After finishing dinner, I crossed the street to get on the D.C. Metro, and as I walked along the crosswalk, the U.S. Capitol suddenly came into view. Since I’m not as familiar with the area, I didn’t expect that emergence, I smiled at the discovery and took a photograph.
But then, it suddenly in dawned on me that I was standing on a street corner on the very route that people took to march to the Capitol — that arrival that soon after, became an insurrection on January 6. It gave me pause. I was able to picture all of that in a new way, and it felt very real.
Last week, a friend sent one of my community groups a podcast recommendation. It’s the story of white supremacist race riot that took place in Wilmington, North Carolina in 1898, which then ended in a coup of the state government through rigged election. After that happened, these very legislators in North Carolina began to codify a series of laws that eventually came to be known as Jim Crow. The podcast is about how media was complicit in willingly distorting and then completely burying the story of what happened in Wilmington. People didn’t come to know about it again until recent years, because thankfully, Black writers left breadcrumbs of information for people to discover later.
Here’s the podcast episode:
Scene on Radio: The Forgetting
Additionally, I’ve been noticing something taking place on my Facebook feed. I’m finding that there are a lot of beautiful and cute images showing up from accounts I’ve never followed — some look real, some look AI generated. Typically, they’re nature images. What’s the harm in sharing images like these?
To give one example, there was a beautiful photo (maybe real, I don’t know) from a group that called something like, Michigan Beauty. It showed up on my feed. I had never followed it, but there it was. I loved the image and thought, “Oh, that’s a group I would actually join.” So I went to join, and there were membership questions, including, “Do you live in Michigan?” and “What is your zip code?”
And I thought… Maybe this is getting us primed for the election, because I live in a possible swing state. Where do you live, so later, we can show you, not nature photos, but other media and alternative facts? Not necessarily on the page of “Michigan Beauty” but so you can be targeted with ads and the like?
No, thank you.
I probably wouldn’t have had that thought in the slightest, if I wasn’t also aware that I had never followed this group, yet it had emerged on my feed. (Did a FB friend like it? Was it paid for, like an ad? Some other way? Why is it on my feed?)
I’m not a conspiracy theorist. But I’m a realist. And I’m also still realistically hopeful at what we can create together, while being diligent. I think we need to be hopeful, but diligent.
What are you noticing?
—Renee Roederer
Smuggling Grace 