Republican Academic Racists Make Mainstream Inroads
Friday, April 22, 2005 at 02:00PM
TheSpook
''If the black man wins,'' warned a New
York Times editorial on the eve of the historic 1910 fight between Jack
Johnson and ''Great White Hope'' Jim Jeffries, ''thousands and
thousands of his ignorant brothers will misinterpret his victory as
justifying claims to much more than mere physical equality with their
white neighbors'' (New York Times, 7/3/1910—as cited on PBS’s
Unforgivable Blackness, 1/17/05). In an earlier editorial (11/1/1909),
the editors worried over the fight while revealing what passed for
discretion at the Times of nearly a hundred years ago: ''[We] will wait
in open anxiety at the news that he has licked the—well, since it must
be in print, let us say the Negro, even though it is not the first word
that comes to the tongue’s tip.'' Of course, great strides have been
made by American media and society since that editorial, and many
others like it, were published. But progress seems to come in fits and
starts. It doesn’t help that journalists often fail to recognize and
challenge racism, even when—or perhaps especially when—it involves
their own institutions. Racism, in fact, may be gaining a firmer
foothold in American media institutions as its promoters adopt more
stealthy and sophisticated ways of presenting it. Consider two recent
episodes in which David Brooks and John Tierney, both conservative New
York Times writers, touted the work of Steve Sailer, a well-known
promoter of racist and anti-immigrant theories. [more]
Article originally appeared on (http://brownwatch.com/).
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