For White America, Black Protesters Never Do it Right

[loyalsister]

59. Salon did a good job of trying to capture some of the controversy as well

People have been so quick to try to turn this story around to be about them with what they see as less gray area rather than to explore important questions. For example, "WHY don't these black protesters trust the media?"
I know from first hand accounts... they don't feel safe. Ferguson happened just a little over 100 miles away. The cop would wanted to lionize Darren Wilson on the anniversary of the day Mike Brown was shot lives here in Columbia. There have been numerous threats since this protest started- some criminally prosecutable. People really want to command the protesters (who have been threatened) to automatically assume that people with media credentials have good intentions when they try to infiltrate the spaces where the protesters are trying to gather?

This “unbearable whiteness of liberal media” is precisely why the Black student protesters asked journalists to please “respect” them as well as their space by leaving them alone, at least long enough to collect their thoughts. When Sable-Smith repeatedly asked for a statement, the students replied, again and again, joyfully: “To God be the Glory.” He did not understand that response.

Journalist Tracie Powell runs the website All Digitocracy.org, which works to support journalists of color while raising awareness of structural racism in the media. Powell is concerned about the treatment of Tai, the student photographer, but her gut instinct was that the refusal of the protesters to admit the press was, more accurately, their refusal to feed the biases of White journalism. “For me, the overwhelming impression was that they didn’t trust the White reporters suddenly trying to cover the story.” In conversation with me, she noted that these reporters had already shown themselves to be ranging from indifferent to outright hostile to the concerns outlined by Black students on campus, and “parachute journalism”–jumping in to a big story and then leaving–would give activists no reason to trust them. Her instincts are confirmed from various tweets from student protesters on campus, including one from #ConcernedStudent1950: “It’s typically white media who don’t understand the importance of respecting black spaces.”

http://www.salon.com/2015/11/10/missouri_activists_vs_the_press_is_still_a_story_about_race_this_is_what_happens_when_black_students_cant_trust_the_media/