"Do You Understand How Racially Motivated This Is?": Institutional Discipline, Double Standards, and Projects of Media Fugitivity

Mainstream imaginaries of success in the United States tend to center white men. This phenomenon, though increasingly criticized, pervades media sys-tems, which have effectively served as major chan-nels to facilitate, disperse, and popularize such ideals globally. Unsurprisingly, then, US main-stream media institutions have not generally favored non-white and/or non-men creators. Via code phrases such as best practices and professionalism, racialized and gendered assumptions continue to shape participatory landscapes of media production. Hence, for many Black women enrolled in formal media education and training programs, schooling's disciplinary norms-alongside society's inclination to mark and marginalize Black women as Other-both frustrate and inspire them to develop cunning, cul-turally mindful approaches that make use of accessi-ble lessons, resources, and networks without abandoning the social issues and objectives that brought them to media in the first place. Framing their flexible methods of resource procurement and repurposing as projects of media fugitivity, this arti-cle explores how Black women navigate the overlap-ping social, technological, and ideological disciplines of institutional subjecthood and cultivate strategies through which to participate in these schooling infrastructures, while at the same time also protect-ing themselves from them; redistributing gains accrued in them; and selectively challenging hege-monic asks made, norms modeled, and compliances expected in them. [media anthropology, Black femi-nism, race, gender, and class, media production, fugitivity]