Amid fervent conversations about antiracism and police violence, Media and the Affective Life of Slavery delivers vital new ideas, analyzing how media culture instructs viewers to act and feel in accordance with new racial norms created for an era supposedly defined by an end to legal racism. Author Allison Page examines U.S. media from the 1960s to today and argues that visual culture works through emotion, a powerful lever for shaping and managing racialized subjectivity. On this episode, Page joins collaborator and friend Brittany Farr in conversation.
Allison Page is assistant professor of media studies with a joint appointment in the Institute for the Humanities and the Department of Communication and Theatre Arts at Old Dominion University. Page is the author of Media and the Affective Live of Slavery.
Brittany Farr is an assistant professor of law at New York University School of Law. Farr’s areas of research include civil rights, contract law, legal history, property, and race.
-Ask a Slave (Azie Mira Dungey, YouTube web series; askaslave.com)
-A Subtlety (Kara Walker, public project)
-Lorraine Hansberry, playwright
-Roots (television miniseries)
-Dark Matters (Simone Browne)
-Alex Haley, writer
-Stephanie Smallwood
-Christina Sharpe
-On Agency (Walter Johnson)
-Black Feminism Reimagined (Jennifer Nash)
Chapters
Amid fervent conversations about antiracism and police violence, Media and the Affective Life of Slavery delivers vital new ideas, analyzing how media culture instructs viewers to act and feel in accordance with new racial norms created for an era supposedly defined by an end to legal racism. Author Allison Page examines U.S. media from the 1960s to today and argues that visual culture works through emotion, a powerful lever for shaping and managing racialized subjectivity. On this episode, Page joins collaborator and friend Brittany Farr in conversation.
Allison Page is assistant professor of media studies with a joint appointment in the Institute for the Humanities and the Department of Communication and Theatre Arts at Old Dominion University. Page is the author of Media and the Affective Live of Slavery.
Brittany Farr is an assistant professor of law at New York University School of Law. Farr’s areas of research include civil rights, contract law, legal history, property, and race.
-Ask a Slave (Azie Mira Dungey, YouTube web series; askaslave.com)
-A Subtlety (Kara Walker, public project)
-Lorraine Hansberry, playwright
-Roots (television miniseries)
-Dark Matters (Simone Browne)
-Alex Haley, writer
-Stephanie Smallwood
-Christina Sharpe
-On Agency (Walter Johnson)
-Black Feminism Reimagined (Jennifer Nash)
What is University of Minnesota Press?
Authors join peers, scholars, and friends in conversation. Topics include environment, humanities, race, social justice, cultural studies, art, literature and literary criticism, media studies, sociology, anthropology, grief and loss, mental health, and more.
Allison Page:
All these things that appear quote unquote new, of course, have these much longer histories and aren't new.
Brittany Farr:
Now it seems like people are talking about white supremacy in a way that they weren't five, ten years ago. Hi, Allison. Hi, Britney. So today, we are going to talk about your book, Media and the AFFECTIVE Life of Slavery, which I'm very excited about because I've kind of seen it from its earliest days to now it's in print. And part of that is because we have had such a long intellectual friendship.
Brittany Farr:
And so I thought we could start by introducing ourselves and then kind of talk about our friendship meet cute, before I make you give the elevator pitch of the book. So why don't you tell our listeners or listener a bit about yourself?
Allison Page:
Hi. I'm Allison Page. I am an assistant professor of media studies at Old Dominion University, both in the Institute for the Humanities and the Department of Communication and Theater Arts. My work is primarily on race and contemporary media culture. I also do feminist media and cultural studies, and I, have a kind of side interest in labor in in digital media.
Brittany Farr:
I'm Britney Farr. I am very recently an assistant professor of law at NYU Law School. So I have a law degree, but like Allison, have a PhD in communication, but from USC. I write about racial violence and the ways that it intersects and interacts with doctrines of contract law, property law, and tort law. Happy to talk about what a tort is if anyone wants to know.
Brittany Farr:
But in my PhD days, was writing more about the Moynihan Report and representations of black women. And so Allison and I have a lot of overlapping intellectual interests, which is kind of how we met at the American Studies Association conference in Los Angeles. I was living in Los Angeles at the time. I don't remember the year.
Allison Page:
I think ASA was in LA in 2015. I was having a coffee with Britney's advisor, Sarah Bennie Weiser. And Sarah, I remember, was like, oh, is it okay if my PhD student Britney comes along? And at the time, I was like, oh, sure. Okay.
Allison Page:
You know, I was like, I think back at it. I'm sure you were annoyed too.
Brittany Farr:
I was just try I needed to ask Sarah something, and I was like, I don't know who this woman is. I'm just gonna crash her meeting. Like, I have to take up Sarah's time.
Allison Page:
I just love this so much because then when we I remember we all had coffee, and then Sarah had to leave. And you and I, I have such a clear memory of this. We were outside.
Brittany Farr:
Mhmm.
Allison Page:
Somehow, Saidiya Hartman came up. I think I was saying something about scenes of subjection, and you're like, oh, I love that book. And I was like, oh, wow. This is amazing. Because I I felt some intellectual loneliness, I think, around the kinds of conversations I was interested in.
Allison Page:
And so I was so excited that you were also in a comm program and really wanting to think through these questions. Oh my gosh. City of Hartman.
Brittany Farr:
I know. That's we both sort of had that reaction. And then you said, as often happens at conferences, you're like, oh, let's do, like, a reading group together or exchange writing. And every other time I've had that conversation, nothing has come up. But we actually this is, like, well before the pandemic, like, met on Skype and read books, maybe some of the only books I've read cover to cover.
Allison Page:
I know. I know.
Brittany Farr:
Many of them are cited in media and the affective life of slavery, which also feels very special because we read them together. And then we started exchanging writing, and then somehow it went from, you know, a more professional friendship to really just being besties. We applied to conferences together to hang out because we lived on opposite sides of the country, went to said conferences, skipped most of the country. But
Allison Page:
If any grad students are listening, don't do that. Go to the conference.
Brittany Farr:
It's fine. But yeah. So why don't you give us a two to three sentence description of the book, an impossible task. But
Allison Page:
Yes. Oh my gosh. No. I should have this memorized by now. But, in media and the affect of life of slavery, I look at US media about the history of slavery from the nineteen sixties to the present to think through how media instructs viewers, how to act and feel in accordance with new racial norms created for an era defined by the supposed end of legal racism, and I can talk about this a little bit more when we get into official anti racism.
Allison Page:
I look at a range of texts in the book. I look at an educational video game about slavery. I look at educational curricula developed around the miniseries roots to think through and to argue that visual culture works through emotion, which shapes and manages, racialized subjectivity.
Brittany Farr:
So I wanted to start actually with this idea of official anti racism because when you start the book, you kind of say that this is the backdrop that all of these dynamics that I'm writing about are kind of happening against, and it's different from what came before in terms of the ways that people were thinking and talking about race. And it happens toward the end of World War two. And in the book, you say it's when, quote, it became less acceptable to be openly racist, which is really interesting also to read now in 2022. So given that this is such a foundational backdrop to what you're talking about in the book, could you just tell us a little bit more about the shift toward official anti racism? What does that actually mean and encompass?
Brittany Farr:
Because, obviously, it doesn't mean that people stopped being racist, and kind of how this sets the stage for the the relationship between race, media, and feelings that you described throughout the rest of the book.
Allison Page:
So official anti racism, is an idea developed by Jodi Melamed in her really excellent book, Represent and Destroy, which I think is a Minnesota press book, little plug. And this was really foundational, this idea in her book, to how I began thinking about race during this time period during the kind of post war moment where overt white supremacy becomes residual. So we have all of these cold war anxieties happening in this time period where there's this kind of glaring paradox, right, where there's the huge, obviously, racial inequality at home while The US is also espousing all of this anti Soviet Union rhetoric that's positioning The US as open and free in contrast to this ostensibly closed and communist form of governance. So official anti racism with Mohammed, and she looks at, literature actually. So I felt like literature is a cultural technology, producing racialized subjectivity.
Allison Page:
But one of the things her book is doing here is really challenging progress narratives about, you know, this racial break in this postwar era where there's just, you know, enormous amount of change happening around race, not just in terms of the cold war, but also decolonialization and sort of global social movements to contest racism, white supremacy, colonialism. Right? In this book, she has this idea that we see the state, The US university, and capital incorporating anti racist discourse as this way to basically modify white supremacy in a new era where racism becomes covert rather than overt. It becomes, you know, as I as I write, less acceptable to be openly racist. And certainly, yeah, we can talk about this idea in relation to our current moment.
Allison Page:
But I think I was really compelled by this in relation to a lot of the media culture and specifically television of the nineteen sixties and the way that it was thinking through and talking about race and trying to have these ideas of, okay, look, we're anti racism, but it's a very sort of surface y, obviously, right, kind of anti racism that isn't doing anything to address material inequality in any any sense. So I think in terms of the book, I really am so grateful for her excellent work and thinking about what does it mean when anti racism is both sort of defanged from, again, like I said, this material critique or this idea of resource redistribution to, oh, we just wanna appear or feel anti racist. And so that's where I really started thinking about how does emotion come into play here. I will say when I was thinking about this podcast, I looked back one of my very first I think it was my first publication was in an online journal. It was a book review of represent and destroy, and I just reread it to be like, oh, yeah.
Allison Page:
Let me kind of just refresh. And it was really amazing to see. I think there were so many of the seeds of this book in that review where I was like, I love what Motlana does here. I wonder how we might make sense of these ideas in relation to feeling and to media culture and media text and media as a cultural technology. And and I look back at that now and I'm like, oh, there was.
Allison Page:
It was like a little road map I wasn't able to see at the time.
Brittany Farr:
That'll be very exciting for the grad student a hundred years from now who's writing about, pages, writings, and theories. And they're like, we see the earliest seeds of this idea in this, like, overview, which we think is their first her first publication. And then they'll find this recording maybe if they can listen to it, with their antique technology and confirm. But so I wanna just return to something you said about this moment, this shift toward official anti racism being a moment when overt white supremacy is becoming residual, especially since now it seems like people are talking about white supremacy in a way that they weren't five, ten years ago and identifying things as white supremacists in a way that I actually have found surprising. At a law school where I was a fellow, the dean put in an email to the entire law school kind of denouncing white supremacy, which is not something that I would have expected from, you know, an institutional actor in that way, but it has become more, like, politically acceptable and salient to do that.
Brittany Farr:
And so I'm curious. You started writing this book in, what, twenty fourteen, thirteen, twelve? Yeah. Yeah. A long time ago?
Brittany Farr:
A long time ago, Obama was still president. People were still talking about post race and, you know, we have a black president. We've solved racism, things like that. Obviously, Trumpism was kind of nascent, but I don't think any of us had any idea kind of what was on the horizon. And I experienced this when I look back at my own dissertation, reading it, and the way that I write about race.
Brittany Farr:
It's a little bit like watching a horror movie
Allison Page:
Yeah. With someone, and you
Brittany Farr:
don't go in that room.
Allison Page:
Oh my god. Yes.
Brittany Farr:
She has no idea what's coming. And so but, you you know, I get to leave my dissertation on a shelf, and you had to revise it into a book. And so I would love to hear more about how this shift in the national conversation around race and politics comfort with sort of pushing back on the incorporation of anti racist discourse, people being, like, more comfortable with not feeling anti racist. Right. There are just a couple of those negatives in there.
Brittany Farr:
So anything that you could say about, you know, how your thinking has changed, or how did you have, you know, a relatively stable text as all of these things are kind of swirling around it?
Allison Page:
I think there's two parts to that. So first, I thought about this a lot because as I was revising my what had been the fifth chapter of my dissertation was about the website and app slavery footprint. And when Slavery Footprint came out, it was in the Obama era. The Obama administration had funded it. Right.
Allison Page:
It was this partnership with the State Department. And so when I was writing that chapter as part of the dissertation, so much of it was really about a lot of the discourse that anti trafficking movements use just totally expunge race, right? Where it's this really kind of colorblind post racial. I mean, really, slavery footprint makes that very explicit when they're like, Lincoln declared the slaves free, like this is a quote from their site. And now this is a myth, right?
Allison Page:
We actually have more slavery today than we ever did. And in the book, I talk about how this is part of continuing anti blackness where you can see issues of white supremacy, even though they're not articulated like that over there, never at home. Right? And and the anti trafficking movement, has all sorts of issues. But as I was starting to revise, it's true.
Allison Page:
I had just moved to Virginia. Charlottesville just happened. Right? Like, this I think all of the context of that moment really did inform the revision from the dissertation to the book. Like, I was in Charlottesville when that white supremacist rally happened.
Allison Page:
The tiki torches. Yeah. Exactly. Right. That was like my introduction to Virginia.
Allison Page:
I mean, I know you and I have talked about this a lot, that all these things that appear, quote, unquote, new, of course, have these much longer histories and aren't new, and we can complicate this a lot. But I do think in terms of discursive formations that we are seeing clearly, like, post racialism is residual. I mean, I talk about this a lot with my students who are always like, are you kidding? Like, no. Of course, we don't live in a post race world, and I think that's so so different.
Allison Page:
Right? Yeah. Actually, though, I wanna so this just made me think of some
Brittany Farr:
of the Supreme Court decisions that have come out recently in the last decade or so at, you know, the Shelby County, things that are undoing a lot of important parts of civil rights act and civil rights movement that happened, part of how the Supreme Court justifies this is by saying that we don't need these things anymore because we're not
Allison Page:
Yes.
Brittany Farr:
America's not racist. So there's this weird tension and kind of hypocrisy of I don't know, maybe it's only the Supreme Court that's writing things that say, like, America's not racist anymore, and the rest of us are kind of like, well, we don't know. But some very powerful people are still making that argument.
Allison Page:
Yes. Yeah. And I think that it's such a good point, and it's so breathtaking to see that hand in hand with both the revision that I think Trumpism. I don't wanna say like, oh my god. This is so surprising.
Allison Page:
It's so new. Like, where did all these, you know, overt racist come from? But I was thinking this morning about how, at least in terms of, like, anti racist kind of discourse. I remember when I was an undergrad and the kind of anti racist activism I was doing so much of the the language around it was really about structural critique. And I think that was important, of course, because we wanna get away from for all sorts of obvious reasons, but just, you know, the individual as the site of racism.
Allison Page:
And I think about this a lot with the book because in my first chapter, you know, these TV documentaries were really about sort of, like, changing hearts and minds of white people, but just in like a very surfacey, not too deep of a way, and that will prevent you from having to, like, open up your neighborhood, right, to black people living there. One of the things I I think we see now with Trumpism and its rises is that there's more room to think about, oh, how does how does it happen on an interpersonal level? Right? Like, we need to kind of hold both when we're talking about anti racism. And I think with what you're saying in terms of the Supreme Court, it's just this really fascinating and horrifying, frankly, moment of this gutting of the civil rights protections in the name of, okay, we don't need it's irrelevant now, but also then this revision in this uptake by those on the the far right.
Allison Page:
Right. Of saying, no, we're being oppressed. So, like, I was looking at the language of the Stop Woke Act in Florida and Ron DeSantis' team is, like, we're stopping white supremacy. Like, they frame it so much. Yeah.
Allison Page:
Through interesting. Okay. If you're talking and and we can get into this more too because so much of it is also articulated through feelings. Like, we don't want people to feel they use the terms guilt and anguish.
Brittany Farr:
So making white people feel guilty is white supremacist?
Allison Page:
Right. Right. Like, it's it's really Okay. Feel like shit. I mean, that's at least from as far as I can understand.
Allison Page:
So that's why I think it's so fascinating because we have this total denial, like, race we don't need to think about race anymore by several Supreme Court justices that Trump appointed and also Trumpism saying, no. No. No. No. No.
Allison Page:
White people are being so oppressed. Right? Like, we need to sort of prevent this this racism against white people. And, of course, this reverse racism claim has such a much longer history. Again, I wanna be very, very clear about that, but I do think in this moment, we're seeing it in in kind of different ways, I would say.
Brittany Farr:
I wanna put a pin because we've been trying to figure out what we would coauthor together.
Allison Page:
And we
Brittany Farr:
put a pin in the human trafficking thing because and so I'm I'm sure I've talked to you about this, and I've made you read drafts of this article that talks about Westlaw, which is the main one of the main ways that lawyers find cases. So not just in legal academics, but practicing lawyers. And I didn't know it existed until I got to law school. And part of why I went to law school was because I couldn't figure out how to find cases. And it's behind a massive paywall.
Brittany Farr:
It's very expensive. And sometimes state that's the only way you can find cases. So everybody uses Westlaw. It's the norm. And because I do research on slavery, they have kind of organized things into they call them keynotes, but they're just like headings and subheadings of topics of legal topics.
Brittany Farr:
So you would have, like, a property heading and then real estate and, like, water rights or whatever goes under there, and you can search things by keynotes. And so there used to just be a slavery keynote. Right? A freestanding slavery keynote, which is intense in its own way, and I would go there and click around and find cases. And then, I don't know, a year or two years ago, it disappeared.
Brittany Farr:
It's like, where did the slavery keynote go? Guess where it ended up? In the human trafficking as a subheading under human trafficking. And I just keep telling people because in the hopes that somebody will write about it, but I don't know that it's happened yet. I I need to double check and make sure, but I it's just kind of mind boggling to me because and I'm sure it wasn't done with ill intent.
Brittany Farr:
You know, there are people who work at Westlaw and are thinking, okay. Human trafficking is a big area of law. You know, let's put that there. But for you know, if you know anything about that discourse, it's kind of contentious to put US chattel slavery under human trafficking. I was like, if you put it anywhere, put it under property.
Brittany Farr:
I was like, that's that's the laws that is relevant to. Right. That people would notice that and be up in arms. Anyway, so as you were revising and, you know, maybe parts of the dissertation that were relevant about the Obama administration's involvement in the slavery, but maybe it was less. Were there kind of texts that you decided to include that weren't in the original version, or did you keep all of the the same texts?
Allison Page:
No. That's a good question. The dissertation had five chapters, and the book has four plus the intro and the conclusion.
Brittany Farr:
Oh, actually, let me interrupt you and ask you to just describe the ones that are in the book and then tell me which ones
Allison Page:
are Yes. Yes. Good. Okay. So in the book, I I had my introduction to the dissertation had been started in a very different way.
Allison Page:
So the book I get to work through Azi Dungey's amazing Ask a Slave. She's a comedian and an actor and this YouTube web series that she did. So she had been herself an actor at one of these, like, living history museums. Right? And so she basically is drawing on her experience of the racist and sort of horrific things people asked her while she was playing an enslaved person.
Allison Page:
Like, what do you do for fun or where do you send your kids to school? Right? So I start the book by thinking through because I really wanted to center not just have it be all of these kind of hegemonic uses of the history of slavery for essentially, like, nefarious ends, but black feminist contestation of that. And so I start with Ezzy Dungy, I conclude with Kara Walker and her stunning piece and audience, the, short film that she made or short video, I should say, piece in response to a subtlety, the huge sugar sinks that she installed at the former Domino, factory in Brooklyn. And I had really wanted to write about that.
Allison Page:
So I was like, okay, great. I have these spaces. These are these texts that sort of came out as I was wrapping up the dissertation and, you know, you have to draw lines somewhere. Also, when I was in Virginia, I made this friend, Kanisha, who's a playwright and she and I were talking I can't remember how this came up, but we're talking about Lorraine Hansberry and how she had written a screenplay, for television called The Drinking Gourd about visor slavery. And this was in 1959, and it was never aired, because it was considered, and this is, like, the quote is is just kind of amazing, like, too much of a hot potato for television.
Allison Page:
And in part, it was because of how it portrayed the relationship between whiteness and blackness. So it like, we can think about how roots obviously represents whiteness or sort of portrays its white characters, but clearly, like Lorraine Hansberry has a much richer, much more complex understanding of the inextricability of whiteness and blackness and as racial formations in relation to to slavery in this era she's writing about. So I wanted to do some work on that. So I was able to do some archival research at the Schomburg and find out by the time this all was coming, the the sort of debates with media industry people and the executor of Hansberry's estate, this was posthumous. There was just a lot like this trail of, you know, this correspondence where they're sort of debating, like, why they can't air it.
Allison Page:
And so that I knew I was also like, this is this really amazing kind of text given that if we think about so, like, roots, for instance, was Alex Haley's. And I say this in the book, like, his, you know, really sort of masculinist hero narrative. He in the archival work I did at USC, you could see all of his sort of defense of, you know, what we would call, like, very sort of liberal or even, like, moderate positions in relation to race. And these potentially richer and nonmasculinist, almost, you know, almost, you know, thinking about gender in a very different way, narratives were sort of pushed aside. Right?
Allison Page:
Like Lorraine Hansberry was literally her screenplay. Never it was never developed. It never aired. So the dissertation was five chapters. I had a chapter on these two made for TV, basically, like, after school specials Mhmm.
Allison Page:
About I read that. Do you you remember that? Yeah. Okay. Yeah.
Allison Page:
Yeah. So both of them feature, quote, unquote, like, unruly young black men. They're, like, listening to rap and, you know, their clothing. This was I think they were made in the late eighties, early nineties. So clearly part of this anxiety about, you know, blackness and youth as was revived in in 2016, like Hillary Clinton calling them super predators.
Allison Page:
Right? So it was really of this particular moment where they get sent back to the antebellum era to learn lessons about how to better appreciate their contemporary freedoms. I mean, it's just like Why?
Brittany Farr:
Why do we keep making movies where we send black people back to slavery?
Allison Page:
Oh my gosh. It's yeah. It's and it wasn't like you know, obviously, Octavia Butler
Brittany Farr:
Yes. And Sankofa with everybody writes about. But
Allison Page:
Right. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Yeah.
Allison Page:
Yeah. Sankofa. Yeah. Totally. So when I was thinking about the shift from the dissertation to the book, it did become very clear.
Allison Page:
As soon as I finished the dissertation, I was defending it. I was like, wait, this whole thing is about feelings. And I, you know, I kind of gestured towards it in the dissertation, but it really I do think there's a way in which once you finish something, then you can see, like, oh, what it's actually about.
Brittany Farr:
And Yeah. Well and and just to say, your dissertation was framed around pedagogy.
Allison Page:
Yeah. And citizenship. Right? And sort of like cultural citizenship. And I think that chapter, although I liked it and and at some points, I was like, maybe I should turn that into, like, a freestanding article.
Allison Page:
It kind of goes along with what you and I have talked about where we're both really interested in texts that are not so obvious. Like, yes, of course, this is, like, extremely racist and terrible, and we can, like, yes, situate it in governmentality in terms of this kind of emerging multiculturalism, emerging neoliberalism, like, you need to behave differently. But I kind of felt like that text didn't present itself as progressive in the way that these other texts that I'm looking at or interested in did. And I I think that is most compelling to me because I I do want to kind of unpack the things that we think of as, quote, unquote, good.
Brittany Farr:
I'm curious if your approach to the things that you choose to write about has changed from early graduate school days to now. I mean, mine certainly has a fair amount.
Allison Page:
I think my approach to what I'm thinking about now, yeah, is really different. I I mean, this probably sounds so trite, but, like, reductive understanding of things is, like, good or bad or, like, radical or not. And now I'm much more interested in the complexity of things. I mean, I think a lot about one of my mentors, Rod Ferguson, was always so great about being interested in how power power is repressive, of course, but also, like, power is seductive. And it says, you know, yes too.
Allison Page:
Right? Not just no. And how we're part of that, like, how you can kind of get interpolated into that. And I I want to sort of explore those types of things rather than, like, like, against a politics security method where you're, like, I'm just gonna choose this and I can like, tear it apart. You know, I'm much more interested in complexity, I think, in a different way.
Brittany Farr:
Totally. I mean, yes. I think I started out writing things that are like, this is good or this is bad, and this is racist or this is not.
Allison Page:
And my
Brittany Farr:
advisers kind of pushed me to be a bit more complicated. And I have such a clear memory of, in my qual's defense, Kara Keeling asking me something. I had written a syllabus on, like, feminist something or other, and one of the weeks was divided into, like, real violence versus represented violence. And Kara asks what's sort of what's the difference, and why do you have this distinction? Are you making this distinction just to trouble it for the students?
Brittany Farr:
And can we understand these things that separately? And that really blew my mind in a way that I think I'm still making sense of.
Allison Page:
I see my students really grapple with that kind of question too. I think if you come from a particular, maybe, like, activist bent or, like, like, a political frame, you know, where it is really tempting to be like, well, this is real and this is not. I see that with my students now when things are so harrowing in so many ways for them, and they're like, what's the point of doing certain things when we have real things to be thinking about? You know? And I'm like, how can we make sense of that?
Allison Page:
Right?
Brittany Farr:
So you mentioned that maybe your object choice has changed over time, and you're really feeling it in terms of the next project that you're working on. And I'll say briefly that, you know, the next project is more focused on policing. And I remember when you were first telling me about it, I thought, wow. That seems really different from what you were doing.
Allison Page:
Mhmm.
Brittany Farr:
But, in the chapter where you are this is the slavery footprint chapter, which is a website where you can go and discover how many slaves work for you, and they have, quote, unquote, algorithms that calculate that. That is kind of where I see, the beginnings of this next project. So I'm just gonna read this passage before you start talking about it. And you're talking about slavery footprint here. Through their reliance on algorithms and data to uncover what they term, quote, slavery, Made in a Free World, which is the the parent company, Made in a Free World promulgates the notion of the digital as not only neutral and separate from race and capitalism, but as the ideal solution precisely because the technology obscures race.
Brittany Farr:
Slavery footprint produces a form of ethical that thinks about and acts against racialized labor arrangements, which are never named as such, through consumption and digital media rather than emotion. Data and algorithms are key sites for the production of race, not just reifying existing racial formations, but modifying and constituting them as well. Critically, the ongoing datafication of race and racialized bodies constitutes a new racial formation in the twenty first century, one that attempts to transcend emotion.
Allison Page:
It's so interesting to see this now and to think about sort of everything that we've been talking about. Right? Like, in the wake of the social movements arising out of the police killings of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd and all this explosion of, like, DEI kind of discourse, which is another project I really wanna work on at some point, the kind of history of DEI in relation to the media and also how we understand, like, what quote, unquote diversity means. But I think with this, it's so interesting to see this as I'm I'm really kind of starting to think about this next project because I was really interested in and did some work with a really amazing student of mine, who's now getting her PhD in gender studies at Rutgers. Yay.
Allison Page:
But we were starting to think about policing and emotion and all this discourse of technology as as neutral, which I think really when I was meeting with the student, we were talking a lot about ideas arising from this chapter, you know, where race becoming something we can understand through data, and this is so neutral, and this is gonna take us out of this problem, right, of human bias and human error. And this is actually really a thread that I think kind of appears in some ways throughout the book. Like in chapter one, I talk about in these TV documentaries in the nineteen sixties that are focused on race and slavery, geared towards white audiences, There's often this tension between, you know, we're trying to create these feelings of fear and anxiety, right, for white viewers, but also showing data. Like, I actually just taught one of the documentaries in one of my classes and it ends with, and I talk about this in the book, Mike Wallace bringing in a statistician to to talk about, like, how white people are feeling with respect to this was in the mid nineteen sixties, the civil rights movement.
Allison Page:
And so there's this tension between data and feelings and sort of them being separated from one another. And as these, like, how do we think about race? How do we quote, unquote solve the problem of race that I take this up in chapter two with roots that was very explicitly, like, let's feel our way to the solution. And so I think one of the things that was interesting to me about slavery footprint is that it really was like, okay. We're gonna just turn everything into that we can solve everything with an algorithm or apps or sort of datafication.
Allison Page:
Within media studies, there's a lot of really excellent work about the rise of datafication, this kind of larger assemblage of technological solutions to issues. I mean, there's certainly, like, amazing work and folks at the intersections of environmental studies and and thinking about climate and and media culture. And there's a lot of really great work that is theorizing predictive policing, the kind of implication of policing with these technologies. And so I I knew that I wanted to work on policing in some ways after I had read Simone Brown's really wonderful book, Dark Matters, which looks at the relationship between blackness and surveillance in The US and she sort of talks about in some ways like technologies, like runaway slave posters as this sort of tool of policing, really communicative tool of policing. What I want to do in this next book is really historicize this because so often so much of the work on technology and technology and race is really contemporary, which is critical.
Allison Page:
Right? We need to think about all the ways that these technologies that really rely on this discourse of neutrality are of course not neutral. Right? And then the ways that they are reinscribing racism and all of this kind of racial categorization in the name of neutrality. But I wanna look at the much kind of longer history of that, and this gets us back to some of the kind of quotidian objects that you and I have talked about where I'm hoping that when I get to spend some time in the archive, I'll be able to see, you know, how media technologies, in particular, were talked about at this kind of moment of ascendance in terms of policing.
Allison Page:
So actually in the nineteen sixties, in 1967, Johnson was really obsessed with, like, commissions and reports. And so there was a commission on policing that had a whole chapter devoted to how can we use information technology. This is the term they use to, again, and this is their language, to improve policing. Right? So there's this really early interest that I think is super fascinating, and I also really wanna focus on how highly police communities in this time were really pushing back against and contesting this emergence of technology because we do really see this push, right, for more high-tech policing.
Allison Page:
I mean, certainly, this is really ubiquitous today, like, more cameras. You know, if we use algorithms, we're gonna be able to sort of get around this issue rather than, of course, that's not the fruit issue of of policing and racism. But I wanna kind of spend time thinking about how did this discourse that's now so normalized, where this this moment how did it kind of become common sense and and where did that sort of happen? I had this research assistant this summer do all this work going through all of these papers that the Schomburg had sent me through these activist groups based in New York. I'm working on the NYPD because it's the largest police force in The US and and huge in the world and a really early kind of proponent of high-tech policing.
Allison Page:
Was it as diverse in
Brittany Farr:
the sixties as it is now?
Allison Page:
You know what's so interesting is actually when I was able to get to the archive, I watched this fascinating recruitment video for the NYPD that was, I wanna say, like, mid seventies, and it featured all sorts of black police officers and and women like, white women police officers, police officers of of color. Like, it was sort of multiracial where it was like, this is what I got from the NYPD. You know, being a police officer has allowed me to do blah blah blah. And they had a little section on, like, I've learned computer skills. Right?
Allison Page:
Like, it was really trying to recruit people through the the the tech. It was super interesting. I watched it, like, four times. I was just like, ah, this is very rich text. I really I just need to carve out some time because she really had gone through all of this material.
Allison Page:
I'm also I had another research assistant last year look at a lot of institutional stuff, like all the these police journals called law enforcement news in the way that she looked at every issue from the seventies. She's amazing. Also named Britney. She pulled out all of the parts where they were sort of talking about technology, where they were talking about wanting to have more funding for this, how this would sort of help policing in, you know, these ways. You know, I have to, again, find some time to really sit down with that.
Allison Page:
But I do find myself more and more really wanting to kind of think through what you and I talk about as, like, the mundane in relation to how this gets so normalized and becomes such a kind of hegemonic idea.
Brittany Farr:
Yeah. I mean, I love the idea of taking something boring and making it interesting. That's
Allison Page:
Yeah. Because often, I mean, what, like, power so banal, you know, and it's it's so important to think through that. Yeah. Exactly.
Brittany Farr:
I think that's actually something that I kind of witnessed when I lived in LA because I was writing so much about representation and then seeing behind the scenes how stuff got made and how it was all those little decisions mostly born of, like, lack of time or money that resulted in these upsetting representations. It's like it's little things. You know? So you've talked a lot about archives and loving the archives and going to archives, needing to go to archives. Do you consider yourself a historian?
Brittany Farr:
Like, what is your relationship to the discipline of history? Which is maybe not gonna be interesting for many people, but it's particularly interesting to me because I recently had to answer a lot of questions about, you know, am I a historian or not?
Allison Page:
You are a legal historian.
Brittany Farr:
Thank you. Historian. That's the official answer. So
Allison Page:
I'm sure real historians would be like, you are absolutely not a historian to me. Well, I think my advisor, Laurelette, does a ton of historical work. She really instilled in me a kind of respect for the archives, right, and this this chance to kind of get to dig through. It's almost like I I think as a on a personal note, like, I love, like, thrifting. So it's almost like thrifting through you know, you just get to sift through a bunch of old stuff.
Allison Page:
We've talked a lot about interdisciplinarity with one another, and I I love how I was able my training was very interdisciplinary. I think that produces really rich work. That's partly why I wanted to be on Minnesota because I think Minnesota publishes so much theoretically important and rich and interdisciplinary work, and it really values that, which really aligns with how I like to think about scholarship and and sort of my methods. Let me say it this way. I looked at historians like Stephanie Smallwood, who I think is amazing in, you know, the kind of archival work that she does really, really detailed, right, beautiful, rich, but then the reading of it and the theoretical work that she produces from the archival research, which I think is possibly unusual for some in history as a discipline.
Allison Page:
I think Stephanie Smallwood is a wonderful example of and I think your work is a wonderful example of Thank you.
Brittany Farr:
Thank you. Which you can soon read in the UCLA law review.
Allison Page:
Yay. Good plug. I'm gonna separate you out because you are a historian and we need to, like, really say, you know, but That doesn't
Brittany Farr:
matter now. I have a job.
Allison Page:
Yeah. Yeah. That great. Great. Yeah.
Allison Page:
No. I mean, I think we're pointing to the difficulty of disciplinarity and sort of fitting yourself into these by or making yourself legible in order to to get a job or to, you know, know what conversations you're speaking to. And that's why I think interdisciplinarity is so important to me because I wanna be able to be in several conversations, and that kind of work has been so meaningful to my own thinking. In terms of historical stuff, I I do tend to like, I know you and I have talked a lot about method. I have to teach a lot of methods courses at ODU, which has really transformed my relationship to thinking about method because I used to be like, I don't know.
Allison Page:
I just read. Like, what do I do? What you know, it's hard for, I think, people who are not historians or who are not ethnographers or who not, you know, have these, like, very clear cut methods.
Brittany Farr:
I mean, what are historians doing other than reading?
Allison Page:
Yeah. They read a lot, but they can really you know, like, having the sexiness of the archival work. Right? Like, I don't who other than us would call that sexy, but, you know I know. It's it is very legible, right, when you're trying to describe, like, my colleague who's a TV study scholar, he's like, I'm never gonna get external funding because no one's ever gonna be like, yeah.
Allison Page:
I need to pay you to watch TV. Right? Like, which is obviously a gross reduction and oversimplification of what he does. Having to teach methods and and really working on it and thinking about it in relation to this book, I'm like, oh, yeah. Okay.
Allison Page:
I feel much clearer about thinking about the politics of knowledge and sort of how we come to articulate what we know through sort of methodological terms.
Brittany Farr:
Mhmm. Mhmm. I mean, I think our shared approach to history kind of goes back to our love of Saidiya Hartman, right, who I think of as a historian, but
Allison Page:
Two.
Brittany Farr:
Is not. I keep being shocked to discover she is not in the history department. Like, are you sure, though? Like, I I'm like, I don't know. I think she's in a history department.
Brittany Farr:
Like, she's she's certainly not. And I think as I was sort of making the shift from communication to legal scholarship, and figuring out how to make my work legible to legal historians, discovering that there's just I considered myself, like, pretty familiar with scholarship on the history of slavery, but there's just there's a whole different track of stuff about the history of slavery that's being produced by historians compared to what some historians are writing, but also cultural studies and English and film studies. There's a whole separate literature that and the two of them are not really in conversation with one another. Right. I think for some historians, it's very much the belief that, you know, you can only say something about the past.
Brittany Farr:
Right? Like, you're doing hit you're a historian because you care about history, whereas, like, you're a historian because you care about the present. Right? Like, the worst thing you can say to certain historians is, like, you're a presentist. They're Oh my gosh.
Brittany Farr:
How dare you? And I'm like, yeah. Of course. Why wouldn't I be? And I think there's a little bit of a generational divide there too because I, you know, I have friends who actually have history PhDs who have a much more similar approach to me.
Allison Page:
Yeah. Yeah. I'm thinking of who you're thinking of, I imagine. I think one of the worst things you could probably say to a historian is, like, I'm taking a Foucauldian approach. Like, I wanna, this is a genealogical, like, history of the present.
Allison Page:
There's also an attention to power in a way that I think cultural studies can give us that that's why I like to sort of combine scholarship because I think you're absolutely right. Like, I think about people, like, the work of, like, Christina Sharp or, like I said, Stephanie Smallwood probably less so, but certainly, like, people working on chattel slavery and and questions of representation and performance and cultural techno right? Like, all these conversations that are happening in cultural studies, I can imagine some of the history of of slavery books that you're thinking of, they're not in conversation with one another. When one of the early readers of my book was like, here's some other like, Fabiola Glyph's book and maybe Jennifer Morgan's work too. Right?
Allison Page:
Like, there's some really great work that I think this is the problem of siloing because then you you miss out on all of this.
Brittany Farr:
Mhmm. Yeah. I know. I thought, you know, I've got a PhD. I'm good.
Brittany Farr:
And then discovered just so much stuff I was unaware of and had to read if I wanted to consider myself a historian of slavery. But then on the other hand, you have someone like Walter Johnson, who is a dyed in the wool historian, write something, like, on agency, which I would put more in the camp of the, like, Christina Sharps.
Allison Page:
Yes. Which was really central to my chapter on games.
Brittany Farr:
Especially being in a law school, that article kind of haunts me. Some of this is just the way that our legal system is structured, that you have an individual plaintiff bringing individual claims in front of a court, and students are being trained to be zealous advocates for their clients. And so I think there's a tendency to want to look at history and think about it in terms of agency, and who has agency and who doesn't have agency. And so because I write about poor black workers right after the civil war using the law in ways that people don't expect. One of the ways that many people come to the project is saying, wow, this is incredible that you have, like, rediscovered this agency that they have.
Brittany Farr:
I don't have a good answer for, like, how
Allison Page:
to actually talk talk about
Brittany Farr:
it because also, you know, it's very common in legal scholarship to want to have, like, a normative takeaway, which other disciplines, nobody wants to do that. Like, don't ask me what would happen. What are you talking about? Get out of here. But the other thing is sort of, you know, is this a positive story of what's happening?
Brittany Farr:
Is this a negative story? Is the law doing good here? What should the law have been? All of these questions that I don't have good answers for, but am haunted by.
Allison Page:
Right. No. Totally. Because how can like, the frames that we're so trained into seeing in these like, especially, I think, in terms of legal work, obviously, I'm not I'm law adjacent now, I think, given you and my My case is more
Brittany Farr:
law adjacent. Yeah.
Allison Page:
We've been talking about this a little bit. Like, racial feelings are everywhere, both in terms of all of this kind of explosion around DEI as a one of the key institutional responses to social movement pushes around anti black violence. And so we have that with all this anti critical race theory. It's really it is making me think of Sarah's work on popular misogyny and popular feminism sort of existing intention at the same time. And so here, I think we can see this just intensified anti critical race theory, this renewed push to clamp down on how the history of slavery in particular is being taught.
Allison Page:
Right? Certainly, this extends to all sorts of things. I think I saw something the other day that one school district got rid of, like, the girls who code, but, like, some book about coding and girls, which is just really amazing. I mean Just because
Brittany Farr:
talking about girls is sexist.
Allison Page:
Right. Totally. So there's just this, like, twisting of social movement language. One of the things I keep coming back to so in my first chapter, I look at, you know, these television documentaries about race and slavery, and I look at this one and I I don't get to go into it. I talk a little bit about it in the book, but it's really has kind of been something that stuck with me where the police were being asked to this police force, and it was just like a throwaway line in one of the documentaries, but we're being asked to undergo training around I think they use the word, like, prejudice maybe and discrimination.
Allison Page:
And I have been thinking about that more. I just was reading something in American quarterly about, like, the history a little bit historicizing diversity work, quote, unquote, and in terms of institutions. But I really I want to go back to and try to find some of those training because they were mediated. Right. Sort of using videos and films to shape behavior and to kind of shape the ways that people think about race in an institutional context in the service of adhering to new ideas about workplaces and discrimination.
Allison Page:
And I just keep thinking about this so much. This is, like, my next next project. Like, I know I'm gonna do the policing book, you know, but then I I do really wanna think about, like, this history of diversity discourse, how it gets taken up in terms of media culture. Like, I think all the time about the videos that, you know, like, at my job that when I started, like, you need to watch about, like, harassment and discrimination. So So I'm just curious if you had thoughts about all of the ways that we have all the this explosion of DEI initiatives that are also articulated a lot through feelings.
Allison Page:
There's all this sort of pushback against it, but how this really came to be this kind of institutional response to, you know, social movements. I mean, obviously, it's maybe this the theme of this is low hanging fruit where, like, an institution can be like, look, we're doing something, and we don't actually have to think about, sort of more material changes or shifts we could be making.
Brittany Farr:
I think that some places are thinking of those programs as more material institutional changes. I don't think, you know, implementing different policies like that is necessarily the most superficial thing one could do. It's kind of an in between in terms of what, you know, what would be an effective way of, addressing diversity. In a way, it's a little bit like a prehistory of what Jennifer Nash talks talks about in black feminism reimagined, I think, is maybe the title. Title Mad Libs.
Brittany Farr:
Yeah. Oh, that's what I was gonna say. When I was doing my initial, like, training videos, I had never had to watch active shooter drill videos before and was stunned. Have you?
Allison Page:
No. Oh, okay. That makes
Brittany Farr:
me feel better because I was texting my friend Felipe, and he was like, what? You've never seen this? Like, that's a clear media studies paper right there. It was I was recording it on my phone. I can send you the because I was actors acting out an actor shooter Wow.
Brittany Farr:
Like, thing. And, you know, you have people fleeing. There's somebody who plays the shooter. There are, like, different chapters to it, so you have to, like, answer questions after each chapter. And, like, there's the one chapter that's, like, bar the door and then pick up a heavy object, and you see everybody doing it and, like, getting ready to do it.
Allison Page:
Oh my god. Yeah.
Brittany Farr:
It's a friend of mine who was at I think when he was at Northwestern, they got into some it it was a bit of a hot potato. They had they gave too much backstory on the active shooter.
Allison Page:
And so
Brittany Farr:
it was, like, too immersive, and people were really upset and kind of, like, up in trouble. Anyway, I don't think anyone has actually written about them as media texts. This is not what you're talking about in terms of diversity, but I was just shocked. And, like, someone has to sit around and think about casting also. Right?
Brittany Farr:
Purslow shooter's a white man, which seems like well, one is I think accurate, and two, the most, like, politically safe thing probably. But then there were interstitials with anyway, the whole thing was just I was shocked. Oh. But I can think of comedies that have fake diversity training videos.
Allison Page:
Yeah. Right?
Brittany Farr:
Because they're they're such a common part of our culture that there's a whole other discourse that is making fun of them on what we do in the shadows. I don't know if you're still watching it. But, like, the vampire council's having a meeting, and they bring they roll a television in and say, like, HR made us make this video about harassment policies policies and whatever for the vampire council meeting.
Allison Page:
Let's write about that.
Brittany Farr:
The TV comes on, and it's some, like, grizzled old man. And he said it just says, do whatever you want. There are no rules, and then it ends. And then we have it away. Like, that is just so now I'm gonna, like, go back on what I said earlier about, like, maybe it is a bit more of a meaningful change because if there's that level of, like, cultural critique of them, I think like everyone kind of agreed.
Brittany Farr:
Even those of us who are really committed to diversity and equality, there's these things, like, running in the background and Hello. Clicking the questions and aren't super engaged with it. I think there's an interesting kind of corollary maybe with professional responsibility classes, which are things that you have to take in law school. And I wonder if it's something you have to do in medical school. But the PR classes, which there's also a whole, like, political economy thing there in terms of, like, many law schools staff them with adjuncts and don't hire in PR, and it's a test that you have to take in order to get barred.
Brittany Farr:
You have to, like, pass a professional responsibility test, and so students are then taught professional responsibility and also somehow in some ways to take a test. And from friends who have, like, taken the class and the test, they're like, it sort of teaches you that the answer is the, like, slightly less ethical thing than you think it would be. Yes. But, yes, the way that big ideological goals like diversity or inclusion are then operationalized into, like, legislation and then regulations and then, like, company policies, I think, is a really interesting question. And then, like, all the way down to the actual, like, making of the video.
Brittany Farr:
Yes. And there's not that either of us are, like, media industry people, but, like, even just, like, who's making these videos? Yeah. How are they getting made? Like, what are they paying people?
Brittany Farr:
How are they casting it? What pool of actors are they drawing from?
Allison Page:
Yes.
Brittany Farr:
Are they are they real actors? Are but I don't there's just I mean, there's a lot there that I think is really rich and interesting, particularly in the wake of the Priyanna Taylor, George Floyd summer where all of these companies are coming out and committing to diversity. Here's all the things that we're gonna do. And some of them actually taking time and coming up with really thoughtful
Allison Page:
Mhmm.
Brittany Farr:
Responses. But I think kind of universally, trainings are one of them.
Allison Page:
Mhmm.
Brittany Farr:
There's not really a standard for these trainings.
Allison Page:
I really see a connection from some of the themes of the book to these ideas.
Brittany Farr:
Yeah. Absolutely. In the way that feelings are managed because it's it reminds me, especially the clicking through of the programs compared to the watching of the video, does make me think of your chapter on the video game. Right? And who are the actors and sort of where the culpability is coming from for the problems that these videos or programs are seeking to remedy.
Allison Page:
Yes. Yes. Totally. Britney, I'm so glad we got to talk today, and I'm so glad this is in our besties archive.
Brittany Farr:
Yes. I'm very excited to have this. It feels very special. Thank you for asking me to be the
Allison Page:
one to do it. Oh, the best. Thank you for doing it and for thinking through these things with me. And and I will just say as by way of conclusion, like, Britney really read every word of this book, like, multiple times. She was so central to to its formation, so I'm so grateful and
Brittany Farr:
Including the acknowledgments. I know. More than one.
Allison Page:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. She also. So, yes, I just we're endlessly grateful.