Media is a grind.
I’ve been out of the game for a little while, working mostly, so it’s been 18 months of learning how to make the news and how to make TV, and less of actually being on air, on camera, providing commentary.
While in New York, on unrelated business, I get a call from a producer friend – can I provide a voice on a Google Hangout with Katie Couric about the ongoing violence against black men? Later that day, the request changes. The Eric Garner decision rolls in, protestors are rolling out, New Yorkers are in the streets asking why. The segment has been upgraded to an actual panel – would I mind coming to the studio?
I prep, like usual. I look at outfits to see what I have that might translate well on television. I slide on BB cream in case there’s no makeup artist available. I rehearse talking points in my head, major points I want to make in the conversation. I ask my breakfast companion if she wants a ride into the city since they are sending a car.
The producer pushes back – I can’t share the car. Why not? I’m not asking for another stop, I’m still having a conversation.
The terse answer comes back: No one is supposed to know, and it just got confirmed, but my driver needs to pick up Eric Garner’s daughter as well. All the carefully crafted sound bytes exited my mind – what was I supposed to say to her?
Erica Garner is 24. She is in the middle of a national conversation, an amazingly normal person who lost her father in a horrific incident, an incident that was recorded, televised and played in a loop over and over. “I can’t breathe” has become a rallying cry for activists, a hashtag, cultural shorthand.
Her father died for this conversation, these actions taking place now, all our loving commentary and sharing and social media tributes.
All the words I had felt inadequate.
“I’m sorry for your loss” didn’t begin to cut it.
Retired Philly cop @CaptainRayLewis has protested in #Ferguson and was arrested in #NYC #EricGarner protests. Respect pic.twitter.com/KpiEhN83ac
— Bipartisan Report (@Bipartisanism) December 6, 2014
There is something very, very humbling about riding with someone who is at the center of a media storm. There’s a communication snafu – the driver doesn’t know who he’s picking up. I don’t know that part of NYC. We arrive out front of a normal looking complex in a normal looking day, the shiny ass black car standing out against the background.
Erica enters. She’s wearing red. She tells me she was laying down when they call and her hair isn’t done. This isn’t her first media rodeo – she was used to the constant blitz when the incident first happened, and then four months of silence ensued before producers picked up the phone again after the decision.
She seemed shell-shocked. She’s talking. We’re both nervous. I want her to talk. She seems like she wants a cigarette. She talks to me about all the protests since her father died that the media didn’t cover, her weekly pilgrimage with her family and the community to keep her father’s story at the forefront of people’s minds.
She tells me love stories. About how there was only her mother for her father. How she had no half siblings or step siblings, how everyone was together in the house. In love. Later, on the broadcast, her brother says he misses fighting with their father, and she will clarify petty day to day nitpicks that are also love. Fighting over the TV channel with two dueling remote controls
Inside (and on twitter) I’m starting to freak out. Because it is easy to prepare for anger, rage, hostility. It is much harder to deal with loss. Humanity. The strange, sick kinship of a shared tragedy, my grief about the implications writ large and her grief because her life was made smaller.
#India, France, Japan, all over the globe people are saying #BlackLivesMatter!
#EricGarner #ICantBreathe #seattle pic.twitter.com/Z9LhGodLhW
— Anonymous Argentina (@AnonLegion_Arg) December 8, 2014
Intimacy will break you down far worse than anger ever will.
She shows me a video on her cell phone. It’s a birthday celebration for her father, a celebration of life. Dozens of people cram into the frame to sing happy birthday and release balloons. She tells me that her grandfather just wanted to feed people all day, feed the community. He fried fish from morning till night. She remembers this, a little ray of light in six months of darkness.
We’re still in the car. Traffic is at a standstill in Manhattan. The producers are freaking out, wondering where we are. Erica isn’t on Twitter, so she didn’t understand what I was saying when I told her #ICan’tBreathe was trending nation wide. We looked through the hashtag. She talks about how much the support means to her. We get the link to our segment. I pull it up and see that Ray Kelly is going to be there.
The live stream points us to his press conference about the grand jury decision. I click on it and watch in silence. Next to me, I feel Erica go cold. “If I knew he would be there,” she says to me, “I wouldn’t have come.” Later, W. Kamau Bell will say the same thing to Kelly’s face on the panel.
.@wkamaubell a national hero for trying SO HARD to keep calm while having to debate Ray Kelly http://t.co/TD8hGb8IQO pic.twitter.com/x3EYkbDUZN
— Laura Sterritt (@LauraSterritt) December 4, 2014
We talk, a little more animated now. She tells me that the numbers they are reporting are bullshit. “Arrested 31 times? I always remember my father home with us, how could he be arrested that much?” We discuss semantics and word choice – how someone could be arrested but not booked or charged. You could be arrested in the morning and back out in the world in the afternoon, I say. We talk about word choices and framing. She talks about details of the case. I remind her to say these things on air. She says she tries to but it’s too much to remember in the moment.
We arrive at 1pm, the time the livestream is supposed to start. The driver can’t find the building entrance. They hustle us through security, up to hair and makeup, micing and sound check and all the usual chaos that accompanies a broadcast. I feel drained. Erica reunites with her brother so they peel off to talk to Katie Couric before air time. I see Franchesca Ramsey, give her a hug, stand up under the lights, wait for our turn to talk.
I don’t need to talk about Ray Keller. Arturo posted the video while I was still processing what had happened. If I was in a better mood, I’d make a denialist drinking game. But it’s been a week and I still feel like a media nihilist. What the fuck are we doing?
Clergy stage die-in NY City Hall rotunda. #ICantBreatheUntil #BlackLivesMatter #EricGarner pic.twitter.com/qAPnWq5AeK
— Linda Sarsour (@lsarsour) December 8, 2014
The protests will remain news for a while though it may fade from headline news to tiny stings. Today, the torture report is the lead story. Tomorrow it will be something else. Where will Erica Garner be? Still picking up the pieces, I suppose.
Today, The Guardian published an opinion on what the CIA’s torture report means for the U.S., saying (emphasis mine):
The Senate intelligence committee’s report is a landmark in accountability. Yet it also shows how much remains to be done to tighten the rule of law over the necessary secret agencies of the state, and not only in America. The report provides devastating evidence of the CIA’s consistent and deliberate recourse to torture, with the blessing of the Bush administration, following the 9/11 attack, and in pursuit of the so-called war on terror. It pulls few punches as it details the conscious and repeated subversion of law and justice by a state that is justly proud to be rooted in those very ideals. It is one of the most shocking documents ever produced by any modern democracy about its own abuses of its own highest principles.
Apparently, there was some scattered chatter about the redacted report. There were reported (but unconfirmed) fears that officials believed the full report may lead to global protests toward the United States and it’s practices.
But at this point, isn’t the cat out of the bag?
South American solidarity from Colombia – #BlackLivesMatter. #ICantBreathe #Ferguson pic.twitter.com/bRa7nxnloF
— Khaled Bey (@KhaledBeydoun) December 10, 2014
-31 outside but #yzf in solidarity with #Ferguson #BlackLivesMatter #Denendeh #Yellowknife #indigenouslivesmatter pic.twitter.com/d6hwKTo9Lk
— Dëneze (@Deneze) December 6, 2014
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