Hide your wife, hide your kids… cause there are black people rapin’ everyone out there, while selling your kids crack. According to most media outlets, especially local news, white people are victims to violent crimes, drug dealers and backdoor “reparations” for slavery of black people. Loving mothers will desperately warn their grown children to be careful before wandering into the labyrinth of terror, otherwise called Dallas, alone. It’s no obstacle to find danger lurking in the corners of inner cities in news, but how many know about the CIA-crack-connection in the 80’s? Is it possible that this disproportion coverage represents reality and minorities have this embedded anger that white people are innocent of? Are non-whites simply more prone to crime? Rational thinking, personal experience with the angriest white people, the fact neither you nor I have probably never met someone that’s been attacked by a black person lead me to believe no.
News stations have standards for what makes a crime story “newsworthy.” Feature crimes are usually audacious, vicious, or unusual in some way. If the crime is an immediate threat, then it is considered newsworthy. Other than that ambiguity, newsworthy standards fluctuate between stations and intuitions of reporters. But this “intuition” I speak of invites slanting biases opposing minorities, for the most part. Our mainstream news is more compromised than ever. Floods of stories that seem objectively newsworthy are ignored all the time, for reasons that are open to speculation. The ratio of black criminal coverage to white criminal coverage is 3:1, even though statistics say they commit about ¼ of national crime and only represent 13% of the population (back to rational thinking). And when white criminals are shown, their race is used as an ironic juxtaposition to emphasize how surprising it is that educated white people misbehave. Like in this case, where a suspect involved with child pornography is "not under criminal investigation and police are just concerned for his welfare." This disproportion leads to severe public opinion perversion, whether they’re maximizing people’s failures or ignoring their existence. Mass media is the largest player in public opinion and racial progress because of the amount of people they reach and subtly persuade.
Well-meaning people might question the motive behind racial typecasting and argue that news only broadcasts what is happening. Unfortunately, the news is highly perpetuated by lobby groups and corporations with economic affiliations that have redefined conflict of interest. Politics have their own agenda to set and use the news to reach their audience. White people with power have an unspoken fear of losing what privilege comes with being white; and make no mistake; there is definitely still a gap between white and non-white privileges. Stated bluntly- while we abolished a formal apartheid system, there still remains a white-supremacist dynamic. Race is a tried-and-true tool to wedge a divide between people that would otherwise unite and challenge elites. “Political language," wrote George Orwell in 1946, "is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind."
These points may seem cynical to sweet idealists that have been target to covert manipulation, but these tactics are hardly original. A little research will dig up plenty of examples in history where media is used flagrantly to oppress non-whites. By no means does this come from some arrogant high ground, rather another person stuck in the same dynamic fighting to get out.
1 comments:
Excellent points, Brittany. I like your blunt assessment. And I agree.
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