Building Power for Alternative Futures: Mapping an Entertainment Media Path Toward Abolition Democracy

Introduction

In 2020, as millions of people joined protests in the Movement for Black Lives and called for the defunding or dismantling of law enforcement (Buchanan et al. 2020), the U.S. entertainment industry became a site and source of calls for change. Creators, critics, and consumers alike critiqued Hollywood’s close ties with police, its propagation of white supremacist ideologies, and its production of “copaganda”—content that encourages audiences to see policing and police violence as fair, noble, and necessary (Beato 2003). BLD PWR (“Build Power”), a social justice organization pursuing systemic change in and through the entertainment industries, emerged as a powerful force behind these critiques. Co-founded in 2018 by actor and activist Kendrick Sampson and organizers Tia Oso and Mike de la Rocha, BLD PWR united hundreds of Black artists and executives in 2020 in a collective call for Hollywood to reckon with its role in state-sanctioned and white supremacist violence.

Specifically, in a historic and widely circulated virtual letter, BLD PWR stated that Hollywood has propagated “the epidemic of police violence and a culture of anti-Blackness.” This culture, they make clear, manifests “not only in storytelling” (i.e., film and television content) but can also be found in the business of storytelling, such as the practices and policies of agencies, unions, studios, and production companies. Sampson, Oso, and de la Rocha accordingly insisted that “because Hollywood has been a huge part of the problem, we demand it be a part of the solution” through divesting from the police and anti-Black content and investing in Black creators, Black communities, and anti-racist content (Sampson 2020). This “Hollywood 4 Black Lives letter” amassed over 300 signatures from industry leaders and was met with commitments from various Hollywood organizations—including major studios and agencies—to fulfill BLD PWR’s demands. However, five years later, few significant changes have been made; according to BLD PWR, those organizations swiftly “‘abandoned their commitment to addressing our concerns’” and ultimately “‘failed to meet the demands of the liberation movement that brought us here’” (Kilkenny 2021).

We posit that this failure marks a pivotal moment when media creators and scholars must reimagine the futures film and television are shaping, and reconsider Hollywood’s role in this endeavor. While previous scholarship has focused on film and popular culture representations of Blackness (Alexander 2019; Gates 2018; Gillespie 2016; Keeling 2007; Moody 2016), we focus on BLD PWR’s implicit question of abolition democracy—one deeply intertwined with, but not exclusive to, questions of Black futures (Keeling 2019). Through this exploration, we find ourselves pointing to an alternative mass media spectrum as a possible answer. Existing scholarship suggests that Hollywood can remedy its complicity in police violence by offering critical portrayals of policing in its narratives and including minoritized and systems-impacted creators in writers’ rooms (Bernabo 2022; Color of Change 2020). In this article, we employ a futurist cultural studies approach (Powers 2020) to argue that entertainment media can—and must—do more by rejecting liberal notions of representational progress and instead investing in an abolitionist democracy approach to producing media.

Introduced by W.E.B. Du Bois, abolition democracy originally referred to the “short-lived period of time in the years following the Civil War in which abolishing chattel slavery included both the ‘negative’ emancipation of Black people from bondage and the ‘positive’ building of institutions, practices, and resources necessary for Black freedom” (Dilts 2019, 232). For example, Du Bois (1935) argued that while the 13th amendment did the negative work of ending slavery, it did not do the necessary positive work of providing Black Americans “civil rights, economic opportunity and education and the right to vote, as a matter of sheer human justice and right” (289). At the turn of the twentieth century, Davis (2005) expanded this concept into an “approach” (92) that recognizes the prison-industrial complex as “a result of the failure to enact abolition democracy” (91). Davis (2005) argued that abolition democracy is still “to come” (14), but successfully enacting it will require creating and making “new institutions and resources” (93) available to eliminate prisons and policing. As abolitionist media scholars, we recognize the liberatory potential of media—as exemplified by Du Bois (e.g., 1900 Data Portraits, The Crisis)—and believe that it can play a vital role in imagining and creating these new institutions and resources.

Through this article, we focus specifically on the role that contemporary U.S. film and television can play in building toward abolition democracy. As Jones (2024) posits in her book on film and television’s capacity to change the world, “the old divisions of ‘movies’ and ‘television’, based on screen size or duration, seem increasingly irrelevant, now that most directors, writers and actors move fluidly between mediums and platforms”—a reality illustrated by the “Hollywood 4 Black Lives” letter signees; thus, we use the terms “Hollywood” and “film and television industry” interchangeably throughout this work. Engaging BLD PWR as a case study, we illustrate the need to counter copaganda via investing in abolitionist democracy storytelling: creating narratives rooted in realities without policing and prisons and developing new anti-capitalist forms and means of production and distribution to share these stories. First, we trace the historical relationship between Hollywood and law enforcement to highlight the political and material factors underpinning the industry’s failure to meet BLD PWR’s abolitionist demands. Subsequently, we describe the project of abolition and present abolition democracy (per Davis 2005; Du Bois 1935) and non-reformist reforms (per Gorz 1968; Kaba 2014) as crucial concepts for analyzing BLD PWR’s historic efforts to transform Hollywood. Drawing from this illustrative example, we then forward abolitionist democracy storytelling as a futurist framework for creating and evaluating entertainment media that meaningfully responds to the Movement for Black Lives. Subsequently, we highlight alternative sites of media production—Means TV and the Media and Data Equity (MADE) Lab—as examples of abolitionist democracy storytelling in action.

Hollywood and Policing

As the Movement for Black Lives makes clear, policing and prisons in the United States operate via carceral systems that disproportionately criminalize, incarcerate, and economically, politically, and physically disempower (via cash bail, civil forfeiture, suffrage, abuse, and other means) Black, Latine, and Native American communities (Davis 2005; Vitale 2017). The U.S. film and television industry and law enforcement have a long history of working together to normalize these systems and to obscure their white supremacist origins (slavery in the U.S., the control of a new industrial working class in London and the Northeastern U.S., and colonial violence in Ireland, México, and the Philippines, per Vitale 2017).

The relationship between Hollywood and law enforcement was initially contentious, with police using state power to control media circulation and consumption at the beginning of the twentieth century. As Reiner (2008) describes, law enforcement was a “prominent” force “in campaigns to censor cinema” during this time (319). For example, following objections from the Society for the Prevention of Crime, New York City Mayor George McClellan Jr. revoked the licenses of every cinema in the city, forcing them to close. McClellan only allowed new licenses to be issued if the cinemas agreed to remain closed on Sundays and to refrain from showing any content that would “degrade or injure the morals of the community”; McClellan instructed local police to enforce and “prosecute violations of” these new regulations (NYT 1908). Shortly after, in 1910, the International Association of Chiefs of Police issued a statement condemning the film industry’s representations of the police because, as the organization’s president put it, “‘the police are sometimes made to appear ridiculous’” (Rosenberg 2016). This same organization was silent five years later when D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915) incited widespread white supremacist violence (Ang 2022) and served as “the midwife in the rebirth of the most vicious terrorist organisation in the history of the United States”—the Ku Klux Klan (Franklin 1979). That same year, the Supreme Court ruled in the case of Mutual Film Corporation v. Industrial Commission of Ohio that the First Amendment did not protect movies; thus, they could be subjected to censure and censorship. Notably, however, this right did not seem to extend to civil rights organizations; the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) mobilized, protested, and petitioned to ban the film, but the New York Board of Motion Picture Censorship denied their request. Film organizations’ resistance to anti-racist organizing, and police organizations’ influence on cinematic portrayals of policing, have remained.

The modern “cop show” originated with the television adaptation of NBC’s Dragnet (1951–1959). As Mittell (2004) describes in his case study on the series, Dragnet played a defining role in the development of police dramas as a television genre—“establish[ing] most of the formal precedents for the police drama that programs still draw upon and react against today” (119), including claims to representational “realism” and “authenticity” rooted in alliances with local police departments. Dragnet’s creator, Jack Webb, partnered with Los Angeles Police Department Chief William Parker to establish mutually beneficial production practices (Calhoun 2022). The LAPD’s Public Information Division provided story ideas and the freedom to shoot footage anywhere in the city in exchange for script and final episode approval rights, an agreement that “satisf[ied] both Webb’s yearning for authenticity and the LAPD’s need for positive publicity” (Mittell 2004, 129). This agreement also granted the LAPD substantial power: “If the department objected to something. . .the entire episode might be scrapped” (Rosenberg 2016)—establishing standards for the genre.

In the 1970s, TV shows began to consult with individual police officers rather than entire departments for more “realistic” narratives—a realism that rarely, if ever, extended to those victimized by police. Simultaneously, as Rosenberg (2016) describes, cop show narratives produced during this time shifted from portraying police as being plagued with guilt for killing people to portraying cops who were unwilling to kill as foolish or “weak.” In this latter narrative, criminals and “dangerous villains” were depicted as deserving of death, and “trigger-happy cops” were celebrated—the only exception being an officer who killed another officer: a “cop killer” (Rosenberg 2016). This narrative shift was accompanied by the rise of the war on drugs/mass incarceration and the rise in the popularity of action films. Additionally, this narrative shift involved moving from art mimicking life to life imitating art, with the LAPD’s precursor to SWAT training taking place on Universal Studios sets and the LAPD creating “dedicated SWAT vehicles” after seeing them on the 1975 show S.W.A.T. (Rosenberg 2016). Moreover, despite some police chiefs’ criticisms of movies’ purportedly “ridiculous” portrayals of police, many police departments have used copaganda storytelling techniques (e.g., depictions of climactic car chases and suspense-inducing soundtracks) to recruit officers. For example, a recruitment video created by the Denison Police Department used “throbbing music, blaring sirens and tense chases” alongside a closing quote that stated: “People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf” (Rosenberg 2016)—messaging that perpetuates the normalization of police violence and extralegal state power.

It is through this type of messaging and the continued partnerships between studios and police departments that we see mainstream media partaking in copaganda (Beato 2003; Bernabo 2022). Fictional copaganda is one of the most popular forms of entertainment content in the U.S. (Bernabo 2022; Nichols-Pethick 2012). In fact, mass media is where “the public most often interacts with its community officials” (Lovell 2003, 6). However, there are notable racial divides in audiences’ reception of this content. While the white mainstream “accepts an image of benevolence, fairness, and justice” in portrayals of policing, Black, Latine, and Indigenous communities “know firsthand that the police are possibly all of those things but also definitely can be brutal, oppressive, merciless, aggressive, and extralegal” (Bryant 2020, 47–48). In light of the overrepresentation of white people in writing, directing, and decision-making positions in Hollywood (Color of Change 2020; Ramón et al. 2025; Smith 2025; WGAW and WGAE 2025), and copaganda’s generation of billions of dollars in revenue for studios and networks (Jurgensen 2012; Nash Information Services 2023), the industry’s failure to meet BLD PWR’s demands is unsurprising. Simultaneously, this failure reflects an ongoing commitment to maintaining pro-police ideologies among viewers and highlights the need to reimagine the role of entertainment media in the Movement for Black Lives. We argue that this reimagining must be rooted in the project of abolition democracy, and that futurist cultural studies can—and should—play a role in this endeavor.

Abolition, Abolition Democracy, and Non-reformist Reforms

In her call for a futurist cultural studies, Powers (2020) argues that amidst contemporary climate, health, and geopolitical crises, “futurism is increasingly necessary as a means not simply to react to the onslaught of problems but to imagine beyond the despair and create solutions that dispense with old ways of thinking” (455). Simultaneously, she points to the corporatization of futurism—which tends to reproduce neoliberal notions of progress—and posits that cultural studies, in tandem with critical future studies, can offer humanizing alternatives to corporate, militarized, and technologized notions of the future (Powers 2020); alternatives that are needed now more than ever as a technofeudal class defines much of our imaginative possibilities of the future (Benjamin 2024; Hedges 2025; Pitre 2022). As abolitionists, we see abolition as the ideal lens through which to approach futurist cultural studies. Abolition is a vision, practice, and movement fundamentally concerned with developing alternatives to and eliminating policing, imprisonment, and surveillance (Critical Resistance 2024). Davis (2003) argues that the first step toward accomplishing this is “to let go of the desire to discover one single alternative system” (106) and to imagine and explore many alternatives that might lead us to new worlds free from state-sanctioned violence. Storytelling is one of those areas of imagination and exploration.

Storytelling has a long history in abolitionist movements, as exemplified in the genre of slave narratives (Kotzin 2015; Sollors 1997) and in neo-slave narratives, which have been used “to describe prison and chain-gang-centered soundings, writings, testimonies, and social practices in which the unsettling continuities of slavery and freedom are brought into overt relief” (Childs 2015, 21). James (2005) argues that many of these narratives—particularly those rooted in lived experience—go on to function as “captive insurgent abolitionist” stories (xxxvi). There are also long histories of abolitionist storytelling outside of the West. One example can be seen in Jacob Carruthers’ whm msw, a storytelling method that “represents a moment where the people are forced to repair themselves” (Myers 2023a). Myers (2023b) posits that as the root of much writing is in conflict, violence, or war, history often becomes a record of how societies survive or perish; this offers an impoverished frame for human relationships because “if we only know each other through domination and conflict then we don’t know each other.” Whm msw asks us to focus on the repair work rather than the conflict, thus asking us to imagine a different society and world than our current conflict-centric ones.

Mainstream media, particularly fictional film and television narratives, can also play a role in this process of reimagining the future. As Rifkin (2019) argues, speculative writing has long enabled the political imaginaries required to create “modes of analysis and visions for liberation/decolonization/abolition” (7). The end of policing and prisons requires imagination, and creating new societies without carceral systems necessitates creativity (Benjamin 2024). Indeed, Rodriguez (2019) defines abolition as “a creative, imaginative, and speculative collective labor” (1577). However, mainstream media has historically harnessed its creative capacities and labor to celebrate carcerality. As Hall et al. (2017) illustrate in their seminal text, Policing the Crisis, mass media serve a “control function” by creating “common ideological perspectives” around the necessity of policing and prisons (192).

Contemporary media—through its production of copaganda—continues to serve this “control function” and shape audiences’ understandings of crime and policing in ways that legitimize carceral systems and sustain white supremacy (Critical Resistance 2024). For example, in a comprehensive study of fictional crime dramas, the racial justice organization Color of Change (2020) revealed that racially minoritized characters are frequently depicted as perpetrators (vs. victims) of crime—representations rooted in stereotypes tying Blackness and Latinidad to criminality (Critical Resistance 2024; Erigha 2019; Hooks 1992; Lacy and Ono 2011; Molina-Guzman 2010). Further, Color of Change (2020) found that characters of color are not portrayed as disproportionately targeted or adversely affected by “Criminal Justice Professionals’” (e.g., police officers, FBI agents) abusive and unethical behaviors. Instead, those behaviors are frequently depicted as “routine, harmless, necessary—or even noble—in the pursuit of justice” (31). In fact, “almost all series conveyed the impression that change is not needed: they depicted a system that does not actually have serious problems related to race, gender, violence and the abuse of power” (Color of Change 2020, 32). These depictions contradict and challenge the Movement for Black Lives’ political education efforts, which highlight the white supremacist origins and structural violence of policing and the urgent need for abolition.

Davis (2005) has argued that abolition democracy offers one of the clearest schemes toward ending this violence, and other scholars and activists have illustrated the continued relevance of abolition democracy as a conceptual framework and prefigurative praxis. For example, Obst (2022) discusses the contemporary significance and complexities of abolition democracy as a movement and ideal that “insists on the simultaneous dismantling of oppressive and exploitative structures while working to build alternative structures for the common good.” In doing so, Obst (2022) highlights abolition democracy’s foundational and ongoing concerns with racial capitalism—describing that it was the “re-entrenched reign of racial capitalism” that undermined post-Civil War abolition democracy and that underpins contemporary abolition democracy projects.

Indeed, many abolitionists argue that abolition requires the end of capitalism (Harney and Moten 2013; Hartman 2021). However, as philosopher Gorz (1968) has argued, anti-capitalist movements in overdeveloped countries cannot wait for capitalism’s crisis to bring “into the world the material means of its own destruction” (Marx 1990, 928). Instead, Gorz (1968) calls on modern movements to use “non-reformist reforms”—strategic actions that build their power and lead to more immediate changes or “partial victories” on the path to systemic change. In comparison with a reformist reform, which “subordinates its objectives to the criteria of rationality and practicability of a given system and policy,” a non-reformist reform is understood “not in terms of what is possible within the framework of a given system of administration, but in view of what should be made possible in terms of human needs and demands”—it is “determined not in terms of what can be, but what should be.” In other words, non-reformist reforms are changes sought and won by people united in pursuing “an alternative social model”; each reform represents a step toward realizing that model—“an experiment in the possibility of their own emancipation.”

Abolitionists largely reject reformist approaches to carceral systems because, as Harsha Walia describes, “arguably every reform entrenches the power of the state because it gives the state the power to implement that reform” (Walia and Dilts 2018, 15). However, Walia does not believe that reforms have no use to abolitionists; she suggests that determining whether or not to organize for a non-reformist reform requires asking: “Is it increasing the possibility of freedom?” (15). Additionally, Kaba (2014) developed a specific set of guidelines for determining if police reforms are reformist or non-reformist. She argues that examples of reformist reforms include giving the police more money, expanding policing, technology-focused reforms that result in providing the police with more resources, and reforms that center individuals rather than systemic change. In comparison, non-reformist reforms may include reparations to victims of police violence and requiring police officers to carry personal liability insurance to cover the costs, decreasing and redirecting funds away from policing and prisons, disarming the police, simplifying the process of dissolving police departments, increasing data transparency, and “reduc[ing] contact between the public and the police” (Kaba 2021, 14).

Given critical media industry scholars’ recognition that the media industries operate as an “extension of powerful capitalist forces” (Havens et al. 2009, 237), pursuing abolitionist democracy storytelling in these industries is inherently paradoxical. However, if—as we have argued—there is value in the imaginative and creative capacities of storytelling to work toward abolition, there is an argument to be made that non-reformist reforms in entertainment media storytelling can play a role in building toward abolition democracy. For example, when understanding police as overrepresented in mainstream media (Beckett and Sasson 2003; Bernabo 2022; Denman 2023; McGovern and Phillips 2017; Wilson 2000), non-reformist reforms remind us that rather than funding better representations of police, we can simply fund fewer representations. We thus argue that non-reformist reforms can complement an abolition democracy approach to media-making and that together, they offer a promising framework for evaluating and producing alternatives to copaganda.

BLD PWR: A Case Study in the Promises and Pitfalls of Abolition in Hollywood

To illustrate the utility of this framework, we analyze BLD PWR’s historic and ongoing efforts to transform Hollywood. Founded in 2018, BLD PWR is a non-profit working to “bring about the liberated future we all deserve by organizing, educating and activating the entertainment industry in partnership with grassroots movements” (BLD PWR 2022). In 2020, BLD PWR united hundreds of Black creators in a collective call to “prove Black Lives Matter to Hollywood.” This call, memorialized in a widely circulated letter that remains a central feature of the organization’s site, marked a defining moment in the industry’s history—the often-obscured realities of, as well as opportunities to reform, Hollywood’s role in state-sanctioned violence was thrust into the mainstream. In many ways, BLD PWR’s call and adjoining change-making strategies aligned with the goals of abolition democracy and offered non-reformist reforms to achieve those goals. However, the industry’s failure to support these reforms makes clear that storytelling for and toward abolition democracy is not possible in the “hyper-capitalist” space of Hollywood (Christian 2022)—a reality that renders other abolitionist productions in this site precarious, and points to the need for alternative storytelling ecosystems.

In their historic “Hollywood 4 Black Lives” letter, BLD PWR demanded that film and television studios commit to a series of decarceral divestment and investment strategies in their storytelling and production practices. Specifically, BLD PWR and their co-signers demanded that studios: divest from anti-Black storytelling and invest in anti-racist storytelling, and divest from police and invest in Black creators and communities in their production practices and structures. In offering detailed means for meeting these demands, BLD PWR proposed a series of non-reformist reforms that would contribute to the project of abolition democracy. In their letter, BLD PWR outlined actionable steps studios can take to repair the historic and ongoing harms perpetuated by their production of copaganda. Specifically, BLD PWR called on studios to “commit to no police on sets or events,” only work with union security officers “if they drop their ties with police unions,” pressure Los Angeles legislators into reducing citywide police spending, and “end the intentional glorification of police brutality and corruption in our storytelling” (Lane 2020). These demands reflect abolitionist goals and propose non-reformist reforms for meeting them via “redirecting funds away from policing” and both physically and psychologically “reduc[ing] contact between the public and the police” (Kaba 2021). Additionally, the letter proffered strategies for redressing the industry’s role in promoting anti-Blackness. BLD PWR implored studios to stop producing “content that dehumanizes or criminalizes Black people” and to “hire culturally competent social justice consultants” to prevent the production of anti-Black content (Lane 2020). BLD PWR also called on studios to “invest in developing, producing and distributing anti-racist content that humanizes and advances nuanced portrayals of Black people,” to hire, support, and promote Black creators at every level of production, and to “ensure that Black stories are given adequate [financial] support” (Lane 2020). Each of these demands tie back to Du Bois’ construct of abolition democracy. They call for both the “negative” divesting from anti-Blackness and policing and the “positive” investing in Black creators and Black-led and anti-racist content—changes that could pave an entertainment media path toward abolition democracy.

However, BLD PWR’s efforts to affect these changes in and through the U.S.′s dominant entertainment ecosystem illustrates how Hollywood, as a site of hyper-capitalist production and ideological power, is ultimately limited in its ability to repair the state-sanctioned violence that it has long benefited from and supported. Despite widely publicized commitments in 2020, studios failed to meet BLD PWR’s demands. As the organization described in July of 2021, despite meeting with “union leaders, talent reps, production companies, studio representatives and stars” to determine industry targets and holding “monthly working groups with union members, networks, production companies, and talent reps,” the “entertainment corporations and institutions targeted by the letter have yet to offer meaningful progress” (Kilkenny 2021).

Some representational shifts have occurred, with popular fictional copaganda series such as Brooklyn Nine-Nine and Law & Order: Special Victims Unit adopting new storylines about police brutality and reform. However, these shows continued to employ copaganda conventions. As Bernabo (2022) details in her analysis of U.S. police procedurals produced for the 2020 to 2021 season, while many series addressed widespread calls for police reform, they ultimately portrayed violence and white supremacy as individual (vs. structural) issues requiring interpersonal (vs. systemic) solutions, such as departments recruiting more Black officers and “good cops catching bad apples” (494)—strategies that reflect a reformist approach to the copaganda genre.

Notably, examples of abolitionist stories have also emerged from Hollywood in the past four years, such as Amazon’s I’m a Virgo (2023). Created by Boots Riley and featuring BLD PWR’s Kendrick Sampson, I’m a Virgo is a comedy series that encourages viewers to imagine a world without capitalism, carcerality, and policing. The series centers on the life of Cootie, a thirteen-foot-tall Black man who—after spending the first nineteen years of his life hidden in his guardians’ property—enters the “real world” and learns about the crisis of capitalism, state-sanctioned violence, and the power of community organizing. Cootie’s journey explicitly highlights the fallacies of copaganda, the ties between policing and white supremacy, and the failures of carceral reform versus abolition.

However, this exceptional content ultimately undermines the possibility of abolition democracy as it sustains the very economic system that it critiques. As one of, if not the most powerful corporations in the world, Amazon operates in and through the global system of racial capitalism (Alimahomed-Wilson and Reese 2021; Bhattacharyya 2023). Extant production practices have remained intact for this and other media conglomerates since BLD PWR issued their demands. While studios have made some representational shifts, they have failed to invest in and support Black storytellers at every level of production—as powerfully elucidated during the 2023 Writers Guild of America strike (Braxton and James 2023). Studios have also failed to divest from police groups, to sufficiently reduce spending on police, and to cut ties with police unions.

Additionally, since 2022, Shadowbox Studios—an Atlanta-based production company working with Amazon and other Hollywood studios—has become embroiled in the construction of one of the most prominent police training compounds in the country (i.e., “Cop City”). Shadowbox Studios is slated to create the nation’s largest soundstage complex south of Cop City, joining in the latter’s destruction of the Weelaunee Forest. An agenda item from a 2023 Atlanta Police Foundation (APF) meeting foreshadows a future partnership between Cop City and Shadowbox Studios (Lakhani 2023). According to their February 8, 2023, meeting minutes, APF has considered: “Are there any scenarios where we can come up with some agreement to work with Shadowbox for them to help fund some components and in return they have access to use the facility for filming purposes?” (Atlanta Police Foundation 2023)—a harbinger of copaganda productions to come. Given Hollywood studios’ continued reliance on, and investment in, policing and racial capitalism, their failure to adopt BLD PWR’s proposed non-reformist reforms toward abolition democracy are (unfortunate but) unsurprising.

In light of this failure, BLD PWR devised an alternative approach to affecting abolitionist change in Hollywood: launching their own production company, BLD PWR Productions (BPP). According to Sampson, who announced the formation of BPP in September of 2022, the creation of this company represents an effort to reclaim narrative power. As he stated in a press release announcing the company’s launch: “The days of begging for a seat are over. This is what building our own table looks like. . .We will continue to challenge those in power, but we recognize that it’s not Hollywood’s job to reimagine our future. . . we have always been experts at our own narratives, and we are taking that power back” (Jackson and Shafer 2022). Specifically, BPP aims to “reimagine Hollywood” by producing “stories that center the magic and complexities of Black and Indigenous communities” for cable, broadcast, and streaming platforms (BLD PWR 2022).

This effort to reclaim narrative power by “building our own table” appears, in many ways, to pave a promising path forward. Through forming its own production company, BLD PWR can meet its calls to recruit, hire, support, and promote Black creators at every level of production, to invest in Black storytelling, to develop and produce anti-racist content, and to use police-free production practices (e.g., police-free sets and screenings). Such abilities will offer opportunities for producing abolitionist narratives and employing organic representation practices—“when systems and institutions empower those who have been historically marginalized not only to appear in their stories but also to own and fine-tune narratives, marketing, and distribution” (Christian and White 2020, 136).

However, through forming a production company that will continue to operate within this industry—rather than building or participating in an alternative media ecosystem—BLD PWR’s abilities to sustain this storytelling and pursue an abolitionist business of storytelling are finite. By operating alongside other production companies in Hollywood, BLD PWR Productions will have to sell their content to corporations that participate in a system that has been profiting from copaganda, promoting anti-Blackness, excluding Black storytellers, and exploiting Black labor for decades (Great and Guerrero 2023). By building a new table (production company) in the same room (Hollywood), BLD PWR may have the capacity to tell abolitionist stories (like I’m a Virgo); however, their ability to support the project of abolition democracy via anti-capitalist and anti-carceral production and distribution practices will inevitably be limited. BLD PWR’s historic “Hollywood 4 Black Lives” letter and organizing efforts, and studios’ refusal to meet their demands, ultimately illustrate that the path to abolition democracy necessarily leads us out of the “hyper-capitalist” site of Hollywood. However, we insist that pursuing this path in and through cinematic and televisual storytelling remains possible, as modeled by other creative collectives operating in alternative media ecosystems.

Alternative Media Paths to Abolition Democracy

Turning to two creative collectives: Means TV and the Media Data and Equity (MADE) Lab, we argue that it is possible—and necessary—to create narratives that are rooted in realities without policing or prisons and to create those narratives via anti-capitalist means of production (i.e., abolitionist democracy storytelling). Like BLD PWR, Means TV and the MADE Lab are contemporary collectives pursuing abolitionist goals in and through media storytelling. However, in pursuing decidedly anti-capitalist means of media production and distribution, these alternative media collectives pave a more promising entertainment media path toward abolitionist democracy storytelling.

The term “alternative media,” as defined by Atton (2002), is generally understood to include: activist media (Waltz 2005), citizens media (Rodriguez 2001), community media (Howley 2010), critical media (Fuchs 2010), grassroots media (Teixeira 2020 ), oppositional media (Badran and Smets 2018), radical media (Downing 2001), social movement media (Atton 2003), and underground media (Duncombe 1997). Despite the traditional positioning of alternative versus mainstream media as a binary, scholars have begun to argue for understanding the two as existing on a spectrum (Atton 2002; Downing 2001; Kenix 2011). However, much of the research on alternative media focuses on nonfictional media—generally documentary or journalistic in style (Kenix 2011). Understanding alternative media as a spectrum allows for more complex engagement with the many different types of alternative media, and we argue for the importance of including fictional media in this spectrum; for example, this would enable us to better understand the specificities of, and similarities and differences between, the work of Oscar Micheaux, Grupo Cine Liberación, Ja’Tovia Gary, the British New Wave, Watermelon+, or Glen M. Mimura’s Third Cinema (Mimura 2009). In this article, we ultimately follow Atton in situating our definition of “alternative” in the work of Raymond Williams, who distinguished between alternative and oppositional practices: alternative practices attempt to exist and resist within the existing culture, while oppositional practices try to replace the current culture. We thus understand alternative media as functioning within current media-making structures (in line with non-reformist reforms) and oppositional media as that which replaces current capitalist structures of media-making.

Founded in 2020 by filmmakers Naomi Burton and Nick Hayes, Means TV is a worker-owned streaming service organized around the “collective goal” of the “abolition of capitalism” (Keimig 2020). This explicitly anti-capitalist media cooperative—comprised of employee-owners around the world—creates and distributes original, ad-free entertainment content (e.g., films, television shows, news programs) that critiques—and imagines worlds without—capitalism, patriarchy, policing, racism, colonialism, and other systems of oppression. In line with Atton’s (2002) argument for understanding alternative and oppositional media through four key areas (content, aim, production, and distribution), Means TV epitomizes the possibility of simultaneously offering abolitionist stories and employing anti-capitalist production practices—all while retaining accessibility to audiences (admittedly with a similar distribution method to mainstream media—a monthly subscription to Means TV is similar to, but cheaper than, a monthly ad-free subscription to Netflix, Hulu, HBO, or Disney+).

The MADE Lab at Northwestern University also embodies a powerful model of abolitionist democracy storytelling. Directed by Aymar Jéan Escoffery, the MADE Lab (n.d.a.) aims to “cultivate more equitable, sustainable media and tech ecosystems” through “reparative media”: media storytelling, platforms, and research that counteract and help us heal from systemic harms (Escoffery 2023). Producing reparative media requires creators to “slow down and make time for community building and brave space agreements at all stages of the production process” and to “budget for restorative justice, conflict resolution, intimacy coordination and other harm reduction goals” (OTV and MGG 2023, 14–15). While Escoffrey does not use the word abolitionist to describe reparative media, it is grounded in a similar ideology to restorative and transformative justice and—as with abolition—a desire for non-punitive methods of redressing systemic violence. Additionally, MADE Lab is actively producing abolitionist stories, as evinced by their project: “Black MADE: Envisioning life without prisons and police.” For this project, an “Abolitionist Writers Room composed of artists, writers, filmmakers, and organizers” is collectively crafting a short film series about a community without policing and prisons. While underwritten by Northwestern University—which invests heavily in capitalism and carcerality, MADE Lab is cultivating an alternative–if not oppositional–reparative media ecosystem designed to support creators “outside the university” (MADE Lab n.d.b) and “outside of powerful corporations” (Escoffery 2023). Like that created by Means TV, this ecosystem poignantly illustrates that crafting entertainment media narratives of/for abolitionist futures using anti-capitalist production and distribution practices is possible, here and now, and thus models abolitionist democracy storytelling in action.

Conclusion

Hollywood has a long and “storied” history of investing in the institution of policing. Despite BLD PWR’s recent efforts to compel studios to reckon with and reform their role in the epidemic of police violence and anti-Blackness, Hollywood continues to collaborate materially and ideologically with law enforcement—illustrating the industry’s refusal to meaningfully respond to the Movement for Black Lives. BLD PWR’s efforts to “reimagine Hollywood” and build “our own table” via forming their own production company may provide new opportunities for creating abolitionist stories in the industry; however, extant power structures and copaganda norms within Hollywood will ultimately constrain BLD PWR’s capacity to produce and distribute those stories in ways that resist racial capitalism and carceral systems.

As Davis (2003) argues, ending white supremacy and state-sanctioned violence requires an investment in abolition democracy—dismantling and creating alternatives to oppressive systems (including carcerality and racial capitalism). We argue that investing in abolitionist democracy futures in and through entertainment media is possible and necessary, but requires more than just critiquing copaganda and including minoritized and systems-impacted creators in writers’ rooms. Specifically, it requires: (1) creating new narratives rooted in realities without policing and prisons; and (2) developing new anti-capitalist forms and means of production that those creators own and control.

The case of BLD PWR illustrates that the United States’ current entertainment media industry cannot meaningfully meet these requirements. We recognize that Hollywood is not a monolith and aim—as advocated by Gates (2018)—to “avoid the overly cynical approach, the ‘zero-sum game’. . .that assumes that the structures of cultural hegemony effectively absorb and then stamp out any glimmers of significant change” (15). However, given studios’ recent failure to work with BLD PWR to implement their specific and actionable non-reformist reforms, we see more productive possibilities for abolitionist storytelling outside of this hyper-capitalist and hegemonic industry—at least for now.

Accordingly, we follow the long tradition of calling on individuals to demand fair representation in media and invest in their own production of and engagement with abolitionist storytelling via alternative media and oppositional media, such as Means TV and MADE Lab. Alternative forms of entertainment media production and engagement can lead to building “our own table” in “our own rooms” with doors to new worlds. We hope that future research will apply the framework of abolitionist democracy storytelling to other media examples (e.g., I’m a Virgo), analyze the aesthetics of this type of storytelling, and explore its impact—in particular, is it opening minds to new worlds without police and prisons, offering oppositional alternatives to capital, and “increasing the possibility of freedom?” (Walia and Dilts 2018, 15).