John Hartigan Jr.: What Does Race Have to Do With It?
[John Hartigan Jr. is a professor of anthropology and director of the Americo Paredes Center for Cultural Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. His most recent books are What Can You Say? America's National Conversation on Race (Stanford University Press, 2010) and Race in the 21st Century: Ethnographic Approaches (Oxford University Press, 2010).]
By any measure, this has been a busy year for news stories about race. The most recent, involving the firing of Shirley Sherrod from her post at the U.S. Department of Agriculture over remarks on a videotape that initially appeared racist, followed in the immediate wake of accusations by the NAACP that the Tea Party harbors racists. But the year began with a furor over Sen. Harry M. Reid's comments about President Obama's being a "light skinned" African-American "with no Negro dialect, unless he wants to have one." Another set of controversial comments followed in the aftermath of Rand Paul's victory in Kentucky's Republican Senate primary, when he questioned whether the 1964 Civil Rights Act represented an unwarranted intrusion into the private sector.
Just as summer reached its peak, a new surge of stories hit, centered initially on the release of recordings of the actor Mel Gibson apparently wishing that his ex-girlfriend would be "raped by a pack of niggers," and referring to Latino workers as "wetbacks." That news was paralleled by a stranger tale about the Justice Department's refusal to challenge voter intimidation purportedly committed by two members of the New Black Panther Party, in Philadelphia, in November 2008. And those were just the most attention-grabbing news items. California alone produced stories that easily might have garnered more coverage—the arrest of the Grim Sleeper killer, for example, raised issues of racial profiling via DNA and challenged the bizarre notion that serial killers are always white—if most of the other headlines had not played so effectively into broad partisan debates that are wracking the country.
How are we to make sense of, let alone keep up with, all this attention to race? Journalists assigned to just this task are finding it taxing and tricky. Frank Rich, a columnist for The New York Times, in little more than a week lurched from concluding that Gibson represented "the last gasps of an American era" to opining, regarding the drama over Sherrod, that "we have been going backward since Election Day 2008."
But how can we be both advancing and regressing in matters of race as a nation? That confusion reflects the challenges journalists face as they struggle to report on the partisan accusations of racism being hurled between the Tea Party movement and the NAACP.
Since the emergence of the "race beat," in the mid-1950s, and continuing through a new critical attention in the 1980s to possible race-baiting in campaign ads, news editors and journalists clearly regard reporting on race matters as part of their charge. But as the coverage generated by the selectively edited video clip of Sherrod's comments indicates, that interest is easily manipulated. This summer's spate of stories suggests that the work of covering race is being stymied by the complexity of the subject. It is time for academics who study race to step up and help journalists with this difficult task....
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By any measure, this has been a busy year for news stories about race. The most recent, involving the firing of Shirley Sherrod from her post at the U.S. Department of Agriculture over remarks on a videotape that initially appeared racist, followed in the immediate wake of accusations by the NAACP that the Tea Party harbors racists. But the year began with a furor over Sen. Harry M. Reid's comments about President Obama's being a "light skinned" African-American "with no Negro dialect, unless he wants to have one." Another set of controversial comments followed in the aftermath of Rand Paul's victory in Kentucky's Republican Senate primary, when he questioned whether the 1964 Civil Rights Act represented an unwarranted intrusion into the private sector.
Just as summer reached its peak, a new surge of stories hit, centered initially on the release of recordings of the actor Mel Gibson apparently wishing that his ex-girlfriend would be "raped by a pack of niggers," and referring to Latino workers as "wetbacks." That news was paralleled by a stranger tale about the Justice Department's refusal to challenge voter intimidation purportedly committed by two members of the New Black Panther Party, in Philadelphia, in November 2008. And those were just the most attention-grabbing news items. California alone produced stories that easily might have garnered more coverage—the arrest of the Grim Sleeper killer, for example, raised issues of racial profiling via DNA and challenged the bizarre notion that serial killers are always white—if most of the other headlines had not played so effectively into broad partisan debates that are wracking the country.
How are we to make sense of, let alone keep up with, all this attention to race? Journalists assigned to just this task are finding it taxing and tricky. Frank Rich, a columnist for The New York Times, in little more than a week lurched from concluding that Gibson represented "the last gasps of an American era" to opining, regarding the drama over Sherrod, that "we have been going backward since Election Day 2008."
But how can we be both advancing and regressing in matters of race as a nation? That confusion reflects the challenges journalists face as they struggle to report on the partisan accusations of racism being hurled between the Tea Party movement and the NAACP.
Since the emergence of the "race beat," in the mid-1950s, and continuing through a new critical attention in the 1980s to possible race-baiting in campaign ads, news editors and journalists clearly regard reporting on race matters as part of their charge. But as the coverage generated by the selectively edited video clip of Sherrod's comments indicates, that interest is easily manipulated. This summer's spate of stories suggests that the work of covering race is being stymied by the complexity of the subject. It is time for academics who study race to step up and help journalists with this difficult task....