Imagine that your daughter got in trouble in school for using a racial epithet against a classmate. What do you think would be the best news angle on this? That she did it, that a lot of parents and students were outraged by it, or that some parents and the school administration defended your daughter and that she wasn’t punished?
Of the three, the least interesting is the one where people acted as you’d expect them to act. When children make racist attacks on other children, that naturally upsets people. It’s somewhat newsworthy that it happened at all. But the actual story here is about the people who didn’t act as expected. The parents who defied expectations and said that the comment wasn’t really racist or intended to be offensive or the principal who declined to take any administration action– these are the natural hooks to any good news story on this hypothetical event.
Declining to focus first and foremost on the outraged parents and students who complained isn’t an effort to erase their point of view. Yet, because they’re not particularly newsworthy, their reinforcement of expected behavior can get deemphasized in importance even if, in a way, it’s the most important thing.
This is why I am sympathetic to what Jamelle Bouie is arguing in the New York Times when he points out that the majority of Americans have always opposed Trump and Trump’s racism. He wants to know why the people who love his racism or are at least willing to countenance it are seemingly the only ones the press ever wants to discuss.
Well, I already explained that. Implicit in covering outrageous behavior is the fact that it isn’t normal. But if your opinion is always relegated to the implicit, it can seem like it isn’t being given proper exposure or weight.
The flip side of this, though, is that normative, majoritarian behavior and opinion is presented as correct on the merits. The time to really worry is when it becomes newsworthy that people are upset about kids making racist comments to other kids at school or it becomes rare that such actions are punished.
At a certain point, the very deemphasis on the most important thing becomes newsworthy and people need to be reminded that this country still agrees that hurling racial insults at each other is not good. That’s what Bouie is doing here, and he’s providing a needed corrective to the narrative. But that doesn’t mean the overall critique of the media is correct. When Trump does something unprecedented and norm-shattering, that’s a story. When people shrug it off, that’s a story. If we don’t make these stories, then the norm is weakened and the aberrant behavior replaces it.
So, it’s important to remember that if we want racism to stay outside the norm, we must enforce the lines that should not be crossed and highlight it when they are crossed. We have to shame the people who make excuses more than we applaud the people who cry foul.
Yet, if we let this pattern repeat over and over again without highlighting the good people who are upholding the norm, that’s a mistake, too, because it distorts the overall picture and gives too much attention to the bad people.
Bouie also attempts a political argument that mobilizing black voters is one of the more important ways that the Democrats can improve on their 2016 performance, and this is also true. Yet, it remains the case that if the same people vote the same way in 2020 as they did in 2016, then Trump will win again. Relying solely on differential turnout or a different combination of third-party candidates to pull the Democrats over the top is not a sound strategy. Some Obama/Trump voters need to be won over next time. Not every 2016 Trump voter is attending his rallies in a MAGA hat and chanting for Democratic congresswomen of color to leave the country. If this were the case, Trump would be at least even money to win again. The Democrats do have to be concerned with how people in so-called Trump Country feel about the party because they have to do better with them in 2020.
It may be annoying, but it remains true that the biggest story in American politics is that the president of the United States is a raving racist and that more and more people are making excuses for him. That his support among Republicans remains sky high despite his aberrant behavior is not only a big story, but also an enormous threat to the character of the country and the Democrats’ hopes of defeating him.
For these reasons, the stories will continue, and they should continue. It’s actually a way of preventing racism from becoming the new norm.
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