Exploring the Shaw Community through the Lens of Two Community Anchors, Lincoln Temple Church and Shaw Community Center 

THE REAL NEWS AS A HISTORICAL LENS

“SCC hopes to relate the black narrative in Shaw by examining and memorializing LT’s social justice legacy, honoring its contributions and learning from the past.”

The Real News is a multi-modal process of investigation, (re-)articulation, and resistance that is centered and grounded in the lives and experiences of Shaw youth and the Shaw community, The Real News offers Shaw youth a process of critical inquiry to make the news more relevant and more local.

With this lens, Shaw youth explore how systemic and structural inequalities manifest at both the local and globals levels; using history and theory to critically interrogate  their observations at the local level. Beginning with the assumption that Shaw youth have the authority to make sense of, explain, and give meaning to, the events and the world around them, The Real News serves as an action-driven, critical methodology that privileges the subjective positioning of Shaw youth, their insights, and their voices to address the anti-black racism that they so often experience in the everyday, lived realities of their community.  And, given that they are uniquely positioned to share their insights, any knowledge(s) and meaning(s), made and/or shared, from this privileged position, using this lens, lends strength and support to the messages it carries because it is the one that matters, the one much closer to ‘truth’. 

Through collective and creative restorying practices, and in the grounded and centered, re-positioning of self-- as both subject (author) and object of their inquiries-- Shaw youth shift the frame of focus, forcing a re-negotiation and re-calibration of key methodological considerations (e.g., questions of:  power(-relations), authority, representation, and accountability) that transform the meaning-making process, thereby disrupting the hegemonic epistemology of dominant-defined narratives and understandings about Black communities.

CREDIBLE HISTORIANS – THE REAL NEWS MEDIA TEAM

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Melissa Herman