“We Are Not Your Guinea Pigs!” Black ‘rappropriation’ of ‘whitenessing’ COVID-19 discourses
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Amid the social distancing measures enacted due to COVID-19, people have found themselves relying on social media more than ever to connect, debate, and grapple with the global pandemic. It is, in fact, through social media groups and many other digital spaces primarily occupied by people of African descent that we have discovered the news on the novel coronavirus from Black perspectives; stories and perspectives that may not always be covered in major news sources from the Global North. Using Stuart Hall’s Encoding/Decoding model, the aim of this paper is to assess how members of Black virtual spaces have responded to two White French doctors’ commentaries of using Africans as their preferred COVID-19 vaccine trial group. To do so, we first ask to what degree the members of these racially homogenous virtual communities have adopted the different positions Hall’s theory has long ago articulated: dominant-hegemonic, negotiated, or oppositional by making their voices heard in the liminal social media space. Secondly, we ask what kind of emerging discursive practices and articulations can be observed in the range of readings of and reactions from this kind of racialized, virtual identity group formation? To what extent does their singular occupation of the liminal social media space participate in denouncing the historical power relation between White Eurocentric representations and the Africans, who reclaim – or (r)appropriate – the African body, as a sovereign Black live or Black voice that should matter in conversation concerning their destiny. Key Words: “Whitenessing”; Racism; COVID-19; Eurocentric Mentality; Encoding/Decoding; Liminality. About the Authors Boulou Ebanda de B’béri, Ph.D., is a Full Professor of Communication, Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Canada and the Founding-Director of the Audiovisual Media Lab for the study of Cultures and Societies (AMLAC&S). ** Candide Uyanze is a researcher, and arts administrator based in Ottawa, Canada. Her research interests and creative practice explore online networks and communities, diasporic storytelling, immersive web experiences, open-source tools, accessible media production, African languages, and speech recognition. JCMR Journal of Communication and Media Research, Vol. 16, No. 1, April 2024, pp. 97 -111 © Association of Media and Communication Researchers of Nigeria (AMCRON). Article Citation de B’béri, B. E. & Uyanze, C. (2024). “We Are Not Your Guinea Pigs!” Black ‘rappropriation’ of ‘whitenessing’ COVID-19 discourses. Journal of Communication and Media Research, 16 (1): 97-111. Full Article Words: 8,429 Pages: 16 To access full article, click on download.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.009 | 0.016 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".