The Media Reparations Manifesto

For more than a century, media and technologies have excluded or undervalued Black, Indigenous, and people of color of various ethnicities, genders and sexualities from the means of production and distribution. While the role of the media is often downplayed in conversations about societal harm, this book details how the media have mobilized, promoted, and affirmed white supremacy in the stories they describe and disseminate about American culture and society. How can we heal these deep injustices?This short book offers a framework for healing injustices across the media industries. Building on the work of activists, journalists, media makers, and academics, the book argues that media harm can be understood in three key ways - Exclusion, Distortion, and Extraction - which reveal how access to media for marginalized people has been constrained, disrupted, and misrepresented. The book documents how reparations are a way of healing these injustices, which acknowledges history and cultivates new ways of being together to hold institutions accountable and compel them to justice. The Media Reparations Manifesto pushes the field of media studies to reimagine media systems, and offers practical guidance to researchers, artists, organizers, entrepreneurs, businesses, and those in government, with the steps that can be taken to enact reparative media.