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| Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly (Credit: Reuters/Micah Walter/AP/Douglas C. Pizac) |
New Rules: Instead of standing in the school house door, the new
Segregationist sit in front of cameras and microphones while using the public airways to enable media driven racial stereotypes.
It is not simply that Black people are victims of a numbers game.
Rather, there has been a wholesale P.R. campaign on the part of those on
the right to associate all public goods and services, from public
schools to public assistance, with the bodies of undeserving people of
color, particularly Blacks and Latinos.
Yep, the white, male dominated, media enables
elected officials , and others in
position of power and
influence, to drive a
false narrative.
Any discussion of welfare or public assistance in this country is rife
with dog whistles from the right toward the lower elements of their
base, who in Pavlovian fashion, respond to code words about welfare and
public assistance by conjuring images of the undeserving Black and Brown
poor.
Segregation
today, segregation
tomorrow, segregation
forever, from
sea to shining
sea.
In his new book “How Propaganda Works,” Yale philosopher Jason Stanley argues that while a “liberal democratic culture… does not tolerate explicit degradation
of its citizens,” there are “apparently innocent words that have the
feature of slurs, namely that whenever the words occur in a sentence,
they convey the problematic content. The word welfare …conveys a
problematic social meaning.” I am suggesting that the word “public” in
our political discourse is becoming just such a tool of political
propaganda as well.
Who needs
George Wallace when we have
the media?
Despite bright spots in the mainstream media for representing race and gender diversity, like Melissa Harris-Perry on MSNBC,
the output of the industry largely still appears white and male. Almost
40 percent of the U.S. identifies as nonwhite and women make up more
than half of the population, yet popular media outlets largely remain
homogenous. Missing diverse perspectives from the media landscape can
have wide-ranging detrimental effects.
Ya Think?
