About Us
IN THE WAKE TV is a people-powered media co-op centering Black life through news, culture, documentaries, and live coverage. We are a people-powered platform centering Black life. Rooted Locally. Connected Regionally. Relevant Nationally.
Our newsroom investigates the root causes of systemic harm—from land theft and engineered scarcity to state violence. Simultaneously, our cultural coverage records how our communities heal, create, and fight back.
Our journalism is built on three foundational lenses—radical frameworks for understanding how power operates against Black and Indigenous communities, moving away from merely "reporting crime" and toward documenting systemic harm and community resistance.
The IN THE WAKE TV Coverage Pillars
Pillar I: Land Theft & The Crime of Displacement 🏛️
We redefine "property crime" by centering the original and ongoing seizure of land from Black and Indigenous people.
- The Radical Lens: We treat deed theft, predatory zoning, gentrification, and eminent domain as active crime scenes.
- The Goal: To expose how generational wealth is siphoned away through "legal" mechanisms and to document the collective fight for territorial sovereignty.
Pillar II: Resource Deprivation as Aggravated Neglect ⚕️
We define violence as the deliberate, systemic withholding of the essential means of life.
- The Radical Lens: When a community lacks clean water, healthcare, or healthy food, the "criminal" is not the person struggling for survival—it is the system that engineered the scarcity.
- The Goal: To frame "food deserts" and "medical redlining" as state-sanctioned assaults on the body, the mind, and the community.
Pillar III: State Violence & The Architecture of Coercion ⚖️
We treat the carceral legal system—police, courts, and prisons—as a subject to be aggressively investigated, never as a primary source of truth.
- The Radical Lens: Rooted in the historical legacy of the Central Park Five (The Exonerated Five), we investigate how the state utilizes tools like coerced confessions, over-policing, and predatory surveillance to disrupt Black life.
- The Goal: To document the "Wake" of the legal system and amplify the grassroots, community-led movements working to dismantle these coercive structures.
Why Our Pillars Matter By anchoring our newsroom in these three ideas, we ensure that every story we cover—from a grassroots transit rally to a local youth cultural showcase—is structurally tied back to a larger mission of decolonization, truth-telling, and deep institutional accountability.