cannot move forward without being connected,” Sharifi said. “Despite a lot of pessimism, there are people here on the streets… who want their voices to be heard. The fact that we see every day that women are coming on to the streets and demanding their rights is a unique phenomenon in our history. For the first time in 40 years, they have a voice. And they want that voice to be heard.”
In his talk, Robert Crews, Professor of History, Stanford University said that analysts too often frame the withdrawal as a story about the United States, rather than about Afghanistan. “For too long, we in the United States have looked at this through a narrow framing of supposed American national interest,” Crews said. “[Afghanistan] is an incredibly heterogeneous, diverse, complicated society. It’s only grown more complicated over the last two decades.”
Crews focused his talk on a specific subset of the Afghani population, the Hazaras, a Persian-speaking ethnic group. “It’s a fascinating community that has really emerged in the last few decades,” Crews explained. “They’ve become essential, indeed crucial to the emergence of a kind of civil society in Afghanistan since 2001. They’ve been at the forefront of education, of media, and all kinds of social activism. Hazara youth have been absolutely fundamental in changing society. And here, the roles of men and women have been absolutely fundamental.”
Crews noted that the Hazaras provide a lens on how Afghanistan has evolved since the war began in 2001 — and how the rule of the Taliban could have disastrous consequences. “Because of their minority status, Hazaras have been advocates of a more pluralistic and egalitarian society,” Crews said. “It’s not exaggeration to warn of the potential of genocide at this moment. The American administrations of the last two decades have left the world with no options here. We stand on the precipice not only of a return of groups that we associate with terrorism, but also one that we should associate with genocide, and that now has extraordinary power, arms, and wealth to make that happen. And the world is powerless to do really anything about it, militarily or otherwise.”
Dipali Mukhopadhyay, Associate Professor in the Global Policy Area of the University of Minnesota Humphrey School of Public Affairs, lamented the abrupt withdrawal and evacuation, noting that the “catastrophe of the evacuation is a kind of coda that punctuates and exemplifies the American project of building states in the service of the so-called war on terror.”
Mukhopadhyay said that the rise of the Taliban was predicable, and that “a lot of observers, myself included, believed in the merit of an eventual American withdrawal. But we knew that the way in which that withdrawal was managed could mean the difference between a viable peace process and the government’s collapse.”
She related how, in recent weeks, she and others have faced a harrowing challenge in trying to help Afghanis get out of their country, as they were forced to develop lists of people who might be most likely to be evacuated, based on their circumstances. “Every list I made involves this obscene set of calculations,” Mukhopadhyah said. “Are there too many children in this family to include them on the list? Has the way this journalist framed this threat scary enough to get attention? Will women make for more compelling victims than men? And all of my collaborators in this effort carried their own lists and we were negotiating with each other, hoping that if we provided information, we could get a spot on a flight for someone on our list.”
“The end of the American war is not very different from its beginning, but the hypocrisy undergirding the effort is now particularly on display,” Mukhopadhyay said. “Because today, we see this insidious narrative taking hold this notion that the United States and its allies tried so hard to get the Afghan people and their leaders a chance at democracy, but they didn’t take us up on that generous offer. And now it’s time for us to admit that promoting governance abroad is hard to do, and we’re better off focusing on matters at home. And I think it’s very important for me personally that that narrative not stand. It is imperative to stress in this moment that the American invasion of Afghanistan was for its own ends. And it unfolded in terms that the state-building project crippled the democratization effort in a number of meaningful ways. It deliberately created dependencies and conditionalities and restrictions that in effect doomed the project before it even began.”
In his remarks, Georgi Derluguian, Professor of Social Research and Public Policy, NYU Abu Dhabi, noted the parallels to the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, and explained that the design of the United States in entering the war was was “world domination,” because “if you move into a place like Afghanistan, you are not only to west of China, you are to the south of Russia, you are to the north of India, and you are next to Iran. And once you move into Iraq, you’re not only next to Iran, but you’re a central member of OPEC by default.”
Derluguian noted that the next phase could entail a ripple effect that transforms other Central Asian republics, including Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and Kazakhstan. “They seem patently defenseless, including against their own populations,” Derluguian said. “Is it going to be a big and spreading region of failed states?”
He also pointed out that nations like Russia, Pakistan, and China will also play a role in determining the fate of Afghanistan and surrounding nations in the coming years. “This s a moment of enormous danger,” Derluguian said.
Watch the video of the full discussion above or on YouTube.
On August 26, 2021, Social Science Matrix and the D-Lab presented a lecture by Julia Lane, Professor at the NYU Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, at the NYU Center for Urban Science and Progress, and a NYU Provostial Fellow for Innovation Analytic. The talk, entitled “Democratizing Our Data,” provided an overview of a research collaboration designed to improve the sharing of data across state agencies.
Lane cofounded the Coleridge Initiative, whose goal is to use data to transform the way governments access and use data for the social good through training programs, research projects and a secure data facility. The approach is attracting national attention, including from the Commission on Evidence Based Policy and the Federal Data Strategy.
The lecture featured an overview of Lane’s book, Democratizing Our Data: A Manifesto (2020, MIT Press), which “calls for a more automated, transparent, and accountable framework for creating high-quality public data that would empower citizens and inspire the government that serves them.” In her Manifesto, Lane outlines an organizational model that has the potential to make data more accessible and useful.
“There is enormous interest in building a better understanding of how evidence and data can inform policy,” Lane explained in the abstract for the lecture. “New possibilities have opened up to enable data to be shared and used across states and agencies. One is a technical approach – the Administrative Data Research Facility – which provides a secure environment within which education, training, and workforce data can be shared across agencies and states. The other is human – the Applied Data Analytics training program – which trains government agency staff how to combine and use the data to serve their agency missions. Over 650 participants from over 150 agencies have participated and produced new products and new networks in the process.”
The presentation discusses the approach sponsored by the California Department of Social Services, joint with the Department of Education and the Economic Development Department. The D-Lab worked with the Coleridge Initiative to successfully combine the two approaches. The presentation also addresses the broader vision of how approaches like this can serve to democratize data for the United States.
Watch the video of the lecture above or on YouTube.
On May 14, 2021, Social Science Matrix convened a “Matrix on Point” panel discussion focused on the long (and continuing) struggle for racial justice in America. At the center of the discussion: the critical momentum of Black-led protests and the Black Lives Matter movement from the past year, situated within the larger historical context of social movements for racial justice in the United States and the unfinished work of the Civil Rights Movement.
The panel featured Monica Bell, Associate Professor of Law & Sociology at Yale Law School; Leigh Raiford, Associate Professor of African American Studies at UC Berkeley; and Brandon M. Terry, Assistant Professor of African and African American Studies and Social Studies at Harvard University. The panel was moderated by Christopher Muller, Assistant Professor of Sociology at UC Berkeley.
This event was presented as part of the Matrix on Point discussion series, which promotes focused, cross-disciplinary conversations on today’s most pressing contemporary issues.
“We started conceiving of this panel in the wake of last summer’s Black Lives Matter demonstrations,” explained Marion Fourcade, Director of Matrix and Professor of Sociology at UC Berkeley. “The fact that these protests represented by some measures the largest social movement in U.S. history would have been reason enough to address it on its own terms. But it seemed equally urgent to take a longer historical perspective, and place that movement in the broader context of the very long and unfinished struggle for racial justice and equality in the United States. Today’s panel is a conversation about the past and about the present of that struggle.”
Each of the panelists presented a roughly 15-minute talk. In his remarks, Harvard’s Brandon Terry noted that the concept of racial equality in the U.S. has always been a “bad check,” a form of promissory note that has no real value. Terry explained that this metaphor was also used by Martin Luther King, Jr., who argued that “America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked ‘insufficient funds’.”
Speaking of the murder of George Floyd, Terry said, “When the state fails in this way, when it fails in an enduring and systematic fashion to protect the basic rights, dignity, and even lives of its ostensible citizens, it seems only right to speak of it as akin to money without value or currency without credit…. One of the central questions that the civil rights movement raised was whether the idea of egalitarian citizenship for ordinary African Americans in this society was a promissory note with real value, with a possible future of real fulfillment, or whether the basic structure of American society is organized such that these kinds of aspirations will always prove counterfeit or worthless.”
UC Berkeley’s Leigh Raiford focused on the evolving role of visual imagery in relation to the racial justice movement. Raiford’s book, Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: Photography and the African American Freedom Struggle, addresses how activists in the racial justice movement have used imagery to gain political recognition and re-shape the dialogue about Black lives.
“In the movements of last summer, visual images played an extraordinarily central role, from the circulation of videos of police violence as a catalyst for protest, to narratives around images of protest and police repression, as well as a range of social media strategies to visualize black futures,” Raiford said. “The concept of representation is always at once political and cultural. They cannot be separated, especially in the context of Black life and the lives of marginalized people.”
Raiford described how, since the advent of photography, visual images have been used to advance white supremacy (for example, through the circulation of images of lynchings) as well as to promote racial justice. “Visuality broadly has been a way to underscore white supremacy, to underscore ideas about hierarchy,” Raiford said. “It’s been a way to promote violence or promote dehumanization.”
Raiford also pointed out that images of police violence have led to greater awareness of the need for racial justice, but also carry their own toll. “One of the effects on Black people in particular is that the circulation of these images has led to increased levels of stress and trauma,” Raiford said. “They bring people to the streets on one hand, but there’s also there’s a toll, a cost to their circulation. And this is something that movements have been wrestling with, in our contemporary moment.”
In her comments, Yale Law School’s Monica Bell focused on how the Black Lives Matter movement has evolved since its inception, marked by what she described as the Obama era, the Trump era, and the current era, under the Biden Administration.
BLM began, Bell explained, as a movement similar to Occupy Wall Street, with a goal to “demand recognition of Black life” and raise visibility and awareness. “It was, Black people are here, and Black Lives Matter, but the policy prescription aspect was really secondary,” Bell said. “It was a demand for recognition, more than a demand for particular political arguments. Policy prescription was not at the heart of advocacy in that first era.”
The Trump era, Bell argued, saw the transition of the movement toward “thinking much harder about policy,” a shift marked by the advent of more formal campaigns like Campaign Zero and Eight Can’t Wait, which detailed specific police reforms and policy changes necessary for change. “The elephant in the room here when talking about the summer of 2020 is ‘defund the police,’ which emerged out of local organizing that was occurring in this move between the Obama era and the Trump era in Black Lives Matter,” Bell said. “What we see in racial justice advocacy around policing now is a move toward demands not just to stopping killing us, but instead for liberation.”
Bell said that the next phase under the Biden Administration will be a test for the racial justice movement, as more radical views about what policy changes are necessary (such as abolishing the police) are viewed with skepticism by many in the Black community. “There’s a way in which certain types of activists claims are out of sync with what many Black people feel, if they’re not radicalized and organized,” Bell said. “It does present a number of interesting questions about how the movement will continue to maintain its legitimacy as representing this demand for recognition of Black lives mattering, as the specific policy prescriptions that have been introduced in the Trump and Biden eras become ever more detached from what many Black people would demand.”
The conversation continued as the panelists engaged with each other’s provocative ideas, and with questions from the audience.
Recorded on April 22, 2021, and presented by UC Berkeley’s Citrin Center for Public Opinion Research, a Social Science Matrix Affiliated Center, this online panel evaluated the first 100 days of the Biden Administration.
Speakers included:
Mark Barabak, National Political Correspondent, Los Angeles Times
Terri Bimes, Associate Teaching Professor of Political Science, UC Berkeley
Vanessa Tyson, Associate Professor of Politics, Scripps College
George Breslauer, Professor of Political Science Emeritus, UC Berkeley
Thomas Mann (Chair), Senior Fellow in Governance at the Brookings Institution and Distinguished Resident Scholar at UC Berkeley.
“The central argument of my book is that politicians across the racial and political spectrum can, and often do, engage in what I refer to as ‘racial distancing,'” Stephens-Dougan explained. “Racial distancing is a political strategy whereby some politicians want to indicate to racially moderate and racially conservative whites that they will not disrupt the racial status quo — in other words, that they will not be too beholden to their Black constituents, but also communities of color more broadly. This racial status quo is characterized, I would argue, by racial inequality, with whites at the top of the hierarchy, including white dominance in political, social, and economic institutions. The degree to which politicians are really able to engage in this racial distancing is influenced by both their partisanship and their race.”
Stephens-Dougan noted that politicians have to walk a “political tightrope” to show that they are “not racially insensitive,” while also not “hemorrhaging and not losing too many white voters. And this has implications for the sort of strategies that they pursue and how they talk about race…. If recent history has taught us anything, it’s that race is still one of the most salient political divides in American politics.”
In his comments, Professor Taeku Lee lauded the book as “a virtuoso piece of social science research that I think should sit on top of everyone’s top shelf of books that help us understand what is currently happening in American politics and how we got here.” He noted that “the book makes me much more hopeful about political science,” and he described it as a “sobering account of the hapless incentives facing candidates Black and white — and the hapless choices facing voters Black and white. It’s a wonderful example of theoretical creativity and technical chops working together in magical harmony. Theoretically, Stephens Dougan very carefully and even-handedly parses competing accounts of the dynamics of race and electoral politics today.”
On April 22, 2021, a “Matrix on Point” panel discussion focused on questions of objectivity, disinformation, and the construction of truth from a media-consumption (rather than media-production) perspective, focusing on how internet users find information, how algorithms play a deterministic role in search results, and how lies propagate and solidify.
This event was presented as part of the Matrix on Point discussion series, which promotes focused, cross-disciplinary conversations on today’s most pressing contemporary issues. Offering opportunities for scholarly exchange and interaction, each Matrix On Point features the perspectives of leading scholars and specialists from different disciplines, followed by an open conversation. These thought-provoking events are free and open to the public.
The panel featured Francesca Tripodi, Assistant Professor, UNC School of Information and Library Science; Senior Faculty Researcher, Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life; Sun-ha Hong, Assistant Professor of Communication, Simon Fraser University, and author of Technologies of Speculation: The limits of knowledge in a data-driven society (NYU Press, 2020); Kevin Roose, a tech columnist for The New York Times; author of three books, including Futureproof: Nine Rules for Humans in the Age of Automation, a guide to surviving the technological future; and the host of “Rabbit Hole,” a New York Times podcast about the many ways the internet is influencing our beliefs and behavior; and David Barstow (moderator), Reva and David Logan Distinguished Chair in Investigative Journalism at Berkeley Journalism and a former senior writer for the New York Times.
In his book, Lara-Millán, an ethnographer and historical sociologist, takes us into the day-to-day operations of running the largest hospital and jail system in the world and draws attention to how state agencies circulate people between different institutional spaces in such a way that generates revenue for some agencies, cuts costs for others, and projects illusions that services have been legally rendered.
By centering the state’s use of redistribution, Lara-Millán shows how certain forms of social suffering — the premature death of mainly poor, people of color — are not a result of the state’s failure to act, but instead the necessary outcome of so-called successful policy.
Panelists included Angèle Christin, Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication and affiliated faculty in the Sociology Department and Program in Science, Technology, and Society at Stanford University, and Jonathan Simon, Professor at Berkeley Law.
