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.