Racism and Media

Gavan Titley

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781526422095
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Digital media have radically altered understandings of racism, so that an issue that has too often been assumed to belong to the past has been thrust into contemporary mainstream debates, news and popular culture. In light of the importance of traditional communications and social media to such events as Brexit in the UK and the Trump Presidency in the US, it is imperative for students of media and public discourse to examine the role played by the media in the generation, circulation and contestation of racist ideas. In Racism and Media, Gavan Titley:

• Explains why racism is such a complex and contested concept
• Provides a set of theoretical and analytical tools with which to interrogate how media dynamics and processes impact on racism and anti-racism
• Demonstrates methods' application through a wide range of case studies, taking in examples from the UK, US, and several European countries
• Examines the rise and impact of online and social media racism
• Analyses questions of freedom of speech and hate speech in relation to racism and media

This book is an essential companion for students of media, communications, sociology and cultural studies.

1 Racism, everywhere and nowhere: the debatability of racism

Postracialism and the debatability of racism

In 2015 the Finnish newspaper Helsingin Sanomat reported that Laura Huhtasaari, an MP for the right-wing nationalist True Finns Party, was a member of a closed Facebook group ‘The racist background of rapists that hide in bushes’. Under a banner montage of photos of unnamed men of what appear to be Somali and North African heritage, the group description outlines how it is dedicated to proving how ‘Muslim immigration’ had increased instances of rape in Finland and other northern European countries. As well as detailing the endless timeline entreaties to ‘defend our culture’, the newspaper report drew attention to several instances of overt anti-black racism in posted memes and comments. Given this unwelcome media attention, Huhtasaari sought to distance herself from it publicly, first contending that a rogue algorithm had ‘liked’ the page for her, and then arguing that ‘I’m not racist. Maybe I could define myself for myself?’ (Muraja, 2015). The Finnish politician’s exquisite remix of I’m not racist, but, is, of course, interchangeable with countless similar attempts at racism denial from a wide range of national contexts, as such minor public scandals have become a generic dimension of political life. There is something about the plaintiveness of her plea for ‘self-definition’, all the same, that acutely illustrates a central dynamic explored in this chapter, and book.

Racism, in public culture, is simultaneously everywhere and nowhere. The very mention of race serves as an invitation to disprove its salience, the mention of racism as an invitation to refute its relevance. In the contemporary political context, to speak publicly about racism is to be immediately integrated into an intensive process of delineation, deflection and denial, a contest over who gets to define racism, when ‘everyone’ gets to speak about it. This incessant public contestation is shaped both by contemporary socio-political conditions and conflicts, and by the integration of complex, transnational media connectivity to the spaces of social action in which these conflicts are lived and played out. In the postcolonial, migration nations of western Europe and North America, this contestation centres on the dominant imaginary of these societies as ‘postracial’, socio-political spaces in which, the story goes, the divisive ‘idea of race’ no longer matters, and the violence of racism has been largely transcended. The public cultures of these societies are also shaped by dense transnational networks of media flow and communicative connectivity that provide unprecedented possibilities to both extend and challenge racializing discourses, images, frameworks and information. The overlap between the two produces what this book terms the debatability of racism, the constant contest as to what constitutes racism, as to whose ‘definition’ and voice counts, and as to the consequences that should stem from these fractious forms of public recognition and denial.

This is, in introduction, a very general contention. Racism in public culture may be simultaneously everywhere and nowhere, but the analysis of it cannot linger at this level of generality, for engaging everywhere is to risk ending up nowhere in particular. Racism is not a generic phenomenon or a universal category, and the study of racisms requires paying attention to the historical and contextual specificity of its operations and mobilizations. Context is not defined by or limited to the borders of the nation-state, for while nation-specific or comparative studies are often the main form through which historical specificity is explored, racisms have taken shape within the transnational systems of colonial and capitalist modernity (Stam and Shohat, 2012). They have taken on renewed force within the relations and networks of neoliberal globalization, through which the racialized politicization of migration has become integral to the expression of social insecurity and cultural anxiety. And through the spatial rescaling and disordering of the enduring mutations of the ‘war on terror’, the transnational figure of ‘the Muslim’ has been shaped as a malleable focus of apparently reasonable aversion. In critical social theory, consequently, the analysis of racism requires us to focus on the interplay of structural commonalities and contextual differences, historical specificities and continuities, relational linkages and exchanges across territories and terrains (Murji and Solomos, 2015). Contemporary media theory demands similarly supple coordinates, as racist practices and understandings of racism increasingly take shape within what Ingrid Volkmer (2014: 1) describes as an ‘… unprecedented landscape of digital connections and a new architecture of globalized communication, which we are only beginning to understand’.

The idea of debatability, therefore, is not proposed as a definitive concept. Rather, it is a conjunctural orientation. That is, it proposes, in this particular socio-political and historical moment, a mode of thinking about racism in the media, and racism and the media. That racism appears to be ‘everywhere and nowhere’ suggests that the prevalence of insistent, mediated contestation as to what racism is must be taken seriously. This is not a straightforward analytical task, for as Sanjay Sharma (2013) argues in relation to circuits of social media exchange, networked, interactive media generate a ‘racialized info-overload’ of ‘casual racial banter, race-hate comments, “griefing”, images, videos and anti-racist sentiment (that) bewilderingly intermingle, mash-up and virally circulate’. The everyday ubiquity of this ‘bewildering’ media productivity extends from Sharma’s social media focus across an integrated media terrain, through what Andrew Chadwick (2013) describes as a ‘hybrid media system’ that integrates ‘old’ and ‘new’ media into a system of competing and merging media logics shaping the production of news, mediation of public opinion, flow of political information, and contest of symbolic power. On this terrain, racism is not just a focus of political contestation but also a source of fascination. Long a reliable object of public scandal and ritual repudiation, it is now also a hyperlink to data-productive controversies. The ubiquity of this confusion, fascination and contestation suggests that it must be approached analytically as saying something about the shape and force of contemporary racisms.

At least in part, that something suggests an apparent contradiction: the more racism is regarded as having been overcome in a ‘postracial’ era, the more it is discussed, defined and denied. The extent of this contradiction has expanded significantly in recent years, for as David Theo Goldberg observes in Are We All Postracial Yet?, ‘Race today is supposed to be a thing of the past. But all we do, seemingly, is talk about it’ (2015: 1). The idea of debatability recognizes that this talk is hosted and shaped in a very particular media terrain, one characterized by increased communicative participation through connective media, where ‘more talk’ is a socially valorized and economically prioritized pursuit (Van Dijck, 2013). It is this apparent contradiction, under these conditions, that allows an argument to be built on these opening observations, an argument that is threaded through the chapters of this book. If the meaning of racism is historical and contingent and shifting under changing social relations and through new political conditions and conflicts, then the persistent communicative work that is invested in the attention as to what counts as racism does more than say something of analytical value about the cultural production of contemporary racisms. It must also be approached as a generative political dimension of how racism functions in a putatively ‘postracial’ conjuncture. In other words, in contexts where official narratives and dominant public discourses assume the ‘end of racism’ even as people who experience racism attest to its renewed formations and exclusionary and humiliating force, these everyday communicative concentrations on the status, nature and extent of racism are politically consequential.

While this argument is explored throughout the book, it requires some further initial explanation, as it underpins the approach of this chapter. For some analysts, the prevalence of this ‘talk’ suggests a troubling inflation and relativization of public understandings of racism, where ‘racism’ has become politically and conceptually overloaded (Song, 2014). For others, it suggests a critical gap between racism’s contemporary mutability and the ‘limited conceptual understanding of “racism”’ that broadly dominates in public culture (Bonilla-Silva, 2015: 57). What I have thus far referred to as ‘the postracial’ moment encompasses these dynamics, while also involving further considerations. These further dimensions can be explored by acknowledging, firstly, that the idea of the ‘postracial’ is also inevitably entangled in competing meanings, in part because of different valences between North America and Europe, but also because the ‘post’ implicates two very different imaginaries of a world without racism.

In the first, the post is future-oriented, as it gathers together a knot of theoretical engagements, social observations and political commitments focused on the abolition of race. Race, understood as a pseudo-scientific discourse increasingly ascendant during the late modern period of imperialism, nation-building and genocidal expansionism, imposed a hierarchical system of dehumanizing distinctions that retain a ‘commonsense’ explanatory purchase even in societies where biological racism has been repudiated. Thus the false category of race must ultimately be eliminated, particularly in forms of anti-racism that mobilize racial identifications, concepts and solidarities in opposition to racist violence or exclusion. As Joshua Paul argues, ‘Post-racialism attempts to develop an anti-race anti-racism capable of imagining and bringing into being a world where the pernicious hierarchies of race no longer feature’ (2014: 705). This aim has engendered a hugely complex debate, for as Colette Guillaumin remarks, ‘race does not exist. But it does kill people’ (1995: 107). In other words, the conceptual erasure of race does not necessarily impact on its socio-political and material consequences, consequences that make it real.

The second pronounced trajectory of the ‘postracial’ looks not to the future but to an image of the present, a present regarded as no longer marked by the legacies of what is held to be consigned to the past. Barnor Hesse describes this widely assumed narrative of overcoming:

Since the ending of the US civil rights movement, the Cold War and the apartheid regime in South Africa, political discussion of the meaning of racism seems to be over in the West. Its sociality is overwhelmingly conceived as a problem that has largely been overcome. What remains is seen as residuum, consigned to pathology, a profound moral deviation from the western liberal and democratic ethos and ethnos. Racism has been declared an unacceptable form of western social behavior, committed by groups voluntarily on the political fringes of society or desperately by classes economically jettisoned to its decaying edges. (2004: 10)

Hesse points to the ways in which dominant understandings of racism in western countries tend to be over-determined through association with the still-recent histories of overtly racist regimes that have been discredited and defeated, and, as Chapter 4 examines, the far-right movements and parties that recall these pasts in ideological and iconographic terms (the residuum). Moreover, as the endless parade of public scandals over mediated racist outbursts such as Huhtasaari’s suggests, racism is framed as an exceptional outburst and treated as an individual aberration, not only unconnected from any broader political or systemic patterns, but also often ‘repudiated publicly so that the routine activities of racist statecraft may continue’ (James et al., 2018). This broad mesh of assumptions constructs what Brett St Louis describes as the ‘fiction’ of the ‘actually existing post-racial society’ (2015: 118). This fiction is not simply a superficial cover story laid over an unchanged racist reality. Rather, this over-identification of racism with particular historical formations and lexicons constricts an understanding of how ‘new’ racisms constantly take shape and function. Alana Lentin (2016) has described this as the problem of dominant public understandings of racism being ‘“frozen” in relation to past events that have been sanctioned for identification as racist’.

This fixing of the meaning of racism in public imaginaries has been helped along in no small part by the plethora of ideological projects – such as ‘colourblindness’ or ‘reverse racism’ – that took shape in the post-war and post-civil rights period to insistently declare ‘the end of racism’, and thus to explain away persistent forms of racialized inequality as the result of cultural pathologies or individual failings. In the US context, Touré F. Reed (2018) underlines how ‘post-racialism is in step with postwar liberalism’s tendency to treat racial inequities as if they exist in a world apart from the economic processes that generate them’. But the wider challenge, as Angela Davis argues, is examining how the ‘persistence of historical meanings of racism and its remedies prevent us from recognizing the complex ways in which racism clandestinely structures prevailing institutions, practices and ideologies’ (2008: 2). In this understanding, the postracial is more than a fiction, it is an active political force, operative in the contrast between the ‘frozen’ – ‘there is no room for racism in this society’ – and the shifting political, economic, social and cultural processes through which racism is reproduced and renewed, and through which ‘problem’ subjects are marked out.

David Theo Goldberg’s concept of postracialism captures this generativity, for ‘what is at work … is the restructuring of the conditions of racist expression, and their terms of articulation’ (2015: 113). That is, postracialism is more than confusion as to what now constitutes racism, or ideological denial of its enduring sociality. Rather, it is the totality of the ways in which racism is re-formed – through which populations and identities are marked out as suspicious, as problems to be contained, intervened in or disposed of – in societies where race is regarded as a historical deviation, overcome. Postraciality, Goldberg argues, ‘increasingly erases or erodes the possibility of identifying racisms and their underpinnings, their structures and implications’ (ibid: 88). It is a condition that both obscures the enduring historicity of racial arrangements and structures, while sanctioning and fashioning modes of racist expression that activate their racial underpinnings precisely because it is now difficult if not impossible to recall them to them:

Postraciality … rather than expressing the end of racism, conceals within its conceptual erasure of race the driving mode of contemporary racist articulation. Racisms dis-appear behind the formal deletion of racial classification, state regulation, and legal refusal of racial definition. They express themselves anew in the name of racial disappearance, disavowal, and denial. Racisms proliferate in the wake of the supposed death of race. (ibid: 152)

Debatability, in part, is animated in this space between the fixed and the motile, between the denial of racisms that do not map onto the assumed shape of the past, and the insistence on speaking of racism because what is taking shape requires the force of this naming. In proposing this idea, it should be clear that I do not mean that the experience of racism is open to debate, or that racially structured dimensions of social and political life are radically open to question. Rather, it is intended as a way of thinking about how the experience of racism and the operations of structural racism can be denied not only through silencing, but also through noise; not just through a lack of attention to racism, but also via an excess of particular kinds of attention. And as a theme that extends through the book, I want to suggest that this debatability, this incessant, recursive attention as to what counts as racism and who gets to define it, has political consequences for practices of anti-racism – practices that want to name racism publicly, the better to mobilize to confront it.

In contemporary theory, the tricky prefix ‘post’ is often too prevalent, and opening this analysis with a discussion of postness makes for an admittedly complex starting point. However, a more conventional approach, such as providing a linear treatment of definitions of race and racism, is simply inadequate to explore the contemporary political and communicative context. Understanding the productive political force of postracial confusion in contemporary societies requires that it is this recursive attention as to what counts as racism and what racism is taken to mean in public cultures, rather than an orienting set of theoretical definitions, that provides the analytical point of entry to this study. For these reasons, this chapter differs in its approach from those that follow.

It is structured around three intensively mediated incidents that sketch out a broad canvas of public dynamics produced through the intersection of ‘postracial’ confusion and digital profusion. They are snapshots, not case studies, and each one instantiates an important ‘postracial’ dynamic. By peeling away at the understandings of racism at play, they lay out an orienting sense of the confusion, contestation and polarization the idea of racism currently generates. These interpretative and political dynamics are produced through concentrated bursts of communicative energy, and examining their generation opens up ways of thinking about media dynamics and practices in the ‘hybrid media system’. In short, they open up questions about racism, and about media, that map the analytical challenges subsequent chapters respond to, and help identify the theoretical resources they must marshal in order to get to grips with the generativity of networked communications on a ‘postracial’ terrain.

The decidability of racism

Intensive and ephemeral concentrations of mediated activity and attention are a pronounced feature of contemporary media cultures, and debatability is generated when these discursive episodes pivot on confusion and polarization as to what constitutes racism.

On the 13th of January 2016 the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo published a cartoon by Laurent Sourisseau, or ‘Riss’, a long-time contributor who had been injured in the lethal attack on the magazine on the 7th of January 2015. The edition for the 13th of January followed a highly publicized edition marking the first anniversary of the attacks. Riss’s cartoon also generated significant publicity, for different if not altogether unrelated reasons. Under the heading ‘Migrants’, the cartoon posed a question: ‘What would little Aylan have become if he’d grown up?’ ‘Little Aylan’ is Aylan (or Alan) Kurdi, a three-year-old Syrian boy who drowned with his mother and brother while trying to cross from Turkey to the Greek island of Kos in early September 2015. A photo by the Turkish journalist Nilüfer Demir captured his lifeless body lying in the surf on a beach near Bodrum in Turkey. It was widely circulated in social media and on news sites, and representations of his body, captured in a pose redolent of nothing more than a toddler’s slumber, rapidly circulated in symbolic forms beyond the original photo. Drawing directly on this iconic currency, a small drawing of his body bunched up in the lapping seawater is inserted in a circular inset in the top left of the cartoon, below which the main action unfolds. Two men, whose facial features are exaggerated through some hybrid of pig-like and ape-like characteristics, are chasing a wom...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Acknowledgements
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• Preface and acknowledgements
• 1 Racism, everywhere and nowhere: the debatability of racism
• 2 The politics of representation in postracial media culture
• 3 Reasonable aversions: journalism and the Muslim/Migrant ‘problem’
• 4 From ‘hate’ to ‘like’: organized and assembled racism in a networked media environment
• 5 Hate speech, free speech and media events
• 6 Anti-racism and digital media culture
• References
• Index