The Sacking of ‘Kaeplanta’: Whose Voice is Valued in the Built Environment

Abstract

As Super Bowl LIII was taking place in Atlanta what dominated the headlines was not the football game but former quarterback Colin Kaepernick. Moments before kickoff, the NFL honored several civil rights icons. The honorific moment served as an interesting juxtaposition to the fact that the league had basically blackballed former quarterback Colin Kaepernick for taking a knee against social injustice. Two years earlier, Atlanta artist Fabian Williams painted a mural of Kaepernick on an abandoned building across from historically black Morehouse College. Ironically, the weekend of the Super Bowl the building was demolished leaving some including the artist to question the timing. Art murals often serve multiple functions in a community including as a forum for public debate, a place to demonstrate self-determination, and also black unity. Using a multimodal discourse analysis, this qualitative study analyzed how the media covered the demolition of the mural and its effects on the community. In the local news coverage, the artist was given a voice but the media failed to show the reaction of the loss of art to the community. By not allowing the subaltern’s voice to be heard the audience will continue to rely on stereotypes the media provides them.