Charles Brown
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It is despicable how the media is downplaying the racism. One local headline is "Group hated athletes the most ". It starts out:
Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris hurled insults at Jews, blacks and Hispanics... But they REALLY hated the athletes, who had power and popularity - everything they didn't. (end quote) .
The text itself has he word "really" in all caps.
We in the Black community, veteran scientists of the vast media phenomenon of covering up racism and constantly nurturing in the minds of the masses a sense that racism is not that big of a problem in U.S. society, read this as "white people, don't get to thinking that these kids' main problem and motive was racism. The main thing was they hated athletes". Yea, right, a big social problem in U.S. history and society, the hate of atheletes. Did you realize that America once enslaved athletes ? That Hitler hated athletes more than Jews ? All the typically prevaricating news coverage is saturated with "damage control" to prevent people from connecting their horror at the crime to a horror at racism in general. I hope Chomsky and Parenti publish books on this media coverup of racism phenomenon alone.
By the way, contrast this with the whole O.J. Simpson months long, virtual reality maxi-series, which had coverage priority at least equal to that on the current war. It was astonishing. A relatively private murder, of the type that thousands occur every year became a national religious ritual. There can be no other explanation for this coverage extraordinarily out of proportion to its social or poltical import: it was a Big Brother method of baptising a new generation in the myth of the Black rapist and murderer ( See Angela Davis' essay "The Myth of the Black Rapist" in _Women, Race and Class_ on history of the icon of Black man as rapist and savage as a bulwark of U.S. racist consciousness). Ironically, some of the truth broke through even in the O.J. Simpson maxi-series with the revelation of the Nazi cop Mark Furhman. Notice how the professor's tapes of Furhman's racist ravings have never been made public.
Or maybe the media's motive was to get an O.J. Simpson as an athlete, that widely despised and victimized group.
In this and the current genocidal mass murder,we have the reverse aspect of racist mindcontrol: Playing down in the mass consciousness the scale of actually existing white fascistic racist consciousness , organizations and cliques in the U.S. If the truth of how racist America is today were common knowledge it would be much more difficult to argue that affirmative action is not necessary by alleging that racism is a thing of the past. The signal characteristic of Reaganite racism ( the new racist line seeking to role back the gains of the Civil Rights Movement) is the DENIAL that racism is still a significant problem in the U.S. The post Reagan monopoly media has a term for those who accuse anybody of racism in politics, business or anything else: "playing the race card" or "race baiting". The right wing cries out that Black leaders are falsely portraying Black people as victims. America is really a wonderful place of racial harmony and Black people are just a bunch of lazy ! , malcontents., etc., etc.
Mark my word. We are about witness a whole lot of creative and diversionary sociological/psychological/theological pronouncements and explanations all designed to keep the great mass of white people in denial about the representative racism of this horrific crime.
Charles Brown
>>> "William S. Lear" <rael at zopyra.com> 04/22/99 01:58PM >>>
On Thursday, April 22, 1999 at 13:44:44 (-0400) Max Sawicky writes:
>...
>Evidently the two gunmen in Colorado are not from downscale
>families. They each had two parents. The kids' facility with
>computers suggests they had decent employment prospects. The
>school itself is said to be pretty good. So money seems to have
>little to do with their story, at least in any simple way.
If your evidence that they were not "downscale" is merely that they had two parents, I'll say that the case is still open on that. But, from what it sounds like to me, it was a big dose of good old-fashioned All-American racist violence. But race and class are closely linked here, so it's never too easy to dismiss one or the other.
Bill
It is mentioned, but it is framed in such a way that it seems to have about as much significance as the fact that they wore trenchcoats or played cybergames. The NYT has about eight sub-story articles and none of them explore the racist aspect in depth.
Charles
>>> Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> 04/22/99 03:28PM >>>
Charles Brown wrote:
>It is despicable how the media is downplaying the racism. One local
>headline is
>"Group hated athletes the most ".
How much play is the Hitler's birthday connection getting? I was just at a meeting full of urban sophisticates and only one or two out of a group of ten were aware of it.
Doug