synthesis
12th December 2007, 18:53
I think it's important for leftists to recognize and adjust the changing face of American racism.
Over the last several decades in America, capitalism has begun to supplant religion as the primary means of unifying and equalizing an unequal society through inspirational rhetoric, in part due to the overall decline of religion in the West.
"Everyone can get money! Why aren't you?"
In this new society, inequalities must be presented not as inherent in certain humans but as inherent in the choices they make, rather than as products of external conditions which may not be questioned. It has to be "their fault"; otherwise, people would have to change their outlook on how society works. (oh no!)
Therefore, cultural racism has almost totally replaced scientific racism as the means of rationalizing inequality in society. This article does not examine the various ways in which society is inherently unequal, such as how the same resume will be far less likely to be accepted if the name is "Jamaal" instead of "Matthew".
Rather, it examines ways in which these inequalities are perpetuated through the media which has become so pervasive in the 20th century.
_____________
The Almighty Dollar:
Corporate Media and Racial Stereotypes in an Age of Capitalism
The role of the media in denigrating, dehumanizing and marginalizing racial minorities is nothing new. Hitler made extensive use of the media to solidify German sentiments against the Jews; in America, blackface minstrel shows were instrumental in ossifying racist perceptions of blacks as simple-minded and promoting slavery as beneficial and satisfactory to the slave. Recently, the constant association of Islam with terrorism in the Western media serves to marginalize Muslim immigrants in Europe and create support for Western intervention and imperialism in the Middle East.
However, in the last half of the 20th century, domestic racism in the American media has become more covert; in the patriotic American paradigm, domestic racism cannot be overt because capitalism has begun to supplant religion and race as a proposed source of equality. In other words, at one point in history it was necessary to argue that all were equal before the almighty God; it is now necessary to argue that all are equal before the pursuit of the almighty dollar.
These dichotomies were becoming evident, even before the resurgence of “code-word” racism in the 1980’s, in analysis of the media focus on the “new black middle class”:
"Because of the wide acceptance of the belief of the significant economic progress of blacks, many whites have become increasingly resistant to efforts to racial equality in the areas of education, employment, housing, and economic security… and are strongly resisting the use of their tax dollars on behalf of the poor and minorities…Similarly, while the popular view holds that there has been a significant advancement of blacks into the middle class, it also holds that sizable numbers of blacks are still left behind. But this “chronic” poverty is attributed to the prevalence of a sizable black “underclass” which is said to be characterized by lack of work orientation, lack of education, lack of job skills, long-term unemployment and welfare dependency. "
It is in this context that the corporate media subtly enhances racial divisions in society without truly making them clear for all to see. For example, one study of over 3,000 random Boston news articles collected over a period of one month in the late 1980’s indicated that 85% of the news in the white media about black neighborhoods appealed to stereotypes that blacks are prone to violence, crime, and unstable families, while news from the black Boston media regarding the same neighborhoods tended to report stories about entrepreneurship, academic achievement, and progressive campaigns to alleviate the worst of poverty. The white-owned media also tended to exclusively feature white experts, even on black issues, and denied the role of racism in police brutality, job discrimination, and inequalities in the educational system.
Another study in 1992 found that a “substantial portion” of local news stories that centered on blacks also centered on violent crime committed by blacks. The same study also found that black criminals were far more likely to be portrayed differently than their white counterparts; black criminals would usually “remain unnamed, be seen in handcuffs, in physical custody, and less likely to speak for themselves,” a portrayal that functions to present blacks as physically threatening on the one hand and devoid of personality and self-hood on the other.
In another instance of media prejudice, the assault and gang-rape of a white, female investment banker from the Upper East Side by a group of black and Hispanic youths in Central Park was widely reported in the New York media, while a similar incident involving a black woman in Harlem several weeks prior was almost totally ignored.
The story involving the white victim of minority crime is always judged more newsworthy; in other words, the media deliberately plays up racial tensions for ratings. The media serves to create the perception of blacks as “criminals, crack dealers, drug addicts, murderers, rapists, gang members, welfare mothers, pimps and AIDS victims,” so that when public figures posit “criminals, unwed mothers, and affirmative action beneficiaries” as the source of social evils in American society , instead of the product of social evils, white observers will know exactly who they’re talking about without any need to rely on overtly racial terms.
None of these incidents, however, demonstrate a pronounced indication of deliberately encouraging racism for any sort of clearly articulated capitalist conspiracy to divide the working class. The fundamental focus of these tendencies is not to promote racism in and of itself, but rather to deny that Americans are not equal in their ability to reap the benefits of the capitalist system, while simultaneously harnessing racial tensions to generate interest.
Psychologists such as David Hamilton argue that the “strength of stereotypes” lies in “the mind’s natural bent to seek to confirm its beliefs.” Psychologists who study social cognition call this “theory-driven processing,” based on the belief that stereotypes permeate all levels of information processing “such that they become strongly determinative of relative judgments.” Data-driven processing relies “more on the information of a specific case than on global stereotypes when rendering a judgment. On the other hand, more recent literature has incorporated “data-driven processing” into a “dual process model,” “thereby predicting that stereotype and political judgment will be more closely linked when the case at hand seems to ‘fit’ the individual’s stereotype.”
For example, a black television producer once pitched an idea about the Broadway play “Bubbling Brown Sugar,” which focused on the musical and artistic heritage of Harlem, to a white executive producer; the white producer hated the dress rehearsal, but told the black producer that the play inspired him to do a story about the Harlem drug trade also called “Bubbling Brown Sugar.” The white producer drew a link between blacks in Harlem and heroin trafficking in a setting where artistic achievement was the primary focus; these subconscious biases are the origin of a great deal of racism in the media.
The effects of racism in the media are indisputable. One study indicated that 57% of sixth-graders perceived the sight of a reporter speaking into a microphone to be automatically indicative that the information being presented was truth and another study was released in 1977 which concluded that television was the main source of information about black people for 40% of white children . The portrayal of blacks in the media contributes to the association of violent crime with blacks; the stereotype that “most blacks are violent and aggressive” is one of the most widely expressed negative assumptions made about blacks in America today.
Accordingly, and in line with the aforementioned “dual process model,” whites who hold negative stereotypes about blacks are far more likely to assume guilt on the part of a black person charged with a violent crime such as assault; however, judgment seems to be largely unaffected by racist stereotypes when the defendant is accused of non-violent crime such as embezzlement.
With regards to crime, the media immensely influenced the development of mainstream perceptions regarding the crack epidemic of the late 80’s and early 90’s. Through the media, many people with no exposure to inner-city environments were left with an impression of the crack explosion that involved brutal, amoral retailers on the one end and irresponsible drug addicts on the other; domestic wholesalers were totally ignored by media narratives except when they were glorified in such films as Scarface and New Jack City.
The fact that the media shifted the blame of the epidemic to the potency of crack was instrumental in providing support for legislation ensuring that prosecutions on crack charges would carry a hundred times the weight of prosecutions on charges for powder cocaine. This created a system where police had a much easier time filling their quotas by arresting crack retailers as opposed to cocaine wholesalers; they could either get one five-year minimum by arresting one cocaine wholesaler in possession of 500 grams of powder cocaine, or a hundred such sentences when the product was diluted and distributed to retailers. In fact, people had been free-basing cocaine since the 70’s, and cocaine retailers began cooking crack for any number of reasons: it was a safer alternative to the dangerous process of free-basing cocaine, it was a cheaper alternative to other forms of cocaine, as it could be cut more easily, and it made street dealing significantly more convenient. Crack is no more addictive than free-base, so the crack epidemic must be perceived in a different light.
Another justification that the media provided for the increased penalties involved with crack cocaine was its relationship with violence:
"Dramatic footage of Black and Latino men being carted off in chains, or of police breaking down crackhouse doors, became a near-nightly news event. In July 1986 alone, the three major TV networks offered 74 evening news segments about drugs, half of these about crack…The drug war was not effective or wise policy, but politicians promoted it nonetheless because, among other reasons, it provided a convenient explanation – a scapegoat – for urban poverty."
However, rational analysis provided far different conclusions:
The levels of violence and crime associated with crack appear to reflect parallel and other interactive forces that are related to the relative immaturity and volatility of the crack markets… the increasing social and economic disorganization of the nation’s inner cities beginning in the 1980’s and the mounting proliferation of more powerful guns, as well as the spread of cheaper powder cocaine during this time.
Cheap powder cocaine would later become a contentious issue, after the “crack epidemic” had subsided independently of the government drug war. The corporate media reasserted its nature when an investigative journalist proposed that the crack epidemic could be traced to anti-socialist paramilitary groups in Latin America and their links with the American government. As the United States government had officially prohibited funding counter-revolutionary groups, government operatives blocked investigations into cocaine traffickers who were supplied by anti-socialists such as the Contras and General Noriega. Crack then flooded American cities in the context of extremely cheap cocaine adapted to previous practices designed to maximize profit, the fact that the epidemic was mostly affecting constituencies that were considered to be politically negligible was a key factor in the perpetuation of the cocaine trade.
After the journalist released his allegations, the mainstream media erupted in a firestorm of condemnation against his findings; they focused more on nitpicking irrelevant details and attacking Webb’s credibility than determining the truth of the investigation, which had already been corroborated by John Kerry and would be later acknowledged by the Justice Department and the CIA Inspector-General in 1998. In all cases, the media does not function primarily to openly perpetuate racism, but to consistently legitimize the nature of the capitalist system.
Stereotypes also factor into the dialogue about AIDS in the inner city. In the absence of personal experience with AIDS or the inner city, many attribute the rise of AIDS to an “underclass culture” predisposed to drug abuse and promiscuous behavior, encouraged by media portrayals of inner-city hedonism. This totally contradicts the evidence which indicates that the AIDS rate among white users of intravenous drugs and their partners is substantially lower than that among black and Latino drug users.
If the media reflected reality, it might be more commonly understood that AIDS rates explode in areas targeted by the police, due to the risk of carrying clean needles when paraphernalia is prohibited and disparities in arrest rates coupled with exposure to infection in prison, alongside the tendency of police repression to encourage underground drug clubs, where needles are commonly shared.
Also, drug use tends to be treated as a public health problem rather than a social menace when the user is white; whites are more likely to be sent to treatment center instead of jail, and are rarely arrested for carrying clean syringes, in contrast to minorities in neighborhoods under heavy police surveillance. Finally, effective AIDS education in all settings is often prevented by lack of money, denial of the nature of AIDS, cultural chauvinism, community distrust and myths regarding the origin and spread of AIDS – all of which are much more pressing issues in most minority neighborhoods than in most white neighborhoods.
In conclusion, I argue that as the desire to present all Americans as equal in their pursuit of the dollar requires that public perception no longer considers blacks to be victims of racist institutions and beliefs but rather victims of their own defective morality, the presumption of cultural superiority has in turn replaced genetic superiority as a method of rationalizing social stratification.
Over the last several decades in America, capitalism has begun to supplant religion as the primary means of unifying and equalizing an unequal society through inspirational rhetoric, in part due to the overall decline of religion in the West.
"Everyone can get money! Why aren't you?"
In this new society, inequalities must be presented not as inherent in certain humans but as inherent in the choices they make, rather than as products of external conditions which may not be questioned. It has to be "their fault"; otherwise, people would have to change their outlook on how society works. (oh no!)
Therefore, cultural racism has almost totally replaced scientific racism as the means of rationalizing inequality in society. This article does not examine the various ways in which society is inherently unequal, such as how the same resume will be far less likely to be accepted if the name is "Jamaal" instead of "Matthew".
Rather, it examines ways in which these inequalities are perpetuated through the media which has become so pervasive in the 20th century.
_____________
The Almighty Dollar:
Corporate Media and Racial Stereotypes in an Age of Capitalism
The role of the media in denigrating, dehumanizing and marginalizing racial minorities is nothing new. Hitler made extensive use of the media to solidify German sentiments against the Jews; in America, blackface minstrel shows were instrumental in ossifying racist perceptions of blacks as simple-minded and promoting slavery as beneficial and satisfactory to the slave. Recently, the constant association of Islam with terrorism in the Western media serves to marginalize Muslim immigrants in Europe and create support for Western intervention and imperialism in the Middle East.
However, in the last half of the 20th century, domestic racism in the American media has become more covert; in the patriotic American paradigm, domestic racism cannot be overt because capitalism has begun to supplant religion and race as a proposed source of equality. In other words, at one point in history it was necessary to argue that all were equal before the almighty God; it is now necessary to argue that all are equal before the pursuit of the almighty dollar.
These dichotomies were becoming evident, even before the resurgence of “code-word” racism in the 1980’s, in analysis of the media focus on the “new black middle class”:
"Because of the wide acceptance of the belief of the significant economic progress of blacks, many whites have become increasingly resistant to efforts to racial equality in the areas of education, employment, housing, and economic security… and are strongly resisting the use of their tax dollars on behalf of the poor and minorities…Similarly, while the popular view holds that there has been a significant advancement of blacks into the middle class, it also holds that sizable numbers of blacks are still left behind. But this “chronic” poverty is attributed to the prevalence of a sizable black “underclass” which is said to be characterized by lack of work orientation, lack of education, lack of job skills, long-term unemployment and welfare dependency. "
It is in this context that the corporate media subtly enhances racial divisions in society without truly making them clear for all to see. For example, one study of over 3,000 random Boston news articles collected over a period of one month in the late 1980’s indicated that 85% of the news in the white media about black neighborhoods appealed to stereotypes that blacks are prone to violence, crime, and unstable families, while news from the black Boston media regarding the same neighborhoods tended to report stories about entrepreneurship, academic achievement, and progressive campaigns to alleviate the worst of poverty. The white-owned media also tended to exclusively feature white experts, even on black issues, and denied the role of racism in police brutality, job discrimination, and inequalities in the educational system.
Another study in 1992 found that a “substantial portion” of local news stories that centered on blacks also centered on violent crime committed by blacks. The same study also found that black criminals were far more likely to be portrayed differently than their white counterparts; black criminals would usually “remain unnamed, be seen in handcuffs, in physical custody, and less likely to speak for themselves,” a portrayal that functions to present blacks as physically threatening on the one hand and devoid of personality and self-hood on the other.
In another instance of media prejudice, the assault and gang-rape of a white, female investment banker from the Upper East Side by a group of black and Hispanic youths in Central Park was widely reported in the New York media, while a similar incident involving a black woman in Harlem several weeks prior was almost totally ignored.
The story involving the white victim of minority crime is always judged more newsworthy; in other words, the media deliberately plays up racial tensions for ratings. The media serves to create the perception of blacks as “criminals, crack dealers, drug addicts, murderers, rapists, gang members, welfare mothers, pimps and AIDS victims,” so that when public figures posit “criminals, unwed mothers, and affirmative action beneficiaries” as the source of social evils in American society , instead of the product of social evils, white observers will know exactly who they’re talking about without any need to rely on overtly racial terms.
None of these incidents, however, demonstrate a pronounced indication of deliberately encouraging racism for any sort of clearly articulated capitalist conspiracy to divide the working class. The fundamental focus of these tendencies is not to promote racism in and of itself, but rather to deny that Americans are not equal in their ability to reap the benefits of the capitalist system, while simultaneously harnessing racial tensions to generate interest.
Psychologists such as David Hamilton argue that the “strength of stereotypes” lies in “the mind’s natural bent to seek to confirm its beliefs.” Psychologists who study social cognition call this “theory-driven processing,” based on the belief that stereotypes permeate all levels of information processing “such that they become strongly determinative of relative judgments.” Data-driven processing relies “more on the information of a specific case than on global stereotypes when rendering a judgment. On the other hand, more recent literature has incorporated “data-driven processing” into a “dual process model,” “thereby predicting that stereotype and political judgment will be more closely linked when the case at hand seems to ‘fit’ the individual’s stereotype.”
For example, a black television producer once pitched an idea about the Broadway play “Bubbling Brown Sugar,” which focused on the musical and artistic heritage of Harlem, to a white executive producer; the white producer hated the dress rehearsal, but told the black producer that the play inspired him to do a story about the Harlem drug trade also called “Bubbling Brown Sugar.” The white producer drew a link between blacks in Harlem and heroin trafficking in a setting where artistic achievement was the primary focus; these subconscious biases are the origin of a great deal of racism in the media.
The effects of racism in the media are indisputable. One study indicated that 57% of sixth-graders perceived the sight of a reporter speaking into a microphone to be automatically indicative that the information being presented was truth and another study was released in 1977 which concluded that television was the main source of information about black people for 40% of white children . The portrayal of blacks in the media contributes to the association of violent crime with blacks; the stereotype that “most blacks are violent and aggressive” is one of the most widely expressed negative assumptions made about blacks in America today.
Accordingly, and in line with the aforementioned “dual process model,” whites who hold negative stereotypes about blacks are far more likely to assume guilt on the part of a black person charged with a violent crime such as assault; however, judgment seems to be largely unaffected by racist stereotypes when the defendant is accused of non-violent crime such as embezzlement.
With regards to crime, the media immensely influenced the development of mainstream perceptions regarding the crack epidemic of the late 80’s and early 90’s. Through the media, many people with no exposure to inner-city environments were left with an impression of the crack explosion that involved brutal, amoral retailers on the one end and irresponsible drug addicts on the other; domestic wholesalers were totally ignored by media narratives except when they were glorified in such films as Scarface and New Jack City.
The fact that the media shifted the blame of the epidemic to the potency of crack was instrumental in providing support for legislation ensuring that prosecutions on crack charges would carry a hundred times the weight of prosecutions on charges for powder cocaine. This created a system where police had a much easier time filling their quotas by arresting crack retailers as opposed to cocaine wholesalers; they could either get one five-year minimum by arresting one cocaine wholesaler in possession of 500 grams of powder cocaine, or a hundred such sentences when the product was diluted and distributed to retailers. In fact, people had been free-basing cocaine since the 70’s, and cocaine retailers began cooking crack for any number of reasons: it was a safer alternative to the dangerous process of free-basing cocaine, it was a cheaper alternative to other forms of cocaine, as it could be cut more easily, and it made street dealing significantly more convenient. Crack is no more addictive than free-base, so the crack epidemic must be perceived in a different light.
Another justification that the media provided for the increased penalties involved with crack cocaine was its relationship with violence:
"Dramatic footage of Black and Latino men being carted off in chains, or of police breaking down crackhouse doors, became a near-nightly news event. In July 1986 alone, the three major TV networks offered 74 evening news segments about drugs, half of these about crack…The drug war was not effective or wise policy, but politicians promoted it nonetheless because, among other reasons, it provided a convenient explanation – a scapegoat – for urban poverty."
However, rational analysis provided far different conclusions:
The levels of violence and crime associated with crack appear to reflect parallel and other interactive forces that are related to the relative immaturity and volatility of the crack markets… the increasing social and economic disorganization of the nation’s inner cities beginning in the 1980’s and the mounting proliferation of more powerful guns, as well as the spread of cheaper powder cocaine during this time.
Cheap powder cocaine would later become a contentious issue, after the “crack epidemic” had subsided independently of the government drug war. The corporate media reasserted its nature when an investigative journalist proposed that the crack epidemic could be traced to anti-socialist paramilitary groups in Latin America and their links with the American government. As the United States government had officially prohibited funding counter-revolutionary groups, government operatives blocked investigations into cocaine traffickers who were supplied by anti-socialists such as the Contras and General Noriega. Crack then flooded American cities in the context of extremely cheap cocaine adapted to previous practices designed to maximize profit, the fact that the epidemic was mostly affecting constituencies that were considered to be politically negligible was a key factor in the perpetuation of the cocaine trade.
After the journalist released his allegations, the mainstream media erupted in a firestorm of condemnation against his findings; they focused more on nitpicking irrelevant details and attacking Webb’s credibility than determining the truth of the investigation, which had already been corroborated by John Kerry and would be later acknowledged by the Justice Department and the CIA Inspector-General in 1998. In all cases, the media does not function primarily to openly perpetuate racism, but to consistently legitimize the nature of the capitalist system.
Stereotypes also factor into the dialogue about AIDS in the inner city. In the absence of personal experience with AIDS or the inner city, many attribute the rise of AIDS to an “underclass culture” predisposed to drug abuse and promiscuous behavior, encouraged by media portrayals of inner-city hedonism. This totally contradicts the evidence which indicates that the AIDS rate among white users of intravenous drugs and their partners is substantially lower than that among black and Latino drug users.
If the media reflected reality, it might be more commonly understood that AIDS rates explode in areas targeted by the police, due to the risk of carrying clean needles when paraphernalia is prohibited and disparities in arrest rates coupled with exposure to infection in prison, alongside the tendency of police repression to encourage underground drug clubs, where needles are commonly shared.
Also, drug use tends to be treated as a public health problem rather than a social menace when the user is white; whites are more likely to be sent to treatment center instead of jail, and are rarely arrested for carrying clean syringes, in contrast to minorities in neighborhoods under heavy police surveillance. Finally, effective AIDS education in all settings is often prevented by lack of money, denial of the nature of AIDS, cultural chauvinism, community distrust and myths regarding the origin and spread of AIDS – all of which are much more pressing issues in most minority neighborhoods than in most white neighborhoods.
In conclusion, I argue that as the desire to present all Americans as equal in their pursuit of the dollar requires that public perception no longer considers blacks to be victims of racist institutions and beliefs but rather victims of their own defective morality, the presumption of cultural superiority has in turn replaced genetic superiority as a method of rationalizing social stratification.