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:

On Chris Brown, Rihanna, women as suspect, & teenage domestic violence

On Chris Brown, Rihanna, women as suspect, & teenage domestic violence

 

By Tamara K. Nopper

 

February 14, 2009

 

I have been preoccupied by the recent news of music artist Chris Brown’s arrest for making criminal threats against a woman, presumably his then-girlfriend, music artist Rihanna.  Chalk up my interest in the issue to both my love of popular culture and my concerns about domestic violence and violence against women. 

 

As a woman who has been thrown up against a wall by my neck and punched in the stomach by a boyfriend, I am acutely aware of what it’s like to survive domestic violence and to have to negotiate all of the assumptions about how women “cause” violence against them.  As such, I am of course frustrated and saddened by claims made that Rihanna probably “instigated” the violence against her. 

 

This claim is being promoted on websites and blogs by a variety of Brown’s supporters.  As many Brown fans point out, we don’t know what happened just yet.  Indeed, we don’t know if violence was perpetrated by Brown and if so, who he victimized, even though unidentified police sources have claimed it was Rihanna.  Yet many commentaries suggest that we can not pass judgment on Brown but that we can bet that Rihanna “instigated” the violence. 

Obamas’ marriage & the quest for legitimacy

February 1, 2009

 

The election of Barack Obama to the U.S. presidency has been accompanied by non-stop reminders of the love between Barack Obama and Michelle Obama and the social significance of the marriage for American racial and gender politics.  In short, the relationship is supposed to prove to African Americans and non-African Americans alike that there are 1) Black men and Black women who love each other and have “healthy” marriages and happy nuclear families; 2) that a Black man can love a (relatively dark-skinned) Black woman; 3) that “love” and marriage is “possible” for Black women; and 4) that a relatively dark-skinned woman can be a “good mother.”  Such discourse can be found on the airwaves, television commentary, magazines, websites, and the popular buttons worn by many African American women that show the first couple or first family. 

 

Embedded in the discussions is a celebration of President Obama’s choice of a relatively dark-skinned, not-so-skinny, highly-educated, and professionally accomplished Black woman.  When B. Obama’s Blackness was first being widely debated (before he won the primary), I heard many people defend him by pointing out that he was “willing” to marry a dark-skinned Black woman from the south side of Chicago rather than marry outside of his race or an immigrant or biracial Black woman.  For some who are critical of B. Obama, his marriage to M. Obama is treated as a calculated political decision in order to woo Black voters.  In other words, some suspect that Obama purposefully married a dark-skinned, south side Chicago Black woman to be “down.” 

The trouble with transgender politics

The trouble with transgender politics

 

By Tamara K. Nopper

 

August 15, 2008

 

I have become increasingly interested in and troubled by transgender politics. I first learned what the term transgender meant when, almost a decade ago, I worked with a person who self-identified as trans. She no longer (or perhaps never did) identified with the physical body in which she inhabited. Eventually, she asked us to begin identifying her with male pronouns, altered her name slightly to drop a letter at the end that identified the name as female, and engaged in a series of behaviors that were, to put it mildly, masculine (and at times downright dudish), which, presumably, was to remind us that she was now a transgender man.

 

I was not yet familiar with the term transgender, something that my co-worker assumed I should have been since I was, at the time, enrolled in a Ph.D. program. According to my co-worker, I should have “known better.” While revealing his bourgeois belief that political enlightenment is actually encouraged in the U.S. academy, I was more intrigued with his assumption that I should politically care about his need to be accepted as another gender than what he had been assigned. I had never really thought of having another gender as a political option. I had only considered how men and women were exotified and disciplined, in a variety of ways, for not having bodies that were deemed appropriate. And given that my own Asian body, what many label as “thick,” was often treated as an illicit spectacle by a multiracial group of observers, I was already aware that a fixation on bodies is very much shaped by racial ideologies about what is viewed as appropriate physiology for one’s race. And I also knew that no one had an appropriate body unless the body was white.