Vol. 3 Issue 3
Celebrating a Pulitzer Prize & Mourning a Loss
Click the image to watch the trailer for 16 SHOTS on Showtime, which won an Emmy Award this week for Outstanding Investigative Documentary. Today would be Laquan McDonald's 23rd birthday.
This week 16 Shots, a film on the police murder of Laquan McDonald co-produced by the Invisible Institute, received the 2020 Emmy Award for Outstanding Investigative Documentary.
This is a moment to savor. Collaborating on 16 Shots with director Rick Rowley, Karim Hajj, and Jacquie Soohen of Midnight Productions was a deeply fulfilling experience for the Invisible Institute team. The Emmy is, among other things, a memento of the joy we shared working together.
It’s also an occasion for reflection. One of the moral hazards of journalism is that pleasure in exercising one’s craft and the occasional recognition one receives can obscure the essential nature of the work. I have carried with me throughout my career a caution uttered with feisty charm by I. F. Stone at the end of the 1973 documentary I. F. Stone’s Weekly:
I really have so much fun I ought to be arrested . . . To be able to spit in their eye and do what you think is right and be part of the news and have enough readers to make some impact is such a pleasure that you forget, you forget what you’re writing about. You’re like a journalistic Nero fiddling while Rome burns and having a helluva good time or like a small boy covering a helluva big fire. You’re a cub reporter and God has given you a big fire to cover. And you forget that it’s really burning.
Today is Laquan McDonald’s birthday. Had he not been murdered by a Chicago police officer, he would be turning 23. I marked the occasion this morning by rereading Eve Ewing’s poem “I saw Emmett Till this week at the grocery store,” which beautifully evokes the unfathomable loss of a single life that might have been, were it not extinguished by racist violence.
No narrative strategy, no matter how inspired, can make good such losses. The essence of human rights reporting is to rigorously document past atrocities in order to reduce the likelihood they will recur in the future. That is what we sought to do in 16 Shots.
“It’s always someone else's story first,” Rebecca Solnit has written, “and it never stops being their story too, no matter how well you tell it, how widely you spread it.” In the case of 16 Shots, the story of a child executed by police on the streets of Chicago ultimately became the story of a city struggling to come to terms with structures of racist violence that deform its common life. That story remains radically unfinished.
In accepting the Emmy Award, Rick Rowley ended his expression of thanks with these words:
Lastly and most importantly, to the people of Chicago, to the victims of police violence, to those struggling for justice, this story, this film, this award—they belong to you.
Jamie Kalven
September 25, 2020
This summer, the Invisible Institute designed a remote summer jobs program for Chicago Public Schools high school seniors. Called “You Are Not Alone,” the program created occasions for students to interview seniors living in Chicago Housing Authority buildings about their lives.
The MarketBox program, a collaboration between the organizations at 6100 S. Blackstone, will continue through the harvest season, providing fresh produce, eggs, and bread from 20 local farms to 200 households each week. Our recurring list of recipients is the basis for a network for distributing critical information from the South Side Weekly and Invisible Institute via the weekly food bags and phone bank. Our goal to sustain the program through the end of October is $40k.
Trina Reynolds-Tyler, who worked at the Invisible Institute from 2016-2018 before attending the Harris School of Public Policy, has rejoined the organization as Director of Data. In that role, she will continue her long-term investigations into gender violence by Chicago police officers and will to make our CPDP.co data and analysis useful to those most directly impacted by unconstitutional policing.
Among recent media appearances, Jamie Kalven discussed the Chicago Police Department’s new early intervention system on Chicago Tonight; and Trina and Jamie participated in a Fox-32 series titled “Voice of Change.”
