Mainstream media & the spectacle of racism

Mainstream media & the spectacle of racism

Tamara K. Nopper

August 12, 2009

The recent media frenzy over the arrest of Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. has helped to reproduce the popular myth that racism is a spectacle instead of a constant thread that informs political and social life.  In the case of Gates, the media focused on him because his status as a Harvard professor made him an attractive and “interesting” subject when it came to talking about racism and also because he holds power in spheres of influence.  More, the mainstream media was able to use the Gates’ case to talk about whether racism still exists by playing up the idea that racism is simply an issue of (mis)perceptions and (mis)understanding.  While the hype over Gates’ case is an example of how mainstream media promotes racism as a spectacle, another way in which mainstream news encourages this approach to racism is by sanitizing aspects of news stories or giving little coverage to incidents of racism.  By doing so, the mainstream media contributes to the misguided belief that racism is on the decline, especially in the “Obama era” and that situations like Gates’ case are spectacles deserving excessive attention because they supposedly hardly happen “anymore.”  But there are plenty of news and news-worthy stories that have received either limited attention in national (and at times local) mainstream news or barely address how racism played a role in the situation that is being covered.  Here are some recent examples:

While many of us were fed hours of really bad journalism and analysis regarding Gates’ arrest, the U.S. Senate was busy passing legislation that would include gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people under hate crimes provisions.  I am not a fan of hate crimes legislation to the extent that it treats “hate” against categories of people as spectacles, but it is noticeable that many of the transgendered folks whose violent assaults and deaths became part of the organizational and public appeal for LGBT inclusion under this provision were Black.  Because of the racial, sexual, and gender politics of organizations and the media, we heard little about the violent deaths of the Black trans women whose lives were invoked as reasons for why hate crime protection of trans folks is needed.  While this list is not exhaustive, there are several to name here.  In November of 2008, Moses “Teish” Cannon, a 22-year old from Syracuse, New York, was lured to a parking lot and shot and killed.  Her family, who accepted Cannon being openly gay and trans, pushed for hate crime charges.  The same month and year, Duanna Johnson was “found dead” in Memphis, Tennessee, around the time that she was preparing to file a lawsuit against Memphis police for being beaten while she was in jail.  Also in Memphis, Leeneshia Edwards was shot in the face, back, and jaw as she got out her car in December of 2008.  In the same city, 21-year old Tiffany Berry was shot and killed in February of 2006 and two years later, 20-year old Ebony Whitaker was “found dead.”  In January of 2007, Nakia Baker was found beaten to death in a parking lot of a Nashville club. 

Similar to these Black trans women whose stories tended to appear in local media and among bloggers committed to getting their story out, the situation of five Black male current and former employees of a city of Philadelphia’s trash handling plant, the Northwest Transfer Station, received limited attention in Philly media and got some circulation among Black websites and blogs dedicated to dealing with racism.  A rather detailed story about their case appeared on the website for the Philadelphia Daily News on July 29, but was eclipsed by the media fixation on the “beer summit” held at the White House.  The story detailed how five workers, all in their fifties, allege that their white superintendent, John Gill, has discriminated against them because they are Black.  The men, including Lawrence “Lonnie” Powell, William Wilkins, and Russell Turner describe being told by Gill that they were drinking too much water during the summer and having the water cooler chained and locked in a dirty closet as well as being forced to ask permission to use the bathroom and then having to use one five stories down while white workers were able to use one 25 feet from the from the work station.  Powell bravely revealed that he had defecated on himself several times in the process of trying to get to the bathroom so far away.  While the Assistant City Solicitor Geoffrey D. Bruen said that the city and Gill deny the allegations because they are “absolutely untrue,” Gill has been in trouble before.  A case that two Black workers, Gibson Trowery and Leslie Young Jr., filed in October of 2007 with the Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission claimed that Gill had referred to the trash station as the “Northwest plantation.”  During that case, Gill reportedly didn’t deny the allegation of calling the site a plantation but rather claimed that he was joking.  And things had to be bad if earlier in 2007, no Black workers were willing to show up to work, as happened on August 17 of that year, a day some workers call “Black Friday.” 

A Pennsylvanian who got far more mainstream media attention nationally than the Black city trash workers was Bonnie Sweeten, the white woman who falsely claimed that she and her daughter, Julia Rakoczy, had been stuffed in the trunk of a cadillac.  They had actually flown to Disney World using tickets purchased through a form of identity theft.  While this fact got reported far and wide, mainstream news sources barely mentioned that Sweeten had accused two Black men of being the culprits.  I had read about her lying about two Black male perpetrators when I was reading a blogpost by Dr. Yolanda Pierce, an African American professor at Princeton University.  While at the gym, I watched Good Morning America run the story over and over again about the return of Rakoczy to Pennsylvania.  Although Rakoczy got airtime to talk about how excited she was to meet a Phillies baseball player, and Sweeten’s ex-husband, Anthony Rakoczy, got a chance to stress that his former wife was a good mother, Good Morning America never mentioned during the entire time I watched that two Black men had been accused of committing a crime that did not happen.  When I returned home from the gym I went on-line to google news and put in a series of search words about Sweeten’s story.  Several stories came up in my search.  Yet very few mainstream news stations and on-line sites reported Sweeten’s racist act.  Instead, and thankfully, smaller and lesser known Black websites drew attention to it. 

During the time that we were inundated with the spectacle of Gates, Black protestors were facing off with whites, some of them neo-Nazis, in Paris, Texas over the dragging death of a 24-year old Black man, Brandon McClelland.  In one instance, Black protestors bravely stepped outside of the protest zone regulated by the state as the appropriate boundary for protest.  Yet this face-off received very little attention in mainstream news.  Again, at the gym, I saw a morning news show (I forget if this one is Good Morning America, but it might have been because the gym tends to have either ABC or ESPN on) and Gates’ case received three separate notes on the ticker. The face off in Paris received one.  When I asked several of my friends if they had heard about the protests, very few of them had, and these are people who are constantly reading and watching the news, both mainstream and non-mainstream, and are involved in work that addresses racism. 

About a week after the “beer summit,” George Sodini, a middle-aged white man, opened fire on an aerobics class in Bridgeville, Pennsylvania on August 4, killing three women, Heidi Overmier, Jody Billingsley, and Elizabeth Gannon, and then took his own life.  The story was widely reported in mainstream news, with a great deal of attention given to his blog that chronicled his violent plans.  Rightfully, mainstream news, as well as bloggers, emphasized Sodini’s hostility toward women and his participation in “dating guru” R. Don Steele’s dating workshops.  Yet very few news sources have reported on Sodini’s racist discussions of Black men and white women that suggest his hostility toward women was influenced by a racist misogyny in which he felt rejected by white women for Black men.  The lack of reporting on this fact by mainstream news is even more egregious given how much his blog has been picked apart and that his entry on interracial dating was the first one of the blog.  Posted on November 5, the day after B. Obama’s election, the entry is a diatribe against Black males and white women who are attracted to them:

In light of this I got ideas outside of Obama’s plans for the economy and such. Here it is: Every black man should get a young white girl hoe to hone up on. Kinda a reverse indentured servitude thing. Long ago, many a older white male landowner had a young Negro wench girl for his desires. Bout’ time tables are turned on that shit. Besides, dem young white hoez dig da bruthrs! LOL. More so than they dig the white dudes! Every daddy know when he sends his little girl to college, she be bangin a bruthr real good. I saw it. “Not my little girl”, daddy says! (Yeah right!!) Black dudes have thier choice of best white hoez. You do the math, there are enough young white so all the brothers can each have one for 3 or 6 months or so.

A month before Sodini’s racist anti-women murder spree, I saw Morris Dees from the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) on C-span talking about the increase in white supremacist activity after B. Obama’s election.  I am not a fan of Dees because I find it ridiculous that he equates the rhetoric and actions of Black organizations with white supremacist organizations and that the SPLC includes the former in its list of hate groups.  However, I did think the point he kept hammering home to his audience, which was comprised of members of the National Press Club, who sponsored Dees’ presentation, was an important one.  He emphasized that despite the desire to see the election of a Black president as an indication that racism is on the decline, data on hate groups shows that white supremacist groups are even more popular and on the rise after the election.  Additionally, Dees mentioned, as is known among anti-war and counter-military recruitment organizations, white supremacist groups are purposefully having members, particularly those who have no tattoos or visible markers of group affiliation, enlist in the military so they can receive free training in weaponry and explosives.  According to Mark Potok, who edits the Intelligence Report, which is an investigative journal monitoring the “radical right,” “Barack Obama’s election has inflamed racist extremists who see it as another sign that their country is under siege by non-whites.  The idea of a black man in the White House, combined with the deepening economic crisis and continuing high levels of Latino immigration, has given white supremacists a real platform on which to recruit.”  Although I’m not a fan of B. Obama, it is clear that there are plenty of white people (as well as non-whites) who are not happy at the thought of a Black man running things, despite how corny he is and how limited his impact may be in terms of substantial changes in favor of Blacks. 

Yet mainstream media barely circulated the findings that Dees reported at the National Press Club, which is not surprising but noticeable given that the organization calls itself “The world’s leading professional organization for journalists.”  To be fair, the website for the National Press Club does have some posts on its wire about SPLC’s findings about the increase in white supremacist groups, but given that the luncheon at which Dees spoke was filled with journalists, why hasn’t there been more reporting of this finding in mainstream news?

Taken together, my emphasis on these people and issues—violence against and murder of Black trans women, Black city workers alleging racism, Sweeten, protests in Paris, Sodini, the rise in white supremacist activity—could be accused of being preoccupied with “flashpoint racism,”or emphasizing spectacles in order to challenge the mainstream media’s focus on racism as spectacle.  I agree; an emphasis on flashpoint racism does not address how racism is a structuring and foundational aspect of U.S. society.  My point, though, is really simple: we need more reporting of the racist aspects of events that do get media attention and obviously more reporting of all types of racism than gets airtime in the mainstream news.  And of course, we need better reporting and commentary than the terrible work done by both journalists and many public intellectuals regarding Gates’ arrest.  Taken together, more mainstream news reporting on the racist aspects of the situations that occur and that are covered could help combat the tendency among many in the general public to discount how widespread and mundane racism is.