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Some of our favs may be implicated
88 Plays3 years ago
York University humanities professor Shama Rangwala joins us to dissect and discuss copaganda—everything from Adorno and Althusser to Brooklyn 99 and Falcon and the Winter Soldier as well as some examples from the local media and the local cops. And while we're bringing a critical and educational lens to this pod we need to be clear, this is a no-scold zone. You can still listen to this podcast and enjoy your shows.
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Transcript
Introduction: New Podcast Overview
00:00:01
Speaker
The Progress Report is a proud member of the Harbinger Media Network. A new podcast on the network that I want to talk about is the latest from Full of Chit Chat, where Charlie Demers welcomes thinking person's rock star, Hoxley Workman, for a conversation on uncoolness, the bespoke 1980s, and what the internet is doing to our brains one click at a time.
00:00:19
Speaker
And that's just one show. There's a ton of other great shit on Harbinger, and I can't say enough how much of a fantastic project it is. So get access to exclusive shows and other supporter-only content at harbingermedianetwork.com. Now, on to the show.
Guest Introduction and Background
00:01:09
Speaker
Hey, it's really great to be here. I'm so excited to have been the first person and to be back now, so thanks.
00:01:16
Speaker
Yes, from episode one to episode 77. I love that we have this bench of people who can come on the pod, who are friends of the pod. It's really great. Since we last spoke on the pod, you are now an assistant professor of humanities at York University, so congratulations on that as well.
00:01:37
Speaker
Thank you. And I will say, I think I was one of the first monthly donors to Progress Alberta when you started doing that too. So I feel like I've been kind of a supporter of this for a while. So yeah, happy to be here. True. A true friend of the power. Yes. And job security too. Now that you're officially a business professor, you can afford that $5 a month or whatever it is you give. So it's like, you're not on that session of bullshit anymore.
00:02:07
Speaker
But the reason why we brought you on today after 76 episodes of Interlude is
Impact of George Floyd's Murder
00:02:15
Speaker
You are a humanities professor and specifically you study culture. And, and the, you know, we just like just this past week, the first anniversary of George Floyd's murder at the hands of Minneapolis police was marked. And it really is kind of wild what we have kind of seen happen in a year. You know, the people of Minneapolis burned a police station to the ground. You know, we have seen
00:02:40
Speaker
the rallying cry of kind of Black Lives Matter and defund the police taken up across North America, even here in Edmonton where we live. I mean, we've also seen the forces of reaction and like elites and like
00:02:56
Speaker
capitalism is so adaptive that the struggle has been co-opted by brands and celebrities. We've seen defund the police walk back and defanged by liberals. But really, I think we're at a place now where the daily reality of the racist violence, the murder, the dehumanization that black and brown people and indigenous people face every day by the police has now been made even more clear to the general white public.
00:03:22
Speaker
Yeah, so my work is on adaptation and the kind of adaptations of racial capitalism and as they're manifested in culture. And so when this happened a year ago, this seemed to a lot of us who, you know, think about crisis and think about the ways
00:03:38
Speaker
that critique is co-opted by culture, by the forces of racial capitalism, that burning down a police station was something that maybe could not be co-opted, or that this kind of mass uprising that was global during a pandemic would not be co-opted. And I still think that there was a kind of rupture that happened there that we are still reckoning with. But what we have seen over the last year is all the ways that it actually
00:04:07
Speaker
can be co-opted or the ways that, you know, the US presidency election, how that kind of contained the critique of that event last summer, how culture, you know, like we're gonna talk about some pop culture today, how that has tried to address this really kind of, we say unprecedented a lot this year, but I never thought I would see a police station
00:04:34
Speaker
a US police station burned down on live TV. And so there are some things that can be kind of neutralized from that event, but there are some things I think that will still escape from that and where we don't know. We are still kind of reckoning with that.
00:04:53
Speaker
Yes. And so when we talk about reaction and adaptation and how this stuff has been able to be deflected, I mean, the first thing that came up to mind when you brought up Biden was the Black Lives Matter Twitter account, like the official Black Lives Matter Twitter account saying like, we won after the election or whatever, which is like, oh my God.
The Role of Media in Policing Narratives
00:05:12
Speaker
But the reason why, one of the reasons, one of the many reasons why
00:05:18
Speaker
uh, you know, this, this struggle for black liberation and the struggle to kind of defund and abolish the police has, uh, been co-opted and, and been kind of like, you know, try and where it's been run up, run up against the forces of reaction is the reason why we were talking today and the, what we want to get into in this podcast, which is, you know, copaganda, you know, the overwhelming amount of positive press, uh, that the police are able to generate in order to justify their existence.
00:05:48
Speaker
Yeah, and we've needed propaganda. The we here just being kind of settler culture has used propaganda for a very, very long time. But one of the things we can think about is how has this changed over the course of
00:06:08
Speaker
the different kinds of ways that, you know, anti-Black violence, like the period of slavery, Jim Crow mass incarceration has changed, how has Copaganda changed in these ways too? And so, you know, thinking about Copaganda, again, I think, you know,
00:06:28
Speaker
It's okay to like shows with cops. I think that we watch what we watch and entertainment is entertainment, but it's good to be critical about it. One of the things that I wanted to bring up
00:06:44
Speaker
is just a little bit of leftist theory, which is kind of what I do. And when we're thinking about culture and what culture does, like what is this relationship between culture and capitalism? One of the OGs, like really kind of founding people of thinking about cultural studies in this way,
00:07:06
Speaker
is Theodore Adorno. And so, you know, some listeners might have heard him. He's really meme-able. But yeah, he and Max Porcheimer wrote this article in the 40s on the culture industry. With Adorno, you know, he came from Nazi Germany and went to California and
00:07:27
Speaker
saw that actually propaganda functions in liberal democracy in similar ways, even though, of course, there are very real material differences between Nazi Germany and California of the 40s. But in his work, he argued that this kind of culture industry is just a sort of pacifying force in culture to get us to accept our subjugation within capitalism. So one of the lines I really like
00:07:57
Speaker
of his work is Donald Duck gets his beatings on screen. So we more readily accept ours. And so if you look at some of those, they're on YouTube. They're kind of like great to watch. There's one der Fuhrer's face. There's one where Donald, which is like the end of it is like
00:08:16
Speaker
So Donald Duck has this dream that he's like a Nazi worker or something, and then he wakes up back in the US and he's like, it was all a dream. But there's a silhouette of, in the shadow that looks like, you know, he has to say like, Kyle Hitler, but it turns out that shadow is like just the Statue of Liberty.
00:08:35
Speaker
And so like there's this really striking visual thing like maybe these things are not as different and it's made by Disney. And so sometimes these things can be, you know, maybe not intentional, but like in retrospect in the next century, we can read them in these ways.
00:08:52
Speaker
But yeah, so how does culture make us accept the subjugation that we are experiencing within capitalism and police are inextricable from capitalism? Of course, police protect private property and we know that
00:09:07
Speaker
We know that maybe even intuitively, like even if we haven't thought of police that way, police are not preventing violence in the community. They take the report after something has been, you know, broken into. They weren't protecting people from violence. They were protecting target from being looted. Right. And so we know police protect property. And so they're not, you know,
00:09:31
Speaker
there's there's no like separating policing from capitalism. And so the other person I wanted to talk about is Louis Altizer, who was writing a few decades later in the in the 70s on also, you know, a Marxist theorist. And so he was writing about the ways that the state again makes us kind of accept
00:09:54
Speaker
our position, and he differentiated between what he calls the repressive state apparatuses, which are police, military, anything where it's like, oh, if you don't do this thing, there's some like threat of something towards you, which could be, you know, in many cases, physical violence, and that is what gets you to comply. But the other apparatus is the ideological state apparatus. That's, you know, the family.
00:10:23
Speaker
universities, you know, so education, civil society, the church, the family is kind of the main one. But we can think about culture in this way too, right? The TV, like watching Paw Patrol, like as a kid, is like part of, yeah, yeah, are part of, are part of this. Well, I mean, they're the next kind of
00:10:47
Speaker
question to ask is, you know, is it is it true? Like, do it, you know, Adorno says all of this culture just reproduces hegemony. But I think that, you know, there are there are kind of other schools of thought that critique that, you know, it's been over half a century since since he made these claims that we have agency as viewers. So you can watch PAW Patrol and you can say PAW Patrol gives me a vision because you have a kid, right? Have you watched PAW Patrol?
00:11:14
Speaker
Yeah. I know about Paw Patrol. Uh, we have actually like whatever put the parental controls. So we don't want, so the three year old doesn't watch Paw Patrol anymore. Uh, not only because it's kind of pro cop and, but it's also just like the merch where we have a very strong, like any show that has a ton of merch out there that my kid would want. We usually just end up, uh, just shutting that off so that it's not available on Netflix anymore.
00:11:43
Speaker
Yeah, well, the thing about about the ideological state apparatus is like your parents telling you, like, don't you want to buy a house like and have a hetero marriage and kids and like reproduce, you know, the labor in class or or like reproduce, you know, our like intergenerational wealth as the case may be. Don't you want to go to university? Like Altezer says, we choose this freely. We choose that kind of subjugation, you know, or
00:12:11
Speaker
Interpolation he calls it into hegemony like we choose that freely or we feel like we choose that freely We choose it all by ourselves And and culture is a huge part of this so the other thing about PAW Patrol is that it could be a vision of like
00:12:27
Speaker
We do want some people, you know, some people just do want their jobs to be like, I'm going to go around helping people. Like the Paw Patrol people aren't like these dogs aren't like mauling anybody, right? They're not enacting violence. They're not doing the actual work of policing. They're cute little animals. It's all about rescuing people who are in trouble. It's just that the like the cop dog has a fucking drone.
00:12:53
Speaker
Oh my gosh. Yeah. So this is the way that culture here gets kids. It prepares kids for surveillance culture, I guess, if there's a drone in it. The drone probably looks cute, right? Or it's like not...
00:13:09
Speaker
Of course, it's all cute, right? Yeah. I mean, it's not like a fucking reaper or a predator drone with reaper missiles on it by any stretch of the imagination, but it is still a drone and referred to as such. No, I mean, I think the Altersair stuff is very interesting. Again, I'm a dummy. I don't read a lot of books. I read a lot of children's books these days, but it seems like he's making the point that there is this
00:13:34
Speaker
baked in amount of cultural expectations. That has a lot more control than necessarily a policeman with a trench and beating you over the head. This is the new, more modern way of controlling the population rather than beating you over the head with a trench, which was in the 1930s style of social control.
00:13:57
Speaker
Well, I mean, ideological state apparatuses were there in the 30s, too. We have always had culture and ideology since we've had language. The argument would be that, of course, language itself is ideological. So the way that we're talking about things is going to also privilege certain kinds of perspectives and worldviews. And so, yeah, we could say that ideology
00:14:23
Speaker
is maybe thicker now or thicker in particular moments more so than repression. That could be the difference between Adorno's experience of Nazi Germany and then fleeing to California and experiencing a different kind of way. Of course, Adorno, again, writing decades before Alta is there, but
00:14:45
Speaker
I think we can think about, you know, ideology is really powerful because it erases its own existence. That's what Altuzare says. It makes us feel as if this is just what we want. Like, I want to help my community. And I grew up watching Paw Patrol.
00:15:00
Speaker
And so I'm going to become a cop because this seems like a really good way to help my community. And this is why I'm so not interested in talking about individual cops and their individual motivations, because of course, like some of that, like you might know a cop who wants to do good. It does not matter. Like that does not matter at all for the ways that policing itself is a, you know, is a foundationally violent institution.
00:15:27
Speaker
Yeah, like the foundation of me wanting to do a copaganda episode was me seeing and reacting, interacting with a tweet by a former Alberta NDP candidate who was like, I just watched an Edmonton police officer by an unhoused person, a few coffees. And they treated that unhoused person with dignity and respect. Thank you to the officer for their kindness. Acts like this, quote, quote, acts like this, set us apart and help make our city better for everyone. And it's like just kind of, that good cop narrative is like,
00:15:55
Speaker
such a fundamental part of copaganda. And when you even start to study the history of copaganda and dragnet, the original cop procedural show and the myth of the good cop, it's like, how many good fucking cops does it take to change a light bulb?
00:16:13
Speaker
I'll let you know as soon as a good cop fucking changes anything. The problem is never individual cops, whether they are good or incredibly evil, but it is a system where cops are able to murder and dehumanize black and brown and indigenous people on a regular basis with absolutely no fucking consequences.
Grassroots vs. Institutional Narratives
00:16:33
Speaker
Yeah, and, you know, poor, poor white people too, because that's kind of how they maintain the color blindness of what is a, you know, settler colonial, like anti black anti indigenous institution.
00:16:48
Speaker
Yeah, okay, this is a really good example of these narratives of the good cop or like look at this good cop doing this relation, like having this relationship with somebody. We saw a lot of videos last summer even of and this is you know,
00:17:06
Speaker
Copaganda that is not the culture industry because you know Adorno's culture industry is You know corporations that want to make money. This is the way that kind of Regular folks have taken it upon themselves to perpetuate this because we have social media now so people just filming you know a cop like stopping a little kid and
00:17:28
Speaker
And being like, uh, what are you doing? And then it ends up being like, cause I'm going to give you like an ice cream or something. Right. That they, that it's like, Oh, like there were, there were a few of these kind of circulating like this to say that like, Oh, it's your problem that you think that they're bad. Right. Like you think that cops are bad, but like, look at how good this, this cop is. And I want to say something that I think is not really talks about a lot. Um, and it's something I'm kind of working out, but.
00:17:58
Speaker
For my birthday, I wanted to do a fundraiser for a community organization and I chose Bear Clan Patrol and I actually talked to them because I wanted to get a kind of idea of what they do and I know that they have had some like relationships with police in some ways or like individual police officers and I think that
00:18:21
Speaker
I want to be really careful as somebody whose class position really insulates me from encountering police in a lot of ways to say that people who are unhoused or people who are living precariously should never have any relationships with any individual police officers because, yeah, I think that sometimes it's a survival thing.
00:18:46
Speaker
And I just don't want to get so high and mighty as somebody who's not part of that population. But I had a really good conversation with them about this and the ways that they know some cops who they work with. It's important for that to happen on that scale. I am a theorist of racial capitalism, the adaptations of racial capitalism.
00:19:11
Speaker
So like my perspective on like, yes, all cops are bad are because of the institution of it. But like my lived experience is not one where, you know, I'm not encountering police because, you know, I'm a university professor.
00:19:27
Speaker
Yeah. And I think it might be even a bit useful to just kind of like define, you know, what Copaganda is and why it is, you know, so necessary, right? So it's, it's, you're right. It's not just the cultural stuff that we see, you know, it's Falcon and the Winter Soldier, for instance, is essentially a show about cops or world cops, world superhero cops.
00:19:49
Speaker
uh, all the way, all the way down to like, you know, the, the coverage of the police that you see in your, uh, news sources, you know, tweets like this from this upward NDP candidate that like ended up hilariously being retweeted by the, the president of the Edmonton cop union, uh, or police association. They're cops aren't really cops. I just want to say like a good difference here between the example that I'm
00:20:13
Speaker
giving of maybe if you are a bear clan patrol working with that, that is a very different thing than a politician who actually is in a position to do something about policy. The politician doing that actually perpetuates this system. Politicians should be thinking on the scale of this system. If you are part of
00:20:34
Speaker
You know very like small organization that intervenes an individual You know putting bodies in between cops and people cops are harassing then you might have a different relationship to police and you know I just think that it's different like I would critique I would critique the NDP person much much more like I think they should not be saying that about about police like they should not be giving this like coffee cup stories about police and
00:21:03
Speaker
So, you know, much like what Nancy Pelosi's daughter said back when Jeffrey Epstein was arrested. This is before he, quote unquote, committed suicide. But she said in a tweet that is somehow still up that some of our faves will be implicated. And I feel like that's very appropriate for, you know, what we're going to talk about now, which is like, you know, example after example of propaganda in pop culture.
Marvel's Approach to Racial Issues
00:21:32
Speaker
And just because, and I just want to be clear, this is like a no scold zone. I don't think it's very effective. I don't think it's very useful to yell at people for the cultural content that they watch in their
00:21:47
Speaker
precious few non-working hours. Whatever you laugh at, whatever you watch, whatever you enjoy, I just want to be clear that watch whatever the fuck you want to watch. I'm not going to judge you. I'm not secretly judging you. If you enjoy Brooklyn Nine-Nine, or cop procedurals, or whatever. Again, I'm not judging you. Watch whatever the fuck you want to watch. But just know that ... If any content you consume, any culture that you're consuming, you do need to be conscious of the
00:22:17
Speaker
why it exists, who this is appealing to, why it was made, why is this appealing on a network owned by a weapons manufacturer, MVC and GE, right? Again, not too...
00:22:33
Speaker
school do, but just to educate you. So the one that we kind of talked about in our little pre-interview Shama was, you know, Marvel, Marvel, you know, Marvel is this huge entertainment complex, you know, just just minting billions of dollars every year.
00:22:50
Speaker
And their latest show, you know, Falcon and the Winter Soldier is a really interesting, you know, like post George Floyd, post Black Lives Matters attempt to kind of justify having a black Captain America, you know?
00:23:05
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, this is that thing where it's like, oh, you're critical of society, and yet you participate in it. It's like, yeah, of course we do. So you know, yeah, watch what you want. Watch. But you know, well, it's my it's my kind of job as an educator to say like, well, at least be critical. Falcon and Winter Soldier for me,
00:23:25
Speaker
was the perfect, perfect, perfect kind of series to come after the events like capital E event of the uprisings and police station burning down last summer. And so, you know, it's the equivalent of
00:23:43
Speaker
That happened, and we get our first black woman in the executive branch of the US government who loves cops. She was a prosecutor. The discourse around Kamala Harris is a cop that you get a black woman cop after that. That is the move that it makes.
00:24:07
Speaker
where something happens, it's undeniable. They're like, we need to do something about it, but we're going to do it in such a way that it actually neutralizes that critique. So Falcon and the Winter Soldier, listen, I love Marvel. I would go to the Marvel movies. I'm that leftist professor that's going to be first against the wall when the fascists take over, and I'm still consuming my popcorn and soda and watching Marvel movies.
00:24:33
Speaker
So they're wildly entertaining, right? They're funny. They're like the aesthetics of it, you know, are kind of dazzling. Black Panther is like a legitimately beautiful movie that says like, if you do violence against colonizers, you're just as bad as the colonizer, right? But, you know, I cried when Killmonger died too. Like, so these things are complicated, but we need to be aware of how they affect us. With Falcon and Winter Soldier,
00:25:03
Speaker
What is happening in Marvel right now? And this is the example I'm using because I think it's one that everybody knows. And it's actually, I would say, one of the most popular franchises maybe of all time. And it's so successful because it does not deny that racism is happening or that colonialism is happening. Like Thor Ragnarok is about like, oh, we're the baddies. Like Asgard is the colonizer baddies. Empires are bad. Yeah.
00:25:33
Speaker
Yeah, like it doesn't deny it's very different from something like a Star Wars, which, you know, again, another one of my favorite Marxist theorists is Frederick Jameson. And he says that narratives provide imaginary resolutions to real social contradictions.
00:25:52
Speaker
So after the Vietnam War, America was like, are we the baddies? We can't be the baddies. And then you see the you see something like Star Wars come up where the Empire, they have accents, you know, Darth Vader is like not even human. Like they're the the empirical power, right?
00:26:12
Speaker
But the rebels are like a cowboy and a farm boy, like the all American. And so that's the imaginary resolution to, you know, the real social contradiction of like American crisis, thinking that they're the good guys when they just like napalm the village is like they death starred Vietnam, right?
00:26:32
Speaker
So that, but Marvel I'm saying is working a bit differently. And so they are really acknowledging that yes, like, you know, there was a black super soldier and he was, you know, isolated, incarcerated, all of this, it ends up with him being, like the solution to that is putting him in a museum and for Falcon to become Captain America.
00:26:58
Speaker
And so now we have a black Captain America, which the history of the foundation of the US state and the American nation is fundamentally anti-black. Like to say you have, and they have that character that, you know, tortured black super soldiers say that no black man should want to be Captain America. So they acknowledge all of this.
00:27:21
Speaker
and yet say well nevertheless like he's really going to struggle for six episodes and then accept it because he is going to be able to make a difference in this position and this is where i think that copaganda has changed like so when we talk about cops in the military they're they're the same i mean there's the
00:27:40
Speaker
You know, what Nikhil Paul Singh, he wrote this book called Race in America's Long War. I know I keep giving readings like I'm making a syllabus for the viewers or listeners. But yeah, like Nikhil Paul Singh says there's an inner war and an outer war. And the inner war is the war of policing that's like anti-Black, anti-Indigenous. The outer war, the kind of wars of empire like in West Asia and
00:28:03
Speaker
lots of other places, but these are connected. And so, you know, something like Marvel, like Captain Marvel, you know, she's like, we fight to end wars. It's like, yeah, of course, like everybody thinks they're fighting to end wars because then they'll be the hegemon, right? So, yeah. We are in the peace business, you know, the famous sign on the military base in Dr. Strangelove, right?
00:28:31
Speaker
Yeah, or like Canada's peacekeeping missions or responsibility to protect which like violates sovereignty of other nations, like, you know, things like that, right? It's like, no, no, no, we're just doing all of that to be like the good guys when Canada is like, you know, three mining companies in a trench coat. So, yeah, so these shows like,
00:28:56
Speaker
This new iteration of Copaganda of having us accept the repressive state apparatus is very much about like we cannot deny that this violence happens, but we are going to find some way for
00:29:12
Speaker
the narrative itself to neutralize it and so you can watch and be like you can feel virtuous it it can feel virtuous to watch something like i can't be racist i like to block panther or something right and it's like black panther
00:29:28
Speaker
neutralizes the anti-colonial critique that it also puts forth, right? It puts it forth only to neutralize it. In Falcon and Winter Soldier, the bad guys are called flag smashers. Like, oh, another book to read, Harsha Walia's Border and Rule, if you want to talk about flag smashing.
00:29:44
Speaker
like abolishing borders, she is sympathetic. She is somebody who the audience is supposed to sympathize with, but then she kills people and goes too far. And it's like, no, no, no, we need the law and order of Captain America, because Captain America will only kill when he asks to. And that's also why, you know, T'Challa couldn't kill Killmonger. And he had to actually tell Killmonger, we can save you. And Killmonger had to, you know, say that he chose death.
00:30:13
Speaker
Right? Because the hands have to be clean of the liberal hegemon, right? I would like to learn more about this flag smashing group and if they have a newsletter. I know. I would like to subscribe. I would like to subscribe. Yeah. I mean, capitalism is this incredibly adaptive mutable force, right?
Copaganda in Modern TV Shows
00:30:36
Speaker
And if black rage and black liberation
00:30:39
Speaker
happens or it becomes popular, it's going to get contained and redirected through these liberal entertainment and apparatuses. Again, I'm not the smart theory guy. This is just me observing what's happening.
00:30:51
Speaker
around us. Another incredibly popular example of Copaganda is Brooklyn Nine-Nine. This is a very fun workplace comedy, very funny, good ensemble cast. At the end of the day, the actual police work
00:31:12
Speaker
Is is not anywhere near does not resemble in any way what what happens in Brooklyn, right? And by pretending that it does we're like we're we're buying into the to the idea that like, oh, yeah the majority of like cops The cops spend even a decent amount of chunk like of their time like actually solving crimes which like they don't, right?
00:31:37
Speaker
Yeah, I love this example of Brooklyn Nine-Nine. The person who created it, Michael Shore, also made some of my other favorite shows. I adore The Good Place. I think it's masterful and made me cry a lot.
00:31:52
Speaker
and parks and recreation. So these shows have these like big ensembles, they tend to be like diverse, right? So like the the cast of Brooklyn 99 is like brown people and black people and gay people and and whatever right women.
00:32:07
Speaker
It's not just the sis hat white man cop. I think that it's also a really good example because we are seeing the transition from that kind of colorblind representation to representation is going to save us.
00:32:24
Speaker
in that kind of a show. I don't know what the last season is going to be like. It'll be interesting to see, but I recently saw some episodes of the first season, and the way that we know that Jake Peralta is a good cop is because he has the most arrests.
00:32:40
Speaker
Right. And so that is supposed to be the index of being a good police officer. And it's like how many like are you like we don't see him harassing anybody. We don't see this like, you know, United Colors of Benetton cast shooting anybody. They never kill anyone. They never they shoot at people like nobody really ever gets shot. Right. It's like a it's like a fantasy of what policing what like liberals think policing is. Right.
00:33:07
Speaker
Does the parole to like get a date with Amy Santiago by like arresting more people than her or something? I don't know. They have some kind of a yeah. And so I was just looking at some season one episodes. And yeah, they have some kind of a contest about that. Right. And it's like girl power. Right. With a with the women characters to like that. Amy and Rosa are like more. They're tougher than Jake and Boyle. And so they're all of these ways, though, that we can think about
00:33:37
Speaker
the ways that colorblind representation worked. So there were all of these cop shows. I guess even in the Simpsons, like Lenny and Carl, Carl isn't really racialized, right? He's just drawn kind of brown. He's just not yellow, like the white people in the Simpsons.
00:33:58
Speaker
Um, so it's just like, oh yeah, they're like black cops are like family, like, you know, we're, we're the same age. So like family matters or something, right? The dad is a cop. Like there were all kinds of like black cops and brown cops on TV, but they weren't, um, talking about being like what it, what they weren't grappling with that in the way that say Falcon in 2021 has to
00:34:23
Speaker
to grapple with, like, should I be Captain America? Brooklyn Nine-Nine seems like it's going to have to do that in the last season. And they're ending the show. I mean, my suggestion for the last season of Brooklyn Nine-Nine is to literally just like- Burn it.
00:34:42
Speaker
No, it's to transmute it to literally any other workplace, like a fire station, a community center, a childcare center. You just make it into literally any other kind of workplace comedy. The actors are still the actors, the personalities are still the personalities. You're just no longer arresting people or solving crimes.
00:35:05
Speaker
There's also a foundational piece of Copaganda in my life that I wanted to bring up, which is based on the original piece of television Copaganda, DragNet, which was a program on PBS called MathNet. It was cops in LA
00:35:26
Speaker
solving crimes through math, educational, but it was a beat for beat, loving tribute to this 1950s era cop procedural.
00:35:38
Speaker
And so me as a like in the eighties, early nineties, as a like a young like Canadian and somehow getting 1950s era like copaganda. And there are some hilarious episodes of dragnet. Like there's, there's very memorable ones about like reefer madness and shit. That's still, that's still get brought up to this day. Uh, but like being turned into like children's entertainment, you know what I mean? Which is just wild to think about. Uh,
00:36:07
Speaker
that dragnet this like, what would the 50s be like 70 years ago now? 70 year old kind of copaganda being turned into 40 years later, being turned into like children's entertainment.
00:36:21
Speaker
Yeah, so this is a great example of how copaganda has adapted because there were those earlier kind of like 1970s, 1980s, maybe a bit into the 90s TV shows where it was like the white man cop. And it was, you know, there wasn't really like any depiction of
00:36:45
Speaker
the racism of policing. It was just like, look at this guy. He's so tough. He's like a, you know, that was like a superhero, right? It's glamorous, all of that kind of thing. You know, maybe the equivalent of that for the for the outer war would be like James Bond or those spy
00:37:04
Speaker
shows and stuff, right? Where it's like, it's glamorous to reproduce the state through violence in this way, right? But I think that things like, we are living in a really interesting time where Copacanda can't make the same moves. I'm not saying that it's not as strong. In fact, in a lot of ways, I think that it is stronger for acknowledging
00:37:28
Speaker
that policing is racist and then narrativizing something out of it to say like, and nevertheless, if we just have anti-bias training, like we need to have more- Hire more black and indigenous cops. Yeah, hire more racialized and women or whatever, right? That's like gender, but yeah.
00:37:51
Speaker
We know that Michelle Alexander says that the Black police chief should give us no more comfort than the Black person who was in charge of policing enslaved people on plantations. That it's actually
00:38:13
Speaker
Her whole argument in the new Jim Crow is mass incarceration, being in continuity with Jim Crow and slavery. And we know that from the Toronto example too, Desmond Cole has written extensively about how having a Black police chief didn't change the anti-Black policing in Toronto.
00:38:36
Speaker
And if we want to just pull back from popular culture a little bit and just kind of like dive into your local news, you will find Copaganda just as readily,
Social Media's Influence on Police Image
00:38:46
Speaker
right? And we're going to obviously use the example that we're located in, which is like here in Edmonton and Calgary as well.
00:38:51
Speaker
But if you're listening to this outside of those cities, pay attention to what the sun writes about, your local sun paper, what it writes about cops, what it chooses to feature. But I think there's a really good example of the adaptive nature of kind of copaganda.
00:39:08
Speaker
Then the head of the Edmonton Police Association, Sergeant Michael Elliott. If you just want to get a hint of it, go to his Twitter feed. He has his pronouns in his bio. His Twitter feed is a constant stream of good cop propaganda as well as here are all these guns that we took off the street.
00:39:33
Speaker
And you know what, I don't know anything about him and they don't care about individuals, but he is serving a particular function to legitimize a racist system by whatever kind of, you know, quote unquote, like wokeness that he is promoting, like in his own feed.
00:39:53
Speaker
Yeah. And for all of this wokeness, like the Edmonton cop union was flying the thin blue line flag on its building, like on the anniversary of George Floyd's death. Right.
00:40:04
Speaker
Yeah, so I think this is a really good example of how social media has allowed copaganda to be shared and perpetuated by individuals, not just this kind of culture industry that Adorno was talking about. And so there are people retweeting that like, yeah, thank you, cop, like this or that, right? The thin blue line flag is violent.
00:40:32
Speaker
And there's lots of evidence to that. But in any case, it gets kind of presented in this way as, no, no, no, we're just supporting police officers. A lot of this is the inability of our culture in a lot of ways to distinguish between the scale of the individual and the scale of the systemic.
00:40:59
Speaker
But I they also released a statement after that because people were of course angry that they were flying this, you know, this very threatening kind of thin blue line flag on the anniversary of a very high profile police murder.
00:41:18
Speaker
their statement actually shows how fragile this is. So I'm not really one like, let's talk about like hopefulness, but like, I think that this actually is a kind of way to maybe
00:41:33
Speaker
think that that hold is maybe loosening a little bit, the hold that copaganda has, because people were really angry about it, enough for them to have to release a statement, enough for this statement to be very weak and defensive and incredibly, incredibly thin skinned. Yeah, incredibly thin skinned. And like, yeah, like showing so much weakness by like, well, actually, oh, yeah, we're flying it for this reason or whatever, right? And it's like,
00:41:59
Speaker
There's no defense of it. There's no defense of flying a thin blue line flag, except that we take the side of law in order and police should be allowed to murder people because they're heroes or whatever, right? No. I mean, if you want evidence of the thin blue line being a racist and fascist symbol,
00:42:19
Speaker
the proud boys, a bunch of proud boys counter protested a BLM rally in Calgary last summer with a blue line, an American thin blue line flag in hand. And there's very powerful picture taken of these fucking proud boys and their stupid fucking shirts with their thin blue line flag behind a line of police on bikes. You know what I mean? Like there is no better example of how that symbol is being used in a racist and fastest fashion than like,
00:42:47
Speaker
and now a designated terrorist organization and one that's obviously like a racist fascist street gang flying that flag behind a bunch of cops and being protected by cops at a BLM rally.
00:42:57
Speaker
Yeah, and the ways that that flag was flown during the, you know, storming of the Capitol. Right. And so, yeah, it just shows how fragile they are. And that's why, you know, coming back to this idea of the Capitol event that happened last summer,
00:43:18
Speaker
A lot of that can't be contained. You cannot neutralize the burning down of a police station. Now, does that mean that the forces of liberation are going to win ultimately? I don't know, because we're experiencing multiple crises of capitalism and financialization and of pathogens. And the biggest, maybe inevitable one is climate.
00:43:46
Speaker
We are just gonna see more of this happen and it's going to be harder and harder to neutralize. And I think that the weakness of that statement actually should maybe harden us in a way.
00:43:58
Speaker
I got two more examples of local copaganda to kind of round us out here, Shama. And this first one is a doozy. It's from CBC Calgary. It's written by Elise Von Scheele, who is a CBC Calgary reporter who came on my radar when she wrote a very flattering profile of Tyler Shandrow at the height of the pandemic. Some beautiful portraits of him in soft lighting, talking about how hard of a job he has. But anyways, she's written this piece that was released like literally just the other day, like
00:44:27
Speaker
tailor-made for this podcast called From Gun Purses to Police Chiefs, Alberta's History of Women in Policing, DEC, officers weigh in on the strides policing has made and the work that remains to be done.
00:44:40
Speaker
Oh, boy. I mean, one of the big problems with this idea that we just need more women police officers, or I have actually seen sociologists testify that women are a bit gentler. And so that's why we'll have less violence if we have more women police officers, which is horribly gender-essentialist. But it's also ahistorical if we think about policing.
00:45:07
Speaker
as a way to control black and indigenous people and to reproduce kind of settler capitalism and protect private property or protect capital.
00:45:20
Speaker
Women have been very violent in that system, right? For hundreds of years. And so I just don't, I- Here's the quote from the piece that I'm sure you will really enjoy. Quote, it's not about foot chases and who can punch someone, wit said. Our strongest tools always are verbal skills. And that is our best ability to deescalate situations. And anything that you use beyond that, you get good training.
00:45:46
Speaker
You know, it's really, I'm gonna go back to Altazer for a second, because Altazer says one of the ways that we become subjects of ideology is that we are interpolated. And like, propaganda kind of interpolates us in particular ways. Like, if you watch an ad that's like, don't you want to be like, tough and strong, and then it's like, and like, desired by women, and then something that can add for ax deodorant, that's a form of interpolation.
00:46:12
Speaker
into like kind of consumer as a subject of consumer capitalism and patriarchy. Also there's example of interpolation though in his in his writing is you're walking down the street and a cop says hey you.
00:46:28
Speaker
and you turn around and in the form of address there that, hey, you, you are interpolated as a subject of the law and you could be subject to that kind of, you know, to that repressive state apparatus. Of course, ideology is the examples of the ads, but it doesn't matter if the cop isn't going to hit me.
00:46:51
Speaker
right? It doesn't matter if they it matters that they can. It matters that they when they address when they address you, they interpolate you as some as a subject of this whole kind of violent apparatus. And so it's just such a misunderstanding of how policing works.
00:47:11
Speaker
that is kind of mind blowing. But I mean, the most the most frustrating part about this from gun purses to police chief's story is is also that it's just like a huge recruitment at like it's it is an unpaid like this this would be worth tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of dollars if they were to like actually try and
00:47:31
Speaker
and construct an ad campaign to appeal to, to go out and recruit female recruits to, to the police force. But this is like, why is the CBC doing the fucking work of recruiting cops to female cops or to a fucking system that we know we have ample evidence is incredibly racist and violent and dehumanizing like in its bones foundationally cannot be reformed. Right.
00:47:56
Speaker
I mean, this is also a big problem with liberal feminism. Liberal feminism doesn't have any kind of critique of racial capitalism, so it's very easily co-opted. Captain Marvel is an ad for the US Air Force, right? And the villain is a gas lighter. It's the perfect pussy hat of the Trump era kind of girl power text. And it's funded by the US Air Force, too. There are shots of that.
00:48:24
Speaker
of that movie that look like ads for the US Air Force and like that could be It's like it's a top gets like tough gun Yeah, yeah those those kinds of shots but it's top gun now with more like uteruses or something, right? I mean it's very gender
00:48:42
Speaker
Yeah, just having women because they're gentler or whatever will make policing better. But yeah, of course, it's for recruiting because like, oh, do you feel, this is Rosa and Amy on Brooklyn Nine-Nine, that their girl power, they're tougher than the boys, right? And so if you're like, well, I'm not like those girls, I'm like a tough girl, so maybe I should be a cop.
00:49:08
Speaker
you make an excellent point about how easily the kind of liberal feminism gets co-opted and contained. And I think our final bit of copaganda for the day is again, just a brand new, like you could just pay attention to what your local police force is doing and run it through this lens.
Police and Social Services: A Critical View
00:49:26
Speaker
But as a new headline just came out, this is by the CBC, but I mean, I also have the release from the cops. It's Edmonton police launch unit to focus on cities top 200 prolific offenders.
00:49:38
Speaker
And this is about the launch of a new division within, or new branch within Edmonton Police Services called the Diversion and Desistance Branch. And like it says, it's going to concentrate on those 200 most prolific offenders, so sure. But within the story itself, you understand what that means. And essentially what it means is the cops are hiring teams of social workers to go out and
00:50:04
Speaker
interact with these prolific and persistent offenders, right? The quote in here is, these are high need folks. These are folks that have never had supports before. And I'm saying, well, great, let's give them supports. But why are they being given support by someone who's like by the cops? Like in no way are the cops the best organization to provide those supports.
00:50:27
Speaker
Always behind a cop is the is the threat of the whole repressive apparatus right and so it's not of course it's not going to be the way to help people. Edmonton's top 200 most prolific and persistent.
00:50:43
Speaker
Okay, why is this happening, though? I mean, there are all kinds of people who work on policing. You know, I, Mariam Kaba is is probably one of my favorite who talks about how, like, it's really hard to murder. Like, it's actually like people don't murder a lot. Like, the people are not do out here doing crimes, because they're bad people. That's the other thing about so copaganda,
00:51:05
Speaker
propagandizes in favor of cops, but it also portrays a very particular kind of villain who's just like a bad guy, right? And they just want to do crime like they can't get out of this kind of crime. And it has nothing to do with, you know, unemployment and lack of housing and, you know,
00:51:29
Speaker
inequalities in health care and education, like it has nothing to do with that. It's just like, this guy's a villain, our good cop is going to investigate them and get them. And so yeah, I think this is really, this is also just it has, there's no like analysis of why crime happens. And so that's why they're like, Oh, I guess we just need to help them. We will do that through our whole like repressive apparatus.
00:51:54
Speaker
Yeah. It's not going after the 200 most prolific wage thieves, you know, or like bad employers, right? Yeah. It's going after people who get like drunken disorderly and like property crime, you know, uh, or drug dealing, like low level, like that type of a, what they're talking about here. Canadian shows is trailer park boys and they just do a lot of little crimes, right? But they're like very lovable. And so I think that it,
00:52:22
Speaker
It kind of serves a different sort of function. The cops are really not smart, but it shows that their poverty is the reason that they're doing all of this.
00:52:37
Speaker
shows and also discourses like the police are doing also make legible like what is violence and what is not violence. And so, you know, bringing up wage theft, wage theft is a huge form of violence. I mean, that so many people died this year. We are living in a time of mass debt, death.
00:52:55
Speaker
and debt, and massive increases in wealth for the already wealthy. And that is a form of violence that is not made legible by propaganda.
00:53:09
Speaker
And a part of this diversion and assistance department or branch that the EPS created is within the release is this kind of incredibly troubling implication. I'm just going to read just a few short sentences from this release just so you can understand what I'm talking about. Quote, for those who want to stop offending, case plans are put in place, social workers and other supports are engaged, and an enormous team effort is put in place to keep them on the path of crime free living.
00:53:35
Speaker
For those who continue to offend, a different team watches the offenders closely. And if the risk of an offender outweighs their needs, this team will look to suppression tactics, which may include an arrest.
00:53:48
Speaker
This is so dystopian. It's Minority Report. It is the fucking pre-crime division. We know they're just committing crimes all the time anyways. If they're not following our directions, we'll just arrest them because even if they haven't committed a specific crime, we know they're committing crimes. You know what I mean?
00:54:07
Speaker
So there's this documentary that's now a few years old called Do Not Resist and a large chunk like near the end of the documentary is about predictive policing and the ways that they use data and it's just very chilling. There's this guy who kind of
00:54:27
Speaker
spearheading it and he says that he ran like the statistics on this woman who was either pregnant or like had a had a young child and was like well she's a black woman of this like class position so how do I tell her her kid is gonna commit a crime because it is gonna happen kind of thing and it's like oh my god like
00:54:52
Speaker
So, I mean, sometimes I just despair when I hear that because it feels like these people really buy into it, right? And a lot of money is invested. Police budgets are huge, right? Well, it's like, you know, defund the police and give people housing, right? But yeah, the police budgets are so, so huge. And it's a lot of this kind of militarization and surveillance technology that could do, like, yeah, for pre-crime. I mean, we are living in a pre-crime time.
00:55:22
Speaker
Exactly. I think we're coming to the end of our conversation, but I'm now legally obligated to mention the fact that I am officially running for Senate, and that is a very real election with real results. I will have the power to implement my agenda, which in this case, when we're talking about these particular problems, I think it's quite simple to just take $100 million out of both the Edmonton and Calgary police budgets and just start housing people with that money.
00:55:49
Speaker
$100 million goes a long way. Building houses is not very technologically complex, nor is renovating or buying up existing houses and simply putting people who don't have homes in those houses.
Rethinking Community Safety
00:56:01
Speaker
Sometimes the solutions to our problems are complex and sometimes they're fucking not. If you just want to house unhoused people, you build or purchase a home and you fucking put it in them. And that's as simple as that.
00:56:16
Speaker
Yeah, so that is a solution. I mean, one of the things we can acknowledge is that people think the police do some things that they don't do. When we say, like, get rid of the police, it's not that there would be nothing after that. It's just that there would be things that would serve that function that you think police are doing.
00:56:37
Speaker
And I'm gonna give another reading and it's Alex Vitale is the end of policing and the reason I'm suggesting it is because it the chapters are organized by something we think the police are doing like maybe we think that they're preventing or they're helping with like theft or they're helping, you know protects like
00:56:58
Speaker
Sexual exploitation or like things like like we think that they're doing this thing and that that's or and they're bad Bad things are happening in society. So we need police as that solution and he's very systemic about you know what the actual solutions Could be that have been like tried and uses data and stuff. And so yeah, it's Alex Vitale is the end of policing we
00:57:21
Speaker
can live together better. Everybody can live together better. Police officers, if we want to talk about individuals, I'm sure police officers are suffering from mental health issues and all kinds of things that would get better if they weren't police officers. Yeah. We can keep each other safe in different ways. We don't need the police. Agreed. This has been a fantastic and a terrific conversation. Thank you so much for coming on the pod. Shama, what's the best way for people to find you on the internet and follow along with what you do?
00:57:50
Speaker
Yeah, the best way to find me is on Twitter. And so my Twitter handle is at Fritz Luscha, F-R-I-T-Z-L-E-C-H-A-T. Yeah, and RIP Fritz.
00:58:03
Speaker
RIP friends, my beloved cat. Yeah. All right. Well, thanks again so much to Shama for coming on the pod. And if you like this podcast, if you listened all the way to the end of this conversation and you fucking liked, liked what we talked about, there's a few things you can do to help us out. Uh, you can leave a review. Uh, that's very helpful. Apple podcast really likes reviews for some reason. Also, uh, share us with your friends and family, especially if you've got some friends and family who you've talked to about copaganda or cop shows or defund the police in the past.
00:58:32
Speaker
Um, you know, Shama, we, we pretended that we were an episode of upward advantage and we gave out a bunch of reading recommendations. So please, I can't help it. I can't help it. So I know you're a prof and the biggest, most important way to support us is to obviously support us with, uh, with cash money. So there's a link in the show notes. Uh, you can also just go to the progress report.ca slash patrons, put in your credit card.
00:58:57
Speaker
$5, $10, $15 a month, whatever you can afford. Shama's a supporter. Shama has not regretted it once, I'm sure. No, I'm just saying. And that's the pod for today. If you have any notes, thoughts, things you think I need to hear, I'm really easy to get a hold of. You can reach me at dunkincay at progressroberta.ca via email. And I am on Twitter too much as well at dunkincinny. Thanks again to Shama for coming on the show. Thanks to Cosmic FamU commentists for the amazing theme. Thank you for listening and goodbye.