How Racists Hijack Victimhood
Top Story: The Myth of White Victimhood?
These civil rights descriptors have increasingly been co-opted by alt-right activists and their allies in the MAGA movement to push forward a narrative that white people are the most salient victims of racism.
This is sometimes called the hijacking of victimhood.
It is a framing commonly used by:
Prager U, which posts videos for young Americans that deny racism or insist that efforts to correct for it do more harm than good.
Tucker Carlson — who uses people of color to denounce humanitarian inroads made by the civil rights movement.
Authors like Jeremy Carl, whose book The Unprotected Class sites racism against white people as the real problem facing our country.
It’s also not new.
Still, while reporting on purposefully politicized and manipulated framing — no matter how ancient — it can be hard to avoid becoming a mouthpiece for the framer.
And if journalists are not careful, we can risk pushing out fake theories, rather than denouncing them.
How to avoid that?
Reporting Right has some ideas.
How to Avoid Being Manipulated by White Supremacists Framing?
Know the facts: Understand what the Civil Rights Act of 1964 corrected for; and what it did not correct for.
Share them: When necessary, clarify — with data — how inequities in pay, home ownership, educational attainment, and inherited wealth still remain racialized problems.
Don’t repeat claims that are patently untrue. Despite Supreme Court rulings, and the insistence of influencers like Charlie Kirk, that only racism against white people is alive and well in America, resist false facts. Let data guide you.
But don’t discount the way poor white Americans are suffering — or be forced into reporting that pits one suffering group against another.
The idea that racism against people of color is over in America is unsubstantiated.
We’ll say it again: Use data!
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We’re Reading
Doublespeak: The Rhetoric of The Far Right Since 1945 by Matthew Feldman and Paul Jackson
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Alex Aronson, executive director of Court Accountability
David Armiak, research director for the Center for Media and Democracy
Connor Gibson, founder of Grassrootbeer Investigations
Maurice Cunningham, retired associate professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts at Boston and author of Dark Money and The Politics of School Privatization.
Isaac Kamola, associate professor of political science at Trinity College, founder of Faculty First Responders and co-author of Free Speech and Koch Money, Manufacturing a Campus Culture War
Nancy MacLean, William H. Chafe distinguished professor of history and public policy at Duke University and author of Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America
Ralph Wilson, founder of the Corporate Genome Project and co-author of Free Speech and Koch Money, Manufacturing a Campus Culture War
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