Media and "race"

Image: Alexander Trafford / flickr

20 April 2011"The mediation of racism via mass media of all kinds is not the only source of its devastating impact, but it also operates in a molecular and penetrative fashion throughout the capillaries and pores of today's world… Likewise, the endless routines of media flows put daily flesh on ethnic identifications of oneself and one's visualized community. " -- Downing and Husband

The relationship between media and the animation of racisms is complex, as Downing and Husband intimate. Media in all of their institutional, cultural and democratic permutations have been intimately connected with the shaping and challenging of narratives of “race” and ethnicity throughout history. These corollaries have if anything gained complexity over the past three decades, with the proliferation of user-generated media technologies pluralising and democratising media content on the one hand, and advances in global media networks on the other.

This ‘Media and “Race”’ issue of PLATFORM sets out to explore the imbricating relationship between media and broader cultural and political discourse in re-vivifying the essentialisms that underpin racial thinking, whether these masquerade in the language of culture and ethnicity or in the imperatives and determinisms of the market and economy. This is a timely discussion, given the paradoxes of the past decade which, on the one hand, saw the United States described as “post-racial” following the 2008 election of President Barack Obama, and on the other, saw racisms remain prominent in headlines around the world: the banning of Islamic face veiling in France and Belgium in 2010; France’s repatriation of Romani gypsies throughout 2010; and the 2005 Cronulla Riots in Australia being three recent examples.

These events illuminated the innately chameleonic and resilient nature of notions of “race” and racism. This transformative capacity of “race” is not new.

Read more >

 

Image: Alexander Trafford / flickr

Related Topics

Discrimination

Race

Politics

Creative & Digital

Justice

Social Policy

International

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