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Please turn off your ad blocker in order to continue. To thank you for doing so, we’re happy to present you with an ad-light experience. Hi again. Looks like you’re still using an ad blocker. Please turn it off in order to continue into Forbes' ad-light experience. Thank you for turning off your ad blocker! Media-made racism: A New Jersey case study. Now you can’t goof around at a high school basketball game in silly costumes without the world accusing you of “racial insensitivity.”
Last week, the students of Holy Spirit High School in Absecon, NJ, garnered international headlines and Internet infamy. “Shocking moment students at Catholic school dressed as monkeys and a banana and taunted black basketball players . . . and DIDN’T get punished,” the Daily Mail blared. “Students who taunted black players at New Jersey basketball game get warning, no punishment,” USA Today decried.
Modal Trigger Bossip.com, “the premier destination for African-American pop culture and entertainment,” exclaimed: “Really?!? No, not really. Holy Spirit is a tight-knit community with a 50-year tradition of excellence in academics, sports and character education. I know more than a little about the school and its student body because I’m a proud alumna of Holy Spirit and have stayed in touch with many of its dedicated teachers and administrators over the years.
Why Is So Much Racist Nonsense Peddled in Sports Coverage? This article first appeared on the London School of Economics site.
For many, sport represents the ultimate color-blind space, affording a level playing field where only one’s training and skills are the hallmarks of competition. Hence, racist and prejudicial beliefs and phenomena are both literally and figuratively, out-of-bounds. Moreover, sport has been understood as an activity that promotes racial harmony among participants and observers. But such a claim is a bit simplistic. Try Newsweek for only $1.25 per week To make sense of the correlation between different racial groups’ success and failures amid different athletic events, many draw from the deep well of scientific racism to quench their thirst for explanatory knowledge. After African-American boxer Jack Johnson became the heavyweight champion of the world in 1908, he precipitated a slow reconsideration of the assumption of non-whites’ physical inferiority —a central tenet of early 20th century racial science and eugenics.
Racism is a 'big problem' to more Americans, poll finds. Alex Sproul reads about it in his Facebook feed.
Sheryl Sims senses it when she walks down the street. They are three Americans from three different demographic groups living in three different states. And they believe the same thing: Racism is a big problem. Shooters of color are called ‘terrorists’ and ‘thugs.’ Why are white shooters called ‘mentally ill’? Media pundits have already started to use the “mental illness” narrative to characterize suspected shooter Dylann Roof.
Why not call him a suspected terrorist? (Facebook account of Dylann Roof) Police are investigating the fatal shooting of nine African Americans at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, S.C., as a hate crime committed by a white man. Unfortunately, it’s not a unique event in American history. Black churches have long been targets of white supremacists who burned and bombed them in an effort to terrorize the black communities those churches anchored. But listen to major media outlets, and you won’t hear the word “terrorism” used in coverage of Wednesday’s shooting.
That narrative has formed quickly for Roof. U.S. media outlets practice a different policy when covering crimes involving African Americans or Muslims. [Jon Stewart’s blistering monologue about race, terrorism and gun violence in America] Roof is getting the same treatment. More from PostEverything: Many Ask, Why Not Call Church Shooting Terrorism?
The massacre of nine African-Americans in Charleston has been classified as a possible hate crime, apparently carried out by a 21-year-old white man who once wore an apartheid badge and other symbols of white supremacy.
But many civil rights advocates are asking why the attack has not officially been called terrorism. Against the backdrop of rising worries about violent Muslim extremism in the United States, advocates see hypocrisy in the way the attack and the man under arrest in the shooting have been described by law enforcement officials and the news media. Assaults like the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013 and the attack on an anti-Islamic gathering in Garland, Tex., last month have been widely portrayed as acts of terrorism carried out by Islamic extremists. Critics say, however, that assaults against African-Americans and Muslim Americans are rarely if ever called terrorism.
Photo. Mass Media and Racism. By Stephen Balkaran Mass media have played and will continue to play a crucial role in the way white Americans perceive African-Americans.
As a result of the overwhelming media focus on crime, drug use, gang violence, and other forms of anti-social behavior among African-Americans, the media have fostered a distorted and pernicious public perception of African-Americans.1.