Post by Cynthia Chris, City University of New York

Late in July, a lion named Cecil became an Internet sensation. Unfortunately, his global glory was posthumous: on July 1, an American dentist named Walter Palmer shot Cecil. News accounts report that a professional hunter and guide, who the dentist paid $50,000 or so, lured the lion out of a conservation park and onto private farmland. Both the hunter and the farmer have been arraigned on poaching charges, and Zimbabwe has launched extradition proceedings against Palmer. At this writing, Palmer, who returned to Minnesota after the hunt, appears to be in hiding.

By some accounts, Cecil was already a star at Hwange National Park. He was a handsome example of just the kind of charismatic megafauna that draws tourists on safari, and supporters to environmental causes (small, slimy, or scaly creatures, not so much). He was well documented by picture-taking tourists as well as by researchers from Oxford University’s Wildlife Conservation Unit. Since 2008, Cecil had worn a satellite-tracking collar for the group, which is studying the declining population of the Southwest African lion; Palmer’s guide seems to have tried to destroy the device after the animal’s death to hide evidence of the illegal hunt. So it should come as little surprise that when details of the animal’s death emerged—Zimbabwe officials made an announcement on July 25—social media lit up. What did this sudden burst of interest in lion poaching mean? Initial observations seemed to suggest that social media users’ engagement with political issues is fickle, and that privileged white Americans care more about one lion than they do about crisis-level racist violence that has been in the news steadily for over a year, since the death of Eric Garner in Staten Island, July 17, 2014. I’m not so sure that a surge in Facebook shares is indicative of anything so dire; at worst, however, it might mean that most of what passes for politics on social media is direly superficial.

A first wave of responses to the news of Cecil’s killing was mournful, disgusted, and angry. When I posted an early Guardian story (which misidentified Cecil’s killer as a Spaniard) on the subject to Facebook, a friend posted the following: “What the hell, humanity?”; another, “People—especially wealthy people—are such shits.” Still another posted a link to Yelp, where people were commenting about the lion’s death on Palmer’s dental practice’s webpages. Some wished Palmer a death as gruesome as the one he had inflicted on Cecil. Animal rights activists and animal lovers alike gathered to protest at the Palmer’s shuttered dental practice in the suburban Minneapolis area, and dropped stuffed toy lions, leopards and bears at the doorstep, creating a makeshift shrine.

Within days, online petitions set agendas and garnered hundreds of thousands of signatures. One at whitehouse.gov called for Palmer’s extradition and quickly reached 100,000 signatures, a threshold that often leads to public comment by President Obama. By August 3, over 1.2 million people signed a call for the U.S. and E.U. to ban importation of animal parts taken as hunting trophies. Almost as many petitioned Robert Mugabe, President of Zimbabwe, to demand an end to the practice of issuing licenses to kill endangered species, and to implore the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to finalize listing African lions under the Endangered Species Act and to enforce existing laws that would prevent hunters like Palmer from importing illegally obtained animal parts.

This is not to say that social media responded to Cecil’s death uniformly.

Some observers lamented all the attention paid to the loss of one big cat, while human injustices proliferate. On July 29, feminist writer Roxane Gay tweeted, “I’m personally going to start wearing a lion costume when I leave my house so if I get shot, people will care.” Later in the week, she wrote a more thoughtful, even wrenching op-ed for the New York Times, which pointed out that too many people have more empathy for Cecil—not only on social media, but on late-night TV, where Jimmy Kimmel shed tears for the lion—than for the victims of police violence, whose deaths are too often burdened with blame: “There are always those,” wrote Gay, “who wonder what the fallen did to deserve what befell them. He shouldn’t have been walking down that street. She should have been more polite to that police officer. He shouldn’t have been playing with a toy gun in park. We don’t consider asking such questions of a lion.”

She’s right, of course, as are other bloggers who wrote passionately last week on the necessity to keep police brutality and terroristic white supremacist violence at the top of the media agenda. While there is a sustained critique of police brutality, bolstered in part by the remarkable use of social media to build the #BlackLivesMatter and #SayHerName movements, there is also far, far too much indifference, and antipathy, toward the victims.

But a great deal of social media activity—all those easy retweets, shares, “likes,” and electronic signatures—is reactive, impulsive, and not necessarily indicative of a great deal of investment in any particular idea. Sure, clicktivism has its proponents, but tears jerked by news of Cecil’s death were quick to dry. By July 31, the lion was noticeably less visible, at least on Facebook. Follow-up stories (one erroneously reporting the death of the male expected to take over Cecil’s pride) barely registered. Nevertheless, the world’s best known conservationist, Jane Goodall, found a silver lining in the groundswell of opposition to poaching; indeed, legislation that would expand restrictions on trade in animal trophies was promptly introduced in Congress, and major airlines banned some trophies as cargo.

So, claims that “Cecil news” had pushed other issues off of electronic news feeds seemed premature. In the short run, social media trends are poor indicators of the greater zeitgeist (though tracking longer term trends may be informative), and that to make too much of a temporary blip on the screen may be to appear to suggest that good politics are single-issue politics. This can’t—and can’t be allowed—to be true. In fact, the outrage over Cecil’s death seems to be driven as much by rage against the “1 percent” as it is about animal cruelty or the sixth extinction. After all, the $50,000 or so that Palmer paid to kill the lion is more than three times what a person earning the federal minimum wage of $7.25 earns in a year of 40-hour work weeks.

In other words, when social media buzzes with the latest lost dog story or dead lion, is not the case that one issue thoroughly displaces another. It is that there are too many tragedies, too many crises, and too much violence of many kinds to take in at a glance, on any screen or page.

We must recognize that environmental issues, from global warming to wildlife protection, are moral imperatives and human rights issues. It is not only possible but essential to fight for justice and against exploitation on multiple fronts. We must remember Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Akai Gurley, and Samuel DeBose. Sandra Bland and Raynette Turner. And others far too many others to mention in this short space. To name another victim of corrupt bloodlust—this time, a non-human one, Cecil—is not to claim equivalence between the animal and individual human subjects, and doing so doesn’t trade one issue for another. The Internet is big enough for more than one kind of rage. It has to be.

On April 12, 2015, Freddie Gray was arrested, and on April 19, 2015, he died in the hospital from severe spinal injuries. While it is unclear just how Gray sustained spinal cord injuries while in police custody and why he was arrested in the first place, it is clear that Baltimore police officers failed to get Gray the medical care he needed. Freddie Gray’s death has sparked protests in Baltimore as people question, critique, and protest the continued killings of unarmed black people at the hands of police in Baltimore and across the US.

But what has emerged differently in the protests and discussions around Baltimore is the contradiction between The Wire’s widespread popularity (1.8 million likes on Facebook) and the comparatively small support for the protests in honor of Freddie Gray (thousands protesting in the streets of Baltimore).

In other words, why hasn’t The Wire, which showed us how structural racism and an abusive police department defines black life in Baltimore, translated into collective social action? Why are there only thousands in the streets? Where are the millions of fans of The Wire? And why aren’t they supporting black folks in Baltimore?

My dissertation research provides at least a partial answer to that question. Examining cases of fan-based citizenship (including activism, volunteerism, and political participation), I investigate how we connect popular culture to political participation in a way that invites collective action. Through cases across television, movies, books, and sports, I find that fan-based civic appeals take significant community work and rhetorical work—that is, popular culture media almost never leads directly to collective action on its own. Like any social activism and community organizing, it takes hard work, coordination, deliberation, and discussion. It makes sense then that without a group of fans of The Wire emerging as leaders, providing organizational groundwork and constructing arguments that invite us to see The Wire as connected to our lives today, we see little collective action emerging as a result of The Wire fandom.

Protesters and supporters have pointed out another part of the answer as to why fans of The Wire are not at the protests in large numbers. They explain how the racism of our media industry and culture discourage audience civic action:

As audience members, we are invited to consume a narrative of black suffering. The show invites us to be consumers first and foremost, complicit in the structural racism that undergirds the media industry and our own everyday lives. The bad news is that this is widespread. The good news is that we don’t have to accept this situation as permanent. We can change how we, as fans, engage the story of black suffering on The Wire. We can shift from consumption to solidarity. Of course, we will need to counter cultural scripts, norms, and discourse to do it. But such change is possible, and quite frankly, desperately needed.

We can find a model for this kind of work in the Harry Potter Alliance’s (HPA) Darfur campaign. Through two podcasts and a series of blog posts, the HPA argued that the Harry Potter story called Harry Potter fans to take action to end the Darfur genocide by calling government representatives, divesting from companies implicitly funding the genocide, and donating money to Civilian Protection. On the surface, the story of Harry Potter would seem to have little to do with Sudan, genocide, and geopolitics in Africa (and it would certainly seem to have much less in common with Sudan than The Wire has with the Freddie Gray tragedy and resulting protests). But through sophisticated arguments that connected Harry Potter characters and values to the crisis in Sudan, the Harry Potter Alliance made the Sudan genocide relevant for Harry Potter fans.

The HPA made this argument by drawing connections between Lily Potter (Harry’s mom) and the mothers in refugee camps. By connecting Lily Potter with Darfuri refugees, the HPA a) helped fans understand the lives of women in the camps and b) transferred importance from Lily to refugees, giving fans a reason to take action. Protecting Darfuri refugees became a way to honor and protect Lily Potter.

Andrew Slack uses Lily as a way to understand the risk and sacrifice Darfuri refugee women are taking. In the second Darfur podcast, HPA co-founder Slack says, “we’ll be talking about people like Lily Potter in our world, mothers in Darfur who continue to risk everything to protect their children.” In November 2007, the Janjaweed militia were continuing to circle UN refugee camps, killing any men and raping any women who ventured outside of the camp. The HPA explains that refugees were forced to leave the relative safety of the UN camps in order to gather firewood nearby. Slack explains that, despite knowing they will likely be raped when they leave the camp, Darfuri women choose to take the risk so that they could feed their families. The HPA compares Lily’s demonstration of motherly love to that of the Darfuri women’s. Lily too made a sacrifice for Harry, protecting him from Voldemort’s deadly power. Lily also becomes a reason to take civic action. PotterCast co-host Sue Upton says in the podcast, “What better way to show our love for Harry Potter than to stick up for the women in this world who are doing the same thing for their children just as Lily did for Harry.” Protecting women in Darfur becomes a matter of showing respect for Lily Potter and showing one’s love for Harry Potter. Through the campaign, the HPA helped fans see intervention in the Darfur genocide as a public issue that was both relevant and important.

We can never know exactly what it is like to be another person. But we can stand in solidarity with them. The HPA demonstrates how we can translate a commitment to Harry Potter to a commitment to action to intervene in genocide, and it offers lessons for how we might translate a commitment to The Wire into participation in protests in Baltimore.

Indeed, popular culture media holds great potential to show us new things. And fan commitments and identifications hold great potential to push us to take action. Fans are powerful. But failing to connect The Wire with protests in honor of Freddie Gray represents a missed opportunity—one that we, put frankly, cannot afford to miss.

Miss Packnett calls us to take action:

Freddie Gray is not Dukie. But we must love Freddie Gray like we loved Dukie. We must help write a Season 6 through our protests and actions that create a safer, fairer, and more just Baltimore for black folks. #BlackLivesMatter.

The FCC has done what even a few months ago seemed to most totally unthinkable: they delivered real net neutrality policy, putting in place strong regulations to protect fairness in internet access. After a decade-long policy battle, net neutrality advocates got nearly everything we’ve been calling for: clear-cut Open Internet rules that prohibit broadband network operators from blocking, throttling, or prioritizing internet content and services, that apply to both wired and wireless networks, and— the most wonky, yet most important, point— are based in Title II of the Communications Act. In other words, the FCC can now stop broadband providers from restricting your internet traffic or charging extra for exclusive internet “fast lanes,” whether your connection is to a personal computer or a mobile device, all rooted in a long-standing regulatory tradition of “common carriage” that protects openness and equality for essential two-way communications infrastructure. (For more details, you can check out my previous coverage of net neutrality here on Antenna, where I’ve written about the importance of Title II and the politics of policy that led to this point. For more on what net neutrality even is, you can check out my explainer for the Media Industries Project.)

Overall, the FCC’s new Open Internet rules represent a major come-from-behind victory for net neutrality advocates and a significant achievement for more democratic communications in the US. So, what should we make of this landmark FCC decision? How in the world did this actually get done? And what exactly happens now? Let me mention a couple of quick points along these lines.

The first and perhaps most important point is that a resilient social movement succeeded in getting a meaningful progressive victory in communications policy— an affirmative victory to enact good policy, not a defensive victory to stop bad policy. This success came even on a seemingly arcane and technical regulatory issue of invisible infrastructure, within a policy arena where corporate discourse and dollars dominate. I’ve spent the last eight years following net neutrality and, while I remained cautiously (if, as many told me, irrationally) optimistic throughout that it could get successfully put into policy, even I have to admit that it was quite a long shot to get rules this good from the FCC. Net neutrality policy has a long history of half-steps forward and large tumbles backwards, on a policymaking playing field heavily tilted in favor of the large corporations that set the terms of engagement there. Nonetheless, a strong coalition of media reform and civil rights activists, legal and technologist advocates, and online creators and startups pushed net neutrality forward in the policy sphere and the public sphere. They mobilized millions of citizens to engage with the FCC in its Open Internet proceeding— a powerful popular force in support of net neutrality that made it more than good policy, but also good politics. Some cynical defeatists are content to ignore the real difference made by everyday people’s voices and actions, instead emphasizing the role of the tech industry in lobbying for net neutrality in service of its economic interests. This perspective is not only demeaning and disempowering in terms of activist strategy, but also not very accurate: Google, Amazon, and other tech heavy-hitters mostly sat it out this time around, while smaller outsider tech firms (the likes of Etsy and Kickstarter don’t exactly have much sway inside the Beltway) worked better with the activist coalition.

The second point is this: even though this is a historic victory that should be celebrated, the fight is far from over. This is true in an immediate sense of challenges to the Open Internet rules. Broadband network operators and their allies in Congress are already seeking to block the new rules. The FCC will also surely be sued as soon as the Open Internet rules go into effect, kicking off yet another long legal battle over the agency’s ability to regulate internet infrastructure. It’s worth noting, though, that Comcast and AT&T both have potential mergers being considered by the FCC currently and Verizon’s appeal of the much weaker 2010 Open Internet rules backfired pretty bad on them, making theses corporations perhaps a bit more lawsuit gun-shy than usual (the cable and wireless lobbies look most likely to sue). Regardless, because this time the Open Internet rules are built on the strong and appropriate statutory foundation of Title II, we can be confident that the rules will stand up in court.

But the fight is also not over in a bigger picture sense: as consequential a victory as this is, it is ultimately just one step on a longer journey toward more equitable media structures. On the internet infrastructure front alone, there is much more to be done to ensure faster, more affordable, more inclusive broadband network access (although the other FCC action that same day— to overrule state restrictions on municipal broadband networks— opens a door toward a more promising future of public internet infrastructure for more cities). Having net neutrality meaningfully enshrined in communications regulations, and having FCC policy moving toward treatment of internet access as an essential utility, is huge, but net neutrality has proven a resonant discourse that can speak to critical social justice goals and can be employed more widely. Net neutrality could ultimately end up most historically significant, then, for the powerful discourse and movement that advocates put together around it— if we can build on this success and use this momentum to push forward for more victories like this one.

In the news story, Ulaby interviewed Kate Looby, the Operations Director for the Harry Potter Alliance, who explained that before she got involved with the Harry Potter Alliance, she was “pretty apathetic.” After joining the nonprofit and becoming their Director of Operations, Looby said “I would say now I consider myself to be a full-fledged activist.” Ulaby’s story of how Harry Potter fans were becoming activists demonstrates how surprising it is for most people that fans are not loners, hiding away from the world, but rather are productive and rational- and can create real political change.

For a fandom organization composed mostly of adolescents and young adults to see themselves as activists is pretty surprising. Harry Potter fandom is considered a leisure time activity, something silly, though enjoyable. Adolescents are supposed to be apathetic about current events and critical issues, uninformed, much less engaged. For Looby at least, fandom is playing an important role in her process of recognizing herself as an active citizen and engaged activist.

The Harry Potter Alliance’s rhetoric has invited Looby and thousands of others to begin to see themselves as more than fans using media for themselves, and consider themselves engaged citizens. Fandom and social movement rhetoric are coming together. For people who are concerned with political action, the important question is how a nonprofit can use Harry Potter enthusiasm to spur adolescents into action, where high school civic teachers cannot.

Political theorist John Dewey, philosopher Fredric Jameson, and sociologist Doug McAdam all note that people need grounding in order to act meaningful in the world. For Harry Potter fans, the Harry Potter story provides that grounding. It provides fans with a touch-point, worldview, or philosophy that allows them to take political and social action.

The Harry Potter text operates politically for fans in two ways. First, the Harry Potter text anchors fans as it guides fans and gives them ways of acting in the world. The Harry Potter Alliance asks fans to compare themselves to Harry and to ask themselves what Dumbledore would have done. Since Hermione fought for House Elf rights, then Harry Potter fans should fight for fair trade. If Voldemort killed mudbloods, then Harry Potter fans should value diversity. The Harry Potter Alliance certainly plays a key role in guiding such interpretations by highlighting some aspects of the Harry Potter story (like Dumbledore’s sexuality), organizing particular kinds of alliances (with liberal, social justice groups), and by guiding fans in determining the real world equivalent of House Elf rights.

Second, the Harry Potter text works as a strong anchor, drawing on an intense dedication to the text. The Harry Potter Alliance capitalizes on fans’ already intense identification with the Harry Potter text and translates that to an intense identification with social activism. While apathy about the environment may be easy, apathy about house elf rights for Harry Potter fans is more difficult to maintain.

For young adults who feel like political discussions are irrelevant and distant, Harry Potter offers a way to connect. Maybe political world views like liberalism and conservativism aren’t our only choices anymore. Sarah Palin better move over. Harry Potter just arrived.