Some reflections on the purpose of local journalism in the “Crossroads of America”

“Black Lives Don’t Matter” by Mechi Shakur

A few weeks ago, just before I resigned as managing editor for NUVO, I visited the exhibit: Response: Images and Sounds of a Movement featuring six of the murals created for the Murals for Social Justice Initiative.

This exhibit at the Indiana State Museum and   Art and Activism: One Year Later at Gallery 924 are part of a partnership between the Indiana State Museum, the Indianapolis Public Library, and the Arts Council of Indianapolis honoring the one-year anniversary of the mural program. The former exhibit highlights the 24 artists who created murals over boarded up windows after rioting on the night of May 30, 2020. The latter highlights artwork of artists inspired by, and reacting to, the social justice movement that arose after the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers on May 25, 2020.

In my review of the exhibitions, I not only commented on the artistry and the conceptual content of the work, but I noted the current fraught political environment in which these exhibits are taking place. 

I was both surprised and pleased that Response —  an exhibit that frankly discusses recent Black Lives Matter protests in the city —  was hosted in the Indiana State Museum. Indiana is a pretty conservative state, after all.  I wondered in my article, considering the ongoing backlash to the BLM movement around the country, whether state-supported entities would continue to support social-justice-themed art in Indiana and elsewhere. 

The miscategorization of the term “Critical Race Theory” (CRT), in my view, is central to this backlash. CRT is an academic framework for assessing historical and systemic racism ingrained in the American legal system. As it has been redefined by conservative activists and conservative media, however, it’s come to mean just about anything that makes white people uncomfortable. 

The term “cancel culture” should also be familiar to you. Podcasters such as Ben Shapiro and Joe Rogan, and various Fox News talking heads, often define the act of cancelling as something repeatedly done by liberals (who often tend to be people of color or LGBTQ+)  to white males for mouthing politically incorrect opinions on social media and elsewhere. If you voice your opinion, you lose your platform, or so they say. 

But canceling is not an exclusive activity of the left. In my article, I pointed at the growing cancel culture movement on the right which, in my view, manifested recently when the Florida board of education banned the teaching of CRT in its schools. This action, I fear, will result in making teachers vulnerable to retaliation if they so much mention the topic of race in the classroom.  This issue also manifested closer to home during a school board meeting at Carmel High School where parents voiced their opposition to CRT, however they characterize it. (I would prefer to characterize the efforts to demonize CRT as Faux Acritical Race Theory or FART.)

With FART in mind, I asked the following question in the review: “Will this backlash grow and take aim not only at high school teachers teaching about Jim Crow laws and George Floyd in history class but also at socially-engaged artists who receive state funding or create art in public places?”

It turns out that an incident last week at the Bullock State History Museum in Texas goes some ways towards answering this question. Consider this excerpt from an online article in Mother Jones magazine, titled Texas Lt. Gov. Says State History Museum No Place for History, published July 2: “On Thursday evening two Texas writers, Chris Tomlinson and Bryan Burrough, were supposed to give a talk at the Bullock Texas State History Museum in Austin about ‘Forget the Alamo’, a new book they co-authored with Jason Stanford […]   But a few hours before the talk was to begin, Tomlinson announced that the event had been canceled — in the fullest sense of the word.” 

The reality of the Alamo, as their book details, is a lot more complicated and problematic than the John Wayne movie version. It’s a reality that Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick —   who sits on the museum board —  didn’t want to acknowledge. So he cancelled the event. 

I recently left my role as managing editor at NUVO because I didn’t want the wider context of my writing to be edited out — or cancelled. I felt that the questions I was asking in my review “Art and activism one year later: Exhibitions at the State Museum and Gallery 924” were relevant ones but such questions didn’t fit NUVO. So I quit, and started publishing to my IndyCorrespondent.org site where I could ask such questions. 

I hope to grow Indy Correspondent into a publication that covers all facets of life in greater Indianapolis, known (or formerly-known) as the Crossroads of America.  Local stories national should be given their national context when appropriate. Let’s not forget that Indy is connected by the interstate highway system (among manifold other ways) to everywhere in the U.S. where the hottest skirmishes against the boogeyman of FART are currently being waged. 

This culture war is also taking place on the internet —  the interstate highway system of the mind. But if you are reading about it online, it is likely that you are reading a nationally-based publication. In order to survive, some local newspapers and news websites are adapting a hyperlocal focus and are reluctant to engage with national politics.

But hyperlocal shouldn’t mean unwilling to publish a diversity of op-ed perspectives. Hyperlocal shouldn’t mean self-censoring. Hyperlocal shouldn’t mean that I, as a local journalist and editor, should have to bury my heads in the sand.  

Greater Indianapolis is, after all, the entire world.