
These images popped in my head as I was reading Watching Jim Crow. The coverage during Katrina brought a lot of the racial divisions in our country to the forefront of American minds. All the subjects in the photos are more or less doing the same thing, but the editors of each paper projected their personal opinions/biases/judgement (be it subconscious or otherwise) onto the audience. This relates to the "inferrencial racism" (something that furthers notions/discourse of white supremacy through subtle racial messages) that Classen addresses in his "Programming/Regulating Whiteness" chapter. I think this is a perfect example of how racial bias in our press can be extremely power in reinforcing stereotypes in the collective American subconscious, although this is not as explicit as the battles fought over the licensing agreements.
Discussion: Classen relies heavily on oral histories in this book, do you think this is an affective way of telling this history? Would this opinion hold true if he weren't telling a history about a pop culture medium?
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