Design, collective action and American racism
By: Jennifer Rittner
Tags: Race, Design, Ts, Equity, UX

Photo by Koshu Kunii on Unsplash

On March 3, 1991, an unarmed man by the name of Rodney King was beaten by police officers in Los Angeles, California during a traffic stop. He was one of the lucky ones. He lived. He also became an important data point in the long history of state-sponsored violence against black bodies in this country because his assault was caught on tape.

Rodney King was beaten by design: the design of legal and social systems that empower police to act with impunity, which is the legacy of white patriarchal supremacy.

The Rodney King story was also saved by design: the design of technologies that captured evidence for the record, and provided the means for us to broadcast, share and discuss what we witnessed. Seeing it together gave more people the opportunity to frame what we saw in an historical context, to better understand why it happened, and to plot and demand meaningful change.

Shared with the public, the documentary evidence should have forced a universal reckoning with the historical, American mythologies about the superhuman strength of black men and the blanket innocence of law enforcement that had been de rigueur.

Yet both of those narratives continue to persist. They persist by design. Subsequent acts of violence against black civilians by law enforcement routinely invoke words and imagery of black superhuman aggression; and alongside that, the combined fear and innocence of trained, armed officials. These narratives — both lies — are exploited by a world of design in which saying it makes it a reality, repeating it makes it a fact, and believing it informs action.

Unfortunately, while we’ve gotten better and better at capturing the evidence, and finding more and more reasons to do so, we haven’t gotten any better at effecting change. In the case of Rodney King the evidence was re-framed to argue on behalf of the innocence of the police officers, who were exonerated despite their acts of brutality against Mr. King. Caught, yet acquitted.

The story didn’t end there, though. Following the public announcement of the acquittals of the police officers, citizens protested, and those protests turned into chaos — the response of the voiceless refusing to acquiesce to state-sponsored terror in a country that claims to value all human lives as equal and yet perpetually condemns black and brown citizens to the status of beggars in search of even the smallest crumbs of justice. As a reminder, this is a story from 1991–1992. It might as well be yesterday.

The story of Rodney King was ours to reckon with as individuals and in our various communities thirty years ago. We had the power of that moment to set our collective attention to change.

In fact, what largely happened was that polite society moved on. Given the opportunity to reckon with complicity, many of our communities chose, instead, to return to business as usual.

On April 5, 1991, in the shadow of the Rodney King story, the AIGA held a symposium titled, “Why is Graphic Design 93% White?” and identified seven Problem/Solution groups on which to build a platform of change. These groups are noteworthy:

1. Access to Resources

2. Old Boys Network

3. Serving a White World

4. Lack of Role Models

5. Understanding the Career Landscape

6. Language Facility

7. Internalized Racism

In the published document that followed the conference, we find a summary of the solutions for each of these problems. While I might quibble with the blatantly racializing assumptions of #6, it’s Item #7 that speaks loudest and I quote it here in full:

“Internalized Racism: This issue wasn’t addressed. [It should be noted that participants were instructed choose issues/groups and come up with “doable” steps and actions. The avoidance of this topic does not indicate its unimportance, rather the participants chose to tackle problems where they could realistically effect change.”]

Perhaps it’s only in retrospect that we can clearly see how having the conversation about Internalized or institutionalized racism would in fact have effected change in all of the other areas, combined.

As far as I can tell, no mention was made of Rodney King during the proceedings, a real-world example that might have served as a launching point for some heartfelt discussions about the power shared narratives have to construct false reality.

Then again, the event had only just happened and a national conversation had yet to fully unfold.

But what of the ensuing years? At what stage did our largest design collective take decisive action and bring the power of community to bear against the gravest threat to American life? Did the AIGA or any of our design schools call the community to action in 1999 after police shot Amadou Diallo 41 times while he stood unarmed with only a wallet in his hands? That violent murder by police took place in the shadow of the AIGA’s self-congratulatory year of Branding, as they launched a series of initiatives celebrating the great power of stories to bind us in collective vision. But, of course, their branding initiatives were about consumer, not civic action.

What of more recent events? What would collective action mean in the shadow of now dozens of examples of brutality by design?

I’m guessing it wouldn’t look like the branding for soda, airlines or banks. It might not engender as much passion as a new gap logo.

It might require new tools, new models, new questions and, perhaps more importantly, new people, different collaborations, and radical shifts in the power dynamics of designer-client relationships.

It might mean a new set of rules. A new mandate from the professional organization that informs how we teach design, how we apply practice and how we talk about our collective endeavor in the public sphere.

I don’t want to suggest that designers can solve the problem of police brutality. But applying our collective skills to the problem of narrative and meaning, that is absolutely within our capacity. Bringing more people to the table is in our power and in our best interest.

Designers and design educators can’t sit back and wait for government agencies to change things. We need a proactive, coordinated, radical approach, and this should be our mandate as a community.

We need to build a coordinated curriculum that addresses American racism in all the ways it is designed, through the architecture of buildings to the architecture of neighborhoods, from systems of education to systems of law enforcement, from the products of care to those that have enabled torture. We need to interrogate them all.

When we’ve achieved something of value, as a community, then maybe we can move on.