Rush Limbaugh is probably feeling pretty stupid right about now. Fired in 2003 from a job as a commentator with ESPN's Sunday NFL Countdown, Limbaugh's comment that Donovan McNabb was only a mediocre player but that "the media has been very desirous that a black quarterback do well" is looking dumber by the year. Though McNabb and the Philadelphia Eagles fell just short of a Super Bowl victory this season, they will be next year's clear favorites.
Of course, it's always possible that Maureen Dowd, Paul Krugman and Dan Rather got together and convinced 11 separate NFL teams to lose 15 separate games to the Eagles behind McNabb's continued dominance. But I doubt it.
The problem is that overt racism in the media does not end at one clearly racist pill-popper. Indeed, the fact that we even still have to discuss the issue of a black quarterback playing in the Super Bowl is ludicrous, considering that three out of the five best quarterbacks playing in the NFL today are African American. But there it is.
In American media, the issue of race is omnipresent, and more often than not, it's because media depictions of minorities are overwhelmingly and undeservedly negative.
The sports world is just one small example of a larger media double standard on race. Take, for example, rap music. Demonized from its start, the entire genre is derided by everyone from C. DeLores Tucker to Bill Clinton as glorifying and promoting violence, drug use and crime. But few of these people --who practically knock each other down in their rush to attack young African-American men --are willing to be consistent in their positions.
Charlton Heston, who, in an infamous moment, read the lyrics of Ice-T's "Cop Killer" aloud to Warner Brothers shareholders, certainly had no problem with guns and violence in general as the president of the National Rifle Association.
Fox News commentator Bill O'Reilly, (who has repeatedly and publicly referred to Mexicans as "wetbacks") in an interview with rapper Cam'ron and Damon Dash, the former CEO of Roc-a-Fella Records, assailed Cam'ron and rappers in general as role models leading children to a life of violence. But he quickly dismissed any notion that the violence in the Terminator series of movies, featuring the governor of the most populous state in the Union, could be in any way an influence on the minds of children. "I'm telling you," O'Reilly said, "his movie's a cartoon, whereas this rap stuff is real life."
Johnny Cash, in his song "Folsom Prison Blues," long considered a classic, sung that he "shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die." Elvis Presley, who made his money and reputation by making rock and roll palatable to white audiences not yet ready to hear African-American voices coming from their children's record players, made prison -- the consequence of crime in our society -- look like a party in "Jailhouse Rock." But you won't hear any of today's cultural commentators discussing that.
The issue with rap music for these people, it's clear, isn't about a message of violence or glorification of crime: The issue is that African Americans are the ones to talk about it.
There are myriad other examples in which the media enacts a double standard by playing down minority contributions. Perhaps most notable of late is the story of Jessica Lynch. Lynch was celebrated as an American hero after her capture in Iraq, but her friend Lori Piestewa, who died in the same firefight and was the first American woman fatality of the war and the first Native American female to die in fighting overseas, has received barely any attention. Similarly, Shoshanna Johnson, an African American captured in the same ambush as Lynch and held longer in Iraq, has been all but ignored.
What this double standard has come to mean is a systematic devaluation of minority lives by our media. When whites are murdered, it's a front-page story. Scott Peterson's murder trial will be fodder for the cable networks for years. On the other hand, when African Americans are murdered, the story is often on the back pages of the local section. And after the recent tsunami, non-white victims were often passed over in media coverage, as in ABC News' Good Morning America piece of Dec. 29 about child victims. The piece focused only on the story of four white children, ignoring the non-white victims.
There is, despite frequent denials from the powers that be, still a problem of racism and segregation in this country, a problem which needs urgently to be addressed. But if the people who help to shape American popular opinion can't speak honestly about race, then none of the rest of us will be able to either.
Alex Koppelman is a senior individualized major in the College from Baltimore and former editor-in-chief of 34th Street Magazine. Rock the Casbah appears on Thursdays.
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