Coded Coverage: Why Negative News About Black People Is a Feature, Not a Bug - SARN Minis #86 Transcript
Hi, I'm Sharon Hurley Hall. Welcome to the Sharon's Anti-Racism Newsletter podcast, SARN Minis.
If you pay attention to media coverage, you'll probably notice something: that news coverage of those racialised as Black (and people of the Global Majority) is often very different from the coverage of those racialised as white.
This is not accidental. It's a feature; not a bug.
It goes back to a long history of othering as part of the justification of settler colonialism, extraction, trafficking and enslavement of Africans, genocide of Indigenous peoples and so on. This permeated both arts and sciences, leading to eugenics and books like Heart of Darkness and films like King Kong, all of which privileged whiteness while presenting blackness as evil and somehow subhuman. They weren't even subtle about it.
Once the Global South had been colonised, the aim was to maintain the separation - to talk about Black people in a way that enshrined their inferiority in people's - white people's - minds.
Subscribe to SARN Supporter to read the rest.
Become a paying subscriber of SARN Supporter to get access to this post and other subscriber-only content.
UpgradeA subscription gets you:
- All free benefits (access to the monthly curated reading list, all interviews, and occasional free articles) plus:
- Even more anti-racism content (2x a week), plus a monthly behind-the-scenes update
- The private SARN podcast, with Sharon's short takes on anti-racism issues (2x per month)
- Access to the FULL archive of 700+ posts - no more paywall!