Racism, Violence and Harm: Ideology, Media and Resistance (Palgrave Studies in Crime, Media and Culture) 3031378784, 9783031378782

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MIGRATION, DIASPORAS AND CITIZENSHIP

PALGRAVE STUDIES IN CRIME, MEDIA AND CULTURE

Racism, Violence and Harm Ideology, Media and Resistance Edited by Monish Bhatia Scott Poynting · Waqas Tufail

Palgrave Studies in Crime, Media and Culture

Series Editors Michelle Brown, Department of Sociology, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN, USA Eamonn Carrabine, Department of Sociology, University of Essex, Colchester, UK

This series aims to publish high quality interdisciplinary scholarship for research into crime, media and culture. As images of crime, harm and punishment proliferate across new and old media there is a growing recognition that criminology needs to rethink its relations with the ascendant power of spectacle. This international book series aims to break down the often rigid and increasingly hardened boundaries of mainstream criminology, media and communication studies, and cultural studies. In a late modern world where reality TV takes viewers into cop cars and carceral spaces, game shows routinely feature shame and suffering, teenagers post ‘happy slapping’ videos on YouTube, both cyber bullying and ‘justice for’ campaigns are mainstays of social media, and insurrectionist groups compile footage of suicide bomb attacks for circulation on the Internet, it is clear that images of crime and control play a powerful role in shaping social practices. It is vital then that we become versed in the diverse ways that crime and punishment are represented in an era of global interconnectedness, not least since the very reach of global media networks is now unparalleled. Palgrave Studies in Crime, Media and Culture emerges from a call to rethink the manner in which images are reshaping the world and criminology as a project. The mobility, malleability, banality, speed, and scale of images and their distribution demand that we engage both old and new theories and methods and pursue a refinement of concepts and tools, as well as innovative new ones, to tackle questions of crime, harm, culture, and control. Keywords like image, iconography, information flows, the counter-visual, and ‘social’ media, as well as the continuing relevance of the markers, signs, and inscriptions of gender, race, sexuality, and class in cultural contests mark the contours of the crime, media and culture nexus.

Monish Bhatia · Scott Poynting · Waqas Tufail Editors

Racism, Violence and Harm Ideology, Media and Resistance

Editors Monish Bhatia Department of Sociology University of York York, UK

Scott Poynting School of Justice Queensland University of Technology Brisbane, QLD, Australia

Waqas Tufail School of Social Sciences Leeds Beckett University Leeds, UK

ISSN 2946-3912 ISSN 2946-3920 (electronic) Palgrave Studies in Crime, Media and Culture ISBN 978-3-031-37878-2 ISBN 978-3-031-37879-9 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-37879-9 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: © Yagi Studio/Getty Images This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

Acknowledgements

Monish thanks Igor and Yoshi. Scott thanks Mabel and Luciel. Waqas would like to thank his family and especially his mother and father, Joanna, Kareem and Bilal for their support.

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Contents

Introduction for Racism, Violence and Harm: Ideology, Media and Resistance Waqas Tufail, Monish Bhatia, and Scott Poynting

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Do Roma Lives Matter? A Critical Inquiry into European Media Coverage of Violence Against Roma Petre Breazu

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Police Violence, Racism, and Anti-racism: Opinion Struggles in the Portuguese Daily Newspapers Ana Cristina Pereira, Sílvia Roque, and Rita Santos

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M¯aori, Policing, and Mass Media Narratives in Aotearoa New Zealand Robert Webb and Antje Deckert

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‘Hero Cop’ Versus ‘Unwanted Son’: Criminal Prosecutions Against White Police Officers in Relation to Black Deaths in Custody and the Australian Mainstream Media Amanda Porter and Conor Hannan

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Contents

‘Immortalising the Golden Age of Middle Eastern Crime’: Police-Media Liaisons, Essentialism, and Epistemic Violence Megan McElhone A “Reasonable” and “Excusable” Violence: The Spread of Anti-Muslim Violence Through the Machinery of Media, Social Media and Trigger Events Derya Iner Occupied Narrative and the 2021 Unity Intifada Micaela Sahhar

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A Violent Dream: Importing the ‘Australian Solution’ to the United Kingdom Monish Bhatia and Scott Poynting

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Policing the Savage Horde: The Texas Rangers and Colonial Narratives of Anti-Mexican Violence Margarita Aragon

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Riots in the Master’s Hall: Racism, Nationalism, and the Crisis of U.S. Hegemony Jordan T. Camp and Christina Heatherton

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Index

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Notes on Contributors

Dr. Margarita Aragon is a Lecturer in Sociology in the School of Social Sciences at Birkbeck, University of London. Her research interests lie in the sociological theorising of racism and its imbrications with gender and disability. Her work examines the scientific and popular discourses through which racial knowledge has been produced and circulated, as well as the legal and extra-legal violence through which racialised boundaries have been enforced. Dr. Monish Bhatia is an academic at the University of York, Sociology Department. He researches and teaches in the areas of race, migration and state violence. He has published several articles and book chapters and is the co-editor of numerous books and journal issues including (and to list a few) Media, Crime and Racism (Palgrave, 2018), Migration and Racist State Violence (State Crime Journal, 2022), Critical Engagements with Borders, Racisms and State Violence (Critical Criminology, 2020) and Race, Mental Health and State Violence (Race & Class, 2021). In 2021, he received the best article award from the British Criminology Society’s Hate Crime Network for the article Permission to be

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Cruel: Street-Level Bureaucrats and Harms Against People Seeking Asylum (published in Critical Criminology, 2020). Dr. Petre Breazu is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow based at the Institute for Diplomacy and International Governance at Loughborough University, London. His research lies in the area of discourse and racism, with special focus on the representation of the Roma in European media and political discourse. He works under the framework of Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis (MCDA) to examine practices of discrimination and social exclusion with regard to Roma and other marginalised communities. He obtained his Ph.D. in Media and Communication from Örebro University, Sweden. His doctoral thesis, titled Representing the Roma in Romanian media: A Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis, examined the textual and visual representations of Roma in Romanian press, television news and social media. He has been awarded the prestigious Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship and works on a project entitled “Romaphobia in the Age of Populism: A Comparative Analysis of UK and Swedish Media”. His research has been published in internationally peer-reviewed journals such as Discourse and Communication, Discourse & Society, Ethnicities, International Journal of Humor Research, Language in Society, Social Identities and Social Semiotics. Dr. Jordan T. Camp is an Associate Professor of American Studies and Co-Director of the Social Justice Initiative at Trinity College, author of Incarcerating the Crisis: Freedom Struggles and the Rise of the Neoliberal State (University of California, 2016) and co-editor of Policing the Planet: Why the Policing Crisis Led to Black Lives Matter (Verso, 2016). Dr. Antje Deckert (German, tauiwi) is an Associate Professor in Criminology at Auckland University of Technology in Aotearoa New Zealand. Collaborating with like-minded scholars across the globe, she seeks to push the edges of criminology from decolonising to moving beyond it. She is co-editor-in-chief of Decolonization of Criminology and Justice; co-editor of the Palgrave Handbook of Australian and New Zealand Criminology, Crime and Justice (2017), Neo-colonial Injustice and the Mass Imprisonment of Indigenous Women (Palgrave 2020) and the

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Routledge International Handbook on Decolonizing Justice (2023). She serves on the Advisory Board of the Center for Theory of Change, New York City, and as a research advisor to the Grace Foundation in Auckland—a community organisation that provides stable housing with a wrap-around service for people recently released from prison. Dr. Conor Hannan is a tutor in the Department of Criminology and at the Atlantic Fellows for Social Equity at the University of Melbourne in Narrm/Melbourne. His research interests include contemporary social movements, radical art history and community politics. Dr. Christina Heatherton is Elting Associate Professor of American Studies and Human Rights and Co-Director of the Social Justice Initiative at Trinity College, author of Arise! Global Radicalism in the Era of the Mexican Revolution (University of California Press, 2022) and coeditor of Policing the Planet: Why the Policing Crisis Led to Black Lives Matter (Verso, 2016). Dr. Derya Iner is an Associate Professor and Research Coordinator at the Centre for Islamic Studies (CISAC), where she teaches and conducts research on contemporary issues related to Islam, Islamic cultures and Muslims. She received her Ph.D. in Cultural Studies (major) and Gender and Women’s Studies (minor) from the University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW) in 2011 and started teaching at UW in 2014. Derya is known for her work as the chief investigator and editor of the Islamophobia in Australia Reports I, II, III and IV (2017, 2019, 2022 and 2023), which have gained nationwide and worldwide attention. The second report alone reached a potential audience of 730 million internationally, while the third report reached over 200 million within the first week of its launch. Her academic interests include topics such as Islam and Muslims in the West and Australia, women in Islam, Islamic cultures and societies, Muslim youth identity, anthropology of Islam, and women’s intellectual and political activism in early twentieth-century Muslim states. In addition to her role at CISAC, she is also the deputy chair and research head of the Islamophobia Register Australia and co-founder of

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the International Islamophobia and Children Network. She has provided expert advice to leading anti-racism and human rights organisations. Furthermore, she sits on the advisory committee of Meta, a Facebook group. His research has been widely recognised and has made a significant impact by being featured in national and international media outlets, and quoted in parliamentary discussions by leading politicians and bureaucrats. Dr. Megan McElhone is Lecturer in Criminology at Birkbeck, University of London. Her Ph.D. which she completed in the Faculty of Law at the University of New South Wales, investigated the targeted and sustained policing of Middle Eastern people in Sydney between 1998 and 2018. Since moving to London, she has continued to research processes of racialisation in policing, having written about the London Metropolitan Police’s use of a range of legal powers, and about police institutional racism in England and Wales more broadly. Dr. Ana Cristina Pereira (AKA Kitty Furtado) is a cultural critic committed to blurring the boundaries between academia and the public sphere. She has a Ph.D. in Cultural Studies (U. do Minho), a master’s degree in Educational Sciences (U. de Aveiro) and a degree in Theater Studies (ESMAE). She was a postdoc researcher for the project (De)Othering (2020–22, U. Coimbra); a researcher of the CulturesPast&Present project (2018–22, U. Minho) and of the project on the margins of Portuguese cinema: a study on Afro-descendant cinema produced in Portugal (2018–20, U. Coimbra). Currently, she coordinates the Migrants Activism Research line within the MigraMediaActs project (2022–25, U. Minho). She co-edited two issues of VISTA Journal of Visual Culture-(In)Visibilities: Image and Racism (2020) and The Emancipated Referent (2022); and the no. 54 of RCL Journal-Gendering decolonisations: ways of seeing and Knowing (2021). She is author (with Rosa Cabecinhas) of the book Opening the Buds of Time: conversations about cinema in Mozambique (2022). She coordinates with Inês Beleza Barreiros the SOPCOM Visual Culture WG, within which she curates the Visual Culture Conference and the Reparations Workshop (mala voadora-2023).

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Dr. Amanda Porter is a descendant of the Brinja clan of the Yuin nation in south coast NSW. She is Associate Professor of Criminal Law and Criminology at the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Melbourne in Narrm/Melbourne. She researches process of criminalisation and racialisation, with a special interest in race discrimination and police accountability law. Scott Poynting is Adjunct Professor in the School of Justice at Queensland University of Technology and in the Centre for Islamic Studies and Civilisation at Charles Sturt University. His most recent book was (jointly with Ulrike M Vieten) the Normalization of the Global Far Right–Pandemic Disruption? (Emerald Press, 2022). Dr. Sílvia Roque is an Assistant Professor of International Relations at the University of Évora and researcher at the Centre for Social Studies at the University of Coimbra since 2008. She was an Invited Assistant Professor of the Master in African Studies, at ISCTE-IUL (2017– 2019). She holds a Ph.D. in International Relations from the Faculty of Economics of the University of Coimbra (2014). Since 2005, she has been working in research projects in the field of International Relations, particularly in the area of Peace Studies. Besides Guinea-Bissau and El Salvador, countries where she has concentrated most of her research, she has also collaborated in research projects in Portugal and Mozambique. She was co-PI of the project “DeOthering Deconstructing Risk and Otherness: hegemonic scripts and counter-narratives on migrants/ refugees and ‘internal Others’” in Portuguese and European mediascapes (2018–2021). Rita Santos is a junior researcher at the Centre for Social Studies. She is a Ph.D. candidate in “International Politics and Conflict Resolution”, University of Coimbra. She holds a MA degree in Peace Studies from the Department of Peace Studies, University of Bradford, and a BSc in International Relations, University of Coimbra. Over the last fifteen years, she has worked on nine research projects in the fields of Feminism, IR and Security Studies; violence, gender and small arms; the agenda Women, Peace and Security; and more recently on media and political representation of migrants, refugees and “internal others”. Her current research

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interests include: the agenda Women, Peace and Security; antifeminist movements and actors; and gender equality promotion and development aid. Dr. Micaela Sahhar is a writer and educator. She currently co-heads the History of Ideas programme at Trinity College, the University of Melbourne. Her poetry, essays and commentary have appeared in the Griffith Review, Artlink, Cordite, Overland, Southerly and the Conversation among others. Her research has been published in journals and edited book collections, more recently in Afterstorm edited by Charles Green and Jon Cattapan (Art + Australia, 2021) and Unsettled Voices: Beyond Free Speech in the Late Liberal Era, edited by Tanja Dreher, Michael R. Griffiths and Timothy Laurie (Routledge, 2021). She was a 2021 Next Chapter Fellow at the Wheeler Centre and is a Round 7 grant recipient from the Neilma Sidney Literary Travel Fund. Dr. Waqas Tufail is a Reader in Criminology at Leeds Beckett University. His research interests concern the policing, racialisation and criminalisation of marginalised and minority communities and the lived experiences of Muslim minorities. Much of his work focuses on Islamophobia, media representations of Muslims and the societal impact of racialised moral panics on criminal justice and social policy and the implications this has for anti-racism. He is a Board Member of the International Sociological Association (ISA) Research Committee on Racism, Nationalism, Indigeneity and Ethnicity. He is an activist and community organiser and co-founder of the Northern Police Monitoring Project, a grassroots initiative that works with communities affected by police harassment, brutality and racism. His activism very much informs his academic work. Dr. Robert Webb (Ng¯apuhi, Ng¯ati Te Ata) is a Senior Lecturer in Criminology at the University of Auckland in Aotearoa New Zealand. His research and teaching interests include the critical analyses of criminal justice policies and how these impact M¯aori communities, youth justice and risk, Indigenous criminology, and M¯aori and organ donation. He is an Associate Editor of the journal Decolonization of Criminology and Justice.

List of Figures

‘Hero Cop’ Versus ‘Unwanted Son’: Criminal Prosecutions Against White Police Officers in Relation to Black Deaths in Custody and the Australian Mainstream Media Fig. 1 Fig. 2

Feature page of the Weekend Australian (March, 2022) Front cover of the Weekend Australian (March, 2022)

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List of Tables

Do Roma Lives Matter? A Critical Inquiry into European Media Coverage of Violence Against Roma Table 1

Referential choices for camp evictions and deportations

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‘Hero Cop’ Versus ‘Unwanted Son’: Criminal Prosecutions Against White Police Officers in Relation to Black Deaths in Custody and the Australian Mainstream Media Table 1 Table 2

Language in the Australian mainstream media Language in the Australian mainstream media

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Occupied Narrative and the 2021 Unity Intifada Table 1

Table 2

Total opinion pieces in selected newspapers during operation defensive shield (2002) & operation cast lead (2008–9) Total opinion piece in selected newspapers during the unity intifada (2021)

156 162

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Introduction for Racism, Violence and Harm: Ideology, Media and Resistance Waqas Tufail, Monish Bhatia, and Scott Poynting

This volume follows on from our 2018 edited collection, Media, Crime and Racism (Palgrave), which dealt with the processes of criminalisation as experienced by racialised minorities, and their representations. That volume proceeded largely through an international spread of case studies, including of a number of racialised moral panics and the media, governmental and societal responses to them. The present collection, Racism, Violence and Harm builds upon and marks a departure from this earlier W. Tufail School of Social Sciences, Leeds Beckett University, Leeds, UK e-mail: [email protected] M. Bhatia (B) Sociology Department, University of York, York, UK e-mail: [email protected] S. Poynting School of Justice, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, QLD, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Bhatia et al. (eds.), Racism, Violence and Harm, Palgrave Studies in Crime, Media and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-37879-9_1

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work by examining violence in a wider context, beyond that of crime as such. Here our contributors collectively and variously consider the role of ideology in the marking of racialised, ‘suspect’ populations. Central across both texts however is a consistent focus on racism as a key aspect of a necessary framework for understanding contemporary processes of othering and criminalisation. This volume is necessarily interdiscplinary and includes contributions from scholars across the globe, each exploring and analysing, again often in case studies and national contexts (with reference to the global and to history), contemporary harms related to racism and violence. The chapters within this book are all theoretically informed and share conceptual underpinnings but crucially they also foreground anti-racist practice in the pursuit of justice. This commitment to anti-racism runs throughout the volume and offers new collective insights into how inequality and injustice produced by the racial, capitalist order can be confronted in the twenty-first century. Racism, with its attendant violence and harm is endemic in contemporary societies—globally so. It is instructive, indeed necessary, to consider its national and even local histories and cultures, while attempting to grasp global commonalities and causes. With this book we sought to deepen our understandings of the underpinnings of this violence, rooted in the long and enduring histories of slavery, colonialism and systematic racial inequality, and sustained in ideology and through mass media. In collectively addressing this project, we invited our contributors to consider the roles of media actors and institutions, which are today commonly addressed in analyses of racism but often overlooked in its connections with violence and harm. By this approach, the book foregrounds and offers detailed insights into how relations of power and inequality shape our understandings related to manifestations of racism, violence and harm. Most importantly, this book concertedly engages with resistance to racism and the multiple ways in which anti-racist groups, social movements and communities continue to challenge its harms. The five years since the publication of Media, Crime and Racism have seen a series of global crises with harmful and institutionally violent consequences for the racialised. The Global Financial crisis since 2007–8

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had already led to regimes of austerity that exacerbated the contradictions of neoliberalism. The state and suprastate measures aimed at economic recovery bore unequally heavily on the poor and in many cases that also meant upon the racialised. Moreover, the racialised became convenient scapegoats for resentments against those measures in many nation-states. Ethnonationalism surged globally, and bolstered authoritarian and populist politics—often both, and virulently racist— that marshalled racism against the ‘enemy within’ and the supposedly besieging hoards from without. It spread across Europe, and was simultaneously manifested across the globe in developing powers in different national contexts, such as India under Narendra Modi’s government and Brazil under Jair Bolsonaro’s (2019–2022). Brexit, with its nationalist, anti-immigrant and anti-European Union campaigning, has ushered in ongoing upheaval in the United Kingdom, with a heavy legacy of heightened racism. Then the racist 2016 election campaign of Donald Trump in the United States, targeting Mexican and Muslim immigrants, and his chaotic populist politics and numerous violent and white supremacist and neo-fascist supporters, culminated in the inept attempted putsch in early 2021 after his 2020 election defeat. In the West, that is, a slew of hard-right leaders have won elections promising an anti-immigrant, nationalist agenda – much of which is bound up with nativist, raced and gendered images of who and what counts as belonging to the nation. In countries such as Hungary and Austria the use of Islamophobia has been obvious and crucial in generating hatred of Muslims and fear among the populace. To put it bluntly, Islamophobia has proven to be an election winner. The abovementioned elections of both Donald Trump in the US and Boris Johnson in the UK shone a spotlight on how proven track records of racism, sexism and Islamophobia were not regarded as deterrents to success but in fact enabling factors in increasing their popularity among large parts of the electorate. Despite their rhetoric effusing inclusivity and equality, this environment has been prevalent in states describing themselves as liberal or conservative. Though these processes are not detailed in this book, they form the backdrop in global developments of racism over this period and in the ways that we come to comprehend it and resist it.

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Then there was the 2015 refugee crisis. Global conflict, particularly in Syria and the neo-colonial US-led invasions and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, have led to destruction and destabilisation and unprecedented flows of refugees seeking shelter and safety. In response, Western nations have hardened and further securitised their borders, leading to waves of human suffering with at least 25,000 people losing their lives in the Mediterranean since 2014 in their efforts to seek sanctuary.1 As Harsha Walia (2021) argues in her excellent book on the systematic displacement, exclusion and criminalisation of migrants and refugees, the ‘crises’ stem from a racial capitalist order that encompasses nationalist, conservative as well as liberal regimes. This was followed by another crisis: the Covid-19 pandemic from late 2019 onwards and the economic disruption that came in its wake. The coronavirus led to the recorded deaths of almost 7 million people globally, with perhaps two to four times that many such deaths including unreported Covid cases. The lockdowns in many nations which commenced in early 2020 shut down entire societies and economies but arguably most of all laid bare the extent of racial inequality on a local and global scale. In the UK for example racialised minorities were disproportionately affected ‘far beyond their share of the population’ (Patel et al., 2020: 369). This conclusion was far from unique with research highlighting similar findings in the US and elsewhere (Yaya et al., 2020) whilst other studies have concluded that the outpouring of racism following the emergence of the pandemic built upon and intensified existing patterns of racial inequality (Elias et al., 2021). These patterns of racial inequality affected which countries and which citizens had access to effective healthcare, financial assistance from government and most of all, access to the emerging vaccines. As some scholars have suggested, the implementation of policing (in many cases with new and exceptional powers) as a key state response to managing populations during the Covid-19 crisis resulted in the demonstrable and increased targeting of racialised minorities, a feature that can only be fully understood in the context of a history of state and institutional racism (Dunbar & Jones, 2021; Harris et al., 2022). However, 1

https://www.hrw.org/news/2022/09/13/endless-tragedies-mediterranean-sea.

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whilst there have been regular and numerous state-led attempts targeting racialised minorities, be that in the form of police power, anti-immigrant agendas or the entrenchment of inequalities, there has also been organised, community-led resistance. This was most visible in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic which saw the re-emergence and revitalisation of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement which led to protests against police racism and racial inequality in countries around the world. The footage of African American George Floyd being lynched in May 2020 by police in Minneapolis sparked worldwide outrage and was condemned by leaders and citizens alike. The death of a Black man at the hands of police in the United States was certainly not a rare event— they continue to be killed in shootings and in custody at an alarmingly disproportionate rate. It is not certain why this particular killing sparked so much outrage leading to unprecedented protests, though it has much to do with the stark inhumanity of the videoed event, in which police officer Derek Chauvin held his knee on Floyd’s neck for over nine minutes. The anti-racist protests that followed sparked a resurgence and re-emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement and swept the United States and numerous other countries. Murals depicting the image of George Floyd appeared in dozens of countries including a particularly poignant example in Gaza, Palestine. In Australia for instance protests brought attention to Indigenous deaths in custody. In Bristol in the UK, a statue of slave-trader Edward Colston was dragged down and dumped into Bristol Harbour, highlighting the opposition to not just contemporary racisms but the continued memorialisation of the violence stemming from a history of slavery and colonialism. It is the intention of this book to shine a light on how oppoistion to legacies of racism takes place in a multiplicity of geographies, and within a diversity of contexts. This volume also situates anti-racism as an ongoing, unpredictable endeavour that takes place not only as an everyday, even mundane activity, but that can explode into spectacular action as evidenced by the 2020 uprisings. A common thread in this volume is the critique and contestation of liberal ideas and concepts concerning race and anti-racism. Whilst attention is often (correctly) drawn to the role or far-right actors in fuelling racism, much less attention is paid to the role of liberal democracies

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in enacting exclusionary policies and systems of policing and incarceration that continue to oppress and marginalise racialised minorities. As mentioned above, recent years have seen the resurgence of nationalism in Western Europe and elsewhere, with far-right figures drawing upon racist and xenophobic oratory and imagery in their political posturing. This has increasingly also taken on a gendered dimension, particularly as it draws upon existing anti-immigrant sentiment. Liberal states and leaders have proven all too keen to follow rather than oppose such framings, evidenced by numerous countries enthusiastically introducing and enforcing legislation targeted at minority groups. This has included the banning of face veils that have resulted in the repeated targeting of Muslim women, the aggressive promotion of integrationist agendas, strengthening militarised border policing and approving the spending of billions in domestic and counter-terrorism policing efforts. The justification for this is often framed in liberal mythology concerning equality, the rule of law and progress. As Kundnani (2012) highlights, liberal states encourage and engage in such strategies as they have no interest in disrupting the systems of structural inequality that they depend on. The central role of the of media in these processes is a core theme of this volume. We invited the contributors to address the role of media actors and institutions in providing, be it through misrepresentation, omission or distortion, the ideological justification through which racial harms are advanced. A number of insightful case studies herein show how media actors and institutions routinely rely on state narratives, fail to offer basic scrutiny and present framings and representations that fail to examine properly the violence of the powerful and, of course, its history. As the chapters of this volume highlight, state violence is minimised or ignored by much of the media whilst racialised minorities are all too often presented as violent, savage and as a threat to the social order. Increasingly (at a local and global level), there are examples of how media institutions collaborate with or have been co-opted by the security state. This has been a notable feature of the ‘War on Terror’ period and has inevitably led to media campaigns calling for more policing, more restrictive border policies, citizenship deprivation and deportation, and other illiberal and discriminatory measures.

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It has been our intention with this volume to centre multi-layered understandings of harm. In doing so, multiple harms, be they structural, institutional, personal and interpersonal, can be unpacked and comprehended within their given context. The harms analysed by the authors in this volume focus on but are not limited to harms stemming from racism and racialisation, whilst also examining how they intersect with class, gender and other dynamics of unequal power. The authors in this volume also contend with historicity, namely in examining the contemporary manifestations of regimes of slavery, colonialism, apartheid, dispossession and systematic racial inequality. The violence emanating from such a history demands an analysis that prioritises an examination of the actions of political elites and media institutions that continue to frame racialised communities as ‘Other’, as societal problems in need of intervention, be that from criminal justice systems, policy and legislation, or the oldfashioned methods of scapegoating. The authors in this book each in their own way unpick how such representations form, the ideological and political contexts in which they emerge and the harms they cause. Above all they share, as do we, a commitment to resistance. The resurgent BLM movement in recent years has led to renewed antiracism efforts. This has extended beyond simply shining a light on racial injustice, focusing minds and resources on how racism can be effectively challenged. Abolitionist debates have been brought to the fore, exploring alternatives to policing and prison, with old and new social movements often led by young people. Whilst abolitionism thinking and practice is not a new phenomenon it has encouraged a new generation of activists to think differently about the concepts of social and reparatory justice. Amid the injustice and despair there is cause for hope and optimism that new generations can organise effectively and learn from our history, the better to truly confront the violence, harms and racial inequalities of today. As Angela Davis (2016) reminds us, a truly emancipatory politics of liberation can only be achieved by being internationalist in its outlook—incorporating local resistance against the violence and harms of racist policing and state power whilst also including the ongoing struggle of Palestinians resisting Zionist apartheid and Indigenous communities who continue to fight settler-colonialist oppression and dispossession centuries on.

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Today’s world is riven with multiple crises, be they related to the catastrophic Covid-19 pandemic, war, economic destabilisation and rampant global inequality and the attendant forced migration. There is no doubt that the worsening climate crisis will lead to increased inequalities, desperate displaced populations seeking refuge, and racialised exclusion and victim-blaming. Crises often lead to state power being wielded against the most marginalised (Hall et al., 2017). This state power increasingly uses advanced technologies and weaponry to patrol borders, the implementation of militarised policing units, engagement in widespread intelligence gathering such as through facial recognition and the use of opaque algorithms in order to profile ‘suspect’ populations. The ideologies that underpin such transformations are rooted in a racial neoliberalism that has exclusion and confinement at the heart of its logic. The authors of this book offer critical analyses and reflection that draw upon case studies highlighting how our mediated landscape is too often ahistorical, aligned with state power and ranged against racialised minorities. Yet, as together they cogently demonstrate, wherever these is racial inequality and injustice there are communities of resistance. In Chapter 2, Petre Breazu uncovers the discourses used to represent the Roma minorities—especially in the context of camp evictions, deportations, travel bans and police violence. Roma people are some of the poorest, most marginalised and excluded European citizens. The public image of Roma in the media and political discourse has been widely associated with criminality, primitiveness, cultural awkwardness, and their apparent reluctance to abide by the laws and regulations of European societies. Given the current political climate across Europe, which is dominated by right-wing politics and populism and intolerance towards ethnic minorities—there has been a significant and marked increase in ‘Romaphobia’ and violence directed against Romani people. Breazu draws on critical scholarship in the field of Discourse Studies to demonstate how violent actions against Roma are represented in the European media. He highlights the brutal and violent anti-Roma measures, which are presented to the public in ways which appear natural and legitimate. The discursive scripts in the media reiterate that Roma are dangerous or pose social, economic and cultural threats, making deportations, camp evictions and police

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brutality come across as reasonable, measured and consensual. This results in the silencing and invisiblising of violence against Roma, and readers and viewers are given the tools to distance from the group and their suffering. The chapter draws attention to the role of media in downplaying the structural anti-Roma racism, while minimising or completely ignoring the force and violence used against Romani people. Chapter 3 draws our attention to anti-black racism in Portugal. Ana Cristina Pereira, Silvia Roque and Rita Santos bring to the surface and analyse “opinion articles” that covered the case of police violence and racism—known as the Alfragide Police Station Case. The perpetrators, 18 police officers, based in the Northwest of the Portuguese capital, were eventually charged with detaining and torturing five young Black men who had attempted to protest against another’s arrest. The authors examine three Portuguese daily newspapers, Público, Observador, and Correio da Manhã, covering the period between 2015 and 2019. Drawing from critical discourse analysis, the chapter shows how processes of othering and deothering were put forward. The Alfragide police station case was not a central focus of either of the daily newspapers, and it only became a discursive event through awareness generated via digital media and social networks. The case was later picked up by television and social movements, and finally political power. The majority of the mainstream newspapers, particularly conservative ones, kept the case out of the public domain. The discursive event shows how racism is normalised and reproduced, and ways in which anti-racist activists and scholars fought against it and at times succeeded to counter these opinions, thus affirming anti-racist narratives in the public domain. Nevertheless, and as Pereira et al. argue, there is a reproduction of racism in the Portuguese mainstream media—which conveys stereotypes about Black people, invisiblises violence and treats violent incidents as exceptions to the rule in an otherwise supposedly ‘colour-blind’ and ‘non-racist’ country. According to the authors, the erasure of this case in Portuguese mainstream opinion is a stark manifestation of institutionalised racism. Chapter 4, draws attention to racism in Aotearoa New Zealand, while Chapters 4, 5 and 6 deal with racism, violence and harm in Australia. Robert Webb and Antje Deckert analyse how contemporary police narratives and mass media accounts of policing in Aotearoa New Zealand

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strongly reinforce the racist criminalisation and over-policing of M¯aori people. By analysing and drawing upon three examples of policingrelated narratives that made mass media headlines in Aotearoa New Zealand, the authors examine how New Zealand Police continues to utilise mass media to deny systemic racism in policing by reframing it as ‘unconscious bias’. They then discuss the (racialised) imagery as shown in the reality-TV show Police Ten 7 that stereotypes M¯aori as inherently criminal and violent. According to Webb and Deckert, the show promotes neo-colonial narratives, justifies the extension of discriminatory state social control of M¯aori communities and normalises racist over-policing. The authors also explore Indigenous acts of resistance that attempt to use mass media to expose and challenge the illegal photographing of innocent M¯aori young people by New Zealand Police. In Chapter 5 Amanda Porter and Conor Hannan examine the case of the police killing of Indigenous (Warlpiri) teenager Kumanjayi Walker in November 2019. In March 2022 and after a long awaited five-week trial, a white police officer Zachary Rolfe was acquitted of Walker’s murder before the Northern Territory Supreme Court. Ever since the verdict, the Walker family and Warlpiri community have been subjected to discriminatory and unethical media reporting practices. Media coverage criminalised the deceased, rather than questioning his killing. The chapter uses discourse and content analysis and shows how language is deployed in the Australian corporate media’s coverage of the criminal trials of white police officers charged with black deaths in custody. Porter and Hannan argue: “While no Australian police officer has ever been criminally convicted in relation to an Indigenous death in custody, there is a long history of organised resistance and truth-telling about the racial violence of policing on this continent” (pp. 100). In Chapter 6, Megan McElhone uses the case study of the policing of so-called ‘Middle Eastern crime’ in Sydney (Australia) to demonstrate how “police-media liaisons” channel police knowledge claims into reporting about policing and the policed. She also shows as to how research gatekeeping practices obstruct critical researchers from producing alternative accounts of such practices. According to McElhone, gate-keeping facilitates racial essentialism, produces epistemic violence, and legitimises violent policing. The chapter sheds light on the police’s media unit and ways in which

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it exerts influence over the traditional media and channels police knowledge claims in reporting of the Middle Eastern people and their ‘criminal capacity’. In Chapter 7, Derya Iner analyses the role of trigger events in the spread of Islamophobia and more importantly the coordinated efforts by the far right on media and social media to demonise Muslims and how these incite violence and hate crime against Muslims. Iner explores how Islamophobia is normalised in public discourse then manipulated by the racist extreme right. The chapter uses examples of online threats of mass murder reported to the Islamophobia Register Australia in 2016– 2017 in relation to the ways which anti-Muslim violence is justified as “reasonable” and “excusable”. In Chapter 8, Micaela Sahhar analyses editorials and opinion pieces dealing with popular resistance in Palestine in 2021, from three major newspapers across three different jurisdictions: namely, the Guardian (UK), the New York Times (US), and the NewsCorp national daily, The Australian. The chapter specifically focuses on the Unity Intifada. In May 2021, Palestinians were united in a wave of resistance that spread across the territory between the river and the sea. Unlike earlier Israeli-authored assaults on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, the catalyst for the uprising that grabbed international attention was the expulsions of Palestinian families from their homes in the East Jerusalem neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah. Sahhar notes a statistical shift in media pieces, as they showed more Palestinian guest contributors when compared to previous periods. The opinion and analysis pieces tapped into the impact of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement and foregrounded issues such as Israeli state violence and the denial of Palestinian rights in the language of apartheid, colonialism and systemic racism. The chapter argues that changes are directly related to the two decades of activism in Palestinian civil society and the growing links with international solidarity movements. Chapter 9 turns to the violence of racist policies and discourses against asylum seekers in the United Kingdom and Australia. Monish Bhatia and Scott Poynting analyse the UK’s ‘Stop the Boats’, Illegal Migration Bill and cruel off-shoring policy. The chapter presents media and political discourse and shows how the UK’s contemporary externalisation policy is adapted from Australia’s ‘boat people’ playbook, developed since the

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Tampa crisis in 2001. The chapter argues that Australia’s ‘Pacific Solution’ of military interdiction and offshore detention, along with UK’s current ‘Australian Solution’ constitutes state violence deliberately designed to harm asylum seekers, mostly unlawfully and certainly without regard for international law, to deter people from exercising their rights to claim asylum. Policies structured in racism are instituted in response to populist panic over (certain, racialised) asylum seekers that is marketed by mass media and manipulated irresponsibly for political gain. The violence and harm imposed in this process on those seeking refuge is deliberately perpetrated by the respective states as a monstrously inhumane mechanism of deterrence, cynically rationalised by professed concern for the lives of the asylum seekers, and the dangers they face. The last two chapters, 10 and 11, focus on the United States. In her chapter, Margarita Aragon examines how the US newspapers, memoirs and works of popular history narrated the anti-Mexican violence of the “Texas Rangers” through tropes of settler colonial mythology. The chapter draws on interpretations of a wave of violence inflicted upon ethnic Mexicans in south Texas in 1915, and shows how cultural and media narratives of indiscriminate killing of ethnic Mexicans were unfolding at the time and in the subsequent decades. And how these narratives acknowledge the illegality, the excess, of Ranger violence but also rationalised it as emerging from the nation’s continental destiny. Aragon argues that the mediation of anti-Mexican violence rehearsed logic present in justifcatory discourses of racialized state violence used today. In the final chapter, Jordan Camp and Christina Heatherton analyse the January 6, 2021 siege on the U.S. Capitol in its historical and political context. The chapter starts with the suggestion that struggles over the memory of the overthrow of Radical Reconstruction in the nineteenth century shape struggles over the material conditions in the long twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The authors conclude by arguing that the surge of authoritarian nationalism, which includes the January 6, 2021 riot, represents a racist and neo-fascist response to a crisis of U.S. hegemony and for capitalism on a world scale.

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References Davis, A.Y., 2016. Freedom is a constant struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the foundations of a movement. Haymarket Books. Dunbar, A. and Jones, N.E., 2021. Race, police, and the pandemic: considering the role of race in public health policing. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 44(5), pp. 773–782. Elias, A., Ben, J., Mansouri, F. and Paradies, Y., 2021. Racism and nationalism during and beyond the COVID-19 pandemic. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 44(5), pp. 783–793. Hall, S., Critcher, C., Jefferson, T., Clarke, J. and Roberts, B., 2017. Policing the crisis: Mugging, the state and law and order. Bloomsbury Publishing Harris, S., Joseph-Salisbury, R., Williams, P. and White, L., 2022. Notes on policing, racism and the Covid-19 pandemic in the UK. Race & Class, 63(3), pp. 92–102. Kundnani, A., 2012. Multiculturalism and its discontents: Left, Right and liberal. European Journal of Cultural Studies, 15(2), pp. 155–166 Patel, P., Hiam, L., Sowemimo, A., Devakumar, D. and McKee, M., 2020. Ethnicity and covid-19. BMJ, 369 Walia, H., 2021. Border and rule: Global migration, capitalism, and the rise of racist nationalism. Haymarket Books. Yaya, S., Yeboah, H., Charles, C.H., Otu, A. and Labonte, R., 2020. Ethnic and racial disparities in COVID-19-related deaths: counting the trees, hiding the forest. BMJ Global Health, 5(6), p. e002913.

Do Roma Lives Matter? A Critical Inquiry into European Media Coverage of Violence Against Roma Petre Breazu

The Roma continue to be the poorest and most marginalised European citizens, with a population that draws close to 12 million people. Despite their acute poverty and ongoing social exclusion, Roma’s public image in the media and political discourse has consistently been associated with criminality, primitiveness, cultural awkwardness, and reluctance to abide by the laws and regulations of European societies. The political climate across Europe, dominated by right-wing politics and populism, gave rise to a surge in violence against Romani people, as we are currently witnessing brutal camp evictions, deportations, travel bans and appalling police violence. Drawing on the critical scholarship in Discourse Studies, this chapter gives insights into how violent actions against Roma are represented in European media, highlighting how inhumane anti-Roma measures are often unproblematically presented to the public in ways which appear natural and legitimate. This chapter draws attention to P. Breazu (B) Loughborough University, London, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Bhatia et al. (eds.), Racism, Violence and Harm, Palgrave Studies in Crime, Media and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-37879-9_2

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the role of media in downplaying the structural anti-Roma racism, while minimising or completely ignoring the force and violence used against Romani people.

Introduction The Roma are indeed the poorest and most marginalised European citizens and have historically been the victims of extreme violence and social exclusion, especially during their slavery in Eastern Europe (Achim, 2004), their extermination by the Nazis during the holocaust (Friedman, 2010; Kelso, 2010) and their ongoing oppression and marginalisation in many parts of Europe (McGarry, 2017; Van Baar, 2018). Despite living on the edge of poverty, Roma people across Europe continue to be subjected to increasing persecution and violence, actions which are often endorsed by authorities and legitimised by the media (Breazu, 2020; McGarry, 2017). Reports from various EU organisations have shown that as of today, the Roma live in the poorest areas, often in places with no electricity, gas, running water or paved roads, which in turn, limit or deny their access to education, job market and proper health care. The European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA, 2020) documented that as of 2016, 80% of Roma are at poverty risk compared to the EU average of 17% and these inequalities persist in 2020. Yet the socio-economic and political exclusion of the Roma are absent or infrequently articulated in contemporary media and political discourse, which often acquaints the public with a Roma community which is reluctant to progress and resistant to social inclusion. The political climate across Europe, dominated by right-wing politics and populism, gave rise to more intense societal persecution of Romani people (Breazu and McGarry, 2023; Breazu, 2020). For the last two decades, we have been witnessing a surge in the violence against the Roma in Europe. Reports from the European Roma Rights Centre have documented these violations of human rights such as, forced repatriations across Europe, racial profiling, violence against Roma in Bulgaria, Slovakia, Czech Republic, Italy and Greece or police brutality during Covid-19 pandemic in many countries in central and eastern Europe.

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While violence and intolerance toward the Roma are rampant at this moment in time, they remain largely invisible in the public discourse, especially since, very often, international media are silent. Few reports about the violation of Roma’s human rights make the headlines in the mainstream media, and when they do, these events are presented to the public in ways which accommodate specific ideological views, making anti-Roma measures appear reasonable and legitimate. The practise of dismantling Roma settlements and forced repatriations of Roma migrants to their countries of origin is an ongoing concern in various European countries. This chapter gives an overview of how camp evictions and deportations of Roma migrants have been represented in Romanian and UK media. Drawing on the analytical tools offered by multimodal critical discourse analysis, this chapter highlights how media with its affordances can erase or downplay racism, thus normalising violence against European Roma.

Romaphobia and the Media Racism toward the Roma, also known as ‘Romaphobia’ has a long history in Europe (McGarry, 2017). Scholars have emphasised that in spite of their marginalised status, the public image of the Roma in the media has often been associated with illiteracy, crime, violence, corruption and unwillingness to abide by societal norms and values (Catalano and Fielder, 2018; Tremlett et al., 2017). The Roma are also represented as being unproductive members of society, uninterested in mainstream forms of employment and often dependent on social welfare (Kroon et al., 2016). Other studies have emphasised the warlike conflicts between the Roma and non-Roma and the threat that the former pose to society at large because of their unconventional lifestyle and unwillingness to conform to societal norms (Cheshmedzhieva, 2009; Erjavec, 2001). These studies have shown that the media focus on polarised constructions of Roma and non-Roma, suggesting the impossibility for the two groups to share the same space and co-inhabit happily. There is a sense that the physical–spatial as well as the moral distance between the Roma and non-Roma is needed on the grounds that the Roma

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are socially and culturally deviant, which makes them unwanted by the non-Roma. There is relatively limited research that has addressed how subtle forms of Romaphobia have been incorporated in the public discourse, especially in contexts where right-wing populism has gained traction. As right-wing populist parties have risen in Western European democracies, so has violence and racist sentiments (Assoudeh and Weinberg, 2021). One common strategy used in right-wing populist rhetoric is the open scapegoating of immigrants and specific ethnic and religious minorities, such as Muslims, Jews and the Roma—which are said to be favored by political elites to the detriment of ordinary citizens (Rydgren, 2008; Wodak, 2015). Thus, Roma as well as other immigrant groups are believed to pose a strong economic, cultural and social threat to societies where they migrate (Breazu, 2020; Wodak, 2015). It is this precise socio-political environment—i.e., that which has allowed waves of forced and often violent repatriations of the Roma across Europe to Romania and Bulgaria—that has led scholars and activists to compare the actions taking place today to those of the Nazis during World War II (Korando, 2012; Rorke, 2018). The negative role of the media in general in fostering unfavourable representations of the Roma has been addressed by scholars (McGarry, 2017; Tremlett et al., 2017). As such, it has been argued that the media have contributed to the spread of Romaphobia, thus perpetuating social exclusion rather than integration. Richardson and O’Neill (2012) have indicated that the anti-Gypsy media discourse is hegemonic and has a circular feature in the sense that it does not only reflect shared knowledge or opinions but it also constructs ‘folk devils’ and ‘moral panics’ (Cohen, 2002) which further expand the public negative discourse.

Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis The analysis in this chapter draws on Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis (MCDA), a research methodology under Critical Discourse Studies (Flowerdew and Richardson, 2017) which presupposes an indepth critical examination of language, news photography and other

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forms of communication with a view to revealing hidden ideologies and power relations in discourse. MCDA has been shown to be highly instrumental for the study of racism and discrimination in various media, including the press, television news and social media (Breazu, 2020). Discourse is a key concept in MCDA and it is used to describe broader ideas communicated by a text (Fairclough, 2013). Discourses, as models used to represent the world, carry the ideological interests of those who seek to disseminate them. Van Leeuwen and Wodak (1999) developed a discourse theory according to which representation is always linked to practice, namely to what people do. Thus, discourses are comprised of various components, such as participants, actions, performance modes, evaluations, presentation style, time and place (Van Leeuwen and Wodak, 1999). These components combine to form discursive ‘scripts’ (Van Leeuwen and Wodak, 1999) about certain people who engage in actions in a specific context, driven by certain motivations, ideas and values. In this sense, media discourse is conceptualised as a recontextualised social practice. A typical ‘discursive script’ used in the coverage of camp evictions and deportations of Roma migrants is that Roma set up illegal camps in various cities, live in unsanitary conditions, are a threat to social order and pose health concerns for the people living in the neighborhood (Breazu and Machin, 2018). One task of MCDA is to analyses these discourses in relation to the events they are used to represent. In other words, researchers examine how actual events become recontextualised to form new discursive scripts which support various ideologies. This form of analysis is particularly useful to examine the coverage of camp eviction and repatriation of the Roma migrants in various European media. I ask what kind of components have been deleted, added, abstracted, substituted, rearranged to accommodate various ideological interests. Van Leeuwen (2008) offers a kind of inventory to lead the analyst to identify how events become recontextualised in the media. This inventory can be used to compare discourses identified in texts with actual events and processes taking place (for example, the lived experiences of the Roma).

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• Substitutions: According to van Leeuwen (2008), substitutions are the most common transformations that occur during the recontextualization, and it is a process through which new meanings are discursively created. Substitutions occur when concrete people and events are replaced by abstractions and generalisations. For instance, in the case of ethnic minorities, substitution may be achieved through the construction of universal types of people (the foreigners, illegal immigrants, the Muslims), aggregated constructions (thousands of Roma), and functionalisations (the criminals—when described in terms of their wrong doings). The complexity of processes can also be substituted by the use of passive voice, objectification through nominalisation (e.g., the operation—in reference to the forced eviction of the Roma camps) or abstractions. An example of abstraction is the common discourse: Roma need to be integrated. In such a narrative, audiences never learn what integration really entails. Provision of jobs and accommodation? Equal opportunities? Full membership in the countries where they reside? • Deletions: These kinds of discursive transformations are concerned with the deletion or non-representation of various elements of the social practice. These transformations may involve the deletion of agents by means of passive constructions, e.g., ‘Hundreds of illegal Roma were deported from France’. A natural question would be, who did the deporting? Did such an action involve the participation of police, security officers or other local authorities? In some instances, details about the acts of eviction, deportation or other controversial actions may also be deleted or not explicitly presented. • Additions: Recontextualisation may also involve the addition of a range of elements to the social practice. This can include additions of words or other elements which provide evaluations of participants or actions (e.g., the addition of qualifiers such as ‘illegal’ to people or Roma settlements). This can have the effect of legitimising or delegitimising the social practice in question. Additions can also bring a moral dimension to the discourse (e.g., emotional statements from ordinary people who appear to suffer the consequences of Roma migration). As we will see in the analysis, discourses about the Roma

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are often heavily laden with such additions, which distract from actual ongoing processes and events. • Rearrangements: Rearrangements play an important role in the process of re-contextualisation. Different elements that constitute the social practice may not be presented in the natural order of events but instead can be reorganised and sequenced in a manner that aligns with the intended communicative purpose of the producer of that discourse. • Repetitions: These discursive transformations play a crucial role in the way social practices are recontextualised to communicate identities, values and interests. Repetitions are achieved by the use of different synonymic expressions in reference to the same social practice. As regards media discourse, repetitive patterns of minorities’ representation determine how the social and political conversation about these groups is being framed. As we shall see, the European media coverage of camp evictions and deportations of Roma migrants heavily rely on these discursive transformations in order to downplay racism and make these extreme measures appear legitimate and reasonable.

The Context of Research The Roma expulsion from France in the summer of 2010 began when the French government introduced an aggressive policy which dramatically affected Roma migrants in France. This involved dismantling Roma camps and forcing the people to leave the country. The French authorities offered a financial compensation of e300 per adult and e150 per child for those individuals who agreed to leave France and return to Romania or Bulgaria. Those migrants who declined the offer were forcefully repatriated to their countries of origin in the following months (Gunther, 2013; Korando, 2012). The French model of dealing with Roma migrants is not unique, as similar anti-Roma measures have been adopted in Denmark, Sweden, Italy, the UK and other countries.

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Reports from various human rights groups exposed the cruel manner in which these camp evictions were conducted (Amnesty, 2012a; ERRC, 2017). Some instances in France involved men, women and children being chased by dogs (handled by contractors) while operators managing bulldozers tore down the Roma’s makeshift shelters. The same reports communicate the devastating consequences of these forced evictions on health, children, education or loss of jobs and personal documentation— especially since these actions were often carried out spontaneously or with little prior notice. In addition, accounts from the European Roma Rights Centre emphasise that such actions undertaken by various European countries contravened with the EU protocols1 and directives2 for the treatment of ethnic minorities in Europe, associating them with fascist methods of ethnic cleansing (Rorke, 2018). Despite the cruelty in which evictions were conducted, various media around the world represented these actions as peaceful and consensual, thus erasing the force or violence often deployed to evict Romani families (Breazu and Machin, 2018). In this chapter, I examine how these violations of human rights were represented in Romanian and UK media. I selected two contexts which are rather different: Romania, a country with large numbers of Roma who migrate to western Europe and the UK, a country believed to be a popular destination for Eastern European Roma migrants. The aim here is not to generalise the findings to the entire Romanian or UK media, but to give a contextual understanding of how media coverage in both contexts rely on similar discursive strategies when reporting on violence against Europe’s poorest and most marginalised community.

1 Protocol No. 4 of the European Convention of Human Rights prohibits the collective expulsion of ‘aliens’; it also reinforces the right to freedom of movement for all EU citizens. 2 The directives and recommendations of the 2002 Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly (no. 1557) underline that the Roma are entitled to full membership in the countries where they are born and, consequently, in the EU member states.

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The Coverage of Camp Evictions and Deportation of Roma Migrants The analysis I report in this section is based on findings from a research project on the representation of Roma in European media, comprised of 71 news articles in Romanian media and 219 items from UK media. The aim here is to draw attention to some common discursive strategies used in the coverage of camp evictions and deportations of Roma migrants, strategies which downplay racism and gloss over the violence used against Roma migrants. In this section I outline three interconnected discursive strategies: euphemising the evictions and deportations, criminalising the victims, and reversing victimhood. In addition to these, news photographs that accompany the reports substitute the force and violence used against the Roma for images of civility and mutual cooperation between authorities and Roma.

Euphemising Camp Evictions and Deportations Lexical choices used in the coverage of camp evictions and deportations of Roma migrants are significant for how the events become recontextualised. In Table 1 we see some examples we find in Romanian and British media. Extract 1 (Jurnalul National 9 August 2012) A series of operations of freeing some illegally occupied land has already taken place or is scheduled to happen, especially in Lyon. According to the associations which support the Roma families, these Table 1 Referential choices for camp evictions and deportations Operation of freeing some occupied land A massive clean-up operation Humanitarian intervention Humanitarian aid Voluntary expulsion Return of Roma migrants

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ones (the Roma) opt for receiving the repatriation aid, because ‘they have no choice’. Extract 2 (The Sun 5 April 2016) Romanian beggars get free flight home. COPS rounded up 63 Romanian beggars yesterday—and handed out FREE flights home. Police and immigration officials swooped at 4am on the squalid camp of Roma gypsies sleeping rough in London’s posh Park Lane. Last night the Home Office said: “The flights are being paid for by the Home Office. “It is much cheaper than detaining someone.” Last night Westminster council launched a massive clean-up operation at the site, opposite some of the most exclusive properties in London. Van Leeuwen (2008) has emphasised that substitutions, deletions/ omissions and additions in discourse play an important role in how events and processes become recontextualised and, therefore, evaluated by the public. In Table 1 we see some lexical choices used to describe camp evictions and deportations, which are substituted with the general, soft and euphemistic expressions ‘operation’, ‘humanitarian aid’ and ‘humanitarian intervention’. While ‘operation’ is extremely general and neutral, the notion of ‘humanitarian intervention’ implies some sort of good intention (people were evacuated/repatriated for their protection because they were in danger). No other details are given in the text to explain why these repatriations should be considered humanitarian acts, as opposed to violations of human rights. This manner of representation is in contradiction with the aforementioned reports issued by human rights organisations (Amnesty, 2012a, 2012b) which published accounts of people’s being pressured for weeks to leave the sites—of women, children and the elderly being forcefully displaced, bulldozers tearing apart the barracks and dogs chasing people off sites. Here, and throughout my corpus, all these details are omitted, which makes it difficult to sympathise with Roma and regard them as victims of social exclusion. Instead, the acts of repatriation appear to be measured, civilised or, in the case of Romanian media, voluntary—chosen by the Roma themselves in exchange for a small material reward (Breazu and Machin, 2018).

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In Extract 1, we notice that the act of eviction is substituted for the euphemistic expression, ‘operations of freeing some illegally occupied land’. The addition of the reasoning behind the eviction—to free some illegally occupied land—makes the action appear legitimate and reasonable. In addition, it is also added in inverted commas that ‘the Roma “have no choice”’ but to accept the money, which ironically dismisses such claim. In fact, such a statement, presented as it is in inverted commas, implies some sort of deal between the French authorities and the Roma migrants that the Roma found beneficial. In addition, the social actors who are performing the operations of camp evictions and deportations do not appear in the story. According to Van Leeuwen’s (2008) the deletion of various social actors and their actions in relation to the social practice is not a neutral strategy in communication, but an active choice of those who seek to disseminate various discourses. While we know the Roma are repatriated to Romania or Bulgaria, we are not told who exactly is behind these decisions, though at times police officers are textually and visually represented, as we see in Extract 2. Extract 2 clearly describes a case of deportation in the UK, even though this violation of human rights is also euphemistically referred to as ‘a massive clean-up operation’. The emphasis here is on the bravery of the COPS who rounded up 63 beggars, and the ‘free’ tickets Roma received to return to their country of origin. It is not entirely clear how police carried out their task if it involved violence or if people refused to comply. Instead, the focus shifts toward the Roma’s being the passive recipients of British generosity (‘are handed out FREE flights home’). Here and throughout the corpus, such ‘massive cleanup operations’ appear to be consensual, with Roma’s jumping at the opportunity to take a free flight home, paid by the British taxpayers. These harsh measures are always directed toward a camp, a place, and not toward men, women and children. Thus, it is difficult for readers to empathise with Roma or align with their grieving. In addition, references to ‘humanitarian aid’ or ‘voluntary expulsion’ give the sense that the authorities act for the benefit of the Roma, by providing them with the material opportunity to return to their countries.

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Criminalising the Victims Another discursive strategy through which media conceal this violation of human rights is by deleting Roma’s role as victims and replacing it with a collective image of criminality. As we shall see, this is also realised through discursive substitutions, additions and repetitions (Van Leeuwen, 2008). References to Roma’s being victims of poverty and social exclusion are usually not part of these media reports. Instead, Roma are substituted for a collective image of criminality, always referred to as ‘gangs’, ‘thieves’, ‘scammers’, ‘pickpockets’ or ‘disrupters of public order’. There is no coverage about Roma migrants telling their stories with poverty, discrimination, social exclusion or violence they experience while living in these improvised shelters. Roma’s improvised shelters are also depicted in posh neighbourhoods, in famous parks, close to luxury residences and touristic places—additions which play an important role in evaluating the evictions and deportations. The visual images which are circulated in the media always emphasise groups of Roma lounging around and showing no respect for the social and cultural norms. As such, they are always visually represented as drinking, smoking, urinating in public or harassing people with their begging. There is a particular image of Roma projected in the coverage of camp evictions and deportations, one defined by primitiveness and refusal to comply with socio-cultural norms of societies where they migrate. Roma are said to bring chaos wherever they move by imposing their lifestyle and being a threat to the safety of locals and tourists. We saw in the previous section that when media reports on evictions, the human factor is erased. Yet, when reporting on the wrongdoings, Roma criminality is assigned as a collective marker, irrespective of gender or age. We read about men and women who even exploit their own children to beg or carry our street crime (Breazu & Eriksson, 2021; Breazu and McGarry, 2023). Extract 3 (Jurnalul National 18 July 2013) 1,769 minors were detained by the French police for committing similar crimes in 2012, but even if caught they are released within a few hours.

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‘There’s very little we can do with them [about Roma minors]. As children they effectively have absolute immunity from prosecution’, admitted a Paris police source. Extract 4 (The Daily Mail 11 May 2018) Roma gypsies from countries such as Bosnia, Romania and Bulgaria are regularly blamed by the French authorities for carrying out the majority of street crime in Paris. They live in illegal camps on the edge of cities such as Paris, and travel into the centre on public transport to steal, mug, burgle and beg aggressively. Gangs of mainly Roma girls are a common site around tourist attractions, such as the Louvre Museum and Eiffel Tower.* In the context of camp evictions and deportations, references to Roma criminality is a repetitive pattern both in Romanian and UK media. Repetitions (Van Leeuwen, 2008) are crucial strategies through which media shape the collective image of Roma criminality. In extracts 3 and 4 Roma’s criminality is said to be out of control and to deeply affect the safety and security of locals and tourists in the most iconic touristic venues. Roma’s crimes are represented as outrageous, shamelessly happening in broad daylight, in the most famous Parisian cultural sites, such as the Louvre Museum and the Eiffel Tower. In extract 3, we see the focus on numbers and statistics to emphasise that this is serious, especially since it is suggested that criminal acts are also performed by underage individuals (‘1,769 minors … in 2012’). It is somehow implied that these numbers refer to the Roma, although the police spokesperson might have made a general statement about underage criminality in Paris (French law prohibits racial profiling). According to the police spokesperson, the French authorities feel helpless in dealing with the issue because of the permissive laws which make them unable to take stricter measures when dealing with offences committed by children (the children are released ‘within a few hours’; ‘“There’s very little we can do with them”’; ‘have absolute immunity from prosecution’). Roma appear to exploit the French system by using their own children to carry out

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street crime, knowing that underage criminality cannot be prosecuted. In extract 4 the criminality of Roma who live in illegal camps is represented as out of proportion (‘steal’, ‘mug’, ‘burgle’, ‘beg aggressively’, ‘carry out the majority of street crime in Paris’)—signalling that something must be done, that stricter measures to stop Roma criminality are necessary. The news photographs which accompany these reports are revealing, depicting groups of underage girls aggressively robbing people at cash machines in Paris, or mothers encouraging their underage children to beg and harass people in posh areas of London. We do not know if the news photographs are related to the story being told, but readers are invited to assume so, which further naturalises ideologies carried in the text. Thus, camp evictions and deportations appear as natural measures, since it is difficult to sympathise with a group of people who appear to enjoy living out of crime and pestering members of the public.

Reversing Victimhood Another strategy used in media coverage of camp evictions and deportations of Roma migrants is the reversal of victimhood, where local inhabitants are represented as victims of Roma’s unconventional lifestyle. Here, additions to the discursive script (Van Leeuwen, 2008) provide a new evaluative dimension to how camp evictions and deportations of Roma should be understood. The addition of emotional statements coming from members of the public are not neutral choices in these reports but play an important part in the recontextualisation of events. In the previous section it was established that the collective ascriptions of criminality make it difficult to imagine Roma as victims of social exclusion. This is even more contentious when media repeatedly feature ordinary people voicing out their ‘legitimate’ anger and frustration caused by the arrival of Roma. Breazu and Machin (2018) showed that emotional statements from local French residents were used in the media to account for the reason Roma are unwelcome in France. In a sense, it is implied that Roma’s exclusion was not based on their race but on how they act and behave. As such, Roma migrants are always said to violate the social and cultural norms (steal, threaten, disturb the

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people, negatively change the natural surroundings, engage in dishonest ways of making a living). The ‘people’—described as residents, mothers, fathers, or tenants—are collectively portrayed as victims of the EU open door immigration policy which allows Roma migrants to move freely wherever they want. Roma migrants living in improvised shelters become the symbol for everything that is wrong with the EU immigration laws (Breazu and McGarry, forthcoming). These dissatisfactions are projected onto ordinary people who openly voice out their ‘legit’ anger and frustration, as we see in the following examples. Extract 5 (Daily Mail, 14 May 2016) ‘We don’t have the power to kick them out of the car park, until they are drinking or smoking or being abusive. Then we can call the police.’ He added: ‘They drink all the time, mostly on the weekends. Extract 6 (The Sun 5 April 2016) American tourist Christopher Walker, 29, from New York, said: “Seeing groups of homeless people lounging around where so many tourists like to come was not my idea of London. “I’m glad they are being sent home.” Extract 7 (The Sun 6 December 2016) Scared Brit residents speak of feeling ’like a foreigner’ after influx which they claim has ’ruined community’. Speaking through a security gate at his terraced house, her neighbour Mark said: “They hang around in groups. They won’t move for a woman with a pushchair. And they’re filthy.” A local supermarket security guard said: “When I go to the gym it’s full of Slovaks and Roma and I feel isolated. They don’t want to be your mate and half can’t speak English. “The place has been invaded by immigrants. I feel like a foreigner in my own country.” The arrival of Roma migrants in the UK is said to have a negative impact on the daily lives of ordinary British citizens and tourists who are represented as victims of Roma’s unconventional way of life. As evidenced in

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the above extracts, there is much emphasis on the representation of feelings and emotions of ordinary people who voice out their dissatisfaction with the arrival of Roma migrants (e.g., [the people] feel powerless, feel scared, feel like foreigners in their own country, feel isolated). I draw attention that there are not such representational strategies for the Roma who are presented in terms of their wrong doings (drink and smoke in pubic, steal, spoil the experience for tourists, ruin the community, hang around in groups, harass people, act disrespectfully). We have no access to internal feelings or experiences of Roma with living in improvised camps, daily worries, or future aspirations. These aspects are omitted or overlooked by most media, and, therefore, poverty and homelessness appear to be a choice or a traditional lifestyle for Roma. The media primarily focus on how Roma bring chaos and misery onto the people by importing their lifestyle everywhere they migrate. The news photography also confirms that the frustration and anger of locals are legitimate, that Roma have a way of life that transcends what is acceptable in any civilized society. The visual representations of Roma camps invite more anger and frustration, especially as these are depicted in residential areas, close to touristic places and businesses. The textual and visual portrayals of Roma also convey an image of primitiveness and unruliness, positioning Roma as unwanted migrants. Thus, their exclusion is not presented as a political project, but blamed on their culture.

Conclusions The examples I presented in this chapter reveal some of the discourses used to represent the Roma migrants in the context of camp evictions and deportations carried out in Europe. These discourses need to be placed into the wider socio-political context in Europe which is increasingly dominated by right-wing populism and intolerance toward ethnic minorities. In this context, viewpoints not long ago considered racist (i.e., those associated with a violent and dangerous kind of nationalism) have regained legitimacy and become increasingly naturalised. The media coverage of camp evictions and deportations of the Roma and the discursive script used for this coverage can only be understood

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within such a tempestuous climate. Such discursive scripts which reiterate that Roma are dangerous or pose social, economic and cultural threats, make deportations and camp evictions appear to be reasonable, measured and consensual. The silencing of the violence against the Roma through the use of euphemistic language becomes less problematic. Visual discourses used to represent camp eviction also distance the viewers/reader from the Roma or their suffering. These often depict people walking orderly on a sunny day in the face of friendly police officers who show themselves very friendly. The discourse would be very different if news photography represented women, men and children being chased by dogs or bulldozers tearing apart the settlements: that would perhaps invite the readers/viewers to sympathize with the Roma or at least question the legitimacy of such actions. The discursive script of the Roma as criminals, socially disruptive, primitive, and culturally unfit to live with the non-Roma is what governs the way such reports are understood. As van Dijk (1991) argues, representations such as these provide the cognitive framework for how they are made sense of. Here too is the confirmation of the burden carried by ordinary citizens. There is a reverse victimhood taking place. While European reports document the cycle of social exclusion in which the Roma are trapped (and which they are attempting to break out of through their migration around Europe), the media present a discourse in which the Roma bring chaos down onto the citizens of the countries in which to they migrate. Further, the chaos leads the affected citizens to realise the actual problem and burden that the Roma constitute. The Roma appear to show a flagrant lawlessness and disrespect for common decency that goes unchecked. They seem to ‘play a system’ that is so misguided or naive about their manipulative tendencies. We rarely see media reports criticising brutal actions of evictions or deportations or other forms of violence against Roma. Instead, these actions are represented as the result of a gradual realisation that the Roma constitute a serious and stubborn problem for any society. This manner of representation glosses over the long history of racism, discrimination and social exclusion of Roma and naturalises the use of force and violence against Europe’s most powerless group of people.

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References Achim, V., 2004. The Roma in Romanian History. Central European University Press. Amnesty., 2012a. Chased away. Forced Evictions of Roma in Ile-de-France Amnesty International . http://www.amnesty.eu/en/news/statements-reports/ eu/discrimination/report-chased-away-forced-evictions-of-roma-in-ile-de-fra nce-0654/. Amnesty., 2012b. France: Protect against forced evictions. Amnesty International . https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2012/11/france-protect-aga inst-forced-evictions/. Assoudeh, E. and Weinberg, L., 2021. In western Europe, right wing terrorism is on the rise. openDemocracy. Breazu, P., 2020. Representing the Roma in Romanian Media: A multimodal critical discourse analysis. Örebro University. Breazu, P. and Eriksson, G., 2021. Romaphobia in the Romanian Press: The lifting of work restrictions for Romanian migrants in the European Union. Discourse & Communication, 15 (2), pp. 139–162. Breazu, P. and Machin, D., 2018. A critical multimodal analysis of the Romanian press coverage of camp evictions and deportations of the Roma migrants from France. Discourse & Communication, 12(4), pp. 1–18. Breazu, P. and McGarry, A., 2023. Romaphobia in the UK Right-Wing Press: Racist and populist discourse during the Brexit referendum. Social Semiotics. https://doi.org/10.1080/10350330.2023.2165907. Catalano, T. and Fielder, G. E., 2018. European spaces and the Roma: Denaturalizing the naturalized in online reader comments. Discourse & Communication, 12(3), pp. 240–257. Cheshmedzhieva, D. S., 2009. Media Representations of Roma and Gypsies: The Metaphor of War in Newspaper materials on Roma in Bulgaria and Gypsies in the UK. Language, Individual & Society, 3(1), pp. 30–38. Cohen, S., 2002. Folk devils and moral panics: The creation of the mods and rockers. Psychology Press. Erjavec, K., 2001. Media representation of the discrimination against the Roma in Eastern Europe: The case of Slovenia. Discourse & Society, 12(6), pp. 699– 727. ERRC., 2017. Will Macron turn the tide on Roma Evictions? New report shows thousands of Roma made homeless in 2017. European Roma Rights

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Center. http://www.errc.org/article/will-macron-turn-the-tide-on-roma-evi ctions-new-report-shows-thousands-of-roma-made-homeless-in-2017/4592. Fairclough, N., 2013. Critical discourse analysis: The critical study of language. Routledge. Flowerdew, J. and Richardson, J., 2017. The routledge handbook of critical discourse studies. London: Taylor & Francis. Friedman, J. C., 2010. The Routledge history of the Holocaust. Taylor & Francis. FRA., 2020. Persistent Roma inequality increases COVID-19 risk, human rights heads say. Retrieved from https://fra.europa.eu/en/news/2020/persistentroma-inequality-increases-covid-19-risk-human-rights-heads-say. Gunther, C. T., 2013. France’s Repatriation of Roma: Violation of Fundamental Freedoms. Cornell Int’l LJ, 45, p. 205. Kelso, M., 2010. Recognizing the Roma: A Study of the Holocaust as Viewed in Romania. Brown University. Korando, A. M., 2012. Roma go home: The plight of European Roma. Law & Ineq., 30, p. 125. Kroon, A. C., Kluknavska, A., Vliegenthart, R. and Boomgaarden, H. G., 2016. Victims or perpetrators? Explaining media framing of Roma across Europe. European Journal of Communication, 31(4), pp. 375–392. McGarry, A., 2017. Romaphobia: The last acceptable form of racism. Zed Books Ltd. Richardson, J. and O’Neill, R., 2012. Stamp on the Camps’: the social construction of Gypsies and Travellers in media and political debate. Gypsies and Travellers: Empowerment and Inclusion in British Society, pp. 169–186. Rorke, B., 2018. Smells like fascism: Antigypsyism in Italy and the scourge that is Salvini. European Roma Rights Center. Retrieved from http://www. errc.org/news/smells-like-fascism-antigypsyism-in-italy-and-the-scourgethat-is-salvini. Rydgren, J., 2008. Immigration sceptics, xenophobes or racists? Radical rightwing voting in six West European countries. European Journal of Political Research, 47 (6), pp. 737–765. Tremlett, A., Messing, V. and Kóczé, A., 2017. Romaphobia and the media: mechanisms of power and the politics of representations. Identities, 24 (6), pp. 641–649. Van Baar, H., 2018. Contained mobility and the racialization of poverty in Europe: The Roma at the development–security nexus. Social identities, 24 (4), pp. 442–458. Van Dijk, T. A., 1991. Racism and the press: Critical studies in racism and migration. Routledge.

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Van Leeuwen, T., 2008. Discourse and practice: New tools for critical discourse analysis. Oxford University Press. Van Leeuwen, T. and Wodak, R., 1999. Legitimizing immigration control: A discourse-historical analysis. Discourse Studies, 1(1), pp. 83–118. Wodak, R., 2015. The politics of fear: What right-wing populist discourses mean. Sage.

Police Violence, Racism, and Anti-racism: Opinion Struggles in the Portuguese Daily Newspapers Ana Cristina Pereira, Sílvia Roque, and Rita Santos

Introduction In this chapter, we analyse opinion articles published in the Portuguese daily newspapers Correio da Manhã, Observador, and Público between 2015 and 2019 on the police racist aggression against a group of young Black men on February 5, 2015. This incident of police brutality gave rise to a long court battle and became known in the Portuguese public

A. C. Pereira (B) Centre of Communication and Society Studies, University of Minho (CECS/ UMinho), Braga, Portugal e-mail: [email protected] S. Roque · R. Santos Centre for Social Studies, CES, Coimbra, Portugal S. Roque University of Évora, UE, Évora, Portugal © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Bhatia et al. (eds.), Racism, Violence and Harm, Palgrave Studies in Crime, Media and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-37879-9_3

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debate as “the Alfragide Police Station Case” (hereafter referred to as the Case).1 This article seeks to answer the following research questions: How does opinion operate in the production of discursive events? How does it promote processes of racialised othering or de-othering? As such, we aim to analyse the impact that the Case had on opinion production in three national newspapers, to understand which discursive strategies are used both to defend the status quo and to question structural and institutional racism in Portuguese society. The Portuguese case is particularly interesting since racism is not often acknowledged as a real problem nationally and until recently it was not present in governmental agendas. This unwillingness to recognise and combat structural racism, in particular, stems from a process of national identity building during the fascist and colonialist period that remains unchallenged. The following section provides an overview of the literature on opinion and mainstream media, focused on the contribution of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), while the next focuses on de/othering processes and anti/racism in Portugal, introducing and justifying the case study. The subsequent one explains the methodology. The paper then proceeds to explore how othering processes are discursively activated and contested in the opinion segments of the Portuguese daily newspapers centred on the Case.

Critically Analysing Opinion in Mainstream Newsmedia Whereas the public does not always perceive differences between ‘news’ and ‘opinion’ (Media Insight Project 2018), newspapers’ Op-Eds have long-lasting effects on public opinion (Coppock et al. 2018). In Portugal, research on media representation of immigrants and minorities or ‘internal others’ (El Tayeb 2011)—that is, racialised people who are often read as non-Portuguese—namely immigrants, afro-descendants, 1

This study stems from the project “(De)Othering: Deconstructing Risk and Otherness: hegemonic scripts and counter-narratives on migrants/refugees and ‘internal Others’ in Portuguese and European mediascapes” (2018–2021). See https://deothering.ces.uc.pt/en_GB/.

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and Roma people, has loomed since the 2000s (Cunha et al. 2004, Cunha and Santos 2008; ERC 2009; Santos and Santos 2021), focusing chiefly on press and television news. Studies have shed light on readers’ opinions (hate speech and racism), namely in comment boxes and letters to newspapers (Silva 2021), and on the issue of fake news and bad journalism (Cardoso and Baldi 2018; Pinto 2018); nevertheless, there is a notorious lack of research on the opinion produced by print media. This study uses CDA (Fairclough 1995; Bonilla-Silva 2006; van Leeuwen 2008; Jäger and Maier 2009; van Dijk 2001) to identify the rhetorical strategies employed by opinion-makers to exercise power. Discourses are related to ideologies and, consequently, power distribution in the social world. Thus, discourse analysis cannot be limited to merely describing the linguistic contents of speeches and texts. CDA is a type of analytical research that primarily studies how abuse of social power, domination, and inequality are produced, reproduced, and resisted through texts (of all kinds) and speech in social and political contexts. It seeks to understand, expose, and resist social inequality (van Dijk 2001; van Leeuwen 2008). The battle waged by different social groups to make their opinion and interests prevail in the social space—the struggle for hegemony (Gramsci 2017)—is present in the news clipping and the case under analysis. This struggle is not fought on an equal footing because it is nearly impossible to oppose alternative discourses to hegemonic discourses (Foucault 1996), which are usually naturalised and unrecognised as ideological. Although all events are rooted in discourse, “the theoretical concept of ‘discursive events’ refers specifically to events that appear on the discourse of politics and the mass media intensively, extensively and for a prolonged period” (Jäger and Maier 2009: 54). The Case turned into a discursive event due to the involvement of the Public Security Police (PSP) and other security forces, the Black Portuguese Movement (BPM), the media (including the mainstream), government officials, among others, over a long period and with indelible consequences for the racism debate in Portugal.

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Racism/Othering and Anti-racism/ De-othering in Portugal Rooted in feminist and postcolonial works (Beauvoir 1949; Said 1978; Spivak 1988), othering refers to explicit and implicit processes of reproducing alterity by resorting to discursive binary opposition of in-group/ out-group, built on hierarchisation, where the former dominates the latter (Spivak 1988; El Tayeb 2011). The representation of migrants and refugees as an out-group (Brons 2015), along with other non-majority groups, namely Roma, Afro-descendent, indigenous and queer people (El Tayeb 2011) is an example of this dynamic, which relies on their stereotyping as inferior and or radically different members of society; and also on discursive violence against the out-group, cast as a voiceless and statusless social actor (Spivak 1988). Media plays a crucial role in the diffusion and crystallisation of who is ‘us’/in and who is ‘othered’/out. Racism is hence understood as a salient form of othering, the opposite process of de-othering—i.e., focused on producing horizontal representations and practices aimed at transforming society towards equality, social justice, solidarity, and peace, here represented by anti-racist discourses and practices. Black citizens in Portugal have long faced a process of othering and police brutality. The assault in the Alfragide police station (2015) was not the first case of police brutality nor an isolated incident. This case became a discursive event however because Black resistance and activism were on the rise, partly supported by the Black Lives Matter movement as well as by internal developments. The fact that some of the young people attacked belonged to the BPM is not insignificant. On the one hand, the brutalised youth were already informed and aware of what they should do in the face of assault. On the other hand, they were part of a network connected to the anti-racist struggle. The case ‘exploded’ on social media right after the fake news broadcast by the mainstream media, which accused young Black people of having invaded the police station. The discussion around the National Identity Law is an example of both othering and deothering faced by Black Portuguese, the latter showcasing the rising activism of the antiracist movement. In 2006, the nationality law was amended to reinforce the principle of jus soli (soil

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criterion) to the detriment of jus sanguinis (consanguinity criterion). In 2015 and 2018, changes were made to grant nationality to children of immigrants residing in Portugal for at least two years. This Law excluded people born in Portugal before its enactment. The BPM strived to put the issue back on the political agenda by demanding the attribution of Portuguese nationality to all people born in Portugal from 1981 onwards, eliminating the criteria for one of the parents to have been born in the country and to have resided here at the time of the child’s birth. It also demanded that foreign citizens who had been sentenced to a prison sentence equal to or greater than three years were not excluded from Portuguese nationality. In 2019 the issue was discussed again in the national parliament. The issue of nationality is closely linked with that of national identity. Portugal imagines itself as a white and Christian part of the European community. Integrating different ethnic affiliations is a long and painful process, especially for those who systematically remain at the margins of what is considered Portuguese. Paradoxically, the lusotropicalist theory that the Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre developed in the early 1930s rose to national ideology in the 1950s in Portugal. At the time, the objective of the fascist state was to justify its presence in Africa by circumventing the racist foundation of colonisation. According to this theory, the Portuguese have showcased a particular inclination to mix with other people since Portuguese colonisation was perceived as a benevolent process that provided an actual meeting between all peoples. Lusotropicalist ideas are still very present in Portuguese society, contributing to racism denial and blaming the PBM for racial conflicts (Araújo 2013; Pereira 2019). The historical difficulties of including the specific problems of Black communities on the political agenda led the BPM to commit itself to the election of Black MPs supporting small leftwing parties. The parties of the so-called governmental arc also realised the need to account for the votes of disaffected social minorities. In the 2019 legislative elections, three Black women were elected to the national parliament for the first time in the history of Portuguese democracy. Parallel to the processes of BPM strengthening and the discursive events it provoked, there was a resurgence of the far-right and of populist, racist, sexist, and xenophobic discourses, epitomized in the election of

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a far-right MP (CHEGA party) in 2019. In the 2022 legislative elections, this party became the third political force. Its discourses, based on lusotropicalism and empire nostalgia, have strong penetration in the mainstream media, including television. Lusotropicalism was used to deny racism and to portray ’common Portuguese’ as victims of ’antiracist radicals’, while nostalgia for the empire was used to belittle those not read as Portuguese. Finally, gender, religion, and nationality-based stereotypes were evoked to criminalise, exclude and even try to banish from Portugal citizens considered alien to the Portuguese ethnic/religious pattern (Santos and Roque 2021).

Methodology This article’s empirical material was retrieved from the (De)Othering Nvivo database, which collected and coded news and opinion pieces from daily Portuguese newspapers—Correio da Manhã (365 items in total), Observador (278), and Público (606 items)—between the years 2015 and 2019, selected through a keyword-based search (racism, Afro-descendants, Blacks, immigrants, Africans, neighbourhoods, delinquency, and colonialism). The database aimed at an examination of diverse media representations of immigrants, refugees, and ‘internal others’ in Portugal. These newspapers were selected precisely because of their divergent public and political stances. Correio da Manhã (CM) is a popular newspaper (tabloid). It is characterised by the use of plenty of images against little text; the absence of reports and background work; the use of stereotypes when referring to ‘internal others’; the resort to negative contextualisation, or lack of context; and the deficit of first-person accounts. Observador is a right-wing online newspaper that privileges official sources (police, government, court, etc.) and neglects the gaze of ‘internal others’—whether because its journalists are all White Portuguese, or because Black and Roma people are distrusted as credible sources. News related to racism, migrants, and ‘internal others’ is infrequent and when existent its author is often Lusa (the Portuguese media agency).

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Público is a centre-left newspaper, closer to independent journalism, even though it belongs to an economic group (Sonae). It privileges source diversity and includes some journalists committed to giving visibility to ‘internal others’; while it offers an opinion space to activists from ethnic and social minorities and promotes difficult discussions on colonialism, racism, and xenophobia.

The Alfragide Station Case On February 5, 2015, a short Lusa news take was broadcasted by different media: “A dozen young people tried to invade the PSP police station in Alfragide at 2 pm on Thursday”. The version of the events reported by the police was that a young man was arrested in Cova da Moura, a neighbourhood on the outskirts of the Lisbon metropolitan area, after throwing a stone at a police van and breaking a window. He was taken to Alfragide’s police station, and later his colleagues invaded the police station. The explanations were then given to Lusa by subcommissioner Abreu, the spokesman for the PSP’s Lisbon Metropolitan Command (Cometlis). Afterward, accounts from several witnesses claimed that it all had started with a raid in Cova da Moura, with the police randomly searching residents. A young man was detained by officers of the PSP’s rapid intervention team without justification. The violence used in his detention led some residents watching the episode, primarily women, to protest. The police dispersed those on the street with rubber bullets. People ran and took refuge where they could while the officers handcuffed the young man, transporting him to the police station in a van, where he was assaulted. Upon learning of the events, five young men decided to go to the Alfragide police station where the young man was being held. This was standard procedure for obtaining information and preventing the detainees from being mistreated, especially since the Alfragide police station is known among residents for the brutality of its officers. While trying to talk to the police outside the station, the five youths were assaulted with kicks, punches, clubs, and rubber bullets. Once inside the police station, they were attacked again and suffered numerous threats

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and racist humiliations. It was later learned that one of them had been hit in the leg twice with rubber bullets, two had broken teeth, and the five had bruises and wounds on their bodies and faces (Raposo et al. 2019). In July 2015, the Minister of Internal Affairs initiated a disciplinary process against nine PSP officers involved in the incidents. This resulted in the suspension of three officers for 90 days (DN, July 7, 2015). The Public Prosecutor’s Office (PPO) opened a case against 18 police officers from the Alfragide police station, and the charge of breaking into that police station, imputed to five young men, was withdrawn. In an unprecedented trial, the PPO accused 17 PSP officers (a female police officer was acquitted in the meantime) of slanderous denunciation, injury, kidnapping, offenses to physical integrity, torture, perjury, and forgery of documents, all aggravated by racial hatred. On May 20, 2019, the judges acquitted nine police officers and sentenced seven to suspended sentences (from two months to five years) and one to an effective sentence of one year and six months for recidivism. However, in its closing arguments, the PPO had already dropped the allegations of torture and racism.

Opinion Struggles in Mainstream Print Media Between the occurrence of the aggressions (2015) and the court’s final decision to convict the police (2019), there were a total of 76 articles related to this Case (70 news articles and six opinion pieces) in the three analysed newspapers. While this paper is focused on opinion, the analysis also raised questions regarding the relationship between news and opinion, which involves issues relating to the identity of each newspaper, and, most importantly, of power as “a whole series of particular mechanisms, definable and defined, that seem capable of inducing behaviours or discourses” (Foucault 1996: 394).

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Correio da Manhã CM dedicated two opinion articles to the Case. The first was published on February 9, 2015, on page 19, in the column entitled “Passing of the Hours”, signed by Rui Hortelão, a middle-aged white man, director of the magazine Sábado, which belongs to the same media group as CM. The article was not accompanied by images, only the passport photograph of its author, next to the name, on top of the written text. The author called this short text “Invasion or repression?” and began by reproducing the initial news conveyed by mainstream media, to which he added that “the case seemed serious and the PPO requested the preventive detention of the accused” and, immediately after, the element of surprise: the Judge applied to them the lowest duress penalty “Identity and Residence term.” In the second part of the piece, the author stopped referring to ‘news’ and started to describe a ‘new version’ of events, deeply ironical, resorting to the adverbs ‘after all’ and ‘only’ and also putting the expression ‘rubber’ in square brackets: Another version of events emerged through SOS Racism. After all, the young people only went to the police station to find out about their friend, but “they were shot” [with rubber].

Hortelão only openly revealed his thesis in the last part of the article: the distance between the ‘facts’ presented by the police and the ‘version’ of SOS Racism (an antiracist association) is so great that it is urgent to find out the truth because, according to the author, while the facts are not established, the opportunism of the political party Bloco de Esquerda (Left Bloc) and SOS Racism will prevail: The Bloco de Esquerda, which soon ran to ask the Government for an explanation, and SOS Racism, which threw into the fire “The impunity with which the police acts in peripheral neighbourhoods must end.”

The piece excluded the possibility (later confirmed) of a group of young Portuguese being victims of police aggression and conspiracy, motivated by racial hatred, and gave visibility to a false idea of social polarisation

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and radicalism on the part of anti-racist forces, through the metaphor of the ‘bonfire.’ For Hortelão the real problem was not police violence, nor racist hatred, but the opportunism of SOS Racism and Bloco de Esquerda. Invisibilization—obtained in this case through irony—“presents a successful strategy of withdrawal from what otherwise would cause social reprobation, that is suffering” (Herzog 2020: 188). The second opinion piece on the Case appears on July 15, 2017, on page 12. The column entitled “Security Mail” is signed by César Nogueira, a white, middle-aged man, president of the Republican National Guard (GNR) Professionals’ Association. The article did not feature images, only the passport photograph of the author next to the name above the written text. Using a well-known discourse strategy (Bonilla-Silva 2006; van Dijk 2001; van Leeuwen 2008), the text entitled “Troublesome Truths” began by claiming that, if the events of the Alfragide Police Station were to be true, they must be treated with rigor, giving its author an image of moderation and neutrality, to then introduce the adversative “but” and say what he really meant, i.e., that the same rigor must be applied to the uncomfortable realities that are covered up by the anti-racist discourse. For Nogueira, social indignation against police violence is harmful because “the courts” are not immune to it. Put differently, there should be silence on the issue so as not to influence the judges’ decision: Condemnations are promoted in the public realm on issues such as racism, xenophobia, and violence in the Security forces, and the Courts are not immune to this.

The author warned that: The criminal reality in sensitive neighbourhoods is complex and it is not uncommon for there to be unfair accusations of violence, just in an attempt to allow criminals to get away with it.

The expression “sensitive neighbourhoods” refers to neighbourhoods inhabited mainly by immigrants and Afro-descendants. The author reproduced a false idea that crime in these places is more significant and

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more violent (Maeso 2021), insinuating that accusations of racism are a card that criminals play to get away with it. The words “complex”, “unfair accusations of violence” and most of all, “criminals” reinforced well-known tropes about Black people as aggressive and violent (Pereira 2019). Yet, the author went further and stated that the media coverage of this case might hinder police action in the future: This condemnatory mediatisation can also enhance the hesitation to act for fear of punishment, even if the situation justifies it.

This sentence feeds the fear of the “other” who is cast as a potential criminal, of whom even the police are afraid. At the time Nogueira wrote this, it was already clear that the police officers had forged evidence and created a false narrative. Hence, the author—a member of a police force—resorted to the projection strategy. Projection is an effective and quite common self defence instrument as well as a key tool in creating an “us” versus “them” dichotomy (Pereira et al. 2019). It helps us “escape blame and responsibility and allocate blame elsewhere” (Bonilla-Silva 2006: 64). The argumentative strategy of “face maintenance” has a strong and complex battery of semantic actions and one of them consists explicitly of inversion: focusing on the intolerance of the “other” (van Dijk 1992). Nogueira concluded that The obligation to use force properly and proportionally cannot be confused with the ineffectiveness of the police, just because controversial issues may be at stake.

The “controversial issues” referred to the aggressiveness of Black populations, crime in the neighbourhoods mentioned above, and to the difficulties experienced by the police when dealing with these populations. The author implied that one cannot openly address such issues and that this contributes to weakening the police. Nogueira closed his article by insinuating that the BPM worked to achieve media prominence and to “cloud memories”:

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Crime has no race or creed and deserves the same treatment. One thing is sure, whenever something serious happens in the country, new controversy arises ‘innocently’ involving the security forces assuming the spotlight of the news and clouding memories.

In this paragraph, the author once again proved his moderation by stating that every crime deserves equal treatment and then insinuated that this case was being used to mask other cases/crimes. By resorting to a series of stereotypes about Black populations, both articles shed light on the alleged dangerousness of the BPM and on the supposedly widespread criminality in Black neighbourhoods, rendering invisible the racist brutality of the Portuguese police.

Observador No article was dedicated to the Case in Observador. The newspaper has 29 regular columnists and more than 2500 guests who occasionally contribute to its opinion segment and publishes between seven and fifteen opinion pieces every day ((De)Othering database). Among its regular columnists, seven are women, and the remaining 22 are men, all of them read as white. The topics covered in the opinion section are diverse and range from science, politics, economics, society, etc. However, there was not a single person among the resident columnists who thought it was pertinent to write about the Case. The newspaper did not find it relevant to invite someone to write about this issue in the opinion space either. It is important to mention that Observador did not make the event invisible in the news space, having published 15 articles over five years. Yet, by not reflecting on the event, on police violence, or on the criminalisation of certain social groups, the Case was silenced and rendered invisible by the newspaper. Silencing is knowingly a powerful mechanism that can be used to eliminate participation in the public sphere, in which the “struggles” about knowledge, definitions, practices, and the distribution of power occur. Silenced social groups are denied access to this space (Herzog 2018, 2020). Further, to participate in the public sphere, subjects must often accept the hegemonic rules of the dominant segment of society, leaving their group of belonging (Spivak

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1988). Invisibilisation extends further and refers to the impossibility of perceiving the Other empathetically. The moral claims of the Other, even when perceved as a similar human being do not have the same status as as those of physical and social equals, which makes it difficult to perceive the Other empathetically or as equal.

Público Público published four opinion articles on the Case. On February 14, 2015, the first one appeared on page 45 and was signed by historian Manuel Loff, a middle-aged white man who writes a biweekly Saturday chronicle entitled “On the Contrary”. In addition to the author’s passport photograph, the article is accompanied by an image of an anti-racist demonstration, in which a Black woman is holding a sign that says “Police Violence.” The photograph is credited to Nuno Ferreira Santos, but it is unclear which event it represents. The author called this article “Mild Customs”, alluding to the idea that the Portuguese way of being and living is mild. The author began his text with “Since Lusotropicalism became the official doctrine of Salazarism…”, followed by a summary of some myths derived from Freyre’s theory and the ways in which these were perpetuated in the Portuguese common sense. Loff used expressions of former Presidents to assert his point of view, showcasing the state of denial in which the country lives concerning racism: For more than a century, the majority of Portuguese people let themselves be convinced, with the greatest of self-condescension, by the idea of the Portuguese exception in the world and in history, of a supposed essential difference that would have meant that after so much “we sowed the seed of universal solidarity” (as Mário Soares said in 1992), from having known “to really understand and mix with others” (Cavaco, in 2008), that our collective life would have been free from prejudice and racial persecution—or that our colonies were not colonies, and, by the way, that the colonial war was neither colonial nor war at all...

Although some ideas related to Portuguese exceptionality are older, associating the concept of Lusotropicalism with the phrase “Most Portuguese

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people have been convinced for over a century…” is not rigorous. Freyre published Casa Grande e Senzala in 1933, and, at that time, the book was banned in Portugal because it questioned the purity of the “Portuguese race”. It was not until the 1950s that Lusotropicalism was simplified and transformed into the official doctrine of the Portuguese State (Castelo 1998). In any case, this paragraph demonstrated how lusotropicalist ideas remained in the discourse of power, even after 1974. The author asked how one can understand the events in Cova da Moura in a country that claims to be non-racist. Then Loff summarised the events, including the statements that the youths who were assaulted had given to Público’s journalist Joana Gorjão Henriques, and offered a personal reflection: The problem is that this time, in addition to Bruno Lopes, one of the many unemployed young people in the neighbourhood who are used to police violence, they [the police officers] did not hesitate to arrest, beat and ask for preventive detention (refused by the judge) of activists of a community project that has existed for 30 years in Cova da Moura, and was credited with awards such as the National parliament’s Human Rights Prize.

Loff emphasised the social distinctiveness of the victims to explain why “this time” attention was being paid to violence against young Black people; in doing so, he wanted to make clear that “many unemployed young people” in Cova da Moura are often victims of police violence. The author confronted racism denial, this time resorting to comparison not only to the discourse on the Portuguese colonial past but also to the national discourse on other countries: the racism of others and colonialism of others—always worse than ours. Next, Loff entered the most biting part of his text: the moment he referred to the conclusions of a set of studies and reports that denounce the existence of racism in Portuguese society and within the police. After this relatively long paragraph, the author considered himself in possession of the necessary conditions to give his opinion: Those who still doubt the racism installed in Portuguese society [...] They live in a country in denial: whoever gets caught, take care; something must be done!

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It took another two and a half years for an opinion related to the Case to be published in P. On August 27, 2017, the young activist of Indian origin Sadiq S. Habib signed, as an anthropologist, the opinion article “SOS24 - opinion journalism or journalistic policing?” The author is not part of the newspaper’s opinion group; he writes occasionally, especially in the summer, when many journalists and other columnists are on holiday. There is no image of the author accompanying the article, but an image of a demonstration against police violence featuring several Black people. In the foreground on the left two posters are visible: one held by a young man, saying “No to aggression” while showing a Black man’s mouth with a broken tooth, and further back on the right, a poster saying, “I don’t want to be afraid of the police,” held by an older woman with both hands. The photograph is credited to Nuno Ferreira Santos, but the moment it represents is not referenced. Habib’s article was a critical reflection on how mainstream television was dealing with the Case and presented his thesis right at the beginning (like a lead): “This case does nothing more than to highlight the way in which the television constitutes itself as a sounding board for fascism”. As the title and the summary indicate, it was not a text about the Case itself but about how a television channel—TVI—gave space to the racist right, reproducing its stereotypes related to the Black population, and summoned up the logic of social panic, not only to defend the police but also to condemn the youths who were assaulted. As means of conclusion, Habib wrote: None of our liberation movements ever had the sympathy of the mainstream media. Why should we expect anything different?

The question is pertinent in the Portuguese context and intends to link the current BPM to a past struggle against colonialism, but it also links it—because he mentioned them before—to US Black movements. The opinion Habib utters before the question is not shared by a substantial part of the BPM. The collaboration between media and anti-racist movements has consistently been recognised as very important by the latter. The coverage of the Civil Rights Movement in the US between 1950 and 1960 is an example of how the impact of accurate but not neutral news

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coverage matters for real change (Greenberg 2008). Activists in the Civil Rights Movement were not oblivious to the importance of the media, and neither were the leaders of the movement (Philley 2012). The BPM’s efforts to be present in mainstream media have been significant in the belief that in this way, it can influence public discussion and political agendas. Unfortunately, among the Portuguese mainstream media, Público seems to be the only one to understand the advantage of listening to these voices, even though it does so in a minimal fashion, focusing on Lisbon-based activists. The last two opinion pieces about the Case in Público were written by Mamadou Ba, leader of the anti-racist association SOS Racism. Ba is a Black man of Senegalese origin, around 50 years old, who has been living in Portugal since the 1990s. The first piece is from May 22, 2018; it appears on page 49 and is entitled “What colour will our justice be dressed in?” Above the author’s passport-type photograph, the sentence “More than three years later, the Alfragide police officers finally go on trial” stands out. Ba drew attention to the fact that this case is “finally” starting to be tried, describing the list of charges that the PPO made to the defendants and recalling that Black populations have been victims of police violence for decades, “shielded by the indifference of most of Portuguese society and the impunity they have always enjoyed”. The author named two fatal casualties of police violence in recent years, hinting that more names could be added to the list. He accused the police of failing to comply with “codes and procedures that require smoothness, equal treatment, respect for the dignity, the physical and moral integrity of people” when they raid ‘Black neighbourhoods’. Next, Ba reflected on the public debate that this case has generated, showing how some social sectors have tried to defend the police and the accused police officers, and how the presumption of innocence never applies to Black bodies, to conclude: ... the fact that this indictment is so crystal clear and is coming to trial is of capital importance. Its size and the gravity of the facts imputed to the officers make it an unprecedented case, which gives it social and political relevance. It may help unmask racism within the institutions and the myths about the exemption and smoothness of the security forces in their relationship with racialised subjects. Bringing charges in the terms in

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which they occurred also demonstrates that, if there is a will, it is possible for the Public Prosecutor’s Office to do its job properly and to confront the actions of the police when they break the law.

The author briefly pointed out taking this case to trial was made possible by social mobilisation and exhorted the Portuguese to acknowledge the prevailing institutional racism that he believes this case represents: The concern at the beginning of this trial is whether our justice system will continue to wear the colour of white privilege and the state of denial in which Portuguese society and institutions find themselves in the face of racism. (...) Our expectations, although insecure, are great and reflect nothing more than the legitimate aspiration for equality and justice.

On June 1, 2019, on page 20, a new article by Ba, entitled “What was left uncondemned” closed the set of opinions on this case. The passport-type photograph that tops the author’s name was at this time accompanied by the word ‘Opinion’ written in orange letters. The article was accompanied by an image credited to Rui Gaudêncio, showing a group of GNR officers (in uniform) entering a revolving door. Below, the sentence: To admit that there is a pattern of racist violence and that this is structural is not to say that ‘all’ officers are racist; it is only to recognise - as others have done - that this violence is structural.

The article intended to draw attention to the fact that the officers were not convicted for ‘crimes of torture and racial hatred’, as the prosecution had dropped this charge. Structural racism could hardly be targeted for conviction, although Ba’s entire article is an effort to show that it was structural racism that allowed torture and racial hatred to go uncondemned. Ba began by quoting excerpts from the trial: “Also on this occasion, an unidentified officer addressed the offended several times in the following terms: ‘Fucking niggers, you should all die! What do you want, you fucking niggers?’” “As for the defendant H. [...],

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he addressed at least the offended R. [...], in these terms: ‘you fucking niggers, go back home!’”

He described how the police officers, after assaulting the victims, tried to blame them for what happened; how during the process some unions and security forces alongside PSP’s leading structures attempted to discredit the victims and the PPO itself. The legal bullying against victims and witnesses during the process and the way in which “despite the evident physical and psychological marks of the victims, the panel of judges considered that they did not have enough proof to convict the criminals for the crimes of torture and racial hatred,” meant that this was a missed opportunity to combat institutional racism and impunity in the security forces. For Ba, the convictions fell short of what could be expected, even though a police officer was sentenced to prison because it is not possible to trust those who “lied, forged documents, abused their powers, kidnapped, humiliated and raped citizens”. Finally, Ba claimed: What happened in the Alfragide case calls for structural changes in the organisation of the police forces, in the recruitment and training of their personnel, and in the public and democratic scrutiny of their activity. [...]Let us hope that this sentence will become jurisprudence and that the judicial system will gain more and more courage to confront racism where it is most harmful to democracy, in the institutions.

Conclusion Concerning opinion production, the Alfragide police station case was not a central focus of either of the daily newspapers. This case became a discursive event through, first of all, digital media, especially social networks. It was, later, picked up by television and social movements, and finally political power. Mainstream newspapers, particularly conservative ones, kept this case out of the public discussion, notably after realising that the police’s initial version was false. The invisibilisation of the case was forged in different ways. CM published two opinion articles on the case, both suggesting the criminalisation of public debate around the event.

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In Observador the issue was not addressed in the opinion segment at all, being totally ignored as a possible matter of sociological, political, or other reflection. In Público, the reader was given four opinion articles on the case, but only one of the usual columnists wrote a piece on the topic. The remaining opinion articles were written by occasional guests who were members of the anti-racist movement. Thus, we can conclude that in P the Case was perceived as a matter that concerned only Black people, having no importance for society as a whole. It was a matter of the ‘others’ that only affected ‘them’; therefore, only one of the dozens of columnists in the newspaper (all-white at the time) wrote about it. For Herzog (2018: 13), “the very notion of exclusion typically refers to communicatively or discursively produced mechanisms that lead a group to be considered irrelevant in public processes of communication. Exclusion and marginalisation might therefore be understood as processes of silencing or invisibilizing social groups”, of othering, thus “making silence heard, giving voice to the silenced, and bringing the invisibilized back into the public domain are (...) fundamental tasks of solidarity in reaching a higher degree of social integration” and equality (de-othering). The facts narrated by victims of police abuse and the evidence they presented enabled racialised subjects to talk about other cases of racism in the police forces and put the issue of institutional and structural racism in public discussion. Opinion articles produced by non-white authors have as a common denominator the attempt to deconstruct the hegemonic discourse conveyed by the media, police forces, and power. Even though some concrete denunciations are put forward, namely in Ba’s texts, the presentation of an anti-racist discourse was mainly done through deconstruction: fact-checking; comparison of situations; and the confrontation of double standards. The analysis shows that the discursive strategies of opinion in the daily newspapers are neither unique nor different from those used in other countries, meaning that the much-heralded Portuguese exceptionality does not exist. The scope of this article does not allow us to extend the analysis to other media events of the same period, such as the debate on the National Identity Law; the question about the ethnic origin of citizens in the 2021

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census; the election of three Black women to the Portuguese parliament (2019); or the election of a far-right deputy to the national parliament (2019). The study of these other cases will be critical in the future to assess more comprehensively the discursive strategies of the Portuguese mainstream newspapers regarding Black populations and to understand whether the ethical issues underlying the turning of the Alfragide police station case into a court case prevented some opinion-makers from writing. However, the general conclusions of the (De)othering project allow us to affirm that the Portuguese mainstream media participates in and reproduces racism by at times conveying stereotypes about Black people while more often than not ignoring prevailing racism in society, invisibilizing violence and treating violent incidents as exceptions to the rule in a non-racist country. Therefore, the erasure of the Case in the Portuguese mainstream opinion is a cruel manifestation of institutional racism.

References Araújo, M. (2013). “Challenging Narratives on Diversity and Immigration in Portugal: The (De)Politicization of Colonialism and Racism”, in Philip Kretsedemas (org.), Migrant Marginality: A Transnational Perspective. Oxon: Routledge, 27–46. Beauvoir, S. (1949). Le Deuxième Sexe. Paris: Gallimard. Bonilla-Silva, E. (2006). Racism without Racists: Colour Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States. Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Brons, L. (2015). “Othering, an Analysis.” Transcience 6 (1): 69–90. Cardoso, G. & Baldi, V. (Coord.) (2018). As Fake News numa Sociedade Pós-Verdade. Contextualização, potenciais soluções e análise. Relatórios OberCom. https://obercom.pt/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/2018-Relato rios-Obercom-Fake-News.pdf Castelo, C. (1998). “O Modo português de estar no mundo”, o luso-tropicalismo e a ideologia colonial portuguesa (1933–1961). Porto: Edições Afrontamento.

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Coppock, A.; Ekins, E. & Kirby, D. (2018). “The Long-lasting Effects of Newspaper Op-Eds on Public Opinion,” Quarterly Journal of Political Science 13 (1): 59–87. Cunha, I. F.; Santos, C. A., Silveirinha, M. J.; Peixinho, A. T. (2004). Media, imigração e minorias étnicas. Lisbon: ACIME. Cunha, I. F.; Santos, C. (2008). Media, imigração e minorias étnicas 2005– 2006 . Lisbon: ACIDI/Observatório da Imigração. DN (July 07, 2015). “Três agentes da PSP suspensos”, online. Available at: https://www.jn.pt/justica/tres-agentes-da-psp-suspensos-4666600.html El Tayeb, F. (2011). European Others: Queering Ethnicity in Postcolonial Europe. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ERC. (2009). Imigração, diversidade étnica, linguística, religiosa e cultural na imprensa e na televisão: 2008. Lisbon: ERC. Fairclough, N. (1995). Discourse and Social Change. Cambridge/Malden: Polity Press. Foucault, M. (1996). What is Critique? In J. Schmidt (Ed.), What is Enlightenment? Eighteenth-Century Answers and Twentieth-Century Questions. Berkeley et al.: University of California Press, 382–398 Gramsci, A. (2017). A cultura, os subalternos, a educação. Lisboa: Edições Colibri. Greenberg, D. (2008). “The Idea of “The Liberal Media” and its Roots in the Civil Rights Movement.” The Sixties: A Journal of History, Politics and Culture. 1 (2): 167–186. https://doi.org/10.1080/17541320802457111 Herzog, B. (2020). Invisibilization of Suffering: The Moral Grammar of Disrespect. Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28448-0 Herzog, B. (2018). “Invisibilization and Silencing as an Ethical and Sociological Challenge.” Social Epistemology 32 (1): 13–23. http://www.tandfonline. com/doi/full/10.1080/02691728.2017.1383529 Jäger, S.; Maier, F. (2009). “Theoretical and Methodological Aspects of Foucauldian Critical Discourse Analysis,” in R. Wodak and M. Meyer (Eds.), Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis. London: Sage, 34–61. Maeso, S. (org.) (2021). O Estado do Racismo em Portugal: racismo antinegro e anticiganismo no direito e nas políticas públicas. Lisboa: Tinta da China. Pereira, A. C. (2019). Otherness and Identity in Cinematographic Fiction in Portugal and Mozambique. Ph.D. dissertation in Culture Studies, University of Minho. Braga: Portugal. https://hdl.handle.net/1822/65858

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Pereira, A.C.; Macedo, I.; Cabecinhas, R. (2019). “Film Screening African Lisbon: Talking about Li ké terra and Horse Money in Classrooms.” Lusophone Journal of Cultural Studies 6 (1): 115–135. https://doi.org/10.21814/ rlec.383 Philley, A. (2012). “The Civil Rights Movement: The Power of Television”. 3690: Journal of First-Year Student Research Writing. Vol 2012, Article 4. https://fisherpub.sjfc.edu/journal3690/vol2012/iss1/4 Pinto, P. J. R. (2018). Fake news e social media em Portugal: conceitos, realidades e hipóteses. Master dissertation in Sociology, at University of Porto. Porto: Portugal. https://repositorio-aberto.up.pt/bitstream/10216/119799/ 2/333946.pdf Raposo, O.; Alves, A.R.; Varela, P.; Roldão, C. (2019). “Negro Drama. Racism, Segregation and Police Violence on the Outskirts of Lisbon.” Revista Crítica de Ciências Sociais 119: 5–28. https://doi.org/10.4000/rccs.8937 Said, E. (1978). Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books. Santos, R; Santos, S. J. (2021), “Covid-19 Pandemic: The Reproduction and Contestation of Securitisation of Asylum Seekers, Immigrants and Afro-Descendants in the Portuguese Media,” From the European South 9: 47–68. Santos, R.; Roque, S. (2021). “The Populist Far-right and the Intersection of Antiimmigration and Antifeminist Agendas: The Portuguese Case”, DiGeSt - Journal of Diversity and Gender Studies, 8 (1): 41–58. https://doi.org/10. 21825/digest.v8i1.16958 Silva, M. T. (coord.) (2021). Discurso de ódio, jornalismo e participação das audiências—enquadramento, regulação e boas práticas. Lisboa: Almedina. Spivak, G. C. (1988). “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in C. N. L. Grossberg (Ed.), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Basingstoke: Macmillan Education, 271–313. The Media Insight Project (2018). Americans and the News Media: What they do—and don’t—Understand about Each Other. American Press Institute and the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. https://www.americanpressinstitute.org/publications/rep orts/survey-research/americans-and-the-news-media/ van Dijk, T. A. (2001). “Critical Discourse Analysis,” In D. Tannen, D. Schiffrin, & H. Hamilton (Eds.), Handbook of Discourse Analysis. Oxford: Blackwell, 352–371. van Leeuwen, T. (2008). Discourse and Practice: New Tools for Critical Discourse Analysis. New York: Oxford University Press.

Maori, ¯ Policing, and Mass Media Narratives in Aotearoa New Zealand Robert Webb

and Antje Deckert

Introduction This chapter explores how contemporary police narratives and mass media accounts of policing compound to reinforce the racist criminalisation and over-policing of M¯aori. We explore different policing-related narratives that have recently made mass media headlines in Aotearoa New Zealand (NZ), as well as the attempt of Indigenous resistance to these. These include the narrative of ‘unconscious bias’, the representations in the television show Police Ten 7, and the narrative of ‘useful intelligence’ related to the illegal photographing of M¯aori children and youth. The analysis extends upon the international studies that explore R. Webb (B) University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand e-mail: [email protected] A. Deckert Auckland University of Technology, Auckland, New Zealand e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Bhatia et al. (eds.), Racism, Violence and Harm, Palgrave Studies in Crime, Media and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-37879-9_4

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the criminalisation of ethnic and marginalised minorities by the state and the mass media (Bhatia et al. 2018). It explores the criminalisation of M¯aori and the origins from a history of state control and colonialism, and how mass media portrayals continue to sustain systemic and institutional racism in criminal justice practices. Like similar studies on the media and Indigenous people (Cunneen 2018), we also note that the mass media constructs and reproduces a racialised criminality linked to Indigenous people and culture. As Deckert (2020) argues, these representations may be used ideologically to support further ongoing discrimination against M¯aori, and that, “…it cannot be underestimated how discriminatory portrayals of criminal actors may sway public consent for crime or penal policies that target specific social groups” (pp. 339–340). In the first part of this analysis, we provide a background into the previous research on mass media portrayals in Aotearoa and examples of the criminalisation of M¯aori. This is followed by a discussion of how the New Zealand Police (NZP) have utilised the mainstream mass media to perpetuate their narrative of ‘unconscious bias’, and how this narrative serves to deny systemic and institutionalised racism in the policing of M¯aori communities. We then discuss the reality-TV show Police Ten 7 , which, for 20 years, was a prominent platform for policenarrated portrayals of offenders. We explore a media debate that occurred in 2021, after a politician called for its discontinuation because the show stereotyped M¯aori and Pasifika1 as inherently criminal and violent. Finally, we examine how M¯aori attempt to utilise mass media as a site of resistance, using as an example the recently uncovered police practice of taking illegal photos of innocent M¯aori youth and storing them in a national crime database. We argue that, by and large, the mass media has had a long history of exploiting racialised crime stories that construct M¯aori as the criminal other and that these stories are exploited for the denial of systemic racism in the criminal legal system, ignoring M¯aori as crime victims and their experiences of state violence. While M¯aori can attempt to strategically use mass media to expose and resist illegal state control practices that target M¯aori, we argue that, due to their infrequency, such counter-narratives do little to weaken the 1

. The term ‘Pasifika’ is widely used in Aotearoa New Zealand to describe Pacific migrants.

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prevalent media discourses around crime. We conclude that contemporary media narratives about policing in Aotearoa New Zealand serve to reinforce a neo-colonial belief system among the P¯akeh¯a majority population that seeks to justify ongoing expansive state control into M¯aori communities and the denial of Indigenous self-determination.

New Zealand Mass Media and the Criminalisation of Maori ¯ Critical studies in Aotearoa have highlighted both the historical and ongoing racialisation and criminalisation of M¯aori by the state and the media (Nairn et al. 2012; McCreanor et al. 2014; Deckert 2020). Ballara (1986), for example, explored how the mainstream press developed during the nineteenth-century colonial period and reflected the ethnocentrism and racism of the colonisers, using the racist imagery of the Indigenous population to justify the widespread colonial violence and theft of land. Ballara also notes that colonial attitudes remained entrenched in media reporting during the twentieth century, and that racial stereotypes were used to portray M¯aori as criminals. Other analyses have also examined how M¯aori aspirations to having Indigenous rights and struggles for self-determination have been criminalised. Abel (1997), for example, studied the television coverage of Waitangi Day2 and found that the narratives (a) emphasised a monocultural P¯akeh¯a3 worldview of the day, (b) promoted a fictive notion of national unity that M¯aori were portrayed as fighting against, and (c) portrayed any criticisms of the state’s continued denial of Indigenous rights as creating conflict and disorder. Devadas (2013) also speaks to the denial of Indigenous sovereignty through the media and the reinforcement of colonial governance using the example of the mass media coverage of NZP raids on activist groups and a small M¯aori community in Ruatoki (on T¯uhoe land) under NZ terrorism legislation in 2007. The analysis shows the 2 Waitangi Day is a national holiday to commemorate the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi, which is considered to be the nations founding document. 3 P¯ akeh¯a is the M¯aori term for a person of European descent.

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international and mainstream national media coverage of the raids and the ensuing five-year trial of those charged relied heavily on a racialised moral panic against the M¯aori ‘terror’ suspects, despite P¯akeh¯a activists also being involved. The narrative conflated Indigenous sovereignty with terrorism and created an image of M¯aori as radicals fighting against national unity, thereby justifying police ‘anti-terror’ raids in the interests of public safety (Devadas 2013, p. 6). By contrast, as Abel (2008) observes of alternative coverage, the M¯aori produced news bulletins ‘Te Karere’ and ‘Te Kaea’ spoke to the excessive state force used against Tuhoe, and the fear that the community experienced including families and children from being detained by heavily armed police. Moreover, several studies of NZ mass media have spoken directly to the criminalisation of M¯aori. The research group Kupu Taea (2008) notes that one of the legacies of NZ’s colonial past is the tendency for the mainstream media to identify the indigeneity of police suspects but not use ethnic labels for P¯akeh¯a: Police news releases are more likely to label suspects as M¯aori than Caucasian, and more likely to use physical description with P¯akeh¯a suspects than ethnic labels. They are also more likely to emphasise the M¯aori ancestry of suspects by using terms such as “part-M¯aori”. We call this over-labelling of M¯aori suspects. (p. 7)

McCreanor and colleagues (2014) also show the criminalisation of M¯aori by the print media whose overall content focused heavily on stories of offending by M¯aori. Common news themes include M¯aori being violent, ‘stirrers’, troublemakers, and threatening to non-M¯aori. This form of agenda setting against M¯aori through a focus on and association with negative stories can influence the wider practices and racist attitudes of a society as McCreanor and colleagues (2014) observe: While the contemporary expressions of the marginalisation and dominance of M¯aori of the mass media are arguably more nuanced than their earlier renditions, they continue to do the racist work fundamental to the maintenance of the colonial state. Despite protestations that they merely reflect reality, they produce and reproduce M¯aori as deviant and threatening in what Gargett (2005, 1) has described as a ‘continuing drone of

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colonialism’ that seamlessly reproduces our historically unjust status quo. (p. 137)

We extend upon these analyses by arguing that it is not only the criminalisation and racist stereotyping of M¯aori by the mass media that reinforces a colonial gaze. We explore the area of policing to speak to the ways NZ state officials deny the existence of systemic and institutionalised racism in policies and practices and how they use the mass media to spread their narrative of denial. As Hall and colleagues (1978) note, agenda setting through the media allows the police to become one of the primary definers of what is considered criminal and the policing response towards it. McGovern and Lee (2010) also speak to the problems of the relationship between the mass media and the reliance on police for information, which allows the uncritical reporting of police perspectives in stories on crime in the news. We turn to the example of the term ‘unconscious bias’ as a narrative that has been deployed in the media by senior NZP leadership to deny the existence of racism in contemporary policing. In spreading this NZP narrative of denial, mass media reinforce the idea that the justice system is neutral, rather than another colonising artefact that continues to affect the daily lives of M¯aori communities.

The New Zealand Police Narrative of ‘Unconscious Bias’ In 2009 and 2010, the Auckland Police Districts piloted an early warning and alternate resolutions policy which gave NZP in cases of minor offending, the discretion to warn rather than arresting. The evaluation of the pilot recorded disparities in the application of the use of discretion, with M¯aori less likely than other ethnic groups to receive warnings (O’Reilly 2010). Nevertheless, the policy was deployed nationally. In 2015, when the police figures showed again that NZP applied its discretion disparately, the then NZP Commissioner Mike Bush took the unprecedented step to publicly acknowledge this was due to what he termed ‘unconscious bias’ (Owen 2015).

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When questioned whether he meant this was racism by the police against M¯aori, Bush rejected the possibility. He instead argued that: Unconscious bias, we’ve spent quite a bit of time getting to understand that, and it does not mean that [racism]. It’s something that everyone inherently has, and it’s important that as police officers and professionals, we know how to understand that and ensure that we don’t practise unconscious bias. (Owen 2015)

The current Police Commissioner, Andrew Coster, continues to repeat this narrative of ‘unconscious bias’ and initiated a research programme to explore this type of bias in the organisation (RNZ 2021). Critics of this argument have noted that this re-labelling of systemic institutionalised discrimination as a form of bias lessens the visibility of entrenched structures of racism. As Workman (2021) argues, “labelling racism as ‘unconscious bias’ can be a convenient way for organisations to avoid responsibility, shifting responsibility from the state to the ‘blameless’ individual” (p. 324). We argue that with the deployment of the ‘unconscious bias’ narrative, the NZP engages in a media dialogue to reframe and dismiss systemic racism, thus reinforcing and normalising discrimination and othering in policing practices. It denies the possibility that M¯aori may be victims of state violence, institutionalised racism, and racial profiling. Both Waitoki (2019) and Asafo (2021) have demonstrated how the colonial state utilises mass media to convey narratives that deny the existence of systemic racism and the ongoing violent harms of colonisation. As Workman (2021) observes: The problem may lie deeper than we think. Because social psychologists tend to analyse and attribute racism as a problem of biased individuals (rather than a systemic force embedded in society), we can easily lose sight of the role played by institutions and wider society. This portrayal of racism as an individual – rather than systemic – phenomenon can blind P¯akeh¯a to racism and can guide policy attitudes and preferences in ways that perpetuate racial disparities. (p. 324)

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We argue that a feature of policing is to utilise the mass media to deny the existence of these institutionally racist practices. This ‘unconscious bias’ narrative recasts and reframes the systemic discrimination against M¯aori as actions of only a few individuals and to normalise and dismiss discriminatory practices as a necessary part of supposedly neutral crime prevention practices. This is an important area to consider, for as Latu and Lucas (2008) observe about police discretion in Aotearoa, it has a gatekeeping function which could divert individuals out of the criminal justice system, but for M¯aori and Pasifika people the use of discretion potentially funnels them further into it. This can be revealed from independent research by JustSpeak (2020). This found in the analyses of police statistics that even when M¯aori have no prior criminal history, at the first point of contact with NZP, they are two times more likely to be given a police proceeding, and seven times more likely to be charged than P¯akeh¯a. These figures reflect institutional racism, through the criminalisation of M¯aori and disparate arrest and punishment practices by state agencies (Webb 2017). Policing in this country should also be contextualised in both the origins of the force and the ongoing colonial model of controlling and managing M¯aori communities (Hill 2008; Workman 2021). Another example of the mass media utilisation by NZP that normalises the criminalisation of M¯aori is discussed in the next section, which focuses on ‘reality’ TV portrayals and constructions of policing.

Police Ten 7: Stereotyping ‘Young Brown People’ as Violent Criminals International research indicates that police ride-along ‘reality’ TV shows, such as the US ‘Cops’ programme, are carefully constructed portrayals designed to present a pro-police perspective of law and order (Doyle 1998). New Zealand’s very own reality-TV ‘cops’ show is named Police Ten 7 after the police communication brevity code 10-7, which means “arrived at the job”. The programme first aired in 2002 on Television New Zealand (TVNZ), the NZ state-owned broadcaster. It was initially

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hosted by retired Detective Inspector Graham Bell until active Detective Sergeant Rob Lemoto took over in 2014. Apart from the host being a police officer, NZP also participated in the content selection and editing processes of the show (McKinnell 2021). Police Ten 7 was one of the longest running shows on TVNZ, with 750 episodes shown over twenty years until ending in 2023. Each weekly episode was about 20–25 minutes long (discounting ad breaks) and alternated between two event formats—incidents and cases. An incident is a real-life scene that the camera follows from police officers being first called to an event until it is resolved either through the suspect being questioned, warned, fined, or arrested. A case is a brief profile description of a ‘wanted offender’ that typically includes the (alleged) offence, a suspect photo or facial composite, and, if known, the suspect’s name, age, height, build, indigeneity/ethnicity, and likely location. Often, the profile warns viewers that the suspect is “considered dangerous, DO NOT APPROACH”.4 At the end of the show, the host asks viewers to come forward with any information they may have about a case (Deckert et al. 2023; Pukeiti 2022). The eventual demise of the show followed public concerns being raised about the presentation of racialised stereotypes. On 21 May 2021, a high-profile NZ politician, Efeso Collins (see NZ Herald 2021), who is of Samoan and Tokelauan (Pasifika) descent, tweeted Hey @TVNZ it’s time u dropped Police Ten 7. A couple of days ago I was watching tv & your ad cut promoting the program showed young brown ppl. This stuff is low level chewing gum tv that feeds on racial stereotypes & it’s time u acted as a responsible broadcaster & cut it.

With the term “young brown people”, Efeso Collins refers to people of M¯aori and/or Pasifika descent who account for 16.5 and 8.3% of NZ’s general population respectively (Stats NZ 2022). While the NZ criminal legal system excessively surveils, uses force against, arrests, convicts, and imprisons M¯aori (Walters 2020; Webb 2017), Pasifika people also face the discriminatory application of police use-of-force (Collins 2019). 4

For examples, see https://www.police.govt.nz/can-you-help-us/ten-7-aotearoa.

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Efeso Collins’ criticisms of stereotyping and the call for the discontinuation of Police Ten 7 was followed by a significant mass media debate. While some argued that the show only revealed “cold, hard uncomfortable truth”, others demanded that the programme should “proportionalise the filming of brown people” (NZ Herald 2021). Eventually, TV New Zealand felt impelled to commission media consultant Karen Bieleski and M¯aori legal academic Khylee Quince to compile a report that investigates whether Police Ten 7 portrays M¯aori and other minorities fairly. After Bieleski and Quince (2021) interviewed TVNZ representatives, including the show host, and “viewed a number of current and earlier Police Ten 7 episodes from the early 2000s to the present day” (p. 4), they found that the show has frequently been tarnished by claims of uneven coverage, and particularly allegations of racism and discrimination. We are in no doubt that much of this criticism is levelled at the police generally, rather than at the show specifically. In other words, the low levels of trust and confidence that some communities have in the police, influence their attitude to the show, without pinpointing any particular practices or instances of discrimination in the programme itself. […] M¯aori and Pasifika peoples feature frequently in the show. To some degree this is reflective of the reality of patterns of crime and offending in Aotearoa/New Zealand, where M¯aori and Pasifika peoples are significantly over-represented as both offenders and victims of crime. (p. 17)

In other words, Bieleski and Quince’s (2021) report backs the NZP narrative elaborated on in the previous section of this chapter, i.e., that it is not racial or ‘unconscious’ bias that leads to the excessive policing and incarceration of M¯aori. Instead, socio-economic drivers of crime are to be blamed for any statistical abnormalities (see Ministry of Justice 2009). A more recent research study challenges the report findings on the ground that Bieleski and Quince (2021) have failed to disclose the details of their data collection and analysis processes, “making it impossible to replicate the study and verify its results” (Deckert et al., 2023). Indeed, other studies on Police Ten 7 with clearly stated methodologies and content analyses have concluded that the show disproportionately

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portrays M¯aori as offenders and overrepresents M¯aori in violent offence categories (see Podvoiskis 2012; Pukeiti 2022; Yan et al. 2021). Deckert and colleagues (2023), for example, analysed 12 Police Ten 7 episodes that aired in late 2020. Firstly, they counted the number of M¯aori/Pasifika and P¯akeh¯a police officers and suspects across the 12 episodes, calculated their proportions and compared these with the proportion of actual police staff numbers and actual NZP proceedings against M¯aori/Pasifika and P¯akeh¯a suspects to determine whether M¯aori/Pasifika and P¯akeh¯a are over- or underrepresented as police officers and suspects on Police Ten 7 . Secondly, the researchers coded the 12 Police Ten 7 episodes for the offence categories that M¯aori/Pasifika and P¯akeh¯a suspects on the show were proceeded against and compared them to actual NZP proceedings to determine whether Police Ten 7 accurately represents M¯aori/Pasifika and P¯akeh¯a suspects with regard to typical offending patterns. Finally, the researchers measured how much TV airtime Police Ten 7 dedicated to suspects across the 12 episodes and how much of that total suspect time was dedicated to M¯aori/ Pasifika and P¯akeh¯a. The calculated proportions were then compared to proportions in actual NZP proceedings that year. The researchers found that Police Ten 7 underrepresents M¯aori/Pasifika as police officers, overrepresents M¯aori/Pasifika as suspects, and overrepresents M¯aori/ Pasifika in violent offence categories. Moreover, they found that Police Ten 7 spends most of its total suspected offending airtime on M¯aori/ Pasifika people. Deckert and colleagues (2023) argue “that these distortions are intensified through contrasting juxtapositions with P¯akeh¯a who are underrepresented both as suspects and violent offenders and overrepresented as harmless drunks and bad drivers” and they “conclude that together these distortions and contrasting juxtapositions serve to promote the image of M¯aori and Pasifika as the violent criminal other”. Since NZP partook in the selection and editing process of the show, Deckert and colleagues (2023) contend that (a) the NZP directly contributes to the stereotyping of M¯aori as violent criminals, (b) that the overarching Police Ten 7 narrative is indicative of police bias against M¯aori, and (c) that the show may thus serve to exacerbate the level of distrust that M¯aori already have in NZP (see Heyer 2019; Te Whaiti and Roguski 1998). The authors also argue that the underrepresentation

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of M¯aori as police officers worked to acculturate the Police Ten 7 audience—P¯akeh¯a and M¯aori alike—in a way that viewers were less likely to associate M¯aori with NZP, which undermines ongoing NZP efforts to recruit more M¯aori staff. Moreover, drawing on labelling theory, Deckert and colleagues (2023) argue: that these kinds of misrepresentations may have criminogenic effects on M¯aori […] viewers who consider Police Ten 7 an authoritative programme and may internalise these labels. These viewers are more likely to see themselves as potential offenders than police officers and may act upon such internalisations.

In sum, the overarching ‘reality’-TV mass media narrative broadcast via Police Ten 7, over those 20 years, may have left a range of detrimental effects on their viewership and society as a whole. We argue that this narrative not only supports the ongoing NZP narrative of ‘unconscious bias’, but that the two narratives compound in a way that they reinforce both the image of NZP as neutral actors and the stereotyped images of M¯aori as inherently violent and criminal.

The ‘Useful Intelligence’ Narrative: Police Illegally Photographing Innocent Maori ¯ Youth NZP made headlines in early 2021 for photographing innocent M¯aori youth under the pretence of gathering “useful intelligence” (Hurihanganui 2021) and storing their images in a national database. Parental consent was missing in all of these cases, although some of the young people were as young as 14 and New Zealand law requires a parent/ caregiver to be present when NZP question (or photograph) people under the age of 17 (Deckert et al. 2023; Norris and Tauri 2021). Two young boys, 14 and 15, were alone when it happened to them. [...]. Standing outside [a store] waiting for their koro [grandfather], two policemen caught their eye. Before long, the officers were standing at their feet. “Where’s the bag of money you stole,” one officer asked, nearly

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shouting. The boys were surprised [and] confused. They denied knowing anything about the stolen money, but that did not convince the men in uniform [claiming that the boys] met the description of offenders they were looking for [...]. The officers collected their details, and then they asked the boys to stand still. “We’re going to take your photo now,” the officer said. “Take your hats off and look into the lens”. (Hurihanganui 2021)

Initially, NZP used the mass media to deny that this was a widespread practice or that M¯aori youth were targeted, and they defended their practice by arguing that section 214 of the Oranga Tamariki Act 1989 allowed them to take pictures. That section only applies, however, when youth are reasonably suspected of having committed a crime and there was no evidence for that as NZP later admitted (Norris and Tauri 2021). In response, Police Commissioner Coster (2021) published an opinion piece in the NZ Herald to deflect criticism. He noted that, in the same week of writing his opinion piece, NZP had been criticised for their “alleged failure” of intelligence gathering; for not knowing—until being alerted by the public—that extremists had used websites to make bomb threats against mosques. He then compared this criticism of NZP intel failures with the “alleged inappropriate” collection of intelligence on innocent M¯aori children in the streets. In his opinion piece, Coster questioned the trade-offs in privacy that communities had to make for public “safety”. A critical analysis of his narrative shows how it attempts to dismiss the fundamental failures in the under-policing of the ongoing racist violence against Muslim communities in NZ (particularly after the 2019 Christchurch terror attacks) while comparing innocent M¯aori children to terrorists as an excuse for over-policing. As Emilie R¯akete observed, Brown children waiting outside the dairy without their parents are not the same thing as Nazis. There is a reasonable expectation of privacy - a reasonable expectation from parents that their children won’t be approached and photographed by strangers - that people posting about organising killings on the internet do not have. (as cited in Cardwell 2021, n.p.)

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As more evidence surfaced and was publicised through New Zealand mass media outlets, NZP came under increasing public pressure to abandon this practice (Hurihanganui 2022). This included the government’s Children’s Commissioner Andrew Becroft, calling for an investigation of the issue (Cardwell 2020). The police practice came under joint investigation by the Office of the Privacy Commissioner and the Independent Police Conduct Authority (IPCA), who released their report in September 2022. The report found, inter alia, that this policing practice was widespread, unjustified, and had breached individual rights, and that the mass media coverage of the first cases was instrumental in more victims coming forward (Privacy Commissioner and IPCA 2022). It confirmed that more that 53% of the young people where ethnicity was recorded in the database were M¯aori (p. 91). The report also questioned the usefulness of the information gathered for intelligence purposes when it was not actually related to any criminal investigation. It was noted that, “the benefits of photography for these sorts of intelligence purposes are over-stated. One reason for this is that, unless photographs are linked to a particular investigation or likely investigation, Police lack the systems to organise and categorise them” (Privacy Commissioner and IPCA 2022, p. 9). The Police Commissioner, the Police Union spokesperson, and the Minister of Police all criticised the official report via the news media reiterating the narrative that NZP would be hampered in solving crimes if it was disallowed to photograph innocent people (RNZ 2022; Scotcher 2022). This ‘useful intelligence’ narrative has been deployed to legitimise the disparate social control and over-policing of M¯aori communities, alongside justifications for the further institutional creep of police powers beyond what is legal. It normalises discriminatory and racialised policing practices, by using crime control as an excuse even when no crime has been committed (Norris and Tauri 2021).

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Indigenous Resistance to Police Illegally Photographing Maori ¯ Youth Since the mass media were instrumental both in uncovering illegal actions by NZP that targeted M¯aori communities and in subjecting NZP to public scrutiny (Privacy Commissioner and IPCA 2022), it is important to examine how the media learned about the illegal police practice and how the media were enabled to continuously unfold the story. Such an examination helps to understand how M¯aori use both Indigenous and mass media as a site of resistance—much like other Indigenous peoples (see, e.g., Cunneen 2018; Porter 2015; Wilbricht 2019)—against harm inflicted by police. To that end, we interviewed M¯aori academic and scholar-activist, Dr Juan Tauri, who was involved with one of the first media stories in this case. In November 2020, Dr Tauri had a story relayed to him about a wh¯anau (family) members’ concerns around NZP photographing innocent M¯aori youths in the Wairarapa region, and threatening them with arrest if they refused to comply. At this point, Dr Tauri considered contacting the M¯aori media to make this story public, noting that, “I was going to use the M¯aori media. After all, I thought that they would run the story and take it seriously”. The reference to the M¯aori media acknowledges that M¯aori have developed alternatives to the mainstream mass media in recent decades. As Hokowhitu (2013) notes, there have been changes to the media landscape in NZ with the development of dedicated M¯aori content providers such as M¯aori radio stations, and Whakaata M¯aori (M¯aori Television) which has been broadcasting since 2004. Although having more limited audiences, these broadcasters have allowed a counter-narrative to mainstream media stereotyping with the presentation of more positive images of M¯aori communities and values. In this instance, Dr Tauri continued the story with the state-run broadcaster Radio New Zealand (RNZ) for national coverage and relayed it to a journalist whose stories have focused on serious social justice issues. The first RNZ story was released in late December 2020 and was followed up with further articles and radio interviews in early 2021. Other mass media outlets, such as Stuff and the NZ Herald , also started

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picking up the story. Dr Tauri explains that the progressive supply of media stories would be necessary because—based on previous experience with NZP in the mid-2000s—Dr Tauri anticipated that NZP would create a media counter-narrative that follows a specific pattern: Initially, absolute denial, claiming that the stories are unverified. As more stories emerge, they [NZP] will say that they will look into it and that it is probably just a few overenthusiastic constables who don’t quite understand the law. As further stories emerge from across regions, the narrative changes to a formal internal investigation that then claims it wasn’t systemic. Hence, we knew that we had to pile on the pressure for other agencies like the IPCA and Privacy Commissioner to get involved. […]

Dr Tauri explains that the chosen media format is important as some media outlets tend to present only short, sharp stories. “This is a cool, sexy story today and then tomorrow, they’ll drop it.” Other media outlets prefer long-format, investigative reports, and lengthy multiple stories over several months, which helps activists to build sufficient pressure for government agencies to act. As Dr Tauri explains: To get external agencies to scrutinise a government institution like the police, you can’t rely on anecdotes. You’ve got to gather enough evidence so that the issue cannot be simply swept to the side.

From the start, Dr Tauri trusted that, after the first stories were reported by RNZ, more M¯aori families would come forward and contact the media directly, because if you’re picking on our kids, tamariki [children] or rangatahi [youth], absolutely, we’ll speak up. It’s usually the mums. We [adults] can stand up for ourselves, but our kids are more vulnerable, and we don’t want them to be stood over by some big cop. We want our kids to be safe when they walk around the street.

Dr Tauri also acknowledges that the targeting of children was likely decisive in the media story gaining traction:

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If I [was] stopped by some cops and photographed, I reckon the media would have said “Oh, well”. The fact that it was kids made a huge difference.

While the academic literature has long acknowledged that children as victims of crimes and particular as victims of violent offending are considered newsworthy by the media and often lend themselves to lengthy media ‘morality campaigns’ (Jenkins 1992), the same theory seems to also apply in cases of police harassment. While the NZ mainstream media tend to portray M¯aori in a negative light—as radicals, dangerous criminals, and activists—a threat to the country’s social fabric (Barnes et al. 2012; Devadas 2013; Gregory et al. 2011; Matheson 2007; McCreanor et al. 2014), M¯aori children seemed in this instance to constitute an exception from this rule. Aided by both the inherent and factual innocence of the targeted population, the act of Indigenous resistance via the mass media was successful in raising public awareness. It not only exposed a widespread, illegal police practice but it also resulted in an external state investigation that condemned the practice. However, we argue that, due to their infrequency, such Indigenous counter-narratives do little to weaken the prevalent mass media discourse about M¯aori, or the reliance of the mass media on police narratives and constructions. Our argument is made because NZP leadership only shortly after the policing practice was officially declared illegal used the mass media to reinforce the narrative that this practice is necessary for community ‘safety’ by supposedly preventing future crimes, even if it breached rights. That this narrative has been instrumental in shaping political opinion is evidenced by then Police Minister Chris Hipkins, parroting the NZP position and advocating for a law change to make legal the gathering of private information from innocent people on the street, including fingerprinting youth without parental consent (Scotcher 2022; Tahana 2022).

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Conclusion While research on M¯aori in the media and particularly in relation to the criminal legal system has repeatedly demonstrated the stereotyping of M¯aori as inherently criminal and violent, these research findings tend to stand in isolation. In writing this chapter, we sought to bring together and critically analyse three policing-related mass-mediated narratives that particularly affect M¯aori communities. First, we examined how NZP utilises mass media to spread their narrative of ‘unconscious bias’. We argue that in doing so NZP continue to whitewash a key social justice issue—that of systemic racism in policing. Secondly, we demonstrated that social injustices in policing as experienced by M¯aori communities also extend into mass media narratives about policing as expressed via distorted representations of M¯aori on the ‘reality’-TV show Police Ten 7. In fact, we find that the show distorted reality as it underrepresented M¯aori as police officers and overrepresents M¯aori as suspects and in violent offence categories, while juxtaposing these distortions with P¯akeh¯a suspects who the show underrepresented as suspects and in violent offence categories, and mainly portrayed as bad drivers and harmless drunks. As NZP had editorial power over Police Ten 7, the distorted and misleading narrative of the show can be linked to the NZP narrative of ‘unconscious bias’ in a way that the two narratives compound to reinforce both the image of NZP as innocent, unconsciously biased actors and the stereotyped image of M¯aori as the inherently violent and criminal other. We argue that, by and large, the mass media has had a long history of exploiting racialised crime stories that construct M¯aori as the criminal other and that these stories are exploited for the denial of systemic racism in the criminal legal system, ignoring M¯aori as crime victims and their experiences of state violence. While M¯aori can attempt to use mass media to expose and resist illegal state control practices that target M¯aori, we argue that, due to their infrequency, such counter-narratives do little to weaken the prevalent media discourse. We conclude that contemporary media narratives about policing in Aotearoa New Zealand serve to reinforce a neo-colonial belief system among

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the P¯akeh¯a majority population that seeks to justify ongoing expansive state control into M¯aori communities and the denial of Indigenous self-determination.

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Jenkins, P. (1992) Intimate Enemies: Moral Panics in Contemporary Great Britain. New York, NY: Aldine de Gruyter. JustSpeak. (2020). IDI Research—A Justice System for Everyone. Available at: https://www.scribd.com/document/448820742/JustSpeak-IDI-ResearchSummary#download Kupu Taea. (2008) Submission to the Review of Crime and Criminal Justice Statistics. Available at: https://trc.org.nz/submission-review-crime-and-criminaljustice-statistics Latu, A. and Lucas, A. (2008) ‘Discretion in the New Zealand Criminal Justice System: The Position of Maori and Pacific Islanders’, Journal of South Pacific Law, 12(1), pp. 84–93. Matheson, D. (2007) ‘The Interpretative Resources of Aotearoa New Zealand Journalists Reporting on M¯aori’, Media Studies Journal of Aotearoa New Zealand , 10(2), pp. 91–105. McCreanor, T., Rankine, J., Moewaka-Barnes, A.M., Borell, B., Nairn, R. and McManus, A.L. (2014) ‘The Association of Crime Stories and M¯aori in Aotearoa New Zealand Print Media’, Sites: A Journal of Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies, 11(1), pp. 121–144. McGovern, A. and Lee, M. (2010) ‘Cop[ying] It Sweet: Police Media Units and the Making of News’, Australian and New Zealand Journal of Criminology, 43(3), pp. 444–464. McKinnel, T (2021) ‘Is Police Ten 7 fly-on-the-wall reality or propaganda? These documents make it clear’, The Spinoff , 24 March. Available at: https://thespinoff.co.nz/pop-culture/24-03-2021/police-ten-7-is-pol ice-propaganda-and-i-have-the-document-to-prove-it Ministry of Justice. (2009) Strategic Policy Brief. Available at: https://www.bee hive.govt.nz/sites/default/files/Social%20Risk%20Factors.pdf Nairn, R., McCreanor, T., Moewaka-Barnes, A., Borell, B., Rankine, J. and Gregory, A. (2012) ‘“Maori News Is Bad News”: That’s Certainly so on Television’, MAI Journal , 1(1), pp. 38–49. Norris, A.N. and Tauri, J. (2021) ‘Racialized Surveillance in New Zealand: From the T¯uhoe Raids to the Extralegal Photographing of Indigenous Youth’, Race and Justice, Online First, 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1177/215 33687211063581 NZ Herald (2021) ‘Race Relations Commissioner Meng Foon says Ten 7 reflects ‘racist’ police’, NZ Herald , 22 March. Available at: https://www. nzherald.co.nz/kahu/race-relations-commissioner-meng-foon-says-ten-7-ref lects-racist-police/7IGUI3EIDUH4GHZO7V3CF63ARE/

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Owen, L. (2015) ‘On the Nation: Lisa Owen Interviews Police Commissioner Mike Bush’, Scoop, 28 November. Available at: https://www.scoop.co.nz/sto ries/PO1511/S00456/lisa-owen-interviews-police-commissioner-mike-bush. htm O’Reilly, J. (2010). New Zealand Police Pre-Charge Warnings Alternative Resolutions Evaluation Report. Wellington: New Zealand Police Podvoiskis, G.M. (2012) Reel Cops: Exploring the Representation of Policing on Police Ten 7 . Master’s Thesis. Victoria University of Wellington. Porter, A. (2015) ‘Riotous or Righteous Behaviour? Representations of Subaltern Resistance in the Australian Mainstream Media’, Current Issues in Criminal Justice, 26(3), pp. 289–304. Privacy Commissioner and IPCA. (2022) Joint Inquiry by the Independent Police Conduct Authority and the Privacy Commissioner into Police Conduct When Photographing Members of the Public. Available at: https://s3.docume ntcloud.org/documents/22275588/embargoed-8-september-2022-ipca-andopc-joint-inquiry-into-police-photographing-of-members-of-the-public.pdf Pukeiti, W. (2022) Police in the Media: A Critical Analysis of Police Ten 7 . Honours Dissertation. Auckland University of Technology. RNZ. (2021) ‘Police Launch Investigation Into ‘Unconscious Bias’ Against M¯aori’, RNZ , 16 March. Available at: https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/temanu-korihi/438469/police-launch-investigation-into-unconscious-bias-aga inst-maori RNZ. (2022) ‘Police Association: Illegal Practices Finding “Wrong Interpretation”’, RNZ , 8 September. Available at: https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/nat ional/474431/police-association-illegal-practices-finding-wrong-interpret ation Scotcher, K. (2022) ‘Chris Hipkins Accused of Cowering After Criticising Privacy Report on Police Photographing’, Newshub, 13 October. Available at: https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/politics/2022/10/chris-hipkins-acc used-of-cowering-after-criticising-privacy-report-on-police-photographing. html Stats NZ. (2022) Subnational Ethnic Population Projections: 2018(base)-2043. Available at: https://bit.ly/3bGyDdk Tahana, J. (2022) ‘“They’re Targeting Poor Communities”: Advocates Hit out at Hipkins’ Police Photography Stance’, RNZ , 13 October. Available at: https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/te-manu-korihi/476613/they-re-targetingpoor-communities-advocates-hit-out-at-hipkins-police-photography-stance

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‘Hero Cop’ Versus ‘Unwanted Son’: Criminal Prosecutions Against White Police Officers in Relation to Black Deaths in Custody and the Australian Mainstream Media Amanda Porter and Conor Hannan

Introduction On 25 June 2021 Derek Chauvin was sentenced to 22.5 years prison for the murder of George Floyd. The long-anticipated criminal trial received extensive global news coverage of the movement for Black and Indigenous Lives. Although police officers kill roughly 1,000 people a year in the United States, criminal charges are rarely laid, and are mostly unsuccessful. Some of the reasons for this include systemic and structural racism, workplace culture, weak disciplinary and complaints mechanisms, weak oversight bodies, and the incredible power and influence of police unions (Porter and Cunneen, 2021). A. Porter (B) · C. Hannan University of Melbourne, Melbourne, VIC, Australia e-mail: [email protected] C. Hannan e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Bhatia et al. (eds.), Racism, Violence and Harm, Palgrave Studies in Crime, Media and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-37879-9_5

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The news of Chauvin’s conviction dominated airwaves and headlines across Australia. And while it triggered conversations at the heart of Australian identity—namely, genocide, racism, and the lack of accountability for Black deaths in custody—the Australian news coverage of Chauvin’s jury verdict and sentencing differed significantly from criminal cases against Australian police officers. While rare in the United States, it is rarer still for an Australian police officer to be charged in relation to Black deaths in custody. In Australia, the Department of Public Prosecutions has laid charges in relation to just four Black deaths in custody: John Pat (1983), Mulrunji Doomadgee (2004), JC (2021), and Kumanjayi 1 Walker (2022). In these four cases, all of which resulted in acquittals, Australian news coverage portrayed the victims of police violence in a negative, racialised, criminalised or demonised way—while presenting police officers in a neutral or heroic fashion. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in Australia are the most incarcerated population in the world (see Bhatia, Poynting and Tufail, this volume). Throughout the 1970s and 1980s families and organisations went to the United Nations to bring international attention to the crisis of Black lives in the colony. Mounting pressure resulted in the announcement of a four-year Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody (RCIADIC), which reported on 99 Aboriginal deaths in custody and was tabled in Australian parliament in May 1991 (Johnston, 1991). Since then, conservative2 estimates suggest there has been 527 further Indigenous deaths in custody (Australian Institute of Criminology, 2022). No Australian police officer has been held responsible in relation to an Indigenous death in custody—either civilly or criminally. No police or prison officer has ever been convicted in relation to the death of a Black death in custody. As respected Darumbal and South Sea Islander academic Amy McQuire (2020: np) questions, ‘how can there be 477 deaths and no perpetrators?’. In this chapter we examine media representations of the four instances in which Australian police officers faced criminal charges in relation 1 In observance of Aboriginal custom and family wishes, we use the name Kumanjayi that is the traditional name of the deceased. 2 These figures are conservative as they do not include premature deaths in child care, hospitals or psychiatric wards—nor do they include femicide or racially motivated hate crimes.

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to a Black death in custody. In terms of methods, we use discourse and content analysis of the major Australian corporate news outlets: ABC Australia, Herald Sun, The Australian, The Age, Sydney Morning Herald , Nine News Seven Spotlight and ABS Australia. Here, we use the database Factiva to source news reports from three months following the announcement of the acquittals, all of which were delivered by allwhite juries. The limitations and critiques of discourse analysis have been summarised elsewhere (Sentas, 2018). We respond to and build on these criticisms in section three of this chapter. We are interested especially in examining the ways in which the representation of different subjects— the deceased, the police, the community, the court—are racialised and criminalised. In particular we examine patterns and trends that emerge in the language and framing of police criminal hearings for Black deaths in custody within the Australian mainstream media. In doing so we consider the role of racial stereotypes, deficit frames in the Australian corporate media. We also consider the role of structural and systemic biases within the white settler legal system in Australia, such as suppression orders, legal privilege, contempt of court, non-publication orders, gag orders, and arcane criminal procedure laws.

State-Sanctioned Violence on Trial, Past and Present There are few instances in Australian history of police officers being charged in relation to fatal shootings and Black deaths in custody. This is despite the rich evidence of the violence of policing, past and present. Australia is a British penal colony and the early policing of this colony were founded on the protection of white property and expansion of the colonial frontier. An history of the Australian police’s involvement in genocide (e.g., the Mounted Police and Native Police) and its role in implementing policies built on institutional racism (e.g., Aboriginal child removal and protection legislation more generally) is widely recognised (NISATSIC, 1997; Cunneen, 2001; Owen, 2016). The first police officers in the British colony, night patrol workers in the Sydney settlement,

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were selected by Governor Philip from nine of the best-behaved convicts. In the decades following, the Mounted and Border police participated in racial, settler colonial and patriarchal violence. In this sense, the line between law enforcement and criminality has always been problematic and paradoxical. This has been widely documented (Johnston, 1991; NISATSIC, 1997; Owen, 2016; Richardson, 2008; Perkins, 2022). Massacres of Indigenous people involving Australian police continued well into the twentieth century, including at the Bedford massacre of 1924 and the Coniston massacre of 1928. One of the rare instances in which Australian police officers were charged in relation to the violence of policing was in 1926, when James St Jack and Denis Regan were arrested for their role in the Forrest River Massacre, during which upwards of 100 Aboriginal people were killed by pastoralists and police. The case was never brought to trial, as it was dismissed almost immediately by magistrate Alfred Kidson. Both police officers were later reinstated into the West Australian Police (WAP). In 1928, negative international coverage of the Coniston Massacre caused the state government to commission a Board of Enquiry into frontier killings—stacked with political appointees and including the commissioner directly implicated in the massacre—which quickly produced a report exonerating policemen involved in the deaths of 31 Aboriginal people in Central Australia. This was a significant underestimation. The University of Newcastle’s frontier massacre database (Colonial Frontier Massacres Project, 2018), which documents colonial violence in Australia, estimates a range of between 60 and 200 Warlpiri deaths. The oral testimonies of Survivors suggest a total closer to 200. It was not until February 1984 that an Australian police officer faced trial in connection with an Aboriginal death in custody. In this instance, four policemen and one police aide were charged with the manslaughter of 16-year-old John Pat on the night of 29 September 1983. Pat was arrested and violently beaten by police officers and members of the public outside the Roebourne Hotel in the Pilbara region of Western Australia. Hours later the station reported that Pat had been found hanged in a holding-cell. A coronial inquest in November, however, heard that at the time of his death Pat suffered heavy bruising around the head, a fractured skull, torn aorta, and two broken ribs. An autopsy identified his

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cause of death as major blunt force trauma resulting in a brain haemorrhage. This was the first Aboriginal death in custody to receive coverage in the national press. The Canberra Times published five articles on the trial of the officers, in addition to its coverage of the November 1983 inquest into Pat’s death. In all instances Pat and his family are discussed in mostly racialised terms—along with the one Aboriginal defendant, a police aide—while the white officers were presented as racially neutral. Furthermore, Aboriginal family members were reported as being unreliable witnesses while police families are described in a sympathetic light. The Canberra Times’s coverage of the verdict, for instance, noted “loud sobs” from “wives and family members at the back of the courtroom,” and featured quotes from the defendants about “getting our lives back to normal” (No author, 1984: 1). The second instance in which a white Australian police officer was charged was in relation to the death of Mulrunji Doomadgee on Palm Island, Manbarra Country, in November 2004. Chris Hurley, a former Queensland Police Service (QPS) officer, was charged with manslaughter and assault in relation to the death of a 36-year-old Aboriginal father of one on Palm Island, Manbarra Country. Hurley and an Aboriginal Police Liaison Officer (APLO) were responding to a call for service in relation to a domestic dispute. Mulrunji happened to be passing by the scene while walking his dog and asked the APLO what he was doing: ‘locking up your own people?’ Hurley responded, ‘what’s your problem with the police?’ and proceeded to arrest Mulrunji on the grounds of alleged public nuisance. Mr Doomadgee died in police custody 40 minutes later. A coroner found that Mulrunji sustained injuries including four broken ribs, a burst portal spleen and a ruptured liver (Clements, 2006: 27). In 2007 Hurley was charged with the assault and manslaughter of Mulrunji. He was later acquitted of both charges by an all-white jury in Townsville. He was transferred and promoted to the Gold Coast Local Area Command. In the aftermath of the decision, Palm Island Elder and respected leader Lex Wotton was sentenced to seven years imprisonment, which included a legal suppression order that prohibited Wotton from speaking to the media. The third criminal charge laid against an Australian police officer in relation to Black deaths in custody was the case of The State of Western

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Australia v BW [2021] WAWC 326. The case involved an unnamed police officer who was charged in relation to the fatal shooting of 29year-old Yamatji woman JC while responding to a call for service outside a suburban address in Geraldton, midwestern Western Australia, on 17 September 2019. After a three-week trial the officer was found not guilty of manslaughter. The acquittal of the unnamed officer sparked protests in Perth and Geraldton. The case and its aftermath received widespread coverage in the Australian press, most of which focused heavily on JC’s medical and criminal history. Typical headlines included, ‘Geraldton police shooting victim [JC’s] struggles with demons revealed amid community protests’ (O’Flaherty, 2019) on the ABC News website and ‘Final days of a fragile woman’ (Hennesy, 2020) in The West Australian. By contrast, no information was provided about the anonymous police officer in the press or on social media. Indeed, the suppression of the police officer’s name poses a difficulty for research. We return to this issue below. The most recent criminal trial against a white Australian police officer was R v Rolfe [2022] NTSC 22. Zachary Rolfe is a police officer with the Northern Territory Police (NTP) who was charged with murder, manslaughter and engaging with a violent act following the fatal shooting of Kumanjayi Walker in November 2019. The Supreme Court of the Northern Territory sat for five weeks—and heard from over forty witnesses—before an all-settler jury in March 2022 acquitted Rolfe of all three charges. The family of the deceased and the Warlpiri community complained that there were only Kardiya (non-Indigenous people) on the jury. The court had earlier imposed a suppression order, so as ‘not to unfairly prejudice court processes and procedures’—which was respected by the Walker family and Yuendumu community, who asked allies to refrain from providing commentary on the individual police officer or the criminal trial itself. Sydney-based Seven News Corp defied the suppression order, screening on 24 October 2021 a sensationalist 60minute feature on Rolfe—titled ‘Life and Death’—which attracted over 46,000 viewers. The primetime feature vilified the deceased and detailed his criminal history; by contrast, the criminal history of the white officer Rolfe was not discussed, despite previous convictions for assault causing

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grievous bodily harm, theft, perjury and allegations of murder. The 60minute documentary also vilified Walker’s family and the Yuendumu community, perpetuating racist tropes of a ‘violent’ and ‘dysfunctional’ community. In one scene, shock-jock Denham Hitchcock states, ‘if he [police officer Zachary Rolfe] is acquitted there will be riots, but if he is convicted there is an entire police force that will feel betrayed’. In addition to fueling stereotypes and prejudice, the Seven News Spotlight documentary failed to respect Aboriginal law (for example, the permit system), Aboriginal cultural practices (for example, Sorry Business3 ) and white settler law (for example, suppression orders). We return to these issues below. It is important to emphasise at the outset that criminal charges are not the only form of police accountability. In addition to the criminal cases listed above, there has been a parallel history of civil suits, police complaints, torts and class actions against the police: • In the case of Henry v Thompson (189) 2 Qd R, an Aboriginal man named Mr Henry sued three police officers, in their individual capacity (i.e. not as members of the Queensland Police Service) for targeting, bullying and discriminatory behaviour. Mr Henry alleged that when he was lying on the ground, Mr Thompson, a police officer, repeatedly jumped on his head and shoulders, while another urinated on his stomach. Mr Henry was awarded $25,000 in compensation including for exemplary damages. • Another successful civil case is that of Tiffany Paterson, who sued the Northern Territory Police (NTP) for an undisclosed amount in 2014. The terms of the settlement forbids Ms Paterson from speaking publicly about her case (Carrick, 2014). • Each of the key police oversight entities in Australia—the Law Enforcement Conduct Commission (LECC) and the Independent Broad Based Anti-Corruption Commission (IBAC)—each receives 3 Sorry business refers to cultural protocols and practices when a family member dies and all responsibilities that follow in accordance with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander law, custom and culture. The average life expectancy of Indigenous Australians is roughly 12 years lower than non-Indigenous Australia due to ongoing apartheid and discrimination in contemporary Australia.

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around 2,500 police complaints each year. the only pro bono police powers clinic in NSW. Around 1–2% of these complaints are successful. Generally speaking, civil cases and complaints seldom attract interest from the Australian mainstream media. For these and other reasons, in this study we have focused only on news reporting about police officers facing criminal charges in relation to Black deaths in custody. We continue the discussion of civil actions in our analysis and conclusions.

Methodology: State-Sanctioned Violence in the Media, Past and Present Wiradjuri philosopher and activist Kevin Gilbert once wrote that, ‘the real horror story of Aboriginal Australia today is locked in police files and child welfare reports. It is a story of private misery and degradation, caused by a complex chain of historical circumstance, that continues into the present’ (Gilbert, 1978: 2). The key words here are: locked in police files. The police are notoriously opaque and insular institutions. This means that research into institutional racism (e.g., racial profiling and direct/indirect racial discrimination) is hampered by the failure of Australian policing institutions to collect and make public data on racial profiling. In the United States and the United Kingdom, by contrast, police regularly release and make publicly available rates of arrest and stop and search by Race and Ethnic Status. Critically, however, research produced within and by the police (i.e., by in-house police research units) suggests some acknowledgement of this problem. For example, the Western Australian Police Service’s in-house research unit found that Aboriginal drivers received three times more fines from the police than white drivers. The report was based on data collected over five years and produced by in-house police research units has acknowledged a “clear ethnic disparity” in police-initiated traffic stops (Western Australia Police, 2020: 8). Given the relative weakness of Australian police accountability processes as described above (see Heading 1), the media assumes an

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important default function for accountability, transparency and truth. How has the Australian news portrayed the criminal trials for Black deaths in police custody and police fatal shootings? In Australian news reporting on criminal trials involving the police, who is portrayed as criminal and why? How do these representations compare with Indigenous peoples experiences of the Australian corporate media? To interrogate these questions, we examined news reporting in the major Australian corporate outlets: ABC Australia, Herald Sun, The Australian, The Age, Sydney Morning Herald, Nine News Seven Spotlight and ABS Australia and used discourse and content analysis. We used discourse analysis to examine the language and framing (for example, use of tropes, racial stereotypes, emotive language, who is quoted) and content analysis to examine the optics and visual presentation (for example, photos, tables, timelines, where the article appears on the page, how much space it takes up and where, front page, foldout, special feature, exclusive) of the news coverage. We have focused our analysis on the mainstream media because we are interested in understanding themes and issues that are apparent within mainstream discourse. Having said that, we reflect on the significance/ role of Indigenous media and of Indigenous campaigns for justice and accountability below (see Heading 4). An important limitation of discourse and content analysis is that it often ignores socio-legal politics of the settler legal system (Sentas, 2018). Australia is a legally pluralistic, settler colonial society. It is one of a small number of former British colonies to not have a treaty or treaties between First Nation peoples and the state. The settler legal system represents a foreign legal system for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in Australia. These laws significantly limit and predetermine the parameters of the so-called “liberal marketplace of ideas” regulating free speech. Some examples include: • Non-publication or suppression orders: orders put in place by magistrates, coroners or judges to limit the publication of any material from the brief of evidence or the trial about a given topic. For example, in the Inquest into the death of Chad Riley, Coroner Jenkin (2021) made non-publication orders on the reporting of any details

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relating to police use of tasers. This is a common practice in the criminal and coronial jurisdictions in Australia—one which significantly impacts news reporting on the violence of policing and Black deaths in custody. • Non-disclosure or “gag” orders: orders put in place in settlement of civil and criminal matters that limit victims’ rights to speak on the public record. For example, Palm Island activist and Elder Lex Wotton could not lawfully speak with media or attend public meetings to discuss the death in custody of Mulrunji Doomadgee by police officer Sergeant Hurley. • Tendency evidence: laws in criminal and civil procedure which prohibit the discussion in court and on the public record of prior alleged criminal and civil wrongdoing. For example, and as concerns the case of R v Rolfe [2022] NTSC 22, Burns J found in favour of Rolfe and his legal team that Rolfe’s prior criminal convictions and 46 recorded instances of excessive use of force was inadmissible in the criminal trial. • Contempt of court: laws which govern the conduct of court officials and experts. These laws prohibit the disclosure of the Brief of Evidence on the public record. Other limitations and caveats in our analysis include: • We have focused our analysis on criminal charges only. There is a much lengthier history of complaints and civil actions against the police; • We have focused on Australian mainstream print media. Our search did not include independent, alternative or Indigenous media; • There has been a time lapse between the four criminal trials. For this reason, the first two criminal trials involved searching Factiva, Trove and physical collections including microfilm, whereas the two most recent cases involved searching Factiva only.

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Findings Table 1 provides a summary of the language used by the Australian corporate media to describe key events following the criminal trial. Several themes and patterns emerge. The first observation is that the police tend to be represented in respectful terms. For instance, journalists refer to police by their full title, rank and authority such as, ‘Senior Sergeant’, ‘First Class Constable’, ‘Decorated Former Australian Army Officer’, ‘Star Pupil’ and ‘Cop’. The name of the white police officer facing charges in relation to the death of KC is suppressed. This means that his name has never been publicly released or reported in the criminal trial or subsequent news reporting. Similarly, Australian news reporting in the weeks following Zachary Rolfe’s murder trial in February 2022 was flooded with glowing and romanticised accounts of the police officer. The Australian released a 12-part exclusive by Kirstin Shorten featuring a 4-part podcast, ‘Zac Rolfe’s Story,’ and a 53-minute ‘video exclusive’ interview with Rolfe. The newspaper also published a prominent frontpage spread (see Fig. 2) and a Good Weekend feature in which Rolfe is posed lovingly embracing his dog (see Fig. 1). In this extensive coverage we learn about Rolfe’s school and professional achievements. He is described as the ‘a recipient of the National Bravery Medal’, ‘well respected’, ‘half-naked hero cop’, ‘decorated cop’, ‘star pupil at Canberra Grammar’ and ‘son of prominent business identities and philanthropists’. A front-page headline in the same publication emphasises these attributes: ‘Private schoolboy Zachary Rolfe fell in love with policing before being charged with murder over death of Kumanjayi Walker’ (Shorten, 2022b: 1). Second, the police are rarely if ever racialised or criminalized, even when facing criminal trial in relation to a Black death in custody. One of the most striking findings is the curious absence of references to the police officer’s race. We were unable to find any references to the accused police officers as white or caucasian, or as violent or criminal. The race of the police officers is not mentioned, and journalists do not mention the fact that the police officers were white. The sole exception to this was international news coverage. By way of contrast, a news story published in both CNN and the Washington Post, for example, carries the

The deceased victim

A Roebourne Aboriginal, Mr John Pat, John Pat, an Aboriginal youth, Aboriginal teenager, Aboriginal prisoner, 16-year-old, Aboriginal boy

John Pat Aborigine, Indigenous, 36-year-old, alcohol, drunk, drunken

Mulrunji Doomadgee

Table 1 Language in the Australian mainstream media Young man, Kumanjayi Walker, Aboriginal man, Indigenous man, the 19 year-old, Aboriginal teenager, ‘unwanted son’, ‘failing to thrive’, nits, scabies, chest infection, ear infection, ‘special needs’, ‘dysfunctional child’, ‘always in trouble, ‘too much drinking’, offender, high risk arrest target, high risk offender

Kumanjayi Walker

Aboriginal woman, Yamatji woman, JC, 29-year old, mental health issues, behavioural issues, young Indigenous woman, troubled, smoked cannibis, relapsed, methylamphetamine user, angry, suicidal, out of hand, criminal record, “looking to fight”, “did not have custody of her son”, “undiagnosed, foetal alcohol syndrome”, threatening, combatitive, transient, armed, lethal threat

JC

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The police officer

Constables, a Police aide, five men, police officers, Roebourne police, the accused, defendants, the five

John Pat

Mulrunji Doomadgee Chris Hurley, Senior Sergeant Chris Hurley, Senior Sergeant Hurley, police officer, gentle giant

Constable Zachary Rolfe, former soldier, Northern Territory police officer, Alice Springs Constable, Northern Territory Police Constable, police man, ‘policeman doing his job’, recipient of the National Bravery Medal, ‘half-naked hero cop’, hero cop, decorated cop, former soldier, recipient of three bravery medals, decorated former Australian Army officer, star pupil at Canberra Grammar, son of prominent business identities and philanthropists, star pupil, well respected, decorated cop, supremely fit

Kumanjayi Walker

(continued)

First class constable, cannot be named, WA policeman, WA police officer, cop, policeman, brave, frontline

JC

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Description of the death in custody

Table 1 (continued)

Alleged manslaughter, custody, death, juvenile cell, Roebourne police station, lock-up, closed-head injury, unlawful killing, savagely assaulted, accident

John Pat

Mulrunji Doomadgee brawl, stairs, drunkenly, death in custody

The shooting, fatal police shooting, ‘a flashpoint for long-running tensions’, police shooting death of an Aboriginal man, the shooting, allegedly shot a man, alleged shooting, allegedly shot

Kumanjayi Walker

fatal shooting, shot once in the stomach, knife in her hand, died from her injuries, killed, felled, taken down, bled to death, fatally shot, bleeding internally, heart stopped

JC

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Disturbing situations, concocted evidence, international forums, human rights, racism, intimidated by police, cracked in the witness box, loud sobbing, tearful reunions

Aboriginal observers, uniformed policemen, Aboriginal groups, Aboriginal leaders, defence lawyer, Aboriginal witness, wives and family members

Family, community

John Pat

The aftermath

Mulrunji Doomadgee

Aborigines, rioters, violent, drunken, ringleaders, rioting mobs, angry mob, offenders

Palm Island riots, riots, unrest, warzone, violent, rampage, tropical rampage, rioting mobs, fiery attack, they threatened to kill us, danger, torched, taunt Warlpiri community, Aboriginal community, run-down,

Anxious vigil, spontaneous protests, mourning ceremony, massive protests

Kumanjayi Walker Heated protests, peaceful march, anger and frustration, “were targets of heckling”, list of demands, national day of action, highly charged situation Sister, relatives, advocates, Aboriginal pastor, protesters

JC

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Fig. 1 Feature page of the Weekend Australian (March, 2022)

headline, ‘White Australian Police Officer Acquitted of Killing of Young Aboriginal Man’ (Miller, 2022: 8). By contrast, the deceased victim is both hyper-racialised and hypercriminalised. In this sense the deceased victim is frequently represented in two-dimensional ways that emphasise their Aboriginality and alleged criminality. In general terms, the language used to describe the deceased victim is steeped heavily in racial stereotypes, prejudice, and deficit. For example, the front-page headline from The Australian reads, ‘Unwanted Son Never Stood A Chance’ (see Fig. 2). Moreover the deceased victim is typically represented in terms of some deficit identifier (e.g., alleged criminality, drunkenness, pre-existing health issues, mental health issues). The reporting does not afford the deceased the same humanity that is afforded to police officers in the sense that there are few, if any, positive adjectives used to describe the victim deceased. The deceased victim is frequently demonised, dehumanised, criminalised and vilified. Whereas a full range of positive descriptors are used to describe the police officer, the same humanity and respect is denied the deceased and the deceased’s community who are depicted in stereotypical and prejudicial ways, as ‘drunk’, ‘drunken’ dysfunctional’ and ‘criminal’. The following extracts are reflective of this pattern:

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Fig. 2 Front cover of the Weekend Australian (March, 2022)

Kumanjayi Walker, now 15 months old, was supposed to be living with Oldfield, but it was now unclear who at Warlpiri Camp was actually caring for him. By September 2002 Walker was being cared for by his grandmother but was described as ‘failing to thrive’ and simultaneously suffering from an ear infection, a chest infection, nits and scabies. (Shorten, 2022a: np)

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Zachary Rolfe and his Northern Territory Police partner put themselves at risk by rushing into a dimly-lit home to confront “high-risk” offender Kumanjayi Walker when they had “all the time in the world” to prepare to tackle him safely. (Aikman, 2022: 1)

Finally, and by extension, the deceased’s family and community are also always racialised and constructed as a threat or otherwise depicted in negative terms. In the case of John Pat, news reporting tends to repeat statements and arguments made by the defense, for example about the supposed unreliability of family witnesses. In the aftermath of the Hurley trial, the entire Palm Island Aboriginal community were described as ‘offenders’. Another notable difference is the absence of quotes that are attributed to the deceased’s family and community, who are rarely afforded a voice. By comparison, the police officers on trial and their families are frequently quoted and discussed at length. One headline reads, ‘Zachary Rolfe’s father speaks out after NT officer cleared of murder’ (Fordham, 2022: online). The following quotes are representative: Rolfe’s family share their devastation at the murder charges, which they believe were ordered by the highest levels of the NT government … His tearful mother Deb weeps as she recalls the trauma of talking to her son through prison glass ‘just like in the movies’, while a former police investigator on the case speaks out about his grave concerns over the rush to charge Rolfe with murder. (No author, 2022: online) The father of Northern Territory police officer Zachary Rolfe has spoken out after his son was found not guilty of the death of an Indigenous man. The 30-year-old was found not guilty over the death of 19-yearold Kumanjayi Walker. Father Richard Rolfe told Ben Fordham he’s “incredibly proud” of his son. (Fordham, 2022: online)

A significant point of contrast concerns the Australian news reporting on internal Black Deaths in Custody cases vis-a-vis Australian news reporting on international police fatal killings. In general terms, the Australian corporate media was more likely to comment fairly and

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more sensitively in relation to racism and police killings occurring overseas. Australian coverage of international deaths in custody consists mainly of syndicated articles (Reuters, The Times [Australian], New York Times [SMH/AGE], Associated Press (US)). When deaths are reported, coverage tends to be editorial/ opinion. Table 2 summarises these differences and should be contrasted with Table 1:

Conclusion The way we frame issues and the language we use matters. The language we use shapes understandings of events, evokes certain emotional responses, and can tap into racial prejudice and biases. The findings of this study demonstrate the role the media plays in the reproduction of racial stereotypes and prejudice. In each of the four criminal trials, the deceased victims and the community were represented as dysfunctional, deficient, and criminal. These tropes fuel highly racialised stereotypes and misinformation. They also function to shift blame from the police to the deceased victim and the community. Indigenous deaths are hence presented as inevitable, and Indigenous people are presented as destined to die, a dying race (Watego, 2022). The findings of this study have similarly demonstrated that the police, unlike the deceased victim, are neither racialised nor criminalised, even when standing criminal trial. Furthermore, the police are often represented in heroic and sympathetic terms. It is important to emphasise that in spite of the prevalence of double standards and stereotypical representations in the mainstream media, Indigenous journalists and academics have long sought to independently portray and raise public awareness about the crisis of Indigenous injustice and Black deaths in custody in the colony (Fiske and Napaljarri-Marti, 1997; CAAMA, 2001; Batty and Jupurrurla, 2012; Behrendt, 2014; Clarke, 2018, 2021: l; Hodgson, 2022; McQuire, 2018). This study has considered the ways in which criminal laws and legal procedure—in particular legal privilege, suppression orders, nonpublication orders and other gag orders—dictate the parameters of what is and is not publishable, reportable, knowable. In all four cases, police officer defendants were represented by the very best legal representation

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Table 2

Language in the Australian mainstream media

The deceased victim

The police officer

The description of the fatal death

Mike Brown

Mark Duggan

George Floyd

Mike Brown, Michael Brown, unarmed, black, teenager, accused, killed, shot dead, Brown’s father, his father, his mother, his family, dreams, young, future, proud, potential, gentle giant, good kid, tragedy, friendly, accused, allegedly, dreams, aspirations Darren Wilson, white cop, child-killer, police officer, policeman, police, racist police

Mark Duggan, Duggan, London man, father of four, Mr Duggan

George Floyd, Floyd, close friend, black man, black Minneapolis resident, 46-year-old African American man

Unnamed officer, Officer, firearms officer, police

death, shooting, the slaying, brutality, police brutality, racial profiling, death in custody

Death at the hands of police, gunshot wound, killing, shot him in the chest, fatal shooting, dying gasps

Derek Chauvin, Chauvin, police officer, Minneapolis police officer, former police officer, police force veteran, driven by ego, killer, 45 years old, white, white police officer Died in custody, murder, died, kneeling on the neck, graphic, manslaughter, in cold blood, horrifying death, grotesque (continued)

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Table 2 (continued) The aftermath

Family, community, protestors

Mike Brown

Mark Duggan

George Floyd

riots, rallies, protests, demonstrations, civil disobedience, civil rights, turning point, procession, anger, an unruly march, hostile, race relations, warzone, movement, crisis, die-ins, chaos, complex and violent crisis, peaceful rioters, protestors, political agitators, frustrated, citizens of Ferguson, residents, volunteers, activists, a lady, community elders, the crowd, community, families

Peaceful protest, riot, violence, unrest, mass rioting, looting, anger

Gripped America, high profile Americans, protest rally, protests, violence, looting, arson, emotionally charged, high profile, protests, nationwide debate on police reform, watershed moment Best friend, protesters, Floyd family, crowds, community, emotion, relief, “landmark test of police accountability”

Family, relatives, protesters, rioters, mourners

that money and police unions can buy. In the trial into the murder of JC, the police officer facing criminal trial was able to suppress his name and other details of the case. In the trial into the assault of Mulrunji Doomadgee, police officer Hurley sued the Coroner’s Court of Queensland, while Lex Wotton—who was given a seven-year prison sentence for his role in the uprising—and other community members were subject to gag orders preventing them from speaking publicly. In the trial into the murder of Kumanjayi Walker, Rolfe’s legal team successfully argued that twelve prior complaints of excessive force against Rolfe (the majority

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of whom involved Indigenous complainants) were inadmissable on the grounds of ‘tendency’. These outcomes speak to the power of police unions and Australian policing institutions, who are typically equipped with substantial budgets including for litigation and legal settlements. For example, in 2021 the Victorian Police Service alone spent AU$60 million on legal expenses (Houston, 2020). It is important to understand these figures within the broader context of record budgets and record staffing commitments across Australia, with New South Wales Police Force recently awarded AU$5.5billion budget and 550 new police recruits. These outcomes speak also to the racist inequalities of white settler law. Put differently, the double standards and biases in Australian news reporting is not only reflective of racism within the Australian corporate media but also the structures, institutions, processes and procedures of the settler legal system more broadly. While no Australian police officer has ever been criminally convicted in relation to an Indigenous death in custody, there is a long history of organised resistance and truth-telling about the racial violence of policing on this continent. Respected Aboriginal Elder and activist Lex Wotton was imprisoned and subjected to a four-year gag order for his role in the resistance to the death of Mulrunji Doomadgee. In 2016, Mr Wotton coordinated the first successful class action against the Queensland Police Service on behalf of the Aboriginal community of Palm Island. In the landmark decision, Wotton v Queensland Police Service [2016] FCA 1457, Mortimer J found that the Queensland Police Service contravened s 9(1) the Racial Discrimination Act 1976 (Cth). In the absence of accountability and transparency, Indigenous families and organisations continue to agitate for truth-telling, justice and accountability on the national and global level. In 1991 the RCIADIC included four recommendations that were written specifically for Australian media outlets, editors and journalists (Johnston, 1991: recs 205–208). They require action and leadership from editors, journalists and managers. Journalists and editors would do well to read the recommendations and to act on them.

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References Aikman, A (2022) ‘Rolfe Put Himself at Risk: Expert’ The Australian (28 February 2022). Australian Institute of Criminology (2022) Deaths in Custody in Australia 2021–2022. Canberra: AIC. Available at: https://www.aic.gov.au/statistics/ deaths-custody-australia#:~:text=The%20NDICP%20was%20established% 20at,custody%20since%20the%20Royal%20Commission Batty, D & Jupurrurla Kelly, F (2012) Coniston. Paw Media with the Assistance of Screen Australia. Behrendt, L (2014) Innocence Betrayed . Directed by Behrendt, L. Produced by Cavadini, F. CAAMA Productions (2001) My Mother’s Country Part 1. Directed by Fayleen Lauder and Produced by Priscilla Collins. Carrick, D (2014) ‘Civil Actions Against Police by Crime Victims’, ABC Radio National: The Law Report (14 March 2014). Available at: https:// www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/lawreport/ciivil-actions-against-pol ice-by-crime-victims/5325170 Clarke, A (2018) Unravel: Blood On The Tracks. Available online (Season 1–7) https://www.abc.net.au/radio/programs/truecrime/blood-on-the-tracks/ Clarke, A (2021) The Bowraville Murders. Available at: https://www.sbs.com. au/ondemand/movie/the-bowraville-murders/1942561347815#:~:text=In% 20one%20of%20Australia’s%20worst,society%20that%20have%20failed% 20them. Clements, C (2006) Inquest to the Death of Mulrunji Doomadgee (Brisbane: Office of the State Coroner). Colonial Frontier Massacres Project (2018) The Killing Times (University of NEwcastle with the Guardian AU). Available at: https://www.theguardian. com/australia-news/ng-interactive/2019/mar/04/massacre-map-australiathe-killing-times-frontier-wars Cunneen, C (2001) Conflict, Crime and Politics, Allen and Unwin Press. Fiske, P & Napaljarri-Martin, V (1997) Munga Wardingki Patu / “Night Patrol” [documentary]. Warlpiri Media Association Trading as PAW Media and Communications. Fordham, B (2022) ‘Zachary Rolfe’s Father Speaks Out After NT Police Officer Cleared of Murder’ 2GB (14 March 2022). Available at: https://www.2gb. com/zachary-rolfes-father-speaks-out-after-nt-officer-cleared-of-murder/ Gilbert, K (1978) Living Black, Penguin.

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Hennesy, Anabell (2020) ‘Final Days of a Fragile Woman’ The West Australian (22 February 2020). Hodgson, M. (2022) ‘Disappeared and Murdered Aboriginal Women and Girls’ Curtain the Podcast (see 75 Episodes Generally). Available at: https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/disappeared-and-murderedaboriginal-women/id1164804753?i=1000551470353 Houston (2020) ‘Police Legal Costs Blow Out to $60m—More Than It Spends on Choppers’ (29 October 2020). Available at: https://www.theage. com.au/national/victoria/police-legal-costs-blow-out-to-60m-more-than-itspends-on-choppers-20201029-p569uo.html Jenkin, C. (2021) Inquest into the Death of Chad Riley. Available at: https://www.coronerscourt.wa.gov.au/_files/inquest-2021/RILEY,%20C had,%20Finding.pdf Johnston, E (1991) Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, Australian Government Publishing Service. McQuire, M (2018) ‘The Cases of Missing and Murdered Aboriginal People Need to be Heard’ Medium (28 May 2018). Available at: https://medium.com/@amymcquire/the-cases-of-missing-and-murderedaboriginal-people-need-to-be-heard-88de81041a1b McQuire, M (2020) ‘There Cannot be 432 Victims and No Perpetrators’ The Saturday Paper (6 June 2020). Available at: https://www.thesaturdaypaper. com.au/news/law-crime/2020/06/06/there-cannot-be-432-victims-and-noperpetrators/15913656009926 Miller, M (2022) ‘White Australian Police Officer Acquitted in Killing of Aboriginal Teen, a Case that Gripped the Country’ Washington Post (10 March 2022). Available at: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/ 03/10/zachary-rolfe-kumanjayi-walker-verdict/ National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children From Their Families (1997) Bringing Them Home, Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission. No author [editorial] (1984) ‘Police Officers Not Guilty of Manslaughter’ (1984), The Australian (24 May 1984): 1. Available at: https://trove.nla. gov.au/newspaper/article/126997577 No author [editorial] (2022) ‘Zach Rolfe and Family Feature in Spotlight Episode About Murder Trial and Shooting death of Kumanjayi Walker’ (21 May 2022). Available at: https://ntindependent.com.au/zach-rolfe-and-fam ily-feature-in-spotlight-episode-about-murder-trial-and-shooting-death-ofkumanjayi-walker/

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O’Flaherty, A (2019), ‘Geraldton Police Shooting Victim Joyce Clarke’s Struggles with Demons Revealed Amid Community Protests’ ABC (19 September 2019). Available at: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-09-19/ police-shooting-victim-joyce-clarke-struggle-with-demons/11528364 Owen, C (2016) Every Mother’s Son is Guilty: Policing the Kimberley Frontier of Western Australia 1882–1905, University of Western Australia Press. Perkins, R (2022) The Australian Wars, Blackfella Films, Available at: https:// www.sbs.com.au/ondemand/tv-series/the-australian-wars Porter, A and Cunneen, C (2021) ‘Policing Settler Colonial Societies’ in Birch, P et al (eds) Australian Policing. Routledge. Richardson, J (2008) Secret War: A True History of Queensland’s Native Police, University of Queensland Press. Sentas, V (2018) ‘Beyond Media Discourse: Locating Race and Racism in Criminal Justice Systems’ in Bhatia, M., Poynting, S. and Tufail, W. (eds) Media, Crime and Racism, Palgrave. Shorten, K (2022a) ‘Fears Began When He Was a Newborn: Kumanjayi Walker’s Tragic Life Before He Was Shot by NT Cop Zachary Rolfe’ The Australian (14 March 2022). Available at: https://www.theaustralian.com. au/nation/the-unwanted-baby-who-became-a-violent-abuser-kumanjayi-wal kers-tragic-life-before-he-was-shot-by-nt-cop-zachary-rolfe/ Shorten, K (2022b) ‘Private Schoolboy Zachary Rolfe Fell in Love with Policing Before Being Charged with Murder Over Death of Kumanjayi Walker’ The Australian (14 March 2022). Available at: https://www.theaus tralian.com.au/nation/private-schoolboy-zachary-rolfe-fell-in-love-with-pol icing-before-being-charged-with-murder-over-death-of-kumanjayi-walker/ Watego, C (2022) Another Day in the Colony, University of Queensland Press. Western Australian Police (2020) Briefing Note: Lifetime Traffic Penalty Comparisons. Western Australia Police: Capability and Coordination. (Released under the Freedom of Information Act application by the Guardian Australia. Available at: https://www.scribd.com/document/445 453320/Document-for-Release-the-Guardian-FOI-2019-1912)

Cases Cited Henry v Thompson [1989] 2 Qd R 412 Wotton v Queensland Commissioner of Police [2016] FCA 1457 R v Rolfe [2022] NTSC 22 The State of Western Australia v BW [2021] WAWC 32

‘Immortalising the Golden Age of Middle Eastern Crime’: Police-Media Liaisons, Essentialism, and Epistemic Violence Megan McElhone

Introduction In recent years, scholars, journalists, activists, and others across the English-speaking world have paid increasing attention to racialised police power. Such attention has largely concerned the work of operational police and their deployment of legal powers of stop, search, arrest, and so on. This chapter, in contrast, focuses on the practices of professional police staff—specifically police media units and research gatekeepers— and considers how their work facilitates police organisations’ attempts to shape public knowledge about racialised groups and their propensities for criminality. It argues that these modes of police power produce racial essentialism and epistemic violence, in turn attesting to the need for directly and physically violent policing. M. McElhone (B) Birkbeck, University of London, London, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Bhatia et al. (eds.), Racism, Violence and Harm, Palgrave Studies in Crime, Media and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-37879-9_6

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To illustrate its key contentions, the chapter takes the policing of Middle Eastern people and so-called ‘Middle Eastern crime’ in Sydney, Australia, as a case study.1 Since the late 1990s—and therefore prior to the commencement of the Global War on Terror—Middle Eastern people in Sydney have been intensely surveilled and policed by the New South Wales Police Force. People of Lebanese, Iraqi, Syrian, Palestinian, and even Afghan origin or heritage (amongst others) have been pulled into the ambit of such policing, especially in the localities in the city’s west and south-west where they tend to reside. Such targeted and territorial policing has been propped up by an assemblage of policies, practices, and institutional units, notably including the police’s storied Middle Eastern Organised Crime Squad. While these policies, practices, and police units have attracted little scholarly attention (but see Collins et al. 2000; McElhone 2023; McElhone 2019a), abiding public discourses have affirmed the need for the extraordinary policing of Middle Eastern crime. Indeed, elite and media discourses about Middle Eastern crime, and representations of Middle Eastern criminals on television and radio, and in films and books, have abounded. Significantly, though, as this chapter aims to demonstrate, some commentators—primarily reporters attached to conservative outlets—have been enabled by the police organisation’s media unit to produce accounts essentialising Middle Eastern criminal capacity by drawing on inherited Orientalist tropes, with a view to making Middle Eastern criminals intelligible to public audiences. In one reporter’s words, it was his task to ‘immortalis[e] the Golden Age of Middle Eastern crime’ (Bashan 2016, p. ix). But at the same time, police research gatekeepers obstructed the author’s attempts, as a woman of Lebanese heritage from Sydney’s south-west, to produce an account of the policing of Middle Eastern people. In tracing how these institutionalised practices operated in tandem, this chapter aims to highlight that racialised policing is not limited to the targeted use of legal powers on the street, but extends to the police’s ability to shape public knowledge about race and crime. This chapter therefore offers two key contributions to the criminological and socio-legal literature on policing, race, and crime. Firstly, it 1

This term is sometimes used interchangeably with ‘Middle Eastern organised crime’.

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extends the existing literature on police-media liaisons, which has noted that increasingly servile relationships between police organisations and (primarily traditional) media outlets allow the police to claim greater stake in the production of public knowledge about their work, but under-theorised the effects of these relationships, by implication treating them as though they are race neutral. In turn, by highlighting how the practices of professional police staff like police media units and research gatekeepers contribute to the maintenance of elite and media discourses about race and crime, the chapter also prefaces the sizable body of literature concerning the content of such discourses. As such, while the chapter presents a case study of police practice in one Australian city, it may prove useful to scholars in other jurisdictions by drawing attention to the role of professional police staff in bringing race into being. In other words, the chapter encourages scholars to look beyond discourses that racialise crime, and consider how the practices of police research gatekeepers and media units help to construct and insulate those discourses, as well as the effects for those who are policed. The chapter proceeds as follows. It first presents a reading of the relationships between racial essentialism, epistemic violence, and Orientalism, in order to establish the power relations and political dimensions at stake in the production of public knowledge, and their interrelation with direct and physical violence. The chapter then presents a brief survey of the existing literature regarding the institutionalised practices by which police organisations shape knowledge about policing and the policed, focusing on police-media liaisons and research gatekeeping. Next, the chapter presents a case study of these practices, focusing on how police-media liaisons and research gatekeeping in Sydney have facilitated the production and maintenance of essentialist public discourses about Middle Eastern crime, and thereby propped up the assemblage of powers and units employed to police it. Finally, the chapter explores the implications of its case study, arguing that the practices of professional police staff working in media units and as research gatekeepers are key sites of racialisation: that is, key sites of police institutional practice that bring race into being. The final section of the chapter also characterises these practices as being epistemically violent and discusses their effects for those who are policed.

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Essentialism, Epistemic Violence, and Orientalism Throughout the last half-century, poststructuralist, postcolonial, and feminist scholarship has emphasised that violence involves not just the coercion and control of bodies, but also of minds. Such scholarship has further demonstrated that knowledge—here defined as the frames that people use to make sense of the world and evaluate truth claims—is not universal, self-evident, or neutral. Rather, it is inflected with power and inherently political. Indeed, the production of knowledge is underpinned by unequal power relationships, just as systems of power are upheld by complex webs of knowledge and truth claims, whether governmental, (social) scientific, cultural, or otherwise. Scholarly consensus about the precise nature of the relationships between knowledge, power, and violence nevertheless remains elusive. Although it is beyond the scope of this chapter to try to resolve the ambiguities and disagreements in the relevant literature, suffice it to say that depictions of how knowledge, power, and violence intersect, for example in accounts of colonial regimes, attest to their deep entanglement. This chapter nevertheless takes the view that processes of knowledge production can occasion forms of violence which are distinctly epistemic. These forms of violence may well intersect with direct and physical violence but are not reducible to them (Dotson 2014). The term ‘epistemic violence’ is most often associated with the work of Spivak and her canonical work Can the Subaltern Speak? (1988). For Spivak, epistemic violence is exemplified by ‘the remotely orchestrated, far-flung, and heterogeneous project to constitute the colonial subject as Other’, which entails the ‘asymmetrical obliteration of the trace of that Other in its precarious Subjectivity’ (1988, pp. 280–281). Epistemic violence, then, draws attention to how Western forms of knowledge production preclude subaltern (or otherwise powerless) people from participating in social and cultural meaning-making, and erode their ways of making sense of their material circumstances and lived experiences. Epistemic violence exists in a recursive relationship with essentialism (Guhin and Wyrtzen 2013), here meaning knowledge that reflects and re-creates the thinking that

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certain groups of people are fundamentally different—and usually inferior—because they possess natural, fixed, and immutable pathologies or traits, be they biological or cultural. As such, misrecognition is foremost amongst the effects of epistemic violence, whereby the inferiorisation of subaltern or otherwise powerless people is reflected in their exclusion from meaning-making and linguistic reciprocity, and the preclusion of their truth claims. Spivak conceptualised epistemic violence in the context of the Orientalist regime of knowledge and power relations. On a thumb nail, over several centuries, the written, visual, and oral texts of scholars and other authors situated in Western imperial powers have generated knowledge about the East (the ‘Orient’) by positioning the West (the ‘Occident’) over and above it. The body of knowledge produced about the Orient is complex, and by no means without its internal contradictions, but largely comprises essentialist, binary categorisations which affirm the Western self-image by homogenously representing the many people of the Orient as primitive, exotic, lustful, indolent, and at times violent and dangerous Others. Crucially, though, the Othering of the Orient is not simply an issue of over-generalised or misrepresentative discourses but also of material violence, having enabled imperial domination by making the Orient intelligible and providing justification for the conquest and control of people and territories (for leading accounts of Orientalism, see Said 1992, 1994, 2003). But while the Orientalist regime of knowledge and power relations comprises abiding tropes, it is not static or unchanging; on the contrary, it is ‘vigorously revitalised’ over time and in different places by state practices and elite and media discourses (Pugliese 2003, [6]). For example, since 2001, Western counterterrorism has attracted significant scholarly attention as a site through which Orientalist tropes are reflected and re-stated, with the effect not only of bringing formerly colonised peoples ‘of Middle Eastern appearance’ into the ambit of security and police practices, but also of sustaining (neo)imperialism in the Middle East. Observers have also noted that Australia, itself a settler colony, has ‘picked up the imperial inheritance with full force’, with Orientalism ‘successfully transplanted and developed on Antipodean shores’ (Manning 2004, p. 45). The fullest treatment of such ‘transplantation’

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is provided by Poynting et al. in their influential work Bin Laden in the Suburbs (2004), which traces how, during the early 2000s, elite and media discourses in Australia discursively entangled a range of disparate fears about Arabs, Muslims, crime, terrorism, and refugees in a threatening entity the authors termed the ‘Arab Other’. As further argued by Poynting et al. (2004, p. 50), the Arab Other acted as an ‘ideological explanation’ for, and embodiment of, ‘a range of social problems’. Meanwhile, other works have detailed how Australian popular media texts have depicted Middle Eastern men as being markedly engaged in gangs and firearms-related crimes, and as displaying disregard for policing and the rule of law (Krayem 2017; McElhone 2019b). Because of its incidence in the Orientalist regime of knowledge and power relations, the signifier Middle Eastern is simultaneously reductive and productive. It is reductive in the sense that, despite ostensibly identifying an individual’s place of birth or heritage, its use facilitates homogenisation by ‘obliterating’ the specificity of geography, history, language, culture, and religion (Pugliese 2003, [28]). But at the same time, the signifier is productive because its use brings into frame essentialist ideas about the behaviours and pathologies of Middle Eastern people. It is in acknowledgement of its productive power, and following a tradition of thinking influenced by the work of Hall (2021), that I have chosen to retain the term Middle Eastern in this chapter and to forgo placing it in scare quotes; not to imply that there is any fixed, immutable biological or cultural essence to being Middle Eastern, but because, as this chapter aims to demonstrate, police practices and media discourses in Sydney imbue the signifier Middle Eastern with meaning, significantly affecting the lives of those people so categorised. Although much ink has been spilled documenting the nature and content of the Orientalist regime of knowledge and the signifiers it comprises, less attention has been paid to the processes and practices constituting such knowledge. In the sections that follow, this chapter accounts for two adjacent sites of institutionalised police practice contributing to the ‘vigorous revitalisation’ of Orientalist knowledge— and particularly of the signifier Middle Eastern—in Australia’s most populous city, Sydney. These sites of institutionalised police practice are police-media liaisons and research gatekeeping.

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Police Organisational Opacity When police organisations do not provide the public with information and data about their work, it can be difficult to account for the nature of policing. This is not to imply that only police perspectives about policing are credible or valid: on the contrary, police policies and practices are often hidden and may be contested as unlawful, discriminatory, or otherwise unreasonable, meaning that the perspectives and experiences of those who are policed are valuable in making sense of police work. Nevertheless, it remains the case that police organisational opacity can impede efforts to understand, critique, challenge, and change police policy and practice. Of course, police organisations do not maintain equal commitments to sharing information and data with the public. As articulated by Chanin and Espinosa (2016, p. 500), police ‘transparency is the product of a unique constellation of factors within [police] agencies that lead certain departments to share more than others’, with the factors bearing on such transparency remaining under-researched. However, one inference to be drawn from the existing literature is that while organisational orientations towards transparency vary across police jurisdictions, even within a given police organisation there may well exist greater willingness to communicate and engage with some stakeholders and interest groups than others. Indeed, the difference in how police engage with reporters and researchers—two of the foremost producers of public knowledge about the police and policing—serves to underscore this point. Police organisations in English-speaking jurisdictions have actively cultivated relationships with reporters and media outlets for more than half a century. The New South Wales Police Force is no exception. As explained by McGovern and Lee (2010), the police in New South Wales first created a branch dedicated to fostering ties with media organisations and reporters in the mid-1960s, to counterbalance the ‘crises’ of public confidence that the organisation was beginning to experience. The current iteration of this media branch is the Police Media Unit, which is a ‘dedicated media liaison team’ that negotiates police involvement in commercial ‘reality’ television programmes, works around the

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clock responding to media inquiries, and sporadically issues information to journalists in the form of short, written statements or ‘media releases’ (McGovern and Lee 2010, pp. 448–450). According to Lee and McGovern (2013), the work of the Police Media Unit is animated by the thinking that media engagement is crucial to legitimating and building community trust in policing, and, as such, the Unit has developed a proliferation of strategies to increase the organisation’s liaisons with media outlets of varying descriptions. At the same time, accessing personnel, information, and data remain fundamental and systemic difficulties in conducting academic research into the police and their practices. Aversion to criticism has meant that police organisations the world over have traditionally attempted to limit opportunities for outsiders to scrutinise their internal mechanisms (see, e.g., Punch 1985, 1989; Dixon 2011; McGovern 2011). Put differently, controlling access allows police organisations to regulate images of their work and occupational culture and can help to shelter them from criticism. Although police organisations in some Englishspeaking jurisdictions are currently demonstrating greater willingness to forge partnerships with university researchers, gatekeepers will likely attempt to prevent researchers from inquiring into police policy and practice if they cannot constrain the research agenda and if the findings of a proposed project are expected to cause controversy (Topping 2016). By the admission of senior officers, Australian police organisations have often declined to cooperate with critical researchers and their findings have not been welcomed (Bradley and Nixon 2009). As such, police-media liaisons and research gatekeeping processes are neither inevitable nor immaterial: they are institutionalised practices which allow police organisations to claim considerable stake in shaping public knowledge about policing and the policed. In New South Wales, as in other English-speaking jurisdictions, the police’s attempts to exert control over reportage about policing and the policed have been facilitated by the decline of the traditional media, including ‘[d]windling media budgets, reduced resources … and the proliferation of generalist reporters’ who uncritically accept and reproduce information disseminated by the Unit (McGovern and Lee 2010, p. 453). The Police

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Media Unit also incentivises unquestioning reporting of police knowledge claims by ‘reward[ing] particularly helpful reporters with “scoops” or “exclusives”’ (McGovern and Lee 2010, p. 453). More to the point, these developments have allowed the police to use the media as a platform to communicate apparent successes in crime control by feeding the abiding ‘law-and-order’ rhetoric in New South Wales and extolling the virtues of punitiveness and targeted interventions against marginalised groups, including racialised groups (McGovern and Lee 2010, p. 257). Given that the groups in question do not wield the same influence over the ‘traditional’ media, and that critical researchers may well be obstructed by gatekeepers, decidedly unequal power dynamics are at play in the production of public knowledge about policing, race, and crime. In the section that follows, I present a case study illustrating these power dynamics. Although my personal research experience is given more detailed narrative treatment elsewhere (McElhone 2019a), the case study below highlights how the practices of police media units and research gatekeepers shape public knowledge about policing and the policed by leveraging liaisons with reporters and by obstructing research access. While it may be objected that the case study is not generalisable (nor is it intended to be), it nevertheless provides original insights into how the institutionalised practices of professional police staff can contribute to regimes of racialised police power.

Making Middle Eastern Crime Intelligible: A Case Study As noted above, since the late 1990s, extraordinary attention and resources have been devoted to policing Middle Eastern people in Sydney. At the same time, law-and-order police, political, and media rhetoric have produced abiding public discourses attesting to the alleged criminal capacities of the city’s many diverse Middle Eastern communities. However, since the publication of Collins et al.’s Kebabs, Kids, Cops, and Crime (2000), little scholarly attention has been paid to the policies, practices, and institutional units involved in this assemblage or regime of policing.

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When I commenced my doctoral studies in 2015, I aimed to document the policies, practices, and institutional units in question, analyse how they had rendered Middle Eastern people collectively suspect to police attention, and describe their effects for those people policed. I was particularly interested in interrogating the role of the storied Middle Eastern Organised Crime Squad, which operated between 2006 and 2017, but which had not been subject to any academic scrutiny. Overall, though, as a woman of Lebanese heritage from Sydney’s south-west, my motivation for undertaking the research stemmed from lived, collective, and intergenerational experiences of place, power, and racism. From the outset, I intended to draw data from both the police and the policed, owing to two insights gleaned from the policing literature. Firstly, as detailed above, gaining research access to police organisations often proves difficult. Secondly, police researchers are increasingly realising the need for policing literature which is attentive to the perspectives of those who are policed, and which thereby provides ‘less “cop-sided” view[s] of policing’ (Maher et al. 1997, p. 1). In all, then, I intended to draw data from both the police and the policed to generate nuanced descriptions of opaque police practices, based on accounts which complemented, challenged, and extended one another. In attempting to negotiate police research access, I engaged with the organisation’s research gatekeepers, then called the Research Coordination Unit. I proposed to observe police employees from police command areas where Middle Eastern people tend to reside, including both rankand-file officers and civilian Multicultural Community Liaison Officers. I also requested interviews with 20–25 officers attached to those commands or to the Middle Eastern Organised Crime Squad. Although I was ultimately denied access by the police, my experience of negotiating with the Research Coordination Unit was instructive about the phenomena I had set out to study, providing me with valuable data about how the police have generated and protected their knowledge claims about the alleged criminal capacities of Middle Eastern people in Sydney. I outline my key observations below. Firstly, research gatekeeping practices in New South Wales ensure that support is only given to projects deemed organisationally valuable to the police by the police. As stated on the police’s public website at the

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time I was conducting my research, the Research Coordination Unit assesses whether proposed projects align with the organisation’s corporate plan before deciding whether to commit organisational support to them. Given the emphases on managerialism, efficiency, and cost-effectiveness in contemporary police administration (see, e.g., Mann 2017), it is perhaps unsurprising that the police ask external researchers to demonstrate the relevance of proposed projects to their corporate priorities. But it is important not to lose sight of the fact that the police are the ultimate arbiters of their corporate priorities. Meanwhile, even a cursory glance reveals that the corporate documents police make available to the public tend to be general and ambiguous in nature, and not all corporate documents are open to public scrutiny. As such, the police’s research gatekeeping policy effectively allows the organisation to insulate itself from research anticipated to cause criticism and controversy by declining to participate in projects upon the basis that they are not in keeping with corporate policies and priorities. The bar is therefore set quite low for the police in terms of public transparency and public access; not least given the organisation’s status as a public institution with a budget of a few billion dollars annually (NSW Police Force 2021), whose officers are authorised to use coercive and potentially lethal force, and to constrain people’s freedoms of movement, assembly, and association. However, before they outrightly reject unfavourable projects, police gatekeepers may employ dilatory tactics to dissuade or prevent researchers from undertaking them (Dixon 1999, p. 94). My protracted efforts to negotiate research access with the police began in December 2015 and carried on without resolution until December 2017 when I was informed, without further explanation, that the police had rejected my application. Two years is a fatal length of time for almost any research project to remain in abeyance, even a marathon project like a doctoral study. During those two years, staff attached to the Research Coordination Unit issued me with repeated requests for further information. Once I had supplied them with the requested information, I tended to be met with radio silence, and the responses I did receive to follow-up emails gave little sense whether my application had progressed. I also received an instruction to revise and resubmit my proposal after removing its observational components, with the Unit citing concerns for my safety

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while accompanying on-duty police as their rationale. Although this instruction may be considered by some to represent responsible research gatekeeping, as elaborated below, the same restrictions did not apply to journalists writing affirmative accounts of the policing of Middle Eastern people. While research gatekeepers work to shield police organisations from critical research, police media units liaise with reporters to create conduits for celebratory stories about the police. In early 2016, within a month of the Research Coordination Unit insisting that I remove the observational components from my research proposal, the Police Media Unit granted former News Corp associate editor John Lyons and photographer Gary Ramage—who had each ‘spent time in various war zones … and come across many unsavoury characters’—considerable access to the Middle Eastern Organised Crime Squad (Lyons 2016); an institutional unit I had proposed to study. Over a period of three weeks, Lyons and Ramage interviewed officers attached to the Squad, participated in ride-alongs, and observed arrests and raids. The ‘exclusive’ report Lyons authored after conducting this fieldwork was published in May 2016 while I awaited the Research Coordination Unit’s feedback on my revised research proposal. Similarly, having decided to write a book about the Middle Eastern Organised Crime Squad at the suggestion of some of the Squad’s officers, News Corp reporter Yoni Bashan was permitted interviews with serving police ‘upon request, and on a case-by-case basis’ and given a tour of the Squad’s offices, based in a ‘secret’ Sydney location (Bashan 2016, p. 303). In turn, the sensationalist accounts produced by both reporters venerate the Squad and its officers, framing them as an ‘elite’ unit with ‘cult’ or ‘mythical status’, charged with defending with Sydney’s ‘mean’ streets from the city’s most prolific criminals (Lyons 2016; Bashan 2016). But beyond being sensationalist and celebratory in tone, these accounts reflect and re-create Orientalist tropes, especially regarding deviant Middle Eastern masculinities (see also Grewal 2018; Morgan et al. 2010). Both Lyons and Bashan pit the valiant police of the Middle Eastern Organised Crime Squad against Middle Eastern men who are brazenly violent in carrying out territorial and retributive shootings, cunning and manipulative in running protection rackets, and

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all the more dangerous because they are capricious and disloyal to their associates. Moreover, Lyons’ and Bashan’s accounts deterministically inscribe Middle Eastern familial relations with criminality, each claiming that Middle Eastern families in Sydney’s western and south-western suburbs—and particularly the men in those families—had passed on the knowledge and means to commit serious, organised, and violent crimes intergenerationally, causing so-called Middle Eastern crime to ‘germinate’ throughout the region (Bashan 2016; Lyons 2016). And indeed, it appears that these police-facilitated accounts evinced operational knowledges and practices, as the Middle Eastern Organised Crime Squad’s principal methodology was to conduct targeted investigations into Middle Eastern families (McElhone 2023; McElhone 2019a, ch. 5 and 6; New South Wales Ombudsman 2016, p. 53). In the few instances Middle Eastern people ‘speak’ in these accounts, they invariably personify (or perhaps caricature) criminal capacity. For example, the only Middle Eastern person whose viewpoint is incorporated into Lyons’ report is somebody of interest to the police who engages in conversation with the reporter after being stopped by the Middle Eastern Organised Crime Squad. The person in question has the letters ‘MEOC’ tattooed across his throat because he revels in his status as one of the Squad’s targets; a dubious honour bestowed upon him after he became embroiled in conflict between two factions of a Middle Eastern gang involving at least one ‘gunfight’. The point here is not to deny that Middle Eastern people engage in violent criminal behaviour, nor to dismiss that members of racialised groups may engage in criminal behaviour as a form of resistance against police attention and intervention (Alves 2018). Rather, the point is that in police-facilitated accounts like Lyons’ and Bashan’s, Middle Eastern people are not afforded the opportunity to engage in meaning-making about their subjection to targeted policing; instead, they feature when reporters write about them in instances where they embody and affirm police knowledge claims about their deviance and criminality. Indeed, the quotation in this chapter’s title, drawn from the preface to Bashan’s book, indicates that he has taken it as his task to make Middle Eastern criminals and their behaviours intelligible to his readers. In Bashan’s words:

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The story of the Middle Eastern Organised Crime Squad canvassed in this book spans the years from 2006 to 2011, an era immortalised as a ‘golden age’ by many of its staff … Telling the story right meant I had to choose the Squad’s most defining cases … The point of it all was to give people a view of the landscape of organised crime within Sydney’s Middle Eastern community. I wanted to shed some light on the elusive crime barons, many of whom are still around today, and try to give some insight into their evolving tradecraft (2016, p. ix).

As such, just as Orientalists have done for centuries, reporters like Bashan and Lyons have participated in the production of knowledge about the Other that has been used in the control of (formerly) colonised people. Put differently, the Orientalist accounts these reporters have produced are imbricated with police power. This is not simply because they have been enabled by the police’s media unit, so that their accounts directly channel essentialist police knowledge claims about Middle Eastern people and the criminality allegedly pervading their families, communities, and the places they tend to live; it is also because the accounts in question both detail and attest to the need for the targeted, territorial practices employed by operational police against Middle Eastern people in Sydney’s western and south-western suburbs. In (re)affirming the need for such extraordinary policing, these accounts comprise a key component of an ‘Antipodean Orientalism’ that is captured in the neologism Middle Eastern crime (McElhone 2023).

Professional Police Staff and the (Re)Production of Race This chapter’s key conceptual contribution is to provide cues about how police practices—including those of professional staff, and not just sworn police officers—bring race into being. If one accepts the sociological orthodoxy that race is a social construct, rather than a biological or cultural fact, then it must be prefaced by productive processes: that is, processes of racial categorisation or ‘racialisation’. Nevertheless, as observed by Sentas (2018), sociological and criminological attention has

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tended to focus on the content of media and elite discourses about race, with far less consideration given to criminal justice institutions like the police as key sites of racialised power and practice. Meanwhile, in the small but valuable body of literature considering racialised policing, the work of professional staff like those in media units has been overlooked. That is why this chapter has not only outlined the contours of Lyons’ and Bashan’s accounts of Middle Eastern crime, but also traced how the work of the Police Media Unit channelled police knowledge claims into those accounts. In doing so, the chapter implicates the Police Media Unit in the (re)production of essentialist discourses about Middle Eastern people which collectively attribute criminal capacity and ultimately prop up a broader Orientalist regime of policing so-called Middle Eastern crime in Sydney. And so, as Lentin (2018), following Hesse, has stressed, race is not just a social construct: it is a Eurocolonial construct, which ‘comes into force as a practice, as a mechanism for sifting and classifying the world’, with significant effects for people’s lived experiences. In tracing the role of professional police in the ‘heterogeneous project’ of ‘constituting colonial subjects as Other’ though the regime of policing Middle Eastern crime, the chapter has also demonstrated the mutually constitutive relationship between essentialism and epistemic violence (Spivak 1988). It may be objected that Middle Eastern people living in Australia are not colonial subjects, but themselves settler colonisers. However, it remains the case that they are formerly colonised people and subject to extraordinary police attention in the Australian settler colony, where police institutions were configured by colonialism. Put differently, police organisations in Australia were created to facilitate the expropriation of land and quash Indigenous people’s resistance (see, e.g., Finnane 1994; Cunneen 2001). Bearing in mind Patrick Wolfe’s (2006) insistence that settler colonialism not an event, but a structure, it can perhaps be of little surprise that police violence against Indigenous peoples in Australia ‘continues today through expansions in police powers of arrest, over-surveillance, harassment, heavy-handed policing, under-policing of domestic and family violence, deaths in custody, and so on’ (Porter 2018, p. 446). To be clear, the policing of Middle Eastern people in Sydney is certainly not equivalent to the policing of Indigenous peoples in either nature or extent. However, the Orientalist regime of policing Middle

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Eastern crime does serve to bolster the country’s largest police institution, the New South Wales Police Force, both symbolically and materially. As noted throughout this chapter, the policing of Middle Eastern crime in Sydney involves an assemblage of policies, practices, and institutional units; the creation and maintenance of which have been undergirded by abiding public discourses attesting to the unparalleled violence and criminality of Middle Eastern people. Crucially, just as the policing of Indigenous peoples is qualitatively different to the policing of Middle Eastern people, so are discourses about such policing. In other words, Indigenous peoples and Middle Eastern people are racialised differently, and with different effects; not least because grandstanding about the extraordinary policing of Indigenous peoples risks bringing questions about land rights and sovereignty into the frame. However, sensationalist and caricaturist depictions of Middle Eastern people provide an arrogant, unpredictable, and violent foe of foreign origin against whom the police can position themselves and, in turn, attest to the public value of their crime control credentials. As has been argued throughout this chapter, the work of the Police Media Unit is crucial in this positioning. But epistemic violence does not just entail the Othering of (formerly) colonised subjects: for Spivak, it pivots on the ‘asymmetrical obliteration of the trace of that Other in its precarious Subjectivity’ (1988, pp. 280–281). As traced above, the work of professional police staff further skews the already seriously pronounced power dynamics at play in the production of public knowledge about policing and the policed. Not only do police-media liaisons leverage the police’s influence over the traditional media, but research gatekeeping practices obstruct critical researchers from producing alternative accounts to the representations facilitated by the police. It is beyond the scope of this chapter to explore in detail the specific effects of such obstruction for the author, as a person of Lebanese heritage from Sydney’s south-west attempting to provide an alternative account of the policing of Middle Eastern people; let alone the significant ethical questions regarding who I purported to ‘speak’ for, or indeed could ‘speak’ for. Suffice it here to say that the police’s denial of my status as a ‘knower’ or ‘enquirer’ was desperately frustrating, as was pouring over the reductive and at times vulgar descriptions of Middle Eastern people which emerged from police-facilitated reporting.

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But leaving aside the personal dimensions inherent to my experience of researching Middle Eastern crime, this chapter has illuminated systemic, institutionalised practices which ensure the police’s continued dominance in knowledge production about policing and the police, with the effect of making race a lived reality. The claim that police produce epistemic violence by denying research access is perhaps dubious given the role of social scientific knowledge in propping up imperial and colonial expansion (Castro-Gomez and Martin 2002). As aptly put by Pérez (2019, p. 8), ‘although epistemic violence occurs in all areas of social life, it obviously finds a particularly fertile ground in institutionalised spaces of knowledge production’, primary amongst them the academy. However, it was my intention in carrying out this research to leverage my standing as a university researcher to illuminate, critique, and potentially change, official characterisations of Middle Eastern crime; not least by accounting for the historical and political context in which police practices and discourses brought this essentialist, epistemically violent, and Orientalist regime of policing about, as well as people’s lived experiences of being policed under its auspices. As explored by Guhin and Wyrtzen (2013), such a rationale for undertaking critical academic research is most likely to resonate with those sympathetic to the thinking—evident in the work of scholars including Gramsci and Said—that knowledge can exist relatively autonomously from power. They further caution that scholars starting from such a premise need be reflexive, especially regarding the potential for their research to be used to consolidate power (Guhin and Wyrtzen 2013). Heeding Guhin and Wyrtzen’s apposite warnings, I nevertheless hope that my attempts in this chapter to produce academic knowledge regarding the police practices involved in public knowledge production about race and crime will prove useful to those seeking to understand and challenge racialised police power.

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Conclusion Just as racialised police power abounds across the English-speaking world, so too do institutionalised practices of media liaison and research gatekeeping. The case study presented in this chapter, albeit focusing on the policing of Middle Eastern people in one Australian city, provides original insights about how professional police staff working in media units and as research gatekeepers leverage and reinforce the power dynamics at play in the production of public knowledge policing, race, and crime. As illustrated in this chapter’s case study, police-media liaisons channel police knowledge claims into reporting about policing and the policed, and research gatekeeping practices obstruct critical researchers from producing alternative accounts of them. The case study also starkly illustrates how the public knowledge shaped by such practices both reflects and re-constitutes racial essentialism and epistemic violence: the exclusion of the perspectives of those policed not only precludes them as intelligible producers of knowledge, but makes them intelligible as deviant and dangerous subjects, in turn enabling their control—not least through directly and physically violent policing. In presenting these observations and insights, this chapter speaks to the need for policing scholars to adopt broader views of the types of police work that (re)produce race; a timely contribution given the increasing attention paid to racialised police power across the English-speaking world in recent years.

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A “Reasonable” and “Excusable” Violence: The Spread of Anti-Muslim Violence Through the Machinery of Media, Social Media and Trigger Events Derya Iner

Introduction Islamophobia incidents and hate crimes increase in tandem with heightened tension against Muslims. This is particularly the case in times of crises through which Muslims are stigmatised and associated with overseas (such as ISIS) terrorism. Although the role of trigger events is always addressed in the literature, the coordination of media with social media by the populist far-right to demonise Muslims over trigger events has not yet been systematically analysed. A comprehensive analysis is essential to disclose not only the quick spread of Islamophobia but also the increase of hatred towards Muslims. This chapter analyses how the machinery of extreme hate, i.e., the coordination of media D. Iner (B) Centre for Islamic Studies and Civilisation (CISAC), Charles Sturt University, Auburn, NSW, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Bhatia et al. (eds.), Racism, Violence and Harm, Palgrave Studies in Crime, Media and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-37879-9_7

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and social media in tandem with the trigger events, is used to establish socially normalised hate and carry it to extreme levels in the public discourse without facing any restrictions or legal consequences. Online threats of mass murder reported to the Islamophobia Register Australia in 2016–2017 are used to showcase how violent extremist rhetoric against Muslims is normalised within open and accessible social media channels. Importantly, this chapter identifies how this normalisation occurs in the aftermath of local discussions and trigger events overseas that problematise Muslim identity. Analysing the text and the context, this chapter highlights how anti-Muslim violence is justified in the public discourse as “reasonable” and “excusable” sentiments which inspire “executable” plans of attacks in those prone to online radicalisation. The machinery of creating extreme hate through media and social media in relation to trigger events is explained by Wiedlitzka et al. (2021, p. 1) who point to offline and online interaction through “compound retaliation which suggests that media and social media dissemination about offline acts of hate compound already tense intergroup hostilities, providing further permission for those to express hatred online”. This chapter argues that the far-right utilisation of such media and social media dealing with trigger events aids in bringing to the surface hate that already exists, and in the process normalises even the most severe hate speech. This machinery provides justification for extreme anti-Muslim hatred to be publicly expressed and opportunities for mobilisation of like-minded people. In the absence of a comprehensive analysis of political rhetoric, media and social media orchestration, the frequent focus on the temporal relationship between the trigger events and increasing Islamophobia incidents considers trigger events as an extenuating factor for committing hate crimes. Furthermore, such a temporal relationship indicates that “Islamophobic hate crimes are influenced in the short term by singular, or clusters of, events” (Zempi and Awan 2016, p. 25). The escalation of anti-Muslim hate to severe levels is underestimated as a temporarily heightened hate and one that is in force only during trigger events. Yet, the seeds of extremist violent sentiments and ideas are sown and continually cultivated in low-risk, open social media channels without knowing where such extremist sentiments and ideas will grow and bear

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their poisonous fruits among the 5.07 billion Internet and 4.9 billion (Ruby 2023) social media users. While analysing the machinery of the extreme anti-Muslim, the premises of this argument are that (1) hate is not static, (2) hate does not occur or increase overnight and (3) the machinery of media, and social media acting upon trigger events is effectively operated by extremist farright actors to normalise extreme levels of anti-Muslim hate and incite violence.

The Nature of Hate: Neither Static nor Singular/Linear Hate is not static, nor is it born overnight. People develop judgements about the other over the course of time. The first step of such negative feelings and judgements is implicit bias. In his article “The Nature of Prejudice”, Allport (1954, pp. 37–39) underlines that the dominant majority is always taken as a reference group for oneself. The sense of strangeness occurs through encountering the other, which may lead to perceptions about the other as outlandish if not inferior, slightly absurd or unnecessary. While belonging to the in-group (reference group) makes one feel owned and accepted, it may cause a sense of discomfort and antagonistic behaviours and attitudes in response to out-groups (Allport 1954, p. 46). Hostile attitude is directed towards those who seem to conflict with the in-group values, belief systems, worldviews and everyday acts ranging from clothing to eating. While implicit bias originates from a sense of discomfort and unease, it can turn into explicit bias and hate if the other is constantly stigmatised and problematised. Unless recognised, explicit bias can smoothly turn into a social norm, normalised antipathy and hate, which can be subtly taken to further degrees when the out-group members are introduced as a threat for one’s own identity and survival. Although implicit and explicit biases are related, they have distinct mental constructs. One can unlearn explicit bias by realising and recognising it mostly through the external factors. However, in the context of Islamophobia, implicit anti-Muslim biases can smoothly turn into a socially accepted norm and normalised

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behaviour due to the prevalence of anti-Muslim rhetoric in the political and public discourse (Iner and McManus 2022) and can be reinforced further by media and social media. Opinion polls whose results show an overt stigmatisation of a minority group demonstrate how implicit biases can quickly turn into socially accepted and approved norms and prevent consciousness of problematic thinking. Because anti-Muslim biases are not only socially accepted and approved but are also commonly reiterated in the political and media discourse, many people unhesitatingly express their anti-Muslim opinions in collegial and professional settings. Islamophobia Register Australia records numerous cases of Islamophobic comments uttered by colleagues, neighbours, teachers, and school parents. For instance, in one out of five physical Islamophobia incidents reported to the Register, perpetrators had a social or work relationship with the victim (Iner 2022, p. 3). Hate is fluid and has multiple faces. Islamophobia is therefore multifaceted. By examining the varied definitions of Islamophobia in operation, one can quickly grasp its multiple layers. Islamophobia is widely defined as anti-Muslim racism (Runnymede Trust 2017); antiIslamic sentiments leading to discrimination against Muslims is also considered Islamophobia (Muslim Council of Britain 2021). Each Islamophobia definition in the literature highlights different aspects and levels of anti-Muslim hate. For instance, Erik Bleich’s description (2011, p. 1581) “indiscriminate negative attitudes or emotions directed at Islam or Muslims” refers to both implicit and explicit levels of bias while Jorg Stolz’s definition (2005, p. 548) adds “cognitive and evaluative” levels indicating the systemic and deep-rooted levels of racism. Stolz’s definition mentioning the “rejection” of “Islam, Muslim groups and Muslim individuals on the basis of prejudice and stereotypes” implies a consciously made decision for not tolerating Muslims and their way of life. Salman Sayyid’s definition (2014, p. 20) refers to a more tangible anti-Muslim hate, according to which Islamophobia is a form of racism that includes various forms of violence, violations, discrimination and subordination that occur across multiple sites in response to problematisation of Muslim identity. This diversity of definitions of Islamophobia definition implies that anti-Muslim hate can occur in multiple levels

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ranging from implicit bias to intolerance of Muslims’ presence, which may lead a desire to remove Muslims (Iner 2022; Poynting 2020).

The Nature of Far-Right Islamophobia is not limited to implicit and explicit bias but can be extended to different levels of hate, including anger, contempt, dehumanising, disgust and even wanting to kill (Iner 2022). Likewise, dislike of Muslims is not limited to everyday expressions of racism. Instead, this hostility extends to an extremist political ideology disseminated by white supremacists and their far-right offshoots. For these actors, anti-Muslim bias and hate are commonly shared with other parts of society and are used to recruit new members while amplifying established anger into extremist levels of hate. Politically motivated anti-Muslim hate and its extremist branches can easily go far beyond everyday racism. As a political ideology rejecting democratic pluralism and equality of all citizens (Carter 2018; Mudde 2007), the far-right publicly endorses division and discord as the basis of reviving Nazism and fascism in new forms (Wilkinson 1995). The new far-right popularises its ideology by fluidly crafting its narrative according to the prevailing socio-political climate to appeal a broader audience from mainstream society (Smith and Iner 2021, pp. 12–13). Contrary to the older Nazi groups, whose racism was associated with an anti-Semitic agenda, contemporary neo-Nazi groups and the resurging far-right parties pragmatically utilise already established anti-Muslim hate, trigger events and anti-Muslim debates to legitimise and spread their divisive ideology (Smith and Iner 2021). Islamophobic narratives, which are rooted in orientalist cliches and everyday anti-Muslim rhetoric, are rebranded in far-right extremist ideologies such as the Great Replacement theory, which reinforces the idea that Muslims are demographic, cultural and security threats. Evoking an existential fear that Muslims will “take over” (Obaidi et al. 2022), far-right extremist ideology urges saviours to take action to stop this.

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The Machinery of Extreme Hate: Media, Trigger Events and Social Media Media The media are highly influential on the development of implicit and explicit biases; the consistent negative coverage of Muslims makes antiMuslim biases particularly salient (Lajevardi et al. 2022, p. 659). The economic model of commercial media involves engaging the reader with sensationalist news reports. Muslims and immigrants are among the most covered news topics mostly with hateful content and quotes from political leaders, which legitimises and generates hateful comments by the public as expressed in digital platforms (Lajevardi et al. 2022; ATN 2020, 2021). The media play a role in setting the anti-Muslim agenda (Williams and Burnap 2016, p. 223) by portraying Muslims as outlandish because of their culture and belief system (Moore et al. 2008) and as at odds with Australian values (Iner and McManus 2022). Since the war on terror era began, Muslims’ presence has been further problematised by portraying them as security threats. Frequent references to the Muslim community in the context of countering violent extremism (CVE) (Iner and McManus 2022; Akbarzadeh 2016) in political and media rhetoric laid the ground for the association of Muslims with terrorism and caused discomfort within the Muslim community (Safi and Evershed 2015). Moreover, media outlets and personnel have been quick in labelling attacks by Muslim criminals as “terrorism” while regarding equivalent acts by White perpetrators as crimes of mentally unbalanced individuals (Dolliver and Kearns 2022). Disproportionate coverage of Muslims in relation to crimes and terrorism (Jaspal and Cinnirella 2010) and the tacit conflation of criminals and terrorists with ordinary Muslims have played a major role in building a public perception that ordinary Muslim citizens and new migrants are a national security threat (Iner et al. 2017). Negative portrayals of Muslims in the Australian media have been disproportionately high and hostile. Within the dominant Australian media, Muslims are portrayed as different, strange, threatening and inferior (Poynting and Noble 2003); as being security threats, enemies and

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terrorists (Ewart et al. 2017); and as outsiders or the enemy within (Aly and Walker 2007). The presentation of news articles and page design of newspapers also encourages anti-Muslim biases, with selected imagery and front-page coverage serving to reinforce the negative portrayal of Muslims (Kabir 2019). This ongoing negative portrayal of Muslims in the media laid the foundations for anti-Muslim public attitudes, which are consistently captured in the opinion polls. For example, Scanlon Foundation’s annual social cohesion reports conducted by Andrew Markus disclose that negative views of Muslims are the highest of those of any group in Australia without exception between 2018 and 2020 (Markus 2021, p. 6); 80% of the Australian Defence force held a negative view of Islam (Safi 2016); 49% of Australians support a Muslim immigration ban (The Essential Report Archive 2016); and six out of ten Australians expressed a concern for a relative to marry a Muslim (Kamp et al. 2017). The media directly and indirectly sustain Australia’s far-right agenda. The media industry in Australia is dominated by News Corp and Nine (65% of circulation) and is challenged even less owing to the closure of small and middle-scale alternative media outlets during the economic recession following COVID-19 (ATN 2021). The most prominent farright leaning media outlets in Australia are Sky News, The Herald Sun and The Australian (all NewsCorp) (Peucker 2022). The Australian media regularly supports the ideological claims made by the populist far-right. Although the populist far-right tends to blame the “elitist” media for “fake news”, their leaders effectively take advantage of the media. Populist far-right leaders prioritise media visibility over credibility by making bold and blatant statements. By providing sensational news content for media, far-right leaders secure frequent coverage (Sengul 2022). The permissive and tolerant media environment for far-right influence in Australia (Sengul 2022) not only overstates their popularity but also accelerates their political momentum as noted in the cases of media in Brazil, Hungary, India, Israel and the US (Ihleboek et al. 2020). The damage caused by the media includes “instigat[ing] hate crime by formulating, propagating, and legitimating stereotypes about potential target populations” (Green et al. 2001, p. 486). Indeed, history

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shows serious forms of violence emerge from prolonged periods of hate speech directed at a specific group by the most powerful voices in society (Wiedlitzka et al. 2021). Anti-Muslim hate has been topical in media for decades with the Iranian revolution in 1979; the Gulf war and the collapse of Soviet Union (and the clash of civilisations theory of Huntington) in the 1990s; and has further intensified since the war on terror era in the 2000s, the terrorist activities of Al Qaida and ISIS in 2010s–2020s, and the resurgence of the far-right since 2014. Ultimately, prolonged anti-Muslim hate has not only normalised, but also gradually increased the level of hate expressed towards Muslims to the level of disgust, contempt, dehumanisation and wanting to kill Muslims (Iner 2022). The intensification of hate has been showcased in the readers’ comments in digital media (ATN 2020, 2021) and further utilised and disseminated through social media.

Social Media The Internet has over 5.07 billion active users and 4.9 billion social media users (Ruby 2023). The hyperconnectivity between global users provides real-time communication and interaction between users across the world. The rapid circulation of content enables and motivates ideologically driven hate actors to spread and share harmful and misleading content. A seamless transition from media to social media is achieved simply by sharing the media content on social media. It has increased the salience of Islamophobic sentiments among the global Internet users while contributing to the increase of local anti-Muslim hate crimes especially in the aftermath of overseas terrorist attacks. The far-right utilise social media to construct themselves as “imagined political communities” on social media (Nouri and Lorenzo-Dus 2019). Far-right groups, administrators and followers tend to quote biased media content including news, editorials and opinion pieces. Media coverage of ideological tropes prominent within far-right online communities are also commonly shared (Peucker 2022). The far-right mobilises their followers by focusing on topical news events that denigrate Muslims and immigrants, and alert society about the perceived

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threats the minority groups, and especially Muslims, pose (Nouri and Lorenzo-Dus 2019). In the meantime, the far-right alternative media and social media outlets reframe and recontextualise and thereby reproduce news stories by carefully selecting pieces of information from other sources to justify their ideological agenda. Accordingly, news items appearing to be neutral are recrafted as partisan information and combined with disinformation and propaganda items for the public to consume (Nouri and Lorenzo-Dus 2019). Far-right social media actors utilise trigger events to intensify antiMuslim debates. Beyond merely sharing content, they actively engage social media users in heated anti-Muslim discussions and thereby cocreate a solidified anti-Muslim hate agenda in public. They benefit from the free exchange of viewpoints and opinions in unregulated social media platforms, especially in times of trigger events and in the aftermath of sensational hateful public statements by far-right leaders. Studies investigating the temporal link between online and offline anti-Muslim hate have found that online hate speech is predictive of offline hate-based aggression (Müller and Schwarz 2021; Williams et al. 2020). Indeed, there is now an established body of research suggesting that physical acts of aggression (trigger events) can spark online debate about the causes and impacts of incidents (Kaplan 2006; Cuerden and Rogers 2017; Hanes and Machin 2014; Williams and Burnap 2016). Müller and Schwarz (2021, pp. 40–41) suggest that “social media has not only become a fertile soil for the spread of hateful ideas but also motivates real-life action”. Islamophobia reports highlight the spike of online incidents and the escalation of online hate to extreme levels in tandem with increasing physical assaults in the aftermath of trigger events (Wiedlitzka et al. 2021, Sadique et al. 2018). Extreme hate and violence is endorsed by far-right political and public figures in times of trigger events and widely shared in social media groups to invite like-minded followers to express similar extreme views and thereby co-create a group synergy for inciting violence in public (Awan et al. 2022; Iner 2022). Iner (2022, p. 2) calls this strategic online mobilisation of the public by the far-right group administrators “social media engineering”.

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Social media is turned into a platform by far-right extremists to recklessly publicise their sentiments, plans and acts of anti-Muslim violence. Laub concludes that the way social media operates can lead individuals and groups gradually to self-radicalisation. “At their most extreme, rumours and invective disseminated online have contributed to violence ranging from lynching to ethnic cleansing” (Laub 2019, prg.1).

The Infusion of Hate Ranging from Implicit Bias to Extreme Hate and Violence Like media, social media facilitates implicit and explicit bias in everyday social media engagements. Research suggests that even coincidentally encountering a social media message regardless of one’s partisan backdrop can lead to the internalisation of the content as an implicit bias, especially when the dominant frame is primed (Staats et al. 2015, p. 657). Many normative constraints against hate speech which are present in other forms of mass media remain absent in the lowbrow context and relatively unregulated communications environment of digital mass media (August and Liu 2015). This gives politically motivated hate groups the means to transfer the biased print media news to social media where they can engage more people and generate more hate in an unregulated environment. One UK-based research also shows a smooth transition from print media to social media through the dissemination of anti-Muslim topics and news attracting massive tweets and retweets (Wiedlitzka et al. 2021). Likewise, in the absence of any social and digital media regulations, derogation of Muslims and immigrants, which starts in subtle levels through consistent biased coverage in media, becomes a new descriptive norm on social media. Indeed, people who are exposed in such platforms and started normalising it are more easily persuaded by anti-Muslim hate content. They expressed higher levels of anti-Muslim prejudice. Soral et al. (2020, pp. 4, 10) found that this cohort was more likely to normalise anti-Muslim hate speech than those who acquire their information from traditional mass media.

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Likewise, research suggests a strong and consistent association between reliance on social media and support for a range of anti-Muslim policies (Lajevardi et al. 2022, p. 656) and Internet availability influences racial hate crimes, predominantly in areas with higher levels of segregation and racism, which may lead to increase in hate crimes committed by lonewolf perpetrators (Chan et al. 2016). The way social media operates contributes to the creation of alternative realities. After being convinced via media and social media that hate towards Muslims is a sensible and rational attitude, escalation of hate takes place gradually through the algorithms of social media. Social media platforms generate income by enabling advertisers to target audiences with exact precision, meaning it is in their interests to direct people to the communities where they will spend the most time (Laub 2019). Accordingly, the algorithm is designed to drive people who hold anti-Muslim views or tendencies to the content which promotes further anti-Muslim hate and conspiracy. Such settings facilitate divisive, misleading and hate-mongering content to be constantly consumed by illusioned people who become adamant about anti-Muslim hate and develop further levels of extreme hate (Laub 2019). While Western media refuses to denounce far-right extremism or warn against it, social media platforms provide a fertile ground for far-right actors to gain popularity simply by taking no adequate safeguards to stop the spread of extremism (Liang and Cross 2020, p. 9). Lack of removal or the belated removal of the extreme hate content serves far-right extremists to fulfil their mission by engaging and mobilising their followers after trigger events. A global report discloses that 89% of Islamophobic online content were reported to the social media channels but not removed despite including hashtags like #deathtoislam and #islamiscancer. The harms of these posts were far-reaching, with some receiving 25 million views worldwide. Most of the harmful content was retrieved from public pages that regularly post anti-Muslim hate, and 8 of the 23 such social media groups were Australia based with more than 200,000 followers (Tamer 2022). Butler underlines that only 15% of the over 3 million anti-Muslim hate tweets belonging to 2019–2020 were removed (2022, p. 8) and most were only removed after the hateful content completed its mission of triggering more hate and violent opinions. In fact, a spike

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in hate incidents occurs between 24–48 hours online and 48–72 hours offline following a “trigger event” (Sadique et al. 2018).

Case Studies The following examples have been chosen from the 2016 to 2017 period to set the background and analyse how extreme expressions of antiMuslim hatred were normalised online by the resurgence of the far-right in Australia prior to the Christchurch attacks (2019) and Covid-19 era (2020–2021). Far-right groups gained momentum in 2014 in tandem with the increasing ISIS terror threat and its repercussions in Australia (Iner and McManus 2022). Anti-Muslim political discourse and media not only cast doubt and suspicion on the entire Muslim community (Iner and McManus 2022), but also enabled far-right groups to problematise Muslim Australians and their everyday practices like eating halal and going to the mosque, by portraying halal certifiers as the funders and mosque communities as the hubs of terrorism in 2014–2015. No significant actions have been taken to date to reverse the harmful impacts of traducing Muslims either as terrorists or the funders of terrorism (Peucker and Smith 2019). Trading in anti-Muslim currency has afforded populist far-right politicians increased opportunities to grow their support base—from Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party entry into Australian Parliament to Donald Trump’s election as US President in 2016. Like elsewhere in the West, anti-Muslim hate in Australia is escalated by the ongoing conflation of ISIS terrorism with ordinary Muslims on media and social media. Simultaneously, following trigger events when public anger is heightened—especially in response to ISIS attacks—anti-Muslim hate is escalated to extreme levels like disgust, dehumanisation and wanting to kill. Death threats that relate to the mass killing of Muslims, like threats of burying, shooting and avenging Muslims by killing them and their children, are facilitated on social media (Iner 2022). The proliferation of extreme hate and abuse after these trigger events results in “compound retaliation”. A vicious cycle is created by “online

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expressions of hate incite[ing] offline attacks on Muslims, which in turn provoke more online hate” (Butler 2022, p. 4). The Christchurch terrorism and its copycat attacks showcase online radicalisation of individuals resulting in terrorist attacks by engaging social media and online platforms before, during and after their attacks, which indeed mobilised like-minded people to commit copycat attacks and incite extreme hate online (Iner 2022). For this anti-Muslim extremism, online communities played an instrumental role in the spread and of conspiracy theories and extreme level of hate leading to radicalisation, violent acts and copycat attacks (Soral et al. 2020). Raising anti-Muslim hate to extreme or violent levels during times of tension is achieved by the combination of (1) timely posting of the farright actors to exploit the heightened tension due to the trigger events, (2) equating ordinary Muslims with terrorists and radicalised extremists and (3) seamlessly connecting overseas attacks with local Australian Muslims and accusing them of the attacks. Once this seamless transition is accepted without question despite its logical fallacies, the online extremist actors recklessly invite the online community to take action by expressing their sentiments, opinions and plans for how to harm Muslims. The second Islamophobia in Australia report (Iner et al. 2019, pp. 131–134) identified that online posts encouraging violence and mass killing were posted immediately after several overseas terrorist attacks. In the selected posts inciting hate and encouraging violence against Muslims, all social media users involved in the conversation assumed that all Muslims (including Australian Muslims) are terrorists, and all Westerners (including Australians) are victims. This mindset helped participants view and portray themselves as in danger, which quickly heightened the tension and generated extreme levels of hate against all Muslims. Upon internalising and localising the threat, two conclusions are rapidly arrived at: (1) Let’s take the revenge for (overseas) terrorism in the same way (here in Australia). (2) Let’s protect our children, families and nation by cleansing Australia of Muslims. On 14 August 2016 in Nice, France, a 19-tonne cargo truck was deliberately driven into crowds of people celebrating Bastille Day. The attack caused 86 deaths and 458 injuries. On the same day, heated discussions

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started on Australian social media platforms. For instance, in a reported online hate incident, terrorism is portrayed as a characteristic of Muslims and Islam. When this portrayal was objected to by a few Muslims on the conversation thread, a man blatantly posted that he had no problem with putting a knife “in the heart of these Muslims covered with pig’s blood” (Case 124-16). The comment expressed disgust and a willingness to kill Muslims. It was also gratuitously related to the halal food issue with the mention of “pig’s blood”, which evokes an already established disgust against Muslims related to the halal debate in Australia and anti-halal campaigns (including wide media coverage, social media campaigns and nationwide anti-halal rallies across Australia) that took place in 2014– 2015. This post did not receive any reaction from other followers. Rather, online interlocutors agreed to send politicians a wake-up call against the “Muslim threat”. In such heated discussions, because Muslims are portrayed as terrorists and allies of terrorists, Australian Muslims received direct death threats. On 25 March 2016, three days after the ISIS bombings in Brussels, Belgium, a neo-Nazi affiliate threatened a Muslim social media user in Australia: [the Muslim conversant’ s name included here] needs to see my grand papa’s oven… there is no assimilation but death, you have to die... you have to realise all nations bar [sic] doesn’t find your filth and you have to die, god willed it in the 40s, god will endorse it again…. But your view of god will ignore you when the bullet is put to the back of your head… you’re an [sic] necessity to be wiped… only gods master race will prevail. (Case 19-17)

This white supremacist antagonist looked forward to the return of Jesus to earth to end grief and pain and interprets this as a mission to cleanse Muslims from the earth so that “God’s master race” may “prevail”. Some extremists went further by targeting real places. Two days after a lorry smashed into a crowded Christmas market in central Berlin in December 2016, killing 12 and injuring over 50 people, a far-right group in Australia called on their followers to attack Sydney’s Lakemba Mosque. The tension was heightened when the group made suggestions

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that “patriots” are jailed whereas Muslim terrorists are given bail. Referring to Australian Muslims as homegrown terrorists, the admin of the page suggested removing “all Islamic compounds”: “If the Australian weak government won’t remove them then the people will” (Case 95-16). Portraying mosques as the hubs of terrorism is introduced as an uncontested belief, one which had been internalised in Australia in 2014–2015 through prominent anti-mosque campaigns which gained massive media coverage, social media campaigns and nationwide far-right rallies across Australia. Far-right actors utilised the Berlin truck attack as a trigger event to revive anti-mosque hatred and mobilise like-minded people to target a specific mosque by giving its name openly on social media. No legal consequence was observed for making a local mosque the target of a heightened hate campaign. Another extremist from an anti-mosque web page expressed his desire to kill all Muslims, seemingly as a reaction to the truck attack in Manhattan in October 2017, which caused eight deaths and 11 injuries: “ We have to kill all Muslims before any more innocents are killed. They are not human; even animals don’t behave this way, maybe put a bounty on their heads?” (Case 165-17). In this line of thought, merely being a Muslim is the same as being a dangerous terrorist. Seeing all Muslims, including Australian Muslims, as the cause of bloodshed overseas, and dehumanising Muslims, led to inciting violence against them in Australia (Abdalla et al. 2021). On 1 January 2017, a gunman killed 39 and injured 69 people by opening fire at a New Year’s Eve celebration in a nightclub in Istanbul, Turkey. Sharing this news, a notorious local far-right group in Australia localised the matter, posting “Islamic State cowards will never win against patriots worldwide so enjoy tonight have fun and happy new year!” This instigated hate against local Australian Muslims as captured in the received comments such as “shoot every god dam Muslim in Australia” (Case 99-16). Another post on the same day introduced killing Muslims as a duty and patriotism, and the poster made an oath to kill Muslims (Case 88-16). Even though the victims killed in the New Year’s Eve celebration in Turkey were Muslims, the commentators interpreted the attack as an intolerance of Muslims to a Western celebration and ultimately a combat between Muslims and non-Muslims (Case 99-16A).

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A few days after the Manchester Arena bomb attack, which killed 22 people including one child in May 2017, severe posts were shared on social media that went as far as detailing how to kill Muslim children and women. One extremist posted: And we will kill yours. As I drive past local school when I see a Muslim family, my car will jump the curb and run over your camp kids and your wife and as they lay the screaming for mercy I have little loose over them until they’re dead. You have no problem killing hours he have no problem killing yours. (Case 40-17)

The reporters noted this post to be “frightening” (Case 40-17), noting this was a real person posting his killing plans on social media, and the Muslim children going to school in his district are similarly real. However, no measure is taken, and no repercussions faced for this post. A simultaneous and seamless association between Muslims and terrorists triggered ideas of revenge and increased mass sharing of revenge scenarios on social media without receiving any adverse reaction or legal consequences. In the absence of any known consequences for these extreme expressions of hate, online actors continued to blatantly describe in detail the joy of killing Muslims. On 21 January 2017, the day a Melbourne car attack happened in Bourke Street resulting in a death toll of 5 (including a toddler) and 37 injured, there was a discussion portraying Australian and Muslim values diametrically opposed and expressing how Muslims and their way of life are not wanted in Australia. One associated his pride in being Aussie with killing Muslims: “I’m Aussie and you Muslim c..nt are a goat f…ing piece of pig sh..t and I would in joy [sic]setting to you while are still alive” (Case 14-17). The Australian values which are continually addressed in the political and media discourse as if at odds with Muslims led to dehumanisation and disgust. A trigger event has immediately re-evoked the sense of disgust and provided him with a platform to express extreme hate against Muslims. Trigger events such as the one that led to this outburst are routinely interpreted as extenuating factors, excusing perpetrators and thereby giving them a legitimate ground to incite violent sentiments.

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On 5 June 2017, while on parole a 29-year-old Somalia-born Australian murdered a receptionist and held a woman hostage in Melbourne. During the siege, the perpetrator was killed and three police officers were wounded and the siege was counted as an act of terrorism. Then Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull interpreted the case by calling “Islamic terrorism” “a growing threat” and questioned how a person with a history of violence was allowed parole (Davey 2017). The incident took place two days after the London Bridge attack in which a van was deliberately driven into pedestrians, allegedly by ISIS terrorists, who stabbed people in and around nearby restaurants and pubs. Consequently, 8 people were killed and 48 were injured. A furious online discussion was sparked in Australia by sharing the news report. One commented “This is only the beginning” while another suggested to “Kill or be killed… Mass murder all Muslims [as] this problem can’t be fixed with love and political correctness”. Another user stated: “The ongoing ‘plot’ started 1400 years ago” (Case 45-17). A trigger event once again gave legitimacy for inciting violent hate against Muslims in a conversation in which Muslims are already taken for granted to be terrorists and historic, fearsome enemies. These incidents of inciting violence and spreading sentiments about mass murdering Muslims by targeting local Muslims and their families including women and children did not receive any condemnation by third parties. Instead, it inspired and heightened further hate against Muslims. In the absence of social pressure by the public, effective measures by tech companies, or any legal consequences, the use of social media provided a fertile ground for extreme racist radicalisation in times of trigger events. Trigger events may serve as an excuse for violent statements to be made online. However, while extreme hate sentiments are portrayed as if they are temporary, extreme levels of hate do not occur overnight, and they do not disappear overnight. Reactions to trigger events prove that violent anti-Muslim sentiments remain fresh and can be readily evoked in times of heightened tensions. Extreme anti-Muslim hate peaked following the Christchurch attacks (Iner 2022), in which Muslims were the victims of far-right terrorism. Post-Christchurch copycat attacks and extreme levels of online hate

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proved that ISIS terrorism and trigger events were not a mere “trigger” but rather an excuse to justify extreme anti-Muslim hate. Justifying anti-Muslim hatred by viewing it as a consequence of the trigger events normalises dangerous speech and lowers community standards against anti-Muslim violence.

Conclusion This chapter introduced a comprehensive analysis of the operation of the racist far-right through examining its utilisation of trigger events, media and coordinating social media to extend anti-Muslim hate to extreme levels and normalise extremist violent ideas and intentions among the online users. Using examples from the Islamophobia Register Australia data, this chapter showcased social media posts that referenced the media and incited violence against Muslims—especially in the aftermath of trigger events. Analysing the text and the context, this chapter illustrated how anti-Muslim violence was justified in the public discourse as “reasonable” and “excusable” in these periods of tension, which are taken as “executable” plans by some prone to online radicalisation. Such sentiments were kept alive in the everyday online hate platforms through organised anti-Muslim rallies and online debates and campaigns problematising Muslims’ values, clothing, halal dietary requirements and places of worship as if at odds with the Australian values and way of life. The disgust, contempt and dehumanisation established through such discussions and campaigns in the course of time are quickly escalated in extreme instances to the sense of wanting to kill and harm Muslims in times of trigger events. The overarching theme of the chapter is built upon the fact that hate is neither static nor born overnight. Nor will it retreat overnight when the trigger events disappear from public conversation. The machinery of conventional and social media, interacting with trigger events, turns anti-Muslim implicit biases into socially normalised and acceptable hate. Anti-Muslim farright campaigns portraying Muslims as a global and local threat increase the hate feelings to extreme levels. This lowers community standards by exposing the public to extreme levels of anti-Muslim hate. In the absence

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of effective social media regulations, far-right actors expand their reach to global Internet users by utilising anti-Muslim hate as a commonly shared and accepted form of hate, and opportunistically recruit young people to their cause while facilitating online radicalisation of vulnerable individuals (Parliament of Australia, Foreign Affairs, Defence and Security 2022). The same machinery producing extreme hate has proven successful in the aftermath of the Christchurch attacks by leading to copycat terrorist attacks, increase in physical anti-Muslim harassment and the spread of online right-wing extremism. This machinery has been recently used to cause social discord during the Covid-19 lockdowns and antivaccination debates. Apparently, the lack of a compressive analysis of how the machinery of extreme hate works through media, social media and trigger events and how it is pragmatically utilised by far-right actors prevents online hate and discord from being taken seriously. So these mechanisms of hate-production continue to grow. The mobilisations against anti-Covid-19 measures show that far-right groups are pragmatically fluid and can swiftly change their immediate target according to the conjuncture and can hijack democratic freedoms to threaten social cohesion.

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Occupied Narrative and the 2021 Unity Intifada Micaela Sahhar

Introduction In May 2021, Palestinians from across the 48 territories,1 the Occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip were united in a wave of resistance that spread between the river and the sea. A region often in the news, this time the media coverage was different. The catalyst for the uprising that grabbed international attention was the expulsions of Palestinian families from the East Jerusalem neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah. That Sheikh Jarrah

M. Sahhar (B) Trinity College, The University of Melbourne, Parkville, VIC, Australia e-mail: [email protected] 1

The ’48-territories, or ’48 Palestine, refers to the geographic area now demarked as Israel since Israel’s declaration of independence on May 14, 1948. In referring to the Palestinian population that continues to live in this area, also known as the Palestinian citizens of Israel, ’48 Palestinians is sometimes used. This area, in addition to the areas referred to as the Occupied Palestinian Territories—which comprise the West Bank and East Jerusalem, both administered by Jordan between 1948 and 1967; and the Gaza Strip, administered by Egypt between 1948 and 1967—represent in its totality the geographic territory of historic Palestine.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Bhatia et al. (eds.), Racism, Violence and Harm, Palgrave Studies in Crime, Media and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-37879-9_8

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could capture attention in the way that it did signals a shift in international publics’ structural understanding of relations between Israel and the Palestinians. This chapter focuses on the editorial and opinion pieces published in three newspapers of note—The Guardian (UK), The New York Times and The Australian—during the Unity Intifada, and contrasts it with two earlier events in the first decade of the twenty-first century, to analyse the nature of the change. The transformation is reflected in both a quantitative shift, with more Palestinian contributors published than in previous comparable periods, and a qualitative change reflected in diverse articles in May 2021. Unprecedented in mainstream discourse, a framework long advocated by Palestinians to accurately depict their reality was widely evinced by contributors which had regard to the situation’s context and causes. In particular, commentary tapped into the political programme and impact of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, foregrounding parallels with Israeli state violence and the denial of Palestinian rights in the language of structural oppression. This chapter proposes that these changes are the result of greater mainstream visibility between the activism in Palestinian civil society and its connection with international solidarity movements. I argue that the Unity Intifada cautiously heralds a transformation in how Israel-Palestine is apprehended and portrayed in mainstream media. Describing the events of May 2021 as an Intifada directly associated them with a recent history of Palestinian resistance, and the popular uprisings known as the First and Second Intifadas. Intifada, translated literally from the Arabic as “shaking off ”, has come to hold a crucial conceptual place in Palestinian political culture over the last four decades, and refers to legitimate resistance movements against oppression. Though not exclusive to Palestinian political actors, the term’s familiarity in English speaking contexts is derived from its Palestinian connection. The First Intifada, which began in December 1987 and which was “characterised by the image of young Palestinians confronting Israel’s military might with stones” (Sahhar 2015, p. 41) marked a turning point in international perception of the Palestinian cause, heralding a newfound international sympathy for Palestinian struggle. Conversely, it impacted negatively on public perception of Israel, as

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referenced in comments by then Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who affirms the Intifada had caused Israel “the temporary problem of an image” (Kifner 1987). One consequence of the First Intifada was the Madrid Peace Conference (1991), followed by the Oslo Process through which Israel “sought to disrupt the strategies of the First Intifada” (Sahhar 2015, p. 41) and find a solution to the “image destroying predicament” occasioned by the First Intifada (Neff 1997). The Second Intifada which commenced in September 2000, in comparison, had a more mixed reception and legacy for Palestinians and Israel alike. It is worth noting, as Norman Finkelstein does, that Palestinian suicide bombing—for which the Second Intifada is often remembered—was a strategy that only emerged “five months into Israel’s relentless bloodletting” (Finkelstein 2010, p. 20). The contrast between the strategies of these two intifadas is consonant with Lisa Taraki’s analysis of “the spatial dismemberment of Palestinian society … [which] has contributed to the fragmentation of political action”, observing that in consequence, “national-level politics, a strong feature of political life in the 1970s and 1980s, has gradually given way to more local manifestations of resistance, organisation, and activism” (2008, p. 7). Significantly, the 2021 Unity Intifada seemed to indicate a reversal to this trend, overcoming some of the issues of geographical and political fragmentation to achieve mobilisation at both national and supra-national levels.

Media Representation of the Israel-Palestinian Situation In the case of Israel-Palestine, limitations to journalism—including lack of representation, privileging certain perspectives, and cumulative misrepresentation—are endemic. A number of studies focusing on specific outlets and periods have investigated these problems, highlighting a range of obstacles to reportage that has uniformly done a disservice to public perception of the Palestinian situation (Amer 2009; Berry 2017; Friel and Falk 2007; Manning 2018). One common conclusion across these studies is that journalism has repeatedly failed to communicate the context of news items—particularly in terms of aggregate

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coverage—which has a disproportionately prejudicial effect on the representation of Palestinian actors and a correspondingly beneficial effect on the representation of Israel. Other issues include “a preponderance of Israeli perspectives and a tendency (routinely) to insert a rationale for Israeli but not Palestinian violence” (Berry 2017, p. 103) and the effects of Western media’s ignorance about Palestinian people who have, since 1948, been portrayed to suit “the Western power of the day” (Manning 2018, p. 240). This orientalism in action has enabled successive Western journalists to portray Palestinians as “irrational, violent and inhumane” (Manning 2018, p. 240). Maha Nasser’s (2020) quantitative study of op-eds about Palestinians illustrates the dearth of Palestinian contributors in four American news outlets over five decades, from 1970 to 2019. In The New York Times, the daily with the highest representation of Palestinians in the sample period, commentary by Palestinians accounted for 1.8% of the total. Though the 2.8% average of the most recent decade (2010–2019) was higher than the overall average, in the preceding decade (2000–2009)—characterised by such events as the Second Intifada (2000–2005), Operation Defensive Shield (2002), the election of Hamas (2006), and Operation Cast Lead (2008–2009)—Palestinian commentary represented a mere 1.4% of the total published. This is of particular significance given opinion pieces play a key role in helping readers decide what to think about the news (Nasser 2020). Additionally, journalistic standards and the representation of news in its totality disadvantage Palestinians in public perception. For instance, Howard Friel and Richard Falk’s work on mis-representation of IsraelPalestine in The New York Times between 2000 and 2006 indicates that the unevenness in coverage, specifically that Palestinian violence is “the predominant representation of the conflict”, “veils a major fact about the conflict: Israeli violence against Palestinians far exceeds Palestinian violence against Israelis” (2007, p. 24). Peter Manning’s study of the Sydney Morning Herald between 1947 and 1948 indicates a similar problem of omission that leads to a structural failure in representation of the situation. Manning concludes that the Sydney Morning Herald consequently missed the story of the Palestinian Nakba altogether (2018, pp. 226–227). This is despite the Code of Ethics developed in the 1940s

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which regarded “accuracy, timeliness, fairness and balance” as explicit and accepted corporate values in journalism (Manning 2018, pp. 104–105). My own research, working with a sample of anglophone “papers of record” in the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia similarly underlines the dearth of Palestinian contributors in editorial space, and the limited representation of Palestinian perspectives, during two Israeli military assaults in the Occupied Palestine Territories in 2002 and 2008–2009 (Table 1) (Sahhar 2015). The context of these statistics is the changing role, readership and circulation of traditional news sources over the decade and transformations to the media environment more broadly. In the case of The New York Times, circulation had declined by nearly two hundred thousand print copies per weekday over this period—though it remained close to one million copies daily—pointing to the growing importance of digital platforms by 2009 (The New York Times Company 2003, p. 2; The New York Times Company 2010, p. 2). Indeed by 2021, while print circulation had further declined to 343 000 copies per day, digital subscriptions exceeded eight million— though this includes subscription to non-news–related products (The New York Times Company 2022, p. 3). Concurrently, while mainstream print media remained the key source of information in 2002, by 2008– 2009 issue specific online platforms had increased in significance. Thus, in 2002, editorials were more important sources of public information as compared with 2008–2009, at which time progressive anti-Zionist online platforms (some of which had existed in 2002) had attracted wider readerships from that part of the public looking for coverage outside of the dominant US-Israeli framework typical of mainstream anglophone new sources.2

2 For instance, the Palestine Chronicle (est. 1999), Electronic Intifada (est. 2001), Mondoweiss (est. 2006) and Al Jazeera English (est. 2006).

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Table 1 Total opinion pieces in selected newspapers during operation defensive shield (2002) & operation cast lead (2008–9)

The New York Times The Guardian (UK) The Australian

Total Op-Eds Operation Defensive Shield, April 1–May 31, 2002

Palestinian contributors

Total Op-Eds Operation Cast Lead, December 29, 2008–January 31, 2009

Palestinian contributors

77

3 (3.9%)

37

1 (2.7%)

46

1 (2.2%)

45

5 (11%)

42

1 (2.4%)

26

1 (3.8%)

Operation Defensive Shield (2002) Operation Defensive Shield (Defensive Shield) was the last West Bank invasion of its kind. On April 1, 2002, the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) entered a majority of Palestinian urban areas in the West Bank and the operation came to have three focal points—the detention of Yasser Arafat in his Ramallah compound, the siege of the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, and the ground force invasion of the Jenin refugee camp. According to Israeli sources, this invasion was a response to the wave of Palestinian suicide bombings and in particular a bombing at a Passover Seder in Netanya on March 27. Coverage of Jenin, “a maze of narrow street and high population density”, was particularly limited owing to Israel’s prohibition of media access to the camp—and thus reliance on official Israeli military and government spokespersons for information (Sahhar 2015, pp. 46–47). Defensive Shield occurred in the wider context of the Second Intifada, which commenced in September 2000, though Palestinian actors were later, spuriously, associated with the 2001 9/11; moreover, Palestinian suicide bombing—for which this intifada is often remembered—was a strategy that only emerged five months into Israel’s relentless bloodletting (Finklestein, 2010, P. 20). Editorials were dominated by two key themes: the question of conflict resolution (broadly defined to include the 2002 situation or the larger historic conflict) and the idea that Israel faced an existential threat.

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Editorials concerned with resolution were far from the majority in The Australian or The New York Times, but in The Guardian they account for close to half those published during Defensive Shield. The majority of articles across all three sources relied on the Israeli framework of resolution and presuppose the role of the United States as peace-broker. Pieces are variously concerned with resuming diplomacy, concessions required to achieve stability, and a resolution to the conflict (Sahhar 2015, pp. 69– 78). Attitudes in both The Australian and The New York Times reflect the Western diplomatic position of the Oslo years: affirming the twostate model, censuring settlements and advocating internationalisation of the conflict’s management (Sahhar 2015, pp. 72–73, 76–78). Yet, in The Guardian, there are also politically marginal views, such as when Ahdaf Soueif (2002) writes that Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestinians must end before anything else can be negotiated; a view echoed by Khalil Shikaki (2002). Similarly, Reverend Desmond Tutu (2002) argues that Israel will not achieve the security it craves while it continues to oppress another people; a view also expressed by Yossi Beilin (2002). The editorial theme of existential threat echoed Israel’s own justification for the operation, which characterised “Palestinian terrorism” as a local manifestation of the War on Terror (Sahhar 2015, pp. 79–86). This emphasis indicates the alignment of a majority of contributors with Israel. Editorials in The Guardian were the least concerned with this issue, and often critical of the premise, while The New York Times and The Australian both dedicate substantial space to Israel’s existential threat. Yet despite overwhelming endorsement of the premise, in The Australian, three critical editorials (of thirty published) introduce important representational alternatives. For instance, Scott Burchill (2002) states: For Palestinians, who regard their cause as an anti-colonial struggle against a brutal and heavily armed adversary who has stolen their land, there is no moral equivalence between those armed with stones under occupation and those with tanks and helicopter gunships who illegally occupy their land.

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Though in a minority, these editorials foreshadow a common framework in editorialising the 2021 Unity Intifada. Yet in The New York Times and The Australian particularly, this alternative narrative was not in evidence during Operation Cast Lead (2008–2009). This highlights that the change in 2021 has little to do with available conceptual frameworks, but with the will of media outlets to represent alternatives.

Operation Cast Lead (2008–2009) In Operation Cast Lead (Cast Lead), Israel’s adversaries were ill-defined and their objectives practically unachievable (Sahhar 2015, pp. 94–99); for instance, an Israeli researcher describes this as an effort “to re-establish the perception that if you provoke or attack you are going to pay a disproportionate price” (Mark Heller quoted in Bronner 2008). The Palestinian death toll was high (B’Tselem’s figure is 1391) and many IDF strategies have since been recognised as war crimes. Indeed, these were the findings of the landmark Goldstone Report, made possible in part by the nature of Israel’s bombardment of Gaza and the role of smart devices and social media that enabled Palestinians to distribute footage which shocked Western publics. That attacks on the chair of the Report, Richard Goldstone, ultimately led to his personal retraction, illustrates its significance; in contrast, other damning reports received no more than “passing protest” from Israel (Falk 2011, p. 99). Though the report’s recommendations were not implemented, Rashid Khalidi (2011, p. 376) observes that its impact “reflects how the report is both a product of an evolving consciousness and a vital contributor to it”. The amount of commentary in The New York Times and The Australian was approximately half that published during Defensive Shield (Table 1). Editorials on the question of resolution in Cast Lead bore little resemblance to their 2002 counterparts; the conduct of the operation itself, characterised by unilateral Israeli violence and an absent Hamas, displaced much of the framework of two sides. Irrespective of their perspective, editorials across all papers reflect a sense of rapid disintegration in the feasibility of the peace process. The Australian, most sympathetic to Israel, simply argued that Israel had exhausted all

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reasonable options and published few editorials on this subject (Sahhar 2015, pp. 118–119). More than half of the editorials in The New York Times concerned this issue, referring to the imminent change of the US administration, the two-state solution and the question of an appropriate Palestinian negotiator (Sahhar 2015, pp. 123–127). Though an editorial by Khalidi (2009)—the only Palestinian contributor—seeks to reframe perception of the issues, he is alone in doing so. The Guardian editorials are, in their majority, critical of Israel’s actions and the broader assumptions about the conflict (Sahhar 2015, pp. 119–123). Ali Abunimah (2008) argues for a re-evaluation of the paradigm, stating it is inappropriate to treat coloniser and colonised as if they were on the same footing and further, that this false equivalence has meant all Palestinians resistance, peaceful or otherwise, is “met by Israel’s bullets and bombs”. Similarly, staff columnist Seumas Milne (2008) deplores that “the Palestinians of Gaza are held responsible for what has been visited upon them”. Many of The Guardian editorials thus offered views at odds with the political consensus of the time, but consistent with the response from protesting publics worldwide. Israel’s existential threat is again a dominant theme, particularly in The Australian and The New York Times and is linked to security: locally framed in terms of Israeli citizens in the south; temporally, in terms of Israel’s psychological defeat in the 2006 Lebanon War; and regionally in respect of Iran. These various portrayals all tend to locate Gaza as a symbolic rather than practical site of threat to Israel (Sahhar 2015, p. 128). This is consonant with the way in which Gaza was produced, since Oslo, as a site of exceptionalism and criminality (Hage 2010, pp. 106–107). The idea of existential threat was central to Israel’s rationale for Cast Lead, and arguably, it did not succeed in convincing international publics or obscuring Israel’s unilateral and disproportionate violence in Gaza. Editorialising in these papers marks a distinct shift from 2002 when both papers offered a range of perspectives; in The Australian particularly editorials double-down in vindicating Israeli action. Both papers missed the perspective reflected on the streets of capital cities around the world, where publics protested Israel’s bombardment of Gaza (Sahhar 2015, pp. 128–130, 133–135). Yet while Israel’s public image declined sharply as a result of Cast Lead (Abunimah

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2011, pp. 394–397), mainstream institutional support for Israel under seemingly any circumstances was affirmed.

From Cast Lead to the Unity Intifada The decade following Cast Lead was characterised by changes in public perception of Israel-Palestine, reinforced by subsequent bombardments of Gaza in November 2012 and July–August 2014. As a direct result of Cast Lead, the call for Boycott Divestment and Sanction (BDS) from Palestinian civil society, initially issued in 2005, attracted considerably more attention (Sahhar 2015, pp. 139–141); though Joseph Massad (2014) notes that its selective adoption in institutional contexts is problematic. As Abunimah argues, since 2009, “Israel’s efforts to change the subject” have reflected “a realization that the battle for legitimacy in the countries on which Israel has always relied for military, economic and political support cannot be won at the extremes” (Abunimah 2011, p. 398). To the contrary, the battle has been remediated to “the territory of universal principles, human rights, and equality… ground held increasingly firmly by the Palestine solidarity movement” (Abunimah 2011, p. 398). After Israel’s 2014 bombardment of Gaza, Sweden and Britain proposed unilateral recognition of Palestinian Statehood— which though symbolic, arguably signalled a change in the international community’s willingness to ignore Israel’s violations of international laws and norms. Amidst these changes, Israel has fought to recoup its international reputation and redefine the issues of concern. This has included via Lawfare—a strategy which targets supporters of BDS—and is intended to both exhaust defendants and serve as a warning to others (Winstanley 2014); as well as unsuccessful attempts to undermine the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court, to which Palestinians now have recourse (Bensuda 2021).3 More successful has been the 2016 International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of 3

This was a right attached to United Nations General Assembly resolution 67/19 (2012) to recognise Palestine as a non-member observer state.

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antisemitism which seeks to criminalise criticism of Zionism and Israel’s conduct, as antisemitic, and has been endorsed or adopted across a variety of institutional and national settings. Israel’s image advocacy, including public relations efforts of “Brand Israel” (Abunimah 2011, p. 397), has illustrated what Richard Falk has described as a “politics of deflection”, which aims to shift attention away from substantive criticism (2011, p. 100). Thus, for all the gains made by Palestinian civil society in international representation of their struggle, the grounds of human rights and universal principles, which became the key language of alternative discourse over that decade, did not succeed in displacing the mainstream media’s tendency to reflect and sympathise with Israel’s narrative.

The Unity Intifada: A New Narrative for Palestine? In May 2021, relations between Israel and the Palestinians made the headlines again in what became known as the Unity Intifada. Israeli violence was both state coordinated—such as aerial bombardments in Gaza and attacks of worshipers at Al-Aqsa mosque—and vigilante—such as Jewish-Israeli-authored lynchings of Palestinians in Lydd. However, it was the Palestinian response that made this so significant. As events across the ’48 and Occupied territories unfolded simultaneously, Palestinians overcame both the practical and psychological fragmentation by which Israel has sought to divide them, while Palestinians in the diaspora mobilised in organised demonstrations of solidarity to amplify this struggle. Though editorials started to appear several days before the anniversary of the 73rd Nakba on May 15, events now associated with the uprising attracted attention more than a week earlier, such as a video posted to twitter of a settler in the al-Kurd family’s garden which went viral around May 4 (Al Jazeera 2021). This encapsulated the context of the threatened housing evictions of Palestinian residents from Sheikh Jarrah, spotlighting the legal inequality which prevents Palestinians from reclaiming property lost in 1948, while empowering Jews to do so under

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The Law and Administration Arrangements Law 1970. The #SaveSheikhJarrah campaign, disseminated on social media, was successful in both “showing the world the brutality and injustice of the Israeli regime” and uniting Palestinians—a key reason why it was so vigorously censored by social media platforms (Hawari 2021; Human Rights Watch 2021). On May 18, Palestinians declared a general strike, and activists in the’48 territories published “The Manifesto of Dignity and Hope”, which affirmed the colonial character of Zionist ideology, and identified fragmentation as an Israeli strategy of control which prevents “a united struggle in the face of racist settler colonialism in all of Palestine” (Mondoweiss 27 May 2021). Though not uncontested by Palestinians within the’48 territories (Tatour 2021, p. 85), remarkably its language was reflected in English language commentary. In both The Guardian and The New York Times, structural and contextual issues of Palestinian struggle were frequently represented. One reason for this is the quantitative shift in Palestinian contributors (Table 2). But they were not alone in their characterisation of Palestinian struggle. I used the following five indicators to evaluate this shift in framework: Was Israel identified as colonial? Was Israel’s treatment of Palestinians described as racist? Was Occupation acknowledged as a systemic cause of the crisis? Was Nakba used to refer to the origins of the situation? Was the neglect of Palestinian rights (broadly defined) recognised as foundational to addressing the situation at hand? Table 2 (2021)

Total opinion piece in selected newspapers during the unity intifada

The New York Times The Guardian (UK) The Australian

Total opinion/editorial contributions on the Unity Intifada, May–June 2021

Palestinian contributions

27 25 13

6 (22%) 7 (28%) 0

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a. The New York Times The change in The New York Times during this period is striking in contrast to that of earlier periods. While there are familiar tropes of an intractable situation and the two-state model, expressed in the editorials of Israeli guests (Livni 2021; Halevi 2021; Dayan 2021), alongside staff columnists Thomas L. Friedman (2021a, b, c, d) and Bret Stephens (2021a), it is not the dominant focus. Neither Israel’s existential threat, though Stephens addresses Israel’s “survival” in two contributions (2021b, c). Along with a piece that presents a history of Jewish connection to the region as an implicit defence against Israel’s negative image during the uprising (Wolpe 2021), articles that reiterate Israeli state narratives represent eleven of a total twenty-seven editorials in the sample. That this narrative did not dominate editorial space was unprecedented. Though there were other contributors who expressed sympathy for Israel’s position, these recognised this was only part of the story. Indeed, this was the case for staff columnist Nicholas Kristof, who not only argues that Israel should be held accountable for war crime (2021a), but later defends that view from the criticism he received (2021b). Remarkably, just as many editorials published in The New York Times engage a framework that reflects the substantive issues from a Palestinian perspective. In addition to the six editorials by Palestinian contributors (Salameh 2021; Alareer 2021; Munayyer 2021; Al-Arian 2021; Ghalayini 2021; Buttu 2021), two of the four American-Jewish contributors acknowledge the decades of injustice experienced by Palestinians (Beinart 2021a; Sanders 2021), while three staff editorials acknowledge—unlike, for instance Friedman (2021a) who represents a complex and often incoherent situation—that suppression of Palestinian rights is fundamental to the current crisis (Goldberg 2021a, b; The Editorial Board 2021). All six Palestinian contributors used one or more of the frames of reference identified in my five evaluative questions, including where pieces had “human angle”, rather than commentary-based, approaches. In addition to these, five other pieces explicitly address one or more of these categories and portray the issues with reference to Palestinian views, even when presenting a range of perceptions. It is also notable that on the

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first day The New York Times published commentary on the uprising, it includes Palestinian contributor Rula Salameh, who contextualises the issue of Sheikh Jarrah, and engages most of the themes identified for analysing a representational shift. Salameh (2021) describes Israel as colonial, she refers to Israeli supremacy, to Occupation and to Palestinian rights to remain in their home and homeland. The following day, Peter Beinart’s editorial (2021a) explicitly names the Nakba, and historic suppression of Palestinian rights, as key to present issues. The views of Beinart had changed dramatically since publishing The Crisis of Zionism (2012, pp. 60–72), and here, he advocates the Palestinian right of return. Bernie Sander’s contribution questions why the affirmation of Jewish and Israeli rights necessitates suppressing recognition of Palestinian rights or their experience of structural oppression, and he explicitly connects Palestinian struggle to the BLM movement, concluding “Palestinian rights matter. Palestinian lives matter” (2021). Staff columnist Michelle Goldberg argues that “justice for the Palestinians is a precondition for peace” (2021a), while in a later article she refers to Human Rights Watch’s conclusion that Israel had committed the crime of apartheid in arguing that antisemitism must not silence criticism of Israel’s shocking treatment of Palestinians (2021b). The number of pieces that address at least one indicator for qualitative representational change is thus equal to the number which present the conflict through an Israel-centric lens— offering a range of perspectives unmatched by earlier periods in the New York Times. That this is the case is reinforced by Dani Dayan’s argument that Palestinians must acknowledge they are not the only group indigenous to the land (2021), indicating the moral ground Palestinian struggle has claimed internationally. b. The Guardian Though historically sympathetic to Palestinian views, editorials during the Unity Intifada mark a watershed in representation of Palestinian perspectives in The Guardian. The seven Palestinian contributions are indicative of that (Al-Qattan 2021; M. Barghouti 2021; O. Barghouti 2021; Karmi 2021; Musleh and Alkhatib 2021; Olwan 2021; Sultany 2021); but staff columnists and other guest contributors also deployed

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this representational framework. All four Israeli contributors (Scheindlin 2021; Sfard 2021; Rapoport 2021; Ronel 2021), and four of six Jewish contributors (Angel 2021; Beinart 2021b; Leifer 2021; Wallach 2021), frame their analysis with reference to one or more of the indicators for measuring representational change. Two of the four staff writers also reflect these criteria (Freedland 2021a, b; Malik 2021), as well as two other guest contributions (Bayoumi 2021; Garbett 2021). Thus, the total number of editorials that acknowledge a Palestinian paradigm is twenty of the twenty-five published. The Guardian commentary highlights the new legibility of key Palestinian issues; chief among these was apprehension of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians as racist—two-thirds of the editorials invoke racism as central to the crisis. While descriptions of the situation as an apartheid have circulated for more than a decade (Peteet 2009, p. 17), as Michael Sfard acknowledges (2021), even as a self-identified Israeli progressive he had long rejected the characterisation until he found “the blatant apartheid” impossible to deny. Joshua Leifer (2021) refers to the discriminatory logic at Zionism’s core, while staff writer Jonathan Freedland (2021a) refers to the inherently discriminatory Nation State Law. Yet the fact that these characterisations were based in evidence had not previously led to their wider acceptance; rather, they attracted greater consequence in 2021 due to the momentum of the BLM movement. As I argued at the time, one of its achievements was to demand that the media reach into the past and provide context to atrocities in the present (Sahhar 2021). Where media coverage has tended to obscure asymmetric power in preference for simpler narratives of protagonist and antagonist, the injustice of George Floyd’s death in May 2020, and the outrage it occasioned, was inseparable from, because it was inexplicable without, acknowledging a history of racialised state violence. A similar representational deficit of the Palestinian struggle is addressed by staff writer Nesrine Malik (2021), who states the Palestinian cause has been “rendered dubious through a kind of reversal of roles in the narration of the conflict”. Mariam Barghouti (2021) invokes BLM when she writes that the protests across Palestine are not about any one instance of violence but “a whole regime of oppression”, just as the BLM protests

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were not only about any one killing. Freedland (2021b) similarly argues that apprehension of the abuse of Palestinian rights maps onto “the BLM template”. Moustafa Bayoumi (2021) notes the support by members of the US congress who connected Palestinian liberation to the BLM movement and Omar Barghouti (2021) likewise draws attention to the BLM movements’ solidarity with Palestinians. Jewish American contributor, Arielle Angel (2021) articulates this intersectional significance, arguing BLM can “claim credit for helping masses of people understand the mechanisms of structural racism and oppression, and for consistently linking the Black struggle to the Palestinian one”. If BLM was a catalyst for grappling with historically less newsworthy matters of structural oppression, it appears to be directly linked to references to the Palestinian Nakba (catastrophe), raised not only by Palestinian contributors but by three Jewish contributors (Angel 2021; Beinart 2021b; Leifer 2021), an Israeli writer (Ronel 2021) and an Armenian resident of Jerusalem (Garbett 2021), whose family’s experience highlighted Nakba’s complex displacements. Beyond explicit references were others that described Palestinian dispossession and Israel’s strategy of ethnic cleansing (Rapoport 2021). Omar Barghouti, who is alone in describing the situation as one of settler-colonialism—though colonialism is raised by others (e.g., M. Barghouti 2021; Karmi 2021)—links Patrick Wolfe’s seminal formulation of this category, as a structure and not an event (2006, p. 388), to Nakba, which he describes as “ongoing”. The final editorial published, by Ghada Karmi (2021), argues that silencing the Palestinian story has a long history, and is a product of colonial attitudes and anti-Palestinian racism, used since 1948 in particular, to delegitimise Palestinian victimhood. Karmi illustrates this with reference not only to Israel’s conduct towards Palestinians but also Western inaction and support for “solutions” she argues are racist. c. The Australian Since 2002, coverage in The Australian has become increasingly unipolar and the Unity Intifada did not reverse that trend. No Palestinian contributors were published; nor did any editorials deploy the referents identified for signalling a change in discourse. Though absent of any

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Palestinian contributors, The Australian did cover a local issue—an open letter from media workers using the hashtag #DoBetterOnPalestine, which called for fairer portrayal of the Unity Intifada—which referenced a Palestinian perspective in scare quotes (Madden 2021; Henderson 2021). Staff writer Chris Mitchell (2021) illustrates how the paper misses the Unity Intifada altogether, arguing that the “localised property dispute” in Sheikh Jarrah was “75 km away from Gaza”. Commentary by Gerrard Henderson similarly misses the point, insisting on the same. His editorial disparages the open letter’s call to abandon “both siderism that equates the victims of a military occupation with its instigators”, yet while defending this paradigm, undermines the existence of a Palestinian perspective. Where an historic lens is deployed in The Australian, it reflected Israeli narratives largely discredited in other mainstream outlets during the period. Regular columnist Jennifer Oriel (2021) opens, “The latest attacks on Israel are part of a decades-long plan to destroy the Jewish state and establish Islamist rule in its place”. Characteristic of Israeli-sympathetic narratives of Israel’s existential threat and Palestinian demonisation, Oriel’s views are echoed by the more moderate guest contributor Dave Sharma (2021),4 who himself is quoted as an authority in an inhouse editorial (The Australian 17 May 2021, p. 10). This coverage must necessarily be linked to recent accusations made against the Murdoch media of serious bias, highlighted in former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s call for a Royal Commission into Rupert Murdoch’s abuse of media power (Rudd 2021). Indeed, as The Australian articles decrying the #DoBetterOnPalestine campaign acknowledge, Palestinian perspectives did gain traction in other Australian news outlets, just not this one.

4 Sharma’s candidature for the seat of Wentworth in the 2018 by-election is credited with the Morrison government’s shift in Australian foreign policy to recognise West Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, a move since reversed by the Albanese government.

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Conclusion: Towards an Un-Occupied Narrative Mainstream recognition of Palestinian struggle within a trans-national and intersectional framework—specifically as a result of the resurgence of the BLM movement following the murder of George Floyd, and the direct solidarity extended by that movement to Palestinian struggle— has had a significant impact on popular and public perception of the Palestinian cause. This was in evidence in anglophone commentary of the 2021 Unity Intifada. Though the mainstream media’s consensus to silence about Israeli aggression towards Palestinians remains a significant structural issue, there is nevertheless indication that the mainstream media, along with the mainstream, is taking up a new language of representation. In February 2022, Amnesty International released a report characterising the system of Israeli control of Palestinians as an apartheid, defined in the Rome Statue as a crime against humanity. Though not the first organisation to do so (for instance, Human Rights Watch had concluded this in April 2021), the Amnesty report gained considerable attention; much like Khalidi’s observations on Goldstone, the timing of this report was as significant as its findings. This is part of the BLM movement’s contribution to shaping public understanding of institutional injustice: insisting that the media tackle the root causes and context of violent action, in order to fulfil its purpose and remain a relevant institution (Sahhar 2021). Most explicitly, the BLM framework offered a crucial lens for mainstream publics to make sense of what happens to Palestinians under Israeli control, enabling Palestinian struggle to be understood as a globally connected movement of resistance and one which faces the structural oppression of systemic racism. However, Israeli sieges and raids on Palestinians are often ignored in the mainstream news cycle and thus what Israel does to Palestinians on a consistent basis is regularly obscured. According to the United Nations, 2022 “is the highest year for Palestinian fatalities in the West Bank” in the last sixteen (Al Jazeera 2022), yet outside the widely reported atrocity of Israel’s killing of Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, many others have gone unremarked. Added to this is the ongoing censorship and suppression on social media of Palestinian-owned accounts

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and Palestinian-generated content (Hawari 2021). That censorship is so vigorous has everything to do with the turn in public sentiment and recognition of the context in which Palestinian struggle occurs. Indeed, it makes clear a new terrain of struggle, not against Israel’s capacity to enforce media blackouts but the complicity of media, in all its forms, in suppressing representations unfavourable to Israel’s public image. The desperation of a strategy like suppression, particularly on platforms dependent on user-generated content is—if a specific illustration of the injustice and narrative oppression Palestinians have faced—both evidence and a tacit acknowledgement that Palestinian narrative holds more ground at this moment than it has held since 1948.

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Stephens, B 2021b, ‘If the Left got its wish for Israel,’ The New York Times, 17 May [Online]. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/17/opinion/ israel-palestine-gaza.html [Accessed 12 June 2021]. Stephens, B 2021c, ‘Anti-Zionism isn’t anti-semitism? Someone didn’t get the memo,’ The New York Times, 24 May [Online]. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/24/opinion/anti-zionism-antisemitism.html [Accessed 12 June 2021]. Sultany, N 2021, ‘Peaceful coexistence in Israel hasn’t been shattered— It’s always been a myth,’ The Guardian, 19 May [Online]. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/may/19/peaceful-coe xistence-israel-myth-palestinian-denied-rights [Accessed 12 June 2021]. Taraki, L 2008, “Enclave micropolis: the paradoxical case of Ramallah/ Al-Bireh,” Journal of Palestine Studies, vol. 37, no. 4, pp. 6–20. Tatour, L 2021, ‘The “Unity Intifada” and ’48 Palestinians: Between the liberal and the decolonial,’ Journal of Palestine Studies, vol. 50, no. 4, pp. 84–89. The Editorial Board 2021, ‘A cease-fire, and new ideas in Israel and the Palestinian territories,’ The New York Times, 21 May [Online]. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/21/opinion/ceasefire-israel-pal estinian-territories.html [Accessed 12 June 2021]. The New York Times Company 2003, The New York Times Company 2002 Annual Report. Available at: https://nytco-assets.nytimes.com/2020/ 06/2002_Annual_Report_and_10-K.pdf [Accessed 1 October 2022]. The New York Times Company 2010, The New York Times Company 2009 Annual Report. Available at: https://nytco-assets.nytimes.com/2020/03/200 9NYTannual.pdf [Accessed 1 October 2022]. The New York Times Company 2022, The New York Times Company 2021 Annual Report. Available at: https://nytco-assets.nytimes.com/2022/03/TheNew-York-Times-Company-2021-Annual-Report.pdf [Accessed 1 October 2022]. Tutu, D 2002, ‘Apartheid in the holy land,’ The Guardian, 29 April, p. 11. UN General Assembly 2012, Status of Palestine in the United Nations (4 December 2012, A/Res/67/19). Available at: https://ecf.org.il/media_ite ms/503 [Accessed 10 October 2022]. Wallach, Y 2021, ‘The violence that began at Jerusalem’s ancient holy sites is driven by a distinctly modern zeal,’ The Guardian, 13 May [Online]. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/may/13/ violence-jerusalem-holy-sites-israeli-right-temple-mount [Accessed 12 June 2021].

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A Violent Dream: Importing the ‘Australian Solution’ to the United Kingdom Monish Bhatia and Scott Poynting

In March 2023, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak addressed a press conference, standing before a podium emblazoned with the redbackground slogan, ‘Stop the Boats’. He was setting out his party’s list of priorities in advance of the 2024 election and ‘to stop small boats’ (of asylum seekers crossing the English Channel) was fifth on the list, in a nation beset by economic woes, healthcare crisis and Brexit backwash. That it headlined on the podium (and thus the news) might suggest a calculated distraction from the other issues. For Australian viewers, this was déjà vu. From 2018, a brushed metal trophy in the form of a silhouette of an Asian fishing boat (dis)graced M. Bhatia (B) Department of Sociology, University of York, York, UK e-mail: [email protected] S. Poynting School of Justice, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, QLD, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Bhatia et al. (eds.), Racism, Violence and Harm, Palgrave Studies in Crime, Media and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-37879-9_9

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a desk in the office of then Australian Prime Minister (and sometime Immigration Minister) Scott Morrison. An inscription on its hull infamously boasted, ‘I stopped these’, referring to the so-called ‘suspected illegal entry vessels’ of asylum seekers that the ideologues of xenophobia just called ‘the boats’. Morrison became Minister for Immigration and Border Protection in the Abbott government after the conservative coalition was elected in September 2013. ‘Stop the Boats’ was a paramount slogan of the conservative opposition during the 2013 election campaign, as it had been in 2010 when they narrowly lost. In fact, it was No. 4 of opposition leader Abbott’s talking points list in 2010, after neoliberal opposition to government spending, the federal deficit and alleged ‘new taxes’. By 2013, it was a well-thumbed playbook, not just since rehearsed in 2010, but since 2001. Conservative Prime Minister John Howard and his ministers had virtually written that book during the 2001 election, that the coalition had seemed set to lose. In the event, with a very successful scare campaign over ‘boat people’ aided by racialised moral panic in the mass media (Poynting et al. 2004: 23–28), even before the 11 September attacks and the advent of the ‘war on terror’, Howard won comprehensively. So did Abbott in 2013. It was during the 2001 election campaign that Howard alighted on the so-called ‘Pacific Solution’ as we shall elaborate below. In all the talk of ‘turning back the boats’ from Australia and the United Kingdom, there is not much focus on the actual people in them. This is deliberate and consequential. The Howard government developed this approach at around the time of the ‘Tampa Crisis’ in 2001 and the Australian resort to what became known as ‘the Pacific Solution’. We argue here that Australia’s ‘Pacific Solution’, along with Britain’s current ‘Australian Solution’, as it might be called, constitutes state violence deliberately designed to harm asylum seekers, mostly unlawfully and certainly without regard for international law, to deter them from exercising their rights to claim asylum. The respective state policies and their implementation are a cynical deterrent to irregular maritime arrivals, structured in racism, without respect for the humanity of the victims or the international humanitarian principles to which both the nations are professedly committed. They are instituted in response to populist

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panic over (certain, racialised) asylum seekers that is marketed by mass media and manipulated irresponsibly for political gain.

‘Crisis’, ‘Invasions’ and the ‘Dream’ of Off-Shoring: Racism and Violence in the United Kingdom In early 2023, the British Conservative Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and Home Secretary Suella Braverman made ‘stopping the boats’ one of their top 5 priorities. They presented the ‘Stop the Boats’/Illegal Migration Bill, which in their imagination would end ‘illegal’ entry as a route to seeking asylum in Britain and remove the so-called ‘incentives’ for people risking their lives by taking perilous journeys. People who arrive ‘illegally’, according to them, will be forced into detention and offshored to Rwanda against their will. Despite the grave human rights violations in Rwanda (see HRW 2023), the country was dubbed as ‘safe’ for asylum seekers. The tabloids and right-wing press obsessively and intensely pursued the subject and published numerous articles using the language of war, victory, dominance and control. For instance, they mentioned: “enough is enough … crackdown on migrants using human rights laws to stay in the UK” (The Sun, 4th March 2023). The press challenged/criticised the European Court of Human Rights and United Nations for standing in the way of Britain’s efforts, and how the “defiant” Braverman is proceeding with the plans of “blocking Channel migrants from claiming asylum” with the help of an “army of lawyers in government” (Daily Mail , 8th March 2023). The articles re-assured the readers that the PM will do “whatever is necessary to end small boats crisis and is up for a ‘fight’” (The Sun, 7th March 2023). The media outlets also stirred-up the post-Brexit blame game and accused the French of being incompetent and stopping only “HALF of migrant crossings” despite being paid a staggering sum of £300million (Daily Express, 10th March 2023), and for refusing Sunak’s “plea” to “take back migrants who land in Britain on small boats” (Daily Mail , 10th March 2023). It was later reported in the Daily Mail (18th March 2023) that

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“meddling Euro judges” were on the “brink of finally letting Britain deport migrants to Rwanda”, and “it would be a blessing for migrants to go to Rwanda” (The Sun, 19th March 2023). The majority of the articles alternated between victim and warrior in their portrayal of the PM and Home Secretary and Britain overall. However, in the process, they also reinforced racialised and criminalised constructions of migrants and portrayed the boat arrivals as undeserving, nuisance and disposable. In Britain, the popular press has long and consistently fanned hostility against migrants, refugees and racialised minorities. For instance, in 1938, the Daily Mail published an article on Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany and stated, “the way stateless Jews from Germany are pouring in from every port of this country is becoming an outrage” (Morrison 2004: 3). The Daily Mail and other outlets also insinuated that all foreigners and Jewish people are likely to be traitors and ‘enemy aliens’, who in their view were infiltrating into the island. The Daily Express in fact floated the idea of ‘dishonest refugees’ and published: “In Britain, half a million Jews find their home. They are never persecuted and, indeed, in many respects the Jews are given favoured treatment here” (Morrison 2004: 3). The British state developed a strong view on limiting/restricting Jewish refugees and to assist only if it was in the so-called ‘interest of the country’ (London 2000). In the post-war period, which also coincided with various British colonies gaining independence, the media set the political agenda. The Daily Express 1958, for example, published a racist editorial referring to the “flood of coloured immigrants” (Greenslade 2005). During that period, a predominance of published stories depicted migrants as hypersexed, coloured brothel-keepers, lazy, unemployed, unruly, criminogenic, benefit scroungers, taking resources away from hard-working (white) British people and causing social instability (Greenslade 2005; Solomos 1989). Certain politicians openly used the race/immigration card to win a seat (Solomos 1989). This was followed by Enoch Powell’s infamous ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech in 1968, which used divisive language and violent imagery to oppose immigration. The speech was criticised in various newspapers for being inflammatory, appealing to racial hatred and causing damage to race relations (and indeed Powell was dismissed from the Conservative Party). However, certain media outlets such as the

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News of the World took a strong pro-Powell stance and published: “most people in this country will agree with him” and “we can take no more coloured people. To do so, as Mr Powell says, is madness” (Greenslade 2005: 19). The Sunday Telegraph mentioned voluntary repatriation being “the only honest course” (Greenslade 2005: 19), whereas other papers like The Telegraph and The Express criticised the language but not the substance of the argument and stated that Powell reflected feelings/ expressed the anxieties felt by millions of people in Britain (Greenslade 2005: 19). (This is a claim closely echoed in Australia in the ‘immigration debate’ of the 1980s spurred by historian Geoffrey Blainey and later from 1996 in support of anti-immigration politician, Pauline Hanson, as we shall see below.) Even prior to Powell’s speech, there was a wide media and political discourse of ‘coloured immigration’ spiralling out of control (as highlighted earlier). All of this led to draconian laws being implemented in 1962 and later in 1968 and 1971 and beyond. El-Enany (2020) argues that nationality and immigration laws are acts of colonial theft, and there to maintain the global racial order established by colonialism, whereby colonised peoples are dispossessed of land and resources. Laws also, as she explains, “maintain Britain as a racially and colonially configured space in which the racialised poor are subject to the operation of internal borders and are disproportionately vulnerable to street and state racial terror. Britain is thus not only bordered, but also racially and colonially ordered, through the operation of immigration control” (2020: 7). Throughout the 1970s, the media continued to publish grotesque stories and headlines, often dramatising and highlighting the bursting of floodgates, and the island that is already full being confronted with hordes of unwelcomed (‘coloured’) foreigners. The papers mentioned there was a “new flood of Asians to Britain” (Mirror, 76), and “invasion of Asians Forces” led to the “Borough call for help” (Telegraph, 76), and “another 20,000 Asians” were “on the way” (The Sun, 76). They even called Asians a “queue jumping rumpus” (Express, 76) who have forced into the country for free council houses (quoted in Morrison 2004). In the same period, the media also circulated the stories of a supposed ‘mugging crisis’ and black criminality; thereby, creating a moral panic, criminalising race and racialising crime, and blaming societal problems

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on immigrants (Hall et al. 1978). The ‘crisis’ triggered an authoritarian and coercive ‘law and order’ responses characteristic of moral panics (see also Dijk 1991). The period between the 1950s and 1980s in the United Kingdom witnessed an increase in far-right groups and activities, several racist murders, and immigrants and minorities being subjected to racial violence and abuse by the police (The Monitoring Group website). Migrants were also subjected to covert and violent border control policies and practices. One such practice would be that of “virginity testing”, where women from the Indian sub-continent travelling on fiancée visas were forced through unethical, intrusive and humiliating medical examination of their vagina at the London Heathrow Airport—which was done to identify the ‘genuine’ to be/virgin brides (see Smith and Marmo 2014 for detailed analysis). Of course, the very practice was based on the colonial ideas of gender and sexuality, and one that viewed South Asian women as submissive, meek and tradition bound. In the same period, immigrant children were subjected to X-ray procedures, to check their bone density and verify the accounts of their age (Smith and Marmo 2014). The borders were/are implemented to filter out the ‘bogus’ and ‘fraudulent’ and keep the domestic (white) British population away from the supposedly ‘threating’ ‘other’ of colour. During most of the 1990s, the media focused on asylum seekers and the coverage often ranged from mass displacement and statistics to individuals who are cheats and scroungers (Cohen 1994; Clark and Campbell 1997; Kaye 2001). The news articles vilified asylum seekers who were already inside the country, demanding stricter restrictions to curtail their numbers. And since the late 1990s and early 2000s, the English Channel (or Calais-Dover) crossings became subject of sustained tabloid and right-wing press campaigns. Around the winter of 1998, several refuge seekers from Kosovo, who were fleeing war and persecution, arrived in Calais hoping to cross the Channel and seek sanctuary in Britain. Due to the lack of safe living space around Calais, the Sangatte camp was opened to host the group, and it was operated by the French Red Cross. The Kosovans were joined by asylum seekers from the Horn of Africa and Middle East. The Sangatte population grew, with 80% of its inhabitants later coming from Afghanistan, Iraq and Sudan (UNHCR

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2002). This was a non-issue for many months, but in the lead-up to the general election of 2001, the popular press aggressively pursued the matter. They circulated the stories of gang activities, people smuggling and organised crime, and created a ‘crisis’ which according to them was ignored by British politicians (Schuster 2003). According to Cooper et al. (2021), news coverage varies depending on the migrant country of origin. The cold war gave the original post-war refugee discourse a strong ‘east–west’ dimension, and in the 1990s, it was noted that individuals were also travelling from south to north (and from former British/European colonies), which triggered a different kind of racialised narratives of ‘fraudulent’, ‘economic’ and ‘bogus’ asylum seekers (Phillips and Hardy 1997). Tabloids consistently used the framings of ‘illegals’ and ‘criminals’ to legitimise violence against people seeking asylum, deny their suffering and distance from humanitarian discourses (Bhatia 2018). They demanded that the crossings, a so-called ‘invasion’ of borders, be fought fiercely and bought under control. The media used the terminologies of natural disasters, calamities and wars, to dramatise and project Britain as a helpless victim (Schuster 2003). Under immense pressure from the press, David Blunkett (Home Secretary 2001–2004) persuaded the French government to close the Sangatte camp, as it was seen as a ‘pull factor’ for migrants from the Global South (Bhatia 2018). The closure of the Sangatte Camp created a bottleneck effect and left individuals vulnerable in a spatial limbo. From here on, asylum seekers started living in a flimsy makeshift camp on the polluted industrial wasteland near the Channel Tunnel littered with cancer-causing asbestos (Channel 4 2015). The encampment was termed as the ‘jungle’ by refugees to signify their struggle and highlight to the world the squalid conditions and dehumanising treatment (see book Voices from the ‘Jungle’: Stories from the Calais Refugee Camp 2017). The populist newspapers took over and turned the ‘jungle’ into a negative metaphor loaded with racist and criminal connotations. It was termed as ‘a ghetto’, ‘a hiding place’ for ‘criminals’, where they were ethnic ‘turf wars’, and ‘vicious battles between armed migrants and people smugglers’ (Howarth and Ibrahim 2012: 207–208).

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The ‘jungle’ was represented as a ‘dangerous threat’ to Britain due to the potential of individuals crossing over, as explained by Bhatia (2018: 182) the encampment was portrayed as ‘bandit country’ by tabloid and it was “accompanied by images of men (of colour) in balaclavas and faces covered with mask/scarf, who were waiting to unleash violence on innocent white people … The media constructed it not only as a lost territory, but also as a territory lost to the foreign vagabonds and invaders, who had unlawfully taken over a civilised and peaceful French costal town … [and turned it into] a place where blacks, Arabs and men from the Muslim world exerted their dominance and ‘gang’ rule, and behaved in an uncivilised, pathologically lawless and animalistic manner. The images presented alongside these stories often projected total chaos and disorder, in turn re-asserting the need for even tougher policing and border control measures [to stop the crossings], and further demands to immobilise, and discard these undesirable bodies and protect the nation”. Between 2009 and 2015, the ‘jungle’ was subjected to full demolition six times by the French authorities. After each attempt, the camp re-emerged within a matter of days. According to Ibrahim and Howarth (2016), the ‘refugee crisis’ events of 2015–2016 in the Mediterranean and unprecedented numbers of refugees arriving in the frontier countries reinvigorated and retained tabloid interest in the ‘jungle’. This later become intertwined with the political hysteria around Brexit, with both sides of ‘leave’ and ‘remain’ camps frequently portraying refugees and migrants as both economic and security threats and setting boundaries between ‘us’ and ‘them’ (Virdee and McGeever 2018). The tabloids and right-wing press mentioned about camp shifting from Calais to Dover and migrants ‘flooding’ into Britain (Bhatia 2018). As the Brexit campaign and so-called migrant ‘crisis’ intensified, along with hysteria over ‘terrorist’ attacks across Europe, the popular press continued to obsessively focus on the supposed need for maintaining strong border controls and protecting sovereignty. Britain has directed millions of pounds in constructing the border wall (dubbed as the “Great Wall of Calais”) and other security and surveillance technologies. Scholars have repeatedly argued, this does not stop the crossings but makes it more dangerous and filled with risks (Davies et al. 2021). When migrants died during the crossings, the popular press

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denied their suffering and deaths and portrayed it simply as a collateral damage of border controls and a tragic outcome of their own ‘illegal’ behaviour/status. Somehow, refuge seekers were blamed for their own deaths, presented as a hindrance and a group whose lives are meaningless and valueless because of their ‘illegal’ presence (Bhatia 2018). They were transformed into undeserving victims. While the tabloids did publish stories of their deaths, at the same time they gave the readers tools to distance themselves from the deaths; they treated them as insignificant and unworthy of compassion, and presented them as an outcome of lax border controls and inadequate policing measures—as opposed to a humanitarian issue needing humane and sensible solutions (Bhatia 2018). In October 2016, the French government demolished the ‘jungle’ once again, and the event turned into major news in the British media and tabloid press—a racial “spectacle” devised by the authorities to impress their spatial control over Calais (Ibrahim and Howarth 2016). Migrants were subjected to relentless violence by the authorities, which was legitimised by the popular press. Since the demolition, unaccompanied children and adults have lived in wooded areas, disused warehouses and under the bridges in and around Calais, and in forest area in GrandSynthe (adjacent to the French town Dunkirk). According to Human Rights Watch (HRW 2021), there have been regular evictions and restrictions placed on the distribution of water, food and other essentials by humanitarian groups. The police routinely confiscate the tents or cut them open and render them unusable. All of this has left refuge seekers on a constant alert and in a state of physical and mental exhaustion (HRW 2021). Despite the levels of violence and brutality directed by the state, desperate individuals continue to arrive in Northern France hoping to cross the Channel. Since Brexit, the Dublin Regulation ended and so did the legal, safe route for reuniting separated asylum-seeking family members. The recent years have also witnessed a tighter security around Calais, making the travel through the Channel Tunnel increasingly difficult. There are no safe routes through which individuals can seek sanctuary (such as, refugee visas that were offered to the Ukrainian nationals), thereby forcing people to take ever more treacherous journeys and using small boats to cross the

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English Channel. In November 2021, thirty-one individuals lost their lives in the English Channel drowning and that reinforced the previously established pattern of reporting that focused on the illegality of their behaviour and the need for more restrictions. For instance, The Sun published an editorial called Deadly Dither, in which it was argued: “Maybe the French will end their infantile anti-Brexit games, order their police to get off their backsides and stop these treacherous dinghies setting sail… Maybe our own Government will put in place an asylum system fit for purpose, not our chaotic, lax regime which acts as a magnet for illegal immigration… Hundreds a day now risk the crossing knowing that if they succeed they will be fed, housed and never removed”. Similarly, the then Home Secretary Priti Patel emphasised in her speech that people should come into the country “legally and the system must be fair” and Britain needed “longer term solution” that will “deter illegal migration” (see Bhatia and Lentin 2022). Soon after, Patel appointed as an independent reviewer of the Border Force, Alexander Downer, a former Australian foreign minister including during the Pacific Solution (discussed below), in which he played a significant role, notably securing the off-shoring deal with Nauru (Australian Broadcasting Corporation 2009, cited in Morris 2023: 52–53). When the Nationality and Borders Bill introduced by Patel, with its off-shoring provisions, was debated in parliament, Australia’s High Commissioner to the United Kingdom, George Brandis, gave evidence to the Public Bills Committee (Hansard, 23/9/2021) about the efficacy of Australia’s Pacific Solution. Brandis was in fact that country’s Attorney-General on the basis of whose legal advice the Pacific Solution was legislated. Baroness Williams, sponsor of the Bill in the House of Lords (Hansard, Nationality and Borders Bill, Volume 890, Debated on Wednesday 2nd March 2022, column 847), commended Brandis’s advice and lauded Australia’s success in stopping the boats through off-shoring, turnbacks and disruption. Home Secretary Suella Braverman, in debate on the subsequent Illegal Migration Bill (Hansard 13th March 2023, Volume 729, Column 580), also referred to Australia’s supposed model policy of offshore detention of maritime-arrival asylum seekers: ‘Australia achieved success against a

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similar problem of illegal maritime migration. It reduced annual crossings from 20,000 to hundreds in a matter of months, in large part by operationalising swift third country removals’. Her reference to the Australian example to claim that ‘The aim of the Bill is not to detain people but to swiftly remove them’ is specious. Australia did detain hundreds of asylum seekers in its Pacific Solution, mostly indefinitely and under abusive conditions on Nauru and Manus Island, as we shall outline below. In April 2022, the tabloids circulated the story “Boat to Rwanda” and celebrated multi-million pound off-shoring deal. Nevertheless, the first flight scheduled to take off in June 2022 was halted due to a series of successful legal injunctions. Furthermore, in a public letter, the British Medical Association, Médecins Sans Frontières and Medical Justice, openly criticised the externalisation policy and outlined the ways in which it will seriously exacerbate mental and physical harms and result in wide-scale abuses.1 According to the Refugee Council, nearly half of those who crossed the Channel in 2022 on boats came from Afghanistan, Iran, Syria, Eritrea and Sudan—a vast majority of whom were likely be granted asylum at the initial stage. The crossings by Afghan nationals, in particular, have consistently increased and it correlates to the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan. In January 2022, the government opened the Afghan Citizens Resettlement Scheme and promised to resettle 5000 Afghan refugees in that year and 20,000 in the coming years. However, in 2022, only 22 Afghans were resettled in Britain. Regardless of the above facts and figures, the current Home Secretary Braverman said it was her “dream” and “obsession” to see a flight take people seeking asylum to Rwanda. She later also described migrants crossing Channel on small boats as “the invasion on our southern coast” and claimed that ‘illegal’ migration is “out of control”. While Braverman was criticised in certain factions of the media for using inflammatory language, many others supported that. Approximately a month after the speech, The Telegraph published that “the south coast is under invasion” and it would be difficult for those believing in law and borders to “not resent illegal Channel crossings”. 1

See: https://www.bma.org.uk/news-and-opinion/doctors-seek-end-to-rwanda-policy.

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In October 2022, three petrol bombs were thrown at the Dover asylum centre, and the British national who executed the attack later took his own life. No one else was seriously harmed. Of course, the attack needs to be situated within the broader hostile environment created for migrants, guided by the divisive media and political rhetoric, and narratives that racialise and criminalise the group, and use the language of wars and invasions. Similarly, in February 2023, there was an anti-refugee protest outside the hotel in Merseyside that housed asylum seekers and which eventually turned violent. It is a widely known and an indisputable fact that rich/industrialised nations only host around 15% of refugees, with 85% living in poorer/ developing countries. Therefore, the global burden falls disproportionately onto the poorer nations (UNHCR). With regard to Britain, the number of people claiming asylum peaked in 2002 at 84,132. After that, numbers fell sharply to reach a twenty-year low of 17,916 in 2010, before rising slowly to reach 32,733 in 2015. The numbers fell, rose and then dipped again during the pandemic. In 2022, they rose to 74,751 claims and the highest level since 2002 (Refugee Action website). As of November 2022, there were 231,591 refugees, 127,421 pending asylum claims and 5483 stateless persons in Britain (including recent Ukrainian refuges)—making 0.54% of the overall population. Regardless of the above, Braverman took forward her predecessor’s Rwanda off-shoring plan, which was once again celebrated by the tabloid and right-wing press (see Daily Express, for example). According to Davies et al. (2021), the colonial fantasy of ‘off-shoring’ shows that forces of imperialism remain in operation—it is not a continuation of empire, but rather a system of racialised violence built on colonial ideas of human value and that some lives matter more than others. In the next section, we demonstrate ways in which the Rwanda plan mirrors Australia’s Pacific Solution. The remainder of this chapter will present the concept of the ‘Pacific Solution’ within its historical and political context. It will discuss the unlawfulness of this policy, its violence and the harm involved. This must be grasped within the history of racism of the Australian nation. Racist, inhumane and state-criminal ‘solutions’ are well tried within the history of British colonialism. It is this history that disposed the British state

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towards the ‘Australian solution’ to the perceived asylum-seeker crisis in stopping the ‘Channel crossers’ who had begun coming in numbers since about 2018 and the occasioned media and political panic discussed above.

Australian Solution and the Cruel Spectacle of Deterrence The dehumanisation of asylum seekers was deliberately deployed as a propaganda strategy by Australia’s Howard government at the time of the 2001 Tampa incident and the wider contemporaneous panic over asylum seekers. With vessels interdicted by the military (including Special Air Service commandos in the case of the Tampa), and the media literally held at a distance from the asylum seekers, the government took pains to ensure that any photos issuing from the Tampa or later the naval vessels bearing the asylum seekers did not show the asylum seekers close up, as identifiable people, any more than their human stories were allowed to be told to the public (Marr and Wilkinson 2004: 152, 180). This strategy was all the more effective because of the way the ‘boat people’ were racialised. In the ‘children overboard’ scandal of 2001, a concerted government lie, propagated in the media, represented asylum seekers in a sinking vessel as purposefully throwing their own children into the water in order to attract sympathy and demand rescue so that they could make their asylum claims (Marr and Wilkinson 2004: 257–278). What sort of parents could treat their own children so instrumentally and inhumanly? Figments of racist imagining, as it turned out. The image of the asylum seeker as deviant and manipulative had been constructed over more than a decade, with political leaders vying each to be tougher on irregular immigration than their opposite numbers and populist media outlets boosting their circulation and ratings by scare stories demonising ‘boat people’. In 1992, the Hawke Labor government introduced the policy of mandatory detention, which was later to be a foundation of Howard’s ‘Pacific Solution’. The Migration Reform Act 1992 mandated that ‘unlawful non-citizens’ were to be detained until they were deported or removed or they succeeded in a visa application;

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this category included all those who arrived at the border without a visa (Grewcock 2009: 138). The government was reacting to a relatively small number of Indo-Chinese boat arrival asylum seekers from 1989, notably from Cambodia before peace was formally concluded there in 1991, and to a spate of on-shore applications from Chinese citizens after the Tiananmen Square repression in 1989 (Grewcock 2009). It is the boat arrivals that concern us here. As early as 1986, Labor’s immigration minister, Chris Hurford, asserted that the majority of those fleeing Indo-China by that stage were economic emigrants rather than genuine refugees, and that to allow them to settle would be unfair to the many refugees awaiting settlement in an imagined ‘queue’ (cited in Grewcock 2009: 121–122). These arguments were to be reprised by Prime Minister Hawke in 1990, as indeed by Immigration Minister Gerry Hand in 1992 when presenting mandatory detention legislation to parliament (Grewcock 2009: 127, 138–140). The tropes of queue jumping and sham asylum applications being cover for economic migration were to remain and certainly provided justification for the Pacific Solution. Other justifications of mandatory detention, later to be raised with alacrity by Prime Minster Howard after the Tampa incident, included the deterrence of resort to ‘people smugglers’ (thus smearing asylum seekers for having business with them), the dangers of transnational criminal gangs (Howard was to add ‘terrorists’), a cynical supposed concern for the safety of asylum seekers in small boats on dangerous seas and control by the nation over its borders and its immigrant intake. When, in 2001, Howard infamously, popularly and thus repeatedly declaimed, ‘… we will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come’, he was effectively echoing the pronouncements of Hawke and his immigration ministers and bureaucrats. Australia was going to pick and choose which refugees were acceptable, addressing immigration priorities rather than humanitarian concerns. Yet with Howard there was dog-whistling involved. In 1988, as opposition leader, Howard had caused a furore in his party and been forced to back down, after concurring with populist right-wing xenophobes that there was too much Asian immigration to Australia. (‘Asian’

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in the context of immigration debates in Australia usually means SouthEast Asian or East Asian.) In the 1996 election campaign, when expelled Liberal Party candidate Pauline Hanson stood on a racist platform opposing Asian immigration and supposed ‘handouts’ to Aborigines, Howard had equivocated in his less than fulsome condemnation, as he claimed that she spoke for many people who were tired of having their genuine concerns dismissed through ‘political correctness’. Howard won government that year, and Hanson was elected as a member of parliament. By the time of the 2001 ‘boat people’ crisis, the majority of asylum seekers attempting to reach Australia by sea were no longer ‘Asian’ (in the Australian sense of the word), but Afghans seeking refuge from the Taliban and Iraqis fleeing Saddam Hussein’s beleaguered regime. Mostly Muslim, they were readily racialised in Australia (Poynting and Mason 2007) and a moral panic was already brewing about ‘Middle Eastern’ gangs, spurred by racialised reporting of, and accredited expert commentary over, a spate of group sexual assaults in 2000 and shortly thereafter (Poynting et al. 2004: 116–152). Howard, ever the consummate political opportunist, knew how to pick his mark. The fact that the refugees this time were coming via the Indonesian archipelago allowed Howard and his ministers to argue that they were not claiming asylum in the first countries of refuge and thus that they were ‘queue jumping’ to gain entry to Australia and access to a higher standard of living. In the latter half of 1999, there had developed a moral panic about ‘illegal immigrants’ arriving by sea in Australia’s west, in what was billed as the greatest ‘boat people’ crisis in the nation’s history, surpassing that of the Vietnamese and other Indo-Chinese refugees from the 1970s onwards. Over the year 2000 and up to the time of the Tampa crisis in August 2001, the media hyperventilated about a veritable ‘human flood’ of asylum seekers, unfailingly described as ‘Middle Eastern’, arriving on Australian territory off the coast of Western Australia (Gale 2004: 330). In reality, the numbers were comfortably within the limits of Australia’s planned yearly refugee intake of 12,000: 3,274 in 1999, 2,937 in 2000 and 1,640 from January to May 2001 (Marr and Wilkinson 2004: 56). The moral outrage fixed on their supposed ‘queue jumping’ and at the involvement of criminal ‘people smugglers’.

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On 24 August 2001, a small Indonesian fishing vessel, the KM Palapa 1, was foundering in the Indian Ocean, about 75 nautical miles north of Australia’s Christmas Island, with 438 people on board, mostly Hazara refugees from Afghanistan. They were saved by the MV Tampa, a Norwegian container ship, responding to a distress message that those on board the Palapa be rescued under the direction of the Australian Maritime Safety Authority. The law of the sea requires that those rescued be taken to the nearest practicable port en route, for disembarkation. The Australian authorities demanded that they be taken to the Indonesian port of Merak, almost four times as far away as Christmas Island. The asylum seekers made very clear that they would not voluntarily be taken there and asked the ship’s captain, Arne Rinnan, to take them to Christmas Island, whence they were originally bound. Rinnan accordingly opted to head for Christmas Island, with many of the asylum seekers being ill and in poor condition. There were two pregnant women, 43 children and a man with a fractured leg; upon their rescue, over a dozen had fallen unconscious on the deck (Grewcock 2009: 152; Marr and Wilkinson 2004: 24). Rinnan radioed Australia for medical help, but none was forthcoming. Upon entering Australian territorial waters off Christmas Island, Captain Rinnan was threatened by an officer of the Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs with punishment for which people smugglers are liable under the Migration Act—including the provision for large fines and confiscation of his vessel—if he did not change course and head for Indonesia (Marr and Wilkinson 2001; Burnside 2002; Poynting 2002). With an election soon approaching, the government had resolved to stop these asylum seekers from reaching Australian land, and Howard boasted as much: ‘Those people will never set foot on Australian soil … Never’ (quoted in Rundle 2001). His stated purpose was to show he was drawing a line: ‘I believe that it is in Australia’s national interest that we draw a line on what is increasingly becoming an uncontrollable number of illegal arrivals in this country’ (Howard 2001). Asylum seekers had become ‘illegal arrivals’ and they were to be detained. Offshore. Mostly under abusive conditions and for an indefinite term. To draw a line. The Tampa was halted by Australian authorities four miles off Christmas Island. By this stage, Rinnan had issued a Mayday call. He

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had unconscious survivors on board, had run out of infusion fluid and faced a host of other medical emergencies (Marr and Wilkinson 2004: 97). It was already three days since the rescue. The ship was boarded by Australian Special Air Services commandos from inflatable zodiac boats and taken over. Rinnan later quite reasonably condemned this as an act of piracy. From this point, communications were strictly limited by the Australian military, enabling government propaganda to dominate the narrative. After more than a week of stand-off, the asylum seekers were transferred to an Australian naval vessel, for eventual transportation to the impoverished Pacific island of Nauru. This tiny nation, long depleted by colonialism, was facing an urgent cash flow crisis, which would be alleviated by a multi-million dollar deal that would see the asylum seekers detained there pending determination of their asylum claims and removal or resettlement, allowing Howard to continue his posturing (falsely, as it turned out) that no asylum seeker aboard the Tampa would set foot on Australian soil. Nauru would later be joined by Manus Island in Papua New Guinea as a second site for Australia’s offshore detention of asylum seekers. This offshore detention was to become known as the ‘Pacific Solution’ to Australia’s asylum-seeker crisis. This supposed means of deterrence of irregular maritime arrivals was one arm of the Australian government’s strategy to ‘Stop the Boats’. The other arm was to act in the shorter term: physically to stop and turn around the boats, or to prevent their departure by nefarious means, or to have them sabotaged. This operation, originally called ‘Operation Trump’ (which now appears meet), was later renamed Operation Relex. The operation was launched on 3 September 2001, barely a week after those aboard the Palapa were taken to safety on board the Tampa and while their destination was still being strenuously negotiated. Relex was originally intended as a public show of the government’s toughness over asylum seekers, but soon resorted to militaristic, violent and often unlawful tactics (Wilkinson 2002). Relex involved some 25 major vessels of the Royal Australian Navy, assisted by army troops on board, deployed between September and December 2001. The campaign intercepted twelve ‘Suspected Illegal Entry Vessels’ (SIEVs), of which four were forced back to Indonesia and

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three sank either during interception or towing (Grewcock 2009: 162). There were numerous occasions of military orders conflicting with international law requirements of the Convention on Safety of Life at Sea, with asylum seekers being kept aboard vessels in danger, for instance, or towed to Indonesian waters and abandoned to their fate. Asylum seekers reported beatings and the use of ‘electric sticks’ to force their compliance (Marr and Wilkinson 2004: xx). There were drownings and missing persons. In the case of so-called SIEV 4, the naval commander was ordered by the government to keep asylum seekers on the vessel until it was actually sinking. This was the notorious ‘children overboard’ boat, whose passengers, including children, were in the water as it eventually did sink (Wilkinson 2002). The truth was kept from the Australian public until after the November 2001 election. Many people died in the course of this operation, which the Australian government claimed was to save asylum seekers from hazardous voyages and the depredations of people smugglers. The vessel designated SIEV X was under Australian surveillance from its port of departure in Indonesia with a loose plank, leaking water, to the area in which its engines failed and it sank, in international waters south of Java and within Australia’s border protection surveillance zone around Christmas Island. It had an upper deck added, making it unstable and unseaworthy, as shown in Australian surveillance photographs. Its eventual fate was highly predictable and possibly even contrived. Unwilling passengers were forced aboard at gunpoint by Indonesian police. Despite Australia’s evidently tracking the boat’s passage, there were no Australian rescue vessels sent; the few survivors were rescued by Indonesian fishing boats. Some 353 people perished, including 146 children and 142 women. Former diplomat and senior civil servant Tony Kevin (2004: 201–225) draws strong inferences about the disablement and sinking of the vessel (and other SIEVs during Operation Relex), its surveillance, the subsequent Australian state cover-up and the undercover disruption of asylum seekers’ boats under Operation Relex. In any case, the tragic deaths did deliver a message. Marion Wilkinson (2002) notes the impact of the SIEV X disaster on the eventual stopping of the boats. By 2004, the Manus Island detention centre was closed, having no more detainees. The Nauru Regional Processing Centre was mothballed

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by the Rudd Labor government in 2008, but was reopened along with the Manus Island facility under the government of Rudd’s successor Julia Gillard in 2012 during a later moral panic about boat people, seized upon as a campaigning issue by the conservative opposition under leader Tony Abbott, with the customary boosting by the right-wing media. This measure reinstated the ‘Pacific Solution’ of offshore detention, which was then reinforced by the declaration of Kevin Rudd as Prime Minister in 2013 (having deposed Gillard) that no boat arrival asylum seekers would be settled in Australia. The conditions in the detention centres on Nauru and Manus imposed gratuitously violent, cruel, torturous and unlawful conditions on asylum seekers (see Behrouz Boochani’s remarkable firsthand account, 2018) during indefinite detention, intentionally to deter further maritime asylum-seeker arrivals. This regime was found in 2015 by the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture, Juan Mendez, to have contravened the Convention Against Torture (The Guardian 2015). Sixteen people died since 2013 on Nauru, Manus and Christmas Islands as a result of indefinite offshore detention there (Tofighian and Boochani 2021: 66).

Conclusion The Abbott government, elected in 2013 with its ‘stop the boats’ campaign slogan to the fore, immediately instituted ‘Operation Sovereign Borders’, of which then Immigration Minister Morrison was so proud. The Refugee Council of Australia (2021) describes Sovereign Borders as ‘a more military version of Operation Relex’. Government propaganda stridently announced: Operation Sovereign Borders is the Australian Government’s military-led border security initiative to stop the boats, prevent people from risking their lives at sea, and preserve the integrity of Australia’s immigration program. If you get on a boat without a visa, you will not end up in Australia. (Department of Immigration and Border Protection 2015)

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In 2020, as the ‘stop the boats’ mission was accomplished for the second time, the Morrison Coalition government closed the detention centres on Nauru and Manus Island, leaving only that on the Australian territory of Christmas Island for ongoing undocumented maritime arrivals, while intensifying border patrols and boat ‘push-backs’ under its Operation Sovereign Borders. The camps on Nauru are nevertheless retained and funded in case of future demand, as part of what Julia Morris aptly dubs a ‘spectacle of deterrence’ (Morris 2023: 263 n1). Australia’s High Commissioner George Brandis made clear in 2021 to the UK’s Public Bills Committee that his country’s boat push-backs and its off-shoring of asylum seekers were part of a unified package: the Pacific Solution was sustained by Operation Relex and later Operation Sovereign Borders. These twin policies, and the propaganda associated with the latter, are exactly the type of propaganda and campaigning that the UK government is seeking to emulate in 2023. The inherent racism, violence and harm are equally and abhorrently all of a package. They indeed comprise a cruel ‘spectacle of deterrence’ for those seeking refuge, entailing an exploitative industry of deterrence effected through neocolonialism, as Morris (2023) cogently demonstrates. The regimes of deterrence and the associated narratives are racist towards the peoples prevailed upon to ‘host’ the offshore processing, as well as towards the racialised and unwanted asylum seekers. The violence and harm imposed in this process on those seeking refuge are deliberately perpetrated by the respective states as a monstrously inhumane mechanism of deterrence. These states’ professed concern for the lives of the asylum seekers, and the dangers that they face, is belied by their treatment of them.

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Policing the Savage Horde: The Texas Rangers and Colonial Narratives of Anti-Mexican Violence Margarita Aragon

Introduction In his adulatory history of the Texas Rangers, early twentieth century historian Walter Webb explained the dual nature of the Rangers’ role, who functioned, he said, as both policemen and military. According to Webb these duties were differentiated by their targets. When the ranger pursued ‘enemies from his own society- outlaws, train robbers, highwaymen and thieves’, he was essentially a policeman. However, when ‘he was going to meet an outside enemy- Indians or Mexicans- he was pretty close to being a soldier’ (Webb 1957, 112). Whether or not they were U.S. citizens, in their interactions with Rangers, Mexicans were ‘outside enemies’, in the language of Webb’s schema. Indeed, as Miguel Antonio Levario observes, as revolution erupted in Mexico and Mexican migration to the United States surged, through ‘the application of military M. Aragon (B) Birkbeck, University of London, London, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Bhatia et al. (eds.), Racism, Violence and Harm, Palgrave Studies in Crime, Media and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-37879-9_10

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rhetoric and strategy’, Mexicans in the U.S. were increasingly treated as ‘enemy others’, threatening the security and authority of the nation, rather than simply as ‘nonwhite’ or ‘non-American’ (Levario 2012, 2–5). Webb’s characterization of the Rangers’ double-function as policemen and soldiers provides an unwitting illustration of Micol Seigel’s critique of the ideological nature of the division between ‘civilian’ police and military. Liberal objections to paramilitary style policing, or the so-called militarization of the police, she suggests works to legitimate state violence both at home and abroad; it suggests that ideal form civilian policing is benevolent, restrained exercise of violence directed at ‘crime’ with the consent of the populace; lethal force and technologies of death are the legitimate domain of the ideal form military, who operate outside of the nation’s borders. In fact, she argues, there has been a constant exchange between police and military: Throughout history, ‘[p]olice as a matter of course use military tactics and equipment…Military struggles have been waged with and fed by the assistance and presence of police’ (Seigel 2018, 168). In the case of the Rangers, with their frequently romanticized status as the historical vanguard of white settlement, extralegal violence wielded against ‘outside enemies’ (whether or not those identified as such were U.S. citizens) was an accepted feature of their role as ‘pretty much like soldiers.’ In this chapter, I will examine how U.S. newspapers, memoirs and works of popular history narrated the Rangers’ anti-Mexican violence through tropes of settler colonial mythology. In particular, I will focus on interpretations of a wave of violence inflicted upon ethnic Mexicans in south Texas in 1915, a period that marked both consolidation of a virulent anti-black racism at home and the expansion of U.S. imperialism within and beyond its continental borders. In retaliation to an anarchist inspired uprising, which was itself initiated as resistance to Ranger brutality, Rangers unleashed what the historian Trinidad Gonzales argues is best understood as a matanza, a massacre (Gonzales 2012). Cultural and media narratives of indiscriminate killing of ethnic Mexicans at the time they were unfolding and in the subsequent decades frequently acknowledge the illegality, the excess, of Ranger violence but rationalize it as emerging from the nation’s continental destiny. These narratives are

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but one illustration of the recurring manner in which gendered settler colonial fantasies imbue U.S. narratives of state violence. U.S. media accounts of the Rangers’ killing, I will suggest, employed a historically laden imagery of wilderness, savagery and civilization. In this regard the figure of the Rangers’ other ‘outside enemy’, ‘the Indian’, was a looming discursive presence in white narratives of anti-Mexican violence. Jodi Byrd writes: ‘Indianness becomes a site through which U.S. empire orients and replicates itself by transforming those to be colonized into “Indians” through continual reiterations of pioneer logics, whether in the Pacific, the Caribbean, or the Middle East’ (Byrd 2011, xiii). ‘Pioneer logic’ has also been present in state violence wielded domestically. The historical relationships between the United States and Mexican peoples, on the one hand, and Native Americans, on the other, in the U.S. Mexico borderlands are far from interchangeable. As Rosaura Sánchez and Beatrice Pita point out, the Mexicans who lived in Texas when white Americans appropriated the region were themselves ‘colonist settlers or their descendants’ (Sanchez and Pita 2014, 1046–1047). Nevertheless, the racial constructions of ‘the Mexican’ and ‘the Indian’ that populated U.S. cultural and political narratives were distinct but interrelated, with Mexicans’ proximity to ‘Indianness’ often underpinning white Americans’ assessments of Mexican debasement. As we will see in the context considered here, the media’s construction of Mexicans as ‘like Indians’ or ‘essentially Indian’ was fundamental to the construction of Rangers as both ‘like soldiers’ and the heroic defenders of white civilization. At the same time, constructions of ‘Indianness’ were multivalent and put to work in a number of ways—including to bolster the status of Rangers as the authentic masters of the land and legitimate weilders of civlizational violence. In all such narratives, the killing of Mexicans through methods that exceeded the formal mores of civilization were presented as the latest iteration of the historical struggle of U.S. nationhood. The media coverage of anti-Mexican violence thus did not seek to obscure death and brutality but rather to rationalize it through a cleansing logic of warfare and settlement. The mediation of anti-Mexican lynching by state agents rehearsed logic present in justifcatory discourses of racialized state violence used today- namely that those not on the front-line of the war for civilization

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are incapable of understanding the conditions its soldiers face; and that savage enemies demand savage responses.

La Matanza This chapter will focus on the repression of a conflict that erupted along the border in 1915, when a group of ethnic Mexicans from both sides of the border launched an uprising in the Lower Rio Grande Valley in South Texas. A response to U.S. continental imperialism and its particular local manifestations in South Texas, armed raiders targeted structures of white U.S. domination. In their more spectacular efforts, they attacked the large ranches of agricultural industrialists and derailed a train (Gonzales 2012, 107; Ribb 2012). Before the raids began in the summer, a young Mexican national was arrested in McAllen, carrying a document titled the Plan de San Diego. It called for the independence of those states of which Mexico had been robbed ‘in a most perfidious manner by North American imperialism.’ It also called for the liberation of the Black race from ‘Yankee tyranny which has held us in iniquitous slavery since the remote times.’ To achieve these ends, it pledged to put to death ‘[e]very North American [man] over 16 years of age.’ It also promised to return to the ‘the Indians…of the Territory’ the ‘lands which have been taken from them,’ in exchange for their assistance (Committee on Foreign Relations 1920, 1205). The Revolutionary Congress, as the signers of the document called themselves, produced a number of other, similarly ambitious, anarchist inspired manifestos, which did not repeat the call for killing all white men but did offer passionate critiques of U.S. racial capitalism and calls for the unified resistance of the racialized subjects they termed the ‘Oppressed of the Americas.’ While the exact relationship between the authors of the Plan de San Diego and the armed raiders is unclear, at least some of the raiders acted in allegiance with its principles (Gonzales 2012; Johnson 2003). Many U.S. observers referred to the uprising, and the repression that it activated, as ‘Bandit Wars’, a designation that denies any legitimate political or historical meaning to the conflict, characterizing it as an eruption of Mexican criminality, imagined by some as a timeless racial essence.

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‘The actions of the bandits in this horrible drama,’ one writer explained, ‘proves them to be the same today, yesterday and tomorrow—the Indian in them will drive them to brutality in spite of their vaunted civilization’ (Lott 1953, 65). As we will see, this racial evaluation fit into a larger set of U.S. media and political discourses that attributed political instability in Mexico to its semi-savage, ‘mongrel’ racial make-up. While the extant propaganda of the Revolutionary Congress activists framed the conflict as part of a wider historical struggle in the Americas, it was the acute conditions that existed in Texas that moved the insurgents to action. A circular authored by Ancieto Pizaña and Luis de la Rosa, the leaders of the armed raids, detailed the daily brutality inflicted upon Mexicans in Texas by the ‘miserable Rangers.’1 While the Mexican population in South Texas had been heretofore somewhat insulated from the shock waves of dispossession after US annexation in 1848, the introduction of the railroad to the region initiated an ‘acceleration of the colonization process’ (Gonzales 2012, 110). An inundation of white American immigrants to the region transformed social and economic relations, subordinating both upper and working-class Mexicans, who now found themselves subject to segregation in public spaces and pushed into separate residential districts (Sandos 1992; Johnson 2003; Montejano 1987). This racialized order was infused with anti-Mexican violence. Between 1907 and 1912, Rangers and other ‘peace officers’ killed sixteen Mexicans who allegedly resisted arrest in Hidalgo and Cameron counties, both areas of low population density (Montejano 1987, 116). In response to the uprising, the Rangers and civilian militias unleashed a devastating convulsion of repression against all Mexicans in the valley. Mexican residents were disarmed while a registry was prepared of white men who had arms and were ready to respond to ‘invaders.’ The campaign of terror opened new opportunities for some white people to take possession of land owned by Mexicans and to further entrench the new racialized order. Many Mexicans fled across the border carrying with them whatever they could. Their attempt to seek safety in Mexico, then in the throes of revolution, indicates the potency of the threat in Texas

1

Consul Garrett to Secretary of State Lansing, August 26, 1915, NARA 812.00/ 15929, p. 2.

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(Johnson 2003, 121, 81, 97; Pierce 1917, 115). The following account appeared in the Spanish-language San Antonio newspaper, El Presente: Men have been killed hiding under their beds, and they have been killed inside their houses, in spite of having asked for a moment of peace to explain themselves. They have been taken to the jail to be hanged, and even more have been shot in the back after giving up their arms and surrendering...Nobody knows who killed the men who show up hung from the trees or riddled with shots; but the entire world points at the rangers. (Magón et al. 2006, 202)

Benjamin Heber Johnson estimates the death toll of the repression to be in the low thousands—meaning that a person of Mexican ethnicity in south Texas ‘was more likely to “disappear” than a citizen of Argentina during that country’s infamous ‘Dirty War’ of the 1970s’ (Johnson 2003, 120).

Narratives of Extermination The local conditions from which the uprising and repression emerged were part of the broader historical and geopolitical relationship between the United States and Mexico. This is reflected within the response of the contemporary national press, in which the domestic terror weilded against ethnic Mexicans was presented as the byproduct of Mexico’s perpetual chaos leaking across the border, and thus accepted as a function of national self-defense. ‘The daily discovery of dead Mexicans along the border,’ the Los Angeles Tribune noted in 1915, ‘is presumptive evidence that the pacification of our sister republic goes on apace’ (El Paso Herald 1915, 12). Before turning to specific media treatment of the Ranger violence, I will first examine the transnational context in which it unfolded—one shaped by U.S. imperialism as well as anti-colonial revolution. While much U.S. discourse focuses on the transgressive figure of border crossing Mexicans, from the mid-nineteenth century, American corporations and thousands of American citizens crossed the border in

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the other direction, to extract profit from cheap land and labor. By 1910, 40,000 Americans lived in Mexico. Fifteen thousand U.S. citizens owned 27% of Mexico’s land (Hart 2002, 72, 260). The revolution initiated in 1910, ‘the first major political challenge to American hegemony in Latin American during the modern era’, saw Mexican revolutionaries, workers and citizens attacking U.S. owned estates and expelling U.S. colonists (ibid., 303–304). Those Americans who wanted to aggressively intervene in Mexico frequently compared each nation’s colonial history to explain U.S. superiority and destined continental dominance. In these narratives, indigenous extermination and dispossession were identified as processes that determined the political and racial virtue of U.S. civilization and manhood. Lorenzo Veracini writes that settler colonialism seeks to ‘transform an historical tie (“we came here”) into a natural one (“the land made us”)’ (Veracini 2010, 21–22). As they ventured into new extra-continental projects of imperialism in the twentieth century, in the Caribbean, Asia and Latin America, many white Americans looked back fondly on the elemental struggle from which they imagined they forged both manhood and nation. In his 1914 The Rise of the American People, Roland Usher, a professor of history at Washington University, wrote: There is something of an epic splendor about this growth to rugged physical manhood of a great people. Like Antaeus, we drew our strength from the ground. We built our house with our bare hands and fashioned our national physical body in an incredibly short time out in a cleansing wilderness. (Usher 1914b, 7)

The manly process of self fabrication was necessarily violent. White men made America, future president Theodore Roosevelt put it, by clearing every inch of wilderness with the ‘axe and the rifle.’ The practice of extermination was definitive of the Anglo American settlers’ ancient heritage, he argued. Their forefathers had ‘assimilated or exterminated the Celts,’ before repeating the process in the New World, this time with more extermination and less assimilation. This is very much in contrast to what happened in Latin America, he wrote, where the Spanish settlers didn’t wage wars of extermination. ‘Instead of killing or driving off the

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natives as the English did, the Spaniards simply sat down in the midst of a much more numerous aboriginal population’ (Roosevelt 1889, 12). White men thus become the inheritors of American indigeneity—they alone had ‘arrogate[d] to themselves the title of “Americans”’ Roosevelt asserted (ibid., 14)—birthing civilization from exterminating violence. On the other hand, the second-rate European colonists in Latin America entered into a decadent political and carnal domination of a racially degrading population. Rather than clearing the wilderness they ‘simply sat down’, the result of which was a racial and political chaos below the U.S. border. The chaotic tribal stagnation of Mexican half-civilization, a failed colonial history, was the racial foil to the mythical image of the white frontiersmen carving their national manhood out of the wilderness with the exterminating axe. Those demanding aggressive intervention to protect the considerable economic interests of U.S. capitalists sometimes pointed to their nation’s history of continental domination to demonstrate their right, obligation even, to invade and indefinitely occupy Mexico. Newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, who owned 7,000,000 acres of land in Mexico (Hart 2002, 167), authored an editorial outlining the United States’ ‘obligation and opportunity’ in Mexico: Our flag should wave over Mexico as the symbol of rehabilitation of that unhappy country and its redemption to ‘humanity’ and civilization. Our right in Mexico is the right of humanity. If we have no right in Mexico then we have no right in California or Texas, which we redeemed from Mexico. (Hearst 1916, 22)

Roland G. Usher, the author cited above who imagined white American men as forging themselves from the ‘cleansing wilderness,’ published an essay in the popular literary journal North American Review in which he similarly argued that their past feats of conquest established Americans’ right to Mexico. Usher’s argument depended on emphasizing Mexicans essential ‘Indianness’, imagined as a state outside of civility and the laws of nations, against which the application of violence served a sacred purpose. ‘Mexico is not in our sense of the word a nation at all,’ he

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wrote, ‘but a collection, loosely organized, of more or less developed and more or less widely sundered Indian tribes.’ This conceptualisation of Mexicans as Indians was central to Usher’s argument: ‘Essentially, the Mexican problem is not an international issue of magnitude, but another phase of the Indian problem we have already met so many times.’ Historical precedent for this ‘problem’ had already been clearly established. Through a combined strategy of ‘peaceful occupation’, as well as ‘extermination’ when necessary, white men had taken the land they wanted. Usher thus envisioned the American absorption of Mexico as the sequel to what had already happened in Georgia, Oklahoma, Texas and California; white men were destined to take ‘the last of the red men’s possessions’ on the American continent. After all, he stated, apparently without irony, ‘If it is wrong for us to intervene in Mexico, the history of the United States is the record of a deliberate crime without parallel for magnitude in history’ (Usher 1914a, 46–47, 51). The denigration of Mexican sovereignty, and its imagined status as a cauldron of racial and political chaos, would reverberate through explanatory narratives of anti-Mexican violence within U.S. borders.

Savagery and Civilization Anti-Mexican violence in Texas and wider projects of U.S. slavery and colonialism dovetail in the history of the Texas Rangers. The force was originally formed by the Republic of Texas. Having recently fought for independence from Mexico to defend the sanctity of their right to enslave, the government of the new nation recruited local ‘Indian fighters’ to provide protection, as they put it, against ‘those savage hordes that infest our borders’ (Cox 2008, 46). A decade later, a regiment of Rangers joined the U.S. forces invading Mexico in a war of continental expansion. Giving a celebratory account of the Rangers’ bloody sojourn in Mexico City, Walter Webb emphasized the Rangers’ ruthless approach to the Mexican populace: ‘men had come who took eye for eye, tooth for tooth.’ The Mexican recipients of this talionic justice included a man shot by a Ranger for allegedly attempting to steal his handkerchief

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and another who threw a stone (Webb 1991, 119–120). Monica Muñoz Martinez has highlighted how Ranger tactics in the borderlands were also linked to U.S. colonial violence in the Philippines. Ranger captain Henry Ransom, notorious for his brutality against Mexicans, employed tactics of terror in Texas that he had first honed against insurgents in the U.S. occuppation of the Philippines. In his memoirs, fellow Ranger William Sterling recounted that Ransom told stories ‘about executing Filipinos that made the Bandit Wars look like a minor purge’ (Muñoz Martinez 2014, 666). The Rangers’ colonial remit as protectors of ‘our borders’, their accepted dual function as police and ‘pretty much soldiers’, meant that U.S. observers, at the time of the conflict and afterwards, frequently remarked upon the unrestrained nature of the Rangers’ violence in South Texas, while also rationalizing it as taking place at the ‘wild’ edges of U.S. civilization. In her examination of policing and racism in twentyfirst century Europe, Liz Fekete has observed that the steady stream of incidents of brutality circulated on social media are countered by police leaders who argue that ‘our critics do not understand the realities of policing,’ a phrase that is given cultural meaning from popular depictions of police in television and crime reporting. ‘Yes,’ the narrative goes, police ‘may use unorthodox methods, or violence against the bad guys, but this is necessary to maintain a semblance of civilization in the face of the depraved’ (Fekete 2022, 12). The same logic frequently ran through media and cultural depictions of Ranger violence. Shifting gendered discourses of civilization/savagery were employed to delineate the ‘real’ conditions Rangers operated within to those who may fail to understand them. In the early twentieth century, as Gail Bederman has observed, anxieties proliferated about the softening and effeminizing effect of civilization on white American masculinity (Bederman 1995). Depicted as men policing the outer extremes of civilization, the Rangers were untainted by its emasculating rules and niceties—and thus best positioned to protect it. Romantic narratives of the Rangers emphasize their unbound nature—the Ranger was ‘ununiformed and undrilled, and performs his active duties thoroughly, but with little regard to order or system’ (Webb 1991, 1). In the parasitic tradition of settler mythologies, in which ‘the

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land made us’, Rangers were sometimes depicted by their admirers as having absorbed the traits of the Native Americans they had waged genocidal war against. This transmutation- white men as inheritors of ‘Indianness’- enabled essentializing claims to the land. Webb described his ideal Ranger, Captain Frank Hamer, as having spent his childhood in the ‘unspoiled forests and streams’ of Texas hill country, developing uncanny ‘Indian’ abilities of tracking, hunting etc.; Hamer’s ‘sensory powers- sight, smell, hearing- may not be as acute as those of the Indian, but they are certainly far sharper than those of the average man’ (ibid., 523). The depiction of Rangers as agents of civilizational advance but not themselves of civilization provided a useful dismissal of those who might question their violent excess. Rangers were imagined as operating in a geographical and temporal liminality. They were perpetually of ‘another time’, moving between a nearly by-gone, ‘unfenced’ world, and the settled modernity they helped to bring into being. Mexican death was a definitive feature of that imagined landscape.

Temporal Dissonance In his 1953 account of the rebellion and repression, Virgil Lott, who during the course of his life would work as a reporter and amatuer local historian, as well as a sheriff ’s deputy during the rebellion, noted that it was impossible to count the number of Mexicans killed; ‘hundreds…were killed who had no part in the uprisings, their bodies concealed in the thick underbrush and no report ever made by the perpetrators of these crimes’ (Lott 1953, 120). In other instances, Rangers made a greater spectacle of their killings. Mexican residents from the region recall Rangers burning the bodies of Mexicans in piles. A photograph of three white men, two of whom were Rangers, posing with the bodies of two dead Mexicans was sold as a postcard in Brownsville and appeared in newspapers (Johnson 2003, 119). Though he characterizes the killings as ‘crimes’ in the passage just cited, Lott narrates the repression as an heroic struggle in white Texans’ settlement of what he refers to as an ‘inchoate’ land. As the ‘vanguard of every new colonization project,’ the

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Rangers ‘have been the saviors of the settlers on the Texas frontier from the founding of this republic’ (Lott 1953, 7). As such, Lott writes, the youth of today who walks the streets of our Valley cities should be made to realize that he owes more than he can ever repay to those valiant pioneers who grimly went about the business of exterminating a horde more savage than any red man that ever lifted a scalp. (90)

Lott’s invocation of the scalping ‘red man’, and his description of the Rangers as ‘valiant pioneers’, establishes Mexicans as an enemy for whom exterminating violence is not an act of barbarity but a cleansing force that makes life and civilization possible. It furthermore makes anti-Mexican violence foundational to but temporally outside of Texan modernity. Rather than the violent expression of new social relations established through the twentieth century surge of white American immigration into South Texas, extermination is the fumigation of savagery from a still prehistoric terrain. The debt of today’s youth, presumably naive to the conditions faced by their valiant pioneer forefathers, and the exterminating violence with which their peaceful valley was purged, reiterates an ongoing theme in popular setter historiography. The ‘from another time’ rationalisation was well-worn by the time Lott was writing. In his nineteenth century account of the Rangers, Ander Jackson Sowel, himself a former ranger, who participated in the invasion of Mexico during the Mexican American War, recounted an anecdote in which Ranger Captain J.H. Callahan accepted the surrender of a wounded Mexican man and offered to transport him to a nearby town. When the unarmed man limped towards Callahan’s horse, Callahan executed him. ‘In our day and time,’ Sowell observed in 1884, three decades after the incident took place and three decades before the repression of 1915, ‘this would look cruel and brutal, but those were desperate times’ (Dobie 1954, 46–47). The colonial narrative works to stretch the temporal divide, so that the civilized present can always maintain a moral distance from the continually recurring ‘desperate times’ of the frontier. Contemporaneous as well as retrospective chroniclers of the Rangers’ activity mapped their violence as outside of ‘our day and time’. In his piece for the St Louis Dispatch, the reporter Clair Kenamore described

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the Rangers’ de-facto policy of mass punishment: ‘When a certain man is discovered to have taken part in a bandits’ raid, is captured or killed in such a raid, his brothers, half-brothers and brothers-in-law are assumed to be guilty and are immediately arrested or killed.’ Kenamore described an instance in which, after raiders wrecked a train, the Rangers pursued a list of 25 suspects. ‘Those who “resisted arrest” were killed and a few were placed in jail’ (Kenamore 1915, 8). The sardonic quotation marks around the phrase ‘resisted arrest’ draws attention to the extralegal nature of the killing. Such methods, Kenamore’s article suggests, were necessitated by the particular conditions in which the Rangers operate and an explicitly racial imperative. ‘In this section [of the country], the distinction made is “whites” and “Mexicans,”’ Kenamore explained to his midwest readers, more familiar with a social order given meaning through the brutal exclusion of African Americans. [A]nd it seems the Rangers’ duty to uphold and emphasize the fact that this is and will remain a white man’s country. The early Texans maintained this with high courage, when they were strangers in the midst of a hostile people. Nowadays, the Rangers employ the same method, but changes in thought, conditions and the presence of an army of 5,000 soldiers and the establishment of law makes these methods seem archaic to the newcomer.

Rather than marking them as dangerous or obsolete, the Rangers’ refusal to employ methods in accordance with modern sensibilities speaks to their masculine integrity and deep knowledge of the social landscape. The Rangers’ efficacy in disciplining Mexicans in the region, who ‘have a very heavy percentage of Indian blood,’ and are regarded by the local white people as ‘children or incompetents,’ prone to theft and ‘quite without morals,’ is evidenced in their innate fear of the Rangers. The Rangers’ superior manhood contrasts not only with the Mexican ‘children’ but with white men more constrained by civilization. U.S. soldiers sent to the region, ‘many of whom are pasty-faced youths’, Kenamore notes, compared unfavorably with the hardened Rangers, ‘men of thirty to forty years,’ who were lean and serious, ‘as capable as any men I’ve seen’ (ibid.). The Rangers’ ‘archaic’ practice is thus placed in temporal

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dissonance from the mainstream of U.S. modernity, but still, in a hardbitten accounting, both necessary and sanctified in the harsh business of making a ‘white man’s country.’

Emerging Unscathed In his history of the Rangers, Walter Webb admitted that many innocent Mexicans were killed by American civilians and state agents along the border in a conflict that constituted an ‘orgy of bloodshed.’ Explaining this unfortunate situation, under the subheading ‘Dead Men on the Rio Grande,’ he wrote, ‘the Mexican Revolution tended to overrun the border and to produce in southern Texas…conditions similar to those that existed in Mexico itself ’ (Webb 1991, 478). The ‘reign of terror’ initiated at the hands of Rangers, peace officers and local posses against Mexicans, then, was not an expression of U.S. national civilization in the borderlands, but rather its as yet incomplete consolidation. In a syndicated series that appeared in several newspapers on the East Coast, a journalist named Frederick J. Haskin regaled his readers with the details of the Texas ‘bandit wars.’ In Haskin’s account, the bandits are inferior to American fighting men, but are enabled to attack and retreat through the desolate wilderness at the border. ‘“The Mexicans disappeared in the brush,”’ he writes, ‘is a sentence repeated again and again in the annals of the bandit war.’ To a great extent the brush, the tangled thickets of mesquite and chaparral is the crux, the heart to the whole situation…The brush is the bandits’ strongest ally. The iron tough mesquite flourishes in the rich soil all the way from a little brush to a tree two feet in diameter. It is dense and impenetrable from the ground to a height of thirty feet. Scattered through it are great piles of broad-leaved cactus and hundreds of sword like yuccas perched on their prickly pedestals like little palms. Where the ground is moist this confusion is worse confounded by a luxuriant growth of cane and willow. The whole is worse than an African jungle. (Haskin 1915b, 34)

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Further emphasizing the symbiotic relationship between Mexican lawlessness and the confounding tangles of impenetrable growth, Haskin writes that for the ‘Mexican native’ the brush is both a refuge and, if necessary, a home. His assertion that the brush is ‘worse than an African jungle’ momentarily invokes the imperialist imaginary of the so-called Dark Continent. Adjoining the border landscape to Africa, commonly treated in early twentieth century U.S. and European discourse as nature not merely untamed but hostile, dangerous and disease-ridden (the ‘The White Man’s Grave’) accentuates the alien racial otherness of the ‘Mexican native’ who seamlessly disappears into its darkness (Jarosz 1992, 106–107). In his report in the St. Louis Post Dispatch, Clair Kenamore approvingly relayed one Texas ranchman’s proposal to end the ‘lawlessness’ that made the eradication of the brush central to both the restoration of social order as well as the control of the potentially dangerous Mexican population. The solution would be to establish martial law and then ‘round up all Mexicans living north of the line,’ placing them in ‘concentration camps along the river from Rio Grande City to the Gulf.’ The inmates of the camp would be compelled to clear the northern bank of the river of the semi-tropical vegetation that was ‘almost impenetrable for American soldiers,’ but which the bandits ‘seem to go through at will’ (Kenamore 1915, 1). Unlike the ‘cleansing wilderness’ from which Roland Usher envisioned white Americans forging their national body, the Mexican brush is at once over-ripe and fruitless, producing only a dark ‘confusion’ of virtually weaponised vegetation. Haskin’s reference to the territory’s ‘rich soil’ hints at the productive capacities of the land, were it to be properly managed, further insinuating the Mexicans’ native backwardness. The ‘worse-than-jungle’ Mexican brush maps the sterile and decrepit nature of Mexican sovereignty. While Mexicans are linked to the primitive landscape of the brush, white Texans, as rugged men of the frontier, are repeatedly figured as having a masterful, disciplinary relationship to the territory. The Houston Post asserted that the ‘Rangers know the brush as well as the Mexicans,’ noting that 200 ‘marauding Mexicans’ had thus far paid the penalty for 21 Americans killed (Houston Post 1915, 1). The Rangers’ knowledge of the brush is evidenced in their violent subjection of Mexicans, who

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in turn are likened to fauna. A paper in Lyford, Texas, for example, reported that ‘bandits’ were being ‘hunted like coyotes and one by one are being killed’ (Johnson 2003, 108). In his piece, Haskin wrote that ‘[t]he Texas Rangers, a band of picked fighting men, are beating the brush for Mexicans as hunters beat thickets for deer’ (1915a, 10). Applauding their efforts to rid the country of ‘bandits’ the CourierGazette in McKinney, Texas, noted appreciatively how the Rangers deigned from ‘boasting’ about their deeds: ‘The way they speak of their heroic acts when a dead Mexican is found among the cactus bushes, is a jocular statement that said “greaser” must have suffered an attack of “sunstroke” or some other term equally as witty.’ The author claimed to ‘deplore death in any manner’ but opined that the ‘marauding bands which have infested the lower Rio Grande Country for the past fortnight are getting what is coming to them.’ ‘There is danger,’ the author observes, ‘that some guiltless may suffer, but we indulge the hope that none will be killed who have not at this time or some former time conspired against the peace and dignity of the State’ (Courier Gazette 1915, 2). As well as a site from which Mexican lawlessness leaks, the brush thus also becomes the site of Mexican death, decay and containment by the policing agents of white civilization, signifying both the subnormality of barbarous Mexican masculinity and its ultimate doom. As agent of civilizational advance but not himself bound within its constraints, the Ranger’s learned savagery—his ability to ‘track like an Indian,’ and ‘to know the brush as well as a Mexican’—facilitates his unique capacity and prowess as a defender of the ‘colonization project.’ Capturing the dynamic in his reflections on the period, Lott would later write, ‘The wilderness of chaparral and mesquite blazed with gunfire as the grim Texas Rangers went about their business… The chaparral was putrid with the dead of the “Army of Independence.” The Rangers, strangely enough, always emerged unscathed’ (Lott 1953, 22). Texans, whose manhood is produced and expressed through their relationship to the land, ‘know the brush as well as Mexicans,’ but also know how to call forth its bounty and to discipline its dangers. The Mexican enemy’s ‘disappearance’—often permanent—‘into the brush’ is emblematic of his racial indolence and his unfitness for sovereignty. The Ranger’s ability to enter and regulate the brush demonstrates the streak of virile masculine

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savagery necessary for frontier defense. His unscathed emergence from the wilderness demonstrates his manly mastery of savage land and savage people.

Conclusion: A Thin Blue Line The confidence with which Lott asserts that the Rangers always emerge unscathed from the savage wilds they police is characteristic of all the media considered here. The contempt for Mexican savagery, and the macabre imagery of unburied Mexicans in the brush, doesn’t detract from the overall tone of optimism. There is a certainty about the trajectory of the nation’s civilizational expansion. In these cultural texts, the Rangers, even when depicted as part of a disappearing era, possess a nearly superhuman exterminating racial prowess. The Rangers are few, the Mexican dead are always uncountable: ‘How many Mexicans were killed, I don’t know, but the Mexicans fear nothing under heaven as they do the Rangers’ (Kenamore 1915, 1). Though playing with the same themes of civilizational struggles, in late twentieth and early twentyfirst centuries narratives of police heroism, the police—and American civilization- are depicted as dreadfully vulnerable. In his cogent examination of the ‘thin blue line’, which imagines the police as the protective barrier between law-abiding citizenship and the monsters that surround them, Tyler Wall reflects on the significance of ‘thinness’ in the metaphor. The blue line protecting ‘us’ from the ravages of criminality is not a fortified barrier but is instead depicted as ‘perpetually on the brink of being broken or obliterated by bestial hordes.’ In 1981, for example, Ronald Reagan utilized the metaphor in a speech before the International Association of Chiefs of Police: ‘The thin blue line…holds back a jungle which threatens to reclaim this clearing we call civilization’ (Wall 2020, 321). In 1915, the St. Louis Clair Kenamore reporter cited the perceived historical fact that ‘Texas was and will remain a white man’s country’ to explain the Rangers’ violent excess. In this century, in the right-wing imagination the police are misunderstood and endangered by Black activists and the depraved inhabitants of ‘innercity jungles.’ Their supposed vulnerability is linked with the existential

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threat of ‘white replacement’ and the destruction of U.S. civilization. Each discourse, that exulting the inevitability of white domination or the paranoid fixation on its seemingly inevitable decline, speak to the continuity of colonial logic, and terror, at the heart of U.S. policing.

References (1915) “21 Americans Have Been Killed Along the Rio Grande Border”, 29 October, Houston Post, 1. (1915) “Kickback,” Courier-Gazette, McKinney, Texas, 23 August, 2. (1915) “Short Snatches from Elsewhere,” 5 October, El Paso Herald , 12. Bederman, Gail. (1995) Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 . Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Byrd, Jodi A. (2011) Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Committee on Foreign Relations. “Investigation of Mexican Affairs.” edited by Sixty-Sixth Congress Second Session. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1920. Cox, Mike. (2008) The Texas Rangers: Wearing the Cinco Peso, 1821–1900. New York: Tom Doherty Associates, LLC. 46. Dobie, James F. (1954) A Vaquero of the Brush Country: The Life and Times of John D. Young. New York: Pennant Books. Fekete, Liz (2022) “Racism, Radicalisation and Europe’s ‘Thin Blue Line’,” Race and Class 64(1), 3–45. Gonzales, Trinidad. (2012) “The Mexican Revolution, Revolución de Texas, and Matanza de 1915,” in ed. Arnoldo de León, War Along the Border: The Mexican Revolution and Tejano Communities. College Station: Texas A&M Press. Hart, John M. (2002) Empire and Revolution: The Americans in Mexico Since the Civil War. Berkeley: University of California Press. Haskin, Frederick (1915a) “The Mexican Muddle II. The Plan of San Diego,” 27 November, Pittsburg Telegraph, 10. Haskin, Frederick (1915b) “Mexican Muddle. III. The Bandit War,” 21 November, 1915, The Sunday Star, Washington, D.C., 34.

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Hearst, William Randolph. (1916) “The Obligation and Opportunity of the United States in Mexico,” 3 May, San Francisco Examiner, 22. Jarosz, Lucy. (1992) “Constructing the Dark Continent: Metaphor as Geographic Representation of Africa,” Geografiska Annaler. Series B, Human Geography 74 (2), 106–107. Johnson, Benjamin Heber. (2003) Revolution in Texas: How a Forgotten Rebellion and Its Bloody Suppression Turned Mexicans into Americans. New Haven: Yale University Press. Kenamore, Clair. (1915) “What Texans on Mexican Border Would Do to End Rio Grande Lawlessness,” 14 November, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 1 and 8. Levario, Miguel Antonio. (2012) Militarizing the Border: When Mexicans Became the Enemy, College Station, Texas A&M University Press. Lott, Virgil N. (1953) “The Rio Grande Valley, Part II.” Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, The University of Texas at Austin. Magón, Ricardo Flores, Mitchell Cowen Verter, and Chaz Bufe (eds) (2006) Dreams of Freedom: A Ricardo Flores Magón Reader. Oakland: AK Press. Montejano, David (1987) Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836– 1986 . Austin: University of Texas Press. Muñoz Martinez, Monica. (2014) “Recuperating Histories of Violence in the Americas: Vernacular History-Making on the US-Mexico Border,” American Quarterly 66(3), 661–689. Pierce, Frank C. (1917) A Brief History of the Lower Rio Grande Valley. Menasha, Wisconsin: George Banta Publishing Co. “Proceedings of the Joint Committee of the Senate and the House in the Investigation of the Texas State Ranger Force,” vol. 1, 303. Records of the Department of State Relating to Internal Affairs of Mexico 1910–1929, National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). Ribb, Richard. (2012) “La Rinchada: Revolution, Revenge, and the Rangers 1910–1920,” in ed. Arnoldo De León, War Along the Border: The Mexican Revolution and Tejano Communities. College Station: Texas A&M University Press. Roosevelt, Theodore. (1889) The Winning of the West. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons. Sanchez, Rosaura and Beatrice Pita. (2014) “Rethinking Settler Colonialism,” American Quarterly 66(4), 1039–1055. Sandos, James, A. (1992). Rebellion in the Borderlands: Anarchism and the Plan of San Diego, 1904–1923. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Seigel, Micol. (2018) “On the Critique of Paramilitarism,” The Global South 12(2), 166–183.

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Usher, Roland G. (1914a) “The Real Mexican Problem,” The North American Review 200(704), 45–52. Usher, Roland G. (1914b) The Rise of the American People: A Philosophical Interpretation of American History. New York: The Century Co. Veracini, Lorenzo. (2010) Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Wall, Tyler. (2020) “The Police Invention of Humanity: Notes on the ‘Thin Blue Line’,” Crime, Media, Culture 16(3), 319–336. Webb, Walter Prescott. (1957) The Story of the Texas Rangers. New York: Grosset & Dunlap. Webb, Walter Presscott. (1991) The Texas Rangers: A Century of Frontier Defense. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Riots in the Master’s Hall: Racism, Nationalism, and the Crisis of U.S. Hegemony Jordan T. Camp and Christina Heatherton

While modern political leaders have stoked violence to overturn elections, it seemed implausible that a US president would attempt the same, until suddenly, it was not. Rising smoke, a surging mob, the barricades breached, flagpoles wielded as spears, the bloodied faces, the rockets’ red glare; scenes from the January 6, 2021, capitol riot, were distressingly frantic and troublingly familiar. The mob that descended on the US capitol, consciously carried these contradictions. Donald Trump, the sitting US president, had urged supporters to come to Washington, D.C. to “stop the steal” of his 2020 presidential election loss. Those who showed up and pummeled past state security forces did so with J. T. Camp (B) American Studies, Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut, US e-mail: [email protected] C. Heatherton American Studies and Human Rights, Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut, US e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Bhatia et al. (eds.), Racism, Violence and Harm, Palgrave Studies in Crime, Media and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-37879-9_11

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different levels of canniness and coordination. Media footage and cell phone videos revealed the resulting chaos (Belew and Gutiérrez 2021). While CNN and the New York Times had caricatured Trump’s base as “angry and ignorant white people in MAGA hats baying at the moon or beating up journalists,” the rioters represented a more inchoate and complicated amalgamation of interests (Davis 2020, 18). Unaffiliated Trump supporters marched alongside avowed white supremacists, members of far-right paramilitary organizations and neo-fascist militias, rightwing evangelicals, active-duty cops and servicemen, as well as veterans of the police and military, who brandished weapons and moved decisively, often in formation, towards the capitol. Affiliations were not always easy to decipher. Members of proto-fascist groups like the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, and Boogaloo Boys, for example, abandoned their traditional costumes—black and gold Fred Perry shirts for the Proud Boys, Hawaiian shirts for the Boogaloos—to blend in with the jeans and sweatshirt wearing crowd. Rioters wore “Make America Great Again” hats while flying flags representing Russia, India, South Vietnam, and QAnon, the online conspiracy network that claims Democrats are leading a cannibalistic cabal of global child sex traffickers. The Israeli flag was flown alongside swastikas and the anti-Semitic slogan “6MWE,” an acronym for Six Million Wasn’t Enough (a ghastly reference to the number of Jews killed in the Holocaust). Rioters assaulted police while wearing putatively pro-cop Blue Lives Matter symbols. Though no singular identity predominated, the markers all represented forms of reactionary politics, violent nationalism, and variants of white supremacy. Significantly, while storming the capitol and proclaiming the event as their “1776” American Revolution, rioters proudly carried the battle flag of the Confederacy, the defeated southern slaveholding states of the US Civil War (1861–1865). To make matters more complicated, many of the aggrieved “white working class” rioters had themselves arrived in private jets and checked into four-star hotels, coming as they did from Trump’s predominantly upper middle-class base. Others who heeded Trump’s call as it was amplified across local and social media, represented a decisive fraction of financial interests. Rather than the traditional mainstays of conservative wealth, much of Trump’s backing came from new sectors of the

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vulture economy. Like Trump, these were capitalists who had amassed their wealth from major real estate developments, private equity, auto dealerships, casinos, medallion cab companies, and other usurious industries. These “post-industrial robber barons” noted Mike Davis, did not come from metropolitan centers but from “hinterland places like Grand Rapids, Wichita, Little Rock and Tulsa.” The January 6th riot was not a spontaneous expression of white working-class Trump support, but a staged and mediated action representing the “lumpen millionaire” interests of the neoliberal economy (Serwer 2021; Bunch 2021; Mutz 2018; Tracy 2021; Farber 2018; Davis 2020). While the riot offered a cacophony of dissonant references, footage from the Senate floor offered more peculiar historical resonance. Rioters attempted to storm the Senate where election results were being certified. Armed capitol guards blockaded the chambers and drew their weapons against the approaching mob. Trembling senators ducked in the observation deck and began calling loved ones. Once the representatives were all evacuated, a surreal scene ensued. Rioters won entrance into the emptied Senate chambers. They walked around in dazed amazement. Some angrily hunted for senators. One masked armed man in tactical gear clambered over seats, one gloved hand menacingly clasping zip ties. Rioters moved with pride, howling, pounding on surfaces, riffling through Senate papers, and gleefully placing their feet atop legislators’ tables. A shirtless man known as the “QAnon Shaman,” wearing a horned headdress, his face covered in red, white, and blue paint, shouted from the Senate dais. Through a bullhorn he led the rioters in prayer, thanking his creator, “for filling this chamber with your white light and love, your white light of harmony.” Referring to the “communists, the globalists, and the traitors within our government” he asserted, “this is our nation, not theirs…Thank you for allowing the United States of America to be reborn” (Mogelson 2021; Sinha 2021). These images paradoxically call to mind the infamous scene from D. W. Griffith’s film Birth of a Nation (1915) called “A Riot in the Master’s Hall.” In that scene, purportedly illegitimate occupants of Congressional chambers were filmed with their feet also atop tables, shouting from the podium, sometimes laughing, sometimes menacing, and otherwise

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performing similar transgressive acts of space within the halls of government. Unlike the white rioters of 2021, Griffith’s film depicted Black legislators from the post-Civil War Reconstruction government (1867– 1877). Instead of red, white, and blue face paint of the QAnon Shaman, white actors in Griffith’s film appear in blackface. While white rioters in 2021 appeared to stake claim as legitimate occupants of Congress, Griffith’s scene portrayed Black legislators as the illegitimate holders of their government posts. Both of these scenes circulated during moments of financial and political crisis. Indeed, while no Confederate flags were present in Griffith’s “Master’s Hall” scene, both scenes linked historical fantasies of vengeance, violence, and white supremacy that were connected to the legacy of the Confederacy and the violent overthrow of the Reconstruction government in the U.S. South. Financial interests behind both the capitol riot and Birth of a Nation sought resolution to the crises of their day by reproducing a specific form of racist “common sense.” Antonio Gramsci used the concept of common sense to theorize uncritical conceptions of the world (Gramsci 1971, 323). Gramsci insisted that attention must be paid to the role of common sense in the rise of fascism as an “exceptional” state form. He penned these thoughts while he himself was incarcerated in a fascist prison. In our own time, neo-fascist common sense combines antipathy to “globalist elites” with dedication to nationalism, law and order, and the criminalization of migrants, people of color, LGBTQI communities, liberals, and socialists. This common sense has taken shape in a conjuncture marked by capitalist crisis, deepening social polarization, increasing precarity, and a crisis of hegemony for the state (Wade 2020; MacClean 1994). In order to develop effective strategies and tactics for change, Gramsci developed the distinctive method of conjunctural analyses (Camp and Greenburg 1982, 2020; Hall 1980; Kundnani 2020). He argued that the “analysis of situations” can only be understood through a concrete analysis of the specific “relations of force” at “various levels,” which include the economic, political, and military forces within a society. The analysis of the relations of force proceeds through a distinction between the levels of the social formation, which represent the “conjunctural fluctuations of the totality of social relations of force” (Gramsci 1971, 185). Following

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Gramsci, the task at present is to evaluate the extent a conjunctural analysis of racism and capitalism can enable us to grasp the articulations of neo-fascist common sense and law and order in the sense of linking them and also of “giving expression to” (Hart 2020, 305). This essay offers a conjunctural analysis of the ongoing struggle over the memory and meaning of Radical Reconstruction at present. It argues that the playbook of resurgent white nationalism has been and continues to be the overthrow of Reconstruction (Sinha 2021). It demonstrates how we might gain a deeper understanding of the global specter of renewed neo-fascist and vigilante violence by comprehending the struggle over this memory. The essay theorizes the relationships between the struggle over the memory of the U.S. Civil War and Reconstruction and the resurgence of revanchist racisms and nationalisms today. In doing so, it suggests the stakes in the development of a theoretical framework adequate to the challenges of the current moment of crisis: a crisis of U.S. hegemony and for capitalism marked by violent nationalisms (Hart 2021; Silver and Payne 2020). By drawing on W. E. B. Du Bois’s writings on Reconstruction, Antonio Gramsci’s writings about crises of hegemony, and Cedric Robinsons writings on racial regimes, we interrogate how the current crisis can also be seen as an opportunity to confront the racist and revanchist common sense underpinning resurgent nationalisms and authoritarianisms in the neoliberal era (Camp 2016).

Radical Reconstruction and the Far Right At a private White House screening, President Woodrow Wilson infamously declared Birth of a Nation (1915) to be, “writing history in lightening.” The film was based on The Clansman (1905), a popular novel by Wilson’s college friend, Thomas Dixon. The film adaptation was intensely popular, becoming the first U.S. “blockbuster” and thereafter a landmark of U.S. cinema. Both The Clansman and Birth of the Nation offered a celebratory narrative of national unification after the Civil War. This version imagined a fictive unity of the former Confederate South and Union North in a common struggle against Black political

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power. Instead of memorializing the abolition of slavery, enfranchisement of Black voters, the passage of Civil Rights legislation, and the election of Black Republicans during the project of Radical Reconstruction—what W. E. B. Du Bois called “the world’s greatest experiment in democracy”—Birth of a Nation gruesomely celebrated Reconstruction’s overthrow (Du Bois 1992). In stirring scenes and still-emulated dramatic techniques, the film elevated forms of white terrorism carried out in the South. The Ku Klux Klan and other white vigilantes who carried out racist terror are depicted as national heroes. Free Black people including Black elected representatives are represented as the sources of physical, sexual, political, and psychological terror. The White House screening was no surprise given that President Wilson was himself quoted in the film with favor: “The white men were roused by a mere instinct of self-preservation … until at last there had sprung into existence a great Ku Klux Klan … to protect the Southern country.” Rather than depicting the defeat of the slaveholding Confederate South, Birth offered the Confederacy a central role of valor in a new national narrative, routed through the celebration of white supremacy and racist terror. As film scholars have suggested, Birth of a Nation was not merely a historical re-enactment of Reconstruction but an attempt to craft a nationalist narrative appropriate for the period in which it was written. The early twentieth century saw massive transformations in the social, spatial, and political order of daily life. From 1910 onwards, Black people moved en masse into Northern Cities in the Great Migration. This movement coincided with a mass influx of immigrants, many from Southern and Eastern Europe, 15 million between 1910 and 1915. These new populations were funneled into the vastly expanded production of wartime industries. This period subsequently saw a rapid realignment of racist orders in cities, specifically in the organization of residential dwellings, factories and other worksites, places of leisure, and the navigation of public space. During this time, US commercial and military ventures also expanded globally, with extended U.S. military occupations in Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Nicaragua, as well as brief military interventions in Mexico, and ongoing engagements throughout the Philippines, the Caribbean, and South America. Racist imaginings of seemingly “foreign” populations at home and abroad, only intensified

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with these new alignments and new international incursions (Heatherton 2022; Robinson 2007; Roediger 2005). These transformations were accompanied by the dramatically increased surveillance powers of the government as well as new local, state, and federal capacities to maintain segregated space and squash political dissent. Globally, the era saw the advance of reactionary populist political movements, including fascism. A domestic fascist variant could be seen in the rise of the Second Ku Klux Klan which had between 4 and 6 million members and almost 4,000 chapters by the 1920s. It is perhaps no surprise that Birth of a Nation became the first major US blockbuster. Filmgoers did not encounter historical re-enactment, but an argument for the virulent racism of the present. Griffith’s film was therefore an unapologetic effort to consecrate the reigning racial regime of the era in which it was made (MacClean 1994; Gordon 2017; Robinson 2007). In the growing tension of newly integrating cities, neighborhoods, worksites, and beaches, Birth of a Nation offers a simplified romance of white supremacy. In the film’s telling, it was not the attempted secession of the slaveholding Confederacy that was mistaken, but the abolition of slavery itself that appeared to be in error, with Reconstruction seen as a dangerous challenge to political, social, and racial order. It made heroes of the original Klan (1866–1871), depicting them as saviors of white womanhood, and decisively helped to expand the ranks of the second Klan (1915–1940). In the film, Black men are depicted as violent sexual predators and deviants. The most notorious scene is of an attempted rape of a white woman by a Black man, an act ultimately avenged by Klansmen. Other scenes in the film depict more prosaic forms of violence. During Reconstruction, over 1,500 Black men were elected to political office at the state and federal level. They were instrumental in working with other Radical Republicans to pass landmark legislation expanding democratic access to voting rights, education, public accommodation, and civil rights. Through entities like the Freedman’s Bureau and new banking practices they also dramatically reconceived the role of the state and the project of what would be known as “abolition democracy.” The scene “the Riot in the Master’s Hall” maligns the newly elected Black politicians and the multiracial democratic and socialist project

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of Radical Reconstruction. The scene opens with a view of an empty congressional chamber. In a slow transition the hall is revealed as nearly entirely full of Black representatives, while a so-called “helpless white minority” of congressmen look on. The floor is chaotic as Black representatives are presented as being oblivious to their duties and basic codes of professional conduct. They hardly listen to proceedings and can barely remain seated. Instead, they are depicted as standing, moving, laughing, eating chicken, and taking furtive swigs of liquor. During the legislative session, one representative removes his shoes and placesing his feet on top of his desk, forcing the speaker to rule that all representatives “must wear shoes.” The depiction not only robs the Reconstruction project of its singular democratic ambitions and prestige, it robs its Black leaders of their dignity. The scene highlights a small group of white observers sitting apprehensively in the upper chambers. Suddenly aware of the presence of white women in the hall, the Black congressmen slyly look towards them. The speaker announces passage of a bill allowing interracial marriage. The leers build into a crescendo as all the Black congressmen rise from their seats, raising their hands and twirling handkerchiefs in celebration along with the Black visitors. As the white women swiftly escape the gallery, the film’s audience is meant to sympathize with them and their purported terror. The sequence underscores the film’s appeal to “moral panics” about race, gender, and sexuality (Hall et al. 2013, x–xviii, 7–31; Carby 1992, 738–755). It is in chivalrous defense of white womanhood that the Klan appears to launch its violent insurrection to overthrow the democratically elected Black Republicans from office. The overthrow of Reconstruction is thereby imagined as an act of self-defense and an extension of white chivalry (Nystrom 2011; Davis 2014; Woods 2017; Du Bois 1962). Such narratives of Reconstruction were in keeping with historical scholarship in the period. The film specifically dramatized a narrative of aggrieved Southerners suffering under the imagined racist tyranny of emancipated Black people and their Northern allies. Radical scholar W. E. B. Du Bois noted how hegemonic U.S. historical narratives described slavery as having been, “thrust upon unwilling helpless America, while the South was blameless in becoming its center.” In these consensus

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narratives, “nobody seems to have done wrong and everybody was right” (Du Bois 1962, 714). Central among these works was the scholarship emanating from one of the country’s most elite educational institutions, Columbia University. There, former Confederate soldier John W. Burgess, founder of Columbia’s Political Science Department, and his pupil, William A. Dunning, a Columbia professor of History, had trained generations of scholars in writing the history of Reconstruction. The “Dunning school” as it was known, produced historical narratives that exonerated the plantocracy, absolved Northern capital, and erased histories of Black insurgency and Reconstruction. In its racist conceits, this scholarship was “one-sided” and “partisan to the last degree” (ibid., 719). Historians of the Dunning school aligned with the “lost cause” ideology that imagined the white South as the true victims of the Civil War. This ideology had motivated the violent overthrow of Reconstruction and conditioned racist vigilante violence waged by the Ku Klan Klan formed in the 1860s, the White League, and other terrorist organizations (ibid., 727). The circulation of these narratives in print and on film were not incidental to the movement of capital in the long twentieth century. As political theorist Cedric Robinson argues in Forgeries of Memory and Meaning (2007), these white nationalist narratives appeared at the very moment that “a new racial regime was being stitched together from the remnants of its predecessors” following the “collapse of the slave system” in the nineteenth century. As Robinson observed, the struggle over slavery did not end with the Civil War or legal abolition but continued as “an ideological struggle over the nature and remembrance of the old regime of slavery intersected with forging new fetters for free Black labor” (Robinson 2007, 103). Official narratives about the inauguration of the Jim Crow era authorized the state’s management of diverse populations at home and abroad. Popular culture depictions, especially those circulating in film, sought to instantiate a common sense about race appropriate for the emergent social and economic order. As newly urbanized cities and vastly expanding industries grappled with the influx of new people, this common sense was critical. It was in this precise historical conjuncture that the film industry became an “instrument of American capital,” and

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the “needs of finance capital … determined the construction of successive racial regimes publicized by motion pictures” (ibid., xv). Robinson observed how Du Bois responded to the construction of this regime by “revising a class interpretation of race,” and by “rewriting the history of the Civil War, Reconstruction, and American imperialism” (ibid., 339). Black Reconstruction in America (1935) represented Du Bois’s extraordinary rebuttal to the racial narratives of the Dunning School. The book presented the history of abolition by enslaved Black people during the U.S. Civil War; the subsequent era of Reconstruction; and its violent overthrow by extreme forces of racism and reaction. It recognized how propaganda about the past had shaped the consolidation of Jim Crow capitalism. In it, Du Bois described how a faltering Southern capitalist historical bloc had made an uneasy alliance with poor whites and unleashed racist terror in an attempt to restore its own power and legitimacy. Du Bois saw that the Southern ruling plantocracy had been so weakened by war that it required an unusual alliance with poor whites to sustain itself (Robinson 2000). The doctrine of “race” separation therefore served to demonize Black people and disqualify the Reconstruction project of “abolition democracy,” while it also facilitated an imagined unification of “the planter and the poor white.” The Southern plantocracy had appealed to a mythical racial and nationalist unity to justify the restoration of its hegemony. The Dunning School presented these racist and nationalist myths as official history (Du Bois 1962). In the 1930s, then the worst crisis in the history of capitalism, Du Bois witnessed how faltering powers sought their own racist and nationalist myths to shore up threatened interests. He appraised the global ramifications of U.S. racial regimes (Robinson 2007, 82–108.) “Imperialism,” he wrote, “thrives on the approval of the United States, and the United States gives that approval because of the South” (Du Bois 1962, 706). For Du Bois, challenging racist nationalisms meant confronting the gendered, racist, and nationalist myths that were designed to promote fictive racist loyalties, break class unity, and restore capitalist legitimacy. In the midst of the worst crisis of hegemony since the Civil War, Black Reconstruction is a fitting text to reconsider. At present, white supremacist and neo-fascist militias are joining together and attracting new members amidst a crisis of hegemony of the state and for capitalism on a scale

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not seen since the 1930s (Belew 2018; Burke 2018; Arrighi 2010). To comprehend the links between racial regimes and nationalisms and class struggle in our time, we can draw on Du Bois’s writings that grappled with the racist nationalisms and fascism of the 1920s and 1930s (Robinson 2000). Yet, we also need to develop a modality of theorizing and writing that is responsive to the specific challenges of the current global conjuncture. In this sense, it is important consider how racial regimes “tend to wear thin over time” (Robinson 2007, xiii). Attention to the ways racism serves as a “cover for class” can inform an analysis of racial regimes adequate to the challenges of the present (Robinson and Robinson 2013). Crises of capitalism have produced new political challenges, but they also produce new opportunities for building “alliances” that were “never anticipated by capitalism” (Morse 2019). In this spirit, we want to emphasize the theoretical work required to develop an understanding of our own moment of crisis. Such moments, as Gramsci observed, describe periods where the ruling class no longer “leads” but is merely “dominant” and therefore exercises “coercive” force alone (Gramsci 1971, 275–276). Just as Du Bois’ Black Reconstruction analyzed the 1860s and 1870s to intervene in debates about the crisis of the 1930s, so too must an analysis of the 1920s and 1930s seeking to intervene in the present situation confront the articulation of racism and capitalism within the current conjuncture to understand the specific conditions of struggle (Gilroy 1981; Davis 2012). In what follows, we suggest how a conjunctural analysis of racism and capitalism might advance struggles against them rather than serving simply to mollify or incorporate them (Camp and Heatherton 2017).

The Current Conjuncture In our present conjuncture, marked by the spectacle of racist police violence, the repression of social movements, and the resurgence of the far right, the ideology of American exceptionalism has unraveled, and the U.S. state is unable to command the consent it once did (Bello 2021). The defiant political mobilizations and social movements that began in the summer of 2020, following high profile police killings of George

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Floyd and Breonna Taylor, and the vigilante murder of Ahmaud Arbery, are illustrative. Protestors demonstrated against the killings themselves and against broader regimes of racist state and vigilante violence, mass unemployment, and the failure to contain the COVID-19 pandemic. In a cycle of rebellion that rocked all fifty states, antiracist protestors demanded a defunding of the police: a redirection of resources away from military and police budgets and toward a reinvestment in education, environmental protections, and healthcare. The events took shape amidst a crisis of U.S. hegemony and for capitalism on a scale not seen since at least the 1930s (Silver and Payne 2020). As the intersecting crises in the United States have intensified, there have also been rapid expansions of right-wing paramilitary organizations and other militia and vigilante groups (ibid.). The law-and-order agendas of the past appear to have evolved into a white nationalist insurgency. In perhaps the most dramatic example, the January 6, 2021 siege on the U.S. capitol, thousands of armed rioters as well as off-duty sheriffs, police officers, and ex-military marched proudly alongside avowed far-right neo-fascist organizations, like the Proud Boys, as well as by rightwing militia groups including the Three Percenters and the Oath Keepers (Thompson 2021; Thompson and Fischer 2021). The severity of the threat could be gauged in how easily they overcame state forces. Rioters arrived at the capitol bearing arms. They swiftly transformed police barricades into weapons and overwhelmed police forces. Commentators quickly compared the policing around the January 6th riot with the George Floyd and Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, namely those that had also occurred in D.C. in June 2020, just a few months prior. Those protests had been met with fearsome force (which included personnel from the Washington, D.C. police, US Park police, over 5,000 National Guard Troops, the federal Bureau of Prisons, and military hardware such as the uses of helicopters) (Borger 2021; Gerstein and Cheney 2021; Zeitz 2022). In this period, Trump famously utilized extreme violent force to clear the road of protestors for a photo op (Smith 2020). Only weeks before January 6, pro-Trump protestors had clashed with counter protestors after Proud Boys burned a Black Lives Matter flag. In that case, the police presence was also substantively more intense than January 6th) (Vlamis 2020). The political objective of

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the January 6 riot, as some have argued, was not merely to stop the verification of the presidential election but to orchestrate a show of force, a recruitment event, and perhaps even, a dress rehearsal for an imagined or future seizure of power (Khalili 2021). Such racist vigilantism has long been essential to the maintenance of white minority rule. Indeed, the farright nationalist movement in the United States has long desired a system of white minority rule as manifest in the racial regimes in Rhodesia and South Africa (Belew 2018). In this way, South African apartheid can be viewed as an antecedent to the current U.S. political situation (Hart 2021). Inspired by Gramsci, we suggest that there is the need to “translate” his insights to understand the specific articulation of racism and capitalism in relation to the present crisis. In particular, we want to take his warning about fascism’s popular appeal seriously. As relevant to understanding the class basis of revanchist racisms and authoritarian nationalisms today (Kipfer and Hart 2012; Hart 2012). In this way, the resurgence of the racist and nationalist right is what, following Gramsci, we might term a “morbid symptom” of a broader crisis where the “old is dying and the new cannot be born” (Gramsci 1971, 276). Amidst the chaos of deepening inequality both nationally and globally, ecological crises, the expansion of mass migration, and the escalation of carceralwarfare state responses, the lumpen millionaires of the far right has positioned themselves as an ameliorative force around the world. Within an extremely racist and exclusionary nationalist framework, their opposition to “globalism” and putative support of workers has attracted broad popular support. Such populist movements in the United States have coalesced around a narrative of crisis and betrayal by globalist elites such as those offered by far right-intellectuals like Steve Bannon, and a variety of far-right and Neo-Nazi websites, online messaging boards and more mainstream social media (Bello 2020). While the Trump administration has been voted out of the White House, the racism, xenophobia, nationalism, and misogyny Trump promoted is actively supported by around 47% of the electorate (or about 74 million people). The tacit and overt support of Trump and his allies by the media, the Republican Party, and neo-fascist militias continue to embolden white nationalist violence and extremism. The

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challenge is to theorize the historically specific ways in which the tilt toward the right has been facilitated and justified through racist and nationalist ideologies both nationally and internationally (Belew 2018; Bello 2019; Silver 2020; Silver and Payne 2020). The specter of renewed neo-fascist and police violence in the U.S. shares features with far-right counterrevolutionary movements internationally (Bello 2019; McCoy 2017). This proliferation of racist state and vigilante violence needs to be understood, as geographer Gillian Hart observes, “as part of a contradictory hegemonic project, intimately linked with U.S. imperialism and racial capitalism” (Hart 2021, 61). Such an analysis entails bringing the U.S. into the same frame as countries like Brazil, Hungary, India, the Philippines, and South Africa, where rightwing populist and authoritarian nationalisms have also proliferated. Such movements do not believe that their visions can be carried out democratically but instead argue for the necessity of extremist and violent vigilante measures (Gramsci 1971; Goonewardena 2020; Belew 2018; Hart 2020). These movements have weapons and military training and see themselves as engaged in a long war against the state first declared in the early 1980s, that then jumped scales when the militia movement grew to an estimated 7 million people by the 1990s (Thompson et al. 2021; Belew 2018). These movements have proliferated since the crisis of 2008, the election of 2016, the onset of the pandemic in 2020, and the siege on the U.S. capitol in 2021 (Hall 1980; Hart 2012). This chapter began with the suggestion that struggles over the memory of the overthrow of Reconstruction in the nineteenth century continue to shape struggles over the material conditions in the early twenty-first century. We conclude by arguing that the surge of authoritarian nationalism, which includes the January 6, 2021 riot, represents a racist and neo-fascist response to a crisis of U.S. hegemony and for capitalism on a world scale. Given the resurgence of right-wing racism, growing armed militancy, increasing precarity, and the expansion of an already bloated military budget under President Joseph Biden, the resolution of the current crisis will be the product of a complex struggle. Social protest against racist state and vigilante violence amid the COVID-19 pandemic have laid bare the inability of capitalism and the state to solve social problems or meet the demands of labor and social movements. In periods of

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“systemic chaos,” such as the present one, there is a growing demand for anti-systemic solutions to crisis (Silver 2020; Silver and Payne 2020). In this decisive moment, the challenge is to consider how struggles over the memory and meaning of the past are connected to struggles to confront and transform the common sense underpinning racist nationalist and populist politics in the present (Hart 2020; Hall 1988).

References Arrighi, Giovanni. (1994) 2010. The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times. New York: Verso. Belew, Kathleen. 2018. Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Belew, Kathleen and Ramón A. Gutiérrez. (eds.) 2021. A Field Guide to White Supremacy. Oakland: University of California Press. Bello, Walden. 2019. Counterrevolution: The Global Rise of the Far Right. Halifax, NS, Canada: Fernwood Publishing. ———. 2020. “The Far Right: Formidable, But Not Unbeatable.” Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy, 9.3: 392. ———. 2021. “America Has Entered the Weimar Era.” Foreign Policy in Focus, 7 January, https://fpif.org/america-has-entered-the-weimar-era/. Borger, Julian. 2021. “Maga v BLM: How Police Handled the Capitol Mob and George Floyd Activists – in Pictures.” The Guardian, 7 January. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jan/06/capitol-mobpolice-trump-george-floyd-protests-photos. Bunch, Will. 2021. “An Insurrection of Upper-middle Class White People.” Philadelphia Inquirer, 12 January. Burke, Kyle. 2018. Revolutionaries for the Right: Anticommunist Internationalism and Paramilitary Warfare in the Cold War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Camp, Jordan T. 2016. Incarcerating the Crisis: Freedom Struggles and the Rise of the Neoliberal State. Oakland: University of California Press. Camp, Jordan T. and Jennifer Greenburg. 2020. “Counterinsurgency Reexamined: Racism, Capitalism, and U.S. Military Doctrine.” Antipode, 52.2: 43–451.

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Index

A

Abbott, T. 180 ABC Australia 81 Abolition democracy 234 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander 80 Aboriginal child removal and protection legislation 81 ABS Australia 81 Afro-descendent people 38 Age, The 81 Al-Aqsa mosque 161 Alfragide Police Station Case 52 American exceptionalism 235 American Revolution 226 Anarchist 206 Anti-Mexican racist violence 207 Anti-mosque hatred 141 Anti-Muslim hate 128 Anti-Muslim violence 128

Anti-Roma racism 16 Anti-Semitic 131, 226 Anti-Zionist 155 Apartheid 168 Arab Other 110 Arafat, Yasser 156 Arbury, Ahmad 236 Auckland Police Districts 61 Australian Broadcasting Corporation 188 Australian identity 80 Australian Muslims 139 Australian, The 81, 133, 152

B

Bad journalism 37 Ba, Mamadou 50 Bandit wars 218 Bannon, Steve 237

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature 2023 M. Bhatia et al. (eds.), Racism, Violence and Harm, Palgrave Studies in Crime, Media and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-37879-9

245

246

Index

Beauvoir, S. 38 Bederman, Gail 214 Bedford massacre of 1924 82 Bhatia, M. 186 Bin Laden in the Suburbs 110 Birth of a Nation 227 Black Lives Matter (BLM) 236 Black men 231 Black neighbourhoods 50 Black people 230 Black Portuguese 38 Black Portuguese Movement (BPM) 37 Black Reconstruction in America 234 Black women 39 Blainey, Geoffrey 183 Blue Lives Matter 226 Blunkett, David 185 Bonilla-Silva, E. 44 Boogaloo Boys 226 Boycott Divestment and Sanction (BDS) 160 Braverman, Suella 181 Breazu, Petre 15 Brexit 179 Bulgaria 16 Burgess, John W. 233 Bush, Mike (NZP Commissioner) 61

C

Calais 184 Calais-Dover 184 California 213 Camp evictions 15, 21 Canberra Times, The 83 Can the Subaltern Speak? 108 Capitalism 229

Capitol riot 225 Carby 232 Caribbean 230 Carlson, Tucker 237 Central and eastern Europe 16 4Chan 237 Channel migrants 181 Chauvin, Derek 79 Christchurch attacks 138 Church of the Nativity 156 Civil Rights Movement 49 Clansman, The 229 Clarke, John 232 CNN 226 Cohen, S. 18 Collins, J. 180 Colonial gaze 61 Colonialism 49 Colonialist 36 Colonisation, violent harms of 62 Confederacy 230 Confederate 233 Coniston massacre of 1928 82 Countering violent extremism (CVE) 132 Courier-Gazette 220 Cova da Moura 41 COVID-19 pandemic 16, 236 Crime against humanity 168 Crime victims 58 Criminalised 81 Criminalising the victims 23 Criminality 15 Criminal other 58 Critcher, Chas 232 Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) 36 Critical Discourse Studies 18 Czech Republic 16

Index

D

Daily Express, The 182 Daily Mail, The 27, 29, 182 Dark Continent 219 Darumbal and South Sea Islander 80 #deathtoislam 137 Denmark 21 De-othering 36 Department of Public Prosecutions 80 Deport 182 Deportations 15 Discourse Studies 15 Dixon, Thomas 229 #DoBetterOnPalestine 167 Doomadgee, Mulrunji 83 Dublin Regulation 187 Dunning school 233 Dunning, William A. 233

E

Eastern Europe, slavery in 16 El Presente 210 Enemy others 206 Essentialist discourses 119 Ethnic cleansing 136 EU protocols 22 Eurocolonial construct 119 European 15 European Roma Rights Centre 16 European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights, The 16 Express, The 183 Extermination, narratives of 210

F

Fake news 37, 133

247

Falk, Richard 161 Far-right paramilitary organizations 226 Fascist 36 Federal Bureau of Prisons 236 Fekete, Liz 214 Feminist 38 Floyd, George 79, 236 Folk devils 18 Forced repatriations 16 Forgeries of Memory and Meaning 233 Forrest River Massacre 82 Fox News 237 France 20 Freyre, Gilberto 39

G

Gang activities 185 Gaza Strip 151 Georgia 213 Gilbert, Kevin 86 Golden Age of Middle Eastern crime 106 Goldstone Report 158 Great Replacement theory 131 Great Wall of Calais 186 Greece 16 Griffith, D. W. 227 Guardian, The 152

H

Hall, Stuart 232, 238 Hanson, Pauline 183 Haskin, Frederick J. 218 Hate-based aggression 135 Hate-production 145

248

Index

Hate speech 37 Hearst, William Randolph 212 Hegemony 37 Herald Sun, The 81, 133 Holocaust 16 Howard, John 180 Human rights 16 violations of 24, 181 Human Rights Watch (HRW) 187 Huntington 134

Jungle 185 Jurnalul National 26

K

Kebabs, Kids, Cops, and Crime 113 Kenamore, Clair 216 Klansmen 231 Ku Klux Klan, The 230

L I

Illegal presence 187 Illegal Roma 20 Immigrants 36 Implicit bias 136 Indianness 207 Indigenous people 38, 59 Indigenous rights 59 Indigenous sovereignty 59 Institutional racism 36, 81 Internal others 36 International Criminal Court 160 International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance 160 ISIS attacks 138 #islamiscancer 137 Islamophobia 127 Islamophobia Register Australia 130 Islamophobic hate crimes 128 Israeli military 155 Italy 16, 21

J

Jefferson, Tony 232 Jewish refugees 182 Journalist 218

La Matanza 208 Law and Administration Arrangements Law, The (1970) 162 ‘Law and order’ rhetoric 113 Lebanese heritage 106 Lentin, A. 119 Levario, Miguel Antonio 205 Lisbon Metropolitan Command 41 Los Angeles Tribune 210 Lott, Virgil 215 Lusotropicalism 40 Lusotropicalist 39 Lynching 136 Lyons, John 116

M

Make America Great Again (MAGA) 226 Manchester Arena bomb attack 142 Marginalised European citizens 15, 16 Massacre 206 Massacres of Indigenous 82 Master’s Hall 227

Index

Matanza 206 McGarry, A. 17 McKinney, Texas 220 McQuire, Amy 80 Media 17 Media Insight Project 36 Media representation 36 Mexican criminality 208 Mexicans 206, 209 Mexico 209, 230 Middle Eastern Organised Crime Squad 106 Middle Eastern people 106 Militarization of the police 206 Military 206, 226 Minister for Immigration and Border Protection 180 Minorities 36 Mis-representation 153 Moral panics 18 Morbid symptom 237 Mosques 141 Mounted and Border police 82 Mounted and Native Police 81 Movement for Black and Indigenous Lives 79 Mugging crisis 183 Multicultural Community Liaison Officers 114 Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis (MCDA) 18 Muslims 127

N

Nakba 154 National Guard Troops 236 Nationality law 38 Nature of Prejudice, The 129

249

Nazi groups 131 Nazis 16 Neo-fascist militias 226 Neo-Nazis 140, 237 NewsCorp 116, 133 News of the World 183 New South Wales Ombudsman 117 New South Wales Police Force 106 New York Times 152, 226 Nine News Seven Spotlight 81 Noble, G. 180 North American imperialism 208 North American Review 212 Nvivo database 40

O

Oath Keepers 226 Occupied West Bank 151 Oklahoma 213 Operation Cast Lead 158 Operation Defensive Shield 156 Organised crime 185 Orientalist 131 Orientalist tropes 106 Other 108

P

P¯akeh¯a 59 Palm Island, Manbarra Country 83 Paramilitary style policing 206 Pasifika 58 Patriarchal violence 82 Persecution 16 Philip (Governor) 82 Philippines 230 Police 226 Police brutality 35

250

Index

Police Commissioner Coster 68 Police Media Unit 111 Police racist aggression 35 Police use-of-force 64 Police violence 15 Populism 15 Populist far-right 127 Portuguese society 36 Post-Civil War Reconstruction government 228 Postcolonial 38 Powell, Enoch 182 Poynting, S. 180 Press 19 Proud Boys 226 Public Security Police (PSP) 37

Q

QAnon 226 QAnon Shaman 227 Queer people 38

R

Racial capitalism 208 Racial Discrimination Act 1976 100 Racial hate crimes 137 Racial hatred 42 Racialise crime 107 Racialised 81 Racialised othering 36 Racialised police power 105 Racial profiling 16, 62 Racism 23, 37, 130, 131 Racist settler colonialism 162 Racist terror 230 Racist vigilantism 237 Ramallah 156

Refugees 38 Representation, lack of 153 Republican National Guard (GNR) Professionals’ Association 44 Republican Party 237 Research Coordination Unit 114 Rightwing evangelicals 226 Right-wing politics 15 Rise of the American People, The 211 Rivers of Blood 182 Roberts, Brian 232 Robinson, Cedric J. 233 Roma community 16 deportations of 21 migrants 17 people 38 violence against 15 Roma Lives Matter 15 Romani families 22 Romani people 16 Romaphobia 17 Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody (RCIADIC) 80 Ruatoki 59

S

Sábado 43 Said, E. 38 Sangatte camp 184 #SaveSheikhJarrah campaign 162 Scanlon Foundation 133 Security 206 Seigel, Micol 206 Servicemen 226 Settler colonial 82, 206 Settler colonisers 119

Index

Shikaki, Khalil 157 Sky News 133 Slovakia 16 Smuggling 185 Social construct 119 Social exclusion 15 Social media 19, 128, 134 South America 230 South Texas 214 Spectacle of deterrence 191 Spivak, G.C. 38, 108 State of Western Australia, The v BW [2021] WAWC 326 84 State violence 58, 206 St Louis Dispatch 216 Structural and systemic biases 81 Structural racism 36 Sun, The 29 Surveilled 106 Sweden 21 Sydney Morning Herald 81 Systemic racism 62

251

T¯uhoe land 59 Turnbull, Malcolm 143 Tutu, Desmond 157 Twitter 237

U

UK 21 UK media 17 Unconscious bias 58 United States (US) 79, 206 Usher, Roland G. 212 US imperialism 206

V

Van Dijk, T. A. 31, 44 Veterans 226 Victimhood 23 reversing 28 Violence 16, 38, 130 Violent nationalisms 229

T

W

Tabar, P. 180 Tauri, Juan 70 Taylor, Breonna 236 Te Kaea 60 Te Karere 60 Telegraph, The 183 Television news 19, 37 Terrorism 127 Texas 213 Thin blue line 221 Three Percenters 236 Travel bans 15 Trigger events 135 Trump, Donald 225, 237

Waitangi Day 59 War on Terror 157 Washington D.C. 225 Washington D.C. police 236 Webb, Walter 205 West Australian Police (WAP) 82 Western media 137 Whakaata M¯aori 70 White American masculinity 214 White House 229 White working class 226 Wilson, Woodrow (President) 229 Wiradjuri community 86 Wolfe, Patrick 119

252

Index

World War II 18

Yuendumu community 85

Y

Z

Young Black men 35

Zionism 161, 165