AMHERST — A group of panelists at the University of Massachusetts Amherst recently said while some in the media industry have acknowledged historical harms toward marginalized communities and people of color, more work needs to be done.
“It’s about looking back, and it’s about looking forward,” said Kathy Roberts Forde, UMass journalism professor and chair of the series “Media Reparations in Our Digital Era.” Four panelists spoke to about a hundred students, faculty and members of the public on the UMass campus the evening of April 1.
“We are reckoning the deep histories of harm and exclusion that have shaped U.S. media systems,” Forde said. That included “silencing Black voices in the press” and the enforcement of “white supremacist power and anti-democratic political and economic systems, often through violence,” she said. “But it’s also about imagining something better.”