On
Jan 6th 2021, a Coup was attempted in the United States, as a group
of Donald Trump supporters breached the Capitol building in Washington DC,
following a rally. The rally in question, was held by Donald Trump to continue
stoking fear and falsity regarding the results of the 2020 election; which he
lost. Upon his order and incessant
urging, the crowd predominantly filled with white men and women stormed the
Capitol, broke down windows, forced open doors and began looting. At the end of
the hours long siege, 5 people were dead including one police officer. While the full scope and repercussions from
this have still yet to be fully realized, as of this writing, over 80
protestors have been arrested, and there are discussions of Trump’s removal
from office. A lot of analysis is coming in from several sources as to the
causes and socio-political paradigm shifts that have happened due to these
events.
Given the nature and focus of this blog, I am
interested in the way our consumption of media, film and popular culture is
incorporated into a person’s (white) privilege; allowing these insurrectionists
to believe in a lack of consequences for such actions as storming the capitol
and looting; as well as being both delusional and oblivious to one’s own wrongdoing,
that it leads to public self-incrimination through social media posts. As I have argued in the past, pop culture is
a form of soft power because it gets integrated into our general knowledge and
helps to shape behavior and expectations which, beyond the typical dynamics of
social groups and their behavior, explain a lot of behavior that we would
identify as irrational and inexplicable otherwise. Thus, it is through the consumption of film
and popular culture that partially contributes to the mindset, expectations,
and assumed consequences of the insurgents on the Capitol. However, before we
get into the way film and popular culture impacted the behavior and
expectations of the seditionists on Jan 6th , we need to do some
basic sociological group behavior table setting.
SOCIOLOGICAL BASICS OF GROUP BEHAVIOR
Much
of the events on Jan 6th can be broadly understood with the basics
of group and crowd behavior: such as Group Think, Diffusion of Responsibility, Emotional
Contagion, and collective effervescence.
Crowd Behavior and
its motivators
Crowd Behavior is the
action and behaviors of people in groups where the result of physical proximity,
and the protection and contagion of the group’s individual behaviors, begin to “act out of the
ordinary” from routine standards of demeanor, becoming more explosive and unpredictable.
This makes crowd behavior a general potential threat to the social order. Thus,
when people are in a crowd that is single minded and particularly motivated (as
the Trump protestors were) their actions can clearly become erratic due to the social
psychological trifecta of Group think, emotional contagion and the diffusion of
responsibility.
Group think is the social
psychological explanation for collective behavior among others within
society. Group think is achieved when an
individual believes or follows in mindset, or in behavior, the understandings
or actions of a particular group that they are a part of, or one which they
desire membership.
Monte Bute (2015)[1] points out that stereotyping
and scapegoating flow out of group think, and this is certainly true of the far-right
rebellion on Jan 6th. For 5 years, feelings of xenophobia, multiple
facets of racism, and ethnocentrism have been sowed by Donald Trump and his
ilk; fueling the generations long history of systemic, institutional, and
cultural discrimination, present since the founding of the United States, to
the point of the deranged despotism of this single act. The racist motivations
of the would be usurpers, and the racially
inconsistent response by police officers that challenged them, maintains
the powerful foundation of anti-black and brownness in the US.
Additionally, group think
causes a lack of individualized critical thinking resulting in a herd mentality. Individuals become swept up in the movement
and trajectory of the crowd, without reason or understanding of the group’s
actions and or consequences; a result that is compounded by the diffusion of
responsibility and emotional contagion. Diffusion of responsibility is the
process by which individuals relinquish feelings of responsibility for their
actions to an authority. In the case of Jan 6th, many of the actions
performed by the mob upon the Capitol building, were rationalized by them as
acceptable because Donald Trump encouraged them to do it[2]. This was understood in
the now classic Stanley Milgram experiment, which found that when presented
with an authority figure, individuals often shift the psychological blame for
their own actions onto them.
At the same time that the
crowd is diffusing the responsibility for their actions, they are also getting
swept up in the collective emotions of the crowd. Emotional Contagion is the
idea that within a large enough crowd, emotions become contagious and spread
through a crowd like wildfire. Fear in an individual, becomes panic in a crowd.
Personal anger transforms into group rage.
The election protestors in front of The White House on Jan 6th
, had their emotions whipped up by the fiery rhetoric of their deified false
prophet; who’s words lit the fuse to violence and death at the Capitol.
As the action escalated
beyond the control of common sense and law enforcement, the ‘beer-back
rebellion’ was thriving through collective effervescence. Collective Effervescence,
coined by Emile Durkheim in his book Elementary Forms of Religious Life,
is the unity one feels to the group; allowing the communication of the same
thought and participation in the same action.
Through this sense of unity, illegal violent behavior became normalized.
MEDIA MECHANISMS OF KNOWLEDGE
The media as an agent of
socialization, ushering us through the social learning process, not only tells
us what has value, what is normal, and what we should believe; it also gives us
knowledge without experience. The media often
fills in the gaps between our experiential knowledge and our formal education.
What we do not learn from those two main sources is often supplemented by the
knowledge we draw from the media. This results in a fair amount of our knowledge,
and the source of our “common sense”; by which we make both arbitrary and
important decisions, is coming from the media.
It is very humbling to audit your everyday knowledge only to discover
that many of the truths that you cling to, are based on a point of view that is
shaped by ads, television shows and films.
How much of what you know about deep sea crab fishing is based on the
Discovery channel show The Deadliest Catch? How much do you know about
the operations of the CIA (or other government agencies) because you watched a
few espionage films? What complicates
this issue even further is the way that the media, as an agent of
socialization, is used as a recruitment tool for occupations, military service,
and brand loyalty. Since the media is a powerful tool in our society;
institutions and corporations are trying to shape the knowledge we get from the
media to increase their numbers, both in personnel and profits. Therefore, by
accident and design, the media becomes a foundational part of how we see the
world.
THE FALSE CONSCIOUSNESS OF FILMMAKING AND
STORYTELLING
For
the last 20 years both the amount and rate of media consumption has increased
considerably. People in the US are watching more, at a faster rate. The stay-at-home
orders and the lockdown of businesses due to the COVID 19 pandemic, has only
increased these numbers with the average American spending 12-15 hours on
social media during the pandemic in 2020. Add to this an 79% increase in social
media profiles since 2008, and most people are watching something almost every
moment of everyday. This impacts the way
that we interact with and perceive the world.
Filmmaking
is a form of entertainment predicated on the development and sustainability of
false consciousness (The Marxian belief in a social position that is untrue.) for
the run time of the film. Cleverly labeled “The suspension of disbelief,” it
allows for fantastic circumstances and events to be accepted by the audience. That acceptance is easier the more media
people consume, the normalization of filmmaking and storytelling structures.
Due to generations of media consumption, we have come to expect these patterns,
regardless of the industries attempts at nuance. Typically, protagonists are
going to succeed and antagonists will fail, whatever the struggles between
them. Going into a Marvel film you
already know, by the nature of storytelling, that the Avengers are going to
win; its just a matter of how, and how long it takes to achieve. Additionally, because they are framed as
protagonists, we support their endeavors and justify their actions, no matter
how cruel, misguided, or dangerous they might seem. The unfortunate result of
this normalization of storytelling, is that we all begin to believe that since
we are the protagonists of our own stories, we rationalize and justify our
behavior so that we always come out the hero; regardless of any objective truth.
This is also problematized by the structure of storytelling itself.
A
film is always a snapshot in time. The story that unfolds on screen is precise and
exacting. It only shows the audience enough for the advancement of the plot, or
emotional investment of the characters to achieve its thematic goals. From an economic
pragmatist perspective, Filmmaking costs money, they would not waste money on a
shot that wasn’t necessary to the completion of the story. This is why many
films do not show the drudgery of daily living (traveling from one location to
another, eating, using the restroom etc.) unless that is a story focus. The
audience is often dropped “in media res”, an industry term to mean “In the
middle of things”. You don’t know what came before, you just start at an
arbitrary “beginning” based upon a screenwriter’s whimsey. Similarly, the film ends at a particular
moment; concluding the story, but often allowing the audience to fill in the
gaps for what came after. For example, at the end of most romantic comedies
(which usually end with a wedding) we assume that the protagonist and their new
spouse will have lived “happily ever after.”; even if the circumstances, if
placed in reality, would not have played out the same way. Likewise, any revolutionary action we witness
in film is further dramatized with the audience’s assumption of its success. We assume when the film cuts to black that our
revolutionary protagonists prevailed, because we have been conditioned to root
for seditious, treasonous vigilantism in every media genre. The toppling of
order and control is romanticized as a wish fulfillment fantasy. The idea that
your life can fundamentally change through glorified actions is very satisfying
storytelling, but it doesn’t work in reality. Moral murkiness is both
entertaining and compelling writing, as Drama is captivating, energizing, and
exciting, unless this is all happening to us. Where film stops, life keeps
going.
REVOLUTIONS:
AS SEEN ON TV
The overall increase in media
consumption, and use of media in the understanding of our social world, causes
the unnecessary result of individuals dramatizing their life. Erving Goffman was one of the first
Sociologists to talk about this through dramaturgy. A dramatic analysis of
society in his famed dissertation, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life.
He maintained that we attempt to control how we are perceived by others. We
achieved this by controlling “impressions that we give off” through our dress,
language, hobbies, mannerism etc., in hopes to maintain a desired image (Goffman
1959). Today, much of our ideas for that
image are manipulated through our consumption of advertisements and general
media, while performance of our “impressions” has expanded into social media
spaces. Likes, repost and retweets are
the identity currency now, through which we cultivate a self -identity that heavily
mirrors the media that we consume. This
can account for the number of people whom, on Jan 6th participated
in the protest and later coup style riot as if they were going to a NFL
football game and tailgating party; proudly wearing face paint and colorful
costumes. Not only are they dressing and
behaving for the camera (with which they will also upload evidence to social
media), they were treating political rallies, and subsequent mob behavior like
the end of a “big game”, that they lost.
It is these Durkheimianly
profane actions, along with all of the group behaviors mentioned previously, fueled
by the false consciousness of storytelling, that results in people believing
that their actions will not have consequences. After the mob was dispersed many
were seen banally discussing the events in hotel lobbies, while posting
pictures of the event to social media; oblivious to any perceived wrongdoing and
potential repercussions. These are the collective threads of white privilege.
WHITE PRIVILEGE: MASKS A COUP IN CLOTHING
OF REVOLUTION
The basic definition of
white privilege is the individual, structural, cultural, social and historical
advantages/ lack of barriers provided to an individual based upon the color of
their skin (or its implication) which results in easier successful achievement whether
intended or unintended within a society. The use of the term privilege is often
criticized in the literature because: A. people that received it often do not
recognize it. B. The “privileges” that white people receive are how all people
should be treated. Some have argued that we need to move away from using the term
privilege, and instead, use the phrase “denial of rights” to connote the
inequity that exists (Zack 2015). Yet,
for those of us that teach about white privilege, comparison examples are
always helpful. Thus, the events of Jan
6th, are often armored by White Privilege for many of its
participants, not because they will not face consequences for their actions,
but because those consequences will be far lighter, and more lenient than if
the crowd was full of People of color, especially Black or Latinx folks.
Since the events of Jan 6th,
to highlight forms of white privilege through differential treatment, many
commentators, pundits and scholars have juxtaposed the treatment of the
seditious rioters at the Capitol with the treatment of peaceful Black Lives
Matter Protests for racial justice to end police violence against Black
people. The stark differences have led
to a renewed criticism of police and discretionary justice they employ based
upon race. Additionally, as of this
writing,
many of the arrests that have been made are for lesser charges
than those that could be brought against the individuals in question.
One of the more obscure social
psychological benefits of white privilege is the ability to be treated as an
individual and not as a collective group.
Regardless of who is arrested, what they are charged with and what their
sentence might be, it will never change the understanding that one white
person’s actions do not reflect the actions of all white people. While this principle should be applied to all
people regardless of race, it is not. Likewise, the ability to perceive your
admitted ‘revolutionary’ actions as not only being morally just, but patriotic is
often fueled by our media consumption. For example, the 30+ year syndication of
the “reality based” drama Cops, and how it has perpetuated the
reinforcement of racist and classist stereotypes among individuals that do not
have daily interactions with people of a different class or racial background.
It is this kind of programing that contributes to a justification for the
actions of police officers among white communities. It is not much of a stretch
to see, that such a steady diet of shows and films that reinforced the
criminalization of blackness (of which there are many) inevitably lead to
people believing that Police officers are on their side because they are white;
as one of the Trumpian “liberators” stated in a quote to a Nation
reporter: “This is not America. They’re shooting at us.
They’re supposed to shoot at BLM, but they’re shooting the patriots.”
CONCLUSION
We have been told through
media to be the protagonists of our own stories. We are conditioned to want love
interests with interesting backstories and action set pieces for our vacations.
All of this is done to manufacture a brand for ourselves and share that brand through
social media. This causes us to have a cinematic
and spectator outlook upon life and the events within it. Yet, it is through
the added prism of white privilege that toxifies this cinematic dramaturgy that
we find ourselves in. The various protections of white privilege allow the
false consciousness generated by cinematic storytelling to go unchecked. Resulting
in groups of people interacting in the world with the frivolity of watching a
movie. The unfortunate result, as seen
in the events of the attempted coup on Jan 6th 2021, is groups of people
with such a lack of self-awareness that they view their treasonous sedition, as
patriotic entertainment.
REFERENCES
Burle, Monte 2015. How to Recognize the Dangers of Group Think
The Society Pages https://thesocietypages.org/monte/2015/09/05/how-to-recognize-the-dangers-of-groupthink/
Goffman, Erving 1959. The Presentation of Self in
Everyday Life. New York: Anchor Books.
Zack, Naomi 2015. White Privilege Black Rights
