Thread by @OLAASM

If the world had shaken out a little differently, you could have scholars writing about "copologism" (incessant media apology for police abuse) instead of "copaganda."

It was still up in the air which portmanteau I was going to push harder back in 2012. lol 🤣😉

https://twitter.com/OLAASM/status/274204179751378944

I'm glad this tweet exists. It jives with my recollection of having heard the word first from Bilal (while at the militant, Home Foreclosure Defense called "Fort (later 'Fuerza') Hernandez" in LA (Van Nuys, specifically) around this exact time.

As I recall, we were sitting around behind the barricades, maybe drinking beer (hey, that's what you do when you're behind actual barricades waiting on an imminent LAPD raid) and Bilal sneered something about #copaganda. Maybe I misheard him. Maybe his speech was slurred.

Maybe his dentures slipped. But we were talking about media representation of the siege of "Fort Hernandez," sipping some beers and this elder, former panther comrade definitely dismissed the news story I was fuming over and derided it as what I distinctly heard as "copaganda."

And from that day forth, I ran with it. That's why I don't take credit for coining it. I don't even know if Bilal would take credit for it. We were sitting around drinking beer in a basement. I just thought it was clever and needed to be generalized. I thought it explained a lot.

I don't know if it was a named concept fully formed in Black radical circles or if that concept itself exactly matches what we now talk about when we say "copaganda." Collective endeavors can and often do become entirely different things than they originally meant over time.

I don't know if Bilal individually coined it or even actually said it. It doesn't really matter. Media participation in policing was absolutely understood in Black radical communities. And insofar as anyone wonders about the provenance of "copaganda," they should know that much.

What I know, or added to any understanding of "copaganda," came directly and without qualification from Black radical communities actively involved in street militancy who I struggled alongside in Los Angeles.

I sure as fuck didn't discover it. As I've said elsewhere, I absolutely worked hard to popularize the word once I was acquainted with it. I thought it was a useful framing for understanding the local media I was consuming (and later, seeing similar dynamics in entertainment).

One thing about being against property and individualism - and individual, intellectual property especially - is that I am absolutely vulnerable to seeing things I produce (or particpate collectively in producing) turned into someone else's individual, intellectual property.

If I get the sense that somebody is profiting individually off the collective work of thousands (especially without crediting *those people*, if not me individually), I still get that punk rock tween angst against "sellouts" and "opportunists" building fences around the commons.

I'm getting a little nervous these days. And, while I appreciate being credited as a popularizer of a term (when even that much happens), I absolutely insist any real credit for taking media representation of police and policing in Amerikkka seriously go to Black radicals.

That's *my* origin story on "copaganda." I feel egotistical asserting any role in its now-ubiquity and I hate it. But I also feel very protective of this collective project *and especially* the badass Black radicals outside the academy who taught me and let me struggle with them.

Glad we had this little chat. lol.