The MSM stirring the racism pot
The left and the MSM (but I repeat myself) have created a narrative of increasing racism over the last ten years:
…[T]he media’s embrace of “wokeness” did not begin in response to the death of George Floyd. This racial ideology first began to take hold at leading liberal media institutions years before the arrival of Donald Trump and, in fact, heavily influenced the journalistic response to the protest movements of recent years and their critique of American society.
Starting well before Donald Trump’s rise to power, while President Obama was still in office, terms like “microaggression” and “white privilege” were picked up by liberal journalists. These terms went from being obscure fragments of academic jargon to commonplace journalistic language in only a few years—a process that I document here in detail. During this same period, while exotic new phrases were entering the discourse, universally recognizable words like “racism” were being radically redefined. Along with the new language came ideas and beliefs animating a new moral-political framework to apply to public life and American society.
This is followed by a graph which cannot be reproduced here, so you’ll have to follow the link to see it. It tells the tale of a sharp increase in “the usage of the terms ‘racist(s)’ and ‘racism’ as a percentage of all words in four of the nation’s largest newspapers from (depending on the publication) 1970 through 2019.” You can see from the graph that the increase began around 2011 in all four papers, with the WaPo leading the way in steepness of the climb, the NY Times not far behind, the WSJ having a much more modest increase, and the LA Times somewhere in-between the WSJ and the NY Times.
It is highly unlikely that racism itself ramped up during those years; just the propaganda about it. The reporting increase predated Trump and started during the presidency of that great racial healer, Barack Obama. The mechanism came from academia, and involved defining racism as something so broad that it can consist of nearly anything:
In the absence of legal discrimination, in the post-affirmative-action era, and in light of the immense absolute improvements in the quality of life of the average Black person over the past half century, concepts like “microaggression” and “implicit bias” have been critical in cultivating the perception, amplified by the media, that America still practices a form of insidious racial apartheid. This occurs by a process of concept creep—a stretching of the terminological and normative boundaries of what constitutes racism and racist behavior. In other words: The racialization of things that weren’t previously viewed or understood through the lens of race. The upshot is that the more aspects of social life the media racializes, the more “racism” there is for the media to report on.
And like all effective propaganda, many people appear highly susceptible to it – and those people are of the white Democrat persuasion:
In 2011, just 35% of white liberals thought racism in the United States was “a big problem,” according to national polling. By 2015, this figure had ballooned to 61% and further still to 77% in 2017.
In December of 2006, 45% of white Democrats and 41% of white Republicans reported that they knew someone they considered racist. By June of 2015, this figure increased to 64% among white Democrats, while remaining at a steady 41% among white Republicans. No increases were observed for any of the nonwhite Democrat groups. In fact, what (statistically insignificant) change occurred among Black (52.7% to 47.2%) and Hispanic (41.1% to 33.8%) Democrats were actually in the opposite direction.
There’s a great deal more at the link.
If one is motivated to look for something, one may be particularly scrupulous about not missing any details, no matter how small.
That would, of course, include changed definitions.
From my observations racism had pretty much disappeared in the US until Obama came along. I love to watch football, which is 75% black. Nobody cared and the small boys would wear team shirts with the numbers of black players, hardly a racist act. All the commercials during a game had lots people of all colors. It had become a non-issue.
Then Obama came along and started stirring the pot telling an audience that the white people were going to have to sit in the back from now on. Talk about racism, and from the President of the US!
The lack of attention by the MSM to the implications of the latest evidence in the case of Floyd is similar to the absence of commentary about the newly-revealed links of Clinton to Epstein and his infamous island of horrors. In both instances, the ever-increasing information severely undermines the only narrative allowed to exist by leftists and their enablers in the media, and it must therefore be ignored (the situation, of course, was identical in the Russiagate hoax).
It’s so very frustrating for me to see these charges of “racism” everywhere. I can remember clearly the years when it actually WAS everywhere. Now, everyplace I go (before the virus, when I could still go places), Americans of all races and ethnicities are represented as both employees and customers, in every possible role. Younger people may not realize that this was not always so.
Whoever controls the dialog controls the narrative. Journalists who always promote the DNC narrative like Chris Hayes, Rachel Maddow and Joy Reid are richly rewarded.
In 2006 (during Chimpy McBushitler’s 2nd term) there was a sci-fi show that came out that took as its conceit that 4400 people had been abducted by aliens in the past 80-ish years or so and then all dropped off in rural Oregon in 2006 after stasis, so no aging or anything.
One of the major storylines involved a black veteran who’d been abducted in the 1950’s being shown very ham-handedly how racism just isn’t a thing anymore.
Yup. Hollywood put that message out in 2006 under that Nazi Bush. But now everyone’s all racist all the time. Well… all the white people, anyway. /sarc
In 1966, my family moved from Minot, ND to Prattville, AL. George Wallace was governor. In Minot we lived and went to school on base. In Bama, my father was a student at the Air University at Maxwell AFB so no quarters thus we lived and went to school off base. It was climate shock and culture shock. My sister’s best friend at Minot had been black. On the first day of school, there was this one black girl on our bus that was going to the black JHS. I don’t know why she was assigned to ride the white grade school bus. My sister went and sat by her. The bus driver came absolutely uncorked and threw the black girl off the bus on the spot. My sister was stunned of course and couldn’t understand what she had done wrong. On the way home that afternoon, one of the barefoot hillbilly boys was thrown off the bus for smoking a corn cob pipe.
I love to watch football, which is 75% black. Nobody cared and the small boys would wear team shirts with the numbers of black players, hardly a racist act. All the commercials during a game had lots people of all colors. It had become a non-issue.
One of the great TV commercials was that of a small white kid giving “Mean Joe Green” a Coke. In return, Green tossed him a jersey. It’s been downhill since, especially with Obama.
I didn’t have the stamina to go through all the graphs, as 1 or 2 graphs sufficed for me to see confirmation of my opinion that the MSM had been increasingly pushing the “racism” trope in the last 10 years. Really increasingly, according to the first graph.
All that media outrage over the deaths of 6’2″ “child” Trayvon and the “gentle giant” in Missourah, and their killers were found innocent. That told me the media outrage was ginned up. Also note that Black Lives Matter was founded in response to those deaths. More ginned-up outrage. (As further indication of what a sham BLM is, consider that BLM Co-founder Opal Tometi is a supporter of Venezuelan dictator Maduro. Venezuelan police kill at a horrific rate. Crickets from Opal.)
One bar graph had answers to the the Question, “Do you know anyone who you would consider a racist or not? percent yes”
2006 2015
White Democrat 45.4 63.9
Black Democrat 52.7 27.2
Hispanic Democrat 41.1 33.8
White Republican 40.9 41.1
It appears to me that White Democrats pay attention to and believe the MSM, while White Republicans don’t pay attention to the MSM and /or don’t believe the MSM. Interesting that Black Democrats inform us that racism has declined, but White Democrats believe that racism has increased.
I’m a Human Bio-Diversity (HBD) Realist (= a Racist in the Current Year) and that’s OK.
The data suggest it has to do with the dynamics of social class competition among whites, which changes from cohort to cohort. And keep in mind, the actual semantic content of ‘racist’ is unstable.
Gringo, that 64% of white Democrats who think they know a racist is consistent with the fact that most of the BLM protesters, and even more, the Antifa rioters, are white liberals. Many are white female liberals.
Wokery was already underway in the late 90s. I have been boxing books – inefficiently, as I stop and read. Came across some of Bill James’s baseball stuff. There were 2 cases he discussed: in 1997, Marge Schott, Al Campanis, and Jimmie the Greek. And in 2000, John Rocker.
This stuff has been growing for a while. The big difference is that the volume has been turned up, and it is more continuous. But the tune is the same.
(James, BTW, was sound on the issue.)
If someone accuses you of racism, Agree and Amplify, then laugh in their faces.
Best not try this at work if you rely on an income. But for the rest, it’s time to take a stand. You gain nothing by denying and listing all the special protected class instances who are your bestest buddies. It’s like trying to deny an accusation that you beat your wife.
A lot of us are like Kate: We remember back to the 50s and 60s when bigotry was alive and real. What we have now is nothing short of a miracle; no one could have predicted it.
Up until very recently terms like systemic racism and white privilege would just make me want to roll my eyes. But now I’m inclined to anger. How dare you deny the gains of the last 50 years.
Related (from paper of record):
https://tinyurl.com/y3tjk5r9
+ Special Bonus (in these difficult times):
https://babylonbee.com/news/biden-screams-at-pigeon-i-dont-need-a-cognitive-test
Paper of Record now Official:
https://babylonbee.com/news/snopes-rates-babylon-bee-worlds-accurate-news-source
I’m going to have to give up linking Bee articles, because every one of Neo’s posts is addressed by several of them, especially if you go back into the archives.
When I first started commenting on blogs, I tried to use the original Aesop’s Fables as tie-ins to the Crisis du Jour, but the repetition became boring.
Just suffice it to say, Old Aesop pretty much covered the territory, just as the Bee does.
My other primary source for “official news” is the oeuvre of op-ed Twitter threads by John Hayward aka Doc Zero, unrolled for easier reading here:
https://threadreaderapp.com/user/Doc_0
He cuts through to the heart of most of today’s issues in what are really essays, chopped up for the Twits, this being the modern blog form for people who don’t want to maintain a full-service website.
I believe I’ve said it before so I’ll put it provocatively. I believe there is residual white racism. I see that racism as two kinds. The first kind is the old overt white racism that pegged that little “White Only” sign into the lawn outside a roadhouse in Virginia the first time I travelled below the Mason Dixon line in 1963. It was certainly still present in 1998 in East Texas when two white men dragged James Byrd Jr to death behind a pickup. Unlike in the segregation era two whit men discovered that a jury would convict them. One of them was executed in 1919, the other is serving life. Then there were the black people in in the South Carolina church gunned down during the Obama era. Still, I believe that old variety of racism has steadily diminished over my lifetime, and agree with the majority on this site that most of this kind of racism is pretty well gone. But there is another kind of white racism that I don’t think has gone away or diminished at all in my lifetime. And that is the assumed duty of the white race “to uplift, civilise and Christianise” their little brown brothers as President McKinley so eloquently expressed it over a century ago. LBJ put it more subtly when he compared the situation to a foot race and made a case for giving blacks some form of assistance or head start. But however whites express that kind of tacit sense of superiority is the core attitude. Larry Elder and Candice Owens point explicitly to how the LBJ era’s well intended assistance actually destroyed the black family. The kind of institutional racism revels itself in failing to notice these policy disasters, and outright denying that these policies ave failed. The give away is that the whites never are willing to just and let blacks have full agency and hold blacks responsible for their actions as true equals. I believe it is because many whites still unconsciously regard blacks as children and treat them as such. – witlessly mixing their parenting instincts into the racial stew. I have been guilty of it myself to a degree. For example I first noticed in 68-69 while working on the Southside of Chicago in a black institution that there came a point where the blacks began to kick the whites out of the civil rights movement. I had enough of an intuitive feel for the situation to understand that moment of taking full control was necessary. That a certain element of Malcolm X separatism needed to be alloyed with MLK’s reconciliation. I did not have enough understanding back then to see that when I said I wanted to STABD BEHIND a black protest at our institution why I was immediately corrected by a white person “No’ we should stand BESIDE them.” The implication being that it would be cowardly to stand BEHIND. I accepted the criticism at the time – but in retrospect I think I chose the right word. What I didn’t have the nous or depth of understanding to see was that I intuitively wanted to SUPPORT the black cause, while letting the black people make the running. Today I support conservative black voices from Shelby Steele to Condi Rice. To BLM I say go ahead and live out your Marxist program, that is your affair, but no, I don’t support you.
So, guys. You accused me of being a racist, right? Deal with it.
Not. Interested.
Lorenz Gude
It [racism] was certainly still present in 1998 in East Texas when two white men dragged James Byrd Jr to death behind a pickup. Unlike in the segregation era two whit[e] men discovered that a jury would convict them.
The convicting jury `in Byrd’s death wasn’t the first evidence of change in East Texas. A black man who owned a business in Jasper pointed out to me that instead of no one in Jasper identifying Byrd’s killers- which used to be a common response in the South – people in the community quickly told law enforcement who the killers were.
BTW, he also said that Ted Koppel and other media people who came into Jasper came across as condescending so-and-so’s who had little interest in listening to what people in the community had to say.
Today I support conservative black voices from Shelby Steele to Condi Rice. To BLM I say go ahead and live out your Marxist program, that is your affair, but no, I don’t support you.
Yup.
Pukudude, 5:47, 8/6:
“…Chimpy McBushitler…”
“…Nazi Bush…”
A squalid little troll excreting what’s left of his pathetic venom on Neo’s classy site.
I believe I’ve said it before
1. Concision is a virtue.
2. About 13% of all homicides in this country feature an offender and a victim on opposite sides of the color bar. About 70% of the perpetrators of such homicides are black. A typical metropolitan region in this country will see about 45 homicides a year, of which about two (2) will be blacks killed by non-blacks. Lethal violence committed by whites contra blacks is simply not a common problem in this country; nor is any other sort of violence committed by whites contra blacks a common problem.
3. There’s no reason to believe welfare policy was aught but a weak vector influencing the quality of family relations in this country. The breakdown in family stability occurred in every stratum of society and was not reversed in the least by the radical reduction (after 1995) in benefit income distributed to women with ba*tard children.
Diversity dogma (i.e. class-based systems, processes, and beliefs), notably derived from low information attributes, not limited to racism, sexism, and affirmative discrimination, is a progressive condition.
The convicting jury `in Byrd’s death wasn’t the first evidence of change in East Texas.
There were five homicides recorded in Jasper County between the beginning of 1999 and the end of 2004. Given that the population of the county at the time was just north of 35,000, that translates into a mean annual rate of 2.3 per 100,000. Lethal violence isn’t all that common there. The rate’s higher than you’d find in a non-metropolitan county in New York or New England, to be sure; the demographics of the county are a tad different than is the norm up north. (I’m going to wager Jasper County’s homicides are – with few exceptions – the issue of domestic disputes and bar fights).
NeoConScum:
I believe that pkudude99’s references there were sarcasm. There’s a sarcasm tag at the end.
Lorenz Gude –
Very true what you say about whites and black agency.
You mentioned Shelby Steele – I just finished his 2015 book “Shame” and I highly, highly recommend it. Steele, IMO, gets it right about both races.
Neo: Apology if you’re right. Tired beyond describing of alleged conservatives dumping on our Great 9/11 Warrior President. Thank God for him.
Apparent subtlety radar lapse.
“institutional racism reveals itself in failing to notice these policy disasters, and outright denying that these policies have failed.” – Lorenz
Which is why all of the “racism” on display today is occurring in cities and states that are majority Democrat, and often run by Black Democrats, and have been for decades.
Lorenz’s contrast of overt and covert racism reminds me of the same contrast between overt and covert oppression — it is sometimes easier to deal with the overt type, because you know what it is and who is doing it, others can also see it (unlike microaggressions and the other buzzwords of the day), and you can stand against it forthrightly — the do-gooders insist you be grateful for the destruction they have wrought.
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”
? C. S. Lewis
I wish I knew why hyphens in the original text get transmogrified into quote-marks by the comment system.
@Gringo, thanks for the feedback. I was not aware of that much detail re East Texas, but I did run into the condescension among Dem friends in the DC area and remember delivering a pretty passionate “No, it is not Mississippi in 1950s, diatribe. I had spent time in the area in the 90s and knew first hand it had changed a lot.@Art Deco I’m relying on what Candice Owens’ says for the increase in out of wedlock births after the Great Society programs came. I understand that stats used to make arguments are often not the whole story. So what you say overall is suggestive. Thanks.
At this point, racism is almost the only thing that the Democrats can use to justify their policies. Therefore, if racism didn’t exist, the Democratic party would invent it… Oh, wait