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Racing the Story

When Renisha McBride’s killer looked on his porch on Nov. 2, he saw a threat, not a victim. The middle aged white man wielding a shotgun looked at the 19-year-old, Black, unarmed McBride and shot and killed her at point-blank range.

Would Theodore Wafer have shot McBride if she had been a 19-year-old white woman seeking help? We may never know. But we do know that Wafer’s perceptions of who and what constitutes danger are informed by a media culture that is increasingly controlled by people who don’t look like Renisha McBride or her community.

According to a 2013 Pew … Read more “Racing the Story”

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Whitening the Media

I like MSNBC’s Up with Chris Hayes. It’s TV for thinkers, at least most of the time. But this past weekend, in a discussion about the collapse of truth in media, Hayes said something that almost had me throwing my coffee at the T.V.

His comment was a response to a plea from good ol’ Amy Goodman of Democracy Now for poor people, especially poor people of color, being able to speak for themselves in media. She said truth in media is “larger than a truth that is yes or no…” speaking to the fact that, even in the … Read more “Whitening the Media”