Media Reporting and Racism Based Crime 1773615327, 9781773615325

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MEDIA REPORTING AND RACISM BASED CRIME

MEDIA REPORTING AND RACISM BASED CRIME

Marko Nikolić

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www.societypublishing.com

Media Reporting and Racism based Crime Marko Nikolić

Society Publishing 2010 Winston Park Drive, 2nd Floor Oakville, ON L6H 5R7 Canada www.societypublishing.com Tel: 001-289-291-7705 001-905-616-2116 Fax: 001-289-291-7601 Email: [email protected] e-book Edition 2019 ISBN: 978-1-77407-053-6 (e-book) This book contains information obtained from highly regarded resources. Reprinted material sources are indicated. Copyright for individual articles remains with the authors as indicated and published under Creative Commons License. A Wide variety of references are listed. Reasonable efforts have been made to publish reliable data and views articulated in the chapters are those of the individual contributors, and not necessarily those of the editors or publishers. Editors or publishers are not responsible for the accuracy of the information in the published chapters or consequences of their use. The publisher assumes no responsibility for any damage or grievance to the persons or property arising out of the use of any materials, instructions, methods or thoughts in the book. The editors and the publisher have attempted to trace the copyright holders of all material reproduced in this publication and apologize to copyright holders if permission has not been obtained. If any copyright holder has not been acknowledged, please write to us so we may rectify. Notice: Registered trademark of products or corporate names are used only for explanation and identification without intent of infringement. © 2019 Society Publishing ISBN: 978-1-77361-532-5 (Hardcover) Society Publishing publishes wide variety of books and eBooks. For more information about Society Publishing and its products, visit our website at www.societypublishing.com.

DECLARATION Some content or chapters in this book are open access copyright free published research work, which is published under Creative Commons License and are indicated with the citation. We are thankful to the publishers and authors of the content and chapters as without them this book wouldn’t have been possible.

ABOUT THE EDITOR

Marko obtained his Master’s degree from University of Belgrade - Faculty of Law in 2014. He specialized in Criminal Law, Family Law and Environmental Law. He spent his Master year studying about international child abduction. He is currently employed in Ministry of Defense’s Legal Department.

TABLE OF CONTENTS



List of Contributors........................................................................................xv



List of Abbreviations.................................................................................... xvii

Preface..................................................................................................... ....xix Chapter 1

Understanding Racism............................................................................... 1 What Is Racism?......................................................................................... 1 Racist Behaviour and Systemic Racism....................................................... 2 Racism in Australia..................................................................................... 3 Racism and the Law.................................................................................... 4 The Importance of Culture, Language and Identity...................................... 5 Reference................................................................................................... 7

Chapter 2

Alt_right White Lite: Trolling, Hate Speech And Cyber Racism on Social Media.......................................................................................... 9 Abstract...................................................................................................... 9 Introduction: Three Online Connections................................................... 10 How The Internet Does Its Racism Thing................................................... 12 Political Economy And Cultural Analysis of Online Racism....................... 13 Alt_right And Social Media: The Dark Side of The Web............................. 15 An Australian Case Study: The Dingoes as an Exemplar of Gaming The System in the Name of White Power......................................... 18 Countering Racism Online: Lightening The Impact of the Alt_right White................................................................................ 23 Potential Australian Initiatives................................................................... 25 Some Current Proposals In Australia......................................................... 27 References................................................................................................ 29

Chapter 3

“Aussie Humour” or Racism? Hey Hey It’s Saturday and the Denial of Racism in Online Responses to News Media Articles............... 37 Abstract.................................................................................................... 37 Introduction.............................................................................................. 38 “Modern Racism” and Denials of Racism................................................. 40 Australian Humour, Race And National Identity........................................ 44 Methodology............................................................................................ 46 Reverse Racism, Mitigation And ‘Pc Gone Mad’....................................... 48 Positive Self-Presentation, Humour, And Denials of Racist Intent: Building An Australian Identity............................................. 53 Conclusion............................................................................................... 55 References................................................................................................ 57

Chapter 4

Social Media Conflict: Platforms For Racial Vilification, or Acts of Provocation and Citizenship?............................... 61 Abstract.................................................................................................... 61 Introduction.............................................................................................. 62 Digital Citizenship And The Building Blocks Of Bystander Anti-Racism.... 65 Racist Rants On Australian Public Transport And Youtube......................... 67 New Zealand And Australian Flash Mob Hakas........................................ 70 Adam Goodes........................................................................................... 71 Conclusions.............................................................................................. 74 References................................................................................................ 75

Chapter 5

Racism, Ethnicity and The Media In Africa: Reflections Inspired by Studies Of Xenophobia In Cameroon And South Africa...................... 79 Abstract.................................................................................................... 79 On Media And The Politics Of Belonging In Africa.................................... 84 South African Media And The Narrow Focus On Makwerekwere.............. 91 Reconciling Professionalism And Cultural Belonging In Africa’s Media..... 97 Conclusion............................................................................................. 109 References.............................................................................................. 111

Chapter 6

Racial Embodiment And The Affectivity of Racism in Young People’s Film.......................................................................................... 119 Abstract.................................................................................................. 119 Introduction............................................................................................ 120

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Film Context and Analysis....................................................................... 123 The Real of Racial Embodiment.............................................................. 124 Film Content And Storyline..................................................................... 126 Sensing Affective Racism........................................................................ 128 Disgust And Abjection............................................................................ 131 Racism As Fantasy and Enjoyment.......................................................... 132 Unveiling Symptomatic Racism.............................................................. 135 References.............................................................................................. 138 Chapter 7

Grooming And The ‘Asian Sex Gang Predator’: The Construction of A Racial Crime Threat........................................................................ 143 Abstract.................................................................................................. 143 The Creation of a Racial Crime Threat..................................................... 145 An Explosive Combination...................................................................... 146 A Conspiracy of Silence?........................................................................ 148 Spurious Statistics................................................................................... 149 The Official Picture................................................................................. 150 Implications of A Racial Crime Model.................................................... 151 Conclusion............................................................................................. 152 References.............................................................................................. 154

Chapter 8

Media Event, Racial Ramblings, or Both? An Analysis of Media Coverage of The Tamworth Council Sudanese Refugees Resettlement Case (2006)....................................................................... 159 Abstract.................................................................................................. 159 Prologue: What Was All The Media Hype About? The “Tamworth Case”.......................................................................... 160 Introduction............................................................................................ 161 News Framing And Audience Understanding.......................................... 163 Method................................................................................................... 165 Putting Race Upfront: What’s In A Headline?.......................................... 169 “If That Is Racism, Then Call Me A Racist!” The Utterances of Mayor Treloar............................................................................ 172 Race/Ing The Tamworth Case?................................................................. 175 Media (Re)Producing The Problematized (Sudanese) Refugee Subject..... 176 Discussion And Conclusion.................................................................... 179 References.............................................................................................. 183 xi

Chapter 9

Covering Islam in Western Media: From Islamic To Islamophobic Discourses...................................................... 189 Abstract.................................................................................................. 189 Introduction............................................................................................ 190 Theoretical Considerations...................................................................... 192 Research Method.................................................................................... 194 Results, Analysis and Discussion............................................................. 195 Conclusion & Suggestions....................................................................... 198 References.............................................................................................. 200

Chapter 10 Racism In Public Discourse In Poland. A Preliminary Analysis............... 203 Abstract.................................................................................................. 203 Introduction ........................................................................................... 204 Number of Africans In Poland ................................................................ 204 Theory of Discourse and Elite Racism .................................................... 205 Textual Analysis ..................................................................................... 208 Conclusion ............................................................................................ 218 References.............................................................................................. 220 Chapter 11 Racial Hierarchy And The Global Black Experience of Racism.............. 225 Abstract.................................................................................................. 225 Introduction............................................................................................ 226 The Concept of Race.............................................................................. 227 The Global Hierarchy of Race................................................................. 229 White Privilege and Racism.................................................................... 230 Black Identity and Disadvantage............................................................. 232 Institutional Racism and The Black Experience........................................ 233 Conclusion............................................................................................. 235 References ............................................................................................. 236 Chapter 12 Publicistic Text In Modern Media Discourse And Its Impact on the Audience..................................................................................... 241 Abstract.................................................................................................. 241 Introduction ........................................................................................... 242 Concept Headings ................................................................................. 244 Method .................................................................................................. 251

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Results ................................................................................................... 256 Conclusion ............................................................................................ 257 Acknowledgement ................................................................................. 258 References.............................................................................................. 259 Chapter 13 The High-Profile Case as ‘Fire Object’: Following The Marianne Vaatstra Murder Case Through The Media............................. 263 Abstract.................................................................................................. 263 Introduction............................................................................................ 264 STS And The High-Profile Case as Object................................................ 266 Data and Analysis................................................................................... 268 A Case of ‘Senseless Violence’................................................................ 269 Safety At Night: Dark Cycle Paths And The Demand For Road Lighting... 272 Xenophobia: An Asylum Seeker Centre In The Village............................. 274 Forensic DNA......................................................................................... 277 Conclusion............................................................................................. 280 Acknowledgements................................................................................ 282 References.............................................................................................. 285 Chapter 14 The Criminalisation Of Ethnic Groups: An Issue For Media Analysis..... 289 Abstract.................................................................................................. 289 Approaches to the Study of News Media: Theoretical and Methodological Issues................................................................... 290 Operationalisation: Research Techniques................................................ 307 Some Issues In Research Design............................................................. 313 References.............................................................................................. 319 Chapter 15 Media Images And Experiences Of Being a Jew In The Swedish City of Malmö........................................................................................ 327 Abstract.................................................................................................. 327 Introduction............................................................................................ 328 Previous Research and The Theoretical Point of Departure...................... 331 Materials and Method............................................................................. 336 Results And Analysis............................................................................... 339 Final Discussion..................................................................................... 348 References.............................................................................................. 351

xiii

Chapter 16 Sexual Violence, Race And Media (In)Visibility: Intersectional Complexities In A Transnational Frame.................................................. 359 Abstract.................................................................................................. 359 Introduction............................................................................................ 360 Feminist And Intersectional Approaches To News Coverage of Rape....... 362 Data ..................................................................................................... 370 News Media And The Geographies Of Rape........................................... 371 Conclusions............................................................................................ 378 Acknowledgments.................................................................................. 380 References.............................................................................................. 382 Index...................................................................................................... 387

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS Andrew Henry Jakubowicz University of Technology Sydney, Australia Clemence Due University of Adelaide, Australia Amelia Johns Centre for Citizenship and Globalisation, Deakin University Anthony McCosker, Swinburne University Francis B. Nyamnjoh Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Cape Town Kathrine Vitus Department of Public Health, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen K, Denmark The Danish National Centre for Social Research, Copenhagen K, Denmark Ella Cockbain Department of Security and Crime Science, University College London Kwamena Kwansah-Aidoo Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia Virginia Mapedzahama Western Sydney University, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia Bouchaib Benzehaf Chouaib Doukkali University Morocco Margaret Amaka Ohia University of Wroclaw

xv

Hyacinth Udah Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia Vera Nikolayevna Levina Tambov State University named after G.R.Derzhavin, Tambov, Russian Federation Svetlana Vladimirovna Guskova Tambov State University named after G.R.Derzhavin, Tambov, Russian Federation Lisette Jong University of Amsterdam, Netherlands Amade M’charek University of Amsterdam, Netherlands Marcello Maneri Department of Sociology and Social Research, University of Milan-Bicocca, Via Bicocca degli Arcimboldi 8, 20126 Milan, Italy Jessika ter Wal European Research Centre on Migration and Ethnic Relations, Faculty of Social Sciences, Utrecht University, Heidelberglaan 2, 3584 CS Utrecht, The Netherlands Anders Wigerfelt Malmö University, Sweden Berit Wigerfelt Malmö University, Sweden Vrushali Patil Department of Global & Sociocultural Studies, Florida International University, 11200 SW 8th St, DM 212 Miami, FL 33199, USA Bandana Purkayastha Department of Sociology, University of Connecticut, University of Connecticut Unit 1068, 344 Mansfield Road, Storrs, CT 06269, USA

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LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS AFL

Australian Football League

AHRC

Australian Human Rights Commission

BNP

British National Party

CDA

Critical Discourse Analysis

CEOP

Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre’s

CSE

Child Sexual Exploitation

ECRI

European Commission against Racism and Intolerance

EDL

English Defence League

FECCA

Federation of Ethnic Communities Councils of Australia

ICTs

Information and Communications Technologies

ITU

International Telecommunications Union

NYT

New York Times

OHPI

Online Hate Prevention Institute

SDS

Sydsvenska Dagbladet

STS

Science and Technology Studies

TOI

Times of India

TRS

The Right Stuff

PREFACE

The issue of racism is closely associated with the consciousness of society, the media image, and to the deep-rooted stereotypes. Fear of the unknown, conspiracy theories and historical influences are always near. Economy, education, a behavior of politicians, and other factors influencing the stability of certain country are relevant in determining whether negative racial stereotypes will take charge at some point. Also, racist subcultural groups are an element that we must always be aware of. Tragedies, such as hate crimes, happen more than once when certain negative opinions become widespread, perhaps even dominant. The trigger for the crime could be anywhere, but it is certain that the media have a significant role in it. An accusing article or a TV report could provoke the darkest feelings in the audience. Someone who you would never tell that could commit a crime, you might see as a part of lynch mob, or as a deranged individual taking vengeance. The basis is in the historical and the economic conditions, or in the ignorance, and through history we have learned that this negative phenomenon is erupting through indoctrination or the raising of emotional tension. We could analyze the phenomenon of racism regarding its causal and consequential relation with the media. Here we will stay on the problems of modern society, but it is important to note that everything said before, could be associated to the Second World War, the consequences of the American Civil War and hundreds of other conflicts in the world. It is important to emphasize that, for the author, the social media represent an integral part of media image and communication, and will be included in this book. Given that the definition of the racism is similar everywhere in the world, we will start our study on the example of Australia. Some would say that Australia is one of the most distant continents; however, we could not avoid it regarding the topic of this book. In order to open up our topic and start analyzing the impact of racism in social networks, we will review the case of the show “Hey Hey” from 2009. This Australian example is just seemingly harmless; actually, it opens up the possibility for a comprehensive analysis. After that, we immediately turn to the influence of a global platform - YouTube to this issue.

When we mention racism, usually we think of apartheid and South Africa; therefore we will dedicate the next chapter to this region. Film as an important medium of modern culture must certainly have an influence, especially on the younger generation, and not only for the scientific purposes of interpreting the reaction of the viewer. The film somewhat shapes and directs discourse and breaks the barriers. Although there are different opinions about the influence of the film on racism, our collection certainly deserves a chapter devoted to the phenomenon of the seventh art. For years, some negative issues – negative according to dominant population, have been connected to a particular racial group. Usually these are stereotypes, although the focus cannot be on the race of the perpetrator or the victim, this is a pattern that exists in the whole world. This chapter follows a type of criminal behavior associated with the Asian gangs in London. Offenders in both racist and religiously motivated hate crimes in the United Kingdom are usually white men, with these incidents tending to take place in public spaces, especially those close to religious and community buildings. The post-9/11 period must cover a clear overview of Islamophobia in Western countries, massive migrations in Europe, and the correlation of racial/religious elements and crimes, as they are the most fertile ground for increasing number of racist incidents. In order to continue the comparison from the beginning of the book, we will cover the Tamworth Council Sudanese Refugees Resettlement Case, and examine Australian media reporting on this matter. Afterward, we’ll deal with the Islamophobia in general. The issues of racism and extreme right-wing groups have a particular meaning in countries such as Poland or even Israel. One chapter is dedicated to public discourse in Poland before we look more closely at the experiences of the black population. What is the manipulative capacity of the media in general, and what are the effects of an article or a TV report on the audience? We will make a review from the scientific standpoint, separate from criminality and racism, expecting that it will help us to understand even delicate weaving of our topic. It’s somewhat easy to recognize violence, aggression or prejudice, although it’s hard to fight against them. The question is what else we could read between the lines and what might be the effect on our mind? Vaatstra murder in the society and media outlets involved the incrimination of the asylum seekers by the vocal part of the local community. The next chapter will deal in more detail with the omission from the Netherlands as well as the xx

role of the media in the criminalization of ethnic groups, and the relations between the criminalization and the racialization. In the end, we will examine trolling, hate speech, and cyber racism in social media as phenomena taking charge worldwide, and can lead to serious consequences. We will consider sexual violence associated with the racism and the media, as well.

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CHAPTER

1

UNDERSTANDING RACISM

WHAT IS RACISM? The Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (1998) defines racism as: ‘an ideology [belief] that gives expression to myths about other racial and ethnic groups, that devalues and renders inferior those groups, that reflects and is perpetuated by deeply rooted historical, social, cultural and power inequalities in society.’ 1 Racism is a destructive act. It disables people by decreasing their individuality. It threatens community unity and creates separation in society. It is the opposite of the democratic principles of equal opportunity and the right of all people to be judged fairly. Racism has its roots in the belief that some people are better because they belong to a particular race, ethnic or national group. Racist attitudes and

Citation: Commonwealth of Australia 2012, Understanding racism, https://learn.scu. edu.au/bbcswebdav/orgs/HR-PLP/cultural_competency/resources/ochre_resources/ racism/understanding_racism.pdf Copyright: © Commonwealth of Australia 2012 | Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution- ShareAlike 3.0 Australia License

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beliefs engender false impressions about people based on their race and are often formed because of a fear of difference, including differences in customs, values, religion, physical appearance and ways of living and viewing the world. Racism includes negative attitudes towards the use of different languages, ‘foreign’ accents or the use of non-standard variations of a dominant community language. Examples of racist actions include ridicule, racist abuse, property damage, racial harassment, racist propaganda, racial slander and physical assault. Racism also includes practices that exploit people or exclude members of particular groups from participating in the society in which they live. Extreme examples of racist behaviour include ethnic cleansing and genocide.

RACIST BEHAVIOUR AND SYSTEMIC RACISM Racism or racial discrimination is shown by behaviour that may be overt (direct) or covert (indirect) in nature. There are also instances where organisations or governments put into place systems that are discriminatory to people of a particular race or ethnic group and this is called systemic (or institutional) racism.

Overt Racism Overt racism is the unfair or unequal handling of a person or a group on racial grounds. It involves conscious and deliberate acts of intolerance and hatred perpetrated by individuals or groups. Overt racist beliefs, attitudes and practices are expressed or shown publicly or in an obvious way. An example of overt racism would be an employer who won’t hire someone on the basis of their cultural or linguistic background. This type of discrimination is typically premeditated.

Covert Racism Covert racism expresses racist ideas, attitudes or beliefs in subtle, hidden or secret forms. Often unchallenged, this type of racism doesn’t appear to be racist because it is indirect behaviour. Examples of covert racism include avoiding people on the street or not interacting with them publicly because of their race and the denial of public benefits on the grounds of race; for example informal exclusion of people of certain cultural backgrounds from public places such as night clubs or hotels.

Understanding Racism

3

Covert racism is the most common form of racism in our society today as overt racism is against the law and considered ‘politically incorrect’.

Systemic Racism Systemic or institutional racism is differential treatment of racial or ethnic groups through what appear to be neutral rules, policies and procedures by organisations or governments. These procedures disadvantage people from different cultural backgrounds and can result in unfair treatment. For example, a rule that says that no student may wear headwear to school could result in discrimination against students whose religion requires the wearing of headwear. Systemic racial discrimination can occur even when there is no intention to discriminate. Systemic racism is subtle and manifests itself in seemingly innocuous ways. Further examples of systemic racism include asking people to present birth certificates, to fulfill point system identifications or to read and write English. Members of some minority racial groups may have no access to the necessary documentation or resources to fulfill such requirements and they may use English as a second or third language. Thus, even to participate in a common activity such as getting a driver’s license can become something that is more difficult for a person from a racial minority group.

RACISM IN AUSTRALIA In Australia, racism is directly linked to the nation’s history of colonisation and migration. The original Aboriginal residents were largely cast out of their land and discriminated against by the first European settlers. Some Aboriginal people perceive the process of colonisation as an invasion. Racial discrimination has continued to impact on the lives of Aboriginal Australians in the two centuries following European settlement. The resettlement of people in Australia from all parts of the world has led to the increased cultural and linguistic diversity of the Australian population. Intolerance and discrimination have been experienced by many such groups in particular people from language backgrounds other than English, despite the fact that government migration schemes encouraged them to settle in Australia. Until recent years, racist policies and practices were also incorporated within Australian laws and institutions. The most powerful examples of

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these practices were the removal of Aboriginal children from their families and the rejection of full residency rights to Aboriginal people. Similarly, the White Australia Policy aimed to restrict immigration to Australia by people from non-European backgrounds. Racist beliefs are also at the core of the resentment expressed by some Australians at measures taken by governments, such as Aboriginal land rights, to address the disadvantages of particular groups. Such affirmative measures and positive discrimination are frequently seen by critics as the preferential treatment of one group at the expense of another, rather than the means of redressing the disadvantage inherent in society. This resentment often finds expression in the belief that ‘reverse racism’ is occurring. The notion of reverse racism is that people from the dominant culture are being discriminated against, or not receiving the same benefits as people from minority groups. All ethnic or cultural groups are capable of discriminating against other groups and all can be in a position of being discriminated against, but it should be noted that minority groups are more likely to suffer from systemic racism. Racism is detrimental, not only to its victims but to society as a whole. It damages communities by limiting the contributions of their members and disrupts peaceful co-existence and co-operation among groups. Racism damages individuals by destroying their self-confidence and preventing them from achieving their potential. It is particularly damaging for children as it hampers social development and limits educational opportunities. The consequences of racism are social injustice, a less productive economy and a divided community.

RACISM AND THE LAW Under Australian law it is illegal for people to behave in a racist manner or to encourage, incite or permit racist acts to occur and the law protects people who make complaints about racial discrimination. It is against the law to discriminate on the basis of: • • • • •

race colour nationality descent ethnic or ethno-religious background

Understanding Racism

5

•

whether a person has a relative or associate who is of a particular race. Australian legislation relating to racial discrimination addresses many aspects of racist behaviour, but legislation cannot always address the underlying social issues. Education, together with effective legislation, provides the best hope for developing a society free from racism.

THE IMPORTANCE OF CULTURE, LANGUAGE AND IDENTITY Understanding and valuing cultural diversity are the main ways to counteract racism. All people must feel free to explore and express their culture and identity while developing their understanding of the cultural diversity that exists in the world around them. Culture may be broadly defined as the ways of living built up by a group of human beings, which is passed on from one generation to the next. Every community, cultural or ethnic group has its own unique values, beliefs and ways of living. Culture contributes to how a person is seen by others and how they see themselves. The shared stories, customs, values and histories distinctive to a person’s culture, shape the way they think, behave and view the world. A shared cultural heritage bonds the members of a group together and creates a sense of belonging through community acceptance. Food, clothing, celebrations, religion, story telling and language are part of a person’s cultural heritage. The preservation of languages within a multicultural society is critical for the preservation of cultural heritage and identity. Language communicates values, beliefs, customs and feelings. It is the most important way a person’s culture and traditions can be saved or preserved. When Aboriginal language is lost, this usually means the loss of culture and identity. A large number of languages have been lost around Australia. In many places the censorship of Aboriginal languages was used as a deliberate policy in order to suppress and destroy those groups. Australia’s diversity in culture and language has expanded over the past 200 years with the arrival of people from more than 120 cultures from all over the world. Australian governments have adopted multicultural policies, recognising and respecting each person’s right to keep and protect their cultural heritage and emphasising the importance of a culture that is free of racism.

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Australians working together can and will achieve a more equal and fairer Australian society that respects and values its diversity. We need to foster cultural understanding to rid us of hatred, mistrust and fear.

Understanding Racism

7

REFERENCE 1.

New South Wales Department of Education and Training 2005, Understanding racism: What is racism? viewed 21 April 2006, .

CHAPTER

2

ALT_RIGHT WHITE LITE: TROLLING, HATE SPEECH AND CYBER RACISM ON SOCIAL MEDIA Andrew Henry Jakubowicz

University of Technology Sydney, Australia

ABSTRACT The rapid growth of race hate speech on the Internet seems to have overwhelmed the capacity of states, corporations or civil society to limit its spread and impact. Yet by understanding how the political economy of the Internet facilitates racism it is possible to chart strategies that might push back on its negative social effects. Only by involving the state, economy and civil society at both the global level, and locally, can such a process begin Citation: Jakubowicz, A. 2017. Alt_Right White Lite: trolling, hate speech and cyber racism on social media. Cosmopolitan Civil Societies: an Interdisciplinary Journal. 9(3), 41- 60.http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/ccs.v9i3.5655 Copyright: © 2017 Andrew Jakubowicz. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported(CC BY 4.0) License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/),allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license.

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to develop an effective ‘civilising’ dynamic. However neo-liberalism and democratic license may find such an exercise ultimately overwhelmingly challenging, especially if the fundamental logical drivers that underpin the business model of the Internet cannot be transformed. This article charts the most recent rise and confusion of the Internet under the impact of the Alt-Right and other racist groups, focusing on an Australian example that demonstrates the way in which a group could manipulate the contradictions of the Internet with some success. Using an analytical model developed to understand the political economy and sociology of mass media power in the later stages of modernity, before the Internet, the author offers a series of proposals on how to address racism on the Internet. Keywords: Internet, cyber racism, antisemitism, Australia, regulation, state, economy, civil society, social movements, trolls, Alt_Right, trolling

INTRODUCTION: TIONS

THREE

ONLINE

CONNEC-

The spread of cyber racism has become an increasingly prominent issue, from Myanmar to India, from the USA to Africa, and throughout Europe. An Australian study, ‘Cyber Racism and Community Resilience’[1] (Jakubowicz et al., 2017) has recently been completed by an interdisciplinary research team from six Australian universities, in partnership with the Australian Research Council, the Australian Human Rights Commission, VicHealth and the Federation of Ethnic Communities Councils of Australia, and in conjunction with the Online Hate Prevention Institute (OHPI). This article draws on that study to reflect on one aspect of online racism, namely antisemitism, and the rise of online neo-nazism. While the full study covers many ethnic, racial and religious groups, antisemitism has been chosen here because the author came across a strong antisemitic attack directed towards him online, and discovered in pursuing its origins some of the real world complexities of fighting racism online. In the first half of 2017 the global social media industry was struck by an explosive break-down in its underlying business models, a predictable outcome of its underlying logic. The two behemoths that had charted the trajectories of exponential expansion for the previous decade started to freeze. Both Facebook and Alphabet (the conglomerate covering Google, YouTube and many other cutting edge apps and platforms) were confronted by advertising boycotts (Mostrous, 2017) and huge financial losses, as

Alt_Right White Lite: Trolling, Hate Speech and Cyber Racism ....

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major global brands found their marketing materials served to sites closely associated with terrorist, racist, homophobic and sexist messages (Alba, 2017). Companies tripped up on Google included PepsiCola and Wal-Mart. Over a period of a few weeks the algorithms that had produced billions of dollars in profit for the brands by finding consumers whose social media profiles best fitted with their products turned on themselves to begin destroying the brands’ value. While the platforms reworked their practices to some extent, much of the correction was done by staff over-riding the deeper algorithms. The Verge’s Nick Statt reflected on this position, when he wrote in the midst of the crisis in March 2107, ‘YouTube is now in the position of being structurally incapable of policing its platform and perhaps culturally hesitant even to do so with more heavy-handed moderation methods’ (Statt, 2017). The deep dynamic that created these misaligned serves was compounded by payment going to the sites for the number of hits they attracted. It was when these sites tripped a minimum visits alert, that advertisers were served to the sites, and the site owners received payment from the advertisers through the platforms’ e-business model. For the Alt_Right (Alt standing for Alternate, a handle developed in the early days of the Internet to describe non-mainstream newsgroups and bulletin boards) the flow of payments from Facebook and Alphabet had become a motivation for and an unexpected benefit of the way the Internet had been developed. While the Alt_Right began in the USA it soon spread globally, including to Australia, where old Right-wing groups soon found new followers and new impact as social media opportunities emerged that the platforms had not envisaged and could not easily control. Inspired by the Breitbart (Amend and Morgan, 2017, Cadwalladr, 2017) pro-Trump intervention in the US Presidential election in the USA, a group of Australian Internet trolls adopted the name ‘TheDingoes’ in mid 2016, and set up a social media network to test out how far an Alt_Right strategy could penetrate the Australian online world through a multiple platform attack on Jews, Aborigines, Muslims, Africans and ‘multiculturalism’. Their fairly marginal presence in Australia compares to the central role that the Alt_Right has achieved under the Trump presidency – thus the title of this article includes the descriptor ‘Lite’, a reference to both their copying of the American model, and the comparatively low level of their political influence. Even though they were small, they achieved over a short period of time front-page coverage in the mainstream Fairfax press, while they established an increasingly popular and virulently hate-filled podcast site,

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and saw a string of their tweets screening in Q&A on ABC TV (@ndy, 2017, Begley and Maley, 2017, Di Stefano, 2017, Di Stefano and Esposito, 2016). Also early in 2017, following many months of damage to his own reputation while the platform had been facilitating hate speech and racism (Maier, 2016), Facebook head Mark Zuckerberg announced that after a decade of connecting people to friends and family, Facebook would now expand into the business of building communities, while interfering with freedom of speech within communities as little as possible (Zuckerberg, 2017). He extended this viewpoint in an interview on the CNN network in June 2017 (Kelly, 2017) where he reiterated the value of community and his preference that communities set their own standards and Facebook not be required to police their morality, allowing individuals to defend their personal spaces from exposure to views they detested by blocking content they did not want to see, and allowing online communities to crowd-source their boundary settings for civility. The three instances that are used here, that is, the advertisers’ boycott of Alphabet and Google, the emergence of the Alt_Right and its Australian mimics, and Facebook’s attempt to create a newer discourse of responsibility to relieve it of the pressures that it was facing, reveal global and local fractures in the Internet. These fractures tie back into the heartland of the Internet, a place now so increasingly poisoned by hate speech that even the originator of the World Wide Web Tim Berners-Lee has admitted that his dream of freedom had produced a monster of hate, and his Foundation should now set out somehow to put things aright (Berners-Lee, 2017, World Wide Web Foundation, 2017).

HOW THE INTERNET DOES ITS RACISM THING These were not unconnected events, as they reveal the layers that contribute to the experience of racism online. The Internet was created in the mid 1990s, designed as a multinodal communications system that would be difficult to control (or destroy) from one central point. Its technological infrastructure depends on a series of negotiated agreements that facilitate the rapid transfer of data through multiple redundant pathways, employing compatible methods. The infrastructure and those who manage it, the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), remain agnostic as to what messages are carried through the system (International Telecommunications Union, 2017). The main globally active interventions by states relate to child sexual abuse and violence, and even in this realm there are many spaces

Alt_Right White Lite: Trolling, Hate Speech and Cyber Racism ....

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that exist outside regulatory effectiveness. More recently there has been a growing focus on the use of the Internet for the recruitment and promotion of terrorist violence, but here too interventions have not been overwhelmingly successful. While racism has moved more to the foreground since the rising racism generated in the migration crisis in Europe, the role of race hate speech and its proponents in the US presidential election in 2016 have revealed the multiple layers of conflict around race and the value placed on the Internet by national and transnational social movements (Brookings and Singer, 2016, Amend and Morgan, 2017, Simon Wiesenthal Center, 2017).

POLITICAL ECONOMY AND CULTURAL ANALYSIS OF ONLINE RACISM A 1994 Australian study of Racism and the Media (Jakubowicz et al., 1994) completed in the period just before the advent of the Internet drew on John Thompson’s model of media power in modernity (Thompson, 1994) to structure its analysis through a layered exposition of the relationship between politics, economics and culture in television, cinema, newspapers, magazines and radio. While the research at that time differentiated between producers and consumers of media, it explored the political economy of the spaces in which meaning is created, that is, when the intention of the producer and the application of attention from the consumer link the two together. One of the most significant changes in media in the digital age has been the emergence of the prosumer, members of audiences who at the same time produce content – ranging from material that is highly professional through to the billions of often incoherent or sub-culturally coded posts in Facebook and Twitter. The media operate on a global, national and local level, both reflecting and shaping wider social perceptions, values and understandings. They operate to tie together the state (as regulator and the centre of power), the economy (huge commercial enterprises and their multitudes of satellites) and civil society (as the source of prosumers, the locus of civil interactions, and the space where social movements form). An understanding of racism in cyberspace needs to address how each of these elements magnifies the opportunities that proponents of racist hate speech have discovered. The single element that distinguishes the Internet from previous media lies in the location where value is produced (Fuchs, 2017, Curran et al., 2012). While value is produced at the point of production, and much of

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the industry still manages this through wage relations, a significant part of the value that the Internet economy generates comes from the unpaid labour of Internet users. Much of the content that draws users to platforms such as Facebook, and the clumping of users is what Facebook then sells to advertisers, (a key element in theories of modern media (Mattelart et al., 1984)) has been generated by the users themselves through their social networking, their commentaries, their images, and their offering of interest profiles (Fuchs, 2009). Our research (Jakubowicz et al., 2017) has described the clustering of Internet users around points of attraction (we label these points ‘sticky spots’) as ‘swarming’. Any process that enables such clustering into online communities (the goal so recently announced by Facebook’s Zuckerberg (Zuckerberg, 2017)) becomes effectively sealed into the underpinnings of the Internet. Any actor or motivator who can create a sticky spot that enables a swarm to form and to stay attached over time becomes a value creator of significant importance in the vast universe of value nodes. While the overall capital value of the Internet is probably incalculable, it remains important to understand that the Internet has become a framework for the creation and circulation of capital, with the multiplicity of value nodes serving a similar function in the digital realm as the factory served in early periods of industrial capital. In one sense the ‘owners’ of Internet capital comprise those with any capacity to produce sustainable swarms of users whose presence can be onsold and whose presence can therefore be monetised, including as it turns out racists, terrorists, pornographers, and child abusers. The most manifestly successful constellations of clusters are Google (and its associated Alphabet entities such as YouTube and CapitalG) with its linking capacity between things, and Facebook with its linking capacity between people. Any major attempt to control the spread of racism that requires an adjustment of this political economy may well fail at the outset. The opportunities that have opened for value expressions on the Internet include space for significant numbers of ultra-conservative and radically supremacist groups and individuals. Nagle (Nagle, 2017) has argued that the new Internet culture of the Alt_Right also includes significant ‘learning’ from the counter-culture of the late twentieth century, a mix of geeks, libertarians and counter-hegemonic cultural warriors, washed through with disengaged psychopaths. A successful player in the race hate field has been the increasingly influential US White Power community associated with the

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label of ‘Alt_Right’, a term that refers back to the earliest period of the Internet with its ‘Alt-’ newsgroups and bulletin boards, based on the altkey function on computer keyboards, used to specify alternative text when selected. In the next section, I explore what makes the Alt_Right such a pernicious and effective movement, tying together as it does psychological delight in gaming power and a commitment to ‘politically incorrect’ (or rather politically abusive) attitudes on race, gender and sexuality.

ALT_RIGHT AND SOCIAL MEDIA: THE DARK SIDE OF THE WEB There is growing agreement that the Internet has played such a powerful role in building the edifices of contemporary racism due to three interacting factors (Klein 2017). •

The political economy of the Internet favours freedom over control, facilitated by technologies that magnify the anonymity of racist protagonists. • The ideology of the Internet has long been flavoured with attachments to freedom without limits, boundless interactions magnified by the heavy ideological and legal commitment of the United States (US) to unfettered freedom of speech. • The particular configuration of activity on the Internet, that places billions of lone individuals before their screens, interacting effectively with anyone they choose, enhances the psychological dimensions of anonymity, disengagement, and dis-inhibition, particularly where we find people whose personalities accord with the Dark Triad or Tetrad (Buckels et al., 2014). This last combined personality-oriented characteristic of web trolls has emerged as the most significant parameter in the growth of Internet hate. The identification of the personality traits associated with the producers of hate speech has created a triadic association between the different personality traits, including psychological attributes of narcissism (the passionate fixation on oneself), Machiavellianism (the enjoyment gained from manipulating the behavior of others), and psychopathy (lack of empathy). While in the outside world these traits can occur independently, in the digital space they appear together with ominous regularity. A fourth trait, often identified in conjunction with the others (thus the tetrad), is sadism, the enjoyment of cruelty through the inflicting of pain on others. (March et al., 2017).

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The pursuit of targets online has come to be called ‘trolling’ (Stein, 2016). Trolling has become an omnipresent part of the web experience for anyone of any celebrity (or indeed anyone based on their appearance, clothing or opinions). It began its life when social media for the first time made it possible anonymously to identify and harass other people. The heartland of trolling has been the ‘Politically Incorrect’ (/Pol/) board of the website ‘4chan’, essentially a US-based old-style bulletin board which allows people to post ideas totally anonymously, and then see where they run (Hine et al., 2016). /Pol/, which serves as ground zero for the rise of cyber hate in the period of social media, has been the development space for aggressive memes, for the capture and re-purposing of Pepe the Frog – a meme asserting the dominance of White Power online (Koebler, 2016) and the strategies for bypassing attempts by major Internet providers to develop automatic devices (bots) to block race hate (Pearson, 2016). Moreover it has been the birthplace for the Alt_Right hashtag and cyber group, identified publicly as overtly racist when US Democratic Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton outed the nascent movement in the US presidential elections in 2016 (Chan, 2016). ‘4chan’, amongst its many other features, has published a dystopic set of ‘rules for the internet’, reflecting the gamer language and self-enhancing narcissism of its many users. While proponents of race hate have been avid users of the Internet since its inception (Jakubowicz, 2012), the explosion in racist demagoguery since at least 2010 has been fueled by political, economic and social crises around the world. As identity politics has deepened along the fault lines of race, gender and sexuality, so the Internet has become not merely a battleground but indeed a real weapon in the conflicts over resources, power and life choices (Klein, 2017). That is, the Internet has been used to harass targets, including the practice of ‘doxing’ (the release of private documents), in which the real world information of targets has been revealed so that they can be further pursued, for instance, through harassment of their children both online and off. Racists are more likely to exist in societies that are racially demarcated, with histories of racist oppression, and in hierarchies where race is associated with privilege or liability. Metropolitan societies of former empires are very likely to generate racist hierarchies, though racially-conflicted societies clearly also exist where the remnants of colonial regimes have left unresolved inequalities. Racially-associated resentments can continue for many generations where it has proved as yet impossible to ensure equity between racial groups.

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The US, occasionally described after the election of President Barak Obama as ‘post-race’, has more recently seen a re-ignition of racial conflict and racial antagonisms. Seeking to frame the origins and structural continuities in racism especially for African Americans, Joe Feigin has noted: In the United States, racist thought, emotion and action are structured into the rhythms of everyday life. They are lived, concrete, advantageous for whites and painful for those who are not white. Each major part of the life of a white person or person of color is shaped directly or indirectly by this country’s systematic racism (Feigin, 2014). First published in 2000, Feigin’s study tracks the structural impact of racism in the US and explores how that structure affects the agency, opportunities and life outcomes for majority Whites and a range of ethnoracial minorities. He denies though that the country can be truly analysed as post-racial, reflecting on the 97% of Americans who opted for a single racial label in the 2010 Census (p.251). Feigin argues that US society has been dominated by a White Racial Frame, such that the narrative of the society and the development of its institutions have been systemically bent towards the interests and perspectives of Whites, especially White men. While Australia has a much smaller historical involvement with slavery than the US (mainly in relation to indentured workers from the Pacific) the idea of White framing that Feigin uses may well prove helpful in reflecting on Australian racism. Australia has a particular constellation of histories of invasion, extermination, slavery, and exclusion – it was founded by the invasion from the United Kingdom by military forces and forced settlers (Jupp, 2002). Thereafter governments imposed various regimes of racial oppression and exclusion, mainly but not only on Indigenous people, Asians and Pacific Islanders, such that in the formal creation of the Commonwealth of Australia in 1901, racial hierarchy was central to the project and its legislative priorities (Williams, 2012). Thus for at least three generations after the establishment of the Commonwealth, White privilege drove the social, political and economic life of the country. Indigenous people were effectively without recognition until the mid-1960s, a time also when White Australia immigration restrictions began to erode. It was not until the late1970s that the celebration and defence of White privilege was abandoned by government, though core values and worldviews of Whiteness remained circulating within the society, as an insistent counter-narrative (Jakubowicz,

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1997). Multiculturalism was adopted as formal policy in 1978 (Jakubowicz, 2013), though there has been sustained resistance to it among many sectors of the society, which continue to bemoan the reduction in White privilege. Institutions geared towards countering racism have been in place since 1976, though not without resistance and sustained hostility (Soutphommasane, 2014).

AN AUSTRALIAN CASE STUDY: THE DINGOES AS AN EXEMPLAR OF GAMING THE SYSTEM IN THE NAME OF WHITE POWER The example used in this article of the trolling/ 4chan approach, set up in Australia during the US Presidential elections, is a project of a group calling itself TheDingoes. Perched on a service provided by .xyz (a new service platform that hosts many thousands of clients), TheDingoes exemplifies all the various elements of state of the art antisemitic and racist online presence; Buzzfeed reported that the founders of the TheDingoes were intentionally using as wide a range of social media as they could, skirting rules and testing boundaries, in order to normalise racist hate speech (Di Stefano, 2017, Di Stefano and Esposito, 2016). Typically the members remain disguised behind pseudonyms and delight in their anonymity, particularly the opportunity it gives them to ‘bant’ (banter). Their use of the .xyz demonstrates a close knowledge of Internet trends. The .xyz domain name was released to the general public in mid-2014, as part of a refreshing by ICANN of generic top-level domain names. Google adopted it for its corporate Alphabet site, (abc.xyz), and by June 2016 it was the fourth most registered top level global domain name after.com, .net and .org. The name is managed by a company called Generation XYZ, (http:// gen.xyz), which describes itself as ‘a global community inspired by the Internet and its limitless potential… to connect with the world in a whole new way… you can focus on connecting with your audience anywhere in the world’. It represents a further layer of defence for users, from any retributive pursuit by people they harass. TheDingoes appeared online in 2016, their website registered in January, followed up with a Twitter account in June. A number of the people associated with the group also joined about that time, including one tweeter whose display image contained the anti-immigration slogan ‘Fuck Off, We’re Full’. TheDingoes (once the name of a 1970s Australian music band that left for the US) described itself as ‘#AltRight, but not in the way that

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violates #Rule1’. Here they refer to Rule1, that is the 4chan /b/ rule 1, ‘Do not talk about /b/’ (which is also rule 2). /b/ is the general posting board for 4 Chan users. They also have ‘88’ on their page, which stands for the initials ‘HH’, a code for ‘Heil Hitler’. As of February 2017, TheDingoes had 1,461 followers online, had posted 3,640 posts, garnered 5,507 likes, and was following 442 other Tweeters; by September 2017 it had grown to 2,146 followers (gaining about 100 followers a month), with 4,615 Tweets and 7,500 likes, though it had abandoned some of its followed friends (down to 420). The site followed a range of micro-nationalist groups, a raft of conservative online commentators and some ‘lulz’ (Laugh Out Loud plural) antisemitic posters, such as one identifying as ‘Goys just want to have fun’, and another as ‘Dachau Blues’, backed by an image of the Auschwitz ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ sign. The 400+ twitter accounts that TheDingoes follow, provide a helpful geography in Australia, the USA and Europe, of both the antisemitic old right and the new Alt_Right, that shows how fragmented and competitive and attention-seeking such groups can be. TheDingoes consciously incorporate three other rules from 4chan/b/, numbers 13 to 15: ‘nothing is sacred; do not argue with a troll – it means they win; the more beautiful and pure a thing is, the more satisfying it is to corrupt it’. These rules are compounded by two other insights (Rules 19 and 28) generated by the Dark Triad souls who drive the machine: ‘The more you hate it, the stronger it gets’; and ‘There will always be more fucked up shit than what you just saw’. These views are nihilist rather than conservative, angry and pathological rather than intellectual or analytical. TheDingoes are aligned with a number of ultra-Right sites in the US, where they posted podcast interviews with former ALP leader and later conservative commentator Mark Latham[2] and National party MP George Christensen[3] (hosted globally on The Right Stuff (TRS) (The Dingoes, 2017). Querying the Christensen interview, one commentator (self-styled as ‘rabbijoeforeskinsucker’) challenged the interviewers for focusing too much on Muslims (Christensen was strongly anti-Muslim), declaiming: ‘Lot’s [sic] of talk about Muslims, not much about the Jew. Are you guys kosher nationalists by any chance? Or are you just cowards?’ The slackbastard blog, an anarchist monitor of far right politics in Australia, reported that TRS ‘obtained its semi-popularity on the AltRight, in part, by its willingness to address The Jewish Question, ie to name the Jew as being responsible for All The (Bad) Things’ (@ndy, 2017).

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By February 2017, TheDingoes had become national news, when their TRS interview with Christensen became a point of attack by Jewish leaders on the Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, on the day Benjamin Netanyahu, then Prime Minister of Israel, arrived in Australia for an official visit. BuzzFeedNews reported that: Dr Dvir Abramovich, whose Anti-Defamation Commission tracks antiSemitism online … was angered to hear Christensen speaking to the podcast network. Abramovich said ‘The Right Stuff’ network started one of the most prominent anti-Semitic memes on the internet, which involved racist trolls putting parentheses, or ‘echo’ symbols, around the names of Jewish journalists. ‘While we do not know what is in Christensen’s heart, for an elected official to be interviewed on a podcast that traffics in bigoted and demeaning stereotypes is deeply troubling,’ he said (Di Stefano, 2017). While researching racism online this author found himself a target of TheDingoes. I have a Jewish heritage, my immediate family being Holocaust survivors who escaped to Australia, via China, in 1946. Many members of my close family were murdered by the Nazis in Poland during the Second World War. Since 2011, I have been a regular contributor to The Conversation, a global website publishing articles by academics from universities across the world, written for an intelligent lay audience. Over this time, I have contributed over 40 pieces, mainly on multiculturalism and racism. On 6 December 2016, I published a piece on ethnocracy, applying to Australia the ideas of scholars who had analysed Israel and Northern Ireland in terms of their different populations’ unequal access to democracy (Jakubowicz, 2016a, Jakubowicz, 2016b). The article attracted 5,400 hits, and 120 published comments. Among the comments (since removed by the community standards guardian at The Conversation) were a number of curious posts. The first, from a Clara Newsom (most likely a pseudonym), asked ‘To what extent are Jews like you overrepresented in positions of power?’. She followed with: ‘I want to know how many university professors are Jews’. Then she wrote: ‘Good take on this over at The Dingoes. ‘Ethnocracy’ is a pretty shabby concept tbh, not worthy of a real sociologist. Looks like more ethnically motivated, anti-Australian animus to me!’ She then posted a link to TheDingoes web page (posted on 8 December), which referred to the ‘Skype-rat’ jacubowicz [sic]. The comments continued – ending with ‘What if academics of a (((certain ethnicity))), e.g. are disproportionately guilty of sowing white ethnomasochist memes such as ‘white privilege’ …. Try this instead: the Dingoes link’.

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I had not, at that stage, heard about the moves made on 4chan or TRS to label people as Jewish and therefore a problem, or picked up on the bracket creep ((( ))). The (((echo))) device was first launched by the TRS blog in June 2016 (note its logo names it as an ‘Echo Free’ site), as a way of capturing Jewish names ‘that echoed through history’ (Fleishman and Smith, 2016b). The echo brackets are supposed to represent graphically the ringing of a bell that continues over time, which therefore enhances the names inside the brackets with the implied negative impact of Jewish perfidy through the ages. Soon after, a related device was trialed, by altrightmedia which uploaded an extension for Google Chrome, called ‘Coincidence Detector’. The extension would draw on a list of supposedly-Jewish names, regularly updated, and wherever one of the names appeared during a web search for one of its users, the name would be echo-bracketed for that user. This process was designed as a ‘Jew detector for unknowing goyim’, ensuring that those so inclined could see American media and politics draped in the brackets (Fleishman and Smith, 2016a). So, that explained the echo brackets that Newsom had used in her TheConversation comment, and which re-appeared on The Dingoes attack. Indeed the story about the brackets had broken quickly in the US and global media some weeks before, though in resistance many people adopted the brackets as a sign of solidarity with the targeted Jews. But Skype-rat was something else again. As it soon turned out, a new game was being tried with Google, where the trolls at 4chan had invented a strategy for identifying Jews (and Blacks and Mexicans) through attaching proxy-labels, which were major commercial identifiers on the Internet. Hine and colleagues have studied 4chan, ‘the dark underbelly of the Internet’, and its /pol/, the politically incorrect board. In particular they looked at ‘Operation Google’, a response to Google’s announcement of anti-hate machine learning-based technology and similar initiatives by Twitter, designed to sabotage the then extant anti-hate strategies (Hine et al., 2016). The Alt_Right trolls proposed using ‘Google’ to replace ‘nigger’, and ‘Skype’ to replace ‘Kike’ (Jew). The call went out on September 22 – that day ‘Google’ increased its use on the Internet by word count by five times, while Skype doubled. By September 26, the use had declined, though the words remained part of the /pol/ vernacular. Ten weeks later the word ‘Skype’ added to the old antisemitic label of ‘rat’ was up and running in Australia. Within two days of my The Conversation article being published, the Skype-rat piece had been posted on TheDingoes.xyz, in their website, on Twitter and on Facebook, written by ‘Carl’. It contained over 2,000 words

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focusing on the ‘Jewish Marxist’ race traitor motif that has been a common trope of neo-Nazis (and indeed the original Nazis). The post opened with my history laid out, the first being my (((Polish))) parents, under an image of a canopy of photographs of Jews killed in the Holocaust, taken from a Jewish memorial site, the Yad Vashem Hall of Names. By May 2017 TheDingoes had made it onto the front page of the Sun Herald, a leading Sydney newspaper. The article reported a forthcoming Dingoes conference, where the guest speaker was to be US neo-Nazi ‘MIke Enoch’ (aka Mike Peinovich) founder of TRS (The Right Stuff) and host of The Daily Shoah podcast. The article concluded by quoting ‘Mammon’, a Dingoes’ spokesperson, as claiming Australia should become a white ‘ethnostate’, a term curiously redolent of my argument which the site had attacked some months before (Begley and Maley, 2017). In investigating this group’s emergence, I tracked the layers of technology it had used to create the webpage. The site itself does not supply ownership information. The publishing software they use is made by Ghost.org, a US firm, which describes its mission as ‘to create the best open source tools for independent journalists and writers across the world… Behind the scenes, we’re just a group of weird, fun-loving humans who enjoy experimenting with new technology. We believe in creating as much freedom in the world as we can, and everything we do is based on that core principle…’. In an email to me, John, the principal at Ghost, responded that ‘our code of conduct covers our customers, and the user in question is not one of our customers, It’s a person on the Internet who has downloaded our free-of-charge code and made his own website with it… there’s absolutely a legal precedent for Digital Ocean, of whom this person is a customer, to take responsibility for what he publishes’. I then contacted Digital Ocean, a US company which hosts the site. Despite three attempts the company failed to respond, an automated message saying ‘we are not seeing any abuse complaints’. The domain name they used, from .xyz, was not covered by anti-abuse provisions, as ‘XYZ exercises no control over the uses to which a domain name may be put and no control over the content or operations of any website’. A ‘Whois’ search revealed that TheDingoes.xyz was created in January 2016 for eight years. Meanwhile another Alt_Right site, XYZ.net.au, accused me of being a member of the ‘regressive left’, collecting a series of descriptors from my The Conversation profile (Hiscox, 2016). This XYZ name was chosen as the Alt_Right response to the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation),

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while also acknowledging its political proximity to the US site Breitbart (http://www.xyz.net.au). However XYZ.net.au has no relationship to XYZ. xyz. Andrew Anglin, founder of the Daily Stormer (genuflecting in its name to the Nazi Party’s Die Sturmer), described his group of Alt_Right thus: Trump-supporting White racial advocates who engage in trolling or other activism on the internet … The core concept of the movement, upon which all else is based, is that Whites are undergoing an extermination, via mass immigration into White countries which was enabled by a corrosive liberal ideology of White self-hatred, and that the Jews are at the center of this agenda (Anglin, 2016). The bursting forth of the Alt_Right into the sphere of antisemitism online has been paralleled in time with the rapid rise in threats directed against Jews in the real world, especially in the US. It is important to recognise that the trolling online has close similarities with the real world attacks being tried out in cities and towns, be it the rapid spread of graffiti in trains and on walls, for instance ‘Jew’ scrawled on images of rats stenciled on walls in Chinatowns in the US to bring in the Year of the Rat (Chernikoff, 2016) or neo-Nazi graffiti stickers that have appeared in Melbourne. As part of the same coterie, 4Channers have described themselves as: the people devoid of any type of soul or conscience. Products of cynicism and apathy, spreading those very sentiments daily. Anonymous is the hardened war veteran of the internet. He does not forgive or forget. We have seen things that defy explanations; heard stories that would make any god-fearing, law abiding citizen empty their stomach where they stand. We have experienced them multiple times and eagerly await their return[4]. The bizarre world of trolls and cyber Nazis has become bound together with centuries old antisemitism, while the characteristics of the Internet contribute to, and the personalities of the trolls may well ensure, that the hate will flourish.

COUNTERING RACISM ONLINE: LIGHTENING THE IMPACT OF THE ALT_RIGHT WHITE While authoritarian regimes with strong Internet controls, such as the Peoples’ Republic of China, have almost managed to curb unauthorised racism online (Hornby, 2017), most democratic societies and their associated capitalist economies have found the challenges far greater (McGonagle, 2012a).

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Constrained by ideologies promoting freedom of speech above freedom from hate, and concerned to ensure economic growth and the profitability of online enterprises, governments have been loath to intervene in cyber behaviours that are not overtly criminal. Indeed the Australian government has rejected options to do so a number of times – most significantly in the adoption of the European convention on Cybercrime, for which Australia at first floated in a draft agreement, and then withdrew, acceptance of the optional protocol on cyber racism (Council of Europe, 2001, Council of Europe, 2003). Two major forums in 2002 and 2010 sponsored by the Australian Human Rights Commission have heard calls for but rejected any legislative intervention on cyber race hate speech (Australian Human Rights Commission (AHRC), 2013, Jakubowicz, 2010). In the launch of the Children’s E-Safety Commissioner, the Australian government noted that its concerns were for sexual abuse and psychological damage to children, carefully stating that freedom of speech priorities would apply to any cyber race hate issues affecting adults (Parliament of Australia, 2014). Of course the same government’s relentless battles over its unsuccessful attempts to reduce the protections offered under Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act in the period from 2014 to 2017 reinforce the public bemusement with the commitment of the state to protecting vulnerable targets from online racist abuse. It was only in August 2017, when the 18C battle had been pushed into the background, that the E Safety Commissioner was able to initiate action around the threats young people experienced on the basis of race hate. The E Safety Commissioner found that more than half of Australians between the ages of 12 and 17 had witnessed racist or hateful comments about cultural or religious groups online (Giakoumelos, 2017). While the United Nations and its agencies such as UNESCO and the ITU, the European Union (European Commission against Racism and Intolerance (ECRI), 2015, Cerase et al., 2015) and other international bodies have recognised the social, political and economic harm caused by online racism(Gagliardone et al., 2015, McGonagle, 2012b, Global Forum for Combating Antisemitism, 2015), there has been little progress in collaboration at the global level between government, civil society and the economic actors given the resistance by the largest corporations and their agents to any mention of governmental and especially intergovernmental regulation. Such collaboration will ultimately be crucial, as unconstrained vitriolic hate speech contributes to declining civility both within and between nations.

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POTENTIAL AUSTRALIAN INITIATIVES However there are possibilities at the national level, and locally in countries such as Australia. There are federal government agencies and departments concerned to enhance social cohesion, reduce the contributors to violence and conflict, and supportive of civil communication. Meanwhile the onshore representatives of the global economic players on the Internet can be brought together, while their industries are also well-organised (Internet Industry Association, Australian Interactive Multimedia Industry Association). An argument can be made that oligopolistic economic actors such as Google or Facebook have very significant social obligations, however uncomfortable such claims might be for the owners of those platforms. For instance Napoli has argued in relation to journalism online that the preventative and individualistic approach adopted by most of the platforms in relation to their freedom to deliver content as they wish should be replaced with a public interest test for the algorithms used by the platforms (Napoli, 2014). Yet advancing such arguments remains constrained by the absence of national lobbies of civil society actors concerned with such a public interest test. Civil society has no national peak concerned with online racism, other than the rather amorphous Racism It Stops With Me network established by the Australian Human Rights Commission. Unfortunately, the most influential civil society organisation, and one that opposes any constraints on hate speech, the Institute for Public Affairs, has close ties to the News Limited print media, where the Alt_Right also has a base on its Sky News cable channel. Their links reveal the close alliance between conservative political forces and major economic actors in the media environment. Logically then the broader regulatory context in Australia would be wellserved by a national body to promote a more civil and protected online communication space, with the authority and influence to negotiate with government and industry to support effective monitoring, responsiveness and ultimately intervention. Online civil society activism depends on information about the extent, form and impact of Internet racism, combined with networks that can support targets, applaud resisters, and pursue perpetrators. Racism works best when it terrifies, fragments and immobilises its targets. Racist propaganda travels quickly through the Internet, cleansing sites of opponents, and intimidating bystanders. It can be slowed when creative interventions and systematic resistance are produced and sustained, racists called out, and their platforms pursued to deny them communication space. The anonymity of trolls

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currently provides them with their greatest weapon, while the preference of platforms to protect targets by allowing them to cut themselves off from attack leaves the target isolated and the perpetrator free to operate elsewhere with their defamatory and harassing posts and activities left untouched in the growing number of secret cells of private groups. Governments often do not see racism as important enough an issue to provide the level of investment necessary for civil society action against it. Organisations such as the Online Hate Prevention Institute, identified globally as innovators in finding and outing racism online, struggle to survive as Australian governments focus on protecting children and tracking terrorist recruitment. While these other related spheres are clearly very important, racism online contributes greatly to both of them, threatening children and justifying in the minds of some their recruitment into violence against their racialised ‘enemies’. If we understand that online racism has all the characteristics of multiple conflicting and competing social movements, then a social movement model might best provide the way to limit its impact and hold both perpetrators and supporters to account. There are many civil society groups, from local churches, mosques, synagogues, temples and ashrams, through online activist groups such as GetUp!, to trade unions, neighbourhood committees, and sports clubs, that have an interest in a more civil and comprehending cyber sphere. Within the sphere of economy there are real challenges to the Internet industry where its fundamental economic logic may need to be somewhat unstitched and then recombined in ways that allow the sticky spots that attract the swarms that deliver the profit to operate with less negative impact on more vulnerable and less resourced users of the internet. While governments at the state level have recognised the importance of social media in promoting social cohesion, they have been slow to think through the systematic processes they will need to research, design, implement, review and refine. This article has sought to illuminate why action against cyber-racism has so quickly become as important as it has, while suggesting some frameworks for innovation in the context of the way the Internet industry is organised. As civil society decries the rise of the cyber racists, racists are making hay as they discover ever more ways to ‘bant’ the system supposedly there to limit their impact.

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SOME CURRENT PROPOSALS IN AUSTRALIA In this final section a summary is provided of the range of recommendations that the CRaCR project has made to its industry partners, namely the Victorian Health Promotion Foundation (VicHealth), the Australian Human Rights Commission (AHRC), and the Federation of Ethnic Communities Councils of Australia (FECCA). While the partners will make their own decisions about their priorities, the range indicates the multiple levels at which cyber racism must be addressed. There are three areas of law that could be addressed. At the global level, Australia could withdraw its reservation to article 4 of the International Convention to Eliminate All Forms of Racial Discrimination. Such a move has been flagged in the past, but stymied by relentless opposition from an alliance of free speech and social conservative activists and politicians. Perhaps with the new data released by the E Safety Commissioner on the exposure of children to Hate Speech, governments and opposition parties could be led to a common cause. Similarly Australian law could move to recognise European legislation on Cyber Crime, and adopt the Additional Protocol as it has for the overall legislation. Finally, Australia could adopt a version of New Zealand’s approach to cyber hate, where platforms are held ultimately accountable for the publication of online content that seriously offends, and users can challenge the failure of platforms to take down offensive material in the realm of race hate. Taken together these elements would mark out to providers and users of Internet services that there is a shared responsibility for reasonable civility. However there are many initiatives in civil society that would empower those who are currently the targets, and disempower those who are the current perpetrators of race hate. For organisations concerned with sustaining civility and community mental health, a multi-layered approach becomes crucial. Firstly, people who are targeted by racists need support and affirmation; this approach underpins the approach that the E Safety commissioner has undertaken in the development of a Young and Safe portal. The portal offers stories and scenarios designed to build the confidence of young people, and provide them with the skills to grow. The Online Hate Prevention Institute has become a reservoir of insights and capacities to identify and pursue perpetrators. There could be a CyberLine for tipping and reporting race hate speech online, for follow up and possible legal action. Anti-racism workshops (some have already been run by the E Safety commissioner) have aimed to pushback against hate, while building structures where people

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can come together online. Modelling and disseminating best practice against race hate speech offers resources to wider communities that can then be replicated elsewhere. The Point magazine, an online youth-centred publication for the government agency Multicultural New South Wales, reported two major events where government sponsored industry/community collaboration to find ways forward against cyber racism. (Fares, 2016) In Sydney a YouTube Content Creators Bootcamp brought together the industry with young creatives to find ways of building counter narratives. In Melbourne, the Federal government, focusing on countering radicalisation, collaborated with industry groups and young people in a media online hate prevention forum. However the industry participants could not see, in this sort of collaboration, an ending to cyber racism: there would need to be industry and community collaboration, whatever that might mean. Finally we need to recognise that the growth of cyber racism marks the struggle between a dark and destructive social movement that wishes to suppress or minimise the recognition of cultural differences, confronted by an emergent social movement that treasures cultural differences and egalitarian outcomes in education and wider society. Advocacy organisations can play a critical role in advancing an agenda of civility and responsibility through the state, the economy and civil society. The social movements of inclusion will ultimately provide the pressure on the state and in the economy that ensures the major platforms do in fact accept full responsibilities for the consequences of their actions. When the population confronts the industry, demonstrating it wants answers, then we will begin to see responsibility emerge. Cyber racism has been produced by the intimate relations of power generated by the state, the economy and civil society. The focus for civil society social movements will necessarily be to loosen the suction that holds state bodies so closely in thrall to the industry.

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29. Hine, G. E., Onaolapo, J., De Cristofaro, E., Kourtellis, N., Leontiadis, I., Samaras, R., Stringhini, G. and Blackburn, J. 2016, ‘A longitudinal measurement study of 4chan’s Politically Incorrect Forum and its effect on the Web (version 3)’. Available at: https://arxiv.org/ pdf/1610.03452v3.pdf (Accessed 20 February 2017). 30. Hiscox, D. 2016, ‘XYZ vs AGE (part 1): Regressive Left run for cover’, XYZ. Available at: https://www.xyz.net.au/xyz-vs-age-part-1regressive-left-run-for-cover/ (Accessed 25 February 2017). 31. Hornby, L. 2017, ‘China battles to control growing online nationalism’, The Financial Times(9 January). Available at: https://www.ft.com/ content/5ae7b358-ce3c-11e6-864f-20dcb35cede2 (Accessed 23 January 2017). 32. International Telecommunications Union 2017, ‘What does ITU do?’ Available at:http://www.itu.int/en/about/Pages/whatwedo.aspx (Accessed 21 January 2017). 33. Jakubowicz, A. 1997, ‘In pursuit of the anabranches: Immigration, multiculturalism and a culturally diverse Australia’, in Gray, G. & Winter, C. (eds.) The Resurgence of Racism; Howard, Hanson and the Race Debate, Monash Publications in History. Clayton Department of History, Monash University. 34. Jakubowicz, A. 2010, ‘Cyber Racism, Cyber Bullying, and Cyber Safety’, Conversation at the AHRC Cyber-Racism Summit 2010, Available at: https://andrewjakubowicz.com/publications/cyberracism-cyber-bullying-and-cyber-safety/(Accessed 31 October 2017). 35. Jakubowicz, A. 2012, ‘Cyber Racism’, in More or less: democracy and new media [Online]. Version. Available at: http://www.futureleaders. com.au/book_chapters/pdf/More-or-Less/Andrew_Jakubowicz.pdf (Accessed: 16 July 2016). 36. Jakubowicz, A. 2013, ‘Comparing Australian multiculturalism: the international dimension’, in Jakubowicz, A. & Ho, C. (eds.) ‘For Those Who’ve Come Across the Seas...’: Australian Multicultural Theory Policy and Practice, Australian Scholarly Press, Melbourne, pp. 15-30. 37. Jakubowicz, A. 2016a, ‘First the word, then the deed: how an ‘ethnocracy’ like Australia works’, The Conversation. Available at: https://theconversation.com/first-the-word-then-the-deed-how-anethnocracy-like-australia-works-69972(Accessed 12 March 2017). 38. Jakubowicz, A. 2016b, ‘Once upon a Time in … ethnocratic Australia:

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migration, refugees, diversity and contested discourses of inclusion and exclusion’, Cosmopolitan Civil Societies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, vol.8, no.3, pp. 144-167. https://doi.org/10.5130/ccs.v8i3.5239. Jakubowicz, A., Dunn, K., Paradies, Y., Mason, G., Bliuc, A.-M., Bahfen, N., Atie, R., Connelly, K. and Oboler, A. 2017, Cyber Racism and Community Resilience: Strategies for Combating Online Race Hate, Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3319-64388-5. Jakubowicz, A., Goodall, H., Martin, J., Mitchell, T., Randall, L. and Seneviratne, K. 1994, Racism, Ethnicity and the Media, Allen and Unwin, Sydney. Jupp, J. 2002 From white Australia to Woomera : the story of Australian immigration. New York Port Melbourne, Vic.: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9781139195034. Kelly, H. 2017, ‘The Zuckerberg Interview’, CNN Business. Available at: http://money.cnn.com/technology/zuckerberg-interview/ (Accessed 24 June 2017). Klein, A. 2017, Fanaticism, Racism and Rage Online: corrupting the digital sphere, Palgrave Macmillan, Cham, Switzerland. https://doi. org/10.1007/978-3-319-51424-6. Koebler, J. 2016, ‘Hillary Clinton Is Right: Pepe Is a White Supremacist’, Motherboard (15 September). Available at: https://motherboard.vice. com/en_us/article/hillary-clinton-is-right-pepe-is-a-white-supremacist (Accessed 21 February 2017). Maier, L. 2016, ‘Germany investigates Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook over slow removal of hate speech’, Forward. Available at: http://forward.com/news/world/353625/germany-investigates-markzuckerberg-and-facebook-over-slow-removal-of-hate/ (Accessed 23 March 2017). March, E., Grieve, R., Marrington, J. and Jonason, P. K. 2017, ‘Trolling on Tinder® (and other dating apps): Examining the role of the Dark Tetrad and impulsivity’, Personality and Individual Differences, no.110, pp. 139-143. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2017.01.025. Mattelart, A., Mattelart, M. and Delcourt, X. 1984, International Image Markets: In Search of an Alternative, Comedia, London. McGonagle, T. 2012a, ‘Minorities and online “Hate Speech”: A parsing of selected complexities’, European Yearbook of Minority Issues

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Online, vol.9, no.1, pp. 419-440. https://doi.org/10.1163/2211611790000177. McGonagle, T. 2012b, ‘The troubled relationship between free speech and racist hate speech: the ambiguous roles of the media and internet’, Day of Thematic Discussion “Racist Hate Speech”, Available: UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. Available at: https://www.ivir.nl/publicaties/download/Expert_Paper_Racist_Hate_ Speech_UN.pdf(Accessed 24 May 2016). Mostrous, A. 2017, ‘YouTube hate preachers share screens with household names’, The Times(17 March). Available at: http://www. thetimes.co.uk/article/youtube-hate-preachers-share-screens-withhousehold-names-kdmpmkkjk (Accessed 25 March 2017). Nagle, A. 2017, Kill All Normies: Online culture wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the alt-right, Zero Books, Arlesford, Hants. Napoli, P. 2015, ‘Social Media and the Public Interest : Governance of News Platforms in the Realm of Individual and Algorithmic Gatekeepers’, Telecommunications Policy, vol.39, no.9, pp. 751-760. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.telpol.2014.12.003. Parliament of Australia 2014, Enhancing Online Safety for Children Bill 2014, Explanatory Memorandum Canberra: House of Representatives. Available at: https://tinyurl.com/ExpMemOnlineSafChild (Accessed: 15 September 2016). Pearson, J. 2016, ‘Scientists invented a tool to expose 4chan’s racist trolling campaigns’, Motherboard. Available at: https://motherboard. vice.com/en_us/article/block-4chan-to-stop-the-alt-right-fromspreading-racist-memes-scientists-say(Accessed 21 February 2017). Simon Wiesenthal Center 2017, ‘Simon Wiesenthal Center’s 2017 Digital Terrorism & Hate Report Card: Social Media Giants Fail to Curb Online Extremism’, Simon Wiesenthal Center. Available at: http://www.wiesenthal.com/site/apps/nlnet/content2.aspx?c=lsKWLb PJLnF&b=4441467&ct=14988437 (Accessed 15 April 2017). Soutphommasane, T. 2014, ‘Unconscious bias and the bamboo ceiling’. Available at: https://www.humanrights.gov.au/news/speeches/ unconscious-bias-and-bamboo-ceiling (Accessed 24 October 2016). Statt, N. 2017, ‘YouTube is facing a full-scale advertising boycott over hate speech: The biggest brands continue to leave’, The Verge(24 March). Available at: https://www.theverge.com/2017/3/24/15053990/

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google-youtube-advertising-boycott-hate-speech (Accessed 31 October 2017). Stein, J. 2016, ‘How Trolls Are Ruining the Internet’, Time (18 August/ 12 September) (Accessed 21 February 2017). The Dingoes 2017, ‘The Convict Report Episode 62: Mark Latham 2 – Dingo Boogaloo’, The Right Stuff Radio: Echo Free Entertainment, 2017 (7 February). Available at: https://radio.therightstuff.biz/tag/altright-australia/ (Accessed 11 April 2017). Thompson, J. 1994, The Media and Modernity: a social theory of the media, Blackwell, London. Williams, G. 2012, ‘Removing racism from Australia’s Constitutional DNA ‘, Alternative Law Journal, vol.37, no.3, pp. 151-155. Available at:https://ssrn.com/abstract=2144763 (Accessed 25 March 2017). World Wide Web Foundation 2017, ‘Delivering Digital Equality: The Web Foundation’s 2017 – 2022 Strategy’, Web FoundationAvailable at:http://webfoundation.org/2017/02/delivering-digital-equality-theweb-foundations-2017-2022-strategy/ (Accessed 12 March 2017 2017]. Zuckerberg, M. 2017, ‘Building Global Community’, Facebook. Available at:https://www.facebook.com/notes/mark-zuckerberg/ building-global-community/10154544292806634/ (Accessed 2 May 2017).

CHAPTER

3

“AUSSIE HUMOUR” OR RACISM? HEY HEY IT’S SATURDAY AND THE DENIAL OF RACISM IN ONLINE RESPONSES TO NEWS MEDIA ARTICLES

Clemence Due

University of Adelaide, Australia

ABSTRACT In early October 2009, a blackface parody of the Jackson Five performed on the Hey Hey It’s Saturday reunion reached not only an audience of over 2.5 million people in Australia, but also millions of people around the world

Citation: Clemence Due, “Aussie humour” or racism? Hey Hey It’s Saturday and the denial of racism in online responses to news media articlesPlatform, 2011; 3(1):36-53. Copyright: Journal of Media and Communication is a fully refereed, open-access online journal for graduate students and early-career researchers, published by the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne, Australia. Clemence Due © Creative Commons 2.5 Australia licence.

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after guest judge Harry Connick Jr accused the skit and the show of racism. The incident was widely discussed within various online communities, and whilst widely condemned internationally, online comment sections and responses to online newspaper polls suggested that the overwhelming opinion within Australia was that the skit was not racist. This paper considers the way in which such denials of racism were performed in online comments to a number of newspaper articles and polls.

INTRODUCTION To ratings of over two and a half million viewers, the Australian family variety show Hey Hey It’s Saturday returned to the Nine Network in Australia for two reunion shows in 2009, ten years after it was originally taken off air. The second of these shows aired on 7 October 2009 and caused a controversy surrounding accusations of racism that became the subject of national and international newspaper coverage. The incident in question occurred as part of the Red Faces amateur talent quest section of the show. On this segment, a group of doctors performed a sketch titled the Jackson Jive, in which they mimed to Michael Jackson’s Can You Feel It. The Jackson Jive was originally performed on the show 20 years earlier and revived as a form of tribute to the history of Hey Hey. The performance included a Michael Jackson impersonator with a whitened face and five back-up singers with blackened faces. Singer Harry Connick Jr, a guest judge on the segment, gave the Jackson Jive a score of zero (out of ten), stating that the show would never have been put to air in America. Later, he said that if he knew the skit was going to be on the show he would never have appeared on it, and that “I just wanted to say on behalf of my country, I know it was done humorously, but, you know, we have spent so much time trying to not make black people look like buffoons, that when we see something like that we take it really to heart” (Molitorisz and Steffens, 2009, no page). The incident made headlines around the world, as international newspapers and commentators condemned the act as demeaning (see Mitchell, 2009 for a discussion of this), mind-boggling (Hyde, 2009) and ridiculous (Kyles, 2009). In Australia, however, the response was more mixed and largely argued for the supposedly humorous nature of the skit, thereby defending against accusations of racism. For example, opinion writers stated that the performance was ignorant rather than racist (Bolt, 2009) and even Australian politicians weighed into the debate by arguing that the skit was simply meant to be humorous (Millar, 2009). A strong majority

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of public opinion – as reflected in opinion polls and online comments – interpreted the skit as “just a bit of fun”. Many people argued that since Australia does not have the same history with blackface as America (where minstrel shows have a long and problematic tradition), the skit could not be considered offensive (see news.com.au article Readers say Hey Hey Jackson Jive skit ‘not racist’ for an outline of the public response to opinion polls for News Limited online newspapers). This paper considers such responses, as seen in online comments, in order to examine how Australians defended the show and themselves from accusations of racism, and to consider the implications of humour in relation to denials of racism within Australia more broadly. Specifically, the paper considers two aspects of these online comments. Firstly, drawing upon the seminal work of van Dijk (1993), the paper uses a thematic analysis approach to consider how these denials were performed at the level of the text – that is, what resources the writers utilised in order to deny racism. And secondly, drawing on the work of Hage (1998) and Stratton (1998), the paper considers the implications of such denials at a broader level, in particular in relation to the identity of Australia as a multicultural society. Before examining the literature surrounding denials of racism and Australian identity, a brief discussion of the blackface tradition itself is called for (see, for example, Gubar, 1997; Lott, 1992; Saxton, 1975; Strausbaugh, 2007 for more detailed examinations of blackface and minstrel shows). In relation to the blackface tradition, Lott argues that “while [blackface] was organized around the quite explicit ‘borrowing’ of black cultural materials for white dissemination (and profit), a borrowing that ultimately depended upon the material relations of slavery, the minstrel show obscured those relations by pretending that slavery was amusing, right and natural” (1992, p. 23). Thus the blackface tradition in America was based largely on the slavery and oppression of black (African) Americans and functioned to reinforce stereotypes of black people as inferior. Indeed, as Saxton argues, “Blackface minstrels’ dominance of popular entertainment amounted to half a century of inurement to the uses of white supremacy” (1975, p. 27). A note regarding terminology is also required before continuing with a discussion of definitions of racism. As the skit in question, and subsequent media and online discussions, employed racial binaries of “black” and “white”, this paper does the same. It is acknowledged here that such binaries are not congruent with the broadly supported position of race as being social constructed, and that they do not reflect real-world experiences in which

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lived experiences of race are broad and include much more than “black” and “white”. As Riggs argues, to refer to racial identities such as “black” and “white” is: not to naively accept that race as a category is useful, or a biological fact, or internally coherent. Rather, to ‘recognise race’ (as in referring to someone as ‘white’) is to acknowledge that the assumption of racialized differences continues to inform how we relate to one another as people, and that this is the legacy of a long history of violence that has been perpetuated in the name of imperialism and empire against people classified as racial others (Riggs, 2006, p. 350). This article employs the terms “black” and “white” to denote those racialised differences which inform and are taken as given in the Hey Hey debate. These terms are used mindfully and it is recognised that they are reductive, and frequently function to maintain power relations that privilege people on the basis of features that are generally taken as denoting racial differences, such as skin colour. Correspondingly, it is also important to note here that this paper deals with an Australian case study concerning issues of race and racism. It is therefore highly localised within the Australian context of cultural and race relations and as such is not considered generalisable to other countries in which race relations will take a different form.

“MODERN RACISM” AND DENIALS OF RACISM Overt expressions of racism such as those associated with blackface performances and minstrel shows are now broadly taboo in Western countries (see Augoustinos and Every, 2007; McConahay, 1986; Wetherell and Potter, 1992). Instead, research on “modern” or “symbolic” racism has shown that racism no longer manifests as overtly racist acts but rather in more subtle forms, such as arguments stating that marginalised groups transgress norms within communities (Augoustinos et al, 1999; Augoustinos and Every, 2007; Liu and Mills, 2006). This research suggests that racially marginalised groups are no longer overtly discriminated against on the basis of race per se, but are instead criticised for violating traditional values, and are therefore constructed as deserving of the criticism they receive (Simmons and LeCouteur, 2008). This notion of implicit racism directed at minority groups on the basis of cultural issues has important implications for definitions of racism. For example, Wetherell and Potter argue that, “Racist discourse, in our view, should be seen as discourse (of whatever content) which has the effect of establishing, sustaining and reinforcing oppressive

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power relations” (1992, p. 70). As such, racism requires both prejudice towards a group of people based on the social construction of race and the power to oppress those groups of people. Thus it does not make sense – at least within Australia as a country with a history of colonisation – to discuss racism from marginalised groups towards dominant ones. This definition is important in that, whilst acknowledging that individual acts of racism can and do occur, a broader definition of racism involves discourse which functions to further marginalise groups who are already disadvantaged. The more implicit nature of “modern racism” has led to increasing taboos surrounding overtly racist opinions or actions. This taboo means that accusations of racism, such as those made by Harry Connick Jr in relation to the Hey Hey skit, carry a lot of weight, and the people at whom such accusations are levelled are strongly invested in refuting them. This means that even though overt forms of racism are considered unacceptable, denials of racism continue to have an important function while racism exists in more “symbolic” forms. In relation to such denials, van Dijk argues: In general, a denial presupposes a real or potential accusation, reproach or suspicion of others about one’s present or past actions or attitudes, and asserts that such attacks against one’s moral integrity are not warranted. That is denials may be a move in a strategy of defence, as well as part of the strategy of positive self-presentation (van Dijk, 1993, p. 180). Thus denials of racism respond to a perceived accusation of racism and can both defend the speaker from such accusations and present oneself (or in this case, a television show or one’s country) in a positive light. Previous work considering the denial of racism argues that a number of techniques are available to people when they attempt to defend what could otherwise be considered racist behaviour (Wetherell and Potter, 1992; van Dijk, 1993). In a seminal work used widely in the study of racism (see, for example, Simmons and LeCouteur, 2008; LeCouteur and Augoustinos, 2001; Augoustinos and Every, 2007; Saxton, 2004; Johnson and Suhr, 2003), van Dijk (1993, pp. 179-82) argues that techniques for the denial of racism include: the denial of racist intent; trivialising the seriousness of the racist incident; reversals of racism in which dominant (typically white) group members become the targets of discrimination; and positive self-presentation. Although the work of van Dijk (1993) is now 17 years old, his work in analysing denials of racism remains centrally important in studies concerning race and racist discourse since, as Augoustinos and Every argue, “contemporary race talk… is strategically organized to deny racism” (2007, p. 126). Given this,

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van Dijk’s techniques for the analysis of denial provide analysts with critical tools for examining how such denials are mobilised. In the context of this paper, such tools allow for a detailed examination of the ways in which humour is used to deny racism, or to justify discourses that could otherwise be seen as racist. Each of these techniques can be utilised in order to deny that a particular incident was racist. These will now be discussed in further detail, followed by a more general discussion regarding race in Australia. By “reverse racism”, van Dijk (1993) refers to the tactic by which dominant group members turn charges of racism around, and argue instead that it is they who are being discriminated against and who are the victims of political correctness. In Australia, for example, non-indigenous Australians are often depicted as discriminated against due to policies which supposedly give Indigenous Australians “more than their fair share” (Augoustinos and Every, 2007). However, van Dijk (1993), Hage (1998), Saxton (2004) and Wetherell and Potter (1992) have argued that true reverse racism is impossible in countries like Australia since both prejudice and power are required in order to oppress groups on the basis of their race. Importantly, and as discussed previously, such definitions of racism are contingent upon context and, of course, are also dynamic. A definition of racism as requiring both prejudice and power is salient in the context of Australia as a colonial country in which, as discussed throughout this paper, there remain residual effects of a desire for Australia to be seen as a “white” country in which those located as “white” people are seen to be “native” (as opposed to Australia’s First Nations peoples). In this sense, whilst acknowledging other conceptualisations of power in relation to racism – such as Foucault’s (1977) arguments concerning power as dispersed and circulatory rather than centralised – this paper maintains a definition of racism which requires not only prejudice but also power in terms of the maintenance of a differential allocation of privilege and disadvantage. In Australia, such power is located in the hands of white Australians and remains evident in the continuing effects of colonisation upon Indigenous Australians, in institutional practices such as those seen in mainstream news media and the political arena, and in the effects of restrictive border control policies that adversely affect asylum seekers and immigrants seeking to enter this country who may be labelled as “Others”. Nevertheless, the argument that the dominant (white) group in Australia is being unfairly treated when compared to marginalised groups is frequently

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strong enough to defend against accusations of racism, particularly in light of changes within Australia (such as policies of multiculturalism) which led to a perceived sidelining of majority group needs and a foregrounding of marginalised interests (Ahluwalia and McCarthy, 1998; Hage, 1998). Next, denials of racism based on “mitigation” are predicated on the ability to down-play or trivialise the seriousness of the event or talk in order to mitigate the possible negative consequences resulting from it (van Dijk, 1993). In relation to humour, accusations of racism are frequently mitigated by arguing that, for instance, the speaker was “only joking”, and that the intent of the humour was not racist (Billig, 2001). Thus mitigations of racism are tied closely to denials of racism based on arguments of intent. Van Dijk (1993) argues that denials of racist intent are able to diminish the responsibility of the person accused of racism, and therefore to defend against accusations of taboo, overtly racist, attitudes or opinions by arguing that the speaker or actor did not intend their speech or actions to be racist. This is also discussed by Riggs (2009) who analyses the denial of racist intent in the 2007 series of the UK’s Celebrity Big Brother reality television show. Riggs argues that such denials overlook the social consequences that racism may have, regardless of the initial intention, and therefore denials of racist intent are predicated on the speaker’s denial of the effects of entrenched racism in colonial societies. Similarly, Liu and Mills argue that what they term “plausible deniability” is theoretically central for the communication of modern racism… Plausible deniability is a communication tactic that is used to warrant or defend public discourse about minority groups against accusations of racism by constructing statements in such a way that the speaker can convincingly disavow any racist intent (Liu and Mills, 2006, p. 84). Thus, the denial of racist intent is central to modern racism in that such denials work to protect people from accusations of an overt racism that is now increasingly taboo. Those who do not wish to be seen as racist or as defending racist behaviour are therefore invested in being able to deny racist intent whilst still maintaining (or defending) an argument or position which discriminates on the basis of race. Finally, denials of racism can also be made through reference to positive self-presentation. In the case of Australia, Hage (1998) argues that positive self-presentation is frequently achieved through discourses of “tolerance”. Thus, Australia presents itself as valuing tolerance in its treatment of those considered “Others” despite legislation such as the White Australia policy,

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which privileged the intake of immigrants from Britain, Ireland and New Zealand until 1972 and therefore effectively reinforced the dominance and centrality of whiteness in Australia. As such, discourses of positive selfpresentation in relation to white countries are therefore frequently tied to the rhetoric of nationalism discussed above in which differential treatment of those depicted as “Others” is, rather than being considered racist, instead re-framed as necessary for the good of the nation. Augoustinos and Every (2007) argue that positive self-presentation is able to protect the in-group as a whole from accusations of racism, and is tied to negative other-presentation. Using the above example, Australia’s “tolerance” can be compared to the “intolerance” of other countries which do ostensibly have racist immigration policies.

AUSTRALIAN HUMOUR, RACE AND NATIONAL IDENTITY It has also been argued that “modern” or “symbolic” racism can be conceived of as an expression of nationalism, in that negative attitudes or restrictive immigration policies towards those considered “Others” are able to be expressed as a desire to maintain national security, a sense of national identity, and to defend the interests of the (white) nation against some outside threat (Augoustinos and Every, 2007; Hage, 1998; LeCouteur and Augoustinos, 2001). To this end, Augoustinos and Every point out that “the category of nation is increasingly taking over from race in legitimating oppressive practices toward minority groups and, indeed, as a means by which to sanitise and deracialise racist discourses” (2007, p. 133). Thus racist opinions or practices now materialise (alongside more “traditional” forms of racism) in the form of patriotism or pride in a country on the basis of a particular set of values that may discriminate against and exclude minority groups of people. Again, this form of “modern” racism is considered not to be predicated on overt discrimination against racially marginalised groups, but instead such groups remain marginalised due to practices which foreground the interests of the (white) nation, and its supposed values and norms. In Australia, one such norm or value which serves to supposedly “define” Australians and differentiate them from others is that of humour. “Aussie” humour is meant to be self-deprecating, “ocker”, defiant, and ironic (Rainbird, 2004). This form of humour has largely been seen as uniquely Australian, and one that separates Australia from other countries, thereby becoming fundamental to the Australian identity. Importantly, and as will be elaborated

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in more detail later in this paper, this value of Aussie humour is one which is largely associated with a white, “mainstream” Australian identity. Indeed, certain aspects of Aussie humour – such as its anti-politically correct stance – have been argued to play an important role in maintaining the centrality of this white identity in Australia by fighting against the rise of policies such as multiculturalism which were seen as prioritising marginalised voices at the expense of the “ordinary Aussie battler” (Rainbird, 2004). Indeed, many researchers have argued that race and racism still play a central role in Australia. For example, in his book White Nation, Hage (1998) argues that the dominant group in Australia (i.e. white Australians) perceive themselves to be normatively “Australian”, and therefore able to set the norms and values to which those seen as “Others” must adhere. Thus, whilst Australia claims to be multicultural, the reality of this is that there is a dominant white majority that see themselves as managers of the national space who are able to “tolerate” Others. Whilst obviously restrictive immigration policies such as the White Australia Policy are no longer in operation, Hage (1998) argues that current policies surrounding multiculturalism maintain the dominance of white people in Australia. Stratton argues along similar lines in his book Race Daze (1998) in which he asserts that policies of multiculturalism in Australia are conservative, and leave whiteness as central and as a benchmark against which all other people are measured. Furthermore, Stratton argues that within multicultural Australia there is a myth that the concept of race has disappeared, when in fact it has become a signifier of culture and therefore possibly of difference. In making this argument, Stratton echoes Etienne Balibar’s (1991) concept of “neo-racism” in an Australian context. The concept of “neo-racism” in which culture replaces the biological notion of race has important consequences for this paper, since, as Balibar points out, matters of racism based on culture will differ depending on national situations, thus again highlighting the highly contextualised and localised nature of discussions of race and racism. The present article therefore discusses each of the aforementioned techniques for the denial of racism in turn, and illustrates the way in which they played out in relation to the Hey Hey racism debate. Furthermore, the paper examines how such denials were frequently made on the basis of the incident simply being about Aussie humour and considers the construction of a mainstream Australian identity portrayed within such arguments.

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METHODOLOGY Data Much has changed in the world of media since Hey Hey It’s Saturday was originally broadcast in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. A skit performed on an Australian TV show can be broadcast around the world courtesy of video sharing websites such as YouTube. Similarly, the advent of online journalism has made it easier for people to contribute to discussions surrounding news items through online opinion polls and “reader’s comments” sections. Comments left by the general public in response to news items allow for an insight into public opinion surrounding a topic that, though obviously not able to be generalised to all people involved, nevertheless does provide a reflection of public sentiment. This paper analyses online comments written in response to articles published online on news websites from three of Australia’s major news providers; News Limited’s Herald Sun (broadly considered a conservative newspaper), Fairfax’s The Age (considered a more liberal newspaper), and the national news website news.com.au which also publishes content from the News Limited press. The first of these articles was entitled Controversy for Hey Hey It’s Saturday over Jackson 5 Skit which was published in its original form on the Herald Sun website on October 7, just hours after the show was aired. This article received a total of 1088 comments, and was later updated as Acting Premier Rob Hulls says Daryl Somers right to apologise over Jackson Jive sketch. Secondly, comments on an article published on The Age blog website, entitled Hey Hey Uproar (a total of 737 comments) were considered, and finally comments on an article published on news. com.au entitled Hey Hey It’s Saturday in Red Faces Racist Row (a total of 371 comments) were also included in the data set for this analysis. These articles were chosen in order to provide an overall picture of the response provided by online comments to articles published in major newspapers. By virtue of their nature as online comments, however, it is important to note again that this data set does not necessarily provide a representative sample of public sentiment in relation to this issue. The data set does, however, provide an important snapshot of the (vocal) Australian public reaction to the accusations of racism made by Harry Connick Jr. The comments examined in this paper are included verbatim.

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Analytic Notes In order to analyse this data corpus, the current paper utilised a thematic analytic approach (see, for example, Braun and Clarke, 2006) in which the online responses to the three relevant articles were analysed for the dominant themes appearing in the texts. Thematic analysis was chosen for this analysis due to the rigorous nature of Braun and Clarke’s approach, which enabled the large data corpus to be analysed thoroughly and consistently. In particular, the first stage of analysis involved data familiarisation and therefore involved reading over the corpus of online comments. Secondly, the data was systematically coded for interesting features, and these codes were then collated to reveal potential themes in the third step. Fourthly, these themes were reviewed to determine whether they were indeed reflective of the entire data set and then the themes were named. Finally, extracts were chosen which contained representative and compelling examples of the themes in question. It is noteworthy therefore that the broader theme of the denial of racism was the most salient theme within this data set. This is not to say that there were no instances of comments in which people wrote to support the claim of racism made by Harry Connick Jr, however these comments were not common enough to be considered a theme in and of itself. Within the broader theme of the denial of racism, the themes returned using this approach included: a) comparisons between blackface and whiteface, with associated arguments that if the latter is not generally considered racist then the former should not be either; b) accusations of excessive political correctness; c) claims that Australia does not have the same racist past (or history of blackface) as America, and that the comments made by Harry Connick Jr were therefore irrelevant in the Australian context; and d) references to Aussie humour as a way of denying racism. These four main themes are considered in this paper in the context of Van Dijk’s techniques regarding the denial of racism, and their function in building a particular image of Australian identity.

Analysis As mentioned previously, denial of racism in the skit was the most common response from the public in Australia. According to an article entitled Readers say Hey Hey Jackson Jive skit ‘not racist’ published on the News Ltd news. com.au website on 8 October (the day after the show went to air), almost thirty thousand people voted in online polls and more than fifteen hundred

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left comments on News Ltd sites in relation to the Hey Hey It’s Saturday news story. Poll results ranged from 53 per cent saying that the skit wasn’t racist at couriermail.com.au to 81 per cent saying that the skit wasn’t racist at perthnow.com.au. In light of this response and the techniques discussed earlier, this paper examines how such denials were mobilised, and how they functioned to build on and reinforce a particular image of Australian identity.

REVERSE RACISM, MITIGATION AND ‘PC GONE MAD’ As outlined earlier, van Dijk (1993) argues that racism is frequently justified using a technique called “reverse racism”, in which dominant group members argue that in fact it is they who are being discriminated against or disadvantaged rather than marginalised groups. One way in which such justifications or denials were seen in online comments was through the argument that it would not equally be considered racist if a black person were to impersonate a white person. Examples of this argument are seen in the following comments. Throughout this analysis, the names of the respondents have been removed and replaced with numbers. R1: It’s strange that Harry Connick Jnr seems to think white men dressed as black men is racist. When 2004 US movie ‘White Chicks’ has black men dressed as white girls is not seen as racist. (Herald Sun) R2: This has been blown totally out of proportion. It’s a tribute. They had done this before and they weren’t mocking any race or disrespecting mj…. I would also like to point out that there was a white painted face as well. Is that being racist too? (Herald Sun) R3: Man I love double standards. Making fun of anything but white people is bad, but once it’s racism towards white people then bam! It’s a-okay. Racism is a matter of perspective and opinion, if people stopped taking everything so seriously when it wasn’t necessary (i.e, comedy) then there would be no racism. (news.com.au) R4: It wasn’t a racist act when it was first performed 20 years ago and it wasn’t a racist act tonight. Just another uptight American with no sense of humour. I would not be offended if five black men appeared on Red Faces with white paint on their faces. (Herald Sun) R5: Black face minstrels were never part of our culture. Yes this ‘art form’ did belittle Afro Americans and is not acceptable now or then but I do not see this act as a minstrels act. It is just white guys doing a cover of an

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act by Afro Americans. Lousy music but not racist. If black Australians did Abba would we white guys be offended. No I suggest not. (The Age blog) In these comments, racism is denied through arguments that black people dressing up as white people would not be seen as offensive, or receive the same response from Harry Connick Jr, and that the outcry internationally is therefore a “double standard”. Such arguments are predicated on a form of “equality” which views equal treatment as equality rather than equal outcomes (Wetherell and Potter, 1992). For example, such arguments overlook the history of racism and oppression reflected within the blackface tradition by equating painting one’s face black with painting one’s face white. Similarly, such arguments ignore historically unequal power relations in both American and Australian society by assuming that a black person with their face painted white has the same power to oppress and ridicule white people as would a white person with their face painted black. As mentioned previously in relation to the definition of racism at a broader level as involving the maintenance of differential allocations of privilege, whilst it can be considered racist for a white person to dress up as a black person, it is not equally racist for a black person to dress up as a white person, given the differences in power relations inherent in the social constructions of these racial categories. Nevertheless, it is worth noting here that a black person painting their face white (whilst not an example of racism) can be read instead as resistance to racism. Gilbert argues that, in the Australian context, whiteface has been used not only “as a revisionist tactic designed to deflect - and reverse - the imperial gaze” (2003, p. 679), but also as a vehicle to render colonialism and whiteness (traditionally invisible and normative) visible. Thus not only is the use of whiteface not able to be considered racist in the same way that blackface is, but furthermore it can be considered as a method which can highlight and resist entrenched colonial racism and white privilege. Given this, it is important to highlight the fact that the members of the Jackson Jive skit were themselves ethnically diverse, with the man playing Michael Jackson identifying as Sri Lankan Australian. This man whitened his face for this performance, and this was picked up on in online comments, such as R2 above, and the following: R6: How was it racist painting your skin colour to the Jackson 5. And its not like they were all black either, the Indian member of the group painted it white... unless its racist against all nationalities (which ironically the group was extremely diverse in their cultural background themselves). (news.com. au)

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Interestingly, the fact that the man playing Michael Jackson had his face painted white was a point of difference from the original skit. Online comments such as the one above noted this, and used it as an argument against accusations of racism, arguing that given that the Jackson character had white paint on his face, the accusations of racism could not hold “unless its racist against all nationalities.” There are several points to be made about comments such as that made in R6. Firstly, comparisons between the “racist” nature of painting one’s face black to impersonate an African American and painting one’s face white to impersonate Michael Jackson work in a similar way to arguments of reverse racism discussed above in that they do not account for the history of oppression associated with the blackface tradition, a history which does not equally apply to painting one’s face white. Additionally, painting one’s face white to impersonate Michael Jackson may do little to challenge existing stereotypes of race given the already racialised body of Jackson. Secondly, drawing on the diverse racial identities of the men involved in the skit to defend against accusations of racism allows online commentators to argue against accusations of racism due to a presumption that the blackface tradition, when enacted by people who self-identify or are identified as not white, does not contain the same elements of racism. This is interesting given the arguments above that racism requires both prejudice and power, and that, as non-white people, the people involved in this skit may not have the required power of oppression. Again, however, it is arguable that the tradition of blackface does have this power, and when played out to a white host on a commercial television network, a skit such as the Jackson Jive does little to challenge existing stereotypes and more to support them. Denials of racism based on this type of “reverse racism” could also be considered ways in which the possible racist nature of the skit was mitigated. Mitigation of racism was further seen in respondent’s comments which focussed on political correctness as the catalyst for the comments made by Harry Connick Jr. For example: R7: Oh for Heaven’s Sake! It was a bit of harmless fun. It was so wonderful to see Hey Hey back on telly and then this rubbish! I am of Italian and Greek Background. Do I become insulted with all the ‘wog’ jokes around? Of course not! You have to be able to laugh at yourself. It would be a very, very sad world if we all got to the stage where we were unable to appreciate humour and have a good laugh. Must we become so terribly precious and politically correct all the time? Come on you guys! Just

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appreciate it for the funny skit that it was and please stop taking everything so seriously. Isn’t this world serious enough? (The Age blog) R8: As an ESL teacher I work with people from all over the globe, and one thing I have learned is that every culture has its own version of humour. What is side-splitting in one country leaves another for dead. This is obviously what happened in the wonderful Hey Hey reunion. The U.S. is uncomfortably aware of its slavery history, leading to a degree of PC that is unwarrented in Australia. Sure, we have our racism issues, but we are also able to laugh at controversies, and at ourselves, in a way that puts matters into perspective thus allowing tensions to dissipate. Harry Connick Jr. was right to be apprehensive about how his appearance on the Red Faces panel would look to his U.S. fan base, however, Hey Hey was also right in allowing the six multinational doctors to revive their Jackson Jive skit. The fact that the medical student who played Michael is now a plastic surgeon is the kind of irony that Australians delight in. (Herald Sun) R9: If US people are offended that’s their problem it was an Australian television show made for Australians. I they take offence at light hearted comedy like this which was not meant to offend but entertain then too bad. This another case of political correctness gone mad. (news.com.au) R10: Ahhhh the politically correct get on the band wagon again. It would be interesting to know how many people thought that it was funny... and THEN thought... how politically incorrect. Geeez... how refreshing to know that someone has the balls to have a crack at breaking the new ‘norms.’ Well done Daryl and co. (Herald Sun) R11: Not racist – poor taste – maybe but in reality now just the subject of too many politically correct persons with too much time on their hands. guys put it in perspective – the act was a re enactment of past skit 20 years ago. That was the whole point of the show – bringing back some of the past. does this mean we can never air any al jolson footage or even his songs because clearly the politically correct naysayers would have to now label him racist and off limits – or is it ok to be a politically correct hypocrite. (The Age blog) Within these comments, the seriousness of racism is mitigated by arguing that instead of being a reaction to what he saw as racist, Harry Connick Jr’s accusation was based on overly-sensitive political correctness. These comments position political correctness as inherently a negative, restrictive force that interferes with people’s ability to find the skit funny and to “laugh at controversies”. As such, accusations of the racist nature of the skit are dismissed by locating them as the result of overly politically

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correct sensibilities, and therefore as an over-reaction to something which was simply meant to be humorous. Indeed, such arguments further mitigate racism by instead constructing the skit as “humorous” rather than as racist. In relation to appearances of political correctness in a right-wing German newspaper, Johnson and Suhr argue that, adherents of ‘political correctness’ are being constructed as an outgroup which insists on subjecting the rest of the population to an ongoing process of moral blackmail vis à vis the recent German past, thereby forestalling the efforts of those who wish to ‘progress’ towards a more normalized sense of national self-identity” (2003, p. 64). These constructions of political correctness were also seen in the above comments whereby it is argued that subscribers to political correctness create a “boring and sterile” world and that, rather than the skit being racist, Hey Hey instead has “the balls to have a crack at breaking the new ‘norms’”. Indeed, an aversion to the politically correct has been an ubiquitous part of constructions of the “Australian identity” made through humour, in which the emergence of multiculturalism and a perceived “favouring” of minority or marginalised group interests has led to a backlash through critiques of politically correct sensibilities – notably seen in the rise of Pauline Hanson and the conservative Howard government which promised to govern “for the mainstream” (Ahluwalia and McCarthy, 1998). In particular, debate surrounding political correctness has focused on the right to free-speech, and opposition to oppression (Wark, 1997; Rainbird, 2004), something which resonates exceptionally loudly in the genre of humour and comedy. Indeed, in Australian comedy circles, political correctness has been largely criticised as irrational and as oppressive (Rainbird, 2004). Rainbird (2004) and Johnson (2000) have both argued that such a backlash against political correctness can be read as a reaction to perceived changes in the Australian identity, in which the centrality of the dominant (white, male, heterosexual) Australian is being challenged and shifted. In the context of the Hey Hey controversy and the comments seen above, such arguments can be read as a similar backlash against shifting values from the 1980s to the present day, in which Aussie humour is seen as being under threat from oppressive, anti free-speech forces, especially given the fact that the skit did not receive similar criticisms when it was originally performed (see, for example, R11 above). Arguments about accusations of racism being politically correct – particularly directed toward Harry Connick Jr – therefore reinforce an identity for Australia as being able to ‘have a laugh’ at what may otherwise be read as racist or controversial.

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POSITIVE SELF-PRESENTATION, HUMOUR, AND DENIALS OF RACIST INTENT: BUILDING AN AUSTRALIAN IDENTITY Each of the comments above also defended against accusations of racism by appealing to an argument that the skit was based on humour. For example, in R8 above, the writer claims an authority position by stating that he/she is an ESL (English as a Second Language) teacher, and has therefore worked “with people from all over the globe”. The writer then continues to argue that “every culture has its own version of humour”, and that this difference in humour is what led to the accusations of racism. Such arguments suggest that since the incident was intended to be funny, it follows that it is not also racist, as well as building on a particular construction of Australian identity based on a type of humour. This argument was frequently seen in comments in response to the news item, with several examples shown below: R12: After watching Hey Hey it was clear just how dated the show was but as for Mr Precious Harry, what a lot of rubbish. The skit was taking the mickey out of The Jackson Five and only a precious yank could have turned the emphasis to racism. How could you do a skit like that without dressing similar to the person you were taking off. Connick is a great performer but seems to be just a little superior to us colonials. Have we really all become as precious as him? I hope not, because I don’t believe the skit was in any way designed to be offensive to Afro Americans! (Herald Sun) R13: Totally enjoyable show! Only downer was Harry. Us Aussies are laid back in our humour and don’t look at things with a racist viewpoint - the poor guys were doing the skit for CHARITY... good on them!!! Apart from that, I loved it, my kids loved it, and my parents loved it. 3 generations of Hey Hey fans!! Well done guys... Thanks!! (Herald Sun) R14: I guess you could say white Australians suffer the oppression of not being allowed to have an opinion on oppression due to the lack of oppression throughout their history. Christ! How some of you survive in those tiny little narrow heads of yours I’ll never understand. (The Age blog) R15: Oh that’s rich. Being called racist by the Americans. I guess that we don’t have enough history in being racist like the yanks. We didn’t import black slaves and beat them to work for us. We didn’t have “whites only” waiting rooms, buses, schools and so on. No, we just have an amazing multicultural melting pot of people that have all managed to get on with

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each other, and still able to poke fun at each other. Australia is a perfect example of how to be racially tolerant, unlike other so called ‘civilized’ countries. Get a life and chill out! (The Age blog) These comments argue that “Australians” have a capacity to not take offence at everything, to poke fun at people, and to not “look at things with a racist point of view”, thus explicitly working up a particularly Australian identity based on this form of humour. As such, they effectively deny racism not only in the skit, but in Australia as a country. Here, racism is mitigated by reference to humour and a supposedly tolerant past, so that such incidences are viewed in cultural terms as part of an innate and unique “Australian value” of humour rather than in terms of racism, thus again asserting a sense of nationalism whilst denying racism. In line with van Dijk’s (1993) argument that denials of racism involve both a defensive position and a position that builds positive self-presentation, these arguments defend against racism and present Australia in a positive light; by comparing the country favourably to Americans who have a “history in being racist”. Such defences are discussed by Billig (2001) who argues that the defence “I was only joking” is frequently used to justify racism, and that those people belonging to the “in-group” may defend comments or incidents as “just a joke” which those considered “Others”, or indeed other people in general, may instead find racist. The denials of racism based on the intention of the skit to be humorous were also examples of the denial of racism due to positive self-presentation, and therefore played a role in building an image of Australia as anti-racist and as able to “poke fun” at oneself or others. This presentation of Australia as humorous and of America as inherently lacking in humour (or as not having an understanding of what Australians may find funny) positions Australians as fun-loving and able to laugh at themselves and others, and contrasts this with an uptight “precious” America which easily takes offence. This was particularly seen in R14 above which not only denied oppression in Australian history (thereby denying the history of policy differentiation and violence towards Indigenous Australians and immigrants seen as “not-white”), but went so far as to position white Australians as “suffering oppression”. Also of interest in these comments is the fact that the national categories of “Australians” and “Americans” are used frequently in these arguments without reference to race per se and therefore arguably function to overlook those groups of people within both Australia and America who are the targets of racism and who may find white people impersonating black people to be not only offensive, but also racist and discriminatory.

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Such comments also conflate all Australians into one category, and therefore work to imply that all Australians find such humour funny, rather than only certain members of the population. As such, these comments work up an identity for Australia that is predicated on mainstream values and “ordinary Aussie battlers” and can therefore be read as a reaction to more “modern” values that centre marginalised voices (for example, by considering the implications of blackface). Thus these comments reflect the move away from concepts of overt racism to categorisation of people on the basis of nationality, as discussed previously in this paper. These comments therefore highlight the flexible nature of denials of racism as outlined by van Dijk (1993). These findings are discussed further in the conclusion.

CONCLUSION This article has demonstrated how a number of techniques regarding the denial of racism were utilised in online comments made in response to the accusations of racism within the Jackson Jive skit. Furthermore, this paper has shown how these denials were able to build on and reinforce particular constructions of the Australian national identity, particularly in relation to “Aussie humour” and Australia as a country free from racism. Thus the response to the Hey Hey incident as it appeared in these comments is able to be read not only as a denial of racism in a particular event, but a defence against racism in Australia as a country, and a construction of Australian national identity specifically through the vehicle of humour. It is worth noting here that van Dijk (1993) has argued that the denial of either racism or prejudice can in fact be read as yet another expression of racism itself, for example by justifying acts that could be seen to be racist by not acknowledging them as such. Denials of racism therefore serve a socio -political function in that if racism is unilaterally denied, then it is perceived that there is no problem and therefore no need to take measures against it. Thus, denials of racism can present events such as the blackface skit performed on Hey Hey It’s Saturday as “a bit of fun” in a country that does not have a problem with racism, and therefore argue that no one should take offence. Of course, such constructions effectively deny a voice to those people who do take offence, positioning them as excessively politically correct or sensitive, and as reacting to an offence which did not exist – as seen in the comments analysed in this paper. Furthermore, constructions of the accusations of racism made by Harry Connick Jr as being overly politically correct are able to be read as an

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assertion of an Australian identity predicated on “norms” and “values” of mainstream Australia (which include the ability to “poke fun” at oneself and others), and a rebuttal of what is seen as the foregrounding of minority or marginalised voices within multicultural Australia (Ahluwalia and McCarthy, 1998; Hage, 1998) . For example, the many comments seen in this paper that claimed that the skit was not racist as it was “just a bit of fun” indicate the construction of an Australian identity predicated upon an “ocker”, “battler” identity stemming from a particular concept of humour that centres values seen to be typically “Aussie” – that is, an ability to poke fun at all people equally and to laugh at what others might see as controversial. This is particularly of interest as whilst the original skit may not have drawn upon such values per se in its performance of the Jackson Jive (although of course, part of the blackface tradition itself is caricature), this mainstream Australian identity was worked up in the subsequent denials of racism in the skit as seen in these comments. Interestingly, such assertions were made in spite of the multi-ethnic background of the performers of the skit, thereby re-asserting multicultural Australia provided that “mainstream” Australian values are being adhered to (Hage, 1998; Stratton, 1998). Finally, as mentioned previously, the large-scale response this incident received could be read as a denial of racism not only in the skit in question, but also in Australia more generally. Indeed, this was often made explicit in the comments analysed in which Australia was often compared favourably to America both in terms of its (apparently) non-racist past and its so-called ability to laugh at “controversy”. In light of van Dijk’s (1993) argument that the denial of racism is just another expression of racism, denials of racism in incidents like the Hey Hey skit become more insidious than simply denials that a particular skit on a family variety show was an exhibition of racism. Instead, the denial of racism in Australia as a country, together with arguments that Australia does not have the same history of racism as America, work to overlook Australia’s history of immigration and other policies which differentiate between people on the basis of perceived cultural differences and race; as seen, for example, in the 2007 comments by then Immigration Minister Kevin Andrews regarding the supposed “failure to integrate” on the part of Sudanese refugees (Topsfield and Rood, 2007). Perhaps even more problematically, such denials also function to further marginalise those people who do experience racism within Australia by denying the existence of racism altogether and instead reinforcing an “ordinary” Australian identity as a country in which people are able to “laugh at themselves and controversy”.

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Acting Premier Rob Hulls says Daryl Somers right to apologise over Jackson Jive sketch. (2009, 7 October). Herald Sun. Retrieved 7 October, 2009 from http://www.heraldsun.com.au/entertainment/ controversy-for-hey-hey-its-saturday-over-jackson-5-skit/storye6frf96f-1225784042163 Ahluwalia, P. and McCarthy, G. (1998). ‘‘Political correctness’: Pauline Hanson and The construction of Australian Identity. Australian Journal of Public Administration, 57(3), 79-85. Augoustinos, M., Tuffin, K. and Rapley, M. (1999). Genocide or a Failure to Gel? Racism, History and Nationalism in Australian Talk. Discourse and Society, 10(3), 351-378. Augoustinos, M. and Every, D. (2007). The Language of ‘Race’ and Prejudice: A Discourse of Denial, Reason and Liberal-Practical Politics. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 26(2), 123-141. Balibar, E. (1991). Is there a ‘neo-racism?’. In E. Balibar and I. Wallerstein (Eds.), Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities (pp.1728). London: Verso. Billig, M. (2001). Humour and Hatred: The Racist Jokes of the Klu Klux Klan. Discourse and Society, 12(3), 267-289. Bolt, A. (2009, October 8). Not Racist, But Dumb. Herald Sun. Retrieved 15 February, 2011 from http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/ andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/not_racist_but_dumb Braun, V. and Clarke, V. (2006). Using Thematic Analyses in Psychology. Qualitative Research in Psychology, 3(2), 77-101 Foucault, M. (1977) Discipline and Punish. New York: Pantheon. Gilbert, H. (2003). Black and White and Re(a)d all Over Again: Indigenous Minstrelsy in Contemporary Canadian and Australian Theatre. Theatre Journal, 55(4), 679-698. Gubar, S. (1997). Race Changes: White Skin, Black Face in American Culture. New York: Oxford University Press. Hage, G. (1998). White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society. Australia: Pluto Press. Hey Hey it’s Saturday in Red Faces Racist Row. (2009, October 8). News.com.au. Retrieved 8 October, 2009 from http://www.news.com. au/entertainment/television/hey-hey-its-saturday-in-red-faces-racist-

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row/comments-e6frfmyi-1225784048432 Hey Hey Uproar. (2009, October 8). The Age. Retrieved 8 October, 2009 from http://blogs.theage.com.au/yoursay/archives/2009/10/hey_ hey_uproar.html?page =fullpage#comments Hyde, Marina. (2009, October 7). Harry Connick Jr Weirdly Unimpressed by Australia’s Blackface Jackson 5. The Guardian. Retrieved 7 October, 2009, from http://www.guardian.co.uk/ lifeandstyle/lostinshowbiz/2009/oct/07/harry-connick-jr-blackfacejackson-jive Johnson, C. (2000). Governing Change: Keating to Howard. St. Lucia, Qld: University of Queensland Press. Johnson, S. and Suhr. S. (2003). From ‘Political Correctness’ to ‘Politische Korrektheit’: Discourses of ‘PC’ in the German Newspaper, Die Welt. Discourse and Society, 14(1), 49-68. Kyles, K. (2009, 7 October). Australian Blackface Performers Need a Gut Punch. The Kyles Files Blog. Retrieved 15 February 2011, from http://www.chicagonow.com/blogs/kyles-files/2009/10/australianblackface-performers-need-a-gut-punch.html LeCouteur, A. and Augoustinos, M. (2001). Apologising to the Stolen Generations: Argument, Rhetoric and Identity in Public Reasoning. Australian Psychologist, 36(1), 51-61. Liu, J. and Mills, D. (2006). Modern Racism and Neo-liberal Globalization: The Discourses of Plausible Deniability and their Multiple Functions. Journal of community and applied social psychology, 16(2), 83-99. Lott, E. (1992). Love and Theft: The Racial Unconscious of Blackface Minstrelsy. Representations, 39(1), 23-50. McConahay, J. B. (1986). Modern Racism, Ambivalence, and the Modern Racism Scale. In J. F. Dovidio and S. L. Gaertner (Eds.), Prejudice, Discrimination, and Racism, (pp. 92-125). New York: Academic Press. Millar, Julia. (2009, 9 October). Gillard sticks up for Hey Hey skit. ABC News. Retrieved 9 October, 2009, from http://www.abc.net.au/ news/stories/2009/10/09/2709039.htm Mitchell, Peter. (2009, 9 October). US talk-show weighs in on Hey Hey ‘black face’ skit. The National Indigenous Times. Retrieved 9 October, 2009, from http://www.nit.com.au/breakingnews/story.aspx?id=18772

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25. Molitorisz, S. and Steffens, M. (2009, 10 October). Hey Hey, ABC, Deny Skit is Racist. The Sydney Morning Herald. Retrieved 10 December, 2010, from http://www.smh.com.au/news/entertainment/tv--radio/ hey-hey-abc-denies-skit-is-racist/2009/10/09/1255019613342.html 26. Rainbird, M. (2004). Humour, Multiculturalism and ‘Political Correctness’. Paper presented at the conference of the Australasian Political Studies Association, The University of Adelaide, Adelaide, Australia. 27. Readers says Hey Hey Jackson Jive skit ‘not racist’ (2009, 8 October). News.com.au. Retrieved 8 October, 2009, from http://www.news.com. au/entertainment/television/readers-says-hey-heys-jackson-jive-skitnot-racist/story-e6frfmyi-1225784415621 28. Riggs, D.W. (2006). Psychology and Anti-Racism: Understanding the Melancholic White Subject. In Bridging the Tasman: Proceedings of the 2006 Joint Conference of the APS and NZPsS (pp. 350-354). Melbourne, Australia: Australian Psychological Society. 29. Riggs, D.W. (2009). Poppadoms, Princesses and Privilege: (Neo) Colonial Racism in the Celebrity Big Brother Household. In R. Clarke (Ed.), Celebrity Colonialism: Fame, Power and Representation in Colonial and Postcolonial Cultures (pp. 209-224). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Scholars Press. 30. Saxton, A. (1975). Blackface Minstrelsy and Jacksonian Ideology. American Quarterly, 27(1), 3-28. 31. Saxton, A. (2004). Whiteness and Reconciliation: A Discursive Analysis. Australian Psychologist, 39(1), 14-23. 32. Simmons, K. and LeCouteur, A. (2008). Modern Racism in the Media: Constructions of ‘the Possibility of Change’ in Accounts of Two Australian ‘Riots’. Discourse and Society, 19(5), 667-687. 33. Stratton, J. (1998). Race Daze: Australia in Identity Crisis. Sydney, Australia: Pluto Press. 34. Strausbaugh, J. (2007). Black Like You: Blackface, Whiteface, Insult and Imitation in American Popular Culture. New York: Penguin. 35. Topsfield, J. and Rood, D. (2007, 4 October). Coalition accused of race politics. The Age. Retrieved 25 February, 2010, from http:// www.theage.com.au/news/national/coalition-accused-of-race-politi cs/2007/10/03/1191091193835.html 36. van Dijk, T. (1993). Denying Racism: Elite Discourse and Racism.

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In J. Solomos and J. Wren (Eds.), Racism and Migration in Western Europe (pp.179-193). Oxford: Berg. 37. Wetherell, M. and Potter, J. (1992). Mapping the Language of Racism: Discourse and the Legitimation of Exploitation. London: Harvester Wheatsheaf. 38. Wark, M. (1997). The Virtual Republic: Australia’s Culture Wars of the 1990s. St. Leonards, Australia: Allen & Unwin.

CHAPTER

4

SOCIAL MEDIA CONFLICT: PLATFORMS FOR RACIAL VILIFICATION, OR ACTS OF PROVOCATION AND CITIZENSHIP?

Amelia Johns Centre for Citizenship and Globalisation, Deakin University Anthony McCosker, Swinburne University

ABSTRACT Although racism remains an issue for social media sites such as YouTube, this focus often overshadows the site’s productive capacity to generate ‘agonistic publics’ from which expressions of cultural citizenship and Citation: Amelia Johns, “Social Media Conflict: Platforms for Racial Vilification, or Acts of Provocation and Citizenship?”, http://mams.rmit.edu.au/jkbtfsdtmp9fz.pdf Copyright: © 2015 (Amelia Johns & Anthony McCosker). This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs (CC BY_ND) License. For information on use, visit www.creativecommons.org/licenses. Cite as Johns, A. And McCosker, A. (2015), ‘Social Media Conflict: Platforms for Racial Vilification, or Acts of Provocation and Citizenship?’, Communication, Politics & Culture, vol. 47, issue 3, pp. 44-54.

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solidarity might emerge. This paper examines these issues through two case studies: the recent proliferation of mobile phone video recordings of racist rants on public transport, and racist interactions surrounding the performance of a Maori ‘flash mob’ haka in New Zealand that was recorded and uploaded to YouTube. We contrast these incidents as they are played out primarily through social media, with the case of Australian Football League player Adam Goodes and the broadcast media reaction to a racial slur aimed against him by a crowd member during the AFL’s Indigenous Round. We discuss the prevalence of vitriolic exchange and racial bigotry, but also, and more importantly, the productive and equally aggressive defence of more inclusive and tolerant forms of cultural identification that play out across these different media forms. Drawing on theories of cultural citizenship along with the political theory of Chantal Mouffe, we point to the capacities of YouTube as ‘platform’, and to social media practices, in facilitating ground-up anti-racism and generating dynamic, contested and confronting micropublics. Keywords: social media, racism, provocation, agonism, publics, acts of citizenship

INTRODUCTION Social media platforms have brought to the fore the promise of new modes of public, political and civic engagement. Although it is a highly dynamic field of platforms and practices, by ‘social media’ we are referring to networked media technologies that enable multi-directional communication, media production and exchange, within both narrow and mass public forums. This includes social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, or video sharing sites like YouTube (which is the focus of this paper). These are communication tools that are productive of new forms of ‘digital citizenship’ and that encompass creativity, cultural expression and civic engagement by enabling more active and interactive engagement with media content, audiences and publics. In particular, there have been numerous studies that identify a link between social media use and increased political and civic engagement for young people and other marginalised groups who tend to be underrepresented in more conventional forms of civic and political participation (Coleman 2006, Harris et al 2007). This underlines the democratic potential of social media platforms, if not always their actuality. But social media platforms are also frequently admonished for supporting the flow of unchecked

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racism, misogyny and other forms of ‘anti-social’ practice. Public anxiety is enlivened by the same extension of the means to participate in public media forums. In line with these arguments, proprietary social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube are under increasing pressure to weigh their interests in mass participation and freedom of use against stronger regulation and platform moderation (see Dibben 2012; Pakham 2012). Certainly, federal governments have been steadily expanding the scope of regulation for social media misuse in the guise of ‘cyber-safety’, digital citizenship policies and by increasing pressure on service providers to remove ‘offensive content’, but also under more constructive policies of social inclusion (Penman & Turnbull 2012). Underlining this commitment, an Australian ‘cyberbullying commissioner’ role has been proposed by the current federal government to provide legislative muscle in dealing with ‘aberrant’ uses of internationally based social media service providers (Department of Communications 2014). Meanwhile, in contradiction with this move toward greater regulation, the Australian government has recently been embroiled in a media storm over proposed changes to section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act 1975 (Cth) (RDA), which would remove clauses that make it illegal to ‘offend, insult, humiliate or intimidate’ on the grounds of race (McIlroy 2014). Although this move has been blocked by opposing parties, the changes were proposed in light of a successful case being made against political and media commentator, Andrew Bolt, under section 18C for his offensive comments relating to ‘white aboriginals’. The equally inflammatory choice of words of Attorney-General George Brandis – who defended the proposed changes because ‘everyone has a right to be a bigot’ (Griffiths 2014) – led to a public outcry from commentators on the left and right of politics, including many Coalition MPs, who claimed that the proposed changes would act as a ‘dog whistle’, giving a ‘green light to bigotry’. Worryingly, and despite valid objections to the proposed changes to the RDA, the de-valuing of freedom of speech and its relevance to a healthy democracy in the furore has had the unfortunate effect of invigorating calls for a tightening of laws and increased regulation of media content across the board. In other words, rather than having a reasoned debate about the pros and cons of increasing regulation in the complex media ecology emerging in an era of convergence, the debate has been reduced to one where freedom of speech is equated with the right to be a bigot whilst media censorship is hailed as the only remaining measure to protect our civic rights and freedoms. In thinking through these issues, media and platform specificity is crucial.

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In this evolving and contested context we consider recent instances of racist provocation in Australia and New Zealand, where social media platforms have played a central role in the dynamic that has unfolded. The problem that concerns us is not that there is a ‘rise of social media racism’ (although one study conducted by Dunn, Jucubowicz and Paradies has provided strong evidence for this claim). Rather, we want to emphasise the need to better understand social media participation in order to bring into the frame the importance of these platforms and their uses for rethinking responses to racism and promoting anti-racism strategies. We first consider two instances of racist provocation and counterprovocation on YouTube and compare them to a similar instance that played out through mainstream commercial news media. Racist rants and associated bystander actions have recently been recorded on public transport in Australian cities and uploaded to YouTube, echoing cases across Europe and the UK (Johns 2013a). In these (Australian) cases, we will highlight the extent to which social media circulation and interaction enabled a broader public exchange, mostly condemning the racist sentiments of those recorded, albeit often in equally provocative and vitriolic language. Secondly, we look at the celebratory uploading of a ‘flashmob haka’ videos recorded in New Zealand. The flashmob is a social media-oriented practice, but these cases involved intense racist and anti-racist exchange over an extended period of time within the videos’ comments fields. We contrast these incidents with the move by Australian Football League (AFL) footballer Adam Goodes to make public – and condemn – a racist slur levelled against him by a crowd member during the AFLs Indigenous Round. These cases demonstrate some of the affordances of social media sites in contexts of public conflict, including their ability to extend anti -racist publics beyond those present at the specific time and place of the racist act whilst also highlighting the ‘counter-provocative’ potential of these interactions. By making reference to the Adam Goodes incident we also want to highlight the specificity of media platforms and to demonstrate the different capacities and expressions of anti-racism and bystander actions, where participants in publicly mediated racist exchange are able to leverage the reach, attention and legitimacy afforded by mainstream commercial and public news media through television, radio and newspapers.

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DIGITAL CITIZENSHIP AND THE BUILDING BLOCKS OF BYSTANDER ANTI-RACISM Problems with conceptualising social media participation are often to do with the reflexive adherence to a dominant and persistent normative notion of digital citizenship. Specifically, digital participation in these accounts is aligned with a desire for rational discourse and conflict-free, productive civic or democratic engagement in line with a Habermasian or Rawlsian model. Digital citizenship has thus been defined as ‘the ability to participate in society online’ and in terms of the potential the internet has ‘to benefit society as a whole, and facilitate the membership and participation of individuals within society’ (Mossberger et al. 2008, p. 1). This reflects the common moral or ethical positioning in government, educational programs and social media codes of practice. However, there are many problems with this vision of life online (and citizenship more broadly) that a reading of Chantal Mouffe’s concept of ‘agonistic pluralism’ usefully addresses (see Shaw 2012; Marchart 2007). Mouffe’s notion of agonism is helpful here because it points to the potential behind the kinds of adversarial and passionate contest that can follow from open modes of civic engagement. In Mouffe’s model, the institutions of democracy should aim to allow ‘collective passions … to express themselves over issues which, while allowing enough possibility for identification, will not construct the opponent as an enemy but as an adversary’ (Mouffe 2000, p. 103). Agonistic contest occurs when conflicting parties acknowledge that they are adversaries but nonetheless ‘operate on common symbolic ground’ (Papacharissi 2010, p. 161). Unlike in models of deliberative democracy, in Mouffe’s account of agonistic pluralism ‘the prime task of democratic politics is not to eliminate passions from the sphere of the public, in order to render a rational consensus possible, but to mobilize those passions towards democratic designs’ (Mouffe 2000, p. 103). Passions and affects, she argues, play a crucial role in securing allegiance to democratic values (Ibid., p. 95). Mouffe’s broader proposition is that ‘far from jeopardizing democracy, agonistic confrontation is in fact its very condition of existence’ (Ibid., p. 103) . According to Mouffe, the method for achieving this is to multiply opportunities for speech; democratic individuals can only be made possible by multiplying the institutions, the discourses, the forms of life that foster identification with democratic values (Ibid., p. 96). We can apply this understanding of democratic participation and engagement to lessons from citizenship scholarship that, since at least the

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1990s, has considered the cultural component of citizenship (see Turner 2001; Stevenson 2001; Hartley 2012; Miller 2007) along with Isin and Nielsen’s notion of ‘acts of citizenship’ (2008). Broadly, citizenship has in recent times come to include performative and cultural dimensions. That is, while online civic engagement is often equated with participation in political process or policy formation (Mossberger et al. 2008; Coleman et al. 2009; Hindman 2008), there are other ways people enact forms of citizenship – for instance, in the complex practices, experiences and meanings associated with digital cultures and activities, which serve also as spaces for negotiating forms of ‘cultural citizenship’. The term ‘cultural citizenship’ implies that points of cultural reference become central markers for citizenship beyond place of birth or nationality, and that these points of reference are fluid and contested (Hartley 2012). We want to emphasise the idea that markers of identification and civic participation derived from cultural practices, traditions and affiliations can also operate as forms of provocation, whether to belonging or exclusion, aggression or celebration (Miller 2007). Conceptualising citizenship as emergent through acts of expression, sharing and exchange better incorporates the political, ethical, cultural and aesthetic qualities of a wide variety of forms of engagement, including provocation, passion and intensive (digital) civic participation. The difficult balance here lies in addressing the kind of civic responsibility that might apply in any context (mediated or face-toface) in which vitriolic expression or explicit racism remains exclusionary without rejoinder. Trolling, bullying and racist social media activities can fall within this remit, but in very different ways and through circumstances that require more specific analysis. Though it is perhaps not what the aforementioned theorists had in mind, it is the argument of this paper that racist provocation and anti-racist counterprovocations – as they operate in relation to one another in social media spaces – have the potential to generate ‘agonistic’ publics and productive acts of citizenship. In particular, it is important to keep in mind that forms of vitriolic contest, as media theorists have argued, intensify and sustain productive social media exchange and political engagement on platforms such as YouTube (McCosker 2014; McCosker et al. 2013). In light of this, there is a strong argument to be made that regulating social media content neglects the potential for these forums to generate agonistic publics through which acts of cultural citizenship and solidarity may emerge. This has some resonance with an emerging focus in anti-racism research on ‘bystander

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anti-racism’, which is broadly defined by Jacqueline Nelson, Kevin Dunn and Yin Paradies as follows: ... action taken by a person or persons (not directly involved as a target or perpetrator) to speak out about or to seek to engage others in responding (either directly or indirectly, immediately or at a later time) against interpersonal or systemic racism. (Nelson et al. 2011, p. 265). In elaborating on the forms that such interventions might take, Nelson et al. ‘outline a case for the wider social benefits of hearing racist talk and witnessing bystander anti-racism’ (Ibid., p. 264). Significantly, in discussing the potential of these acts to shift social norms ‘towards intolerance of “everyday racism”’, they argue that confrontational and provocative actions of bystanders may serve an important and productive function (Ibid., p. 280). Despite strong support for these theories and associated interventions, there has been little examination of bystander anti -racism across social media platforms; where attention is directed to those platforms, it is mainly to push site owners to simply remove racist content, or to lock down or remove commenting, rating and sharing facilities.

RACIST RANTS ON AUSTRALIAN PUBLIC TRANSPORT AND YOUTUBE While racism is increasingly affected by the affordances of social media platforms, the productive potential of these platforms is often overshadowed by the desire to eradicate all forms of conflict or passionate, aggressive and vitriolic exchange. The cases analysed here play out the supposed threat of unchecked racism and conflict online, but we argue that they also demonstrate potential for a ground-up anti-racism through social media acts of citizenship that are generative of dynamic, contested – even if confronting – networked publics or micro-publics that have the potential to generate anti-racist action (Keane 1995). In a pre-social media era, John Keane used the term ‘micro-publics’ to point to the formation of dynamic, small-scale social movements around do-it-yourself communication technologies (1995). We might conceptualise the social media-enabled cosmopolis as being comprised of many emergent and often contested ‘micropublics’ in a way that emphasises their heterogeneity and relational character. We see this in action in some of those prominent incidents of racism or cultural conflict that flow into and through social media platforms. But, as we hope to demonstrate, this augments and reshapes the operation of

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racism and counter-racism in mainstream, commercial or public broadcast services and publications. To begin with, we can think about these dynamics through the events of a sustained and terrifying verbal attack in 2012, by two male passengers on a French tourist on a Frankston line bus. The attack was recorded by at least one passenger and uploaded to YouTube. The video depicts a woman who is singing in French being told by a passenger to ‘speak English or die motherfucker’. The woman is then threatened by the man, who tells her he would cut off her breasts if she didn’t stop singing, highlighting the gendered and violent nature of the threat. Another seemingly unrelated passenger joins him in the abuse. In the recorded part of the incident, other passengers did not appear to directly challenge the perpetrators. This is understandable, given the visceral and intimidating nature of the abuse and the potential for violent escalation. One witness to the event underscored the danger, saying ‘the main thing was just to get away’ (Burns 2012). Viewers can see a window being smashed at the end of the video. In the weeks and months following the incident, the intensity and violent force of this late night incident was amplified and sustained by its circulation through social media and the broader debate and discussion that followed through news media and particularly in the comments field of the video and through its movement across Facebook’s interconnected personal networks. Significantly, due to its rapid spread and its strong public reaction, the video was used as evidence against one of the perpetrators of the violence, leading the man to be charged and later jailed (AAP 2012). This demonstrates the effectiveness of social media engagement not only as a place to ‘witness’ acts of racism, make claims for justice and enact citizenship, but also in practical terms: to provide evidence that make such acts prosecutable. The bulk of the interactions that flowed through the comments field, and continue to flow now well after the event, were highly critical of the verbal assault. By far the most popular YouTube version of this video was one produced with voiceover commentary, uploaded by CheckPointComedy.1 The video brings attention to the broader problem of racism through a remixed parody-documentary format interspersed with raw video footage of the rant. It attracted over 4 452 400 views and more than 37 000 comments. The scale of the commenting public that has formed in relation to the video warrants attention itself for what it reveals of the potential for participation that social media offers. The video maker’s passion, along with the use

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of humour, asserts an alternative voice of inclusive national citizenship, encouraging a younger public to take action by sharing the video. The young narrator‘s comments below are instructive in this regard: I want people to share this video for two reasons. Firstly because although we like to think we live in a culturally inclusive society, sadly this kind of stuff isn’t that uncommon. I know I’ve copped my share for being brown and all my ethnic friends have a story or two. It’s a thing in this country, let’s not pretend it’s not. And secondly so this video gets back to these three in particular. I want you guys to see this in the sober light of day so you can see how truly pathetic you are. Fuck you! Combining several different modes of address, the creator of the video engages in an ‘act of social media citizenship’ and opens up a sustained space for affirming anti-racist sentiment. In doing so, he makes a claim for a more inclusive public, as an Australian citizen, as an ethnic minority Australian, and as a claimant who has himself experienced this kind of abuse. However, this is by no means a unified public decrying the racist and violent acts depicted. Some continue the vitriolic, bigoted and aggressive tone of the perpetrators, and this is cause for concern for many. For example, a comment – which itself acts as a provocation which other people respond to and condemn – posted a year and a half after the incident ridicules the perpetrators of the abuse using the following racist, sexually explicit and offensive language: White Australasians are the lowest of the fuckin low. Their [sic.] like the Alabama of the Southern Hemisphere...a bunch of red neck, **** assholes with no education whatsoever. It’s better for non-whites to stay the fuck out of that shithole. Who the hell would wanna be treated like her? And she’s white. Let these red necks live in their ignorant oasis. (PopCan 2014) As we have done elsewhere (McCosker 2014; McCosker et al. 2013), we wish to highlight the place and logic of provocation/counter-provocation as it operates in the initial racist rant and violent acts, in the act of videoing and uploading the event to YouTube, in its remix and humorous overlay, in the myriad acts of sharing and responding, and perhaps most significantly in the tens of thousands of comments posted to the video. The specificity of each of these sites of civic action is vital for understanding the boundaries of the kinds of digital citizenship that might be enabled or curtailed across social media platforms. Considering the benefits, but also the concerns, of bystander anti -racism, we would argue that this case study highlights the

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potential for social media spaces to provide an alternative public forum where obstacles are minimised and the role of bystander anti-racism is extended beyond the immediate scene. In these circumstances, social media plays an important ‘witnessing’ role, but it also opens up a space for rejoinder, by encouraging a new public to form, to claim and assert rights, and assume civic responsibility for these actions without fear for personal safety.

NEW ZEALAND AND AUSTRALIAN FLASH MOB HAKAS There are even broader reasons for considering the productive capacity of even vitriolic and aggressive contest within the interactive fields of social media platforms such as YouTube, where rich and nuanced expressions of cultural citizenship are able to play out. A second case study extends the analysis above, and highlights a potential cultural pedagogy and active affinity as forms of cultural citizenship derived from responses to racist provocation. In 2011 and 2012, a number of flash mob Maori hakas were performed in New Zealand, Australia and elsewhere in the world. Initiated by troupes performing for the 2011 Rugby Union World Cup hosted by New Zealand, the hakas were performed in public as surprise events and – in typical flash mob fashion – videoed and uploaded to YouTube. Many of the videos have been viewed by millions and commented on by tens of thousands of YouTube users. We analysed the comments field for a flash mob video of the Maui Potiki haka performed at Sylvia Park, a shopping centre in Auckland, in 2011. In the three month observation period there were 1 242 368 views and over 2600 comments, and we coded a sample of 1448 comments to examine qualities of passionate expression, provocation and counter-provocation. Again, while there was an overwhelming flow of positive sentiment and cultural pride, video comments were peppered with aggressive, vitriolic, racist provocation, followed by equally vitriolic reactions from those trying to win back expressive control of the ‘tone’ of the comments field. Much of the vitriolic provocation seemed carefully constructed to initiate ongoing reactions and to draw attention. This type of provocation, often thought of as trolling, in this case mostly took the form of racial bigotry and came from individual commenters framing their provocation in a way that directly counteracts the cultural pride more commonly expressed. The producer of one flash mob haka video filmed in Sydney in late 2011 responded to the flow of racist vitriol a year later, and in measured tones emphasised the idea

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that negative comments are a form of defacement: I am very disappointed with the actions of some people’s comments on here, it shows a great lack of respect for what people believe in and where they are from whether it be by birth or by heritage, if you do not like the video or the comments other small minded little pieces of crap have made then don’t respond and leave my page. I don’t come and deface your videos and crush something that you are proud of so don’t do it to mine (Ljkennedy1 2012). Defacement, however, carries a suggestion of private ownership of the space that is not accurate or helpful. Typically, responses take the form of counter-provocation or conflict. With the Silvia Park video, what struck us as more interesting than most typical examples of racist provocation and bigotry was the consistent attempt to collectively engage in transformational dialogue, a kind of pedagogy of Maori culture and history. A good example was where a long exchange followed a provocation connecting Maori men with domestic violence: ‘...and when they get home, they take it out (for real) on their partners, children....’ (elgar104 2011). There were many responses, many of which were equally vitriolic and aggressive, but all worked to transform the tone of the exchange back toward the celebratory acts of cultural expression displayed in the video. For example: @elgar104 People who consider this attention seeking probably have no culture or traditions to learn from. I am no a Maori but I can see the passion these guys have when they do it (Jandalkingz, September 2011). @jandalkingz Back you up there bro, this is New Zealand and if haterz in here have issues than migrate to Australia, simple. This is about passion and these boys have given a glimpse into our heritage (Joeydudester1, September, 2011). So many exchanges like this, which might seem to begin and often continue as simply abhorrent, aggressive and racist expression and exchange, are expressions of cultural citizenship that also enable a plurality of acts of citizenship. These are a set of processes and acts that give rise to anxieties and risk, but are also sought out by, and we would argue are crucial to, social media participants enacting forms of identification and cultural citizenship within emergent and ephemeral – but contested – micro-publics.

ADAM GOODES There is clearly a different kind of force at play when participants in

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publicly mediated racist exchange are able to leverage the reach, attention and legitimacy afforded by mainstream commercial and public news media through television, radio and newspapers. As a point of significant contrast to the previous two cases, we compare such a situation in which a racial slur against Adam Goodes, a well-known and respected Indigenous AFL player, became the focus of broadcast news media attention, owing to the nature of the offense as well as Goodes’ celebrity status and significant media profile. In 2013, during the opening match of the AFL’s Indigenous Round, a 13-year-old member of the crowd directed verbal abuse at Goodes who was near the boundary, calling him an ‘ape’. Goodes immediately brought the incident to the attention of a nearby official, and was visibly hurt and struggled to continue with the game (Johns 2013b). He took the matter further after the match and, in his statement through broadcast news channels, explained his dismay at the public attack on him, saying ‘I turned around and when I saw it was a young girl and I thought she was 14, that was my initial thought, I was just like “really?”. I just thought how could that happen?’ (Johns 2013b). This incident highlights the complexity with which racism enters a society and is normalised until the meaning of insidious, racist terms become dispersed, invisible to some who would voice them. At the same time, the Goodes incident demonstrates that such taunts are no less deeply felt by those groups who cannot forget the original meanings of the terms, and the personal and community-wide legacies they have left. However, it also indicates the significance of the media channels through which such expressions are made, encountered and responded to. In this case it is clear that through his celebrity status and his access to broadcast media channels of communication, Goodes has a particular capacity to amplify attention and respond in a way that the ordinary, individual users of social media of the previous case studies do not have. This affords him significant power in being able to shape the public narrative. In the uses of YouTube described above, there is only the sense of larger, multiple or pluralistic publics competing through exchange. Recognising the particular force and focussed attention that broadcast media afforded him, Goodes and others (such as AFL boss Andrew Demetriou) were quick to move attention away from the girl who made the racist slur to the broader context of public education and cultural change. In his press conference the next day, Goodes explained that it was now about education for the girl and for society (Windley 2013). While for Goodes this meant taking a stand for himself, his family and his community, and telling people ‘that a simple name, a simple word, can cut so deep’, he did not blame the girl and asked

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for the public to give her support, just like he had received. Goodes put it as follows: I just hope that people give the 13-year-old the same sort of support because she needs it, her family need it, the people around them need it. It’s not a witch hunt. I don’t want people to go after this young girl. To this end, Goodes called for education instead of naming and shaming ‘so it doesn’t happen again’. But the very step of making this public appeal for clemency demonstrates the difference between his ability to leverage mainstream media to communicate an anti-racist message to a mass audience and the ability of the young perpetrator, or other participants in instances of racial abuse in an AFL football crowd, to leverage mainstream media to make their voices heard, or to enter into an open exchange where such provocations may be raised or addressed, perpetrators condemned or educated, victims supported. Goodes’ ability to garner the resources of commercial and public broadcast news is also supplemented by his role as ambassador for the Australian Human Rights Commission’s ‘Racism. It Stops With Me’ campaign launched around the same time. The campaign used high profile public figures such as Goodes to promote the idea of a shared responsibility for anti-racist practice (Australian Human Rights Commission 2013). All of these factors alter the dynamic and structures of voice through which racist provocation and counter-provocation operate, as well as the broader effects they might have. In particular, when we consider which social media actions may provide the greatest breakthrough in terms of encouraging mass participation and equality of access, it is not always those examples which are completely free of vitriolic exchange that are most productive. At the time of viewing (23 October 2014), the ‘Racism. It Stops With Me’ YouTube site had 697 subscriptions and 259 452 views. The comments field had been disabled, so it was difficult to tell how much overall traffic the site had had from its publication on 23 May 2013 to the time of writing. When contrasted with the other videos discussed in this paper, it is nevertheless clear that the videos posted by ordinary users and the reasonably unchecked flow of comments and video responses that such videos may invite are often more sought-after and discursively productive than those produced by media industry professionals. We argue in light of these dynamics that the media sites and tools through which expression and exchange occur must be of foremost consideration when devising strategies to combat racist activity. In particular, we argue

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that locking down the interactive capacities of social media platforms is not necessarily the most effective response.

CONCLUSIONS To conclude, our aim in this paper has not been to downplay the existence of harmful expressions of bigotry and racism in online forums, but simply to move toward a notion of contested publics that might be able to accommodate – that is, not to celebrate, nor to eradicate – forms of passion and conflict, even where aggression and bigotry are involved. Incidents such as those depicted in the YouTube examples described above demonstrate the complex role of social media platforms in documenting racism and making it visible, but also social media’s role as an enabler of new micro-publics and from-below ‘acts’ of cultural citizenship. Our concern is that in much of the anti-racist and digital citizenship literature and policy manoeuvring, this kind of content and exchange is simplistically considered harmful and is often removed or shut down by site owners (VEOHRC 2013). This approach ignores the productive potential of even aggressive and conflict-ridden exchanges to provide new opportunities for young people in particular to make claims and take responsibility as citizens, in ways that embrace what Hartley describes as the right to act up and the ‘right to dance’ (Hartley 2012). Though such a position might suggest a defence of the ‘right to be a bigot’, we wish to shift the attention from individual acts of bigotry and consider instead the capacity of social media platforms to make bigotry visible to a wider public, and to encourage forms of exchange that may be productive of anti-racist bystander action and acts of social media citizenship. We also wish to contrast these examples with the wider capacities of mainstream commercial and public broadcast media to provoke through racist expression and effectively draw attention – and respond – to racism. Care must be taken not to conflate the two media contexts, and to take into account where they leverage off and inform each other. In the cases we have examined there is an evident capacity for agonistic – that is, contested but inclusive and sustained – micro-publics to persist, from which productive expressions of cultural citizenship, solidarity and anti-racist practice can emerge. But there is equally potential for great social harm. The point is to ensure that the foundations are in place for agonistic contest and productive publics with expressive capacities that not only bring to light racist sentiment, but are also empowered to respond.

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25. Shaw, F. (2012). “The Politics of Blogs: Theories of Discursive Activism Online”, Media International Australia, Vol. 142, February, pp. 41-49. 26. Stevenson, N. (2001). Culture and Citizenship. London: Sage. 27. Turner, B.S. (2001). Outline of a General Theory of Cultural Citizenship. In N. Stevenson, Culture and Citizenship (pp. 11-32). London: Sage. 28. VicHealth. (2010). Review of Bystander Approaches in Support of Preventing Race-based discrimination. Retrieved from http://www. vichealth.vic.gov.au/Publications/Freedom-from-discrimination/ Bystander-approaches-in-support-of-preventing-race-baseddiscrimination.aspx. 29. Victoria Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission (VEOHRC). 2013. Reporting Racism: What You Say Matters. Retrieved from http://www.humanrightscommission.vic.gov.au/index. php/our-projects-a-initiatives/reporting-racism. 30. Windley, M. (2013, May 25, 2013). Adam Goodes “gutted” after 13 year old girl’s racial slur, who called the Sydney Champion Today to Apologise’. Herald Sun. Retrieved from http://www.heraldsun.com. au/sport/afl/adam-goodes-gutted-after-13-year-old-girls-racial-slurwho-called-the-sydney-champion-today-to-apologise/

CHAPTER

5

RACISM, ETHNICITY AND THE MEDIA IN AFRICA: REFLECTIONS INSPIRED BY STUDIES OF XENOPHOBIA IN CAMEROON AND SOUTH AFRICA

Francis B. Nyamnjoh Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Cape Town

ABSTRACT This paper demonstrates the extent to which the media and be-longing in Africa are torn between competing and often conflicting claims of bounded and flexible ideas of culture and identity. It draws on studies of xenophobia in Cameroon and South Africa, inspired by the resilience of the politicization of

Citation: Francis B. Nyamnjoh, “Racism, Ethnicity and the Media in Africa: Reflections Inspired by Studies of Xenophobia in Cameroon and South Africa,” ISSN: 18686869 (online), ISSN: 0002-0397 (print). Copyright: Africa Spectrum is an Open Access publication. It may be read, copied and distributed free of charge according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.

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culture and identity, to discuss the hierarchies and inequalities that underpin political, economic and social citizenship in Africa and the world over, and the role of the media in the production, enforcement and contestation of these hierarchies and inequalities. In any country with liberal democratic aspirations or pretensions, the media are expected to promote national citizenship and its emphasis on large-scale, assimilationist and territorially bounded belonging, while turning a blind eye to those who fall through the cracks as a result of racism and/or ethnicity. Little wonder that such an exclusionary articulation of citizenship is facing formidable challenges from its inherent contradictions and closures, and from an upsurge in the politics of recognition and representation by small-scale communities claiming autochthony at a historical juncture where the rhetoric espouses flexible mobility, postmodern flux and discontinuity. Keywords: Cameroon, South Africa, Africa, mass media, xenophobia, ethnicity, racism A conference on racism, ethnicity and the media in Africa presupposes that racism and ethnicity are sensitive issues in Africa, and that how the media relate to these issues is critical. This raises some questions: In what ways are racism and ethnicity sensitive issues in Africa? How do the media in Africa relate to racism and ethnicity as sensitive issues? Racism and ethnicity become issues of concern for media when tracing belonging and identity through exclusion becomes obsessive and problematic— forcing upon others exclusion when they expect inclusion, and seeking to justify such exclusion with porous arguments, stereotypes, stigmatisation and scapegoating. Xenophobia (whether racially or ethnically inspired) is indicative of such problematic and obsessive tendencies to define and con-fine belonging and identity in terms of cultural differences, with little regard to the reality of interconnections and ongoing relationships forged across communities by individuals as navigators and negotiators of various identity margins. Racism and ethnicity in obsession link culture and place in very essentialist and politicised terms. This makes it difficult to account for cultural differences and similarities within individuals and communities in a world where particular cultures are mapped onto or confined to particular spaces, places and races. Belonging and identity based on the logic of exclusion are informed by the erroneous assumption that there is such a thing as the ultimate insider, found through a process of

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selective elimination and ever-diminishing circles of inclusion. The politics of nativity, authenticity, autochthony, indigeneity or citizenship, premised narrowly around cultural difference and the centrality of culture, are pursued with this illusion of the ultimate insider in mind. Yet, even the most cursory of looks into the lives of Africans and the daily relationships they forge with difference would suggest that such frozen representations of cultures and identities are in no way a reflection of real life. Is there anything in real terms to the frozen claims of authenticity, autochthony, indigeneity or citizenship on which cultural difference is predicated? To define indigenous peoples simply as those who “were there first and are still there, and so have rights to their lands” (Maybury-Lewis 2005), or even as those “particular groups who have been left on the margins of development”, “are perceived negatively by dominating mainstream development paradigms”, “whose cultures and ways of life are subject to dis-crimination and contempt”, and “whose very existence is under threat of extinction”, a definition adopted by the African Commission’s Working Group of Experts on Indigenous Populations/Communities (ACHPR and IWGIA 2005: 87–97), is to incite inquiry about the reality of internal and external migration and the political, cultural, economic and historical factors that have configured competing articulations of being indigenous. Although such strategic essentialism may be understandable and indeed useful in the pursuit of common ambitions of dominance, or in redressing injustices collectively experienced as a colonised or subjected people, it hardly provides for theorising pre- and postcolonial identities as complex, negotiated, relational and dynamic experiences that respond to and feed from local and global interconnected hierarchies. Qualifying to be considered “authentic”, “autochthonous”, “indigenous” or “bona fide” is a function of the way race, geography, culture, class, gender and generation define and prescribe, include and exclude. These hierarchies of humanity assume different forms depending on encounters, power relations, and prevalent notions of personhood, agency, and community. Africa offers fascinating examples of how the terms indigenous and native were employed in the service of colonising forces, of how colonially created or deformed ethnicities have had recourse to indigeneity in their struggles against colonialism, and of how groups vying for resources and power among themselves have deployed competing claims to indigeneity in relation to one another (Vail 1989; Nnoli 1998; Salih and Markakis 1998). In Africa, the meaning of “indigenous” has varied tremendously.

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Communities large and small have both accepted and contested arbitrary colonial and postcolonial administrative boundaries and the dynamics of dispossession. Failing to achieve the idealised “nation-state”, relatively weak vis-à-vis global forces, governments and cultural communities have often sought to capitalise on the contradictory and complementary dimensions of civic, ethnic, and cultural citizenships. In this context, being indigenous socio-anthropologically is much more than merely claiming to be or being regarded as the first. Colonial and apartheid regimes of divide-and-rule created and imposed a proliferation of “native identities” circumscribed by arbitrary physical and cultural geographies. They made distinctions between colonised “natives” and colonising Europeans but also between “native citizens” and “native settlers” among ethnic communities within the same colony. In this context, to be called “indigenous” meant to be primitive, which became a perfect justification for the colonial mission civilisatrice and for dispossession and confinement to officially designated tribal territories, homelands or Bantustans, usually with callous disregard for the histories of relationships and interconnections forged with excluded others, and the differences and tensions even among the included. In all, being indigenous was for the majority colonised “native” population to be shunted to the margins in socio-economic and juridico-political terms. These dynamics of classification and rule conceived of the “natives” through frozen ideas of culture and imagined traditions applied under “decentralised despotisms” in rural areas, while the town and city were reserved for the minority colonial settler population and their purportedly “modernising”, “cultured” and “detribalised” African servants and support staff (Mamdani 1996, 1998). Even then, the colonial and apartheid authorities made it extremely difficult for their African servants and support staff to feel at home away from home, thus driving even the most enthusiastic of them to look back to their home villages for solidarity and sustenance, when they would have preferred permanent integration as bona fide townsmen and townswomen (Mayer 1971). This meant that effective assimilation or integration into the so-called universal “modern” culture or civilisation was impossible for the modernising native, however hard he tried, and whatever the rhetoric encompassed in various variants of modernisation theory. African townsmen and townswomen were thus compelled in reality to bond with the place where their umbilical cords were supposedly buried, and to celebrate primordial solidarities with their imposed ethnic kin, while dramatising differences with purported ethnic strangers. This effectively discour-aged or disciplined mobility among Africans, as it confined them to

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home-lands of labour reserves for the colonial economy. If this negative history still shapes the highly critical stance of African intellectuals and nationalists toward nebulous claims of autochthony today (Mbembe 2006; Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2009), it has also, quite paradoxically, tended to render invisible the everyday reality of postcolonial Africans (in-cluding those same intellectuals and nationalists) as straddlers of civic, ethnic and cultural citizenships and of multiple global and local cosmopolitan identities. Yet terms such as “multiculturalism”, “racial minorities”, “ethnic minorities”, “subcultures”, “multiple identities”, “hybridity”, and “cosmopolitanism” are explicit or tacit admissions that cultures and individuals as embodiments of cultural influences do defy their mappings or spaces and that spatial purity in cultural terms is more assumed than real (Gupta and Ferguson 1992: 14), just as, in some cases, multiculturalism is also more assumed than real. It is thus a dangerous illusion to seek to naturalise obviously socially constructed (racial, ethnic, national) cultural identities (Jenkins 1996: 819). In the light of the global obsession with exclusionary ideas and practices of belonging, this paper uses the examples of Cameroon and South Africa to argue that xenophobia arises from the failure by politicians, policymakers, media, intellectuals and other key social actors in public life to problematise both taken-for-granted assumptions of similarity (belonging together) and difference (not belonging together) and preconceptions of peoples and cultures as tied to particular places and spaces. Local and global hierarchies in Africa, just like similar hierarchies in Europe, North America and elsewhere, are, often with the assistance of global consumer media, actively producing inequalities based on bounded notions of race, place, culture, nationality, citizenship, class, gender and age, and the prejudices that derive from this process in turn produce xenophobia, especially in a world of rapidly globalising uncertainties and insecurities (Nyamnjoh 2005a, 2006, 2007a, 2007b). The obsessive investment in exclusionary claims to cultural belonging and identity in Africa is part of an intensifying global trend (Geschiere 2009; Comaroff and Comaroff 2009). In Europe, the political right has—especially since the late 1970s and early 1980s and since accelerated mobility became possible for people from the underdeveloped worlds of former colonies, facilitated by information and communications technologies (ICTs)— developed a political rhetoric of exclusion through cultural fundamentalism in which cultural difference is seen and treated as a threat to the assumed

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congruence between polity and culture in the “host” countries with the power to define and confine belonging (Stolcke 1995; Wright 1998; Geschiere 2009). As Jean and John Comaroff observe, although anthropologists, sociologists and political scientists have largely moved away from “primordial-ism, pure and simple”, “ethno-nationalists around the world continue to kill for it” (2009: 39). Similarly, while modernisation theory and its teleological assumptions of progress and development are largely passé in serious scholarly circles, “some organic intellectuals persist in protecting ‘ancestral customs’ from historical deconstruction” (2009: 39). It is for these reasons that any primordial or exclusionary claims of cultural difference based on assumed purity of racial or ethnic belonging are inherently problematic, even when understandable. As Verena Stolcke argues, “making sense of cultural diversity without losing sight of shared humanity” is fraught with “formidable difficulties” (1995: 1), which the media might collude with, contest or mediate. For a closer look at the relationship between problematic articulations of belonging and identity in Africa, I have chosen studies of Cameroon and South Africa as cases in point.

ON MEDIA AND THE POLITICS OF BELONGING IN AFRICA Cameroon as a Case Study In 2005 I published Africa’s Media: Democracy and the Politics of Belonging. One of the main findings of that study was that the media have assumed a partisan, highly politicised, militant role in Africa. They have done so by dividing citizens into the righteous and the wicked, depending on their political party, ideological, regional, cultural or ethnic belonging. By considering the Cameroonian experience, the book sought to understand how scapegoatism, partisanship, and regional and ethnic tendencies in the media have affected their liberal democratic responsibility to act as honest, fair and neutral mediators—accessible to all and sundry. The study did this by looking at polarisation in the press and at how the media have shaped and been shaped by the politics of belonging. Characterised by the politicisation of culture and ethnicity, this politics of belonging privileges an obsession with differentiating nationals into “ethnic/regional citizens” and “ethnic/ regional strangers”—likened to “cam-no-gos”, a stubborn skin rash that itches terribly— and feeds on and into stereotypes, stigma and xenophobia.

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Neither the state, nor intellectuals, nor the media, nor even religious institutions seem in a hurry to challenge these exclusionary articulations that make it possible for Cameroonians to be simultaneously insiders and outsiders in their national territory (Nyamnjoh 2005a). The following excerpt from Married But Available (Nyamnjoh 2009: 53– 54), gives an idea of the sort of struggles over belonging that go on even at a university purportedly modelled on an overarching “Anglo-Saxon” colonial cultural heritage. The Vice Chancellor and Registrar—daughter and son of the native soil where the university is located—would go to all lengths, including mobilising ethnic kin and kith outside of the university, to fight off perceived ambitions by ethnic others to take over the leadership of their university: The elephant men reassured the VC and the Reg that what they had buried “will numb every student and member of staff who thinks evil of you.” Before leaving the scene, the elephant men promised to in-tensify their magical powers to ensure that “our daughter and our son, and all those who mean them well, are protected by our native soil from all cam-no-gos.” “What are cam-no-gos?” Lilly Loveless asked. “These are a skin rash that itches like mad,” Bobinga Iroko laughed. “You scratch and scratch and scratch, but the itches go nowhere.” “So the VC and Reg have been attacked by this skin rash?” Lilly Loveless was baffled. “Yes, and it disturbs them like hell,” he continued to laugh. “Really?” Now Lilly Loveless knew that Bobinga Iroko was in his joking mode. “Yes, and embarrassing too. At parties and official functions the cam-no-gos do not allow the VC and Reg to do their jobs. They attack, and the VC and Reg would scratch and scratch to no avail. They can’t even take their fingers from their skins to take a drink or something to eat. It is terrible, because the cam-no-gos make them feel like going naked, and grating themselves against a rough surface till they find satisfaction.” Lilly Loveless finally understood the metaphor. “So people have borrowed from this skin rash to refer to others they don’t like?” she asked. “That’s right. Cam-no-gos are people whom the sons and daughters of the native soil consider a pain in the arse.” “You mean ethnic-others?”

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“Yes, ethnic-, regional-, and whatever others… Anyone not perceived to belong really.” “Isn’t that rather parochial and dangerous?” “That is the way those who run this country have fought to ensure that we remain forever divided. They’re out to mar, not to make.” “It’s like racing where angels fear to tread.” Belonging in Cameroon goes beyond protecting control of university spaces from invading cam-no-gos. Almost everywhere in Cameroon, citizens expect the urban elite—including journalists and media proprietors—to make inroads into the modern centres of accumulation. The state, a major source of patronage and resources, together with other economic institutions, must be manipulated to divert the flow of finance, jobs and so forth to the home regions from which the heterogeneous urban originally derive. Elites are under pressure to act as facilitators and manipulators with respect to the state. Through elite development associations, they lobby foreign agencies and NGOs to provide their home villages or regions with new sources of wealth and livelihood. In return, they may be rewarded with neo-traditional titles in their home villages. These honours confer on them symbolic or cultural capital, not expressed in material wealth but sustained by what Fisiy and Goheen (1998: 388) have termed “the conspicuous display of decorum and accompanied by public respect”, that in turn can always be exploited for political ends at regional and national levels where elites are expected to serve as vote banks for a regime that has little legitimacy in liberal-democratic terms. In certain cases, investing in the village is a way of consolidating success in the city, especially in the politics of ethnoregionalism (Nyamnjoh and Rowlands 1998; Konings and Nyamnjoh 2003). Modern big men and women thus live with one foot in the city and the other in the village. They take advantage of the economic and political opportunities of the city while redistributing wealth back to the home village. They play an active role in the cultural affairs, government and development of their home areas, which they define, confine and seek to represent in often essentialist and instrumentalist terms. Their survival within the politics of belonging of the failing modern state often depends on doing just that. At the same time, their rural ties lead them to consider customary law and local opinion when making national decisions. They thus become, in the words of Mitzi Goheen (1992), mediators between local and national arenas, interpreters as well as architects of the intersections between national law and customary law, which they often treat as unproblematic and consensual. For

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this project, the elite recruit journalists and the media (preferably from their home areas) for communication and public relations within and between communities and also with the state and the outside world. In Cameroon, almost every appointment and promotion into high office is the prerogative of the head of state, and most appointed ministers and director generals of state corporations return to their home villages to celebrate with kin and kith and express gratitude to the president. This would seem to suggest that they are appointed primarily to cater to the interests of their home villages or regions and are only marginally at the service of all and sundry (Nyamnjoh 1999). The stereotyping and xenophobic violence they encourage or condone towards ethnic or cultural others in their home villages and regions is indicative of how far they are ready to carry their politicisation of belonging in the name of democracy (Geschiere and Nyamnjoh 2000). The practice of patriotism to the home village does not escape media professionals. The study of Cameroon reveals a tension between dominant normative media theories that demand of media practitioners professional independence and detachment from conflicting loyalties to cultural and ethnic communities. The country case study points to the interconnected-ness and interpenetration between citizenship and subjection, the cosmopolitan and the local, the individual and the collective, the insider and the outsider, tolerance and xenophobia. These tensions make understanding democracy in Africa far more complex than simplistic liberal notions would suggest. In discussions of the media, democracy and rights, a heightened sense of cultural identity cannot simply be dismissed as “tribalism” or “politicization of ethnicity” and consigned to the past or to the primitive mind-sets of its advocates. The Cameroonian experience offers interesting empirical material to inform discussions of how to marry liberal democracy with African historical, cultural, and indigenous political and economic realities, however contested. While the study clearly highlights the shortcomings of ethnicised and politicized media in liberal democratic terms, it also shows the limitations of liberal democracy in a context where people are obliged or ready and willing to be both citizens and subjects, both inclusive and exclusive. They identify with their ethnic group or cultural community on the one hand (ethnic or cultural citizenship) and with the nation-state on the other (civic citizenship). The argument for democracy both as an individual and as a community or cultural right cannot simply be dismissed when there are individuals who, for multiple reasons, straddle realms of individual rights (liberal democracy) and of group rights.

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As the book maintains, major characteristics of Africa’s second liberation struggles since the 1980s have been a growing obsession with belonging and the questioning of traditional assumptions about nationality and citizenship. Identity politics are central to the political process. Exclusionary conceptions of nationality and citizenship have increased. Group claims for greater cultural recognition are countered by efforts to maintain the status quo of an inherited colonial hierarchy of racial and ethnic groupings. As ethnic groups, either local majorities or minorities, clamour for status, they are countered by an often aggressive reaffirmation of age-old exclusions informed by colonial registers of inequalities among the subjected. This development is paralleled by an in-creased distinction between “locals” and “foreigners” and between “indigenes” and “settlers” within and between countries, with the emphasis on opportunities and economic entitlements. It is the latter preoccupation with distinction that is the subject matter of my second case study, South Africa.

South Africa as a Case Study My second case study, South Africa, was part of a study that resulted in my 2006 book Insiders and Outsiders: Citizenship and Xenophobia in Contemporary Southern Africa. In pockets of economic prosperity in South Africa, Namibia and Botswana, where hierarchies of humanity informed by race, place and culture (among other things) are at play, xenophobia is rife against migrants from other African countries. Referred to derogatorily as Makwerekwere (mean-ing those incapable of articulating local languages that epitomise economic success and power), some of these migrants come from countries that were instrumental in the struggle against apartheid. The rhetoric of government authorities, immigration officials, the media, and the general public suggests that black migrants and immigrants are collectively unwelcome. The construction of the Makwerekwere and of boundaries between South Africans as “deserving citizens” and Makwerekwere as “undeserving outsiders” has been skilfully recounted by Phaswane Mpe (2001) in a novel titled Welcome to Our Hillbrow. The novel is written in two voices. The first celebrates official rhetoric internalised by ordinary black South Africans of having graduated into citizenship, only for this to be endangered by the influx of Makwerekwere with little but trouble to offer. The second voice is more measured and tries to mitigate the tendency to scapegoat and stereotype Makwerekwere, who most of the time are not as guilty as painted. This well informed novel is more subtle and nuanced than some of the surveys which have sought to capture

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the relationship between South Africans and Makwerekwere. We gather from it that negative attitudes are not towards foreigners as a homogenous entity but rather towards black African migrants in general and those from certain countries in particular. The hierarchy of humanity inherited from apartheid South Africa is replayed, with white South Africans at the helm as superiors, black South Africans in the middle as superior inferiors, and Makwerekwere as the inferior scum of humanity. Coloureds and Indians are not part of the picture in a big way. There is a clash between those who have learnt to stutter no more (blacks) and those still embedded in stuttering (Coloureds and Indians), and the stutterers are a challenge to blacks’ ability to harness mod-ernity. Black South Africans come across as having basically two attitudes towards foreigners: they either look up to them as articulate and accomplished or look down on them as stuttering and depleting. The articulate and accomplished white migrants are presumed to bring opportunities; the stuttering and depleting Makwerekwere compound the insecurities and uncertain-ties in South African lives. There are black South Africans who feel strongly that Makwerekwere “should remain in their own countries and try to sort out the problems of these respective countries, rather than fleeing them”, be-cause South Africa has “too many problems of its own”, and in any case “cannot be expected to solve all the problems of Africa”. Others would agree but argue that this is “no excuse for ostracising the innocent”. Nega-tive views about African migrants are particularly dangerous when held by the police. In the novel we see how policemen arrest Makwerekwere and “[d]rive them around Hillbrow for infinite periods of time”, saying: “See it for the last time, bastards”. As we learn from the novel, it is outright dis-honest to blame the woes of post-apartheid South Africa on Makwerekwere. Novelists like Phaswane Mpe and social scientists alike find South Africa’s public culture has become increasingly xenophobic (Landau 2004a, 2004b, 2006; Mattes et al. 1999; Morris and Bouillon 2001; Sharp 2008; Sichone 2008a, 2008b; Hadland 2008). Politicians often make unsubstantiated and inflammatory statements that the “deluge” of Makwerekwere is responsible for the current crime wave, rising unemployment, or even the spread of diseases (Crush 1997; Morris 2001b). Seen as hailing from “an impoverished and unhealthy wasteland where health measures have ceased to be operative”, Makwerekwere are considered a threat to the physical and moral health of the nation and “should therefore be kept out of South Africa” (Peberdy 2002: 24).

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As the unfounded perception that migrants are responsible for a variety of social ills grows, Makwerekwere have increasingly become the target of abuse by South African citizens, the police, the army, the Department of Home Affairs and even the media. Dark-skinned refugees and asylumseekers with distinctive features from “far away” countries are especially targeted for abuse (Bouillon 2001a, 2001b; Landau 2004b; Morris 2001b; Sichone 2001). According to Sichone (2001: 1), migrants are subject to more state regulation and open to victimisation by “owners of the means of violence”. Xenophobia is not just an attitude of dislike but, as in May 1998, is often accompanied by violence and is racist and ethnic in its application. Victims are predominantly black and are targeted for their very blackness by a society where skin colour has always served as an excuse for whole catalogues of discriminatory policies and practices. You are repeatedly made to “mind your colour” (February 1991) until you are entirely minded by colour. Individuals are often assumed to be Makwerekwere on the basis that they “look foreign” or are “too dark” to be entitled to South Africa, and “[p]olice are supposedly able to identify foreign Africans by their accents, hairstyles or dressing styles, or, in the case of Mozambicans, vaccination scars on the left front arm” (Bouillon 2001a: 38). In the frenzy to root out foreigners, they also victimise and arrest their own citizens. Since the beginnings of the Portuguese, Dutch and English transatlantic slave trade in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, blackness has been a curse (Bernal 1995: 999). In Heart of Darkness, the darker character is less qualified for citizenship (Mamdani 1996; Elbourne 2003). This tendency continues. “[T]he best qualified black” is seen “as worse than the worst white”, thereby justifying black dehumanisation and inhumane treatment (Bernal 1995: 999–1000). Even in post-apartheid South Africa, salvation for blacks seems linked to how successfully they “try for white”, “play white”, or “pass for white”, in the manner of the coloureds under apartheid. Light-ening one’s darkness with chemicals and philosophical enrichment might help in aspirations for “honorary whiteness” (Fanon 1967a: 166– 199, 1967b; Fonlon 1967: 20), but it cannot guarantee against mistakes by fussy police-men and authorities with a nose for appearances. Black South African citizens are sometimes mistaken for the dark invading barbarians or stutterers who must be confined to the fringes. To the police and authorities, South African modernity, like its identities, is all about appearances. Being unable to belong as an “insider” makes Makwerekwere all too vulnerable to “excessive criminalisation” and “primitivisation”. They cannot vote or benefit from social services, and

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Makwere-kwere are especially vulnerable to mistreatment by the police, who know that non-citizens “are less likely to lay a complaint and, if they do, they are not likely to be given a fair hearing” (Landau 2004a: 10–13; Morris 2001b: 86), especially if they are black. Black Makwerekwere are largely seen as deportable criminals even by the Minister of Home Affairs and the forces of law and order (Landau 2004a: 13–14).

SOUTH AFRICAN MEDIA AND THE NARROW FOCUS ON MAKWEREKWERE In South Africa, the conventional media were until the end of apartheid in the early 1990s in the service of white racism aimed at black disempowerment and dehumanisation. The media were preponderantly white-controlled businesses and, although the end of apartheid has led to some degree of black ownership and partnership, this has not necessarily “made the newspapers more representative of South African society” (Van Kessel 1998: 4– 10; see also Tomaselli 2002). There continue to be claims and counterclaims of “racism in the media” and the “racialized and stereotypical portrayal of blacks” (Berger 2001; Glaser 2000; Pityana 2000; Neocosmos 2006, 2008), which is indicative of how much bridge-building remains to be done. The rise of mass-circulating tabloids such as the Daily Sun and the Daily Voice and their popularity with the poor and working-class, black majority, for most of whom broadsheets are irrelevant, elusive and oppressive, is indicative of a post-apartheid South Africa determined to renegotiate skewed professional assumptions and practices in the interest of an ethic of effective inclusion and of common humanity in journalism (Wasserman 2010). Typically, however, the logic of bounded citizenship means that even as they make a case for inclusion of the poor and the sidestepped workingclass South African black majority of the townships, the tabloids are all too ready to caricature and misrepresent Makwerekwere as the greatest obstacle to the fulfilment of their dreams of material abundance and comfort. It is hardly surprising therefore, that following the May 2008 violent uprisings against Makwerekwere, the Daily Sun, one of the leading tabloids and the most widely circulated in areas affected, not only failed to condemn the violence forthrightly but was also found guilty of employing inappropriate and discriminatory terminology to describe black Africans immigrants.1 There is still little real investment in geographical and cultural knowledge of Africa, despite much political rhetoric to the contrary, and in spite of the aggressive expansion of South African businesses into Africa north of

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the Limpopo (Miller 2006; Adebajo 2007).2 Much has changed within an extremely short space of time in South African media and society, while much seems to have stayed the same. The rhetoric of transformation does not match realities and expectations, as the media continue to “talk left, act right” (Duncan 2000). Whites in South Africa may not be a unified bloc, but the edification of biological and cultural racism under apartheid made it possible for their collective interests to be privileged, regardless of class, gender, status or the resistance of some against the structures in place (Steyn 2008; Posel 2010). This makes it extremely difficult for non-white South Africans not to equate whiteness with power and privilege, as they seek to situate themselves in the racialised hierarchy of humanity imposed upon them since the days of the Cape “Hottentots” in the 1640s (Johnson 2007). That the media in postapartheid South Africa are still dominated by white interests in ownership, control and content is a good case in point that talking or scripting change is different from living change. If the media in general and the print media in particular still mainly serve elite white interests and the economy is largely still under elite white control, it means that how the media cover immigration and migration is likely to be indicative of dominant elite white views and interests on these issues. And if in the face of negative coverage, black South Africans were to reinforce their hostility towards Makwerekwere, they would be acting in tune with dominant elite white interests, even as they may claim to be defending their own interests as emerging citizens. The media thus play a critical role in the production, circulation and reproduction of prevalent attitudes and perceptions of foreigners by South Africans, who are reified as a homogeneous entity with common interests to be collectively defended against undeserving “others”. In other words, the media are part of a national obsession with the production of a fixed, essential, stable, unified and exclusive South Africa where the subjected of the apartheid era are included only to the extent they are able to uncritically internalise, reproduce and aggressively defend the apartheid rhetoric of biological and cultural purity. The media offer a platform for the South African public to comment on “foreigners” through letters to the editor, talk shows and television de-bates. While Makwerekwere are very absent in public discussions about them and their purported ills, Indians were very present in the debate around Mbongeni Ngema’s controversial song Ama-Ndiya, accusing South African Indians of exploitation and resisting change. Makwerekwere are an absent presence, to be acted upon but not expected to act or react. Perceived essentially as a

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negation to civilisation, they can be talked at, talked about and sometimes talked to or for, but rarely talked with. As a collective menace to citizenship and opportunity, Makwerekwere are denied the legitimacy of a voice by the media as the voice of civilisation and legitimacy. In this way, the media do not simply carry information to the public as a neutral vehicle reflecting the workings of society. They reproduce certain ideologies and discourses that support specific relations of power in accordance with hierarchies of race, nationality, culture, class, and gender (Nyamnjoh 2006). Racism—both in its biological and cultural forms (Mac an Ghaill 1999: 61– 80; Stolcke 1995; Wright 1998)—is constantly produced and reproduced in South African print media (Glaser 2000; Pityana 2000), thereby making what is reported and how it is reported essential for a fair appreciation of the place of the media in creating or reinforcing perceptions of Makwerekwere as the constructed “Other” (Danso and McDonald 2001; Harris 2001; Fine and Bird 2006; Sichone 2008a, 2008b). Representations of Makwerekwere by the print media in South Africa are largely negative and “extremely unanalytical in nature”, as the majority of the press has tended to reproduce “problematic research and antiimmigrant terminology uncritically” (Danso and McDonald 2001: 115–117; Fine and Bird 2006: 18–62). The mainly white-controlled media have thus been instrumental in the creation, reproduction and circulation of the frozen imagery of black immigrants as a threat to an equally frozen or homogeneous South African society. In both cases, the media have failed to accommodate the overwhelming diversity of cultural identities, social experiences, and subjective realities of individuals and communities, preferring instead to caricature. Makwerekwere are regularly connected with crime, poverty, unemployment, disease and significant social costs in the media and by authorities whose declarations the media reproduce uncritically (Danso and McDonald 2001; Harris 2001; Landau 2004a, 2004b, 2005; Morris 2001b: 77–78; Shin-dondola 2002). Makwerekwere are uncritically portrayed by the bulk of the print media as constituting a social problem and a threat to the locals, first through their coming to the country and then through their illegalities (Danso and McDonald 2001; Fine and Bird 2006; Neocosmos 2006, 2008). Such “harsh treatment” has in turn pushed Makwerekwere to view South Africans and their obsession with autochthony and rootedness negatively (Landau 2005, 2006). Nigerians and Congolese, for example, perceive black South African men as “extremely violent”, “brutal”, “lazy”, “adulterous and not nurturing of their partners”, “shackled by colonial attitudes and

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... feelings of inferiority [to whites]” and South Africans in general as “poorly educated and ignorant”, “narrow-minded”, “hostile”, “indifferent”, “unpredict-able” and “unenterprising and wasteful” (Bouillon 2001b: 122– 140; Morris 2001b: 78–80). But these counter perceptions and stereotypes by Makwerekwere seldom make their way into the dominant media, or into the conventional research sponsored by and conducted in the interest of the status quo. By replying with stereotypes of their own, Makwerekwere only attract further hatred from black South African men in particular, who are incensed by their perceived popularity with local women (Morris 2001b: 74–80), and by their success in the informal sector (Morris 2001b; Simone 2001, 2004). The media, in conjunction with other institutions of social control, succeed (with or without conspiring) in diverting the attention of blacks seeking meaningful integration into the South African economy. The ANC black majority authorities, by opting for neo-liberalism without justice or restitution, are thus co-opted by a white-dominated economic system that can then conveniently deny accusations of racism, while the racial outcome of its policies and practices persists (Glaser 2000; Hendricks 2004; Pityana 2000; Fine and Bird 2006; Crush 2008; Sichone 2008a, 2008b; Sharp 2008; Steyn 2008; Posel 2010). For over two decades following independence in 1980, Zimbabwe experienced serious outflows of its white and black populations to South Africa and Botswana, among other destinations (Tevera and Crush 2003). While black Zimbabweans are castigated and stereotyped for transgressing South African borders (Mate 2005), curiously, white Zimbabweans fleeing into South Africa because of Mugabe’s land redistribution policies are uncritically welcome. Any noise by the local media is rather to criticise the ANC government for its “quiet diplomacy” towards Mugabe’s “diabolical” land redistribution policies while whites suffered the loss of “legitimately” acquired land. The coverage of crimes by black migrants from African countries is common, even as criminal activities by other nationalities are rarely reported. Little is said about Thai, Romanian and Bulgarian women involved in prostitution, or Taiwanese and Chinese “illegals” responsible for the smuggling of poached contraband. There is also almost a complete blackout of “references to crime and illegality on the part of Western Europeans and North Americans in South Africa, despite the fact that nationals from these regions also commit crimes and many are in the country ‘illegally’”. The hierarchy of races and cultures dictates a sense of newsworthiness, which is ill informed by the real impact of different categories of immigrants on

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the South African economy (Danso and McDonald 2000: 127; see also Fine and Bird 2006). Babacar, a francophone Makwerekwere and street vendor, cannot understand the double standards: Why don’t they talk about the Chinese or the Yugoslavs? There are so many foreigners, other nationalities in South Africa. The Chinese are here. They sell in the streets! I know Yugoslavs. They sell. But they are not mentioned. They use South Africans to sell in the streets. There are other nationalities which sell here, but they don’t have black skins like us (Bouillon 2001b: 132). Crime has been racialised, and the print media have also tended to nationalise crime attributed to Makwerekwere. Criminal syndicates, smuggling and drug trafficking are usually associated with particular groups of foreign nationals, with black Makwerekwere being portrayed either as perpetual criminals or more prone to commit serious crime than nonblack immigrants from Africa or elsewhere. Nigerians are associated with controlling the drug trade (cocaine) and, as depicted in the film District 9, represented as dangeous extraterrestrial refugees to be watched at close range. The Congolese are identified with passport racketeering and diamond smuggling; Lesotho nationals with the smuggling of gold dust and copper wire; and Mozambican and Zimbabwean women as indulging in prostitution (Danso and McDon-ald 2001: 126–127; Mate 2005). The media have also sensationalised immigration with screaming and alarmist headlines such as: “Illegals in SA add to decay of cities”, “6 million migrants headed our way”, “Africa floods into Cape Town”, and “Francophone invasion”. Aquatic or mob metaphors such as “hordes”, “floods”, “flocking”, and “streaming” are quite common. Also frequent are derogatory and unsubstantiated references to the rest of Africa (e.g. “Strife-torn Central Africa”, “Africa’s flood of misery”) and comments that portray persons from those areas essentially as real or potential economic refugees (e.g. “as long as South Africa remains the wealthiest and strongest country on a continent littered with economically unstable and dysfunctional nations, it will continue to attract large numbers [of mi-grants]”). The tendency is to report on black Makwerekwere in South African cities as turning the clock of civilisation back to the primitive realities of their home cities (e.g. “Johannesburg’s inner city is now assuming the appearance of a typical sub-Saharan African city”), which predicts doom for South African urbanites if not contained. The presumed primitivity of Makwerekwere is meant to presuppose an inability to articulate life in a modern “world class city” like Johannesburg (Gotz and Landau 2004; Landau 2004a, 2004b, 2005, 2006), where only

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whites or those for long directly subjected by settler whites can cope (Steyn 2008; Posel 2010). This criminalisation of migration by black Africans is “just as true of black-oriented newspapers as it is of white” (Danso and McDonald 2001: 127–129; Fine and Bird 2006). In view of such sensational and uncritical reporting, hostile attitudes towards black Makwerekwere could be described as partly driven not by experience but by mass-mediated stereotypes and myths of the dangerous, depleting and encroaching “Other” from the “Heart of Darkness” north of South Africa (Crush 2001: 28; Morris and Bouillon 2001; Sichone 2008a, 2008b). The South African media and nationals thus give the impression that black African migration is The Problem, not migration as a whole (Landau 2004a: 6). Flexible mobility is for those at the top of the hierarchy of humanity (determined by race, place, class, gender, age, etc.), not those at the bottom. Thus, whites from everywhere are free to come and go, and are hardly represented as a burden to the economy or society. Negative attitudes and hostility towards black Makwerekwere are actively promoted and sustained by the draconian immigration policy of detection, detention and deportation (Landau 2004a, 2004b). As Morris (1998) argues, “even though progressive legislation and positive reporting can alter perceptions over time”, “there has been little endeavour by the authorities or the media to construct narratives that would counter xenophobia” targeted at black African immigrants. It is hardly surprising that public opinion towards Ma-kwerekwere “is shaped by the attitude of the media and the authorities” (Morris 1998: 1126), and that in turn, the media and authorities are influenced by the interests of the elite whites and blacks who, in partnership with multinationals, control the South African economy. It is neither in the interest of the elite whites who constitute the dominant interest in the free market economy (Steyn 2008; Posel 2010) nor in the interest of the crystallising, young and old, upwardly mobile, black elite in power and business to en-courage balanced media reporting (Fine and Bird 2006), when stereotyping and scapegoating black African migrants can serve a useful diversionary purpose in the face of the rising expectations of ordinary black and white citizenship. In South Africa we see how race, culture, class and citizenship intersect in the interest of global consumer capitalism, to the detriment of those with the wrong race, the wrong culture, the wrong class, the wrong gender, the wrong nationality or the wrong citizenship.

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RECONCILING PROFESSIONALISM AND CULTURAL BELONGING IN AFRICA’S MEDIA In view of these tensions and conflicts between professionalism and cultural belonging in African journalism, I would like, in this paper, to critically ex-amine conventional journalism in Africa, discuss its shortcomings, and point to the creative processes underway in the lives of ordinary Africans as the way forward for meaningful journalism on and about Africa. The paper also explores the role of innovations in the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) to mitigate victimhood and promote more democratic journalism from the standpoint of how ordinary Africans, as individuals and communities, appropriate ICTs. Behind every newspaper, radio or television, behind every journalism, African or otherwise, is the journalist as a socially produced being desperately seeking professionalism in a context of competing and conflicting demands on his or her talents and calling. I have often wished I were a journalist, but when I watch African journalists at work, when I scrutinise the challenges they face daily and fathom the compromises they have to make, I thank God I am only an aspiring journalist.

Practicing Journalism in Africa is Like Swimming Upstream Media freedom advocacy groups, journalists, and media scholars, myself included, have catalogued the daily economic, political, institutional and professional constraints confronting African journalists. Among these is the tendency of African governments towards excessive centralisation, bureaucratisation and politicisation of state-owned media institutions, making it difficult for state-employed journalists to reconcile government’s desires with their professional beliefs and public expectations. Also stifling are the legal frameworks regulating the press in many an African country. The craving by most states to control leads lawmakers to see journalists as potential troublemakers who must be policed. In some countries, (even after certain draconian aspects of the press laws of the one-party era were re-placed with new provisions that are relatively more tolerant of opposition views and of criticisms), the selective application of the laws, together with the use of extra-legal measures, have often been detrimental to the critical private press and made it difficult for this press to have the professional independence it needs. Other factors adversely affecting African journalism include widespread job insecurity, poor salaries and poor working conditions of most journalists.

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Financial difficulties, lack of personnel and inadequate specialisation or professionalisation, ignorance of the market, and the uncertainties of life in the age of flexible mobility and its paradoxes have only compounded the predicament. Even when NGOs and other organisations intervene to assist the media, financially and otherwise, they often resort to abstract and rigid notions of freedom that make them appear more like religious fundamentalists—what Harri Englund (2006) has termed “human rights fundamentalists” in his study of rights activists in Malawi and their deafness to alternative perspectives and the lived experiences of those they seek to convert. These, however, are not the challenges that concern me in this paper. Of concern here are the basic assumptions that underpin African journalism in definition and practice, and their consequences on journalists as socially and politically shaped beings who are part and parcel of the cultural (be these premised on race and/or ethnicity) communities in which they pursue their profession. To what extent does journalism, as defined and practiced in Africa, adapt to the lived realities and ideas of personhood of the various (racial and ethnic) individuals and communities that claim Africanity? Or, that live in the geographical space known as “Africa”, while claiming not to be of Africa? Or that selectively claim to be or not to be African?

Africanity Caught in the Web of Bounded Identities If belonging is a process, then the idea of the social construction and dynamic nature of Africa has to be taken seriously, both by the media and by those studying racism and ethnicity in Africa. What does it mean to be African? Who qualifies to claim Africa? Is being African or claiming Africa an attribute of race and skin colour (black, white, yellow), birth (umbilical cord, birth certificates, identity cards, passports), geography (physical spaces, home village), history (encounters), culture (prescriptive specificities), economics (availability and affordability, wealth and deprivation), sociology (social configurations and action, inclusion and exclusion), psychology (mindsets), philosophy (worldviews), politics (power relations), collective memory (shared experiences and aspirations) or a category through which a world that is not rigidly geographical, racial or cultural is constructed, to name just a few of the many possibilities? These questions inform debates on citizenship and identity and the definition of rights, entitlement, duties and responsibilities. The questions are of course not uniquely African. Similar questions have been and are being debated with considerable passion in other parts of the world, and contestations around them have also often been played out in

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violent communal confrontations, civil wars, and inter-state conflicts. While they may seem straightforward to answer, the questions have been rendered more complex by the dynamic interplay of race, ethnicity, age, gender and religion in the structuring and exercise of power and opportunity. Precisely for this reason, they are not questions that can be addressed in the abstract. How one answers the questions generated by any attempt at grappling with Africanity is not only situationally determined but is also a function of how selective one is with regard to the various indicators available. Some individuals and communities on the continent and elsewhere might claim Africanity or have it imposed upon them for various personal, collective, historical and political reasons. But it is not always straightforward to say which of these claims may be legitimate and why, especially as identity is not only how one sees oneself but also how one is seen and categorised by others and especially by state bureaucracies and regimes of control, particularly where the absorption of new populations is involved. This is all the more complex as identities are themselves always in mutation, shaped as they are by changing historical contexts and circumstances, such as internal and international migrations and shifts in social power relations. It is safe to say, however, that to most ordinary people in the geo-graphical location known as “Africa”, Africanity is more than just a birth certificate, an identity card or a passport—documents that many of them do not have, even as others coming from elsewhere and waving the flag of Africanity may have all these documents and more. For the ordinary person, to be African is not simply to be labelled or merely defined as such. It is to be a social actor or actress enmeshed in a particular context that has been and continues to be shaped by a history of connections and disconnections informed by interconnecting local and global hierarchies. That history is marked by great social movements and achievements as well as by unequal encounters and misrepresentations. For the masses of Africans, Africa is above all a lived reality, constantly shaped and reshaped (socially produced) through toil, sweat and struggle to live in dignity and transform society progressively. The fact of their Africanity is neither in question nor a question. And the least they would expect from the media is to refrain from adding to their burdens via socially and culturally disembedded and ahistorical journalism which trivialises their collective experiences and memories, as evidenced in the Cameroonian and South African case studies, where uncritical and simplistic assumptions about culture, identity and belonging have only compounded their predicament.

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Problematic Assumptions about Culture and Belonging in Africa’s Media The basic assumptions underpinning African journalism in definition and practice are not informed by the fact that ordinary Africans are busy Africanising their modernity and modernising their Africanity in complex ways. The current precepts of journalism in Africa are largely at variance with dominant ideas of personhood and agency (and by extension society, culture and democracy) shared by communities across the continent. They assume there is a One-Best-Way of being and doing to which Africans must aspire and be converted in the name of modernity and civilisation—and this de-spite the fact that the very modernity and civilisation they are called to embrace actively produces and reproduces them as “different”, “inferior”, and belonging to the “margins” of the forces shaping global processes (Ferguson 2006; Zeleza 2003). This divergence is at the heart of some of the professional and ethical dilemmas that haunt journalism in and on Africa, a journalism which tends to debase and caricature African humanity, creativity and realities. Constrained by a One-Best-Way approach, African journalism becomes one of bandwagonism, where mimicry is the order of the day as emphasis is less on thinking than on doing, less on leading than on being led, less on defining than on being defined. African journalism lacks both the power of self-definition and the power to shape the universals that are deaf and dumb to the particularities of journalism in and on Africa. Because journalism has tended to be treated as an attribute of so-called “modern” societies or of those “superior” others, it is only proper, so the reasoning goes, that African journalism and the societies it serves be taught the principles and professional practices by those who “know” what it means to be civilised and to be relevant to civilisation in a global hierarchy of humanity and cultures. Aspiring journalists in Africa must, like containers, be dewatered of the mud and dirt of culture as tradition and custom and be filled afresh with tested sparkles of culture as modernity and civilisation. African journalists are thus called upon to operate in a world predefined by others, where they are given the tools and meant to implement and execute and hardly ever to think or rethink. What is expected of them is respect for canons, not questioning why or how canons are forged or the extent to which canons are inclusive and reflective of the creative diversity and complexity of Africa and the relations it forges and evolves in the universe that is purportedly of interest to the journalism of the One-Best-Way. And that is not all, because

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African journalists are defined a priori as inferior and marginal to the forces that shape global journalism; their best journalism is at best second-rate (Wasserman 2009).

Providing for African Humanity, Creativity and Conviviality in Africa’s Media The relevance of journalism to Africa and Africans depends on the value it brings to African humanity and creativity. If it privileges a hierarchy of humanity and human creativity and sees African humanity and creativity at the abyss of that interconnected global hierarchy, such journalism is bound to be prescriptive, condescending, contrived, caricatured and hardly in tune with the quest by Africans for equality of humanity and for expression, recognition and representation. If African journalists were to, wittingly or un-wittingly, buy into that hierarchy, they would in effect be working against the interests of the very African communities they claim to serve with their journalism. If one convinces oneself that one is at the abyss, that one is a veritable heart of darkness, one doesn’t need much convincing to buy into prescriptions on how to fish oneself out of the abyss or the heart of dark-ness, especially if such prescriptions come from those one has been schooled to recognise and represent as superior, and especially if the latter are in a position of power—if they have the yam and the knife, as Chinua Achebe would put it. A closer look at democracy in Africa is a good indicator of how journalism has tended to articulate and appreciate African realities through the prescriptive lenses of those who believe their ideas of humanity and creativity to be sufficiently rich and practiced for uncritical adoption by “emerging” others. In Europe and North America, liberal democracy is said to guarantee journalism the best environment it needs to foster freedom and progress. Liberal democracy’s colossal investments in the making of the “independent individual” are projected as the model to be promoted and defended by journalism in and on Africa. Yet the more Africa strives to implant liberal democracy, fewer are the successes to be reported and greater is the need to critically examine the prescription and how it contradicts the colonial and postcolonial histories of unequal relations between Africa and the prescribing West. Even the most optimistic of African journalists would hesitate to term liberal democracy and Africa good bedfellows. If African journalists were to scrutinise the democratisation projects with which they have been involved since the early 1990s for example, they would agree that

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implementing liberal democracy in Africa has been like trying to force onto the body of a full figured person, rich in all the cultural indicators of health with which Africans are familiar, a dress made to fit the slim, de-fleshed, Hollywood consumer model body of a Barbie doll-type entertainment icon. They would also agree that instead of blaming the tiny dress or its designer, the tradition among journalists has been to fault the popular body or the popular ideal of beauty, for emphasising too much bulk, for parading the wrong sizes, for just not being the right thing. Not often have African journalists questioned the experience and expertise of the liberal democracy designer or dressmaker, nor his/her audacity to assume that the parochial cultural palates that inform his/her peculiar sense of beauty should play God in the lives of Africa and African cultures. The difficulties of implementing liberal democracy and One-Best-Way journalism attest to a clash of values and the fact that African cultural realities might well enrich and domesticate liberal democracy towards greater relevance. By overstressing individual rights and underplaying the rights of communities (cultural, religious and otherwise), African journalism and the liberal democracy it has uncritically endorsed have tended to be more liabilities than assets. Given that Africans (journalists included) in their daily lives continue to emphasise relationships and solidarities over the illusion of autonomy, it is difficult to imagine the future direction of democracy outside a marriage between individual aspirations and community interests, especially in a context where whole groups were, under colonialism and apartheid, dispossessed not as individuals, but as racial, ethnic and cultural groups, imagined or real. For democracy and journalism to succeed in the present postcolonial context of the twenty-first century, their proponents must recognise that most Africans (and indeed everyone else) are primarily patriotic to their home village (region, province, ethnic or cultural community, etc.), to which state and country in the postcolonial sense are only secondary. It is in acknowledging and providing for the reality of individuals who, like Barack Obama, negotiate and navigate different forms of identity and belonging and are willing or forced to be both “citizens” and “subjects” that democracy stands its greatest chance in Africa and the world, and that journalism can best be relevant to all and sundry in Africa and beyond.

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Navigation of Citizenship and Subjection in Africa Despite the distinction Mahmood Mamdani (1996) and others in scholarly circles make between “citizens” and “subjects”, in Africa (and indeed most everywhere else at a closer look) we find individuals who are both citizens and subjects, who straddle “cultural” and “civic” citizenships, and who would not accept sacrificing either permanently. Sometimes they are more one than the other and sometimes more the other than the one, but are certainly not reducible to either. They appropriate both in creative and fascinating ways. A democracy or journalism that focuses too narrowly on the individual and is insensitive to the centrality of group and community interests is likely to impair and frustrate the very recognition and representation it celebrates. It pays to go beyond prescriptions to describe the lives of actual individuals seeking to make sense of the competing and often conflicting demands on them as social beings. Regardless of the status of those involved in “rights talk” and “culture talk”, they are all convinced of one thing: “Cultural citizenship” is as integral to democracy as political and economic citizenship, irrespective of how they came by their cultural identities. If African (or marginal) philosophies of personhood and agency stress interdependence between the individual and the community and between communities, and if journalists identify with any of the many cultural communities, all seeking recognition and representation at local, national and global levels, they are bound to be torn between serving their cultural communities and serving the “imagined” rights-bearing, autonomous individual “citizen” of the liberal democratic civic model. A democracy that stresses independence in a narrow, abstract and disembedded sense, in a situation where both the worldview and the material realities emphasise interdependence and conviviality, is bound to result only in violent dependence. The liberal democratic rhetoric of rights dominated by a narrow neo-liberal focus on the individual does not reflect the whole reality of personhood and agency in Africa (imagined and related to as marginal), which is a lot more complex than provided for in prescriptions of rights and empowerment. Instead of working for a creative mix with indigenous forms of politics and government, liberal democracy has sought to replace these, posing as the One-Best-Way of modern, democratic political organisation. This may be a new right way of conducting modern power politics while, wittingly or unwittingly, failing to demarginalise Africa enough to fulfil its purported prescriptions. The same may be said for the journalism it inspires,

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which stays narrow and asphyxiates alternative outlooks and practices of sharing news and information, and of entertaining and educating. In the use of language alone, few African journalists have dared to write the way Chinua Achebe suggests is a popular mode of communication among Igbo, where proverbs are the palm oil with which words are eaten. Fewer still have dared to contemplate using English, French, Portuguese or Spanish in the creative ways that the ordinary Africans they purportedly target with their journalism do. While journalists mark time with linguistic orthodoxy, African communities have been busy creolising inherited European languages by promoting intercourse with African languages, and in turn enriching local languages through borrowing. The spoken word continues to perfect its intermarriage with the unspoken through body language and other nonverbal forms of communication. With the introduction of the cell phone and of Short Messaging Service (SMS), or text messaging, youth are adding to such creativity with their innovative use of language codes to communicate with one another. When African journalists begin to reflect such popular creativity among Africans, without a sense of guilt that they are violating journalistic taboos, they will help make democracy and journalism in and on Africa relevant to Africa. When they begin to cover the border- (national-, cultural-, ethnic-, “Other-”) straddling that goes on and deepens daily, they may begin to help mend the continent. When they begin to understand straddling urban and rural realities not as a problem but as an important socio-cultural and economic phenomenon, they may begin to reflect the realities of modern life in Africa. African journalism must recognise and provide for the fact that the home village in Africa has retained its appeal both for those who have been disappointed by the town, as well as for those who have found success in the town. It takes going beyond prescriptiveness to capture the lives of urbanites and villagers, to see the relationships and practices that link them, making of them navigators and negotiators of multiple spaces and identity margins.

Cosmopolitan Africa Shaped by Local and Global Encounters Recognising indigenous African forms of sociality, conviviality and interdependence should not be mistaken for throwing the baby of adaptability out with the bathwater. African popular musicians for example have evolved (and relate in musical idioms) ongoing processes of how Africans modernise their cultures and traditionalise their modernities. African ideas of personhood and agency simply refuse to be confined to the logic of dichotomies,

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essentialisms, markets and profitability, as the personal account of one of Africa’s leading contemporary musicians, Manu Dibango, demonstrates. He has lived the best part of his professional life in Paris, and his music has been enriched by various encounters. Manu Dibango describes himself as “Négropolitain”, “a man between two cultures, two environments”, whose music cannot simply be reduced to either, without losing part of his creative self (Dibango 1994: 88–130). Dibango’s idea of being African and cosmopolitan simultaneously has been embraced by scholars such as Achille Mbembe (2006: 4). Using the more politically correct term of “Afropolitan”, Mbembe stresses the need for South Africa “to recapture the ideal of non-racialism and attend to all South African citizens, black and white, in a resolute attempt to build … a truly modern and cosmopolitan society”. He envisions “a new political mainstream committed to a liberal constitution, to an explicitly social democratic agenda and to an Afropolitan cultural project” that provides for “Africanity” and being “African” beyond the confines of race and ethnicity. Journalists, like academics, can learn from Africa’s artists like Manu Dibango, whose art navigates and negotiates myriad identity margins. It appears that no one in Africa is too cosmopolitan to be local as well. This is manifest in a multitude of ways. Take for example how Africans have harnessed the cell phone to interlink town and home village (De Bruijn et al. 2009). Faced with the temporality or transience of personal success in the context of African modernities, even the most achieving and cosmopolitan individuals hesitate to sever their rural connections entirely. The city and the “world out there” brought closer by accelerated mobility and interconnections are perceived as hunting grounds; the home village is the place to re-turn to at the end of the day. Investing in one’s home village is generally seen as the best insurance policy and a sign of ultimate success, for it guarantees survival even when one has lost everything in the city and abroad, and secures and makes manifest a realisation of success through satisfying obligations and fulfilling requests (Mercer et al. 2009). Although successful urbanites or migrants may not permanently return or retire as such to rural areas, most remain in constant interaction with their home village in all sorts of ways. Some leave express instructions with kin to be buried or reburied in their home village (Geschiere and Nyamnjoh 2000), while others send their children back home to be raised by parents or the extended family they have left behind (Nyamnjoh 2005b). Prescriptive journalism that denounces this reality instead of understanding, adapting

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and relating to it is bound to be a liability for Africans and their ways of life. The narrow insistence on disembedded individual rights and freedoms has impaired understanding of the interconnectedness of peoples, cultures and societies, and facilitated the production of Africans as the scum of humanity, deserving to be defined and confined by others, and expected to mimic, but not to think or create. Discussing racism, ethnicity and the media in Africa thus calls for scrutiny of the importance of cultural identities in the lives of individuals and groups, and how these identities are actively produced and articulated within particular historical contexts and power relations. This argument challenges reductionist, decontextualised and ahistorical views of democracy and the media. It acknowledges that democracy and media take different forms and that they are construed and constructed differently in different societies, as informed by history, dominant culture, economics and politics.

Negotiating Democracy and Democratising Journalism in and on Africa The way forward is in recognising the creative ways in which Africans merge their traditions with exogenous influences to create realities that are not reducible to either but enriched by both. The implication of this argument is that how we understand the role of journalism in Africa depends on what democratic model we draw from. Under liberal democracy where the individual is perceived and treated as an autonomous agent, and where primary solidarities and cultural identities are discouraged in favour of national citizenship and culture, journalism is expected to be disinterested, objective, balanced and fair in gathering, processing and disseminating news and information. The assumption is that because all individuals have equal rights as citizens, there can be no justification for bias among journalists. But within popular notions of democracy where emphasis is on interdependence and competing cultural solidarities are admitted, journalists and the media are under constant internal and external pressure to promote the interests of the various groups competing for recognition and representation. The tensions and pressures are even greater in situations where states and governments purport to pursue liberal democracy, while in reality they continue to be highhanded and repressive to their populations. When this happens, journalists are at risk of employing double-standards as well, by claiming one thing and doing the opposite, or by straddling various identity

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margins, without always being honest about it, especially if their very survival depends on it. To democratise means to question basic monolithic assumptions and conventional wisdom about democracy, journalism, government, power myths and accepted personality cults. It means to suggest and work for the de-mystification of the state, custom and society. To democratise African journalism is to provide the missing cultural links to current efforts, links informed by respect for African humanity and creativity, and by popular ideas of personhood and domesticated agency. It is to negotiate conviviality between competing ideas of how best to provide for the humanity and dignity of all and sundry. It is above all to observe and draw from the predicaments of ordinary Africans forced by culture, history and material realities to live their lives as “subjects” rather than as “citizens”, even as liberal democratic rhetoric claims otherwise. Calling for an exploration of alternatives to bounded identities in Africa could be perceived as a threat and a challenge. It would receive a hostile hearing in particular from those who have championed the cause of onedimensionalism nationally and internationally—that is, those who benefit from the maintenance of the status quo and who stand to lose from changes in African identities and media. They fear the stimulation and provocation that more flexible identities and genuinely democratic media promise— genuinely democratic meaning the effective, as opposed to token, celebration of difference and diversity. They want life to go on without disturbance or fundamental change, especially by or in favour of those at the margins. And they are well placed to ensure this, thanks to their power to define and regulate media, the power to accord or to deny a voice to individuals and communities. It is easier said than done, but worth saying all the same: Only well articulated policies informed by public interest broadly defined to include individual and community expectations, and scrupulously respected, would guarantee against such abuse and misuse of office and privilege. The future of democracy and the relevance of journalism to Africans and their predicaments will depend very much on how well Africans are able to negotiate recognition and representation for their humanity and creativity beyond the tokenism of prevalent politically correct rhetoric on equality of humanity and opportunity.

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Lessons from Popular Creativity for Africa’s Media Africa’s media, to be relevant to social consolidation and renewal in Africa, must embrace professional and social responsiveness in tune with the collective aspirations of Africans. In a context where economic and political constraints have often hindered the fulfilment of this expectation, the ad-vent and increasing adoption in Africa of ICTs offer fascinating new possibilities. The future for democracy and the relevance of the media therein have much to learn from the creative ways in which Africans are currently relating to innovations in ICTs. The same popular creativity that has been largely ignored by conventional journalism is remarkable today all over Africa and among Africans in the diaspora. Africans seek daily to harness, within the limits of the structural constraints facing them, whatever possibilities are available to contest and seek inclusion. Blending conventional and citizen journalism through the myriad possibilities offered by ICTs is a way to harness both democracy and its nemesis. The current context of globalisation facilitated by ICTs offers exciting new prospects not only for citizens and journalists to compete with and complement one another, but also opportunities for new solidarities to challenge undemocratic forces, ideologies and practices that stand in the way of social progress. There are lessons for African journalism in such creative appropriation processes. Comprehending the overall development, use and application of ICTs within African social spaces would take the fusion of keen observation and complex analysis to capture structural, gendered, class, generational, racial and spatial dimensions of the phenomenon. A dialectical interrogation of the processes involved promises a more accurate grasp of the linkages than would impressionistic, linear and prescriptive narratives of technological determinism. If African journalism pays closer attention to the creative usages of ICTs by ordinary Africans, African journalists could begin to think less of professional journalism in the conventional sense and of how to blend the information and communication cultures of the general public with their conventional canon and practices, to give birth to a conventional-cumcitizen journalism that is of greater relevance to Africa and its predicaments. I think “citizen journalism” brings a whole new dimension to mainstream journalism in Africa, of which I have been critical for being so neatly detached from what is really going on in the ordinary lives of people. It is because our journalists, by sticking too narrowly (and indeed hypocritically) to liberal, democratic normative canons of journalism, miss

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the point of how people gather news and make news and communicate and share communication with one another, when Africa has a rich landscape in this regard that can inform journalism. Before citizen journalism became popularised, you had citizen journalism all over Africa. Ordinary people used forms such as radio trottoir, social commentary, rumour and various other forms of political derision and art to obtain information, share it and create possibilities where normal channels were beyond their reach. Citizen journalism provides an opportunity to revisit an old problem, that of understanding popular forms of communication and how they blend with conventional media for the best of society. Thanks to innovations in ICTs, the structure and content of the big media are being challenged and compelled to be more sensitive to cultural diversity. The flexibility and accessibility of ICTs make possible new media cultures and practices, and offer new possibilities to radical, alternative, small, independent, local and community media. Cultural communities hitherto marginalised are better catered for even within the framework of dominance by global cultural industries. Conventional journalism can learn lots from these new media practices and possibilities, as cultural communities the world over seek recognition and representation.

CONCLUSION In this paper I have sought to demonstrate the extent to which the media and belonging in Africa are torn between competing and often conflicting claims of bounded and flexible ideas of culture and identity. I have drawn on my study of xenophobia in Cameroon and South Africa, inspired by the resilience of the politicisation of culture and identity, to discuss the hierarchies and inequalities that underpin political, economic and social citizenship in Africa and the world over, and the role of the media in the production, enforcement and contestation of these hierarchies and inequalities. The media are expected to promote national citizenship and its emphasis on large-scale, assimilationist and territorially bounded belonging, while turning a blind eye to those who fall through the cracks as a result of racism and/or ethnicity. Little wonder that such an exclusionary articulation of citizenship is facing formidable challenge from its inherent contradictions and closures, and from an upsurge in the politics of recognition and representation by small-scale communities claiming autochthony at a historical juncture where the rhetoric espouses flexible mobility, postmodern flux and discontinuity. In Cameroon and South Africa, as elsewhere in Africa and the world, accelerated mobility

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and increased uncertainty are generating mounting tensions fuelled by autonomy-seeking difference. Such ever-decreasing circles of inclusion demonstrate that no amount of questioning by immigrants immersed in the reality of flexible mobility seems adequate to de-essentialise the growing global fixation with an “authentic” place called home. Trapped in cosmopolitan spaces where states and their hierarchy of “privileged” citizens try to enforce the illusion of fixed and bounded locations, immigrants, diasporas, ethnic minorities and others who straddle borders are bound to feel like travellers in permanent transit. This calls for scholarship, politics and policies informed by historical immigration patterns and their benefits for recipient communities. Such scholarship and political attention should focus on the success stories of forging new relationships of understanding between citizens and subjects. Understanding these relationships will point to new, more flexible, negotiated, cosmopolitan and popular forms of citizenship, with the emphasis on inclusion, conviviality and the celebration of difference. Flexible and negotiated belonging, while a popular reflection of how ordinary people live their lives, is clearly not compatible with the prevalent illusion that the nation-state is the only political unit permitted to confer citizenship in the modern world. Nor is it compatible with a regime of rights and entitlements narrowly focused on yet another illusion—“the autonomous individual” (Comaroff and Comaroff 1999). The price of perpetuating these illusions has been the proliferation of ultra-nationalism, chauvinism, racism and xenophobia that has consciously denied the fragmented, heterogeneous, and multinational cultural realities of most so-called “nation-states”. The challenge for Africa’s media, in a context of racism and ethnicity, is to seek to capture and promote that flexibility in navigating and negotiating democracy and articulating belonging.

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59. Neocosmos, Michael (2006), From “Foreign Natives” to “Native Foreigners”: Explaining Xenophobia in Post-Apartheid South Africa, Dakar: CODESRIA. 60. Neocosmos, Michael (2008), The Politics of Fear and the Fear of Politics: Reflections on Xenophobic Violence in South Africa, in: Journal of Asian and African Studies, 43, 6, 586–594. 61. Nnoli, Okwudiba (ed.) (1998), Ethnic Conflicts in Africa, Dakar: CODESRIA. 62. Nyamnjoh, Francis B. (1999), Cameroon: A Country United by Ethnic Ambition and Difference, in: African Affairs, 98, 390, 101–118. 63. Nyamnjoh, Francis B. (2005a), Africa’s Media, Democracy and the Politics of Be-longing, London: Zed Books. 64. Nyamnjoh, Francis B. (2005b), Images of Nyongo amongst Bamenda Grass-fielders in Whiteman Kontri, in: Citizenship Studies, 9, 3, 241– 269. 65. Nyamnjoh, Francis B. (2006), Insiders and Outsiders: Citizenship and Xenophobia in Contemporary South Africa, Dakar/London: CODESRIA/Zed Books. 66. Nyamnjoh, Francis B. (2007a), Ever Diminishing Circles: The Paradoxes of Belonging in Botswana, in: Orin Starn, Marisol de la Cadena (eds), Indigenous Experience Today, Oxford: Berg, 305–331. 67. Nyamnjoh, Francis B. (2007b), From Bounded to Flexible Citizenship: Lessons from Africa, in: Citizenship Studies, 11, 1, 73–82. Nyamnjoh, Francis B. (2009), Married But Available, Bamenda: Langaa. Nyamnjoh, Francis B., Mike Rowlands (1998), Elite Associations and the Politics of Belonging in Cameroon, in: Africa, 68, 3, 320–337. 68. Oucho, John O. (2002), The Relationship between Poverty and Migration in Southern Africa, paper presented at SAMP/LHR/HSRC workshop on Re-gional Integration, Poverty and South Africa’s Proposed Migration Policy, Pretoria, online: (accessed: 04 July 2004). 69. Oucho, John O. (2007), Migration in Southern Africa: Migration Management Initiatives for SADC Member States, Institute for Security Studies, Occasional Paper, 157, online: (accessed: 11 February 2010). 70. Oucho, John O., Jonathan Crush (2001), Contra Free Movement: South Africa and the SADC Migration Protocols, in: Africa Today, 48,

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CHAPTER

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RACIAL EMBODIMENT AND THE AFFECTIVITY OF RACISM IN YOUNG PEOPLE’S FILM Kathrine Vitus1,2 1

Department of Public Health, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen K, Denmark

2

The Danish National Centre for Social Research, Copenhagen K, Denmark

ABSTRACT This article uses a bodily and affective perspective to explore racial minority young people’s experiences of racism, as enacted (on film) through disgust and enjoyment. Applying Žižek’s ideology critical psychoanalytical perspective and Kristeva’s concept of “abjection”, the article considers race embodied, that is the racial body both partly Real (in the Lacanian sense) and a mean for the projection of ideological meanings and discursive structures, which are sustained by specific fantasies. From this perspective, Citation: Kathrine Vitus, Palgrave Communications volume 1, Article number: 15007 (2015), doi:10.1057/palcomms.2015.7 Copyright: This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 International License. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in the credit line; if the material is not included under the Creative Commons license, users will need to obtain permission from the license holder to reproduce the material. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

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the film’s affective racism is “symptomatic” of the discrepancies between, on the one hand, Danish social democratic welfare state ideology and a dominating race discourse of “equality-as-sameness”, on the other, the Real of racial embodiment, which makes the encounter with the Other traumatic and obscene. The analysis exposes the bodily and affective underside of race relations (which lead attempts to discursively undo racism to fail) and instead seeks to undermine the fantasies that sustain racial power relations.

INTRODUCTION When do I effectively encounter the Other “beyond the wall of language”, in the real of his or her being? Not when I am able to describe her, not when I learn her values, dreams, etc. but only when I encounter the Other in her moment of jouissance. When I discern her in a tiny detail—a compulsive gesture, an excessive facial expression, a tic—that signals the intensity of the real of jouissance. This encounter with the real is always traumatic. There is something obscene about is. (Žižek, 1998: 168) This article analyses young people’s experiences of racism and their articulations of such experiences from a bodily and affective perspective. In Denmark, issues of racism are frequently debated in public and in politics; however, at the apparent foundation of these debates is a predominant understanding that social, political and economic welfare state politics has progressively moved society beyond the old forms of biological, juridical and structural racism that dominated Western countries during the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century (Andreassen and Folke Henningsen, 2011). Moreover, in academic debates, racism is treated as primarily a discursive phenomenon based on stereotypical understandings of culture, and as an element—in society’s conversation about itself—of ideas and cognitive, categorical practices aimed at (re)producing and justifying semantic inequalities between races (Wetherell and Potter, 1992; Wetherell, 2003). While such approaches have much to offer not only as means of apprehending institutional and historical forms of racism but also as vital critiques of individualizing treatments of racism, they are less suited for capturing racism’s affective, embodied nature and ambiguous quality, and its apparent stubbornness to social change (Hook, 2004: 672). In this article, I explore how racism is not only discursively reproduced, but also bodily and affectively enacted and experienced. To offer a window into such affective dynamics, I draw on a 4-min film titled Racism: Go Back to Your Own Country (henceforth Racism), which was co-produced in 2010

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by a group of young Danish women with immigrant backgrounds and a professional film-crew during a film-research project facilitated by me. I approach race as embodied and as partly Real (in the Lacanian sense), and “not simply a reality of meaning or signification, but a holistic experiential reality of embodiment, affective and spiritual depth” (Hook, 2002: 8) beyond symbolic and verbal representation. However, in racial embodiment, the body is still a means for the projection of ideological meanings and symbolic and discursive structures. In Denmark, such meanings and structures are reflected in the official race ideology of “equality-as sameness”, which has various socio-historical roots. Failure to acknowledge Denmark’s colonial history (Olwig, 2003) has created a national self-understanding as a mono-cultural, as opposed to a multicultural, predominantly White nation state dominated by cultural norms of unmarked Whiteness (Andreassen, 2005; Jöhncke, 2007; Myong Petersen, 2009). Furthermore, since the first half of the twentieth century, Denmark has, driven by social democratic welfare state ideology, built strong institutions to secure social and economic equality and universal (economic and juridical) rights to all citizens, across differences of class, geography, gender, race, sexuality, religion, ethnicity and so forth. Nevertheless, these universal rights—and the legitimacy of the ideology behind them—have come under pressure by recent global developments, including an increase of non-White immigrants to the country (for example, Kvist et al., 2012). During the previous two decades, Denmark—along with other European countries—has witnessed strong opposition to immigration, and political parties advocating against immigration have increasingly gained a foothold (Mouritzen, 2006). In public debates, the question of racism is most often tackled through individualization that is explained (drawing on traditional psychological approaches) as phenomena located in perceptions, attitudes and stereotypes— not only of the individual racist, but also of the victim—rather than problems of social power (Hook, 2004: 674). Thus, in allegations of racism, racism is commonly represented as an exceptional instance, existing primarily in the minds, utterances or acts of deviant individuals (Jensen et al., 2010). Moreover, racism is tackled through linguistic moulding by finding new ways to talk or prevent talk about race and racism (Myong Petersen, 2009). Over the last few decades, the term “race” has vanished from the Danish language in favour of the term “ethnicity”; “racism” has been almost obliterated from legal and policy language, and has been replaced by less politically and historically loaded concepts such as “discrimination”, “unequal treatment”

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and “self-perceived discrimination” (Jensen et al., 2010). Thus, while in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century racism (like sexism and heterosexism) lay on the very surface of discursive consciousness and could be unrepentantly stated at this level (Young, 1990a), today racial objectification is no longer condoned and a discursive commitment to equality has emerged (Young, 1990b). Collectively, Denmark suffers from what Ahmed (2012) terms “overing”, assuming that, generally, society is “over” racism (and other relations of structural inequality), with race and racism having been absorbed in the ideology of equality-as-sameness. The rather limited critical academic race research in Denmark taps into (and reinforces) a discursive and social constructivist approach to racism and its eradication (for example, Jensen et al., 2010; Nielsen, 2010; Hervik and Jørgensen, 2002). However, social constructive and discursive analyses of racist phenomena may, while opening the field for political action through new discursive practices, also suffer from the same shortages as the dominant notion that by representing race differently (moulding language) racism will no longer exist. Following Žižek (1998: 667), a discursively vanished racism will typically reoccur as “the return of the repressed”. This return takes place as a displacement of acknowledged and explicit discursive and even institutionalized forms with more insidious, oblique types of racism: “symptomatic racism”. Such racism is symptomatic in the sense that its stated reason is different from its actual cause (Hook, 2004: 684). It is symptomatic of fundamental discrepancies in the reality of racial relations beyond the inconsistencies that we may be able to represent and mould symbolically and discursively. In other words, answering the “hows” and “whys” of symptomatic racism cannot be done by looking at discursive dynamics at play, but must be done by looking at dynamics that operate in the ontological domain that precedes—and exists in opposition to—the realm of language and the “symbolic” (Oliver, 1993 in Hook, 2004). Here, we may find the publicly unacknowledged “obscene” supplement—the affective underside—of our Danish race ideology of equality-as-sameness. In the film Racism, we are offered a window into such affective dynamics that reflect not only a certain discursive racism and the fantasies that sustain it, but, more importantly, the unofficial affective underside of this racism (which escapes attempts at becoming discursively undone) and the fantasies that feed these affects. However, while analyses of the affective constitution of racism tend to focus on fear and hatred (for example, Clarke, 2003), I point to the role of enjoyment in the disgust felt by both the offender and the

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offended in the racist encounter. Illuminating the enjoyable affects related to experiences of racism not only broadens our understanding of affective dynamics in race formations, but also problematizes the common notion that, in racist encounters, there are clearly distinguishable roles of violators and victims, and thus grabbles with both the individual racist’s investment in his or her own racist subjectivity (Hook, 2004: 672) and, more importantly, the victim’s investment in being a victim of racism. To unfold the dynamics of racial embodiment and affective racism, and the ideological and fantasmatic qualities of such racism, I watch the film through Slavoj Žižek’s ideology critical and psychoanalytical perspective (Žižek, 1989, 1992, 1997, 1998, 2006). In exploring dynamics of bodily and affective inclusion and exclusion in racial encounters, I apply the concepts of disgust and abjection (Kristeva, 1982; Ahmed, 2004; Hook, 2004) and social abjection (Tyler, 2013).

FILM CONTEXT AND ANALYSIS Racism, 1 a 1-min fiction (part of an 8.5-min film in three parts) shows the confrontation of two racial minority young women with a majority Danish White mother and her young daughter in a street of Nørrebro, a racially diverse borough of Copenhagen. The three film producers were friends, all born and raised in Nørrebro, with parents from Bosnia, Lebanon and Iraq. They had been recruited at their local school (that had about 40 per cent minority students), spoke fluent Danish, did well in school and were active in organized leisure activities; these characteristics are dominating political norms for “integrated” minority youth. I initiated the film project as part of a research project studying “social cohesion and ethnic diversity” in Copenhagen, in which I asked the young people to make films about youth life in a multiracial neighbourhood (see http://www.sfi.dk/soced_partners-12588.aspx). The film workshop, run by professional film producers and myself, consisted of 2 weeks of sessions in pitching, scripting, acting, directing, shooting and film watching and discussion. During 6 weeks of shooting (which I followed and recorded), the young producers were supervised by a mentor who actively gave suggestions for storyline, scenes and shooting techniques, and an editor who made choices of scenes, sequences and cuts, which eventually influenced the film’s dramatic curves and plots. Thus, while young women were permitted to voice their perspectives as scriptwriters and producers, Racism—like most other films—became a collaborative product (Banks, 2001; MacDougal, 2006; Rose, 2012). The following analysis therefore treats the film as

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a cultural product that while staging the issue of racism within the film media’s dramatizing form and language and hereby potentially accentuating conflictual aspects of everyday life experiences draws on collective narratives and fantasies that emanate from shared political and ideological conditions. In this way the film serves as a window into the ways in which dynamics around race relations and racism are not only experienced, but also performed and narrated by racial minority youth: dynamics that all make up the affective economy of racialization and “racism”. The strength of visual media such as film is in its ability to communicate non-verbally through sensual and affective expressions, and to evoke audience perceptions and multisensory reactions in various registers, including the conscious and unconscious, the cognitive and emotional and the sensual and pre-reflexive (Spencer, 2011: 32). Besides, operating also in the Imaginary order of social reality, film invites not only to analytical interpretations and audience gazes, but also to fantasmatic (Žižek, 1992). To embrace these different registers of meaning, I analyse the film on three parallel levels: the storyline and dialogue; the non-verbal (bodily and facial expressions and tone of voice); and the moods of expression (Grady, 2001) through various compositional elements (including genre, picture content, spatial organization and point of view) (Rose, 2012).

THE REAL OF RACIAL EMBODIMENT Following Žižek, when we make symbolic and discursive representations of social phenomena, something is always lacking; as Lacan (2006 [1964]: 848) writes, “the letter kills”. What we lack are representations of the Real (Žižek, 1989: 123, 1997: 82). In my analysis of Racism, I suggest that this Real is race and racial embodiment. Much as the social order is never complete, the human subject is a split structure, never complete or unified unto itself. This incommensurability also concerns embodiment—what Hook (2002: 2) terms the “dilemma of embodiment”. Thus, there is a split between symbolic representations of the body and experiences of how the body works as a physical and material vehicle for subjectivization, through which racialized individuals make sense of their being in the world (Knowles, 2003). In this dilemma, the body, itself, becomes the means for the projection of ideological meanings, corporally playing our symbolic dilemmas (Hook, 2002: 5). The body, then, is not merely a socially constructed object that may be captured through discursive contextualizations, but partly Real (in the Lacanian sense); that is, it eludes the closure of the symbolic and irresolvable to discursive

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and other social–symbolic representations, reflecting “the impossibility of the symbolic [and the subject] fully to ‘become itself’ ” (Žižek, 2000: 120). Race is, in this sense, “not simply a reality of meaning or signification, but a holistic experiential reality of embodiment, affective and spiritual depth” (Hook, 2002: 8). Paradoxically, the Real of racial embodiment disturbs our social– symbolic constructions both by revealing the inability of the Symbolic to fully represent race and by manifesting itself in relation to the Symbolic exactly by revealing this inability (Žižek, 1989: 123, 1997: 82). Manifestations of the Real of racial embodiment may take different forms, as something pre-linguistic (that is, unavailable to language) that inherently “opposes symbolization” (Žižek, 1989: 169) but, at the same time, offers something more than the Symbolic can (Rösing, 2007: 30). In this manifestation, racial embodiment constitutes a surplus of meaning that discourse cannot embrace or positively identify, which leaves discursive representations insufficient. Alternatively, racial embodiment takes form as an undifferentiated matter of being—an amorphous substance that only enters into form, being and meaning through symbolic representation (language); however, at the same time, it is blocked from our immediate access in the Symbolic, in language (Bjerg, 2008: 16). This suggests that racial embodiment as a sensation of the phenomenology or materiality of, for instance, skin colour, cannot, however, be accessed or understood unless discursively “translated” into language about race and racial differences, attributes and identities. Finally, the Real of racial embodiment may appear as the “parallax Real”—that is, in the distance between different representations of race that is also projected to the racialized subject and body (Žižek, 2006: 26). In this form, the Real of racial embodiment dissolves all forms of essence or identity into a multitude of incongruous representations, such as the different discrepant discursive representations that have emerged throughout Danish (and Western) history, which are still part of collective repertoires for understanding and symbolizing race. This parallax Real of racial embodiment represents neither the unity nor the dissolution of perspectives on race, but is a manifestation of the traumatic kernel of race that hinders its symbolization (Žižek, 2006: 26), which, nevertheless, obtains effect through the production of endless symbolizations to overcome these discrepancies. In the Danish context, I trace three discourses of race (generally phrased in terms of ethnicity) that define what race is, how it works, and whether, how and why racism takes place. First, the traditional race theory, which

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we have now moved beyond (Koch, 2000, 2004; Andreassen and Folke Henningsen, 2011), which essentializes and hierarchizes (biological, cultural and physical) differences between races. Second, the multicultural discourse that has never really gained political foothold in Denmark (Hedetoft, 2006b, 2011), which essentializes cultural differences between races but equalizes them socially in terms of power, rights and so forth. Third, a specific Nordic race discourse that essentializes sameness and considers racial sameness the basis of social equality (for instance, in power and rights). Thus, on the one hand, racial equality (rather than hierarchy) is embraced together with, on the other, racial sameness (rather than differences), to generate a race discourse of equality-as-sameness (Gullestad, 1992; Hedetoft, 2006a, b; Jöhncke, 2007). This discourse is rooted in the ideological notion that the Danish welfare state’s equalizing distribution of goods and Denmark’s long national history as a liberal democratic and culturally, ethnically, religiously and socially homogeneous country has made races equal and, consequently, society does not (systematically) produce racism or racists. However, as shown by Gullestad (1992) in relation to Norwegian cultural norms of social relations, both the ideal of equality and the conformity of seeking sameness in social relations—resulting in an ideology of equality-as-sameness—is sustained by cultural practices of avoiding (the uneasiness provoked by) the proximity of (for example) class, racial and gender differences and different Others. Such proximity is managed through symbolic (and physical) fences and distance. In the following analysis I show how fantasies that sustain the ideology of equality-as-sameness are punctured when—as portrayed in the film—cultural norms (also prevalent in Denmark) of proximity versus distance (in regard to social differences) are transgressed, and how such transgressions generate racism. Now let us turn to the film.

FILM CONTENT AND STORYLINE In Racism, we meet two parties—two young women with immigrant backgrounds and a White mother with her young daughter (about 5 years old)—each involved in an intimate and emotional interaction. The underscoring—a light solo string backed up by deeper vibrating strings— sets an intense atmosphere of suspense and alertness. The location is an ordinary street of Nørrebro with people, bikes and cars passing; the scene is an apparently everyday afternoon. We first follow the two young women, Carla and her friend, in a close-up from behind, as they chat and tease each

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other about some boy, Hussain, while shambling along with dangling arms, pushing each other by the shoulders as they stroll down the pavement. The camera takes the young women’s point of view as we see a White mother and her small daughter approach. This is followed by a close-up of the young women en face, showing the intimacy and emotionality of their interaction, with Carla shyly pushing her friend when asked about Hussain. The camera shifts to a close-up of the White mother and daughter, hand in hand, chatting cheerfully about the daughter having had too much candy, and dancingly pulling each other’s arms. The camera shifts its point of view back and forth between the young women and the White mother and daughter until the two parties pass each other and one of the young women, teasingly pushed by her friend, stumbles over the daughter. The White mother instantly turns towards the young women and aggressively asks: “What the fuck are you doing? You don’t bump into my daughter like that!” Carla turns towards the White mother, backs away a few steps and raises her hands defensively. In an apologetic voice she replies: “Easy, it wasn’t on purpose”. The White mother, while continuing to walk away from the young women, turns back to them and hisses: “Go back to your own country, won’t you? … so we can get rid of you”. “Say again?” Carla replies in an offensive voice, and steps towards the White mother with an aggressive bodily posture; however, she is held back by her friend. The White mother moves a few steps away, then stops, turns her body towards the young women again and asks condescendingly: “Haven’t your parents taught you to behave properly?” Carla rapidly steps towards the White mother and faces the camera in an intense, almost blurred, close-up, asking, “What have my parents got to do with this?” The White mother steps towards Carla and repeats her question in a more intense, low voice. In this new clash, the camera follows the turbulent movements of the characters. The White mother again angrily accuses Carla of getting too close to her daughter. Carla—once more approaching aggressively—replicates, “Go away yourself”. The White mother now takes a firmer hold of her daughter’s hand: “Yes, let’s get away. Come on, baby”. She turns to leave the scene, but makes a return, hisses in an intense, repressed voice, “Fucking, Paki”. Carla is held back by her friend, who calms her down by saying “Carla, forget it”. As the two young women also turn to leave the scene, Carla makes a grimace, waves her hand and shouts in a sarcastic, condescending yet triumphant voice, “Bye-bye, racist Dane”. This scene spells out an everyday, initially innocent situation that step-bystep builds into a racist confrontation, with the derogatory (racist) intentions

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of the White mother stated in the final line, “Fucking, Paki”, which provokes Carla to finalize the scene and conclude these intentions by shouting “Byebye, racist Dane”! Furthermore, the moral of the story appears to be that racial minority young people experience verbal attacks on their racial background from the White majority as part of everyday experience. The positions in this encounter are clearly distributed, with the White mother in the role of the racist aggressive offender and the racial minority young women in the roles of the self-defending victims. Thus, racism is depicted as the enactment of verbal aggression by the majority White against minority non-White people, reproducing a hierarchy of races (which, in the film, is corroborated by the adult–youngster asymmetry). When interpreted at the symbolic level, the film presents a critique of the dominant notion that, in Denmark, we are “over” racism. This notion is strongly supported by the race discourse of equality-as-sameness. Moreover, the storyline implicitly reproduces the idea that exposing the ways in which racism works discursively provides the opportunity for this racism to be politically undone; to change the way we talk about and treat race. However, if we the look closer at the affective dynamics of the scene, we may discover that the enactment and experience of racism in the film is much more ambivalent.

SENSING AFFECTIVE RACISM To get a sense of the affective dynamics in Racism, let us turn our attention to the movement of bodies, gestures of faces and intonation of voices (following the speech) in the film. We will start from the opening (and determining) act, in which Carla’s body movement suddenly brings her into a confrontation with the White mother and daughter. The sudden closeness creates a rupture in the intimacies of both the White mother and daughter and Carla and her friend—intimacies filled with joy, smiles and signs of interconnectedness (Fig. 1(a)–(c)).

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Figure 1: The encounter between two racial minority young women and a white mother and daughter. (a) The scenery; (b)The young women’s intimacy and joy: teasing about a boy; (c) The mother’s and daughter’s intimacy and joy: teasing about candy.

Note: These film stills are reproduced from “Racism: Go back to your own country” with permission. The rupture makes the White mother react affectively in ways that directly show in her bodily and facial gestures (Sedgwich and Frank, 1995). She first reacts with surprise (her body almost jumping back, her eyebrows lifting), then anger (shown in her tense tone of voice), then contempt–disgust (her lifted upper lip and chin pulled away looking long, intimidatingly and down at Carla while she bows over and imposes her body close to Carla’s, spelling out her words in a slow, intensified and condescending voice). Carla’s affective reactions appear to mirror the White mother’s; however, Carla’s reactions move from defensiveness to offensiveness during the course of the interaction (Fig. 2(a)–(e)).

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Figure 2: Building up the conflict. (a) The white mother in surprise and anger; (b) The white mother bodily intensifying the conflict; (c) The white mother showing contempt and disgust; (d) The young women’s defensiveness; (e) The young women’s offensiveness. Note: These film stills are reproduced from “Racism: Go back to your own country” with permission.

As part of these affective responses, some dancing back and forth—with the parties pulled to and from each other in turn—takes place. There is a dance of alternatingly getting (too) close, transgressing the intimate borders of the bodily integrity of the other and aggressively distancing one’s self from the other. The White mother turns her back to the young women more than once to walk away, but then returns, as if to escalate the emotional intensity of the situation, accelerating her own affective investment and Carla’s affective reaction. What is the meaning of this pulling towards and away from each other? Why do the opponents not just leave the scene? Because, I suggest, the racist confrontation in the film exemplifies an encounter with the Other in the Real of racial embodiment—an encounter that we are unable to realize and must therefore escape from, but to which we also feel deeply attracted. The racism portrayed in the film is a piece of the Real—racism that is symptomatic of the traumatic kernel of race and racial embodiment. Let me

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unravel this line of thinking by looking first at disgust and abjection, then fantasy and enjoyment, in this encounter of racism.

DISGUST AND ABJECTION First, the affective ambivalence in this encounter, revealing both disgust and some attraction, may be conceptualized as “abjection” (Kristeva, 1982; Hook, 2004; Tyler, 2006, 2013). Abjection is—at the level of the individual— concerned with the borders of the subject, the boundaries of one’s identity and how such boundary lines are disrupted, unsettled and made disturbingly permeable. To experience abjection is to feel horror or disgust as a kind of “border anxiety”, an urgent response that arises to separate one’s self from a potentially overwhelming or contaminating external quality or entity (Hook, 2004: 684). The “abject” is taken to be the source of such affects— an uncontained and indefinable “thing” that elicits fear, dread, anxiety and disgust (Young, 1990a: 207). Disgust, in itself, is a spatially aversive affect: when we are disgusted, we flee from the “perceptual neighbourhood” of the revolting thing or person and from possible intimate contact or union with it (Tyler, 2013: 22). Thus, in Racism, the dance of bodies to and from each other may testify to the White mother’s disgust, which was her unconsciousness and spontaneous reaction provoked by the sudden threatening closeness of Carla (when she stumbled towards her), and her “flight from” this closeness. However, disgust is deeply ambivalent, and also involves desire for or attraction to the very objects we feel repellent towards (Ahmed, 2004: 88). While disgust pulls us away from an object—a pull that feels almost involuntary, as if our bodies are thinking for us or on behalf of us—desire, in contrast, pulls us towards objects and opens us to the bodies of others. This pulling is an intensification of movement—in which the objects seem to have us “in their grip”—and requires us to pull away (Ahmed, 2004: 84). Disgust thus involves not simply distantiation (reconciliation), but the intensification of bodily contact that “disturbs” the skin with the possibility of desire (Ahmed, 2004: 88). Understood as abjection, the encounter of Carla and the White mother becomes an operation of repulsion, expulsion, ejection and denigration (Butler, 1993), not only as sentiment, but also as action (Hook, 2004: 686). The White mother acts by verbally, symbolically and affectively expelling the young women (saying “Go back to your own country”); ejecting them (trying to physically distance herself and show bodily loathing); and denigrating them (by impugning their motives and disqualifying their parents

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as parents). This latter impulse shows how disgust may also transform into and be expressed as morality (Kolnai (1929) in Korsmeyer and Smith (2004)). “Moral disgust” emerges through an “associative transference between physically and morally repulsive reactions” (Tyler, 2013: 22), as shown in the White mother’s slide from physical disgust (provoked by the young women’s bodily intrusion) into contempt and judgement of values. This slide illustrates the social, relational and cultural aspects of disgust, functioning to affirm the boundaries of the social body through (actual and symbolic) expulsions of what we collectively agree to be pollution objects, practices or persons (Douglas, 1966). Disgust reactions are always contingent and relational, and reveal less about the disgusted individual or the thing deemed disgusting than about the culture in which disgust is experienced and performed (Tyler, 2013: 23). Thus, abjection refers not only to the constitution of human subjectivity through differentiation and separation (Kristeva, 1982: 2), but also to collective dynamics of racial subject formation and exclusion (Butler, 1993: 3). The abject is a threat to the coherence of the symbolic of race relations (that is, larger social and linguistic structuring systems of laws, symbols, prohibitions and meanings) (Hook, 2004), and abjection is that which “the symbolic must reject, cover over and contain” (Gross, 1990: 89). Thus, abjection in the racist encounter in Racism may be seen as a manifestation of the publicly unacknowledged “obscene” supplement of the Danish ideology of equality-as-sameness.

RACISM AS FANTASY AND ENJOYMENT Second, in Žižek’s social reality, in which the symbolic, discursively produced race formations are continuously disturbed by the Real, inescapable inscrutability of racial embodiment, a healing of this discrepancy takes places in the Imaginary (Žižek, 2000: 120). The Imaginary is the layer of reality (which film also displays) in which dreams, hopes, ideology and fantasies are produced to make the social world appear coherent. According to Žižek, we need—and therefore desire—a sense of coherence and completeness to be able (as subjects and society) to act socially. Thus, desire is a central driving force in “healing” the gap between the symbolic and the Real, and in the subject’s inscription into ideology (Žižek, 1989: 3; Bjerg, 2008: 21). With the help of fantasy, we sustain a “public ‘official’ ideological texture” (Žižek, 1998: 159); for example, an ideology of race relations apparently overcomes the discrepancies between our symbolic representations and

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the disturbing Real of racial embodiment. What fantasies do the young filmmakers produce in Racism and how do these fantasies sustain the Danish ideology of equality-as-sameness? One fantasy sustaining equality-as-sameness (the idea that “we” are the same as the “Other” and that racial differences do not essentially exist but are conceived through a historical heritage of racial inequality that we have now realized is wrong) might be that if we make the Other the same as us, we will be able to fully embrace and love the Other (as one of our own). Such a fantasy works to conceal the reality of our ambivalent relationship with the Other: the reality of racial relations, which, following Gullestad (1992), are structured through a social contract for physically avoiding the Other that is avoiding the Real of embodied difference. In a Lacanian perspective, our relationship with the Other is formed by, on the one hand, our close draw to the Other, to the extent that we not only desire the Other, but we also desire the Other’s desire for us (Žižek, 1989). On the other hand, we cannot bear the closeness of the Other, because such closeness threatens to reveal that (due to the intrusion of the Real) the Other is never able to accommodate our desire for the Other’s desire, love, closeness and sublime wholeness. As Žižek (1998: 163) puts it: “Do we not encounter here, in this […] very intrusive overpromixity, the horrifying weight of the encounter of a neighbor in the real of her presence? Love thy neighbor … no thanks!” This is a reflection of the Danish (or Nordic) discomfort of physical and symbolic proximity of difference. To bear this traumatic paradox, we need fantasy “to fill the opening in the Other, to conceal its inconsistency” (Žižek, 1989: 123). Thus, we thrive in the longing for closeness, because it preserves the fantasmatic illusion that the Other represents the key to our sublime wholeness. In the fantasy sustaining Danish ideology about the Other being the same and therefore lovable, we stay protected from the truth that the Other cannot give or steal from us the total love (or stable, unquestioned identity that such love will bring us) that neither he, she, nor we, possess (Žižek, 1993: 203–205). Following this line of thinking, in this paradoxical encounter with the Other—driven by an unfulfilled longing for closeness—a “surplus enjoyment” (Lacan’s “jouissance”) is produced. This “more-than” pleasure emerges in the pain caused by the lack of fulfillment from and wholeness with the Other. Pain generates enjoyment via a magic “reversal-into-itself”, by means of our facial and bodily expressions of pain (like shame caused by humiliation) (Žižek, 1998: 156). In Racism, the characters are confronted with the disgust that the transgressing closeness with the Other causes in

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them. Seen through this lens, Racism not only displays the producers’ loss of love, but also the very essence of their experience of racism. Moreover, the film publicly laments such loss of love, which gives rise to a pleasure of its own (Žižek, 1998: 156). The film, in this way, articulates the “paradoxical jouissance as the payment that the exploited—the servant— gets for his serving the Master” (Žižek, 1998: 156). Watching the film closely reveals how Carla’s friend smiles several times during the confrontation with the White mother. These smiles apparently seem like illogical affective impulses, which nonetheless illustrate the surplus enjoyment generated (via its magic reversal-into-itself) by the pain and humiliation caused by the White mother’s verbal assault of the young women (Fig. 3(a)–(d)).

Figure 3: Defeat and triumph. (a) The young women’s intrusiveness and enjoyment; (b) The young women exposing surplus enjoyment; (c) The white mother staged as a racist; (d) Concluding the scene triumphantly: this is racism!

Note: These film stills are reproduced from “Racism: Go back to your own country” with permission. In other words, the film shows how the racially minority youth found enjoyment in not only the pain caused by the White woman’s hostility, but also in exposing the pain caused by such a loss of love by the racial majority Other. Enjoyment may, however, have also driven the White mother’s condemnation of Carla and her friend as a way for her to rid herself of disgust by projecting it towards the Other. The encounter between racialized bodies may, in this way, have represented a somewhat legitimate site of violence, in which the White mother could be “safely” aggressive.

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The film’s other fantasy, which also sustains the race ideology of equality-as-sameness, is that we overcome racism by “talking it away”. This fantasy asserts that if we think and talk about the Other as if he or she is the same as (and therefore equal to) us, racism will disappear. Likewise, if we do not speak about or speak differently about racism, it will vanish. The historical change in contemporary liberal societies towards discursive commitments to equality (Young, 1990b) has brought with it new taboos of race. Not only have symbolic markings of racial differences and hierarchies become illegitimate, but racism, itself, has become a taboo. Such taboos both spring from the official ideological script about racial equality-as-sameness and are based, at a deeper level, in the fantasmatic illusion about our love for the Other. Taboos call for transgressions, as transgressions mark subjects’ resistance to absorption into ideology (while simultaneously legitimating ideology). In Racism, the taboo of racism is transgressed. Thus, the film facilitates a situation that legitimately stages the White mother as a racist in a storyline that calls for, and indeed requires, the racial minority young women to call her a racist. Thus, designing a scene in which the racial minority may justifiably accuse the White majority of racism facilitates the release of both parties’ defenses and survival senses and displays their true, paradoxical desire for and estrangement from each other (Žižek, 1998: 160). Moreover, the audience is invited to yield to their fantasmatic kernel of jouissance—their surplus enjoyment (Žižek, 1998: 169).

UNVEILING SYMPTOMATIC RACISM Racism draws our attention to the ways in which dominant modern discourses and ideologies of race position racially minority young people as “social abjects” (Tyler, 2013). From a structural perspective, these people are cast as a waste population that threatens national borders of racial identities from within. At the same time, the racial Other constitutes a surplus that the system requires both to constitute the boundaries of the nation state and to legitimize the prevailing order of racial power (Bataille in Tyler, 2013). The borders that are drawn and reinstated in the confrontation between the White mother and the racial minority young women are the borders of the nation state (as stated in the line “Go back to your own country”) with reference to race (as stated in the line “fucking, Paki”). The confrontation exemplifies the bordering of White privilege to Danish territory. The confrontation, however, also exemplifies the limitations of

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the ideology of equality-as-sameness; more precisely, it illustrates the disturbing breakthrough of the Real of racial embodiment into the Symbolic interchange of races in actual personal encounters. In the Nordic context, where social relations are structured to avoid closeness with the different Other, maintaining the ideology of being not only equal, but also the same, bodily confrontations and closeness with the different Other are transgressions of the (bodily and symbolic) fences that sustain such an ideology. The confrontation thus illustrates the ways in which borders of national ideologies of race are policed at the micro-level in daily interaction—not only discursively, but also affectively, through both bodily enactments of prohibitions (for example, of closeness) and transgressions of these same prohibitions (for example, accelerations of the bodily and emotional intensity of this closeness). Moreover, the film exposes how it feels to be situated in the position of the abject, and how this position is continuously re-enacted through the interplay of ambivalent bodily and affective dynamics that revolve around enjoyment and disgust. Enjoyment and disgust interchange between the parties in the racist encounter, revealing both enjoyment in the disgust they meet from the Other and disgust that they show the Other in return. This encounter is a moment with the Other “in the Real of her jouissance” (Žižek, 1998: 168)—in the intensity of the Real of racial embodiment going beyond the public official ideological script of race into its unacknowledged supplement. Such an encounter with the Real is always traumatic: “there is something obscene about it” (Žižek, 1998: 168). However, without this Real of jouissance, we ultimately cannot relate to or interact with the Other, as she would otherwise remain a fiction—a purely symbolic subject of strategic reasoning. As such, the kernel of Otherness resides in the regulation of his or her jouissance(Žižek, 1998: 169). In this obscene encounter, racism becomes a symptom of the Real of racial embodiment. However, simultaneously, at another level, the racial Other—being different, disgusting and anxiety provoking—becomes a symptom in the form of a projection of that which prevents the realization of the Danish fantasy of all races being the same and equal—the ideological illusion on which we build our national identity as liberal and tolerant. As a symptom, the Other deprives the Danish community of an object of enjoyment—namely, the fantasy of loving the Other as we love ourselves. However, we cannot get rid of the symptom, as it is not an isolated defect or deviation from the norm, but a recurrent systematic error that functions as the fantasmatic protection of the fundamental gap around which the Symbolic

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is constituted (Žižek, 1989: 78). If the mother succeeds in expelling Carla, making her go back to her own country, she would have to crush the fantasy and realize that the sameness, and the love that it promises (upon which Danish cultural identity is founded), is a fiction—an impossibility. She must realize that not only do we not love Others who are the same, but also we desire not to be equal with them. In the politics of race, the symptom through which the impossible fantasy of equality-as-sameness is veiled is the precondition for the Symbolic to function at all. If we were to fully realize that symptoms—as they manifest in individual racial Others (like Carla and the White mother) or in symptomatic bodily affective–abjective racism—are not just isolated limitations or deviations from the functioning of the social reality, the Symbolic falls apart. Thus, we need fantasy despite, and by virtue of, the grip, it has on us. To undermine this grip of fantasy, we can, as I have tried to do in the analysis of Racism expose the fantasies that sustain the racial power relations. Such power relations rely on an obscene supplement—for instance the ambivalent affectivity of abjection, disgust and enjoyment— which sustains it only as long as this supplement remains in the shadow. Adapting an ideology critical psychoanalytical perspective for an analysis of racism as portrayed by the young producers provides the opportunity to explore not only the dynamics of racial embodiment and affective “racisms” uncanny logic of return, but also the micro–macro dialectics of such dynamics. Analysing the micro dynamics of Racism, illuminates the current political macro dynamics of apparently growing levels of intolerance, hostility and hatred towards and from racial minorities in liberal societies (such as Denmark, the Nordic and others Western countries), in which equality and democracy have become enshrined political ideals (Žižek, 1998: 677). Thus, Racism shows how—in a climate of “equality”—displacements take place through collective affective and subjective bodily dynamics that transforms overt racism from being socially unpalatable to becoming inwardly permissible (Hook, 2004: 683). Such insights may enable us as society to grasp—maybe even for youth practitioners to grabble with—racial minority youths ambivalent affective relations with majority society. This may be achieved by acknowledging the subconscious and bodily nature of not only racial minority youths experiences of alienation and the practices of re/ abjection by both racial minorities and majority society, but also the mutual affective investments and profits from engaging such social interactions and bodily affective transactions.2

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CHAPTER

7

GROOMING AND THE ‘ASIAN SEX GANG PREDATOR’: THE CONSTRUCTION OF A RACIAL CRIME THREAT Ella Cockbain Department of Security and Crime Science, University College London

ABSTRACT Following a mainstream British newspaper’s claim to have uncovered a new crime threat of ‘on-street grooming’, extensive and emotive debate continues around the so-called ‘Asian sex gang’ problem in the UK. This article examines the construction of a new racial crime threat, assessing the validity of its foundations and exploring its possible causes and consequences. Grooming is shown to be a dubious category, not a distinct offence but an ill-defined subset of child sexual exploitation more generally. The article highlights a fundamental tension in the grooming discourse, showing that claims of a uniquely racial crime threat are ill founded but that Citation: Ella Cockbain, Volume: 54 issue: 4, page(s): 22-32, Article first published online: March 28, 2013; Issue published: April 1, 2013, https://doi. org/10.1177/0306396813475983 Copyright: Тhis article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access page (http:// www.uk.sagepub.com/aboutus/openaccess.htm).

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Asians have been overrepresented, relative to the general population, among suspected child sexual exploiters identified to date. The implications of the current fixation with grooming and ‘Asian sex gangs’ are examined and shown to further a political agendum and legitimise thinly veiled racism, ultimately doing victims a disservice. The article concludes by calling for a shift from the sweeping, ill-founded generalisations driving dominant discourse to date, towards open and level-headed discussions around child sexual exploitation, including but not limited to, examining relationships between race and offending. Keywords: Asian, child sexual exploitation, crime, grooming, media, Pakistani, political correctness Since 2011, there has been widespread media, public and policy debate in the UK around so-called ‘grooming’, depicted as a new crime threat inextricably associated with ‘Asian sex gangs’ who deliberately seek out white British girls for repeated and horrific sexual abuse. This article traces the origins of the grooming debate, examining the possible roots of its incendiary nature and critically assessing key factors against historical parallels. In an area beset by confusion and complexity, this article provides a simple overview of key definitional and statistical considerations. While exposing the logical fallacies in representations of a uniquely ‘Asian model’ of grooming, it also shows that Asians have been overrepresented among suspected perpetrators of child sexual exploitation (CSE) identified to date, relative to the general population. The risks of a narrow race-based construct of grooming are examined and shown to include fuelling racist rhetoric, distorting policy and practice and exacerbating community tensions. The article concludes by arguing for a shift away from a fixation with grooming as a uniquely racialised threat towards responding to CSE in its entirety, including, but not limited to, an honest, transparent examination of observed racial trends. At the outset, it should be noted that, in Britain, the term ‘Asian’ typically refers to people of South-Asian descent. Grooming has been overwhelmingly associated with Asians of Pakistani heritage, although the terms ‘Asian’, ‘Pakistani’ and ‘Muslim’ have often been conflated. Consequently, other South-Asian groups have argued for greater linguistic precision in order to distance themselves from grooming’s stigma. In practice, data-recording conventions mean that specific Asian ethnicities can rarely be disentangled from large-scale datasets. Consequently, despite recognising its contentious nature, the term Asian is used in this article when greater specificity is

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impossible.

THE CREATION OF A RACIAL CRIME THREAT In January 2011, The Times, a leading British conservative broadsheet newspaper, ran a front-page exposé entitled ‘Revealed: conspiracy of silence on UK sex gangs’.1It claimed to have uncovered a new racial crime threat, dubbed ‘on-street grooming’; this coinage has since been widely abbreviated to ‘grooming’, the term used throughout this article. According to The Times, the grooming threat was a ‘plague on northern towns’, threatening in particular white working-class girls in England’s North and Midlands – regions with large and segregated Asian communities, where racial tensions are thought to have been exacerbated by industrial decline, economic deprivation and media sensationalism.2 The authorities, it claimed, were failing to tackle widespread cases involving Asian male offenders sexually abusing white British girls for ‘fear of being branded racist’.3 Against a context of increasingly vocal disillusionment with multicultural Britain, the contention proved explosive that ‘foreigners’ were not only abusing ‘natives’ but also going unpunished due to misguided political correctness. This exposé coincided with the culmination of the latest in a series of trials across the late 2000s involving multiple offenders convicted of sexual offences against British children. Of the thirteen defendants in this case, the UK’s largest CSE investigation to date, one was white and twelve were Asian, primarily British Pakistanis. While this was not the first trial of its kind to feature multiple Asian defendants, previous coverage had typically been localised, sporadic and comparatively low-profile, and defendants’ race was rarely discussed. Nonetheless, occasional predecessors to The Times’ exposé include a 2010 article ‘How predatory gangs force middle-class girls into the sex trade’4 and a 2004 TV documentary5 investigating primarily Pakistani-heritage offenders sexually exploiting white girls in Keighley, an economically depressed Yorkshire town with a large and segregated Asian community. Despite almost being cancelled for fear of inciting race riots,6 the political implications of this film were minimal: pre-Times exposé, Keighley’s member of parliament remained virtually the only mainstream politician discussing CSE. In contrast, The Times’ coverage catapulted grooming into the national consciousness. In the week immediately following the exposé, grooming dominated the national news agendum: it was the subject of the BBC News website’s most-read article and of intense debate on numerous high-profile

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radio and TV shows, including BBC’s Newsnight. At the time of writing, almost two years on, grooming continues to attract intense media and political attention and has led to several prime-time documentaries, two nationwide scoping studies and a government action plan on CSE. Perspectives have typically polarised between those who uncritically present grooming as a racial crime threat and those who concentrate on the illegitimacy of this racialisation. Both extremes, however, involve propelling race to centre stage. Characteristic of the racialisation of the grooming debate, the Daily Mirror, a liberal tabloid newspaper, re-released an article several days after its original publication, substituting the original headline ‘Nine quizzed over child grooming’ for ‘Nine Asian men quizzed over alleged grooming of white girls for sex’. Misunderstanding persists around the legal status of grooming. Despite statements such as ‘50 of 56 men convicted in English courts of on-street grooming were Muslim’,7 grooming is not a distinct criminal offence. Grooming is better understood as a subset of CSE,8 itself a broad, umbrellatype phenomenon encompassing diverse offences – ranging from rape to sexual activity with a child, to false imprisonment. Occasional commentators have further confused grooming with the offence of ‘meeting a child following sexual grooming’, prohibited under Section 15 of the Sexual Offences Act 2003.9 Intended primarily to support proactive enforcement against online sex offenders without requiring actual sexual activity, this offence is unlikely to be charged in so-called grooming cases.

AN EXPLOSIVE COMBINATION Grooming’s immediate ‘appeal’ probably lay at least partially in its incorporation of most classic news values associated with crime journalism,10 as well as involving children and a clear political dimension, both of which typically amplify an issue’s impact.11 As one newspaper exclaimed, ‘There could, of course, hardly be a more emotive story than this. Sexual abuse! White girls! Pakistani men! Politically-correct establishment letting it happen!’12 Grooming combines novelty with comfortable conventions: many of the defining characteristics of the new threat discourse are resolutely familiar. At its most extreme, it can seem that the greatest effrontery about grooming is not the abuse of children but the interracial sex itself. This may explain a tendency towards ethnically homogenising victim and offender groups: victims’ whiteness and offenders’ otherness are both regularly

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overstated. White co-offenders and ethnic minority victims are routinely downplayed in the insistence that this is a problem of Asian men targeting white girls. In fact, this contradicts early research findings which suggest that victim recruitment is largely opportunistic and that ethnic minority children are also abused.13 The literal and metaphorical ‘whitening’ of victims raises the question that grooming might never have attracted such attention, and its victims such sympathy, if the offender threat figure had not been so resolutely ‘other’. This treatment recalls a similar process played out in the Australian media around the threat of Lebanese rapists,14 which led one commentator to state, ‘It is a shame we have to be racist in order to recognise the rights of raped women.’15 In the early 2000s, a series of group rapes by predominantly Lebanese offenders sparked mass hysteria: notably victims were consistently misrepresented as white Australians.16The rapes, as with current grooming cases, were implicitly constructed as an extrinsic attack on dominant white culture and nationhood itself.17 Grooming concerns should be contextualised against deeper-seated concerns and frustrations around migration, the alleged failure of multicultural Britain, positive discrimination and growing Islamophobia in the wake of the 9/11 and 7/7 bombings. Against this backdrop, it is perhaps unsurprising that confident assertions from a reputable mainstream media outlet of an Asian (Muslim) crime threat sufficed to open the floodgates for a national scandal. At its most extreme, the mood was one of outrage at a failing system supposedly incapacitated by political correctness, encapsulated in furious diatribe about ‘multicultural, reverse-racist, sickeningly hypocritical Britain’.18 Many aspects of the construction of the ‘Asian sex gang predator’19 as Britain’s newest folk devil recall 1970s Britain’s archetypal moral panic around mugging.20Mugging, like grooming, was constructed as a new and pressing crime threat, for which the ‘ideological bedrock’ was the widespread conception of Afro-Caribbean communities as highly problematic.21 As a result of this racialised construction, mugging became inextricably linked with attacks on the ‘elderly white lady’22 by young black men, even when perpetrators deviated from this racial stereotype.23 Just as young blacks subsequently had to contend with being ascribed ‘certain collective qualities, e.g. alienated, vicious little criminals, muggers’,24 Asians in Britain may find themselves treated as potential groomers in future. Again, as with mugging, grooming has been readily explained in political and

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media debate in cultural terms. Reflecting a broader preoccupation with the idea of irreconcilable culture clash theories, grooming proved a convenient focal point for longstanding frustrations about arranged marriage practices (whose implication for migration policies should be remembered), perceived misogyny and insufficient assimilation. Despite little direct supporting evidence for such cultural correlates, they were not only presented as selfevident but as direct causes of grooming. In fact, certain claims can be readily exposed as dubious, despite attracting little scrutiny at the time. For example, Jack Straw, Britain’s former home secretary, was quick to explain grooming as an inevitable consequence of an arranged marriage culture, whereby young unmarried Pakistani-heritage men resort to abusing readily available white British girls out of pent-up sexual frustration. Not only is the notion that CSE is the only outlet for sexual release risible, but Straw ignores the fact that the offenders in the cases in question were typically already married and in their 20s or 30s, hardly the sexually frustrated ‘young men … fizzing and popping with testosterone’25 of his argument.

A CONSPIRACY OF SILENCE? A particularly pernicious element to constructing grooming as a racial crime threat arises from the claim that grooming constituted a ‘conspiracy of silence’, in which authorities were ‘crippled by misplaced fears about upsetting racial sensitivities’.26Consequently, attempts to examine critically the validity of the Asian groomer construct could be, and were, attacked as further evidence of an institutional cover-up. Similar attacks were levied at Australian police in the wake of the Sydney rapes discussed earlier. In reality, the situation is probably far more mundane and less racially motivated than has been suggested. It is possible that local authorities, police and children’s services may have been nervous about tackling CSE cases involving Asian offenders in the wake of the 2001 Bradford race riots and widespread criticism of the police for institutional racism following the Macpherson inquiry into their handling of the Stephen Lawrence case. Nonetheless, there are numerous other factors that may have played as much, if not more, of a role in deterring effective responses to CSE. After all, it is critical to note that CSE in general, not just the spurious grooming model, has only just begun to be treated as a child-protection priority that requires effective, co-ordinated and proactive responses. CSE cases have been easy to ignore as victims rarely report their abuse, and, even if they do, the Crown Prosecution Service appears to have been reluctant to pursue prosecutions because of fears

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around witness credibility and jury members’ insufficient understanding of the nature and impact of CSE.27 Finally, it should be noted that, in a climate of budget cuts, CSE is an expensive, complex and time-consuming issue to tackle. A major positive repercussion of the grooming debate, despite its many limitations, has been to establish CSE firmly as a child-protection issue and exert considerable pressure for clear and concerted multi-agency responses nationwide.

SPURIOUS STATISTICS Another possible reason why The Times’ exposé enjoyed such immediate and far-reaching impact was that it took an emotive and novel issue, furnished it with a catchy name and legitimised it with statistics. In media and policy debate, as in academic research, quantification can often be confused with objectivity; the methods and assumptions underpinning apparently selfevident statistical conclusions are not necessarily scrutinised. The Times’ creation of grooming as a new racial crime threat is a classic example, it seems, of a bold claim resting on shaky foundations: anecdote, opinion and spurious statistics. The basic ‘proof’ that grooming was a racial issue was that, of fifty-six offenders, convicted across seventeen trials, ‘[t]hree of the 56 were white, 53 were Asian. Of those, 50 were Muslim and a majority were members of the British Pakistani community’.28 Despite the severity of the offences, seventeen cases hardly constitute the alleged ‘tidal wave of offending’,29 a clear example of the disproportionality of the original threat, a key ingredient for any moral panic. Findings from an exploratory academic study were cited in support, despite the authors publicly emphasising that their (unpublished) work, focusing on two cases alone, had been de-contextualised and deliberately ‘over-extended to characterise an entire crime type’.30The Times’ statistics were widely repeated, often uncritically; the source of these figures was rarely addressed. Their frequent misrepresentation as ‘research’ may have served to heighten their impact. In fact, The Times’ figures derived from a search of press coverage from 1997 to 2011 aimed at identifying convictions involving two or more men for sexually abusing girls aged 11–16 years they had met locally, hence the ‘on-street’ in grooming.31These inclusion parameters have never been explained or justified, despite the questionable decision to exclude male victims wholesale. This raises the question as to whether the statistical

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exercise was deliberately designed to isolate evidence for a predetermined ‘Asian model’. Finally, a reliance on press coverage to measure a crime will naturally echo media biases about newsworthiness, including the tendency to over-report offences involving lower-class or ethnic minority offenders.32

THE OFFICIAL PICTURE Widespread concern around grooming resulted in two large-scale government studies: the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre’s (CEOP) assessment of ‘localised grooming’,33 and the Office of the Children’s Commissioner for England’s (OCCE) study on ‘child sexual exploitation in gangs and groups’.34 It is important to emphasise that these studies measure not convicted or charged suspects, but simply those highlighted by dataproviders, including the police and children’s services, as suspects: many will never have been formally identified. Consequently, the degree of active engagement with CSE locally is likely to impact upon the level of CSE identified. In the absence of a single study covering all forms of CSE, it is worth summarising what each of these studies measured and their findings regarding suspects’ ethnicity. An additional caveat in interpreting results is that both reported considerable data deficiencies, including missing or incomplete data. Addressing the UK as a whole, CEOP measured ‘localised grooming’: the name echoing the new grooming debate, a clear example of media influence shaping official responses. Like The Times, CEOP focused on communitybased CSE, specifically excluding familial, peer-on-peer, professional35 or primarily online abuse. Unlike The Times, CEOP removed limitations on victims’ age and gender and covered both solo and group offenders. Of the 31 per cent (N = 753) of suspects for whom race was known, 49 per cent (N = 367) were white and 46 per cent (N = 346) Asian.36Meanwhile, the OCCE included all forms of CSE in England, both online and offline, but was restricted to offenders acting in groups of two or more, the exclusion of solo offenders seriously undermining its claim to provide the ‘most thorough and comprehensive collection of information’ on CSE to date.37 The statistics presented in the report are often confused and incoherent,38 exacerbating methodological shortcomings and understandable data deficiencies. What can be disentangled is that only a minority of submissions to the call for evidence included any information on suspects. Of a total of 1,514 suspects thus identified, race data were available for 84 per cent (N = 1266). For those suspects where race was known, 43 per cent (N = 545) were white and 33 per

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cent (N = 415) Asian.39 These studies clearly demonstrate that, contrary to popular opinion, CSE is not a uniquely Asian threat: in both cases the single largest ethnic group among suspects was white. At first sight, however, the large proportion of Asian suspects is concerning, since Asians comprise just 7 per cent of the British and 6 per cent of the English population. Yet, at least one, if not both, of these studies relied overwhelmingly on a few geographical areas for their suspect data. Consequently, it would be more accurate and informative to compare the demographic (including racial) composition of the suspect group to that of these areas alone. Neither study included such analysis, nor did they provide information on the geographical provenance of their limited data that would have facilitated independent analysis. Instead, this was a missed opportunity to reduce confusion, alleviate claims of institutional cover-ups and ultimately make a meaningful contribution to the race debate.

IMPLICATIONS OF A RACIAL CRIME MODEL Racialising criminal justice issues poses several risks, some of which have already materialised in the grooming debate. First, it provides ready ammunition to right-wing extremist groups: British organisations have been quick to capitalise on the establishment’s perceived failure and the new social legitimacy of anti-Asian sentiment: some of their most concerning actions are summarised here. The British National Party (BNP) narrowly missed rendering a recent prosecution of a major CSE case a mistrial after its leader tweeted the supposed verdicts while the jury was still deliberating. The English Defence League (EDL) caused a two-week delay to the same trial after attacking two (Asian) defence barristers outside the court: such actions endanger defendants’ right to a fair trial, prolong the traumatic prosecution experience for complainants and incur considerable public costs. Meanwhile, perceiving the OCCE report as a ‘whitewash’, Britain First posted the Deputy Children’s Commissioner’s home address online and circulated it to thousands of supporters, placing her and her family at direct personal risk. Second, fears of racial crime trends can be readily manipulated to win votes and legitimise repressive crime-control measures.40 Taking advantage of a fearful populace, which is more susceptible to manipulation and willing to accept tougher measures, this can help to further the immigration-control agendum.41 Despite failing to engage with CSE during his period as home secretary (1997–2001), Jack Straw suddenly took a hardline stance on

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grooming in the run-up to the critical Oldham by-election.42 The Conservative party’s announcement of a new stance against ‘state multiculturalism’ quite possibly gained credibility against the backdrop of the grooming panic. In the 2000s, the construction of the Lebanese gang rapist as a threat to white Australia and resultant media-fuelled panic culminated in poorly founded legislative change and draconian sentencing.43 Constructions of grooming as a racial crime threat may exacerbate community tensions, support populist racism and even directly incite hate crime.44 Third, the emergent stereotype of a racial crime threat can self-perpetuate. In a classic case of confirmation bias, instances of Asian grooming may attract greater media coverage, thereby fuelling public perceptions of grooming as a racial crime threat. Following a recent trial involving mostly white offenders, parents of the children sexually exploited reported frustration at the relatively low level of interest it attracted, compared with similar cases involving Asian offenders. Recent anger at the OCCE report’s failure to address the ‘Asian model’ highlights the growing misconception that there exists a uniquely Asian form of CSE. 45 The notion of an Asian model rests on two assumptions: ‘[f]irst that Asians and Asians alone follow this particular MO [modus operandi] … Second, that this (at best vaguely delineated) MO is the only one that Asian offenders use’. 46 Both are flawed, as the involvement of non-Asians in classic grooming-style cases and arrests of Asians for other forms of CSE clearly demonstrate. Finally, there remains the risk that official responses will be affected by emergent racial stereotypes, potentially meaning suspects fitting this racial profile are more likely to be identified and pursued than those who do not. Should this transpire, the overrepresentation of Asians among CSE offenders may in itself become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

CONCLUSION The image of the Asian groomer has proved a seductive and enduring one, yet, as this article has demonstrated, the idea of a uniquely Asian crime threat is ill founded, misleading and dangerous. The construction of grooming as a distinct offence and a racial crime threat has been shown to lie on insubstantial foundations: misconceptions, anecdote, opinion and the deliberate manipulation of limited statistics of dubious provenance. Nonetheless, the greatest tension in responding to all this arises from the identification of Asians as the second-largest racial group among suspects of various forms of CSE in two major national studies, greatly overrepresented

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relative to the general population. While race is by no means the only notable aspect to CSE, nor the most important one, this disparity begs further exploration and, if possible, explanation. Admittedly, this is not an easy job. Complex social issues can rarely be explained in terms of a single factor and moving from correlation to causality is particularly challenging. Nonetheless, in CSE, as with other crimes, observed relationships between race and offending may well be mediated by social, structural or situational factors. Asians, like whites or blacks, do not commit CSE offences because they are Asian, white or black. This lazy, circular logic, verging on quasigeneticism, would label every Asian adult equally a groomer-in-waiting and fails to address the immediate precipitates of CSE, such as ready access to children and low levels of formal or informal surveillance to constrain deviant behaviour. As counter-intuitive as it may seem, refusing to talk about race at all risks fuelling racialised stereotypes and racist discourses, validating the claim of institutional cover-ups. Talking about race, however, must not mean pointing fingers at an apparently homogeneous ‘Asian culture’. Simplistic cultural explanations are grounded in a misguided belief in a single, homogeneous and self-evident culture. Cultural explanations are hard to test and rarely offer much in the way of explanatory value, let alone informing interventions. Nor should talking about race mean shifting full responsibility for CSE onto Britain’s Asian population in a way that conveniently absolves the indigenous majority from addressing the involvement of their own. Child sexual exploitation is not an ‘Asian problem’, it is everybody’s problem.

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REFERENCES 1.

The Times , ‘Revealed: conspiracy of silence on UK sex gangs’, published online (5 January2011), available at: http://www.thetimes. co.uk/tto/news/uk/crime/article2863058.ece 2. See discussions in Abbas, T. , Muslims in Birmingham, UK. Background Paper for Centre on Migration, Policy and Society (University of Oxford, 2006). 3. The Times , ‘Barnardo’s demands inquiry into sex exploitation of British girls’, published online (5 January 2011), available at: http:// www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/news/uk/crime/article2864090.ece 4. Daily Mail , ‘Special investigation: how predatory gangs force middleclass girls into the sex trade’, published online (7 July 2010), available at: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1301003/Specialinvestigation-How-predatory-gangs-force-middle-class-girls-sextrade.html 5. Hall, A. , Edge of the City (Chameleon Productions, 2004). 6. BBC News , ‘Campaign to stop race documentary’, published online (17 August 2004), available at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/ tv_and_radio/3572776.stm 7. Telegraph , ‘Jack Straw sparks row with Pakistan “easy meat” remark’, published online (8January 2011), available at: http://www.telegraph. co.uk/news/politics/8248189/Jack-Straw-sparks-row-with-Pakistaneasy-meat-remark.html 8. For the standard definition of CSE, see Department of Children, Schools and Families , Safeguarding Children and Young People from Sexual Exploitation – supplementary guidance to working together to safeguard children (London, Home Office, 2009). 9. Lowles, N. , ‘Grooming: an issue we cannot ignore’, Hope not Hate (Nov/Dec, 2012), pp. 21–2. 10. Chibnall, S. , Law and Order News (London, Tavistock, 1977). 11. Reiner, R. , ‘Media-made criminality: the representation of crime in the mass media’, in Maguire, M., Morgan, M., Reiner, R., eds, The Oxford Handbook of Criminology (4th edn) (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2007); Jewkes, Y. , Media & Crime (2nd edn) (London, Sage, 2011). 12. Telegraph , ‘Are white girls really “easy meat”?’, published online (8 January 2011), available at: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/ crime/8248347/Are-white-girls-really-easy-meat.html

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13. Cockbain, E., Brayley, H., ‘Sexual exploitation is vile, whatever the perpetrators’ colour’, letter published in The Times (7 January 2011), available at: http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/opinion/letters/ article2865492.ece 14. Poynting, S., Noble, G., Tabar, P., Collins, J., Bin Laden in the Suburbs – criminalising the Arab other (Sydney, Sydney Institute of Criminology, 2004), p. 124. 15. Cited in Warner, K. , ‘Gang rape in Sydney: crime, the media, politics, race and sentencing’, Australian and New Zealand Journal of Criminology (Vol. 37, no. 3, 2004), pp. 344–61. 16. Gleeson, K. , ‘From Centenary to the Olympics: gang rape in Sydney’, Current Issues in Criminology (Vol. 16, no. 2, 2004), pp. 18–201. 17. Grewal, K. , ‘The “young Muslim man” in Australian public discourse’, Transforming Cultures eJournal (Vol. 2, no. 1, 2007), pp. 116–34. 18. Daily Mail , ‘While Muslim sexual predators have been jailed, it is white Britain’s hypocritical values that are to blame’, published online (10 January 2011), available at: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/ article-1345687/Muslim-sexual-predators-jailed-white-Britainshypocritical-values-blame.html 19. Daily Mail , ‘I was kept prisoner by the Asian sex gang predator: victim tells harrowing story of “boyfriend” who dubbed his car the “Rape Rover”’, published online (5 January 2011), available at: http://www. dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1347335/Asian-sex-gang-Toni-MarieRedferns-boyfriend-dubbed-car-Rape-Rover.html 20. Hall, S., Critcher, C., Jefferson, T., Clarke, J., Roberts, B., eds, Policing the Crisis: mugging, the state and law and order (London, Macmillan, 1978). 21. Solomos, J. , ‘Problems, but whose problems? The social construction of black youth unemployment and social policies’, Journal of Social Policy (Vol. 14, no. 4, 1985), pp. 527–54. 22. Bridges, L., Fekete, L., ‘Victims, the “urban jungle” and the new racism’, Race & Class (Vol. 27, no. 1, 1985), p. 51. 23. Gutzmore, C. , ‘Capital, “black youth” and crime’, Race & Class (Vol. 25, no. 2, 1983), pp.13–30. 24. John, A. , ‘In the service of Black youth’ (Leicester, National Association of Youth Clubs, 1981), p. 155. 25. Daily Mail , ‘White girls are “easy meat” for Pakistani men: Jack

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27.

28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

34.

35. 36. 37. 38.

39. 40.

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Straw under fire for making “offensive” remarks on sex abuse cases’, published online (8 January 2011), available at: http://www.dailymail. co.uk/news/article-1345277/Jack-Straw-making-offensive-remarkssex-abuse-cases.html The Times , ‘Botched 2008 investigation left sex gang free to abuse’, published online (11January 2011), available at: http://www.thetimes. co.uk/tto/news/uk/crime/article2869880.ece Director of Public Prosecutions , Keir Starmer, cited in the Telegraph, ‘Police probe three more “major” child sex grooming rings’, published online (24 October 2012), available at: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/ news/uknews/crime/9630152/Police-probe-three-more-major-childsex-grooming-rings.html The Times , ‘Revealed: conspiracy of silence’, op. cit. Ibid. Cockbain, E., Brayley, H., op. cit. The Times , ‘Revealed: conspiracy of silence’, op. cit. Reiner, op. cit. Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre , Out of Mind, Out of Sight: breaking down the barriers to understanding child sexual exploitation (London, CEOP, 2011). Office of the Children’s Commissioner for England , ‘I thought I was the only one. The only one in the world’: interim report from Enquiry into Child Sexual Exploitation in Gangs and Groups (London, OCCE, 2012). Here professional refers to the abuse of a professional relationship with children, e.g. as a teacher or scoutmaster. The remainder was 5 per cent black (N = 38) and under 1 per cent Chinese (N = 2). OCCE, op. cit., p.10. For example, two conflicting figures are given regarding the proportion of evidence submissions to include data on perpetrators: 26 per cent and 32 per cent respectively. The remainder was 19 per cent black (N = 244), 4 per cent mixed (N = 49) and 1 per cent ‘other’ (N = 13). Gerbner, G. , ‘Cultural indicators: the case of violence in television drama’, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social

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42.

43. 44. 45.

46.

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Science (Vol. 338, no. 1, 1970), pp. 69–81; and, ‘Television violence: the power and the peril’, in Dines, G., Humez, J., eds, Gender, Race and Class in the Media (California, Sage, 1995). Signorielli, N. , ‘Television’s mean and dangerous world: a continuation of the cultural indicators perspective’, in Signorielli, N., Morgan, M., eds, Cultivation Analysis: New Directions in Media Effects Research (Newbury Park, CA, Sage, 1990). Telegraph , ‘Labour MPs criticise Jack Straw over sexual abuse comments’, published online (8 January 2011), available at: http:// www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/law-and-order/8247769/LabourMPs-criticise-Jack-Straw-over-sexual-abuse-comments.html Warner, op. cit. See, for example, Poynting, S. , ‘What caused the Cronulla riot?’, Race & Class (Vol. 48, no. 1, 2006), pp. 85–92. See, for example, The Times , ‘“Media prejudice” claim as childsex report turns a blind eye to Asian gangs’, published online (21 November 2012), available at: http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/news/uk/ crime/article3606639.ece Brayley, H., Cockbain, E., ‘The Office of the Children’s Commissioner’s CSE report: a missed opportunity?’, Huffington Post, published online (21 November 2012), available at: http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/ helen-brayley/child-sex-exploitation_b_2173982.html

CHAPTER

8

MEDIA EVENT, RACIAL RAMBLINGS, OR BOTH? AN ANALYSIS OF MEDIA COVERAGE OF THE TAMWORTH COUNCIL SUDANESE REFUGEES RESETTLEMENT CASE (2006) Kwamena Kwansah-Aidoo1 and Virginia Mapedzahama2 Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

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Western Sydney University, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia

2

ABSTRACT This article presents our analysis of Australian media reporting of the 2006 Tamworth City Council’s decision to refuse the resettlement of five Sudanese Citation: Kwamena Kwansah-Aidoo, Virginia Mapedzahama, Volume: 5 issue: 4, Article first published online: December 28, 2015; Issue published: December 23, 2015 https://doi.org/10.1177/2158244015621600 Copyright: This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access page (https:// us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).

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families in Tamworth (NSW) and subsequent reversal, supposedly due to the pressure brought to bear on the council as a result of the media “hype.” The question at the core of our analyses is as follows: Did the media play a role in the over-(re)presentation of this case as racist or was it just a case of the media reporting racism? Informed by media framing theory, we examine print media reports for patterns of presentation as well as representations of both the council and the refugees who were the focus of the reporting. We conclude that while the media played a significant role in making visible a case built on racial stereotypes, their reporting also contained racializing and paternalistic stereotyping that contribute to the reproduction of both everyday and systemic racism. Keywords: Tamworth, Sudanese, media, framing, racism, refugees

PROLOGUE: WHAT WAS ALL THE MEDIA HYPE ABOUT? THE “TAMWORTH CASE” In 2006, the federal government of Australia made a request to the Tamworth City Council for the town to become a regional resettlement location (ABC News, 2006) under the broader Humanitarian Settlement in Regional Australia Program (Department of Immigration and Citizenship [DIAC], 2011). The Tamworth Scheme would be similar to the Regional Humanitarian Settlement Pilot programs “already running in Goulburn, Wagga Wagga and Coffs Harbour, and other towns across the country” (Munro & Welch, 2007). Under the Tamworth Scheme, up to 10 Sudanese families would be resettled in the town each year. However, according to the ABC News (2006), The council [ . . . ] made it clear [to the government] it will only accept the refugees if the proposal has widespread community support. A public meeting held [in August 2006] highlighted deep resentment to the idea and a survey [ . . . conducted thereafter] exposed further opposition to the move. [When] the council [ . . . ] released the survey results, [ . . . ] [they showed] only 96 of 393 participants [ . . . were] in favour of accepting the refugees. As a result, at a meeting in December 2006, the Tamworth Council refused the federal government’s proposal for an initial resettlement of five Sudanese families in the town. According to media reports, the council voted six to three, “to spurn the offer by the Department of Immigration to resettle the families” (Norrie, 2006, p. 3). The council’s decision attracted negative

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(national and international) media coverage and attention: On the 15th of December, newspapers all over Australia, and indeed internationally, widely reported and condemned the decision as a race-based decision, that is, based on racial prejudice and stereotypes (of Sudanese people and culture). The decision was reported and condemned as an act of racism. “The mayor, James Treloar, came under fire for what were regarded as racist comments when he said the town wasn’t coping with the 15 Sudanese refugees who already lived there” (Frost, 2007, p. 21). He “said the city was struggling with the 15 refugees it already had, stating they were having problems assimilating” (Clifton, 2007). So, did the media really report an act of racism or was this just another instance of media-fuelled racism? Or, could it have been both?

INTRODUCTION Some researchers have suggested that media coverage of any societal happening(s) can be done in such a way as to turn it into a “media event,” and elevate such happenings to a level of importance that would otherwise not be attained (see, for example, Iyengar & Simon, 1997; Kwansah-Aidoo, 2003). They suggest that this happens as a result of the “heavy mediation,” in terms of coverage that goes on, and also the nature of such mediation, in terms of the frames adopted for covering what is happening, which eventually influence the way people think about it (see, for example, de Vreese, Boomgaarden, & Semetko, 2011; Entman, 2002; Iyengar, 1991). Iyengar (1997) for instance, suggests that the media can influence the importance people attach to issues or events through the subtle means of “framing.” In a similar vein, the role the media play in the construction and reproduction of the “refugee narrative” has been the focus of much research in recent years. In remaining critical of the media’s significant (albeit subtle) role in shaping and amplifying public attitudes and perceptions toward refugees, much of this significant body of work has focused not only on media misinformation, but also on how the media presents negative and distorted images of refugees thereby influencing public opinion. The power of the media to influence what people think about through their agenda-setting function has been established through over 200 publications on the subject (see, Kwansah-Aidoo, 2005) and how people think about what is presented to them, through framing has also been well documented (see, for example, de Vreese et al., 2011). This article adds to the body of work described above by analyzing the media reporting of the Tamworth Sudanese refugee

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case described in the prologue. In this particular case, it can be argued that the issue at stake (refugee resettlement and also race relations in Australia) was a complex one, making public opinion about it unstable, and therefore subject to influence through framing of the issue by both the political elites and the news media (de Vreese et al., 2011). Informed by Media Framing theory, we argue that while the media reports exposed the “ordinariness” of racism, the media reporting in itself, that is, the framing of it, was done in such a way as to turn the issue into a media event “par excellence” (Iyengar & Simon, 1997, p. 256) and also construct the council’s decision as based on race, thereby making the whole event an act of “racial consumption” (Carbado, 2005, p. 635). The media engaged in what we describe as, “normalised” reporting of the “other” that, though presented as an egalitarian and objective attempt to expose racism and “close” the racial gap, was imbued with racial overtones consumed by the White majority. Framing can help us understand the way in which the media attempt to influence individuals in their efforts to make sense of everyday issues that occur in the socio-political and economic realms of their lives (Chong & Druckman, 2007; de Vreese et al., 2011; Slothuus & de Vreese, 2010). Framing can also present us with a more critical way of looking at the media reporting that took place and thereby make a valuable contribution to the literature on the “refugee narrative.” Interrogating media coverage of the Tamworth Case using the conceptual framework offered by Framing is pertinent for a number of reasons. First, apart from economic and political/geo-strategic considerations, the issue also contains cultural dimensions (de Vreese et al., 2011) and is therefore significant in the light of on-going attempts at addressing racism in Australia (see, for example, The Australian Human Rights Commission, 2012), public discourses about multiculturalism, and also the choice of multiculturalism as official cultural policy. Second, the subject matter provides an interesting case to study how news frames can affect/influence the decision making of elected bodies (in this case, possibly cause a change of mind/decision by the Tamworth Council). Third, the issue is of major importance to the future direction of government refugee settlement policy, and for gaining both public and council support for such policy, as well as for the future of multiculturalism in Australia. Finally, it can help in understanding the subtle and incessant way in which racism reproduces itself in the Australian society, through seemingly objective and benevolent ways of reporting the “other.” Whereas some commentators have argued that “there is a general expectation that the media will provide accurate, unbiased and complete

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information” (Wilson, Bonevski, Jones, & Henry, 2009), the discussion in this article will show that the information that the media disseminated was not in itself unbiased, rather it was framed in particular ways, “stressing certain aspects of reality” while “pushing others into the background” and suggesting “certain issue attributes, judgments and decisions” (Lecheler & deVreese, 2012, p. 186). It is worth noting at this point that, for purposes of this article, only online print media coverage is presented and analyzed, hence all reference to “media” in this article refers to “online print media.” This is due to the fact that the search for media reports was conducted more than 5 years after the event occurred, and the easiest access to reporting of the event was through online print media. An initial search for media reporting on the Tamworth event found only one video, hence the decision to limit the analyses to print media.

NEWS FRAMING AND AUDIENCE UNDERSTANDING The issue and nature of refugee settlement is such that media coverage can offer multiple and varying points of understanding. As a result, it is important to identify which particular aspects of the entire Tamworth Refugee Settlement issue of 2006 were highlighted at the expense of others. In an attempt to understand how framing works, many studies have specifically investigated the ways in which the news media frame messages, how news frames affect audiences, and the circumstances under which audiences are influenced (de Vreese et al., 2011). Historically “framing” was applied to how journalists and editors selected certain facts, themes, and so on, to present (frame) a story in a way that will generate maximum interest and understanding among audiences (Willcox, 2001). Entman (2002) notes that frames “call attention to some aspects of reality while obscuring other elements, which might lead audiences to have different reactions” (p. 394). He explains further, To frame is to select some aspects of a perceived reality and make them more salient in a communicating context, in such a way as to promote a particular problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation and / or treatment recommendation for the item described. (Entman, 2002, p. 391) This means that in discussing issues, events, or objects that the media present, framing ensures that attention is paid to only a small number of attributes (McCombs & Estrada, 1997). As Iyengar (1991, p. 11) has

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observed, “Framing is the subtle selection of certain aspects of an issue by the media to make them more important and thus to emphasize a particular cause of some phenomena.” A media frame therefore is “the central organising idea for news content that supplies a context and suggest what the issue is through the use of selection, emphasis, exclusion and elaboration” (Tankard, Hendrickson, Silberman, Bliss, & Ghanem, 1991, p. 3). Framing is important in assessing media coverage because if the media can tell people what to think about, as has been proved overwhelmingly in agenda-setting research, “then it stands to reason that the media can also influence how people think about what they tell them to think about” (Kwansah-Aidoo, 2005, p. 48). Indeed, some agenda-setting scholars have argued that not only do the media provide cues about the salience of certain topics and issues, but they also tell people how to think about these topics and issues (McCombs, 1992; McCombs, Lopez-Escobar, & Llamas, 2000). Some scholars have observed that frames, apart from influencing the way people think about an issue, can also affect the content of people’s beliefs (Shah, Kwak, Schmierbach, & Zubric, 2004; Slothuus, 2008; Slothuus & de Vreese, 2010). Actually, de Vreese et al. (2011) argued that frames not only affect the importance of beliefs but also directly affect attitudes. This may happen either through the provision of valence to the frame or by offering new considerations (Slothuus, 2008; Slothuus & de Vreese, 2010). It has also been suggested that some frames carry more “weight” than others thus making the valence of some frames stronger than others, and their consideration important (Chong & Druckman, 2007). Valenced news frames, as de Vreese et al. (2011) note, provide an indication of the “inherent good and positive or bad and negative aspects” of the news story. Some scholars such as Shah et al. (2004), de Vreese et al. (2011), and Schuck and de Vreese (2006) have argued that the valence news frame is important because it can affect both cognitive responses and attitudes. Entman (2002) points out that “frames highlight some bits of information about an item that is a subject of a communication, thereby elevating them to salience,” and defines salience as “a piece of information more noticeable, meaningful or memorable to an audience” (p. 392). In that regard, research has shown that negative information tends to be more salient and memorable than positive information (de Vreese et al., 2011; Johnson-Cartee & Copeland, 1991; Lau, 1985). There is conflicting research evidence regarding how framing interacts with political sophistication to produce effects. While some studies (see for

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example, Kinder & Sanders, 1990; Valentino, Beckmann, & Buhr, 2001) have shown that less politically sophisticated people have a higher susceptibility to framing effects, others such as Druckman and Nelson (2003), Lecheler and de Vreese (2012), Slothuus (2008), and Sniderman and Theriault (2004) found a reverse relationship, showing “the moderately or most politically aware to be more responsive to news framing,” particularly where the issue concerned is multi-faceted (de Vreese et al., 2011, p. 184). Accordingly, we would expect that all things being equal, the negative valenced news frames used in the coverage of the Tamworth refugee case had a strong effect on the council.

METHOD The analyses in this article are drawn from the content of 29 newspaper articles (online print media) sourced from an online search of Google and the newspaper database: News Bank conducted from April to November 2012 (refer to Table 1). Table 1. Articles Used in the Analysis

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For purposes of this article, articles by the same author(s) that were published as (slightly) different editions/versions under different headlines have been considered as different articles. This is primarily because headlines are significant for the analyses we engage in here, and also some of the differences have implications or the potential to alter the narrative being constructed. Initially, search terms were Tamworth, Sudanese, and refugee as keywords. The key word search included title, abstract, and body, and was not limited by date. For purposes of this discussion, any newspaper article reporting on the case was included in this study, regardless of the article’s length. On the other hand, any articles that were not (entirely) about council’s decision (or reversal thereof), but instead only made reference to the case, are not included for analysis. In other words, the criterion for inclusion was that the article should substantially focus on reporting the case, not a casual reference to it while reporting on something else. Moreover, given that the focus is on how the media reported the case, responses or comments/responses to media articles (this includes letters to the editor) have also been excluded. Nevertheless, we acknowledge that the responses are significant in that they not only expose how people respond to reports

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(hence the power of the media), they may also be useful for insights into broader community attitudes. Of the 29 newspaper articles, 15 were published before the council reversed its decision, that is, they were about the Council’s initial decision of rejecting the refugees, and the remaining 14 reports were about the council’s rescinded decision. Very few of the 29 articles did not make references to race. A content analysis revealed that out of the 15 articles that reported on the council’s initial decision, 13 used the words race, racism, or racial, and these words altogether occurred a total of 31 times in these articles. The words/phrases Cronulla, Cronulla riots, and Cronulla type situation were used in 11 publications, occurring a total of 19 times. Out of the 14 reports that dealt with the council’s reversal of their initial decision, only four mentioned race, racism, or racial, with these words occurring a total of 14 times, while the words/phrases Cronulla, Cronulla riots, and Cronulla type situation occurred only once in a publication. While these findings about word count are important, what is even more significant is the discourses that were circulated within these media reports and how these words were used to frame the reports to paint a certain kind of picture for readers through emphasizing a particular cause of this phenomena (Iyengar, 1991) and influencing how people would think about what they were telling them to think about (Kwansah-Aidoo, 2003). Consequently, the discussions here apply elements from content analysis to the media language and discourse to highlight the biases in the ways in which media reported the events surrounding this case. Schulz (2008) notes that [A] major tool in modern communication management is discourse analysis. The rationale behind discourse analysis holds that discourses (linguistic constructions) are used within and describe cultural, political and community ideas and, so, both construct and sustain the specific forms of knowledge and understanding among the general public. (p. 225) The approach we adopt here to determine the media frames adopted in the coverage of the Tamworth case is partly in line with that suggested by Matthes and Kohring (2008). Following (Bell & Entman, 2011), “We scrutinize the most concrete, measurable subsidiary attributes of media discourse at a granular level of analysis rather than making broad thematic statements about news coverage” (p. 555). To make a case for framing and also racialization, we are especially interested in how the media supplied information that would enable and encourage citizens and politicians, in particular ways as suggested by Delli Carpini and Keeter (1997), Bell

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and Entman (2011) or Hacker and Pierson (2005), to see the Tamworth Council’s initial decision as racist and the whole issue as being about racism. Specifically, we adopted a consistent system of analysis in dealing with the reports. First, the reports were searched to identify recurring regularities in terms of discourses. It was then determined that these discourses or discursive regularities contained and reflected certain themes; these themes were further sorted into frames. The frames were determined from the number of times certain words or combination of words (phrases), that served to highlight some bits of information making them more “noticeable, meaningful or memorable” (Entman, 2002, p. 392), were used in the reports. Afterwards, the reports were carefully examined to ensure that the frames within each theme were the same and deserved to be grouped together. In the same vein, the themes were carefully examined for differences so as to ascertain that words/phrases that had been grouped under the different frames were dissimilar and could be classified under the determined frames. This process ensured that all aspects of the reports received the same attention and treatment. It is worth pointing out though that our analyses here does not attempt to discuss every element of the articles, but as is acceptable in these kinds of analyses, we only focused on the aspects that seemed useful to answering the concerns of framing and racialization (Mckee, 2003). According to Schulz (2008), the “recurrent and patterned use of language elements such as lexical choice, syntactical structuring, genres and rhetorical constructs can deliver preferred versions of understanding on a specific subject” (p. 225), similar to framing as previously discussed. Our analyses in the discussion that ensues concentrates on two significant issues that we argue are evident in the media’s language, highlighting that the media coverage was intentionally meant to portray racism or race as “the” factor in the councils’ decision. First are the headlines, whose wording was not only deliberately meant to “catch” the reader’s attention but also to “shock.” Second, is the methodical centering of, and emphasis on, the aspects of the case, to the exclusion of others (framing) that can readily and easily be interpreted as racist. Here we concentrate in particular on the strategic and constant citing of the Tamworth City Council Mayor’s (Mayor Treloar; implicit and explicit) race-based comments on the decision. In addition, it follows that in a discussion of this nature, a question be asked on whether the media “raced” this event: Did they make a racism case out of a non-raced decision, or did they simply report on racism? Our contention is that while the council may have had legitimate reason to refuse the resettlement on the basis of inadequate resources, racial stereotyping and prejudice also played

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a part in coming to that decision. We conclude our analyses by discussing how the media coverage, though it may be interpreted as “pro-Sudanese refugees,” may have also re/produced certain negative and problematized images of Sudanese refugee subjectivity.

PUTTING RACE UPFRONT: WHAT’S IN A HEADLINE? Headlines seem to matter on their own . . . they inevitably enhance or “play up” some information while suppressing other information. (Andrew, 2007, p. 29) Andrew (2007) observes that “functionally speaking, headlines are simplifying mechanisms that summarize and attract attention to what lies ahead (or below)” (p. 24). A news headline “encapsulates the entire story” (Chiluwa, 2011, p. 89) and to that extent, it can be argued that, to all intents and purposes headlines constitute part of the framing mechanisms used by journalists and that, perhaps more than any other aspect of the news story/ article they (the headlines) highlight particular frames adopted in a story. Accordingly, it is now widely acknowledged that headlines “can have a powerful effect on the attitudes that people adopt” (Andrew, 2007, p. 25). Arguing along similar lines, Schulz (2010) notes that “when a specific position is consistently highlighted throughout media headlines [and reports] it establishes a theme or recurrent motif” (p. 70), which is “used then in a promotional type of role to sustain reader interest or shock” (Schulz, 2012, p. 4). Citing van Dijk (1998), Schulz (2012) further describes headlines as “semantic macrostructures, which lead media consumers into what to think” (p. 6). One could argue therefore, that in the case of the Tamworth Council’s decision, the media headlines represented framing that was meant to present the case as being about race and provoke reactions or attitudes to racism. Some of the headlines explicitly included the word racist, racial, or race, clearly intended to incite outrage toward an act of racism. The examples below are illustrative: • • •

“Racism Alive, Sick in Tamworth” (Mirko Bagaric; Geelong Advertiser, Tuesday December 19, 2006) “NSW City Refuses Refugees Claims of Racial Hatred” (Susanna Dunkerley, The Mercury (Hobart), December 16, 2006 “Singing From a Different Songsheet: Race Row Council Still Divided” (Lillian Saleh, The Daily Telegraph, January 17,

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2007[Edition 1: State) • “‘Racist’ Council’s Apology of Sorts—Tamworth’s About-Face” (Lillian Saleh, The Daily Telegraph, January 17, 2007 [Edition 4: City Edition]) Moreover, the articles that were explicit about racism in the headlines tended to have lead paragraphs that also linked the decision directly to racism. The lead paragraph for Bagaric’s (2006) article, for example, said, SUDANESE have black skin and are often Muslim but in every meaningful respect they are the same as every other person in Australia. That’s a lesson civic leaders in Tamworth who have refused to re-settle five Sudanese families need to have drilled into them. Otherwise, their town, which has been voted Australia’s most friendly, might also get the mantle as the most racist. (p. 17, emphasis added) The lead above is not surprising and only goes to buttress the point about the intended frame of the report as represented in the headline. Journalistically, the lead immediately follows the headline in order of importance, and together they represent the most notable part of the story. They combine to provide a gist of what the story is about and what is most significant, and must therefore necessarily work together. In fact, in journalistic terms, the lead is merely an expansion of/on the headline. Consequently, those two parts of the story taken together will offer the most clues about the frame/s adopted by any story. The lead cited above therefore proves that the story was racially framed. The tone of the lead and the subtle reference (Iyengar, 1991) to skin color, religion, and so on, as well as the suggestion that Tamworth will become known as the most racist town in Australia, all point to an intention to highlight race and to make race and racism the most important aspect of the case/story. Similarly, Saleh’s (2007) article “‘Racist’ Council’s Apology of Sorts— Tamworth’s About-Face” had the following lead paragraph/sentence: A COUNCIL accused of racism for refusing to take more overseas refugees apologised to its African population last night and reconsidered its stance. (p. 12) Again, here the headline and lead work in tandem in the effort to frame the case/story as being about race/racism. The choice of words and the inclusion of the words race and racism in the headline and lead are all pointers. Also, by highlighting that a council that had been previously “accused of racism” had now apologized, Saleh infers that the council knew it was being racist, and was apologizing for the act of racism. All of these provide hints and

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show coverage in particular ways (framing) that encourage the audience to see the Council’s initial decision as racist (Delli Carpini & Keeter, 1997; Hacker & Pierson, 2005). In fact, when Saleh cites the mayor’s clarification of his earlier statement that compared having Sudanese in Tamworth to Cronulla riots (discussed in detail in the ensuing section), this reinforced the inference that the council was apologizing for racist behavior: I used them as an example of where the program had failed—not to say they were a lawless mob running riots in Tamworth or that I was concerned about them forming gangs and getting like Cronulla . . . (p. 12) Most of the headlines, however, were only implicit in their reference to race: that is, they did not explicitly reflect the discussion about race and racism in the article. For example the Daily Telegraph’s “Sour Notes— Shame of a Town Called Malice” (Clare Masters, 2007) was in fact extensive in its coverage/discussion of race relations in Tamworth. The article focused on the Council’s explanation of its decision and was one of the few that sought to include multiple voices. There were at least three voices included: the Tamworth Sudanese refugee voice (including their thoughts on/reactions to the mayor’s comments/Council’s decision, as well as their general racial realities in Tamworth), the mayor’s comments, and Tamworth residents (both those who supported the resettlement and those who opposed it). Furthermore, some of the articles only implied race, racism, or racial prejudice in the headline, yet also often had lead paragraphs/sentences that made reference to race/racism. For example, the lead paragraph of the Sydney Morning Herald’s article, “You’re Not Welcome, Town Tells Refugees,” had the following lead sentence: A month before Tamworth hosts overseas musicians and fans at its worldrenowned country music festival, the NSW town has become embroiled in a racism row over a decision to reject five Sudanese refugee families. (Norrie, 2006) It can also be argued here, that while most of the headlines were racially implicit, they were nonetheless framed in ways that portrayed the council’s decision as morally appalling thus confirming Entman’s (2002) suggestion that framing seeks to promote a particular way of defining a problem and moral evaluation. This kind of framing can potentially contribute to a “fear discourse” (Schulz, 2008, p. 227) and potentially create a moral panic about racism or perhaps more specifically racial panic or racial anxiety (Abel, 2011, p. 5) among the readers or the wider Australian community. The headlines below again exemplify this point:

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“Rejection of Sudanese Refugees Sparks Outrage” (Justin Norrie, Sydney Morning Herald, December 16, 2006 [Fourth edition]) •

• •

•

“Chorus of Outrage at Rejection of Sudanese Refugees” (Justin Norrie, Sydney Morning Herald, December 16, 2006 [First edition]) “Home of Country Music Slams Door on Refugees” (Justin Norrie, The Age, December 15, 2006) “No More Refugees—Tamworth Mayor Defends Vote to Slam the Gate” (Lillian Saleh and Neil Keene, Daily Telegraph, December 16, 2006) “Tamworth Tainted by Small Minds” (Sydney Morning Herald, December 23, 2006)

“IF THAT IS RACISM, THEN CALL ME A RACIST!” THE UTTERANCES OF MAYOR TRELOAR Almost all of the articles reviewed began with the mayor’s racially provocative comments. In most of the reports included here, the mayor’s utterances cited were either implicitly or explicitly racist. Below are some excerpts that exemplify the mayor’s utterances that dominated media coverage of the council’s decision from December 15, 2006: Mayor James Treloar said, “The community is concerned that allowing (the families) to move here could lead to a Cronulla riots-type situation. Ask the people at Cronulla if they want more refugees.” (Norrie, 2006) “The community has expressed enormous concerns of mistrust against the Sudanese people, I think this is largely based on previous events like the Cronulla riots,” he [Mayor James Treloar] said. (Dunkerley, 2006, p. 46) Tamworth is a melting pot of cultures including migrants from India, Italy, Lebanon and Greece—but Mr Treloar said it was the recently arrived Sudanese who were causing angst [ . . . ] “They fly out of Sudan, arrive in Sydney, pop on a plane and come to Tamworth—and they come with trauma,” he [Mayor Treloar] said. “We acknowledge that, but we don’t have the trauma counsellors to help them. These people do not respect women. Most of the people haven’t been able to maintain employment because of sexual harassment claims.” (Saleh & Keene, 2006, p. 10) All of the articles reviewed either included the mayor’s reference to the Cronulla riots, or to some conception of “culture clash” or criminality of

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the Sudanese people. One could argue therefore that the media highlighting of the mayor’s statement that equates bringing in Sudanese refugees to Cronulla riots, which were themselves branded an epitome of difficult race relations and racism in Australia, infers two significant things about the council’s decision. First, that the mayor or the council in fact considered this as a decision about race, not resources. The mayor’s statement that “allowing (the families) to move here could lead to a Cronulla riots-type situation” implies that it will be inevitable that allowing the families to settle in the town would result in race-based social unrest or social problems (regardless of the availability of resources). Second, the reference to a violent act (Cronulla riots) implies racial stereotyping that constructs the Sudanese refugees as a violent group. For purposes of contextualization, it is worth pointing out that, at the core of the Cronulla riots was a gang fight between the established “Ozzie” gang and intruding new ethnic gangs, largely Lebanese (who were harassing Australian European women dressed in bikinis and calling them names). There is no evidence that there were any Sudanese involved. Hence, linking Sudanese families to a Cronulla risk (as the mayor did) would seem to be wrong and the only connection is that they are a different racial group from overseas so the mayor’s comments in this respect were patently racist and the framing insofar as it accused the mayor of racism is accurate. Our argument here, however, is not about the racist nature of the mayor’s comments, but rather the focus on those comments to the exclusion of other non-racist comments that were equally important and worth noting. Not surprisingly then, only one of the reports (Norrie, 2006) made explicit reference to the mayor’s utterances about the council’s concern regarding the lack of resources to support the program, but even then, only one sentence was devoted to it: “The town did not have enough health and education services to support the refugees, he said.” This is a clear indication of intent to frame the issue in racial terms on the part of many. Here, we can talk about framing by exclusion/omission (Entman, 2002) or framing by paying attention to only a small number of attributes at the expense of others (McCombs & Estrada, 1997). Furthermore, in some cases, the media reports even disputed the mayor’s claim of lack of resources: Tamworth City Council voted to reject an offer by the department to resettle the families, saying the town did not have the resources to cope. But detractors say the decision was simply racist, arguing the city has the resources to look after 50,000 extra people every year when it holds its famous country music festival. (“Troubled Tamworth Gets Govt Support,”

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2007, emphasis added) Some reports even painted the mayor himself, not the council as an entity, as the racist one: While Treloar keeps running off at the mouth about resident Sudanese, the Oxley Local Area commander, Superintendent Tony Jefferson, gives the lie to the Mayor’s words. He says some have been charged with assault, traffic and domestic matters—but “they do not stand out over any other ethnic group in the community.” Unrepentant, Treloar says: “If this is racist, well so be it. Call me a racist then.” (Murphy, 2006) In some cases, the council’s concern about lack of services was subsumed under a more intense discussion about concern with the “difference” of the problematized Sudanese refugees: Tamworth City Council has voted to refuse an offer by the Immigration Department to resettle five refugee families from the war-torn African nation. It feared cultural differences and a lack of services could lead to increased violence in the city, which is home to the world-renowned country music festival. Mayor James Treloar said public submissions showed there was a clear sense of mistrust in the town, after several existing Sudanese residents were charged with driving offences and one with sexual assault. (Dunkerley, 2006, emphasis added) What seems clear from these reports then is that the council’s decision was not solely about race, as one report cites the mayor: “It was a rejection of the government’s program, not of the Sudanese.” This reaffirms Schulz’s (2008) contention that “modern media practice includes selective processes within the newsroom environment, and journalists abide by certain clearly defined ‘news values’ that prescribe the elements of a ‘good story.’ Such elements generally include “the sensational and the dramatic” (p. 224). It also aligns with the view put forth by certain framing scholars that valenced news frames provide an indication of what is inherently good and positive or bad and negative in the news story (de Vreese et al., 2011) while confirming that negative information tends to have greater salience and memorability than information which is positive (de Vreese et al., 2011; Johnson-Cartee & Copeland, 1991; Lau, 1985). Furthermore, where the mayor was quoted citing statistics to validate the council’s decision, these were presented as either unsubstantiated or motivated by bigotry (Leader, Diamond Valley News, 2007). This again points to framing which is about highlighting and/or downplaying some bits of information about an item to either make them more noticeable, meaningful, or memorable to an audience on the one hand, or less noticeable,

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less meaningful, or less memorable on the other (Entman, 2002). One other important observation about the reporting of the council’s reversal of the decision is how the media coverage magnified the role of external pressures (for example from the church) or widespread outrage (for example from the media “bashing,” community outrage, etc.) that implied that the “racist council” could not come to this decision on its own, without these outside/ external pressures. For example, two of the articles included in this review reported on the role of the churches in the reversal of the decision (Wilson, 2007a, 2007b)

RACE/ING THE TAMWORTH CASE? The media coverage of the issue was largely devoted to trying to prove that residents of Tamworth (and, by extension, most Australians) were racist, while failing to address the basic question of why the local council was voting on the issue in the first place and how they actually had the power to veto the decision to locate the refugees in the town. (Allsop, 2007, p. 27) The question therefore arises, given the foregone discussion as well as Allsop’s contention above, did the media “race” the Tamworth council’s decision? In other words, was the Tamworth council’s decision inherently racist, implying that the media were simply reporting/exposing an act of racism? As discussed already, clearly some of the reports privileged racism above all else, giving the impression that racism was at the core of the council’s decision, as Mirko Bagaric (2006), a social commentator (Geelong Advertiser), writes, Racism, pure and simple is the only reason the council rejected the resettlement of the Sudanese families. Service provision has nothing to do with it. Tamworth has 40,000 people. An additional few families won’t break the bank. In case it decides to stay open, here are some lessons for the councillors. (p. 21) Bagaric’s statement does not leave room for any other explanation for the council’s decision, in spite of some other commentators’ claims that “the broader concerns of the council, in tune with community sentiment, were that the existing government HRRP was ill-equipped to deliver full services to newly arrived refugee families, threatening the longer-term success of the pilot scheme” (Fraser, 2007, p. 17). The racism frame adopted by the writer from the Geelong Advertiser and the emphatic nature of the claim again fits well with the observation made earlier that framing seeks to “promote a particular problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation and/

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or treatment recommendation for the item described” (Entman, 2002, p. 391) and also tries to “emphasize a particular cause of some phenomena” (Iyengar, 1991, p. 11). Nonetheless, we contend, that while the media did give most of their attention to race (to the extent of almost disregarding any other basis for the decision), they did not “race it.” To start with, as Fraser (2007) notes, The Tamworth incident was played out at a time of glaring media profile for the Sudanese community in Australia. The recent cases of convicted rapist Hakeem Hakeem, and of Taban Gany, sentenced for drink driving causing serious injury, have subjected the wider Sudanese population to columns of outrage in the press and to simmering distrust from within sections of the public. (p. 17) One could argue therefore that the council’s decision was made in the context of attitudes and understandings emanating from discourses of the racially problematized Sudanese refugee and that they were influenced by these discourses, while at the same time contributing to them. As Fairclough (1989) rightly points out, “Social conditions determine properties of discourse” (p. 9)” and “the language activity which goes on in social contexts is not merely a reflection or expression of social processes and practices; it is part of those processes and practices” (p. 23).

MEDIA (RE)PRODUCING THE PROBLEMATIZED (SUDANESE) REFUGEE SUBJECT An important (perhaps unintended) effect of the media’s framing of the Tamworth case as a racist event is how the Sudanese subject was portrayed and positioned. The portrayal of the Sudanese refugee—oftentimes reported by quoting the words of Tamworth city councilor and local publican, Robert Schofield—also propagated and perpetuated an image of Sudanese subjectivity defined in terms of victimhood and abject poverty, thereby reinforcing the “us” and “them” dichotomy: Councillor and local publican Robert Schofield said: “These are people escaping war and persecution. I’m sickened by the lack of compassion.” (Norrie, 2006, emphasis added) We’ve got many, many volunteers up here. There’s lots of volunteer groups, they’re only too pleased to help the Sudanese, the poor souls, to get a new life back in Tamworth, Mr Schofield told Southern Cross Radio. “We’re a wealthy country and it’s only five families, and the poor souls

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have got absolutely nothing. They come from a war-torn country where they’ve been fighting there for 21 years, that’s all they’ve known. (Geelong Advertiser, 2007, emphasis added) The emotive appeal of the excerpts above is evident, (“sickened by the lack of compassion”; “poor souls”). Further, the paternalistic overtones constructed and reproduced an “other” who is abjectly poor, hence different from “us” a “wealthy country.” Perhaps more important in the excerpts is the references made to war and persecution. These have more enduring and possibly even inimical consequences for portrayal of the Sudanese subject—as victims, who as Mayor Treloar argued, “fly out of Sudan, arrive in Sydney, pop on a plane and come to Tamworth—and they come with trauma, . . . [to a place where they] don’t have the trauma counsellors to help them” (Saleh & Keene, 2006). Thus, rather than centre the resilience of Sudanese to survive under crisis situations, such reporting instead associates them with violence: Few people could have greater claims to being given safe haven in Australia than the Sudanese. Apart from a hiatus from 1972 to 1983, civil war has raged in southern Sudan since 1955. It has claimed close to two million lives and displaced about four million people. Despite international efforts to broker a peace deal between rebel forces and government troops allied with Arab janjaweed militia, the conflict in the Darfur region shows little sign of abating. (“Shame Tamworth,” 2006, p. 12) Adopting the frames of war, persecution, and violence, instead of resilience and survival in the discussion of Sudanese subjectivity meant that attention was paid to only a small number of attributes, which would subsequently ensure that Sudanese refugees are seen only in a certain light (McCombs & Estrada, 1997). Such reporting/framing reinforces Councilor Schofield’s statement that war is “all they [Sudanese refugees] have known.” A consequence of such reporting is that it can conjure up images and constructs of an “other” sufficiently different from “us” (one who’s only ever known violence) that there is the possibility of a “clash of civilisations.” Not surprising then that the Sudanese subject would be subsequently associated with violent behavior, as Mayo Treloar argued. This “violent” subject, “different from us” is highlighted in the reporting of the sentiments of a Tamworth resident below: A few doors up, a single mother shoos her young daughter inside. She is a large woman, and stands barefoot on her dying front lawn, pointing angrily at her neighbours. “Did you ask them about the 11-year-old-girls that go into

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that house? It’s totally inappropriate,” she says, her eyes welling with tears of rage. “Did you ask them about driving off and not paying for petrol? We don’t do that. Why are the Aborigines scared of them? They stand outside here on the street yabbering away on their mobile phones. They just stare at you. Everybody’s terrified of them in the street. Why can’t they just go back where they came from?” (Murphy, 2006) The excerpt above not only frames the Tamworth case as a racist event, but exposes the fear and uneasiness of some of Tamworth residents with the Sudanese subject. We argue that it is this fear and uneasiness that is behind such residents’ support of the council’s decision: Allowing more Sudanese refugees into the town meant the potential to increase violence (and crime) in an otherwise peaceful town. Moreover, some of the reporting highlighted the Sudanese refugee as not only “different,” but also “raced”: Sudanese have black skin and are often Muslim but in every meaningful respect they are the same as every other person in Australia. That’s a lesson civic leaders in Tamworth who have refused to re-settle five Sudanese families need to have drilled into them. Otherwise, their town, which has been voted Australia’s most friendly, might also get the mantle as the most racist [ . . . ] Sure some Sudanese might express themselves in slightly different ways, prefer different music and eat different food but these no more differentiate them from the rest of us than does the fact most of us follow different football teams. (Bagaric, 2006, p. 17) Such descriptions though purporting to be benign, serve to subtly prop up “the structural relation in which ‘whiteness’ is defined against a homogenized Other constructed as black” (Stratton, 2006, p. 676). It is worth pointing out that the Sudanese refugee subject who is re/ produced in the reports is one who is silenced. In analyzing the media reporting of the Tamworth case, what is glaringly obvious is the lack of the Sudanese voice in most of the reports, that is, the views/opinions of the Sudanese refugees living in Tamworth in relation to the vote. In this sense, the media not only reproduced the problematized Sudanese refugee, it also silenced them, thereby committing what Spivak (1994), calls an act of “epistemic violence” (p. 78). Interestingly, of the few articles that included comments from migrants of Sudanese background, none was from Sudanese living in Tamworth. For example, Saleh and Keene’s article: “No More Refugees—Tamworth Mayor Defends Vote to Slam the Gate” references the experiences of Marial Fieg, residing in Newcastle. Similarly, Saleh’s

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articles: “‘Racist’ Council’s Apology of Sorts—Tamworth’s About-Face” and “Council Reconsiders: Tamworth Says Sorry to its Sudan Refugees” also include “the voice” of Sudanese refugees residing in Blacktown. Our contention then is that the media failed in their role of serving as “a crucial arena for challenging prevailing attitudes regarding the many ‘others’” (Howard & Idriss, 2007, p. 2).

DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION This article has presented analyses of online print media reporting of the Tamworth City council’s 2006 decision (and subsequent reversal of that decision) to refuse the resettlement of five refugee families into the town, which gained media attention and condemnation as an act of racism: a decision based mainly on racial prejudice. Bullimore (1999) writes that The Australian media, like the media of many Westernised countries, plays a significant role in not only providing information about the society in which we live but also in actively constructing for us a picture of that society. (p. 72) What picture of society did the media paint in the Tamworth case then? We have argued in this article that the media framed the Tamworth Sudanese issue in particular ways that would encourage the audience to see the Tamworth Council’s initial decision as racist and the whole issue as being about racism (Delli Carpini & Keeter, 1997; Hacker & Pierson, 2005). According to Gitlin (1980), “Media frames are persistent patterns of cognition, interpretation, and presentation, of selection, emphasis and exclusion, by which symbol-handlers routinely handle discourse” (p. 7). Our discussion here has shown that the media’s selection, interpretation, and presentation of the events surrounding the Tamworth Council’s decisions— rejection and subsequent reversal—were meant to introduce patterns of cognition to the audience that would more than likely make them see the case as being about race and racism. Tamworth council was constructed in the media coverage and discourses as having made a decision based on racial prejudice. In other words, through their framing, the media painted a picture of a “racist” council, by extension, a racist Tamworth, and by inference a racist country/rural Australia (at the very least). The heavy mediation and the frame(s) adopted by the media, which linked the Council’s decisions to the wider issue of race, racism, and racial harmony, turned what could have easily passed for an innocuous everyday occurrence—a Federal Government request to a City Council, and their

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negative response to the said request—into a media event “par excellence” (Iyengar & Simon, 1997, p. 256). In so doing, the media provided “a societywide forum where values, norms, and social structures were scrutinized, challenged, and celebrated” (Hunt, 1997, p. 410) in the name of so-called racial moral outrage and harmonious race relations. Moreover, when one applies Essed’s concept of everyday racism to the case, it is evident that the decision was an act of everyday racism. Essed (1991) describes everyday racism as the everyday manifestations and (re) production of systemic inequality based on race and/or assumptions around race, whether intended or unintended. Though other factors may/could have influenced the decision-making and attitudes of decision makers in this case, it is not far-fetched to argue that the structural forces of racism, represented by attitudes and understandings that permeate the circulating media discourses around Sudanese refugees that problematize and present them as the “racialized other,” would have played a role in influencing the council, acting in an everyday routine situation, to take a decision that would discriminate against the refugees. And as Stratton suggests, these attitudes and understandings are so embedded in the everyday life of a racialized Australian culture that its members don’t even recognize themselves as making decisions based on a racialized history (Stratton, 2006, p. 662). Our conclusions about the media’s framing notwithstanding, it remains debatable whether the media reporting mirrored or portrayed community attitudes and perceptions toward Sudanese refugees. While some may hail the reporting of the Tamworth case as an exposé of a case of racism, it could also be critiqued as sensationalist reporting that pushed the media agenda and exaggerated a race issue for the sake of news (see, for example, Allsop, 2007; Fraser, 2007). Moreover, as has been discussed in detail in this article, the media, in their reporting still reproduced the current negative discourses of refugees that are not only paternalistic and patronizing, but also problematize and pathologize refugees. In so doing, the media became a site for the perpetuation of negative stereotypes of Sudanese (and by extension African) refugeehood that were in themselves racist. In our view, what the media did qualifies as racial ramblings because of the nature of their coverage and their insistent and persistent focus on race and racism, and the presentation of stereotypes, which while supposedly intended to be benign, ultimately served as a platform for (re)producing and enhancing both everyday and systemic racism. The analyses in this article illustrates that the Tamworth

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Case contained base materials for different frames and that there was an opportunity to offer multiple explanations as to why the Tamworth Council made their initial decision to reject the Federal Government’s request, but that did not happen. This article therefore shows that explanations offered in news coverage of such issues while at least partially inherent, are influenced to a great extent by “social, cultural, and historical forces influencing the institution and practice of journalism” (Park, Holody, & Zhang, 2012, p. 477). In terms of value, this article has provided insights into an issue that is of politico-cultural significance within the Australian society—the issue of race, racism, and racial relations. Given the on-going discussions about racism in Australia and how to deal with it, and also public discourses about multiculturalism as official cultural policy, the discussions in this article help us to understand the mass media’s role in highlighting racism as a problem for public and political concern while providing valuable insights into how the media can act as a double-edged sword: helping to unearth and fight racism, thereby championing racial harmony on one hand, while providing a platform for (re)producing racial stereotypes and subsequently everyday racism. The article is also important because it has shown that news frames can affect/influence the decision making of elected bodies (in this case, cause a change of mind/decision by the Tamworth Council), thereby confirming research findings that suggest that people who are moderately or most politically aware are more responsive to media framing (see, for example, de Vreese et al., 2011; Druckman & Nelson, 2003; Lecheler & de Vreese, 2012; Slothuus, 2008; Sniderman & Theriault, 2004). Also by providing some understanding of the “dynamics between media coverage and what people make of the issues presented to them on one hand, and how this coverage interacts with societal factors to produce effects” (Kwansah-Aidoo, 2001, p. 364), the discussions and revelations here can inform discussions around the future direction of government refugee settlement policy. It can also help in designing programs that seek to gain both public and council support for such policy, as well as helping in discussions of a more robust multicultural policy for Australia. Last but not least, the worth of this article can be seen in the way in which it has shown why despite all the talk about racism and the efforts at ending it, race and racial matters continue to be issues of everyday concern. Our discussions have exposed the subtle and yet persistent way in which racism reproduces itself in the Australian society, through seemingly objective and benevolent ways of reporting the “other.”

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To sum up, we revisit the question in our title and conclude based on our discussions so far, that the media through their intense coverage and the negatively valenced frames that they used in their articles/stories, turned the Tamworth Sudanese Resettlement Case of 2006 into a media event (Iyengar & Simon, 1997; Kwansah-Aidoo, 2003). We also contend that in the process of doing so they engaged in reporting, which inadvertently served to enhance stereotypical ways of viewing the migrant Sudanese, and by extension African “other,” thereby contributing to the reproduction of both everyday and systemic racism (Essed, 1991; Stratton, 2006) and thus qualifying it as racial rumblings.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding The author(s) received no financial support for the research and/or authorship of this article.

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66. Wilson, S. (2007a, January 18). Church won over Council–Behind Tamworth’s rversal on refugee refusal. Daily Telegraph (Sydney, Australia), p. 14. 67. Wilson, S. (2007b, January 18). How Church fought for refugee rethink. Daily Telegraph (Sydney, Australia), p. 26.

CHAPTER

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COVERING ISLAM IN WESTERN MEDIA: FROM ISLAMIC TO ISLAMOPHOBIC DISCOURSES

Bouchaib Benzehaf Chouaib Doukkali University Morocco

ABSTRACT A fundamental role allocated to the media is the shaping of public opinion about topical issues, thus making the act of obtaining accurate and verified information a major challenge. In this context, Said (1997) argues that coverage of Islam by the media has always been lacking in subjectivity, and Arabs/Muslims have at best been obscured and at worst “othered” and demonized rather than revealed by the media. The 9/11 attacks have re-

Citation: Bouchaib Benzehaf, Chouaib Doukkali University Morocco JELTL (Journal of English Language Teaching and Linguistics) e-ISSN: 2502-6062, p-ISSN: 25031848 2017, Vol. 2 (1) www.jeltl.org doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.21462/jeltl.v2i1.33 Copyright: JELTL by http://www.jeltl.org is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License

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triggered an explosion of media coverage of Islam and Muslims with the terms “Muslim” and “Terrorist” becoming synonymous in many western countries. The attacks have been exploited to cause a social anxiety/panic toward Islam and Muslim cultures leading to Islamophobia which is being further reinforced in Trump’s America. Situated within the framework of Said’s Orientalism, which helps us understand the relationships between the West and the Muslim world and also framed by agenda-setting media theory, which explains how media manipulate public opinion, this paper argues that Islamophobia results from the way the news stories regarding Islam and Muslims are covered. In particular, these stories are media(ated) and thus distorted. The paper borrows tools from critical discourse analysis, particularly global meanings and lexicalization, to analyse selected examples of media(ted) coverage of Islam and Muslim stories from different media sources with the aim of offering a holistic review of the scope and nature of the coverage of Islam and Muslims. In light of the results, we suggest interfaith dialogue and intercultural education as measures that can bring about understanding and tolerance between different religious communities. Keywords: Media(ation), othering, Islamophobia, CDA, intercultural education.

INTRODUCTION Islamophobia can be defined as fear or hostility towards Islam and followers of Islamic religion. Such unjustified fear has contributed immensely to discrimination and hate of Muslims across the globe. The media have played a decisive role in this phenomenon. Taking advantage of its large target audience, the media have established and reinforced the unjustified fear and hate towards Islam and Muslims. The media have mediated the coverage of Islam and Muslims, and in so doing they have obscured Islam and Muslims rather than revealed them. The media have created barriers to the true understanding of Islam, with non-Muslim journalists, reporters and media analysts using the terms terrorism and Islam interchangeably. In this context, Said (1997) argues that coverage of Islam by the media has always been lacking in subjectivity. The act of obtaining accurate and verified information has, therefore, become a major challenge in this globalized world. The media takes advantage of the fact that its audience is varied and inclusive of all ages and walks of life. The people, who lack adequate skills

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and qualifications, heavily rely on preconceptions passed to them by the media in an attempt to understand the globe (Revell, 2010). The media are used as the most important weapon to shape public opinion and cover realities by their censorship and selective process. Thus, people’s sources of information are biased and mediated. The media agencies have mobilized armies of analysts and journalists whose job has been to defame and tarnish Islamic religion by associating it with terrorism, a social evil in the society (Khan, 2009). As such, these biased depictions of Islam and Muslims make Westerners, out of ignorance, contribute to Islamophobia. Western media coverage of Islam and Muslims has always been cast in a negative light. According to Hafez (2000), Western mass media tend “to characterize Islam as a fanatic and violent religion cutting-off hands, repressing women, and representing a clear antagonism towards Western ideas of freedom, human rights and democracy” (p. 5). Investigating the representation of Islam and Muslims in media news discourse after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Alazzany (2008) found that violence, threat, hate and evil constituted the dominant ideological themes, thus painting Islam and Muslims as a threat to global stability. Examining media representation of Sunni-Shia relations, Douai and Lauricella (2014) reported that the news media portrayed tensions between Sunni and Shia Islam from the perspective of “war on terrorism”. Along the same lines, Alghamdi (2015) used critical discourse analysis to examine Western media coverage of the 2011 Norway terrorist attacks. The main finding was that some western media authors, inaccurately and unjustly, jumped to the conclusion that Muslims and Islamic groups were responsible for the attacks. These writers manipulated language in a way that revealed “blind prejudice against Islam and Muslims”. Similarly, Törnberg and Törnberg (2016) examined patterns of representation around the words Muslim and Islam in a 105 million word corpus of a large Swedish Internet forum from 2000 to 2013. The results obtained showed that Muslims are portrayed as a homogeneous outgroup implicated in conflict, violence and extremism. Also, these characteristics are described as emanating from Islam. The researchers reported that these patterns are often more extreme versions of those previously found in analysis of traditional media. Along the same lines, Oboler (2016) reported that Facebook is being used to normalize Islamophobia. After a qualitative analysis of 349 posts on Facebook, Oboler found several themes that depict Muslims as manipulative, dishonest and a threat to security and to

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Western way of life. The Internet, therefore, was found to reinforce existing discourses in traditional media. Western media did not spare defaming Islam and its prophet even in cartoons targeting children. When considering media’s impact on young children, this is most compelling as it teaches young children how to behave. In this context, Schrag and Javidi (1997) argues that children’s first stories teach them not only false concepts about the real world, but also the criteria to evaluate the truthfulness of later media accounts in light of what has been inculcated into them. Thus, young children, who lack prior experience with Eastern culture, are bound to learn from child films like Aladdin inaccurate stories about Arabs, that they are, for instance, commonly prone to violent rage upon smallest, most trivial things such as discovering a single apple has been stolen from their cart. The present paper is a critical discourse analysis of selected examples of media(ted) coverage of Islam and Muslim stories with the aim of offering a holistic review of the scope and nature of the coverage of Islam and Muslims as well as the point of view from which the world is presented. These examples are taken from different media sources: television, newspapers and Internet. The paper ends with practical suggestions regarding the deconstruction of Islamophobia. In this regard, interfaith dialogue, intercultural education and use of the Internet as a platform for interacting and marketing alternative freeing stories are suggested because of their potential to bring about understanding and tolerance between different religious communities.

THEORETICAL CONSIDERATIONS Said’s theory of Orientalism (2003) constitutes a suitable framework for the understanding of the relationship that binds Westerners with Muslims. Orientalism refers to the inaccurate representations and perception of the Eastern world by the Western world. It reveals Eurocentric prejudice against Arab–Islamic peoples and their culture. It is built on a hierarchy of a European self which is strong, rational and masculine and an Eastern other which is weak, irrational, and feminine. Such polarization helped Europe to define itself by establishing and maintaining opposites and others. The west was everything that the East was not and vice versa. Said believes that besides the academy, the corporations, and the government, the media play a fundamental role in this regard (Said, 1981). Orientalism explains that the West has historically constructed nonWestern societies as the other, distant, sensual, passive, irrational, … to

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define itself. In Covering Islam, Said (1981) points out that the view of Islam is still structured by the historical encounter between the West and the East, an encounter which was framed by passion, prejudice and political interests. Said also argues that Israel plays a mediating role in Western views of the Arab and Islamic world since its creation in 1948. In the same vein, Poole and Richardson (2006) argue that the press often construct Muslims through an Orientalist lens. Thus, a framework of US and THEM has been created which identifies Muslims as dangerous, terrorists and oppressive. As we speak about coverage of Islam in the media, we also need to look at how media operate. While they are claimed to convey the reality, the media, in fact, construct the reality. By mediating the news, the media choose what to put in people’s minds as well as providing them with the framework within which to evaluate, assess and analyze things. True that people are not naïve to believe everything they are exposed to and the issue is more complex than expressed, but mass media’s products constitute a key element of civil society which are aimed at serving the interests of policy makers. Media constitute the soft power which drones on the values of the dominant group and enforces them through consent rather than force. In fact, the news stories generally reiterate the grand narratives that serve the interests of hegemony. According to Gramsci, mass media are important as social institutions that promote the values of the dominant group by producing consensus and manufacturing consent. Similarly, Gitlin (2003) argues that the media control that which it passes to the public, thereby infusing a false consciousness among them. Media representation of Islam and its culture, therefore, should be analyzed within frameworks of media theories. Hence, we suggest that Said’s theory be supplemented with one of the media theories which enable us to understand how public opinion is manipulated. Agenda-setting theory, which refers to the capacity of media to set agendas and to assign importance to an issue through repeated news coverage, is a suitable framework (Severin & Tankard, 2000, p. 219). According to this theory, repeated media coverage of Muslims as terrorists leads to the belief and acceptance by viewers that they are really terrorists, and hence media generates hate and fear of Muslims. Besides setting the agenda for public discussion, the media also puts in readers’ minds what to think, talk about and how. It has an influence on the public perception of issues, and it uses this influence to reinforce orientalist representations of Islam and Muslims.

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RESEARCH METHOD The paper offers a critical discourse analysis (CDA) of selected examples of media(ted) coverage of Islam and Muslim stories selected from different media sources in the latest years. The texts analysed are selected from a variety of sources, television, newspapers and the Internet using the search terms Islam, Muslims, and Arabs. Such a variety of sources aims at offering a holistic review of the nature and scope of the coverage of Islam and Muslims. The choice of the texts is made on the basis of Topic Modeling, a model for discovering the abstract “topics” that occur in a collection of texts. It helps us identify thematic structures and topics within the texts chosen by focusing on the linguistic discursive landscape which contextualises Muslims and Islam and thus influences their meanings. CDA was first developed by the Lancaster school of linguists, an influential figure of which is Fairclough (1995) who has made major contributions to this field of study. CDA makes the point that language plays a crucial role in shaping the way we experience the world, and that language is a tool of domination as well as social practice. Text producers use language in such a way as to shape the hearer/reader’s perception of the world. For example, if the aim is to make people hate Islam and Muslims, mass media, which are managed by dominant groups, focus their talk on the threat posed by Islam and Muslims. By linking Islam and Muslims with terrorism, mass media raises the audience’s fears and influences them into hating Islam and Muslims. To uncover such subtle, implicit ideologies, CDA uses different tools such as lexicalization, modality and transitivity. From a CDA perspective, a text reveals the interests served by the text. It helps us understand that a text constructs a version of reality rather than reflects or mirrors reality. It teaches us that the producer of the text constrains possible interpretations of the events through the use of the language. It is noteworthy that we do not go into details of the texts particularly because it is not feasible with films. Therefore, we only analyse the content and headings using what is referred to as global meanings or topics in Van Dik (2001). Topics play a major role in the analysis because they capture the most important information in the discourse. Also used in the analysis is lexicalization to analyse choice of particular words especially in news that report the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. We believe these two techniques will help us expose the ideological underpinnings of media discourse. Both

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topics and lexicalisation lend themselves easily to memory and that is why they are important in the analysis.

RESULTS, ANALYSIS AND DISCUSSION The main topic that emerges is that Islam is a religion of terror and violence, and that Muslims and Arabs constitute one homogeneous group described as terrorists and killers. In the question of Islam, it is obvious that the global media have overlooked the ethical issues of broadcasting. In the name of ‘fight against terror”, they have launched a concerted campaign against Islam and Muslims. Dozens of documentaries and films have been fabricated which defame Islam and Muslims and portray Muslims as blood thirsty and potential terrorists. As said says, reporters who cover the Muslim world are ignorant about Islam and therefore, develop a distorted image of Islam which they pass on to the masses as if they were the truths. Muslims in Western films and documentaries are exotic, violent, dangerous, always seeking to kill people. Films and documentaries abound in this context. A very telling case in point is a Danish documentary “Fitna” which contains very shocking images. “Fitna”, a 2008 short film, demonstrates that the Qur’an motivates its followers to hate non-Muslims. In a way that makes it appear that the acts of terror by an isolated handful of terrorists are a direct application of the teachings of the Qur’an, the film features selected verses from the Qur’an, followed by media clips and newspaper cuttings which demonstrate acts of terror presumably perpetrated by Muslims. This way, the film links between acts of terrorism and Islam, thereby setting the agenda of Muslims as terrorists. The main argument is that Islam is a religion of terror, violence and blood. Also featured in the film is a caricature of the Prophet Muhammad with a bomb on his head in an attempt to describe him as a killer. Besides, the choice of the word “Fitna” as a title is not innocent. It is an Arabic word which denotes disagreement, disorder and chaos with which the film also associates Islam as a religion. For the people, particularly youths, who cannot obtain information from the mainstream media, the Internet steps in to play the significant role of passing unrestricted information to the masses. Instead offering liberating stories, the Internet constitutes an extension of traditional mass media. It contributes to the process of brainwashing people into believing that Islam has no place in their society. In this context, it was used to host the film “Fitna”. The film was released repeatedly on the internet in 2008.

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Along the same lines, on September 5, 2014, Gary Cass, head of the Christian Anti-Defamation Commission, argues in a post on his organization’s website that the Islamic militant group ISIS had revealed the intentions of all Muslims. The main idea of that post was that Islam has no place in civilized society, thus depicting Islam as a pariah. In Cass’s post, Muslims are referred to as would-be terrorists whereas Westerners are associated with civilisation. He writes, for instance, “ISSI (sic) has done us all a favor,”, hence categorizing Westerners as “US”, a pronoun which implies its opposite, namely “THEM”. The use of the collective pronoun “us” in some of this posting instantiates shared beliefs, viz., those of all Western people who are threatened by a violent Islam. The “US” is inclusive of the West and exclusive of Muslims. In so doing, Islamophobia is a natural outcome and all Muslims are suspects as they constitute the out-group, the pariahs. In the same year, 2014, a Fox News military analyst compared Islam to Nazism, Fascism and Communism, warning Americans to be wary of individuals who claim to be Muslim American. Similarly, on June 20, 2016, and this time on CNN, an analyst claimed that “the next time you hear of a terror attack -- no matter where it is, no matter what the circumstances -- you will likely think to yourself, ‘It’s Muslims again.’ And you will probably be right.” These examples display an Islamophobic discourse, a discourse of fear and hate which works to consolidate a sense of “US” who are threatened by the terrorist “THEM”. Islamophobia has also been deployed to buttress support for Israel, and to cement alliances between Jews and Christians against Muslims. Hence, coverage of conflicts is also subject to deliberate distortion of news and exclusion/suppression of information. In this context, Zaher (2009, p. 28) argues that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is among the main factors that affect the relationship between Arabs and the West. The way it has been covered further shows that media coverage is biased against Arabs and Muslims. A case in point regarding the way it has been covered is from the BBC on 13 February, 2013: THREE ISAELIS KILLED BY ROCKET FIRE FROM GAZA, WHERE 13 PALESTINIANS HAVE DIED IN ISRAELI AIR STRIKES SINCE IT KILLED A HAMAS CHIEF ON WEDNESDAY. The heading shows clearly that the use of language is not innocent. The writer used the verb “killed” for Israelis which makes them appear victims of an act of terrorism while he used the verb “died” for the Palestinian side

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which denotes absence of a perpetrator of a terrorist act. The verb “kill” requires a subject who did the killing while “died” does not require a subject. It is an ergative verb the significance of which is to enable the writer to suppress the identity of the agent responsible for the particular process of killing. Even more, it represents the victim of the action as in some way causing the action by which it is affected. Note that when the verb “killed” is used, the question that follows is “who killed them?” while we cannot ask the question of “who died them?” Palestinians are assigned responsibility for killing three Israelis while Israel’s responsibility is excluded. Such a choice of words legitimates the use of violence against Palestinians and makes it appear as fight against terror. The foregrounding of the Israeli dead people further serves the process of victimization of Israelis and incrimination of Palestinians. Therefore, the analysis of the above texts betrays an ideologically laden discourse that distorts the reality of Islam in a way that dichotomizes the world into a positive self-representation and a negative other-representation. Also, the discourses in all the different media types seem to reflect and reinforce each other, thereby reflecting a symbiotic relationship instead of a competing one. The purpose is to demonise Muslims and their religion by casting them in an unfavourable Orientalist light. The analysis also reveals the discursive sources of power, inequality and bias particularly in covering the Israeli Palestinian conflict. The topics of all selected texts denote that Islam and Muslims including Arabs are terrorists. This leads to Islam and Muslims being hated and feared and thus legitimates any action taken against them. The results obtained fit well with existing research. Representation of Islam and Muslims as a threat to global stability is a discourse that has been at play ever since Western media started the process of coverage. This has been underscored in Said as well as in other researchers who investigated the representations of Islam and Muslims in Western media. Hafez (2000) and Alazzany (2008) also reported biased depictions of Islam and Muslims in their papers. Similarly, Douai and Lauricella (2014) reported that Islam and Muslims are always dealt with from the perspective of terrorism. It is noteworthy that Arabic and Islamic nations are ironically not responding in the same way. They have not described the actions of the United States towards invasion of Iraq as acts of terrorism, although the death toll has surpassed 100, 000 victims (Lehren & Tavernise, 2010). Similarly, the NATO airstrikes on civilians in Libya which caused the death of hundreds

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of innocent noncombatants have not been used by Arabic nations to refer to United States Christians as terrorists.

CONCLUSION & SUGGESTIONS This paper was about coverage of Islam and Muslims in Western media. It showed with examples that coverage of Islam is not innocent, that “objectivity” and “fairness” that are raised by mass media are far from being true. After all, news about Islam is constructed from a particular ideological point of view which serves the dominant groups and their interests. Such being the case, Islamic nations are branded by Western media as central points of violence and terrorism. While this is hardly new, the 9/11 attacks have led to an increase of media coverage of Islam and Muslims with the terms “Muslim” and “Terrorist” becoming synonymous in many western countries. Most western media are using the 9/11 attacks to depict Islam as “fundamentalism”, “extremism” and “radicalism”, thereby manipulating the image of reality to misrepresent Muslims as “terrorists” posing a threat to the western security. The isolated acts of terrorist groups, who kill innocent people, like western hostages, have fed this process of demonization and othering. The isolated attacks are exploited to cause a social anxiety/panic toward Islam and Muslim cultures leading to Islamophobia which is being further reinforced in Trump’s America by Trump’s immigration ban policy. Such being the case, the true meaning of Islam and its teachings can never be accurately understood. They can only be understood when the barriers created by the media are removed. Thus, Westerners are called upon to look for true versions of Islam and Muslims in the teaching of Islam. They should go back to primary sources of Islam instead of receiving their stories from second-hand mediated, biased sources. These are the Qu’ran and the Hadiths of the prophet peace be upon him and the great four Imams who have attempted to explain the two Islamic texts, the Qu’ran and the Hadith. On the part of Muslims and Arabs, to overcome Islamophobia, a number of measures need to be undertaken. Effective initiatives must be made to help non-Muslims get correct Islamic concepts and teachings particularly those of peace and tolerance. First, we must encourage dialogue, and we must all accept and tolerate different cultural and religious values. By integrating difference, it should be underscored that a culturally richer and more open community is the result not a bigot one. Also, open debates should be encouraged in order to make the complexity of the issue transparent and

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enable different perceptions to take place. Intercultural education is also an important measure in the direction of overcoming Islamophobia. It can make an important and meaningful contribution to sustainable and tolerant societies. The importance of intercultural education lies in promoting peaceful coexistence, understanding among the peoples of the world. This could be done by creating programmes that encourage dialogue between students of different cultures, beliefs and religions. Also, student exchange programmes are strongly encouraged because they enable students to experience the history and culture of other countries, thereby promoting tolerance and acceptance of difference. Along with intercultural education, interfaith or interreligious dialogue should be encouraged. Cooperative, constructive and positive interaction between people of different religions/faiths at both the individual and institutional levels leads to mutual empowerments of the religions involved. Interfaith dialogue plays an important role in creating a viable, sustaining human society. It also constitutes an alternative to fear, anxiety and hate. Use of the Internet as a platform for marketing alternative freeing stories are also strongly suggested because of their potential to bring about understanding and tolerance between different religious communities. Particularly young people who are hooked on the internet are encouraged to build stories of love, tolerance and acceptance and to share them with their counterparts in the West. All in all, on the basis of humanity, we should meet and work together towards the best of our world. We all belong to one race which is the human race; we should know that the durability of our world depends on our acceptance of others, sharing and collaborating, not hating, excluding and exterminating. If mass media manufacture consent and serve hegemony, room for change is also possible with counter-hegemony (Stevenson, 1995, p. 17). Last, we do recognise some of the shortcomings of the approach adopted in the analysis. First, the data set is small which risks neglecting important patterns. Second, use of CDA has been tainted as lacking academic rigor as the analysis may be influenced by analyst’s subjective preconceptions. Thus, we recommend future large-scale studies using large data sets and combining CDA tools with new methodologies and technical solutions to capture the multifacets of media discourse on Islam and Muslims.

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REFERENCES 1.

Alazzany, M. A. O. A. (2008). A critical discourse analysis of the representation of Islam and Muslims following the 9/11 events as reported in The New York Times (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). Universiti Putra Malaysia (UPM), Malaysia. 2. Alghamdi, E. A. (2015). The representation of Islam in Western media: The coverage of Norway terrorist attacks. International Journal of Applied Linguistics & English Literature, 4(3), 198-204. 3. Cottle, S. (2006). Mediatized Conflict: Developments in Media and Conflict Studies. 4. Maidenhead: Open University Press. 5. Douai, A., & Lauricella, S. (2014). The ‘Terrorism Frame’ in ‘NeoOrientalism’: Western News and the Sunni-Shia Muslim Sectarian Relations after 9/11. International Journal of Media and Cultural Politics, 10(1), 7-24. 6. Fairclough, N. (1995). Critical Discourse Analysis. London: Longman. 7. Gitlin, T. (2003).The Whole World is Watching: Mass Media in the Making and Unmaking of the New left. London: University of California Press. 8. Hafez, K. (2000). The West and Islam in the Mass Media: Cornerstones for a New International Culture of Communication in the 21st Century. ZEI Discussion Paper. C 61. Center for European Integration Studies. Bonn, Germanny. 9. Kempf, W. (2002). Conflict Coverage and Conflict Escalation. In Kempf, W. & Luostarinen, H. (eds.). (2002). Journalism and the New World Order Vol.2. Göteborg: Nordicom, 59- 72. 10. Khan, M. (2009). Huntington’s Prophecies: A Tribute to an Outstanding Political Genius. Retrieved from Islam Watch: Telling the Truth About Islam: http://islam-watch.org/MA_Khan/Huntington-PropheciesTribute-Political-Genius.htm 11. Lehren, A.W., & Tavernise, S. (2010) A grim portrait of civilian deaths in Iraq. New York Times. Retrieved from: http://www.nytimes. com/2010/10/23/world/middleeast/23casualties.html 12. Oboler, A. (2016). The normalisation of islamophobia through social media: Facebook. In: Awan Imran (Ed.), Islamophobia in Cyberspace: Hate Crimes Go Viral (pp. 41-62). Routledge, New York.

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13. Poole, E. & Richardson, J. (2006). Introduction. In E. Poole & J. Richardson (Eds.), Muslims and the news media (pp. 1-24). London: I.B. Tauris. 14. Revell, L. (2010). Religious education, conflict and diversity: an exploration of young children’s perceptions of Islam. Educational Studies, 36(2), 207-215. 15. Saeed, A. (2007). Media, Racism and Islamophobia: The Representation of Islam and Muslims in the Media. Sociology Compass, 1(2). 16. Said, E. (1981). Covering Islam: How the media and the experts determine how we see the rest of the world. New York: Pantheon Books. 17. Schrag, Robert L., & Manoocher N. Javidi. (1997). Through a glass darkly: American media images of Middle Eastern cultures and their potential impact on young people.” In U.S. Media and the Middle East, ed. Yahya R. Kamalipour, pp. 212–221. Westport: Praeger. 18. Severin, W. J., & Tankard, J. W. (2000). Communication theories: Origins, methods, and uses in the mass media (5th ed.). New York: Longman. 19. Stevenson, N., (1995). Understanding Media Cultures: Social Theory and Mass Communication. London: Sage. 20. Törnberg, A., & Törnberg, P. (2016). Muslims in social media discourse: Combining topic modeling and critical discourse analysis. Discourse, Context and Media, 13, 132–142. 21. Unchit, Sumanawika. (2016). A CDA of Thai and American Music Radio Programs in Terms of the Influence of the Language of American Culture on the Language of Thai Culture. Journal of English Language Teaching and Linguistics, 1(2), 2016. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.21462/ jeltl.v1i2.22 22. Van Dijk, T. (1991). Racism and the press. London: Sage. 23. Van Dijk, T. (1998). Ideology: a multidisciplinary approach. London: Sage. 24. Wanta, W., & Wu, Y. C. (1992). Interpersonal communication and the agenda-setting process. Journalism Quarterly, 69, 847-855. 25. Zaher, A. (2009). A Critical Discourse Analysis of News Reports on the Israeli/Palestinian Conflict in Selected Arab and Western Newspapers. Nottingham Trent University. http://irep.ntu.ac.uk:1801/webclient/ StreamGate?folder_id=0&dvs=14318829 26. 50396 ~704. (25 November, 2014).

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RACISM IN PUBLIC DISCOURSE IN POLAND. A PRELIMINARY ANALYSIS Margaret Amaka Ohia University of Wroclaw

ABSTRACT During the last decade, representations of black people[1] in the Polish media have increased significantly. In this paper, I describe and analyze a set of linguistic mechanisms for portraying black people in the Polish media. My central case for analysis involves two media stories that took place in Poland between 2007-2010 involving two men, one black and one white, both of whom were diagnosed as HIV-positive. Simon transmitted the disease to a series of his female partners and reporting on the case consistently highlighted issues to do with his immigration status, culture,

Citation: Ohia, M. A. (2017). Racism in public discourse in Poland. A preliminary analysis. Edutainment, 1(1). Retrieved from https://jecs.pl/index.php/EDUT/article/ view/10.15503.edut.2016.1.147.161 Copyright: This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. CC-BY-SA

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crime, violence and sexual abuse. This set of issues was not raised in media coverage of Wieslaw, a white man who was also HIV-positive. The data for the analysis are drawn from a corpus of newspaper articles of the Polish newspapers: Gazeta Wyborcza and Rzeczpospolita. Based on the qualitative methods of discourse analysis, I will attempt to elicit some discursive ways of representing the black character, a member of the out-group, in comparison to the white in-group perpetrator. Keywords: discourse, racism, critical discourse analysis, media discourse, linguistics

INTRODUCTION This paper outlines an exploratory study of the generalizability of the theory of dissemination of racism as a function of top-down discourse construction and articulation, reflected through the interests of the symbolic elites as generators of such discourse. My goal is to explore the ways in which Poland, a Central European country without a colonial history, frames the language of media discourse on black people, their actions, and characteristics. Poland has a distinctive history of racial formation with regard to Africans. Unlike Western European countries with a colonial history and significant African Diaspora (like Britain, France or the Netherlands), Poland did not have colonies in Africa and thus now it only has a very small black population. I discuss some characteristics of the representations of the similar actions of the members of binary racial groups in Polish media discourse (massive white dominant vs. tiny black minority). Whereas the racial and ethnic otherness of the black man was emphasized in all sections and hence his individual negative action referred to the whole group, the white man was portrayed as an exceptional case in the Our group of Poles, as a “black sheep” of the society.

NUMBER OF AFRICANS IN POLAND Despite the presence of ethnic minority groups, i.e. Roma, Lemkos, Tartars, Karaims, and Jewish people, Poland along with Romania and Bulgaria is one of the EU countries with the lowest share of non-nationals in the population (conducted by Africa Another Way Foundation in 2011 (Duński, & Średziński, 2011) only 15% of all Poles have met an African in their neighborhood. This refers to the whole country. If we were to look at large cities (over 500,000 in population) in Poland, only 29% of all white

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respondents encountered a person of African origin, and 13% have met one in person. Black people in Poland are usually associated with the following social groups: • • •

students on scholarships (younger groups in large cities), sportsmen (soccer, basketball players), celebrities or prestigious professionals (doctors, journalists, politician john godson), • bazaar sellers. Despite these tiny numbers, black people in Poland have recently become a significant presence in the Polish media. The wide range of stories about black People in the Polish media cover three areas: • • • • • • •

negative representations of hunger, illnesses (especially AIDS), natural disasters, threat and deviance (existential, economic and cultural), TV travel shows (with focus on cultural differences), sexist depictions of women (exoticism), black people in other nations: persons from popular culture and politics (like president Obama).

THEORY OF DISCOURSE AND ELITE RACISM Although the concept of elite racism has been tested and investigated in several distinct countries and contexts, there is an apparent similarity to those discourse contexts that leaves open the question of how generalizable this theoretical construct really is. In other words, contexts where the theory has been tested are ones in which a significant minority population already exists, and has persisted for some time. My analysis of some of the common linguistic and discursive strategies about black people in the Polish media reveals that stereotypes exist in a nation that does not have a significant black population or colonial history. Despite the fact that the Polish experience with black people and with colonialism in Africa is fundamentally different from that of West European nations with significant black populations (like Britain or France), it can still reveal similar types of discourse structures to those we find in pubic discourses of these other nations (Wodak, & van Dijk, 2000), for example, as illustrated for Austria (e.g. Resigl, & Wodak 2001; Krzyżanowski, 2010; Boreus, 2013), Britain (e.g. van Dijk, 1991; van Dijk,

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1993; van Dijk, 1997; van Dijk, 2015; Richardson, 2007; KhosraviNik, Krzyżanowski, & Wodak, 2012), the Netherlands (e.g. van Dijk, 1984; van Dijk, 1987), Germany (e.g. Roberts, 2012), Spain (e.g. van Dijk, 2005), Denmark and Sweden (e.g. Boreus, 2013; Nohrstedt, 2013). My suggestion is that these discourse structures in Poland are likely to have a far more discriminatory effect, and may reproduce more powerful prejudices against blacks because there are so few of them in the nation. If such prejudices exist in a “Western” society, there is still frequent interaction between whites and blacks that can offset such prejudices. However, this has not yet been the case in a social context/space that has historically been without a minority population but is witnessing the emergence of a minority population. In addition to this, much of public discourse is largely controlled by the symbolic elites (i.e. leading politicians, journalists and academics). Studies have shown that the (white) dominant groups are largely responsible for the reproduction of racism in society through their discourse (van Dijk, 1993; Reisig, & Wodak, 2001; Jiwani, 2006; del TesoCraviotto, 2009; Jiwani, & Richardson, 2011). Van Dijk’s argument is about the fact that on the one hand elites would be critical of overt racism from others in society but be blind to their own covert forms of racism, which leads to institutional racism and perpetuates stereotypes and notions of Us vs. Them. However, because black minority group in Poland has not yet reached a threshold in power, population or political capability, racism is not yet the subject of a specific elite interest – or does not appear to be so at the surface. Polish ideas about and attitudes towards black people over the last two decades are drawn from media, cinema, and other popular cultural forms, and are thus are largely stereotypical. We now have available a range of examples across the Polish media – the national and local press, television, radio, internet and so on – in which Blacks are mentioned as a primary or secondary topic. It is through the mechanism of an assertion of the interests of that elite that the origination of racial discourse as being top-down (from the elite in nature) is investigated. For only in an assessment of their interests can we determine whether the general racial discourse in media may be sourced through that elite. This provides scholars with a significant source of evidence upon which to base an analysis of Polish media discourse on blacks. Discourse as a communicative process has a tremendous impact on the social representations, attitudes and ideologies of people, which can perpetuate racist prejudices (e.g. Potter, & Wetherell, 1987; Baker, Gabrielatos, & McEnery, 2013). By viewing, reading, listening and interacting with media channels on a daily level we are exposed to ideologies,

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values and beliefs that are reproduced by semantic and pragmatic meanings of text and discourse. What is crucial here is that racism is mostly learned by discourse. The reproduction of racism through discourse derives from a doubledimensional approach to racism as a system of domination consisting of two subsystems: the system of discriminatory discursive practices and the system of racial prejudices (for details see: e.g. van Dijk, 1991; for details about a socio-cognitive approach to discourse see van Dijk, 2014; van Dijk, in press). For this reason, the social relevance of discourse structures and thus ways that social beliefs pertain to racism will be highlighted in this article. My analysis builds on Teun van Dijk’s socio cognitive theory of the reproduction of racism through text and discourse. He argues that racism is a system of group domination consisted of two subsystems: a system of discriminatory practices and a system of (underlying) racial prejudices which reversely are the cause of the visible and embodied aspects of racism, namely all forms of discrimination as language and social practices (e.g. T. van Dijk, personal communications, February 1, 2010; van Dijk, in press). Hence social structures need to be interpreted and represented cognitively. At the same time, mental representations affect the cognitive processes involved in the production and interpretation of discourse. To show how the underlying attitudes shape discourse about Blacks, I will attempt to elicit some discourse structures and strategies in which media characters are constructed, described, and attributed in the discourse of Polish newspapers, thus contributing to the social reproduction of racism. The discourse structures introduced by Teun van Dijk, supported by Martin Reisigl and Ruth Wodak’s analytical tools for studying discourse on racial and ethnic groups in Western countries, provide an ample methodological basis for the analysis. It is important however to note that the linguistic tools are not enough on their own to conduct the hereto study. What’s crucial here is the context of the investigated matters. Therefore, implied in questions about the name and reference of the characters (marked by membership categorization devices), attribution of characteristics (signaled by stereotypical evaluative attributions of traits) and perspectivation of discourse (specific point of view, citation and quotation) (Reisigl, & Wodak, 2001), global topic (macrostructure) and text schemata (superstructure) (e.g. van Dijk, 2004; van Dijk, 2011) will be inquiries about media political profile or circumstances of the communicative event3.

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TEXTUAL ANALYSIS In this paper, I will focus on various linguistic ways of representing black people in Polish newspaper discourse. I specifically look at the case study about the story of Simon, a black HIV-positive man who transmitted the virus to his sexual partners. The analysis is conducted in comparison to the linguistic representation of Wieslaw, a white HIV-positive man who deliberately infected his partners with the virus. I have selected two sample texts for the analysis, both published in the last decade by the most prominent daily newspapers: Gazeta Wyborcza (typically associated with social liberalism and multiculturalism) and Rzeczpospolita (a moderately conservative broadsheet). To illustrate a few textual and discursive strategies of racial representation in media, I will give a detailed qualitative analysis of two news reports from the aforementioned papers.4 The first example published by Gazeta Wyborcza in 2007, is a part of an article on Simon Mol, a Black HIV-positive man. He was charged with passing the virus to his white Polish female partners in Poland. Simon, a son of Hanna Ngaje, was born in 1973 in Buea, the capital of the British Cameroon. Mol was notably known in Poland as a writer and a journalist. He was an anti-racist political activist and a winner of the Anti-fascist of the Year Prize by the Anti-Fascist Never Again Foundation in Poland. In 2007 when Mol was taken into custody by the Polish police and charged with infecting his sexual partners with HIV, he became one of the most frequently mentioned persons in media discourse in Poland. Nationwide media immediately commented on this and other related issues (the arrest, investigation of the man’s thus far biography, interviews with victims, etc.), highlighting his immigration status, culture, crime, violence and sexual abuse. Polish conservatives and Rzeczpospolita newspaper thus tagged him as “a professional refugee” (Text 3) and “a legend that killed” (Text 4). However, although most discourse was generated by the right-wing elite groups, the case was largely covered by Gazeta Wyborcza, a daily liberal Polish newspaper. This study will bring us to another story, which unlike Simon’s case was predominantly described by local newspapers along with Fakt and Super Express, the Polish nationwide tabloid press. The man was referred to as a “hippie lowlife” or “paedophileby the gutter press” The first example (Text 1), published by Gazeta Wyborcza in 2007, an article on Simon Mol, a black HIV-positive man who was charged with passing the virus to his white Polish female partners in Poland. The case was extensively covered by the media in a series of articles of various genres

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(news reports, editorials, opinion articles, background articles, features, interviews and columns), published between January 2007, when the man got arrested, to October 2008, when he died of AIDS. The analysis below draws from the study of newspaper discourse based on the continual dynamics of two rather classic types of discourse structures: introduced in the study of discourse by Teun van Dijk in his classic study of news discourse in press (e.g. van Dijk’s original work on structures of news in the press 1983, 1985, 2000), with special reference to his concept of global topic (macrostructure) and schematic organization (superstructure) of news discourse. He describes them both as compiling and closely related elements of any text and similarly applied in news text. He argues that a global topic defines what the meaning of a text is, and therefore represents the overall content of a news item. Schematic organization, on the other hand, determines the global topic by conventionally organizing the meaning in different parts of the text (van Dijk, 1991). They consist of headlines, leads, and body of the text that usually include background and context, events, comments, explanations, etc. The following table shows the extracted categories of text organization based on the articles about Simon (Text 1) and Wieslaw (Text 2). Although they are both structured in a standard way, we can see that each part of the first one contrasts with the fragments of the latter. For example, the last section in the article about Simon does not provide any direct comments beside the spokesperson’s, however several voices of the dominant discourse are implicitly mentioned (see the below analysis), whereas in the second story a journalist refers to specific utterances by explicitly indicated representatives of authorities.

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Table 1. Text data; superstructure. Source: Own elaboration based on (Text 1: Gazeta Wyborcza July 03, 2007; Text 2: Rzeczpospolita November 04, 2008). Headline Lead

Event description

Sub headline

A Cameroonian deliberately infected with HIV? (Text 1) “Accusations of exposing to the grievous bodily harm of incurable and enduring disease were rendered to a 34-year-old political refugee from Cameroon, Simon M. who has been suspected of infecting at least 4 women with HIV virus. He is threatened with spending up to 10 years in jail”. “Simon M. was detained by the police in Warsaw on Wednesday morning. He did not plead guilty at the examination”. “Based on his website, he is a Cameroonian poet, writer and journalist. Because of writing an article about the corruption scandal in Cameroon he had left his homeland. He initially sought asylum in Ghana, where he was granted political asylum status in 1998. He came to Poland one year later”.

Did he infect women with HIV? (Text 2) “A 46-year-old HIV-positive man may have infected a 15-year-old home evader, as well as dozens of other women”.

“The police say: Wieslaw is like a wandering bird. While staying in Krakow during the past few months, he rented an apartment where he got together with a 15-year-old. Little do we know about Wieslaw S. He is an electrician. He comes from Gizycko and he does not have any permanent residence. He makes money begging, gathering cans and producing beads necklaces”. “According to Rzeczpospolita research, Wieslaw S. had spent 3 years in prisons in Gizycko and Kielce. Initially in Spring 1994, he was taken into custody for a month. He spent 3 years in jail for an attempted murder from July 1994 to December 1996 and after a break from Autumn 1997 to May 1998”. No sub headline (the text remains Why did Wieslaw S. delibunder the main headline) erately expose his partner to the HIV infection?

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“The police spokesman reports the detention is a result of the police investigation conducted since the last days of November. A woman allegedly infected with HIV reported to the police. She identified a man that she suspected. The police interviewed a doctor who gave treatment to her and diagnosed the disease. After consulting him, it was assumed that there could be more people infected. Based on the doctor’s account, there were many young women infected with a specific type of HIV that occurs in one of the African countries stressed the spokesman”.

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“Marcin Drewniak from the Centre for Prevention and Social Education in Krakow considers, -This kind of behavior may reveal a complex pathology. We should meticulously scrutinize his life up until now. Possibly he intended to take revenge for the mental abuse experienced in the past, or maybe he is insane?” “Zbigniew Nęcki, a psychologist from the Jagiellonian University adds: - His biography reveals some abnormalities that stand beyond the social norms, resulting either from mistakes in upbringing or psychopathic personality. It is evident that he has no sense of moral norms and social life. He only cares about his own fate. That is a huge problem of our society: How to protect people from such psychopaths”.

The headline message attracts the readers first and remains in their memory, and hence has a tremendous impact on how people construe their own representations of a topic. Headlines’ shape, structure and choice of words play a crucial role in attracting the readers and thus influencing their choice of articles (Bedřichová, 2006). Headlines not only summarize the event but they may also convey power relations, by subtle linguistic (grammatical and semantic) means. The question in the headline of the analyzed article “(Did) Cameroonian deliberately infect with HIV?” (Text 1) represents a typical global macrostructure routinely used in news about Africa and Africans. HIV presupposing AIDS is one of the most frequent topics attributed to black people in predominantly white societies. In this case the presupposition (mitigated by a rhetorical question) not only indicates the US vs. THEM binary - by using the ethnonym “a Cameroonian” thus “not a Pole” - but also by deducing that Cameroonians (equals Blacks - the lexical

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choice of the term Cameroonian may only signal an apparent mitigation, that is using a linguistic indicator of nationality, instead of ethnicity or “race”) THEY bring the HIV to US. However, the prepositional phrase “in Poland” is not used in the sentence. It should be noted that the use of nationality instead of ethnicity or race signals a linguistic strategy in liberal discourse to avoid the agent’s skin color. It is hence the term “Cameroonian” used to name Simon Mol that constructs the global membership categorization device (main reference) in the headline. In comparison, the headline in the article about Wieslaw: “Did he infect women with HIV?” has no indication of ethnicity, race or nationality. “Race” here unlike in the story of Simon becomes irrelevant and transparent. Also, the question itself is constructed as a yes/no question, which gives a completely different meaning compared to the previous headline. The primary message in the headline “A Cameroonian infected with HIV” (Text 1) is recited and reinforced in the lead, which is the first paragraph: “Accusations of exposing to the grievous bodily harm of incurable and enduring disease were rendered to a 34-year-old political refugee from Cameroon, Simon M. who has been suspected of infecting at least 4 women with HIV virus. He is threatened with up to spending 10 years in jail”. Here, the identifying references are sequenced in specific order:

Figure 1. Referring Simon’s identity in Text 1.

Traits of identity (age and name) are split up with the socio-ethnic/national markers. In the lead about Wieslaw only age is mentioned [“46-year-old HIV-positive” (Text 2)]. The syntax of the sentences in the lead in Simon’s story raises questions about the agent and the social actor’s responsibility. It is evident here that actions of authorities (police) are diminished and silenced by replacing the active voice where the police/prosecution would be an agent, with the passive voice. Consequently, Mol as the main character

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and his actions remain represented as grammatical and therefore social agents. “Accusations of exposing to the grievous bodily harm of incurable and enduring disease were rendered...” (Text 1); “Simon M. who has been suspected of…” (Text 1); “He is threatened with…” (Text 1). However, it is in the next section of the article where the police would be mentioned as an agent (“by the police”), the passive voice rules place them in a background position while Simon remains the main foregrounding topic of the sentence. The next series of sentences reflects the symbolic spatial distance between US and THEM: “Based on his website, he is a Cameroonian poet, a writer and a journalist. Because of writing an article about the corruption scandal in Cameroon he had left his homeland. He initially sought asylum in Ghana, where he was granted political asylum status in 1998. He came to Poland one year later” (Text 1). Again, the spatial distance is expressed by the following phrases: “a Cameroonian poet, writer and journalist, sought asylum in Ghana, came to Poland” (Text 1). These in turn establish the black actor’s crime as more reprehensible than if committed by a white person due to its reference to the Other (non-Pole, non-European, non-White), hence threatening and highly mystifying. Finally, not only is it presupposed that Simon comes from a mysterious world, but also his identity becomes possibly inconsistent and controversial (see a series of articles about Simon published by Rzeczpospolita (i.e. Text 3; Text 5; Text 6). This lack of credibility is expressed in the apparent parenthesis “according to his website” (Text 1). The parenthesis in rhetoric is an explanatory or qualifying word, clause or sentence, inserted into a passage. However, the use of such a rhetorical device in the quoted sentence is apparent. The clause does not add to the meaning of the paragraph. On the contrary, it questions the plausibility of the narrative. The pronoun phrase “his website” (Text 1) ultimately implicates: according to his (THEIR) own sources which cannot be taken seriously because they arise from the out-group. In contrast, in the first sentence of the main part of the article Wieslaw is referred to as “a wandering bird” (Text 2), which is a peculiar animalization, as someone who is light headed and not responsible for his actions. What should be noted here is also the perspectivation. This sentence is a direct speech police utterance. The reference that follows to the character’s occupation emphasizes an unrepresentative lifestyle regarding social standards. This together with the past life story (credited by Rzeczpospolita) offers a pathologized depiction of a negative in-group character. “The police say: Wieslaw is like a wandering bird. While staying in Krakow during the past few months, he rented an apartment where he got together with a 15-year-old. Little do we know about

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Wieslaw S. He is an electrician. He comes from Gizycko and he does not have permanent residence. He makes money begging, gathering cans and producing beads necklaces” (Text 2). Subheadline (no such in Simon’s case): “Why did Wieslaw S. deliberately expose his partner to the HIV infection?” (Text 2). This constitutes a logical presupposition: Wieslaw’s behaviour was intentional. Due to his Polishness (and “whiteness”) this fact is so unusual that we need to provide a reasonable explanation. The final sections, which constitute the core part of both articles, illustrate the fourth type strategies: presentation of the news from a white dominant perspective. “The police spokesman says that the detention is a result of the police investigation conducted since the last days of November. A woman allegedly infected with HIV reported to the police. She identified a man that she had suspected before. The police interviewed a doctor who gave her treatment and diagnosed the disease. After consulting him, they assumed that there could be more people infected. Based on what the doctors said, there were many young women infected with a specific type of HIV that occurs in one of the African countries, the spokesman says” (Text 2). I consider this fragment as a response to the question in the headline. It gradually evolves into a story within a story, a rhetorical device wherein one narrative is presented during the action of another narrative. The below sequence demonstrates the chain of reporting actions:

Figure 2. Chain of reporting actions in Text 2.

In this chain, several voices are thereby referred to as indirect speech, e.g. the woman’s action is followed by the doctor’s report, followed by the spokesman’s report, followed by the newspaper (the article itself). However, the analysis demonstrates that the most frequent component of all the actions

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is “the police”. The last sentence of this paragraph uttered by the doctor takes out the responsibility for judging and evaluating Mol’s behavior from the authorities and puts it into expert’s lips. Finally, each voice in this discussion subtly refers to the police agency: • Victim discourse (reported to the police); • Police discourse (produced by the police); • Expert discourse (interviewed by the police); • Media (journalist) discourse (based on the police). All this does not matter in the article on Wieslaw (Text 2). Here, we only have two specified experts: a social worker and a mental health counsellor giving comprehensive explanations for Wieslaw’s behaviour. “Marcin Drewniak from the Centre for Prevention and Social Education PARASOL in Krakow says: -This kind of behavior may reveal a complex pathology. We should meticulously scrutinize his life up untl now. Possibly he intended to take revenge for the mental abuse experienced in the past, or maybe he is insane? Zbigniew Nęcki, a psychologist from the Jagiellonian University adds: - His biography reveals some abnormalities that stand beyond the social norms, resulting either from mistakes in upbringing or psychopathic personality. It is evident that he has no sense of moral norms and social life. He only cares about himself.

Figure 3. Wieslaw as a demon in the initial stage of the investigation. External attribution Source: Text 9.

That is a huge problem of our society: How to protect people from such psychopaths” (Text 2). The comparison reveals a key strategy for portraying

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the discourse of Us vs. Them. The main mechanism is the generalization of naturalization of negative traits of the out-group member and pathologizing the same characteristics of the in-group member. Wieslaw’s behaviour was justified by his alleged mental disability. The passage combined with visual images reveals the universal strategy of the representation of negative actions in-group and out-group members. Whereas Simon’s behaviour was described as common (even among the “Cameroonian elites”) and embedded in African practices and as representative of an average African, Wieslaw’s behaviour was unnatural and abnormal. Hence the outgroup member was inherently “bad”. On the contrary, when the action was pursued by the representative of Us, he was referred to as a “black sheep”. His behaviour surprised us and exposed to the degradation of our image. The general mechanism for the creation of negative representation of members of social groups based on the opposition Us vs. Them is presented in Fig. 4. My analysis shows that when a person from an in-group commits a crime (or does something socially unacceptable), their behaviour is diminished - it is usually presented as an action on a local scale (i.e. around Cracow), attributed a geographical reference (Giżycko). Similarly, the prevalence of news coverage - they are usually short notes in the tabloid media, so the context is placed on the periphery of the dominant media. In opposition, the crime committed by the person of the out-group was exaggerated and spread across the country, in different areas of life, including the large scale of Polish society (Mol seduced and deceived countless crowds of Poles) and was mainly described by the mainstream media (even the traditional and conservative daily Rzeczpospolita has taken a tabloid “investigation”, see i.e. Text 5). The second mechanism is related to the attribution of the action. Wieslaw’s action was the result of his individual, mental and personality traits. Wieslaw distinguished from typical Poles, i.e. by a hippie lifestyle and by mental disorders. The black man was a typical representative of his nation, or even the whole continent. Simon represented a system of “African values”, that required from him to transmit the disease to be cured. We can see here the extrapolation of individual characteristics on group characteristics - Mol was deliberately acting in accordance with the cultural determinants of they, his behaviour has generalisation. The method of attribution of action (in the case of the inner member of the group We, external - they group) is also associated with evaluative attribution characteristics of the hero. While Wieslaw S. was a predator, a creepy pervert and a psychopath (and a paedophile), Mol not only appeared to be a

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legend, a professional refugee, ordinary crook, but above all he was a very typical Cameroonian.

Figure 4. Strategies of representing negative actions by in-group and out-group members. Source: Own elaboration.

The practice of racial identification raises many objections if it is completely unjustified. As in such expressions: Black man is suspected (47). vs. 47-year-old man is suspected, which may give rise to associations “race” to crime. One of the global strategies for the representation of black people is associating their presence in media with specific situations, e.g. crime or social problems (such as racism). The result is often that they become invisible in the descriptions of the ordinary, everyday life. Their appearance in the media are highly subordinated by the assumptions that they can only commit crimes and they are our problem. Media representations of black people are limited to black male athletes, or black female sexuality. People whose skin colour is different from the majority in Polish society are not considered “normal”. “Race” usually constructs connotations of a threat of invasion, pollution and deviance. People who are different from Us are not only categorised as “the other”, but they are criminals, they are dirty and they cause problems and diseases. “They” should not have access to public goods therefore they should be isolated from “our” “civilised” culture. Moreover, the analysis revealed the global discourse strategies on ways to categorise characters based on their skin colour. Among these mechanisms, we should specifically focus on the neutralisation of negative characteristics of black people with (they have AIDS, they have an increased sex drive etc.) and the internal attribution of external behaviour. On the other hand, textual strategies applied in the news reports uncover one the demonisation of “the other” presented as a potential source of danger for the group identity and socially shared norms and values.

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CONCLUSION Poland’s post-WWII population to this day remains among the most homogeneous in Europe. One implication of this is that three generations of Poles have been born, raised and educated without the need to question the notion of being Polish while not being an ethnic Pole. On the contrary – where attention has been drawn to questions of Polish identity beyond Polish borders it has been precisely to remind and reconstruct notions of Polish identity amongst ethnic Poles who found themselves beyond borders drawn hastily by others. Needless to say, with respect to what the above, studying racial discourse in Poland brings us to the notion of Polish national identity (about constructing the national identity in relation to outsiders see: Wodak, de Cilla, Reisigl, et al., 2009, Krzyżanowski 2010). Although, heretofore there might be is an implicit understanding that racism against people of African origin may not have been present in Poland prior to the emerging presence of the elite racist discourses, my goal is to investigate the reproduction on racist social representations, beliefs and ideologies through the most powerful sources in the society, specifically media, education and academia. I have conducted this analysis to show some characteristics of the representations of the similar actions of the members of binary racial groups in Polish media discourse (massive white majority vs. small black minority). Whereas the racial and ethnic otherness of Simon was emphasised in almost every paragraph, Wieslaw was portrayed as an exceptional case in the OUR group of Poles, as a “black sheep” of the society. My analysis of some of the common linguistic and discursive strategies about black people in the Polish media reveals that such stereotypes exist in a nation that does not have a significant black population nor colonial history. Despite the fact that the Polish experience with blacks and with colonialism in Africa is fundamentally different from that of West European nations with significant black populations, it can still reveal similar types of discourse structures to those we find in these other nations, for example, as illustrated by Teun van Dijk or Ruth Wodak, among others for Austria (e.g. Mitten, 1992; Wodak, KhosraviNik, & Mral 2013); Britain (e.g. van Dijk, 1991; 1993; 1997 Hartmann, & Husband, 1974; Lynn, & Lea, 2003; Richardson, 2004; KhosraviNik, 2008; KhosraviNik, 2009) and the Netherlands (van Dijk, 1981; van Dijk, 1984; van Dijk, 1987). But my suggestion is that these discourse structures in Poland are likely to have a far more discriminatory effect, and may reproduce more powerful prejudices against black population because there are so few of them in the nation.

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Figure 5. “I am Polish, therefore I have Polish obligations”. Nationalist demonstration on Poland Independence Day, Warsaw 11 November 2013. Phot.: Paweł Relikowski, Gazeta Wrocławska.

I consider discourse strategies as mechanisms that confer rational, systematic action towards a goal of awareness by the group that “we are a group” and that “we have a goal” and that “this language item or linguistic tool help us to achieve our goal”. Whether it is a historically present motto: “I am Polish, therefore I have Polish obligations” (Fig. 5) accompanied by its contemporary derivation “This is Us, This is Us, This is Us: Poland”, a commonly used by far-right discourse “White Power”, or something as common and “innocent” as a child’s poem Bambo the Little Negro by Polish author Julian Tuwim (see: Zamojska, 2012; Piekot, 2016), the antipathy against “the Other” in Poland, a country that is witnessing the emergence of minority population, prevails and is reproduced on all levels of public discourse.

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RACIAL HIERARCHY AND THE GLOBAL BLACK EXPERIENCE OF RACISM Hyacinth Udah Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia

ABSTRACT This article aims to raise awareness on the life conditions of black people in Australia and beyond, and to renew public interest and discussion on how racial inferiority discourses, beliefs, and stereotypes about black people acquired and disseminated generations ago during colonialism together with institutional racism continue to limit their life opportunities and push them to the margins of the society. Therefore, this article explores racial hierarchy, white privilege and the socioeconomic challenges faced by black people. It does this by discussing how structures of inequality generated by the

Citation: Udah, H. (2017) Racial Hierarchy and the Global Black Experience of Racism. Open Journal of Social Sciences, 5, 137-148. https://doi.org/10.4236/jss.2017.53012 Copyright: © 2017 by author and Scientific Research Publishing Inc. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution International License (CC BY 4.0). http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

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concept of race and its use in racialization continue to impact on the global black experience and condition. The article argues that racial inequality is perpetuated, especially, when racism codified in the institutions of everyday life is not acknowledged. Keywords: Black Africans, Racial Hierarchy, White Privilege, Racism

INTRODUCTION Growing up in Eastern Nigeria where everyone had the same skin color, spoke almost the same language, ate the same food and dressed in similar ways did not give me the chance to think or speak about racism. As a child, I was taught that all humans are equal, to work hard and be rewarded. I took it for granted that all men are equal and assumed that anyone who works hard can achieve what he or she wants in life. However, when I left Africa to Australia and learned the plight of people of African descent, I began to question the values instilled in me since my childhood. Wanting to learn more about the lived experiences of black Africans in Australia, I began my doctoral studies. I found that people of African descent are among the most disadvantaged groups in Australia. The discursive constructions of their black identity in everyday language and social relations work to construct their lived reality of being, becoming and being positioned as a racialized subject “Other” leading to their objectification, oppression, marginalization and exclusion from society, which in turn, affect their employment, income, including access to good work, housing, health and career progression. Consequently, they continue to experience poor socioeconomic outcomes. Indeed, most blacks living in Australia and beyond have been affected by their constant racial difference, and this in turn has had a major impact on their life chances. While addressing the problem of race and the relation of the darker to the lighter races, W. E. B. Du Bois (1897) [1] , one of the greatest American social theorists of race, proposes that “the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line”. Many civil right leaders have fought against this color line and advocated for racial justice. The fact remains that all the pressing issues of today seem to rotate around the color line and around racial hierarchy, an indication that race continues to endure in contemporary times. Despite the activism and dedication of many civil right leaders and their efforts to promote racial equality, the human society continues to operate as if differences in race, skin color, ethnic

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origin, language, culture, and religion are real. In view of the reality that the world has not yet cured racism nor overcome centuries of racial groupings, discrimination and subjugation, this article explores racial hierarchy, white privilege and the socioeconomic challenges faced by black people. It does this by discussing how structures of inequality generated by the concept of race and its use in racialization continue to impact on the global black experience and condition. The article aims to raise awareness on the life conditions of black people in Australia and beyond, and to renew public interest and discussion on how racial inferiority discourses, beliefs, and stereotypes about black people acquired and disseminated generations ago during colonialism together with institutional racism continue to limit their life opportunities and push them to the margins of the society. The article argues that racial inequality is perpetuated, especially, when racism codified in the institutions of everyday life is not acknowledged. It is worth pointing at the outset that an exhaustive presentation of the socioeconomic conditions of blacks globally is beyond the scope of this article. However, the article suggests that race remains an important dimension for discrimination and disadvantage of black people. Though global race relations have significantly improved, yet, anti-black racism is still a global phenomenon. It is the expectation, therefore, that this article can help to raise further debate and conversations on the life conditions of black people in the 21st century, especially in most white dominated nations, including Asia and South America.

THE CONCEPT OF RACE Goldberg (1993: 62) [2] notes that race is one of the central conceptual inventions of modernity which was used to explicate European history and nation formation and to reflect the discovery and experience of groups very different from, and indeed, strange to the European eyes and self. Banton (2012: 1110) [3] describes race as “an alternative expression used for classifying humans differentiated by phenotype”. Similarly, Hall (2005: 123) [4] adds that race is a concept used to categorize and qualify different varieties of human bodies distinguished by physical traits, phenotype, blood type, or a distinctive group of people sharing a geographical space. Following this line of thought, race can be described as an analytic construct which is capable of capturing the different categories of human beings, their physical characteristics, their historical baggage and their transnational dimensions (Wade 2012) [5] .

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Race is, fundamentally, a basis and mechanism of distinction and differentiation used in scientific, political and social discourses capable of shaping and ordering social relations as well as the allocation of life experiences and life chances (Jacobson 1998; Bobo and Fox 2003) [6] [7] . Complex social relations can be explained by using the self-evident simplicities of the mental economy of employing race as a descriptive and explanatory concept. For the vast majority of social scientists, race is a social construct used to categorize, differentiate or separate peoples along lines of presumed differences. It is not a meaningful biological entity built on phenotypical variation―that is, disparities in physical appearance. Weber (1998) [8] , for example, argues that along with other comparable concepts such as gender and class, race is historically specific, socially constructed hierarchies of domination and systems of oppression. As a matter of fact, who belongs to which subgroup is largely a matter of social definition and tradition. It is not based on any biological differences (Goldberg 1993) [2] . Race is given meaning and significance in specific social, historical and political contexts. It relies on theoretical and social discourses for the meaning it assumes at any time in history. Although race is biologically and genetically irrelevant, it is a social fact, a self-evident characteristic of human identity and character (Downing and Husband 2005) [9] because it is widely employed as a universal descriptive category to designate groups to which both “Self” and “Other” belong (Hall 2004) [10] . One important element in the success of the term race is the takenfor-granted reasonableness of employing racial categories to identify people (Downing and Husband 2005) [9] . For example, in the United States and other comparable Western countries, racial identity is so politicized that no one is complete without one, and often, people lay claim to a racial identity that represents for them central aspects of their person. On the basis of their physical attributes, particularly skin color, people are seen, marked or described as different, as belonging to a group which results in either inclusion or exclusion. Hence, Weber (1998) [8] argues that the key to understanding race is to note that it is based on social relationships, that is in power relationships, between dominant and subordinate groups and that the centerpiece of race as a system is the exploitation of one group by another as there can be no valued race without races that are defined as the Other and races that have more power and privileges than others.

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THE GLOBAL HIERARCHY OF RACE Once “hierarchy” and not “equality” began to define humanity and became the definitive feature of the universe from the sixteenth century, Europeans began to be represented as “Whites” and “civilized race” having the capacity for self-de- termination while natives of Africa were represented as “Blacks” and “savage race”, lacking in self-control and autonomy (Goldberg 1993) [2] . This led to a paradigm on how to think about race, which Perea (1997) [11] calls “the black and white binary paradigm of race”. Despite today’s color-blind discourses and efforts made to deal with racial inequality and injustice, this black-white binary paradigm has solidified into fixed racial categories and has had a long-standing bearing on peoples’ attitudes. The paradigm has continued to this date to furnish to a great measure a central strand of the means of tying people, power, and history together. The black and white binary paradigm of race has also given definition to human sociocultural order. Indeed, the paradigm has created a caste-like separation between blacks and whites and the conditions for the formulation of racial hierarchy, racist expressions, and practices. The world’s population has surpassed 7,500,000,000 people (Worldometers 2017) [12] . Based on Worldometers’ (2017) [12] world population counter, whites (people who have origins in any of the original peoples of Europe, the Middle East or North Africa) seem to outnumber blacks (people of African descent or people having origins in any of the black racial groups of Africa). In the global hierarchy of race, whites have continued to be at the top of the hierarchy while blacks have continued to be at the bottom of the pile (Orelus 2012) [13] . In every corner of the globe, whites enjoy an extraordinary personal power and privilege bestowed by their skin color (Jacques 2003) [14] . For example, in the United States and comparable countries such as Australia, whites historically have a superior status and privilege, while dark-skinned and other people of color have inferior status and are generally considered as the “Other”. In Australia, while the whites continue to enjoy a higher level of well-being, the Indigenous or Aboriginal people, including the black Africans in Australia continue to experience high levels of racism and disadvantage (Paradies and Cunningham 2009) [15] . The global hierarchy of race remains and persists also in Asian countries such as India, Indonesia, the Philippines, China, Kyrgyzstan and South Korea (Kolhatkar 2015) [16] and in most Latin American nations such as Brazil, Colombia and Venezuela. Blacks are often at the bottom. For example, Cottrol (2001: 33) [17] found that in most Latin

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American countries, Whites, generally have a superior status. People of Indian racial background whose cultural practices are mainly of Portuguese or Spanish derivation would be next on the social ladder. Mestizos, people of mixed indigenous and white background, would have a higher rating than those of largely Indian background. At the bottom of the social pyramid would be Afro-Americans, with mulattoes occupying a higher social status than blacks. The influence of European imperialism and colonial discourses made it appear to both scientists and laymen alike that blacks were inferior to whites. For several Europeans and church fathers in the West, the color “black” was associated with darkness, the devil and evil while the color “white” was signified as good and pure (Jahoda 1999) [18] . Blacks were represented as less than fully human, considered as primitives, savages, cannibals, slavish, barbaric, stupid, and pathologized as lacking in culture, civilization, morality, kindness, and incapable of Christianity (Goldberg 1993; Smith 2002) [2] [19] . Their rational capacity, the very condition of their humanity, was denied and their fitness for enslavement was defined by their brutishness and barbarism (Goldberg 1993) [2] . It still appears that “race as blackness, even today, is still a powerful deterrent to complete selfactualization” (Fordham 1996: 52) [20] . As a result of being constructed as the black other, countless black Africans in America, Australia and other comparable developed countries regardless of their degree of assimilation and conformity have been unable to overcome the limitations associated with being constructed as blacks. However, by virtue of their race and simply for being constructed as whites, white people have unearned advantages over black people. Being white gives considerable privilege to white people (Frankenberg 1993; McIntosh 1998; Solórzano and Yosso 2002) [21] [22] [23] .

WHITE PRIVILEGE AND RACISM According to Goldberg (1993), there is no racism without some allusion to the concept of race. As an ideology of racial domination, racism is the beliefs in the inherent superiority of one race over all others and thereby the right to dominance (Solórzano and Yosso 2002) [23] . Combining prejudice and power in the definition of racism, Essed (1991: 111) [23] defines racism as a dynamic process of oppression and control sustained by legitimizing ideologies and beliefs. Essed (1991) [24] contends that racism is recognized in both individual acts of discrimination and structural systems in society

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that protect unearned advantage and confer racial dominance. Writing about the racial dominance of whites, the power of white supremacy and the invisibility of white privilege, Tatum (2003: 9) [25] argues that “despite the current rhetoric about affirmative action and ‘reverse discrimination’, every social indicator, from salary to life expectancy, reveals the advantages of being White”. She argues that the white person is “knowingly or unknowingly, the beneficiary of racism, a system of advantage based on race” (Tatum 2003) [25] . Gallagher (2007: 13) [26] therefore defines whiteness as “a form of property that yields both tangible assets (land, jobs) and privileges (citizenship, social honor) to whites that are or have been denied to non- whites”. Gallagher takes the position that the inherent power of whiteness is the confluence of multiple social and political fictions that have transformed this category into the dominant, universal racial norm other racialized groups are forced to mirror. Frankenberg (1993: 1) [21] enunciates three linked dimensions of whiteness: 1) whiteness as a location of structural advantage, of race privilege; 2) whiteness as a “standpoint”, a place from which white people look at themselves, at others, and at society; and 3) whiteness as a set of cultural practices that are usually unmarked and unnamed. These configurations of whiteness make white privilege relevant in societies structured in racial dominance (Frankenberg 1993) [21] . Solórzano and Yosso (2002: 27) [23] define white privilege as “a system of opportunities and benefits conferred upon people simply because they are White”. White privilege usually occurs through the valuation of white skin color to the extent that privilege is granted even without a subject’s recognition that life is made a bit easier for him or her for being white (Leonardo 2004) [27] . The white skin color, as an asset, gives privilege and the positive privilege of belonging in everyday life-the feeling that one belongs within the social circle (McIntosh 1998) [22] . This privilege is like an invisible package of unearned assets or an invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions, assurances, tools, maps, guides, codebooks, passports, visas, clothes, compass, emergency gear, and blank checks (McIntosh 1998) [22] . For example, in the in the United States and comparable countries, a white skin opens many doors for whites whether or not they approve of the way dominance has been conferred on them. Also, in many Western societies, the appearance of being a good citizen rather than a troublemaker comes in large part from having all sorts of doors open automatically simply because one is white. Indeed, being white typically affords a disproportionate share of status and greater relative access to the material resources that shape life chances.

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It confers both dominance and privilege to white people (Moreton-Robinson 1999) [28] and still plays a part in determining inclusion and acceptance of black people in societies structured in racial dominance (Holt 1999) [29] . Thus, Solórzano and Yosso (2002) [23] argue that racism is the ideology that creates, maintains, and justifies white privilege. According to Delgado and Stefancic (2012: 8) [30] , the little incentive in large segments of society to eradicate racism is because racism advances the interests of both white elites (materially), and working-class Caucasians (psychically). Bonilla-Silva (2014) [31] explains this clearly in his work. First, Bonilla-Silva (2014) [31] argues race, though, socially constructed, has helped to maintain the totality of the social relations and practices that reinforce racial privileges that benefit members of the white race, and in so doing, maintain racial inequality. According to Bonilla-Silva (2014: 9) [31] , when race emerged in human history, it formed a social structure (a racialized social system) that awarded systemic privileges to Europeans (the people who became “white”) over non-Europeans (the peoples who became “non-white”). Hence, Bonilla-Silva (2014) [31] contends that racial structures remain in place in contemporary times for the same reasons that other structures do. As the people racialized as white or as the members of the dominant race receive material benefits from the racial order (or passively receive the manifold wages of whiteness), they struggle to maintain their privileges. In contrast, those defined as belonging to the subordinate race or races (blacks) struggle to change the status quo or become resigned to their position of low race status (Bonilla-Silva 2014) [31] .

BLACK IDENTITY AND DISADVANTAGE Many studies show that black people in most white majority nations experience social and economic challenges. For example, comparing immigrants’ labor market outcomes in most developed countries, Lemaitre (2007) [32] found that black immigrants experience noticeably worse settlement and economic outcomes than do white immigrants. Also various research published in Australia show that African migrants and refugees in Australia are positioned in the “Other” category (Matereke, 2009) [33] , constitute one of the most disadvantaged groups in Australian society (UdoEkpo 1999; Colic-Peisker and Tilbury 2007; Hebbani and Colic-Peisker 2012; Hebbani 2014) [34] [35] [36] [37] , face multiple barriers (Hebbani and McNamara 2010) [38] , and experience both street and labor market discriminations (Colic-Peisker 2009) [39] on the grounds of being “visibly”

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and “culturally different” in the context of predominantly white Australia. Studies in New Zealand have also shown that people of African descent are excluded from effective participation in the economic, social and cultural life of the community and often find it a challenge to break the cycle of disadvantage because of discrimination and prejudice (Chile 2002; Jelle, Guerin and Dyer 2006) [40] [41] . In addition to the examination of racism as a contributor to black peoples’ social and economic disadvantage, research from Canada by Danso (2002) [42] found that black Africans in Toronto suffer significant downward socioeconomic mobility and experience the greatest difficulty in securing appropriate employment resulting from discrimination. Likewise, in their study, Esses et al. (2007) [43] found that a black applicant was evaluated significantly less favorably than a white applicant. Even when there were no actual differences between the qualifications of a White applicant and those of a black applicant, Esses et al. (2007: 116) [43] found that a black applicant was more likely to have his skills discounted. A Swedish study also found that being black is sufficient reason to lose a much needed holiday job for many African young men and women (Hällgren 2005) [44] . In the United States, every two days, a black person is unfairly stopped, searched, questioned, physically threatened, abused or shot by the police (Smith 2016) [45] . The years 2015 and 2016 have been, particularly, years of protests in the USA against racist system, campaigns fighting against racialized identity constructions and associated forms of discrimination and a Black Lives Matter demonstration against police violence and brutality.

INSTITUTIONAL RACISM AND THE BLACK EXPERIENCE The social and economic challenges that black people in most white majority nations still face does not happen in a vacuum. Despite the status of many black Africans as legal citizens in most developed countries, they are, often, less satisfied with their lives, finances and their place in the society. Is it a coincidence that they are, often, at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder? Why do many black people in most developed countries experience much more severe socioeconomic deprivation? While there may be many factors contributing to their societal disadvantage such as education, age and gender, and even country of residence, there is a strong association between institutional racism and disadvantage among a number of blacks in developed countries (Paradies 2006, Marlowe, Harris and Lyons 2013) [46]

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[47] . The Macpherson Report (1991: 28) [48] defines institutional racism as: The collective failure of an organization is to provide an appropriate and professional service to people because of their colour, culture, or ethnic origin. It can be seen or detected in processes, attitudes and behaviour which amount to discrimination through unwitting prejudice, ignorance, thoughtlessness and racist stereotyping which disadvantage minority ethnic people. Institutional racism is, often, structural not just in people’s minds. It resides in the racist policies, procedures, operations and culture of institutions. It is normative and sometimes legalized. Often, it manifests itself both in material conditions, for example, differential access to sound housing and gainful employment; and in access to power, for example, differential access to information including one’s history, resources including wealth and organizational infrastructure, and voice including voting rights, representation in government, and control of the media (Jones 2000) [49] . Institutional racism has not only led to their oppression and exclusion from society, job markets, lack of career progression, and poor access to housing, education, food, medical care, and public spaces, but also it has produced high incarceration rates in prison, police violence and brutality, poor health problems, and disparities in educational attainment and legal outcomes. Institutional racism has also affected them economically and politically and has also played a major role in their misrepresentation in public discourses by the government, media and other mechanisms of mass communication (Orelus 2012, Marlowe, Harris and Lyons 2013) [13] [47] . For the most part, the media have grossly misrepresented, racialized and portrayed a superficial and negative image of black people that continues to anchor them to the bottom of the world racial hierarchy. Specifically, the media have portrayed black persons as biologically and mentally inferior, as violent thieves and drug dealers in mainstream movies. According to Orelus (2012: 3) [13] , through these movies, the media have presented two different worlds: a people of color and a white world which has become in some way part of collective consciousness, whites and black people alike. Consequently, black people are the group most negatively affected by systemic and institutional racisms. That is exactly why black African activists in America and in the globe insist on the slogan “Black Lives Matter” rather than “All Lives Matter” (Kolhatkar 2015) [16] .

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CONCLUSION The struggle not to be judged and discriminated on the basis of skin color is real and disheartening for many black people. Often, their black skin color shapes the way they move through the world, think and interact with the world, as well as the way they are related to in society. Therefore, the global black experience and the continuous place of black people at the bottom of the global racial hierarchy call for the acknowledgement of the reality of institutional racism which is structural and the racialization of blacks in public discourses that are racist and stereotypical. As Tatum (2015: 19 20) [50] would say, it is one thing to have enough awareness of racism to describe the ways that people of color (blacks) are disadvantaged by it and another thing to understand that the system of advantage is perpetuated when the existence of racism in everyday life is not acknowledged. One important feature of racism which black people experience in contemporary society is that it involves practices, and not just “acts” but attitudes (prejudice), ideologies and complex relations of acts (the seemingly subtle covert acts and conditions of discrimination against them) namely, those social cognitions and social acts, processes, structures, or institutions that are recurrent and familiar in everyday life and become part of what is seen as “normal” by the dominant members of society but directly or indirectly contribute to their marginalization, exclusion and oppression as people and as a group (Van Dijk 1993) [51] . The more status or authority involved in the perpetuation of these practices, the greater the damage. As such, a critical reflection on the structural and ideological foundations of racism in social relations can help to appropriately address the global black experience of racism and inequality in contemporary times. As Orelus (2012: 6) [13] states, because of a white racial superiority discourse that has been circulated through textbooks and the mainstream media, many white people have learned to believe that black people are mentally and biologically inferior. To counter such a racist and white hegemonic ideology, following Orelus (2012) [13] , I argue that there is need to deconstruct the negative images and stereotypes that have been constructed about black people. There is need also for the achievements of blacks to be taught in schools and promoted through textbooks and the mainstream media. In addition, there is need for black and white people everywhere in the world to work together in curing and fighting against racism and in deconstructing the racial superiority ideological discourses circulated through institutions, such as the media, textbooks, schools, churches, families, workplaces, and laws.

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CHAPTER

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PUBLICISTIC TEXT IN MODERN MEDIA DISCOURSE AND ITS IMPACT ON THE AUDIENCE Vera Nikolayevna Levina, Svetlana Vladimirovna Guskova Tambov State University named after G.R.Derzhavin, Tambov, Russian Federation

ABSTRACT Background/Objectives: The relevance of the research is due to the increased interest of theorists to the study of functional semantic features of publicistic texts, which by virtue of their purpose prove a strong impact on various activities in modern society, the formation of public opinion, the system of cultural values. Method: In modern conditions the spectrum of problematic issues of modern mass media space necessary for the study has significantly increased. The work highlights the clear differentiation of such already wellestablished in the traditional science concepts as journalistic style, publicistic

Citation: Vera Nikolayevna Levina, Svetlana Vladimirovna Guskova, “Publicistic Text in Modern Media Discourse and its Impact on the Audience,” DOI: 10.17485/ijst/2016/ v9i44/104712 Copyright: This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

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text and media text (textual analysis method). The impact of the modern publicistic text on the readership has been experimentally determined, which required involvement of the focus group research method, giving objective information about the features of media consumption. Findings: The article presents the results of the study, the aim of which was the determination of the effects of publicistic text on the minds of the audience, in particular its manipulation capabilities. The concepts of journalistic style, publicistic text, media text have been distinguished. During the focus group study in which college students participated, it has been revealed that the audience of modern mass media is subject to manipulation by the media. In these circumstances, this study becomes relevant, since it is evident that through the media the trust of the audience to virtually any message can be invoked by means of manipulative techniques. Improvements: Modern theory described many ways to protect against manipulation of information compilers which, inter alia, are the media. The work has distinguished the most effective and acceptable methods of protection from manipulation for unprepared audience. Keywords: Audience Manipulation in Media, Convergence of Media, Journalism, Journalistic Style, Media Consumption, Media Discourse, Media Language, Media Space, Media Texts, Publicistic Texts, Value Orientation.

INTRODUCTION Introduce the Problem The study of functional-semantic features of publicistic text in modern conditions is always in the field of view of scientists, and not only of linguists, but also psychologists, sociologists, conflict managers. This is due to the great potential of modern journalism, a high degree of its impact on the readership, as many scholars have admitted as a fact that the word, especially printed, can have a strong impact on the audience (not only help in the development the audience point of view, but also to manipulate it, to promote a specific position, favorable to texts creators).

Explore Importance of the Problem With all the variety of scientific research of domestic and foreign scientists considering the publicistic text from different points of view, we should recognize certain research gaps. In particular, there is a lack of studies of

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a conceptual nature, which describe the conduct of the “work” with the audience in order to identify the effectiveness of the impact of media text, which is the focus of this study

Describe Relevant Scholarship Many studies are devoted to the problem of the research of mass media texts, both by domestic and foreign authors. Among them are works by Boguslavskaya1,2, Valgina3 , Do brosklonskaya4 , Kazak5 ,and others. Thus, Boguslavskaya1,2 has identified synergistic features of publicistic text on the basis of linguo-sociocultural method of analysis. Valgina3 pays special attention to the information richness of the text and the means of its upgrading. Dobrosklonskaya4 takes into consideration a systematic approach in the media language study. Typological features of modern media texts are described in the works by Kazak5 . Some researchers, for example, Konkov, pay special attention to the speech structure and the specifics of the genre of newspaper text6,7. Kostomarov “focuses on the texts of the media, a new relationship of written and oral texts, bookish and colloquial character, even vernacular features in communication, as well as the appeal to nonverbal means of transmitting information and methods characteristic for modern text”8 . Stylistic aspects of media language are described in detail in the research of Solganik9,10. One of the promising areas of modern media system study is examination of the specifics of the advertising text in the media11. Worksby the Russian and American linguist Jakobson, whose studies are dedicated to the Russian language and literature, poetics, Slavic studies, psycholinguistics, semiotics, differ by a wide coverage of issues. Many works by foreign scholars are dedicated to the issues of mass media in different aspects. Numerous studies pay attention to the crucial function of the media, namely, their manipulative ability The problems touched upon in these works are as follows: elements of the media (i.e., media technologies, the organization of the media industry, media content and media users); media, power and control (which covers issues of media manipulation, the structure of news, censorship, etc.); and media, identity and culture (which addresses questions of the media and ethnicity, gender, subcultures, audiences and fans)12–20. Many authors pay attention to the fact of mass media influence upon media consumers: “Mass manipulation model of media communication – model claiming that consumers and audiences take in media texts and advertising campaigns passively and that they are being constantly influenced

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surreptitiously by them”17,21,22. The impact is produced by different means used in writing new media. For example, besides language means, they include visual tools, which “suggest implications not only for the tools of writing, but also for the contexts, personae, and conventions of writing. An especially visible change has been the increase of visual elementsfrom typographic flexibility to the easy use and manipulation of color and images”22. In order to resist this media influence and to critically perceive the information presented in the media, consumers should have the corresponding literacy, be able to measure media texts and understand media effects23,“interpret the multiple meanings and messages generated by media texts. Media literacy helps people to use media intelligently, to discriminate and evaluate media context, to critically dissect media forms, and to investigate media effects and uses”24. The fact of digitalization of media is worth attention as well. The issues addressed to in research of foreign scholars include problems of digitextual aesthetics, digital media technologies, digital media literacy, etc.16,25,26. They should be studied as key elements of the digital culture affect “all stages of communication (acquisition, storage, manipulation, distribution) and it effects all types of media – texts, still images, moving images, sound, and spatial constructions”27. As researchers underline, “digital media technologies… are revolutionizing our sensory perceptions and cognitive experience of being in the world. (It requires) new hermeneutics responses on our part simply to keep pace”25.

CONCEPT HEADINGS The aim of the study is to determine the role, place and potential of publicistic text in contemporary discourse, as well as the extent and methods of its impact on the readership. A major role in the establishment of functional style has been played by a distinction between the concepts of style – text, journalistic style – publicistic text. In Russia, the term style appeared only at the end of 17 – the beginning of the 18 centuries, which was associated with the development of Russian philology. In the long run the concept of style has changed, but it was in the 18thcentury when understanding of style as a particular way of language use through which thoughts are expressed was confirmed. During the last decades of the 20th century the question of the meaning of the concept of style in linguistics becomes quite acute. This is due primarily

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to the development of the science of language, increase in language schools, trends that in turn increased the number of linguistic terms. In linguistics from the variety of features, style is distinguished by two main peculiarities: expressive and functional. But for some scientists, expressiveness is the main feature of differentiation of the concept of style, for others this characteristic is functionality The judgment of academician Shcherba28 deserves special attention in which the scholar has identified both functional and expressive as the main peculiarities in the definition of style, however, he does not clarify the concept of the functional principle. The definition of style proposed by Vinogradov has acquired exceptional significance for linguistic research: “Style is a socially conscious and functionally conditioned, internally unified set of techniques of use, selection and combination of means of verbal communication in the area of public, nationwide language, correlative with other such modes of expression that serve for other purposes, perform other functions in the speech social practice of thisnation”29. He also noted that language styles are the basis for the differentiation of speech styles. In our opinion, the most accurate representation of the concept of style is given in the Glossary of linguistic terms edited by Akhmanova:“Style is one of the differential language versions, language subsystem with a unique vocabulary, phraseological combinations, speech expressions and constructions, which differ from other varieties mainly by expressiveevaluative properties of its constituent elements and usually associated with certain areas of speech usage; the fact that these varieties, or subsystems are differential (i.e., have the task of discernment), is revealed very clearly when the elements of one style contrasted with elements of the other”30. Akhmanova defines functional styles as “styles differentiated in accordance with the basic functions of language – communication, messaging and influence – and classified as follows: scientific style – message function, everyday style – communication function, formal documentary style – message function, publicist style – influence function, art-fictional style –influence function”30. Stepanov hasa different look at this phenomenon and believes that it is “historically established subsystem within the system of nationwide language realized by society and designated for particular communicative situations (typical speech situations) and characterized by a set of means of expression (morphemes, words, sentences types and types of pronunciation) and hidden behind them principle of selection of these means

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from a nationwide language”31. However, until now there are difficulties with the definition of this term. For example, in 2015 an article titled “The difficulties of defining the concept of “functional style” by Moiseyeva and Remizova has been published, in which the phenomenon of style is revealed through the system approach. Interest in this subject is due to the development of the media and the study of new types of speech products in terms of functional style, and the lack of precise quantitative enumeration of functional styles. Until now, linguistics has not defined the exact status of the functional styles: they are considered as a manifestation of both speech and language32. The emergence of journalistic style is associated primarily with the development of society and the state, social activities, social consciousness, the means of expression of which becomes a newspaper. In Russia, journalistic style emerged around the end of the 19thcentury. Solganik represents journalistic style as the style of newspapers, radio, television, advertising, oratory speech. Journalistic style has particular functional importance –to influence public consciousness and to shape it, at the same time, its speech structure is focused on the expression of some political ideas, civic position, news coverage, the assessment of behavior of public figures, cultural figures. Journalistic style becoming closer to the art and science styles differs by the specificity of use of linguistic resources, manifested in a special speech systemacity of journalistic factors, primarily in informative and manipulative function of journalistic style9,10. Publicistic text is a unique phenomenon: on the one hand, it is a product of the journalists’ activity, the result of their world cognition and selfknowledge; and on the other hand, the publicistic text is a special act of communication between the author of the text and the audience. Through the text the author shares the information with the reader obtained as a result of cognitive activity. The text in this case is the final work of the world cognition. The concept of publicistic text is synonymous with the concept of journalistic text in modern scientific paradigm. The text is understood as a linguistic unit of higher level, as certain knowledge about the language system born from a variety of texts. There is a certain set of linguistic criteria by which the originality of any text can be identified, including journal texts. Publicistic text is the same model of language journalism system. Any text is a comprehension of social situations standing behind it that give rise to this text. Sociolinguistic reasons have led to a shift of genre and stylistic

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boundaries of texts. Thus, language becomes a reflection of social life in the country. “In the speech structure of a newspaper text, we see the influence of artistic, scientific, official business and colloquial language. The hypothesis of the synthetic nature of mass media texts is confirmed,” – Konkov comes to this conclusion6 . Publicistic style is expressed through the text. The concept of the text, as well as the concept of the style has no precise definition in connection with the change of scientific paradigms in the field of philology. The text as any object of research is differently treated by different scientists depending on their adherence to a particular scientific direction in philology and from research attitudes. Thus, the classical definition, which has been used over extended periods by researchers of the text, includes the interpretation of a text as a multifaceted unity by Galperin in his work “The text as an object of linguistic research”33. Proponents of structuralism, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes in their works distinguish text from literary work. Roland Barthes believed that the text differs significantly from a literary work, since it is not an aesthetic product. The text is what has been said without the author’s will and his/her subconsciousness, and literary work can be defined as something that the author “says”. In this regard, we can say that the text is primary, and the speech unit is secondary, as the text is that has been laid down in the author’s subconsciousness, it is the ideological atmosphere in which he grew up and developed, the environment and social conditions that surround him/her, the time in which he/she lived34. Professor Valgina defines the text as a unit of a higher level, “because it has the quality of the semantic completeness of a whole literary work, i.e. completed informational and structural whole”3 .While accepting this statement,Solganik gives the following definition of this concept: “The text is a complex, hierarchically organized structure, which is a speech unit characterized by integrity, cohesion and completeness”9 . A special place in the typology of texts is taken by a publicistic text that in its speech structure is, firstly, information about something actual, substantial and, secondly, the interpretation of such informationcontent. The study of publicistic texts is currently very promising, as evidenced by the presence of dissertation research, publications, and research areas of scientific conferences of different levels. Of particular note are the works by Volodin, Zasurskiy, Krysin, Solganik and other scientists. Thus, the publicistic text, with a certain referential correlation, requires some strategy

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of actions and is a complex hierarchical system with background knowledge, with the specifics of realities transference, with great semantic potential, therefore it has a significant influence on the formation of cultural values of the younger audience. The term media text appeared in the English-language literature in the 90softhe 20thcentury. The phenomenon was studied by such scientists as Montgormen, Bell, Fowler, van Dijk, T. Dobrosklonskaya, Kostomarov, Solganik and others. Bell in the book “Approachesto Media Discourse” notes that “media texts actually reflect the technology used for their production and distribution”35. Kozak says that the concept of media text includes a summary form of “any media text” which “incorporates parallel, interchangeable or overlapping phenomena – mass-communicative text, news text, teletext, advertising text, PR-text, online text, etc.”.5 She also highlights media text as a new type of texts of mass communication. N. A. Kuzmina says that “media text can be defined as a dynamic complex higher-order unit, through which the speech communication in the sphere of mass communications exists”36. In this connection, the term media text can be regarded as hyperons relative to the previous terms: journalistic text, publicistic text, news text, media text etc. The peculiarity of media text lies in its focus on mass audience. Yu.M. Lotman pointed out the difference between the text facing one person, and the text facing the mass of people. A whole system of linguistic peculiarities is characteristic for mass communication37,38. Media text is a multi-layered phenomenon, so it should be regarded as a system with varied parameters. By way of origin, media text can be created either by the author or the collective of authors. As “oral speech – written speech” are opposed, then two components in the description of a media text are involved – creation form and presentation form. Also, media text has a distribution channel in which it operates. Functional and genre affiliation of the text is another aspect according to which media texts are studied. The content-based characteristics of the text help identify its thematic dominant or belonging to the media topic. These parameters are used byDobrosklonskaya4 when describing media text in her research work. She distinguished the special discipline “media linguistics”, which is based on systemic scientific approach to the study of media language, highlighting media text as the primary category of analysis. Interest in media linguistics is emphasized in a number of scientific articles. Thus, Kardumyan39 notes: “In recent years in the field of linguistics

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and related sciences, works devoted to the study of various aspects of the media discourse began to appear increasingly. Undoubtedly, the interest of scientists to this phenomenon is related to many factors, the main of which is the increasing role of the media in society’s life. The media are referred to as the “fourth power” and sometimes even “the first power”, which is associated with a significant influence of the media on people. In particular, van Dijk40 believes that media dictate not so much that people should think, but how they should think. Modern researchers consider media text in different ways. In particular, highlighting new opportunities in the media textSlavkin41 speaks about the interaction of media text and hypertext. In his works, Gilyarevsky42 examines media text as a component of information technology, which converts the communication activities alongside with the introduction of new digital processes in it. The term media is now interpreted as a way of communication, i.e. information transfer process. The semantic content of the term media (from the Latin “media”, “medium” –a means, a way, a mediator) allows calling any information medium as a media text. However, this term generalizes a synthesized text referring to journalism, PR and advertising43. Today the term of “new media” received a broad interpretation. Thus, Steens and van Fucht44 note that this term is usually understood as “digital, such as the Internet, computer games, digital movies and photos, mobile phones and virtual world” mass media. Moreover, these researchers use more marked term –“old media” alongside with the more neutral term –“traditional media”–as well as distinguish their fundamental differences: the new media are faster than the old ones; new media have users, the old – audience; new media are brief, old – verbose; new media deliver a “picture”, the old ones–a text; new media are active, old ones – passive; new media provide the user with the ability to generate the content, old media give this opportunity to the makers. Although some signs that are inherent to old and new media according to these researchers sound controversial to a certain extent, the most important of them can be considered appropriate. In this regard, there is a thesis that sounds true: “the technical development of the modern media opens up new possibilities of audio-visual effects, generating images and myths that are widely used for the formation of public opinion. Media not only shape public opinion, but they themselves are influenced by public opinion”45. Speaking about the discourse of the media – new and traditional –it should be recognized that there are different

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approaches to the interpretation of the concept of “discourse”, but they are not numerous. In our opinion, the most thorough definition is formulated by Zheltukhina46 who understands discourse of the media as “connected, verbal or non-verbal, oral or written text, coupled with pragmatic, socio-cultural, psychological and other factors, expressed by means of mass communication, taken in the event-driven aspect, which is the action participating in social and cultural interaction and reflecting the mechanism of communicants’ consciousness” It should be recognized that the discourse of the media derives from the social realities that surround us today. This idea is confirmed by Manayenko47, who states that “in the framework of the information space, all communicative discourses as the conventional models of verbal behavior, mediating social processes, are implemented. Any discourse generates text –a specific material object showing the specificity of the interaction of people when creating the information environment in a particular area of activity. The most significant are political, pedagogical (educational) and scientific discourses in terms of the formation of ideological basis of the information space. Publicistic discourse (media) is believed to determine the content of the information space in the parameters and systems of values and standards already specified by the mentioned discourses. Shilina48 in the article “Trends in the development of modern media systems and relevant concepts of the theory of the mass-communication tool” introduces the concept of media system, showing different classifications, and media communication, and also develops the idea of a new integrated discipline of medialogy. The interest in this issue is associated with the emergence of new paths, features and principles of the organization of modern media, which express the phenomenon of a new systemacity of mass communication. Thus, in the course of scientific sources analysis, it was found that the concept of media text can be considered as identical to the concept of publicistic text, but under the conditions of convergence the concept of media text is used much more often. The mediatext peculiarity consists primarily in the fact that it can be included in different media patterns, therefore in the present study we define media text as the total product of mass media. This is also due to the fact that modern society in the era of technology development passes to the information stage of development. Information becomes the main instrument of society, it forms a communicative activity of people, not only verbal but also written, in which even signs and

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symbols are able to control the vital activity of people. A special type of publicistic text is an informational message. This is due to the fact that in the informational message “semantic content of the message determines its value, serves as a source of deriving some knowledge from the actual messages and determines the amount of information in a message regardless of the information capacity of the message carrier”49. Kakorina50 analyzing Internet media language revealed that “communication in the Internet specifies the maximum explicit type of verbal behavior, provoking speakers to the manifestation of personal origin and linguistic freedom”. Therefore, we can say that the information message is a special model of communicative activity, possessing integrity, cohesion and has a definite meaning, peculiarities of linguistic expression. Thus, a variety of definitions of publicistic text, publicistic style and media text in the modern scientific paradigm is associated with a variety of approaches to the study of such a complex and multifaceted phenomenon as the text, which in the convergence era acts as a point of intersection of research interest in various sciences. At the present stage of its development, the text is a mirror of social status; it shows the level of development and education of society, which forms the specific requirements for the content of the text on the basis of their cultural values. Publicistic text is a unique phenomenon: on the one hand, it is a product of the journalists’ activity, the result of their world view and self-knowledge; and on the other hand, the publicistic text is a special act of communication between the author of the text and the audience. Research of publicistic text is especially important, as it reflects the current state of the Russian language; it translates the author’s position in a special way, opening a communicative consistency and readiness of its creator. Publicistic style is expressed through the text; therefore its definition is much broader. The concept of media text is identical to the concept of publicistic text, since it determines the same thing, but its use has become much broader in terms of convergence.

METHOD Under the conditions of growing impact of media on the recipients – media audience –it is appropriate to say about the degree of the influence, and hence about the effectiveness of media messages. “The effectiveness of

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a media text can be considered as the ability of the text to influence on knowledge, opinions and intentions of the message recipient”51. Therefore, the effectiveness of media texts can be evaluated also according to the final result –to that effect, which has the impact on recipients, in particular, we should talk about the manipulation of the audience consciousness via media texts. According to the definition formulated by Dzyaloshinskiy52, manipulation is a system of methods of ideological and socio-psychological impact with aim to change thinking and behavior of people, on a contrary to their interests. Definition suggested by Bityanova is also worth attention, offering to understand manipulation as the common form of interpersonal communication, intended to make an impact on the communication partner in order to achieve their hidden agenda: “Manipulative communication involves the object perception of a partner who is used by manipulators to achieve their goals. In the process of manipulative communication the aim is to gain control over the behavior and thoughts of another person. the partners are not informed about the true purposes of communication, they are either just hidden from them, or are replaced by others”53. And although the interaction of the message sender with the addressee – the author of a media text with his/her readers – occurs indirectly, we can say that resources of manipulative technologies are inexhaustible. In this regard, in the theoretical literature, a lot of classifications of the manipulative tricks, including those used in the media can be found. Usually, however, the following ones defined by researchers as early as the 1970sare primarily known: sticking labels; shining generalizations (or brilliant uncertainty); shifting(or transfer); reference to authority; testimony (or witness); catercousins(or a game of plebeian); the common carriage (or the bandwagon)54–56. In recent years, the above mentioned manipulative tricks in new media have been supplemented. Thus, Dzyaloshinskiy indicates the following ones: •

•

manipulation by updating or creating mental mythological constructs and impact on the archetypes and metaprograms (mythological manipulation), at the same time, the most cultured in modern propaganda mythological images are image of the patron, saint, idol, master, or lord, authority, virtuoso or trickster, devil; use of psychological automatisms (manipulative psycho

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•

• •

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technologies): use of frightening themes and messages; use of contrast; simplification of the problem; use of factors of humor; mockery; concentration on a few traits or features; intrigue; truisms; assumptions; use of contrasts; choice without a choice; the right to choose; “anchoring” technique; manipulation through management of information flow and information environment: a selective choice of information; distraction method, or method of “smoked herring”; method of creating facts; the advancing use of an awkward issue or a problem; method of objective approach; information noise; use of rumors; leaks of private information; usage of misinformation; manipulation through actualization of value concepts of audience (value-emotional manipulation): use of words related to the core values of the society; labeling; method of throwing mud; undefined expressions (positive); vague expressions and hints carrying a negative connotation; use of euphemisms; carrying a positive image; transfer of a negative image; method of historical analogies; use of mechanisms of social control: the same as everyone is, the same as we are; additional evidence; coercive propaganda; logical tricks, use of features of human thinking, manipulation with rational, persuasive arguments: pseudo logical conclusions; affirmative statements; selection of arguments; pseudoexplanation57.

Identify Subsections In order to determine the impact of publicistic texts on the minds of the audience, particularly its manipulative possibilities, a focus-group research was conducted, which was attended by 15 participants – representatives of student youth. The audience was offered questions without answers (open form of questions). Each member of the focus group research could answer the question or evade the answer.

Participant (Subject) Characteristics A group of the focus group research participants was created randomly (its representatives are not classmates, as well as not the same specialty) and included boys and girls aged 18 to 22 years enrolled in the areas of training in the humanities (journalism, publishing). The research

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took place in the classroom in April 2016during 45 minutes.

Sampling Procedures Sample Size, Power, and Precision At the first stage of the focus group research, testees were asked to read a journalistic text, which, as advised by the moderators of research (the authors) contains manipulative techniques. The purpose of research is to determine whether the audience perceives the impact of manipulative techniques of a publicistic text, and what kind of impact of these practices on the audience is. The proposed text (“Kreks, feks, peks! The tale of how Valentina Matvienko proposed to establish the Ministry of Happiness in Russia” (published on April 15, 2016 in Nezavisimaya Gazeta), is of a small amount, so we give it in full. “I’ll start from afar. Thyestes’s favorite song is about the bird of happiness. Not about Gamayun or Zeus forbid about Alkonost. But about the one who “rings with its wings”. Thyestes considers that if he sings it, a full bag of happiness will be piled. Or panties. And I have more to say: we have to dream. Wear your heart on your sleeve and knock head against a brick wall. To dream with Federation Council Speaker Valentina Matviyenko, who offers to adopt the United Arab Emirates experience in Russia, where there is the Ministry of Happiness, Tolerance and the Future. According to Matvienko, the UAE Prime Minister said: “The idea is that we should make every person happy, to build happy schools, to provide such services to the people, so that everyone was happy, he said that every happy person might then make an unhappy person happy...” I would add: let’s have shops, which would have the queues for happiness. You say, how much happiness do you want – a kilogram? In general, an official threw up the game. She had to sing a song “Broad is my native land” and boast that theyhave their own happiness in Russia. Domestic, import substituted. Island Fools and Field of Dreams. New-Vasyuki and motorcade of generosity. If we believe, then even the island and the pyramids can be seen. And not only the Egyptian ones. But, on the other hand, let us also have the Ministry of Happiness. We lack in bright sincere departments. For example, the Ministry of Sadness, Association of Silliness, Department of Fury and Presidium of Meanness. There the vices will be eradicated, and at the Ministry of Future psychic medium staff

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will introduce people into hypnosis and inspire them: you are calm, you will no longer think about the future –about the time when the last barrel of oil will be bailed out. Kreks, feks, peks! And everyone is happy” After becoming acquainted with the text, the focus group was asked the following questions: • How does a journalist present the image of a politician? • Have you change your attitude to her? • What conclusions have you made for yourself after reading the text? Obviously, it should be noted that the text has manipulative techniques established by moderators of research (the authors). The following ones are revealed (according to the classification of I.M. Dzyaloshinskiy): creation of the mythological image; use of factors of humor; mockery; sampled selection of information; method of creating facts; method of throwing mud; vague expressions and hints, carrying a negative connotation; method of historical analogies; coercive propaganda; pseudo logical conclusions.

Measures and Covariates Processing of the results received in the focus group research was carried out as follows. Responses to each question posed by moderators (the authors of the paper) were summarized, repetitions and tautology were excluded. The results were summarized for each answer. It seemed indicative and rational in the course of this study to introduce the answers to the questions in decreasing order of their popularity among the testees. With the popularization of this research experience in the future, it is possible to recommend carrying out a study in several focus groups, which will allow receiving a greater number of responses. In this case, the results can be expressed as a percentage (when the number of participants of focus groups is over a hundred people). In our case, it is reasonable to present results as a numerical ratio.

Research Design This study is characterized by the formation of focus groups at random, but a certain feature is dominant to be the basis for the grouping (in our case – representatives of the students enrolled in the humanities). Staying of testees in previously familiar or unfamiliar room can have only an indirect effect on research productivity (one can feel at ease in communicating in a previously unknown room, the other cannot), which is predetermined by personal characteristics of the communicants.

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Experimental Manipulations or Interventions During the focus group research, it is important to follow the principle of noninterference by the moderator/-s: to not exert a considerable impact on the testees, to ignore the manipulative technologies in general and use of manipulation markers in the speech as well, without emphasizing one’s own point of view; and noncompliance with these principles do not allow obtaining objective and valuable data in scientific terms.

RESULTS Recruitment It should be recognized that the testees are unprepared in terms of abstracting from the effects of manipulative technologies, in connection with which the journalist reaches the desired result – promotes a position advantageous for him. The following responses (listed in a decreasing order of popularity) were obtained. In response for question 1, testees described an image of a politician created by the journalist with the following words: a stupid, short-sighted woman (“greater folly cannot be concocted”, “evident nonsense”, “tyranny thrives”) – 6 persons, “takes someone else’s place, it is necessary to give the bum’s rush” – 3 persons, “she would better deal with some other issues” – 3 persons. In response for question 2, most testees indicated that their fundamental attitude to V. Matvienko has not changed, on the contrary, it has taken root: “She has never been noted by very right decisions”– 4 persons, “What else to expect from her?!”– 3 people, “I have always treated her suspiciously”–3 persons; The answers to question 3can be grouped into three categories: •

•

•

a negative attitude towards politics and the state in general, “We cannot expect more from our politicians”, “Like policy, like state”, “And there will be new ministers...”; remained unconvinced: “Nothing new is discovered”, “Everything is as it has always been: the ministers are needed to offer something new”; humorous findings, support for the journalist’s attitude: “So what,

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it’s a good idea”, “We will live as in the Wonderland”, “And why not? It is possible as in the Emirates – to establish the Ministry of Future, the ministers will make predictions for us”.

Statistics and Data Analysis It should be recognized that the majority of testees (except of those whose attitude remains the same) are not able to withstand the impact – positive or negative – of the media; on the contrary, in present-day conditions the media having a perfect command of manipulative techniques can generate exactly the position which is beneficial to them (in some cases – ordered or paid for), to encourage the audience to action, in what the effect of mass propaganda can be seen. This creates a positive or negative attitude towards the characters of publications, and it is possible to observe that in some publications a positive image of one character is created, in others – it is a negative character (typical of opposition publications). Of course, such technologies are without risk of loss during election campaigns.

Discussion Summarizing the results, it is necessary to emphasize the effectiveness of publicistic speech in general and in particular the media text. In modern conditions, it is endowed with a wide range of publicistic tools that are capable to create an effects palette in society. These effects include manipulative possibilities of media texts that can serve certain interests – favorable to the journalist or publication or preferred by them. Possessing the tools of manipulator – effective publicistic style, journalists are able to steer a readership that is most effective during election campaigns. Only trained audience is able to withstand the “arms” of the manipulator, but the majority of readers are vulnerable to such effects, which, however, are on the surface and are found in the vocabulary and style of publicistic texts.

CONCLUSION However, confrontation to the manipulation of the media requires special training skills that can be developed only through the possession of certain theoretical knowledge and extensive experience of media consumption. Effective and the most radical ways of protection against manipulation of the media are as follows: • distrust (before believing in the truth of the media reports, it is worth to question it, if possible – to turn to other sources to refute

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the message or establish its truths. It is the simplest and at the same time the hard way, because some people are suspicious by nature, others are very sensitive); • critical thinking (a way similar to the previous one. It assumes a critical attitude to everything, including the consumption of information, and the attainment of truth only on their own, without anyone’s influence.); • avoidance of sources of exposure (implies the elimination of sources of information. However, avoidance is the most drastic way and almost rarely achievable). There are a lot of ways of confrontation to manipulation described in modern scientific and popular literature; these are the most appropriate for an unprepared audience of media content consumers.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT The study was sponsored by the Russian President grant for young Russian doctors of science (project number MD-3375.2015.6, 2015-2016.).

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35. Bell A, Garrett P. Approaches to media discourse. Oxford: Blackwell; 1998. 36. Kuzmina NA. Modern media text. Omsk; 2011. 37. Lotman YuM. Inside of minded worlds: a man text – semiosphere – History. University of Tartu. Moscow: Russian languages. Culture; 1996. 38. Lotman YuM. Text and function. Semiosphere. Saint Petersburg: The Art-St. Petersburg; 2004. p. 434–42. 39. Kardumyan MS. The discourse of the mass media: the main features, characteristics and functions. Language. Text. Discourse. 2010; 8:385– 94. 40. van Dijk TA. Racism and language. Translated from English. Moscow: INION USSR Academy of Sciences; 1989. 41. Slavkin VV. Journalistic text in a dynamic aspect. Bulletin of Moscow University. 10. Series of Journalism. 2005; 2:16–20. 42. Gilyarevskiy RS. Text as an element of information technology. Bulletin of Moscow University. Series 10. Journalism. 2005; 2:21–7. 43. Linguistics speech. Media linguistics: 2nd ed. Moscow: Flint; 2013. 44. Steens O, van Fucht D. New media. Herald of Volgograd State University. Episode 8: Literature. Journalism. 2008; 7:98–106. 45. Belenkaya YuP. Media and media environment as factors in forming public opinion. Science. Innovation. Technologies. 2010; 4:52–7. 46. Zheltukhina MR. Specificity of speech influence in the language of the media tropes. Ph.D dissertation in Philology. Moscow; 2004. 47. Manayenko GN. Specifics of the media discourse in the modern information space. Bulletin of Moscow University. Series 10: Journalism. 2005; 1:87–97. 48. Shilina MG. Trends in the development of modern media systems and relevant concepts of the theory of mass-communication tool. Bulletin of Moscow University. Series 10. Journalism. 2010; 1:6–22. 49. Solovyev IV. Ideally, formal, material – in informational messages. Psychological Science and Education. 2014; 1(7):51–5. 50. Kakorina EV. Media and Internet communications (area of intersection and interaction). The Language of Modern Journalism. Moscow: Nauka; 2007. p. 67–98. 51. Sazonova MI. Formation of the valuable landmark in the media text,

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Language Theory and Intercultural Communication. Kursk. 2011; 1:70–3. Dzyaloshinskiy IM. Manipulative technologies in the media. Bulletin of Moscow University. Series 10: Journalism. 2005; 1:29–55. Bityanova MR. Social psychology: Science, practice and way of thinking. Study Guide. Moscow: EKSMO-Press; 2001. Zasurskyi YN. Technique of misinformation and deception. Moscow; 1978. Nigmatullina Ka, Sidorov V, Kurushkin S, Ivanyan R. Dynamics of political meanings: Interpretation and understanding in journalism. Indian Journal of Science and Technology. 2016; 9(14). Luchinsky YuV, Luchinskaya YeN, Patyukova RV, Khoutyz IP, Olomskaya NN. Correlation of the concepts of public communication and PR-Discourse in the mass media space. Indian Journal of Science and Technology. 2016; 9(27). Dzyaloshinskiy IM. Manipulative technologies in the media. Bulletin of Moscow University. Series 10: Journalism. 2005; 2:56–76.

CHAPTER

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THE HIGH-PROFILE CASE AS ‘FIRE OBJECT’: FOLLOWING THE MARIANNE VAATSTRA MURDER CASE THROUGH THE MEDIA Lisette Jong, Amade M’charek University of Amsterdam, Netherlands

ABSTRACT In 1999 a girl named Marianne Vaatstra was found murdered in a rural area in the Netherlands. In 2012 the perpetrator was arrested. Throughout this period as well as thereafter, the Vaatstra case was never far removed from media attention and public debate. How did this murder become such a high-profile case? In this article we employ the concept of the ‘fire object’ to examine the high-profileness of the Vaatstra case. Law and Singleton’s fire

Citation: Lisette Jong and Amade M’charek Crime, Media, Culture First Published August 28, 2017 https://doi.org/10.1177/1741659017718036 Copyright: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons CC BY license, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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metaphor helps to attend to objects as patterns of presences and absences. In the Vaatstra case it is in particular the unknown suspect that figures as a generative absence that brings to presence different versions of the case and allows them to proliferate. In this article we present four different versions of the Vaatstra case that were presented in the media and which shaped the identities of concerned actors. The unruly topology of fire objects, we argue, might well explain the high-profileness of such criminal cases. Keywords: Fire object, high-profile case, murder case, STS, trial by media

INTRODUCTION On the morning of 1 May 1999, friends and family of 16-year old Marianne Vaatstra from Zwaagwesteinde, a small village in the northern Dutch province of Frisia, went searching for her. She had not returned home after spending Friday night partying in the nearby village of Kollum. They found her mutilated dead body in a rural meadow situated in between Kollum and Zwaagwesteinde. On the following Monday, newspapers reported that police investigations had indicated that Marianne had been raped before she was murdered and that the perpetrator had slit her throat with a knife. Some 13 years later, on 18 November 2012, local farmer Jasper S was arrested upon a DNA match found through a type of DNA dragnet called familial searching. He confessed, and was convicted of murder and sexual assault in 2013. Meanwhile, not a year went by when the ‘Vaatstra case’, as it became known, was not attended to in Dutch print and broadcast media. In 1999, the number of articles mentioning the case in national newspapers ranged from 12 to 70 per source, while the regional Leeuwarder Courant published 131 articles mentioning ‘Marianne Vaatstra’. When Jasper S was arrested and convicted, the case received even more media attention than in the year of the murder. The Vaatstra case had become a high-profile case, well-known within and even beyond the Netherlands.1 As a district attorney stated in a 2001 documentary: ‘[The Vaatstra murder] has become a national case … in which something is apparently at stake for everyone’.2 A 2009 newspaper interview with Marianne’s relatives similarly noted that ‘Marianne seems [to be] of everyone’ (Leeuwarder Courant, 25 April 2009). How is it that the murder of a girl in a rural province came to engage so many? There is a scholarship on high-profile cases (e.g. Chancer, 2005; Cottle, 2005; Innes, 2003, 2004; Soothill et al., 2002, 2004) involving different

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approaches. Here two of these works, one taking a more quantitative and the other a more qualitative approach, will be briefly discussed. Criminologists Soothill and colleagues (2002, 2004) differentiate between ‘mega’, ‘mezzo’ and ‘routine’ cases in terms of the amount of press coverage certain homicides receive in a given period of time. Mega cases are understood in terms of intrinsic qualities, such as having a ‘stranger murderer’ or ‘multiple dead bodies’. While the characteristics of mega cases differ, they are all rather ‘unusual’ compared to other homicide cases, which make them particularly interesting (Soothill et al., 2002). Following the reporting trajectories of 13 identified mega cases in the British Times, Soothill and colleagues (2004) suggest that mega cases follow a trajectory connected to both the process of the criminal justice system and case-related ‘incidents’ that generate peaks in media attention. However, the reporting trajectories of high-profile cases that become entangled with ‘wider societal agendas’ turned out to be rather unpredictable (Soothill et al., 2004: 1). Sociologist Chancer studied how certain high-profile cases, an analytical subcategory she calls ‘provocative assaults’, become ‘vehicles for crystallizing, debating, and attempting to resolve contemporary social problems’ (Chancer, 2005: 5). In particular, she attends to how these cases are politically mobilized to address concerns regarding structural inequalities of gender, race and class. Chancer identifies a dualistic framework in media reporting and public debate aligned with the prosecution and defence positions that, sometimes problematically, forces people to choose sides. The analytical notions briefly discussed above, the mega case and the provocative assault, are interesting and have fed into our analysis of the Vaatstra case. However, we struggled with the fact that these perspectives either took the reported case as a given object with set characteristics that can be counted, and/or focused on representations and meanings that are constructed within a framework of pre-existing social structures. Either way, whether the focus is on the quantity or quality of representation, the reported case, as an object, is taken for granted or left unattended. The case itself is then assumed to be a singular, underlying event to which meanings can be attached. By contrast, our point of departure in this article is not how the case is represented in the media but how the case, and in particular its high-profileness, is done. Inspired by Science and Technology Studies (STS), especially material-semiotic approaches, we follow the case through the media. Doing so, we unravel how the case itself takes different shapes throughout the investigation process. Taking the Vaatstra case as a shapechanging object, rather than a singular event, enables us to attend to how

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through enacting different versions of the case various worlds and practices that seem disparate and unrelated are drawn together to become the heart of the matter of the case. In this article we therefore ask: what kind of object is the high-profile case? How may an answer to this question contribute to understanding its high-profileness? Answering these questions, we also aim to demonstrate the relevance of an STS approach to media analysis. It may come as no surprise that murders are rather messy, and so are highprofile cases. Indeed, they qualify as ‘messy objects’; ‘objects that cannot be narrated from a single location’ (Law and Singleton, 2005: 348). More specifically, building on our extensive qualitative analysis of the Vaatstra case through the media, we argue that such high-profile cases can be made comprehensible in terms of Law and Singleton’s notion of the fire object.

STS AND THE HIGH-PROFILE CASE AS OBJECT The interdisciplinary approach taken in this article builds on work in the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS), and material semiotics in particular. One of the concerns of STS has been how objects get assembled and how they assume a quasi-universal or natural form. On the face of it, objects seem to pass as matters of fact, thereby obscuring their process of making. Yet, throughout their existence, objects are dependent on the very practices that helped produce them. These practices help to hold them together as such (e.g. Latour, 1987). This is the famous Actor Network approach. This approach suggests that objects are not singular entities but configurations of various different entities held together in material-semiotic relations (Law, 2004). For example, a DNA profile cannot be reduced to nature or to the DNA of an individual. It folds within itself the DNA of others to whom it has been compared, the technology used to produce the profile, the visual technology used to read it, the statistical models used to analyse the results, the theory of evolution and of DNA mutation rates, as well as legal regulation, police expertise and so on and so forth (M’charek, 2014). They all contribute to the stability of the DNA profile as an object (M’charek, 2016). This irreducibility of objects (Latour, 1993) also means that the division between the scientific and the social, between nature and society becomes problematized (Barad, 2007; Foucault, 1980; Haraway, 1988, 1991; Latour, 1991). This problematization is not merely epistemological (how to get a theoretical handle on a given object) but ‘ontological’ (how does an object come about) (Law, 2004; M’charek, 2013; Mol, 2002; Puig de la Bellacasa, 2011: 87). The relational ontology that underpins much work in STS

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implies that things do not pre-exist their relating. As relating is considered an activity, these practices become the object of study. STS scholars have suggested different metaphors to understand the normativities of objects. Metaphors of the network, fluid, fire and folded object have been introduced to not only understand how objects are shaped but also how they change as they move across practices (Callon, 1986; Law and Mol, 2001; Law and Singleton, 2005; M’charek, 2014; Mol and Law, 1994). In this article we argue that the high-profileness of the Vaatstra case resonates with Law and Singleton’s (2005) notion of the ‘fire object’. Law and Singleton employ the metaphor of fire to analyze the ruptures and discontinuities between the different versions of an object – in their case, alcoholic liver disease. They suggest that these different versions nevertheless hang together as a pattern of presences and absences: ‘Fire-like objects … are generated in juxtaposition with realities that are necessarily absent, even though they bring versions of those realities to presence’ (Law and Singleton, 2005: 345). In the Vaatstra case it is notably the unknown perpetrator who figures as the generative absence, as the other who is not there but whose absence makes different versions of the case proliferate. The versions of the Vaatstra case that we analyze below bring to presence realities of senseless violence, safety at night, xenophobia and forensic DNA, while at the same time transforming those discontinuous realities. We also analyze how these versions relate to other local issues as well as (inter)national concerns, co-constituting the spaces in which the Vaatstra case becomes a high-profile case. The first section attends to how the Vaatstra murder became a case of senseless violence. As such, the case spoke to a national concern that was entangled with a politics of belonging in which Marianne’s life became a particularly grievable one. The second part addresses how the fact that Marianne was murdered along a dark cycle path was used by villagers to focus attention on the vulnerability of cyclists in rural areas. It thus became a case of safety at night. The third section examines how uncertainty about the identity of the unknown perpetrator translated into accusing ‘an asylum seeker’ of the murder. Linked to debates on national asylum policy, the case became one of xenophobia in the Netherlands. The final version of the case discussed in this article attends to the Vaatstra murder as a case of forensic DNA. It addresses the ways debates about new and promissory technologies were entangled with developments in the Vaatstra case. These versions drew in local, national and international audiences as they were fuelled by, but

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also provided fuel for lingering societal concerns. Our argument is that these processes through which the case kept changing shape and content made for the high-profileness of the case. Before we elaborate on the versions outlined here, first a note on the process of data collection and analysis.

DATA AND ANALYSIS The dataset used in this study consists of all articles that were available through the LexisNexis database that mention ‘Marianne Vaatstra’ in 12 national and two Frisian regional Dutch newspapers and several Dutch news and opinion magazines, spanning a period from May 1999 to December 2014. This searching strategy enabled the methodology of following the case through the media and accordingly attending to its public reality beyond the course of the criminal justice system. Alongside the news articles, we included broadcasts of ‘crime watch’ shows, news programmes and documentaries that were available online. The eventual database comprised 2844 newspaper articles and 24 broadcasts. Figure 1 shows the flow of news articles that mention on the Vaatstra case for eight news sources for which data were available over the full 1999–2014 period.

Figure 1. Amount of articles per year that mention the Vaatstra case for 8 news sources over the 1999–2014 period.

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We archived and analyzed the news articles and broadcasting notes using the qualitative data analysis software ATLAS.ti. A chronological overview and periodization was made and a thematic analysis conducted. In order to deal with the large amount of data, the local Leeuwarder Courant was chosen as the initial source to work from. Searching this newspaper generated the most hits for our search terms. More importantly, local newspapers address local concerns and events that may not appear in national newspapers or that are not reported on in detail. As such, newspapers partake in the activity of scale-making. This focus enabled us to take into account how the murder came to matter locally not only through accusations and suspicion towards local asylum seekers, as was also widely attended to in the national media, but also through the notion of ‘senseless violence’ and the ‘unsafety’ of unlit cycle paths. Interestingly, the Leeuwarder Courant does not shy away from publishing quotes from interviews and written materials in the local Frisian language, even when the main body of the text is in Dutch. For the purpose of this article, however, all data have been translated into English. Where specificities of the Dutch or Frisian terms matter, we elaborate on the translation in the notes section. Other newspapers and broadcasting data were woven into the analysis so as to triangulate, elaborate on key themes, check references and understand translations made between different media outlets. Contrasting sources was also relevant to become aware of what was not reported on.

A CASE OF ‘SENSELESS VIOLENCE’ In the late 1990s, public debate in the Netherlands was concerned with what was referred to as the increase in ‘senseless violence’.3 The Dutch term ‘senseless violence’ (zinloos geweld) was coined by the district chief of the mid-Frisian police in 1997 to characterize the murder of a young Frisian man who had died after getting into a physical fight on his way home from a night out in the provincial town of Leeuwarden. This case became a reference point that mobilized media attention for cases that were ever since and retrospectively, irrespective of their great diversity (De Haan, 2011: 37), clustered as cases of senseless violence (Leeuwarder Courant, 15 September, 1997; Pouwels and Vegter, 2002). Senseless violence was not a judicial category. However, in 1999 the Ministry of Justice came up with a definition of senseless violence that characterized cases of spontaneous and incidental acts of ‘intentional violence’ against a ‘randomly selected victim’ (Ministerie van Justitie,

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1999). Although the suspect and his motivations remained unknown, qualifying the Vaatstra murder as one of senseless violence enacted the case as such and shaped the expression of emotions and moral outrage. On the Friday following the murder, friends of Marianne organized a ‘silent march’4attended by thousands of people from across the Netherlands. The silent march figured as an event that was not only an act of commemoration and mourning for the victim, but also a protest against senseless violence. The silent march helped to enact the Vaatstra murder as a case of senseless violence and made it part of a national concern.

A Grievable Life Marianne’s name was added to a list of names on a long banner carried during the ritual march on the annual National Day Against Violence. Marianne thereby became part of a category of victims of senseless violence. Newspapers reporting on these events reiterated the case as such. In Butler’s (2009) terms, the names on the banner could be considered a collection of particularly ‘grievable lives’, lives that became eligible for public mourning. They were presented as innocent victims, recognizable human lives, stressing the similarities between them and the majority of Dutch society. To be sure, what came to matter in the identity of these victims was their ‘likeness’ (Butler, 2009), in the double sense of the word. Marianne was accordingly presented in the media as a nice schoolgoing daughter of Frisian parents, who worked in the local grocery store on the weekends and regularly enjoyed the nightlife in nearby villages. A Frisian family expressed this familiarity as follows: ‘It could have been one of our children. It is such a terrible thing. We should do something about it together’ (Leeuwarder Courant, 3 May 1999). The ‘it’, the senselessness of this violence, enacted the Vaatstra murder as a societal problem that affected not just the victim and her relatives but a broader ‘we’. Caring for Marianne as a victim of senseless violence thus implicated a politics of belonging (Mepschen, 2016). This reality, however, depended on absences, things that were othered and did not come to matter as senseless violence. The asylum seeker centre near Kollum and its residents had been under attack ever since a vocal group of villagers had begun insinuating that the murderer was to be found there. In October 2000, a resident of the centre was stabbed with a knife by two young men when he was on his way home from the train station. The asylum seekers organized a protest march in which the stabbing came to stand for the ongoing violence and hatred they had been confronted with since the Vaatstra murder. While the protestors emphasized

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the particularity of the stabbing, the director of the centre claimed that it was just a case of ‘bad luck’; the victim could ‘just as easily have been a Frisian’ (Leeuwarder Courant, 10 October 2000). In the newspaper, the offenders were identified as a bunch of ‘troublemakers’ who would stab ‘anyone’ at the slightest provocation. Here the articulation of the selection of the victim as random and the act as incidental did not lead to a qualification of the stabbing as a case of senseless violence. Nor was the stabbing allowed to matter as a racist crime, as the particularities of the context were denied and the identity of the victim accordingly kept from mattering. He was made into an ‘anyone’; a not so grievable, othered life.

Nightlife Violence In the late 1990s, senseless violence was popularly associated with an apparent increase in ‘nightlife violence’. In the media, the concern with nightlife violence was particularly present in the form of parental worries about teenage children. A woman who, after the Vaatstra murder, called on Dutch society to hang the flag at half-mast with a black mourning ribbon to protest against ‘nightlife violence’ was explicitly identified as a parent of a teenage son (Leeuwarder Courant, 4 May 1999). A year later, in response to the murder, a group of ‘mothers’ launched an awareness campaign on Frisian nightlife and established the foundation Against Senseless Violence Northeast Frisia (Leeuwarder Courant, 8 July 1999). But there was also something related to this notion of nightlife violence working as an absent presence that shaped the Vaatstra case (Law, 2004). Following the incident in 1997, the Leeuwarden police investigated nightlife violence in the city, leading to the publication of the report ‘Committed to nightlife’ (Bunk et al., 1998). The report was discussed in the Leeuwarder Courant. The reasons for the increase in violence and conflict, so it was reported, were the use of alcohol and the observation that going out had increasingly become a group activity. Conflicts between groups were attributed to the differences between them, understood in terms of class and different ‘cultural backgrounds’ (Leeuwarder Courant, 24 June 1998). In a later article, this conclusion was also exemplified in terms of gendered relations: ‘A remarkable conclusion of the report “Committed to nightlife” was that nightlife violence is often caused by “intolerance and discrimination” between groups of allochtones and autochtones.5“Deviant cultural beliefs lead for example to non-conforming ways of approaching women”’ (Leeuwarder Courant, 5 January 1999).

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When located in Frisian nightlife through the police report and the Frisian media, the notion of senseless violence became differentially specified. The implied opposition between groups of ‘allochtones’ and ‘autochtones’ resonated with another story related to the murder. Marianne had supposedly been ‘threatened’ in a bar a few weeks before she was murdered (Algemeen Dagblad, 22 May 1999; Leeuwarder Courant, 5 May 1999). As it was narrated, she and her friends had gotten into a dispute with a group of teenage residents of the asylum seeker centre in a local bar. One of the boys had told Marianne to ‘shut up’ and had made a throat-slitting gesture while doing so. Although it was suggested that this particular boy would have been ‘very stupid’ to have actually done so, reiterating this account in the media fuelled suspicions towards asylum seekers in general. As Law and Singleton (2005) teach us, fire objects are patterns of absences and presences. The enactment of the Vaatstra murder as a case of senseless violence depended on processes of othering; for example, processes in which certain lives were made less grievable or certain classes of people were made threatening. As we have shown above, the violence against asylum seekers did not come to qualify as an act of senseless violence. In addition, while the conclusion of the ‘Committed to nightlife report’ contributed to the culturalization of difference and conflict, the notion of senseless violence enacted a common belonging6 and obscured instances of racism. The implied politics of belonging fuelled the engagement of a nationwide public and enacted the Vaatstra case as a case of senseless violence, thereby contributing to its high-profileness.

SAFETY AT NIGHT: DARK CYCLE PATHS AND THE DEMAND FOR ROAD LIGHTING Following articles in the Leeuwarder Courant, the demand for road lighting had been an issue in the rural area before the murder. After the Vaatstra murder, the issue was reinvigorated. Safety and unsafety were not so much located in behaviour or physical bodies but in the physical environment. In newspaper articles that discussed the road lighting issue it was explained that Marianne was murdered ‘next to the dark cycle path along the Keningswei near Veenklooster’ (e.g. Leeuwarder Courant, 19 June 1999; Leeuwarder Courant, 5 July 1999; italics added). Tying their worries about dark cycle paths to the murder, a group of villagers united under the slogan ‘Light Gives Sight’. They collected thousands of signatures in a petition demanding illuminated cycle paths which they presented to the councillors

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of the municipalities of Kollumerland and Achtkarspelen in June 1999. After struggling with the costs, Kollumerland eventually met the demand but Achtkarspelen did not. This resulted in some main cycle paths between villages being lit only halfway (Leeuwarder Courant, 30 October 2001). The demand for road lighting resonated with a form of self-organization that was explicated in news articles which addressed the nightly bike ride of young people from the rural villages surrounding the crime scene. Cycling home alone at night time was rather unusual for girls: if they did not take a taxi or were not picked up by parents, young people made sure to cycle in small groups (Telegraaf, 22 May 1999). This informal rule of conduct was seemingly broken by Marianne as she had presumably been alone on the night she was murdered. According to the accounts of the boys who had accompanied her halfway, Marianne had insisted on cycling the last kilometres by herself. Apart from disapproving commentary that they shouldn’t have let her go, it was by some believed that this couldn’t have happened because Marianne ‘wasn’t the kind of girl to do that’.7 Among them was Marianne’s father who doubted in particular the statement of one of the boys, Marianne’s boyfriend at the time, whom he held partly accountable for the death of his daughter (Leeuwarder Courant, 28 April 2000).

Peter R de Vries The doubt surrounding the boyfriend’s statement was reinforced in 2003 when crime reporter Peter R de Vries attended to the issue in his popular crime watch show on Dutch television. Although harshly criticized, De Vries emerged as a ‘super hero’ for the Vaatstra family whose members had publicly declared their loss of faith in the criminal justice system in August 1999. As Reijnders (2005: 646) describes: ‘where the police cannot or will not act De Vries steps in and comes to the aid of innocent victims’. The concern with the dark cycle path disappeared from the media until it reappeared in a different guise in 2012 when Peter R de Vries dedicated an entire episode to the Vaatstra case. Things had changed and the crime reporter had now joined forces with the police. The show was given the opportunity to present the most recent offender profile and investigative technologies to the public. While the statement by Marianne’s boyfriend was no longer doubted, it served as a clue that Marianne may have known her killer and had maybe even planned to meet him that night. In the 2012 episode, the dark cycle path was enroled8 to reinforce this scenario.

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Through a reconstruction of the crime scene, the investigators concluded that the gender of a random passerby could not be read from a distance due to the darkness. It was suggested that this made it less likely for Marianne to have become the random female victim of a well-organized male lust murderer and more likely that she had a planned ‘rendez-vous’ or casual encounter and might have known the murderer. The notion of the perpetrator as a well-prepared rapist, ‘a predator waiting for his prey’, was accordingly overturned. He was now presented as an ‘occasional offender’, who had a friendly encounter with Marianne before he had possibly ‘flipped’. Fire objects, as Law and Singleton (2005) have it, are characterized by jumps and discontinuities, that are nevertheless linked with each other. Above we have encountered the Vaatstra case as a case of senseless violence, while here it has evolved into a case about the safety and vulnerability of cyclists in rural areas. The dark cycle path has been a recurring site of interest that contributed to very different investigative scenarios of the case, enacting Marianne as either an innocent girl or as the girl who broke the rules by cycling alone in the dark and got into trouble. Yet, the importance of road lighting went beyond the criminal investigation process as it connected to a common concern about road safety. Acknowledging the vulnerability of young people cycling home at night in rural areas, it was suggested to introduce a night bus, more specifically a ‘disco bus’, to ensure safe transportation to and from the bars in the villages (Telegraaf, 22 May 1999). The Vaatstra case was thus enacted as a case of safety at night. This version, just like that of senseless violence, added to the high-profileness of the case.

XENOPHOBIA: AN ASYLUM SEEKER CENTRE IN THE VILLAGE Most of the turmoil surrounding the Vaatstra murder in society and media outlets concerned the incrimination of asylum seekers by a vocal part of the local village population. Marianne was murdered in the proximity of a centre for asylum seekers, a temporary shelter at a former camping site. The centre became the locus of political antagonism as it was to be moved to a permanent location within the same village.

Racism and Policy Critique Soon after the murder, the municipality of Kollumerland decided to build a new permanent asylum seeker centre in the village. This was met with dismay by the villagers, and several groups assembled to protest the plans.9

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The Vaatstra case played a pivotal role in the protest. ‘Is the decision on the establishment of the asylum seeker centre dependent on the nationality of the perpetrator?’, asked the mayor of Kollumerland rhetorically (Leeuwarder Courant, 16 July 1999). The public announcement in July 1999 that two former residents of the asylum seeker centre were potential suspects fuelled the anger in the area, culminating in a rally during the public information meeting in October 1999 about the new centre. Young men pelted the mayor with eggs. In a speech by the spokesperson of one of the protest groups, the centre was derogatively referred to as a ‘hotbed of criminal activities’ (NRC Handelsblad, 15 October 1999). Elsewhere in Frisia, the Vaatstra murder was also invoked to counter plans for new asylum seeker centres. In Lemmer, for example, a letter from concerned parents to the local government stated that the presence of an asylum seeker centre would pose a ‘sexual danger’ to their children (Leeuwarder Courant, 5 October 1999). The local and national news media wrote mostly in understanding of the protesting villagers’ sentiments (see also Rigter, 2002: 37). The State Secretary of Justice addressed the ‘racist exclamations’ in a radio interview: ‘I understand the emotions, but I don’t want to condone [these exclamations]’ (Leeuwarder Courant, 18 October 1999). More critical voices argued that the murder simply served as a conduit for the slumbering xenophobia of the village population. In these debates, the identity of the protesting Frisians also became at stake. Were they blunt racists acting out of prejudice, or were they good citizens pointing out flaws in Dutch asylum policy? The people in the Westerein read newspapers and watch television. They also know that there is something extensively wrong with the asylum policy in the Netherlands. They also know that the increasing dissatisfaction with that policy does not emanate from racism. (Leeuwarder Courant, 10 August 1999) The Vaatstra murder thus became entangled with objections to national immigration policy as well as distrust of local actors such as the municipalities and the Frisian Public Prosecutor – especially since the asylum seeker centre was initially not taken into account by the investigation team, but also given the plans of the municipal council to build the permanent centre.

Manner of Death The proximity of the asylum centre to the crime scene and the fact that Marianne’s throat was slit with a knife added to the suspicion placed on the centre’s residents. Slitting the throat was qualified as a ‘non-western’ way

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of killing, something that ‘a Frisian’ would never do (e.g. Parool, 27 June 2001; Trouw, 16 October 1999). Moreover, the slitting of throats was only a few times qualified as an Islamic practice of ritual slaughter, suggesting that it was self-evidently a characteristic of a potentially dangerous Other, and thus required no further explanation in the media. Accordingly, the late populist politician Pim Fortuyn10 reiterated this as ‘a reasonable thought’ in his widely read and well-cited column in the magazine Elsevier (16 October 1999). In line with one of his major campaign issues, Fortuyn continued the piece with a denunciation of Dutch asylum policy.

Trial by media In August 1999, on his crime watch show, Peter R de Vries showed the pictures and full names of the two former residents of the asylum seeker centre.11 The fact that the two men, one marked as suspect and the other as witness, had ‘disappeared’ from the centre on the day of the murder seemed to substantiate and legitimize earlier rumours. Although the Public Prosecutor stressed that one of them, Ali H, was marked as a suspect and not the perpetrator, in media reporting he was already convicted of the crime. The incrimination of Ali H thus enfolded as ‘trial by media’.12He was addressed as a ‘fugitive’; the fact that he wasn’t considered a suspect from the outset was criticized as a ‘failure’ on the part of the police. When Ali H was arrested in Istanbul in October 1999, it was insinuated in the Leeuwarder Courant that his place of residence confirmed his presumed guilt: He did not pick another European country where his fingerprints would have been filed in the police computers … He must have travelled over land on a false passport. Those are easily attainable through criminal organizations that transit people to Canada through asylum seeker centers. (Leeuwarder Courant, 14 October 1999) Ali H was thus ‘guilty until proven innocent’ (Greer and McLaughlin, 2012: 4). Ali H was exonerated when his DNA profile did not match the DNA of the traces found at the crime scene. Nevertheless, Ali H continued to figure in the media as the suspect in the Vaatstra case. In 2007 and 2010 it was repeatedly suggested that the man arrested in 1999 was ‘not the right Ali’. The idea that an asylum seeker had murdered Marianne never disappeared from the media. The indeterminacy of the figure of the unknown suspect translated into the incrimination of a generalized Other. In a documentary

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interview in 2003, the father of Marianne Vaatstra explicated the ongoing incrimination of asylum seekers as follows: ‘If our daughter’s murderer is not going to be caught, never is going to be caught, it will always be an asylum seeker to everyone, and to us as well’ (IKON, 2003). The indeterminacy and othering had different effects that contributed to the high-profileness of the case. While the arrest of Ali H raised questions about the role of the media in the criminal justice system, his mediatized figure was generative of ongoing suspicion vis a vis this group. In a 2001 documentary on the Vaatstra case, the Public Prosecutor confessed that the arrest of Ali H in October 1999 was made under pressure from ‘public opinion’ while he was no longer a suspect for the investigation team. This fuelled public debate on the influence of the media in criminal investigations, a matter that was eventually debated in Parliament on the basis of the Marianne Vaatstra case. Fire objects are energetic objects. They shift and change as they feed off things and practices that are othered. While depending on othering, the very otherness is generative. The Dutch asylum and immigration policy had been a matter of concern ever since the 1990s. This national concern translated locally into anxieties about e.g. the inhabitants of the asylum seeker centre. However, in this process the xenophobia and racism was actively denounced in the media. The problem was not with the local population not wanting to be in the proximity of ‘other people’, but with structural flaws in national policy. Presenting the Vaatstra case as an example of failed national immigration policy obscured the othering and criminalization of asylum seekers. Yet the xenophobia and racism was never completely silenced and kept resurfacing at the national and local level. We want to stress that there was not a linear trickling down of sentiments from the national to the local. The qualification of the manner of death as a non-Dutch way of killing in fact went the other way around. The complicated patterns of absence presences in this instance of the case helped to enact the Vaatstra case as a case of xenophobia and contributed to its high-profileness.

FORENSIC DNA Forensic DNA played a key role in the Vaatstra case. The course of the case and the development of Dutch legislation on the use of forensic DNA technologies in criminal justice had changed shape in close relation to one another.13 In search of the suspect, various forensic DNA technologies were introduced and legally regulated.

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With the arrest of Ali H, a total of 25 DNA profiles of individuals had been compared to the biological evidence found on the victim. After his exoneration, the style of reporting shifted from ‘trial by media’ to highlighting the uncertainties surrounding the unknown perpetrator. The Public Prosecutor was quoted stating that at this point ‘it could have been anyone’ (Leeuwarder Courant, 16 October 1999). Upon this, cast as a ‘last resort’ by journalists, but ‘a powerful weapon’ by the police, in December 1999 a DNA dragnet was announced (Leeuwarder Courant, 8 January 2000). This was only the second time that this forensic method had been applied in a criminal case in the Netherlands, and it attracted a lot of media attention. While the dragnet did not lead to the perpetrator, it did provoke political debates about the forensic technology involved.14 In parliament and public discourse the Vaatstra case functioned both as a reference case to stress the need for further legal regulation of forensic DNA technologies and as an exemplary case in which the technologies had served the community, (non) suspects and the criminal investigation.

A Genetic Suspect Profile In June 2000, the public prosecutor dealing with the Vaatstra case claimed that ‘the DNA profile of the perpetrator is still the most powerful weapon we have’ (Trouw, 14 June 2000). In the same month, a new suspect profile was presented in which the forensic DNA was differently engaged. The forensic laboratory in Leiden had been asked by the Public Prosecutor to infer the geographic descent of the unknown suspect based on the DNA. The inference of personal characteristics from DNA in the criminal justice process was then still unlawful, so the space in which this happened was simultaneously other to and part of the Vaatstra murder as a criminal justice case. In 2003 these boundaries were reconfigured when the ‘law on externally visible personal characteristics’ went into effect to regulate the use of this forensic genetic technology (M’charek, 2008). Based on a study of the DNA, the forensic laboratory suggested that the offender was most likely a man of northwestern European descent. At about the same time, the results of the analysis of six behavioural experts were made public. They concluded that the perpetrator most likely lived within a radius of 15 kilometres from the crime scene. The results of the two expert studies got merged in newspaper headings reading: ‘Murderer Marianne is white [male] in the vicinity’ (e.g. Algemeen Dagblad, 14 June 2000; Leeuwarder Courant, 13 June 2000; Trouw, 14 June 2000). The implicated translations; northwestern European became ‘white’ and a radius

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of 15 kilometres became ‘vicinity’,15 both articulated closeness to the victim. However ‘clear’ and ‘powerful’ the DNA profile may have been, M’charek points out that the alleged ‘Dutchness did not help narrow the task of the criminal investigators’ (M’charek, 2008: 525–526) as it directed attention towards a majority instead of minority population. But it seemed that the primary purpose of the DNA analysis was to alleviate the social tensions surrounding the incrimination of asylum seekers (De Knijff, 2006). Based on the new suspect profile, it was perhaps unlikely that the perpetrator was an asylum seeker. But this did not stop the discriminatory and violent acts against asylum seekers in Kollum or the circulation of scenarios in which asylum seekers were accused of the crime.16

Familial Searching In 2007, Marianne’s father, informed by an expert from a private forensic services company, had already pushed for ‘Y-chromosomal research’, thereby meaning familial searching (Leeuwarder Courant, 30 April 2007). Familial searching indicates a method where DNA comparison is not primarily aimed at finding a match, but at finding a relative of a possible suspect (Murphy, 2010). At the time this was not legally possible. In February 2012, however, an article in the Leeuwarder Courant headed ‘New DNA method [brings] hope in Vaatstra case’ announced that when the law regulating familial searching in criminal investigations was implemented later that year, the Vaatstra case would be the first case in which the method was going to be applied. In April, the search for near matches with the offender DNA profile in the DNA databank commenced. When this did not lead to any cues, a familial DNA mass screening was announced in which 8080 men were requested to participate. The familial searching technology was explicated to be particularly suitable in the Vaatstra case. The trace left by the perpetrator was qualified in relation to the technology as being of ‘top quality’ (Leeuwarder Courant, 18 February 2012) and the village community at stake as ‘geographically stable’17 and ‘in solidarity’ (Leeuwarder Courant, 19 November 2012). More than ever before, the media also played on the notion that ‘everyone in the region is suddenly a potential suspect’ (Leeuwarder Courant, 26 May 2012). By the end of 2012, Jasper S was identified as the suspect based on a full DNA match, and in March 2013 he was convicted for the rape and murder of Marianne Vaatstra. The Vaatstra case ended up being a test case for the governance and legal regulation of forensic DNA in the Netherlands. Over the years, the unknown identity of the suspect continued to be the

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reason to take the next step in implementing novel technologies so as to learn about the suspect’s physical appearances and geographical descent as well as his familial kinship relations. Present day Dutch forensic DNA practice cannot be thought about outside of the Vaatstra case (M’charek, 2008; Toom, 2011). The entanglement of the case with advancement in technologies and regulations changed the nature of the case and made it into a forensic DNA case and thus contributed to its high-profileness. Notably, the generative absence presence in this version of the case is the figure of the unknown suspect of whom there was nothing more known than a ‘top quality’ biological trace.

CONCLUSION … fires are energetic and transformative, and depend on difference – for instance between (absent) fuel or cinders and (present) flame. Fire objects, then, depend on otherness, and that otherness is generative. (Law and Singleton, 2005: 344) Examining the high-profileness of the Marianne Vaatstra murder case, this article engaged with senseless violence, safety at night, xenophobia and forensic DNA. We have argued that the Vaatstra case came in these versions and that the very capacity of the case to assume these different identities contributed to its high-profileness. The case engaged different local and national concerns as diverse as road lighting, a discobus, state of the art forensic DNA technology, nightlife violence among youth, national migration policy and racism against asylum seekers. It thus kept changing shape and rearing its head in the media. Law and Singleton propose a topology of fire to render such messy and uncontrollable objects comprehensible. A fire object ‘lives in and through the juxtaposition of uncontrollable and generative otherness’ (Law and Singleton, 2005: 347). The figure of the unknown suspect was one such generative absence, contributing to other absences, such as processes through which certain lives became grievable while others were not, or the constant racism that was hidden in the manner of death, i.e. the slitting of throats. To be sure, the unknown perpetrator was not a stable figure but took different shapes in the versions presented here. The incidental senseless violence offender was other to the investigator’s lust murderer, and the Iraqi or Afghani asylum seeker yet again other to the white, northwestern European suspect generated by the genetic and behavioural expertise. The one could not transform gradually into the other, as they depended on specific

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versions of the case and presupposed other measures to be taken. But at the same time, the genetic suspect partially depended on the racist violence in the village community and the assumption that the suspect was an asylum seeker. To reiterate Law and Singleton (2005: 347), the: versions are other to each other; they cannot be included in each other. At the same time (and this is the difficulty and the complication), they are also necessarily related to one another because they are part of the same [case] and interact with one another. The case as a version of senseless violence slowly burned out but left its marks in the poem inscribed on the Marianne Vaatstra monument in Zwaagwesteinde. The versions that incriminated asylum seekers left a path of destruction. The permanent centre was never built and the one in proximity to the crime scene was closed in 2003. However, versions of the case in which an (generalized) asylum seeker figured as the perpetrator continued to spread uncontrollably. Even after the arrest of Jasper S, the figure of Ali H as perpetrator continued to be recreated in conspiracy theories. The case as a milestone in the regulation of forensic DNA has become fairly stable and durable. Not only did it translate into legislation of familial searching and the inference of visible characteristics based on DNA, it has also become the most dominant version of the case nationally and internationally – the case as a forensic DNA success story. As the Leeuwarder Courant wrote, with the arrest and conviction of Jasper S, the villagers ‘woke up in a new reality … the perpetrator in the sensational Marianne Vaatstra murder case comes from their midst’ (Leeuwarder Courant, 20 November 2012). Forensic DNA technology had generated Jasper S as the perpetrator. He confessed to the rape and murder of Marianne and was convicted in 2013. The media exploded over his arrest and trial. It is this unusual and constant abundance of reporting in the media that we took as a generous gesture to reflect upon the phenomenon of the high-profile case. Inspired by STS literature, we did not assume that we knew what a high-profile case was, nor did we look for a definition of what it might be. Rather we asked: what is a high-profile case? One of STS’ major contributions is its insistence on practices as important sites to learn about how objects or subjects come about. STS has also alerted us to the mundane material aspect of objects and subjects. In this vein, we have followed the Vaatstra case around so as to unravel the stuff that the high-profile case is made of. We did not take the contours of the case at face value, but rather kept an open eye for ‘odd’ elements that persisted and kept being reported

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on, as if in the shadow of the Vaatstra case, such as road lighting, or the knife. It was such elements that helped us to open up the case for interrogation and to demonstrate how, depending on the concerns it was drawn into, it kept changing shape. The changes could not simply be explained by the context of the case, such as the village, Dutch immigration policy, etc., because as we have seen it was rather the other way around. It was the identity of the village, Dutch legislation, forensic infrastructure, among other things, that were at stake and were subject to change (M’charek, 2016). The Vaatstra case is an inherently indeterminate object. Its unruliness took the shape of a fire-like pattern of destruction and creation, generating and depending on absences and presences. This means that the high-profileness of a case neither inheres in the specificities of the crime committed, nor in the (media) attention it receives. It rather lies in its capacity to shift and change and to engage other societal concerns.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS We thank Jeannette Pols and Maria Fernanda Olarte Sierra for feedback on earlier drafts and for ongoing conversations. We also thank the reviewers of Crime, Media, Culture for their excellent advice on how to tighten our argument and improve the article.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: We would like to thank the European Research Council for supporting our research through an ERC Consolidator Grant (FP7-617451-RaceFaceID-Race Matter: On the Absent Presence of Race in Forensic Identification). Notes 1. Roland Bal’s study (2005) of another Dutch high-profile case, the ballpoint murder, examines the boundary work between credible and non-credible expertise in the courtroom. The case, including how it appeared in the media, allowed Bal to make this boundary work explicit.

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2. Documentary: ‘Een nacht van 800 dagen’ (Omrop Fryslan), broadcast June 2001. 3. The Dutch term Zinloos Geweld (‘senseless violence’) resonates with the social concern over ‘random violence’ in the United States (Stengs, 2007: 159). 4. In its form and organization, the silent march resonates with the ‘white marches’ in Belgium (Boutellier, 2005). 5. The term allochthonous (lit. ‘not from the soil’) is used to indicate those of non-Dutch birth or ancestry, whereas autochthonous (lit. ‘from the soil’) is used for those of Dutch birth and ancestry. The terms came to be used in public policy and national statistics, and have since become mainstream in public discourse (Essed and Nimako, 2006; Geschiere, 2009). 6. In her research on the notion of senseless violence in the Netherlands, Stengs points to cases in which the perception that ‘the division between “good” and “evil” parallels the ethnic distinction between “we” (i.e. autochthonous Dutch and victims) and “them” (i.e. Moroccans and perpetrators)’ was more explicitly expressed (Stengs, 2007: 177). 7. See crime watch show Peter R de Vries (2003). 8. Within the tradition of Actor Network Theory enrolment is understood as the definition and distribution of roles as an effect of multilateral negotiations between both human and non-human actors (Callon, 1984). 9. See also Rigter (2002), who studied the protest against the permanent asylum seeker centre in Kollum as a social movement. 10. Sociologist and politician Pim Fortuyn became known as the party leader of ‘Leefbaar Nederland’ in 2001 and later of his own party ‘Lijst Pim Fortuyn’. He was critical of Islam and argued for a stricter asylum policy. He was shot to death in 2002 by an animal rights activist. 11. Showing head shots and full names of suspects on television was a controversial act. As the Public Prosecutor commented: ‘This could be in conflict with journalistic ethics and the protection of individual privacy’ (Trouw, 31 August 1999). 12. Greer and McLaughlin (2012: 3) define ‘trial by media’ as ‘a market-driven form of multi-dimensional, interactive, populist justice in which individuals are exposed, tried, judged and sentenced in the “court of public opinion”’.

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13. See Toom (2011) and M’charek (2008) for a more detailed account of the development of Dutch legislation regarding forensic DNA. 14. See Toom and M’charek (2011) for a discussion of how different applications of forensic DNA technologies may conflict with the presumption of innocence. 15. The Dutch word ‘buurt’ may refer to ‘vicinity’ as well as ‘neighbourhood’, which strengthened the association with ‘closeness’. 16. The widely explored notion of the ‘CSI effect’ (e.g. Kruse, 2010; Machado and Santos, 2011; Mopas, 2007) thus only partially connected to the Vaatstra case, as the reality of the incrimination of asylum seekers here interfered with the belief in forensic science as a ‘super science’ that is always ‘accurate and infallible’ (Machado and Santos, 2011: 306). 17. The Dutch word used here is ‘honkvast’, which more literally translates into ‘fixed to base’ and resonates with ‘stay-at-home’.

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CHAPTER

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THE CRIMINALISATION OF ETHNIC GROUPS: AN ISSUE FOR MEDIA ANALYSIS

Marcello Maneri1 & Jessika ter Wal2 Department of Sociology and Social Research, University of Milan-Bicocca, Via Bicocca degli Arcimboldi 8, 20126 Milan, Italy 1

European Research Centre on Migration and Ethnic Relations, Faculty of Social Sciences, Utrecht University, Heidelberglaan 2, 3584 CS Utrecht, The Netherlands 2

ABSTRACT This paper studies the role of the news media in the criminalisation of ethnic groups, and the relations between criminalisation processes and the racialisation of difference. The claim of the paper is that criminalisation is Citation: MANERI, Marcello; TER WAL, Jessika. The Criminalisation of Ethnic Groups: An Issue for Media Analysis. Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung / Forum: Qualitative Social Research, [S.l.], v. 6, n. 3, sep. 2005. ISSN 1438-5627. Available at: . Date accessed: 23 may 2018. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.17169/fqs-6.3.29. Copyright: This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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part of a broader process of social construction, which involves, on the part of the news media, the organisation of topics and issues, as well as processes of labelling and attribution of (individual or group) traits, meanings, causes, and responsibilities. The paper is structured as follows: first, we present an overview of different theoretical and methodological approaches to the study of news media discourse, in order to identify indicators of the criminalisation of ethnic groups. Second, we discuss the two main techniques for analysis: content analysis and discourse analysis. We conclude with a short description of possibilities and problems in the design of (comparative) research in this field. Keywords: criminalisation, racialisation, critical discourse analysis, content analysis, news media

APPROACHES TO THE STUDY OF NEWS MEDIA: THEORETICAL AND METHODOLOGICAL ISSUES In social science and criminology, news media coverage of ethnic issues (i.e. issues about so-called “ethnic” or “racial” minorities) has been studied as an indicator for social phenomena such as deviance. However, reporting on deviance and crime cannot be taken at face value as a reliable indicator for actual social phenomena since the media actively construct the reality they are reporting. Thus a study that takes the number of incidents of racist violence covered by the media as an indicator of the number of actual incidents is counter-factual. Moreover, it is dangerous, as the publication of these results could end up being used to create social alarm or, alternatively, to “prove” that racist violence is not such a serious problem (see SACCÀ & MARINELLI, 1997). News reports are less problematic if used to trace episodes that are less affected by media selection procedures, such as political demonstrations (cf. OLZAK & OLIVIER, 1999). As far as crime is concerned, some researchers have compared media reporting on crime with actual crime statistics and shown a divergence between the two (for a review of such studies, c.f. MARSH, 1991). In this case, media content is used to show the under- or over-representation of particular ethnic groups in crime news (for example, DIXON & LINZ, 2000). [1] In contrast, the five approaches on which this paper is focused take the news media as objects of analysis in their own right. These perspectives provide different answers to the question of how and why, as research consistently shows, news on migrants is so often negative and so often

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about crime. We will discuss the key concepts, as well as the different methodologies and problematic aspects, of each approach, limiting our considerations to the question of media content (although some remarks on issues of news-production and reception will be made). [2] It is important to note that the bulk of empirical material from this field dates back to the 1970s and 1980s. This research formed part of the general concern with race relations at the time, in particular in the US, the UK, and to some extent other countries such as the Netherlands. More recently, Southern and Northern European countries that have experienced recent immigration have followed up with studies in which questions of representation have been re-examined in the light of this tradition (c.f. BRUNE, 2002; HUSSAIN, 2002). However, it remains difficult to understand to what extent the observed characteristics of migrants’ representations may have changed over recent decades, as the few newer studies on British, French, and Italian data that are reported here seem to suggest. More extensive empirical analyses will have to be done, following similar standards in different countries, in order to examine this further (cf. TER WAL, 2002; TER WAL, 2004). [3]

“Minorities and the Media” The mass media have long been considered a sort of mirror, albeit a distorted one, of society. This metaphor has worked in two directions. On the one hand, assuming that the mirror provides the images through which a large part of the social world is interpreted, there has always been a concern about the possible distortion of media representations, which could reinforce prejudice among the public. On the other hand, if prejudice is widespread in society and, consequently, among journalists (who are mostly White), the media is likely to reflect that prejudice. [4] In North American studies of the 1960s and 1970s this problem was addressed by investigating prejudice and discrimination within newsrooms. These studies showed that the unequal distribution of power between the White majority and Black minority groups in society was also reflected in the composition of the newsroom (BREED, 1955; WILSON, 2002). The small number of Black and Hispanic journalists and their position in nondirective roles helped to explain the stereotyped portrayals of these ethnic groups in the media (GREENBERG & MAZINGO, 1976). Finally, the predominantly White composition of the audience of dominant media has often been cited as a reason for the orientation of news media towards the norms and interests of these projected audiences. [5]

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Similar theories have been used to explain the media bias towards reporting on crime. However, the existing evidence for the over-representation of ethnic minority offenders in news is contradictory (cf. GRABER, 1980; MARSH, 1991; GAROFALO, 1981; SACCO, 1995). When Black crime was found to be over-reported, this seemed linked to fears about the threats allegedly posed by Blacks to the White majority group. By contrast, police harassment of Black families was rarely reported (LEY, 1974) as it was considered uninteresting for both the White readership and the major advertisers, for whom Blacks were a group of little commercial importance. Today this is no longer the case, as ethnic minorities constitute an important part of media audiences not only in the US, but also in many, though not all, Western European countries (STATHAM, 2002; D’HAENENS, 2003). [6] The predominant methodology used in the ‘Minority and the media’ approach is content analysis. Indicators such as the number of articles and the space, position, and font size of the headlines are taken as measures of the distribution of minority news themes. Using this methodology, media bias is observed in various ways. Firstly, there is a problem of unbalanced selection. Crime, race riots, policing, and violence have always been some of the most-covered subjects, while other subjects have been ignored (SCHARY, 1969; WILSON & GUTIERREZ, 1985; VAN SLIKE TURK, RICHSTAD, BRYSON & JOHNSON, 1989; in a different perspective GANS, 1980; KNOPF, 1975; MERTEN, 1986; VAN DIJK, 1991). A study of British press coverage in the 1980s found that reports on crimes allegedly involving Black people have often been given disproportionate coverage (GORDON & ROSENBERG, 1989). Particular ethnic groups may also receive special attention: for example, in the German press Turks have tended to be covered as if they were representative of the entire range of “foreigners” in that country. This group was also more frequently associated with negative personal characteristics, in particular a tendency to crime and violence, than other groups (MERTEN, 1986). [7] Secondly, bias is indicated by the amount of space allocated to minority opinions, which is always very little even when minority group members are main actors in the news (FISHER & LOWENSTEIN, 1967; SCHARY, 1969; in a different perspective DOWNING, 1980; VAN DIJK, 1991). This means foreigners do not have the opportunity to challenge the negative definitions given of them in the press (MERTEN, 1986). In other words, minorities are mostly represented in the news as speechless actors involved in negative acts (TER WAL, 2002). Similar forms of “biased” or stereotypical representation have been studied in quantitative content analyses using coding categories

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that qualified actor roles and characters, and in lexicographic analyses (HUFKER & CAVENDER, 1990; BONNAFOUS, 1991). [8] Journalists’ associations and unions have played an important role in trying to change attitudes related to ethnic issues within their own profession by promoting the use of guidelines and training facilities. A generally increased awareness has also led to more positive reporting practices, as was revealed in a recent investigation into the coverage of (anti-)racism in the UK in the 1990s. One study, based on the coverage of the six-month period prior to the 1997 British general election, claimed that news on ethnic minorities had become the scene of an “anti-racist show”, where increasing amounts of space were being given to the opinion of accredited minority actors (LAW, 1997). Nevertheless, the same study found that reporting still remained situated within the dominant discursive field of crime. Similarly, recent research in the UK suggests that while Black African and Asian minorities are now treated in the media far better than in the 1970s and 1980s, negative portrayals are being given of newly arrived ethnic groups such as asylum seekers (STATHAM, 2002). [9] Although research should not be restricted to this alone, content analysis can be a very useful part of news analysis. Not only does it make it possible to compare the occurrence of “race” and crime themes with that of other themes or the representation and proportion of negative vs. positive portrayal of migrants as compared to other actors, it also allows for the investigation of other, related, analytical dimensions. For example, to: •

•

• • •

compare the significance given to different types of crime and to their perpetrators and victims, as indicated by page number, number of columns occupied by headlines etc.; quantify the attention given in the mainstream media to harassment and violence by employers, police, etc., against migrants as compared to the attention given to violence committed by migrants; examine the extent to which migrants are over-represented in the coverage of “problem areas”; note the topics on which the news tends not to focus (e.g. the problems experienced by ethnic groups are often overlooked); identify and count the words featured in news headlines that are associated with crime and illegal acts, conflict or disagreement, and control (as compared to headlines associated with other acts/

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groups) ; • verify whether or not ethnic crime perpetrators or victims are designated by “ethnicity” or nationality in the headlines (BOVENKERK, 1978; VAN DIJK, 1988c for the Netherlands; HARTMANN & HUSBAND, 1974 for the UK; MANERI, 1995 for Italy). [10] Clearly, content analysis can only grasp some of the building blocks of social representations, such as labels/denominations for migrants and their recurrence, and further qualitative analysis is necessary. Apart from its methodological limits which will be discussed below, this approach presents a problem regarding the very concept of media bias and distortion: in some cases it is not clear to which model of “unbiased” representation authors are referring. In the case of thematic coverage, what would “fair” representation actually be? How many news items on crime should there be out of the total of items about minorities? As is shown in the next section, the newsmaking approach addresses this problem from a different perspective. [11]

Newsmaking Approach Newsmaking routines are affected by what has come to be defined as “frames” for talking about immigrants, which may reflect stereotypical thinking, or ways to oppose it (for a review of the use of the concept of frame in media research c.f. SCHEUFELE, 1999). However, the newsmaking approach holds that prejudice does not explain everything. The media’s emphasis on immigrant deviance and crime is also the result of routines and constraints inherent to newsmaking. Studies on newsmaking have shown how techniques of news gathering, selection and editing, time and space limits, lack of freedom within the given news format, as well as processes of socialisation within the newsroom and other organisational constraints, help determine news content and perspective. [12] The newsmaking approach maintains that the selection and presentation of news topics, actors, and events is determined by several conditions. The most central factors commonly identified in the literature of the 1970s and 1980s are: i) news values; ii) news scripts; iii) news themes; iv) ownership, control, and political affiliation; v) differential access to the media; vi) the relations between media and politics; and vii) editorial policies, including relations between journalists and editors-in-chief. [13] The first general theoretical assumption is that the selection of news

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depends on dominant news values, i.e. the implicit or explicit criteria adopted by the news media in the selection and framing of events that make it possible for the latter to be sold as news. Important news values are the negativity and recency of events, authority of actors, and consonance of actions with public stereotypes (GALTUNG & RUGE, 1965; GANS, 1980; VAN DIJK, 1988a; for crime news: CHIBNALL, 1977). In their study on racism and the mass media in Britain, HARTMANN and HUSBAND (1974) found that “conflict, tragedy and deviancy” were the main news values dictating the selection of themes. Other studies have also found that crime reporting constitutes a significant part of reporting on ethnic issues in general (GANS, 1980; GRABER, 1980). When migrant crime becomes a news theme in its own right—a topic in which the interest of public opinion is presumed—it may become a news value in itself, favouring the selection and framing of episodes which seem to fit the theme (for “crime waves” cf. FISHMAN, 1978; for migrant crime cf. TROYNA, 1981; MANERI, 1998a, 2001). News values are also found to account for the fact that images of Blacks are frequently distorted through the reduction of complex situations to simple generalisations, to quick and superficial explanations, in order to fulfil the news value of unambiguousness (GORDON & ROSENBERG, 1989). The fact that the circumstantial causes for the occurrence of crime are hardly ever investigated in crime reporting is not necessarily the result of White prejudice or denial of racism. It does imply, however, that the cause of or “blame” for minority crime is more easily attributed to the individual, and by generalisation to minority groups, a mechanism that reinforces and legitimises ethnic prejudice. [14] Another cause of distortion by simplification lies in the use of news scripts, which perform the function of organising potentially ambiguous elements into easily interpretable stories. New occurrences are often adapted to a pre-existing script—a narrative structure used to write about recursive events that are generally treated in the same way. HOLLAND (1981) has shown how, in Britain, the popular press failed to see that the New Cross fire, which killed thirteen Black victims in 1981, was a racist attack. Accustomed to writing stories featuring Blacks in the role of perpetrators, not victims, of crime, journalists focused their initial reports on the theme of Black turbulence and, following the organization of a demonstration, adopted the script of the “race riot”. Similar examples have been found elsewhere in, for example, the Swedish press coverage of an arson attack on a refugee family, when a racially-motivated explanation for the attack was refused (BRUNE, 2002; and for Italy MANERI, 1995). [15]

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News making routines such as the use of sources for information and verbal reactions are also constrained by the power relations inside and outside the newsroom. The predominance of institutional actors in the definition of news agendas and contents is explained by the use of these actors by the media as privileged news sources and as sponsors of the news industry. With regard to news on deviance and crime, this means that official definitions of the situation (by the police and other officials) are likely to be prioritised and to receive prominent coverage as well as high credibility (VAN DIJK, 1988a). If less-official sources that could contradict the stereotypical image given are ignored or covered in a less prominent fashion, it is more likely that a one-sided, and possibly biased, image of ethnic groups will be maintained in the media. The choice of institutional sources relies on their direct access to “facts” of supposedly general interest, on their assumed reliability, and on their ability to provide media with continuous inputs presented in an easily retrievable format (TUCHMAN, 1972; GANS, 1980). Institutions also tend to actively phase events to fit the bureaucratic schedules of news organisations (SIGAL, 1973; COHEN, 1980). Organisations such as civil and police services have the necessary resources and professional staff to organise news events and press conferences, and also have information officers and/or “spin doctors” at their disposal who channel news to those outlets preferred by the organisation before it is generally made public (cf. for the Netherlands, SPRENGER & DE VREE, 2004). [16] Finally, newsmaking routines and conventional news formats are generally determined by editorial policies (GANS, 1980). For example, in the 1990s most Italian news reports on immigration were—for organisational reasons, among others—part of the local or crime news genre (“cronaca”), and often journalists with a general professional interest in this genre were assigned to cover ethnic issues (TER WAL, 1997). Journalistic routines and lack of resources also favour the reproduction of readily-available official figures and accounts. For the same reasons, investigative journalism, background reports, and explanatory accounts are rare (though a recent cross-European study reveals an increase in investigative reporting [TER WAL, D’HAENENS & KOEMAN, 2004]). [17] The prevalent methodologies used in the newsmaking approach are ethnographic observation, content analysis, and discourse analysis. Related research questions are: •

what is defined as news (indicators of news value, but also of the framing of issues);

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•

how and how often, and on which occasions, actors are quoted (an indicator of the different representation of groups in definitions of the situation and opinions about the events, and their possible under- or over-representation, related to different positions of authority or power); • adaptation to news formats that can create a possible “bias”, e.g. the news on deviance and crime rarely incorporate analyses of processes of social, economic, or cultural change (HALL, CRITCHER, JEFFERSON & CLARKE, 1978; KEITH, 1995; TER WAL, 1997); • adaptation to news scripts that can create a possible “distortion”: e.g. the “race riot” schema (HOLLAND, 1981) and the “citizen protest” schema (MANERI, 1995); • what different news formats are used, e.g. what kind of articles, and how (interviews, prevalence of investigative or descriptive journalism, standard reporting of “primary definitions”, phonein programs or letter rubrics either to use “public opinion” as evidence for the need to restore law and order, or to support antiracist initiatives); • which crime news themes emerge, how they work in the selection, framing, and writing of news, in what circumstances they appear, and by which news/political/official practices they are suggested; • how written sources (agency dispatches, press releases) are transformed narratively and semantically in actual news reports. [18] Many scholars analysing these aspects have stressed that newsmaking constraints do not explain away the racist implications of news-media reporting. They also stress that it is not individual journalists who are to be blamed for this. Both observations highlight the importance of examining not only the newsmaking process but also the dominant cultural outlook on and common sense ideologies about ethnic relations, as well as the ideological constructions that are involved in reporting about ethnic issues and crime. [19]

Social Constructionist Approach Classic studies representing this approach are the 1970s studies on the social construction of crime and (youth) deviance in the British press (COHEN & YOUNG, 1973; COHEN, 1980; HALL et al., 1978). All of

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them are characterised by a wider perspective, which inscribes empirical findings in a historical, socio-economic, and political perspective. The reality represented by the news is conceived of as an essentially ideological construction, based on consensual definitions of marginality and deviance reproduced by the media through their institutional sources. According to these studies, political and social elites, acting as “primary definers”, provide that limited set of discourses which are used by journalists to make sense of the world. [20] In their influential study, Stuart HALL and colleagues (1978) argued that a state response to deviance through public order measures could be justified thanks to the coverage of a so-called “mugging wave” in urban areas, a coverage which ignored or dismissed the specific characteristics of a social problem/crisis underlying the events. HALL et al. revealed the constructed nature of mugging, which they considered “not as a fact but as a relation—the relation between crime and the reaction to crime” (p. viii). The creation of “moral panics”(COHEN, 1980; GOODE & BEN YEHUDA, 1994; HUNT, 1997) such as mugging or asylum scares, has been interpreted as a powerful instrument in building a consensus and setting the agenda for the solution of these social problems with law-and-order policies. The moral panic is sustained by appeals to common sense fears grounded in “objective” analyses of the problem at hand. The creation of a moral panic is defined as follows: “A condition, episode, person or group of persons emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests; its nature is presented in a stylised and stereotypical fashion by the mass media; the moral barricades are banned by editors, bishops, politician and other right-thinking people; socially accredited experts pronounce their diagnosis and solutions; ways of coping are evolved or … resorted to” (COHEN, 1972, p.9). [21] In this study, Stanley COHEN reconstructed the stages of a moral panic, in which various social actors—judges, politicians, police, media and “public opinion”—played a predictable role, and showed how these actors contributed to the criminalisation of migrants. [22] From the perspective of discourse, a primary interest has been the analysis of the forms and origins of the myths that ideological signification has built upon. “Riots” in the early 1980s in Britain were defined—and then dealt with—as a criminal, rather than political, phenomenon through reporting centred around the image of a “thin blue line” of police defending the community against an “unprecedented” wave of violence and lawlessness

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(MURDOCK, 1984). Another central myth in British discourse on migrant crime has been that of the “inner-city”, an isolated place or “no-go area” alien to the norms and values of the White middle-class—something potentially destructive for the “British way of life” (BURGESS, 1985). The banlieues in France and several metropolitan areas in Italy have been subjected to a similar construction of deviance (HARGREAVES, 1996; MANERI, 1998b). [23] In order to provide answers about the role of different institutional actors in the social construction of deviance, qualitative research is required. Some of the most important elements in this research will help to: •

verify the access of non-state actors to the media, their frequency, position and style of quotation; • analyse positions on deviance and crime, and the categories and causal models used to explain deviance and social problems in editorials, opinion articles, and political interviews (editorials indicate the importance of an issue for political elites) ; • evince the ideological and moral values expressed in crime news; • compare problem definitions or group designations used by representatives of the state with those adopted by the media and in the wider public discourse of non-state actors, including majority as well as minority perspectives. This comparison also makes it possible to analyze processes of definition which may run a different course than the ones described in the classic studies on “policing the crisis”; • assess the different ways in which violence against other immigrant groups is covered depending on whether or not there is political involvement or a social movement backing an anti-racist or anti-immigrant protest; • analyse the use and (socially constructed) origin of myths surrounding crime; • study the structuring of media campaigns and moral panics and the role of the various actors in launching and sustaining them. [24] A broader perspective in this approach would ideally include not just analyses of media content, but also field observation, interviews of strategic actors, and analysis of official data and documents. However, such work has rarely been done, and the role of the various actors is generally inferred

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from the analysis of media materials. In a similar fashion, the strongest methodological critique made of research in this perspective concerns the difficult task of analysing both criminal action and societal reaction: although claims are made about the “overreaction” that lies behind any moral panic, data are not systematically analysed to prove it. This problem is difficult to overcome, since official data on crime are very sensitive to reactions to it, and indeed measure the latter as much as the former. [25] For the analysis of the news, qualitative methods have been preferred to content analysis, but few, if any, systematic textual studies have been undertaken. Moreover, unless clear indicators are defined, a focus on the reporting of a case, by reconstructing the various stages and headlines, sometimes risks being no more than a summary and paraphrasing of what is found in the material, i.e. a narrative or anecdotal reconstruction of the events covered in the news. Discourse analytical theory is aimed at defining categories for the analysis of textual and linguistic data in a meaningful and systematic way. [26]

Discourse Analytical Approach In discourse analysis news text is the object of analysis, combining insights from the social constructionist and newsmaking approaches with linguistic and social cognition analyses. This approach claims that negative reporting is only partly a result of the above-mentioned routine conditions of news reporting. Of course, the fact that information has to be presented in a condensed and abbreviated manner requires operations of selection, summarisation, and generalisation. News discourse itself is a social and cognitive practice. Negative reporting is produced by (the reproduction of) dominant ideologies that are encoded in the structures (that is, the content and style) of news text (VAN DIJK, 1991). More specifically, discourse analysis maintains that text and talk play a crucial role in the reproduction of ethnic prejudice and racism. Indeed, beliefs and opinions about ethnic out-groups become socially shared through text and talk. Because most ingroup members do not have a daily interaction with immigrants, their beliefs and knowledge about the out-group are shaped to a large extent by the media (VAN DIJK, 1987, see also section on news and public attitudes approach below). [27] The main direction in this approach is that of critical discourse analysis (CDA), and most of the scholars working in the field have a linguistics background. Critical discourse analysis focuses on the roles of ideology

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and power and their enactment and reproduction through discourse. It criticises the ways in which existing power inequalities and discrimination are maintained and reproduced through discourse. Discourse has not only pragmatic functions of persuasion and credibility enhancement but also socio-political functions of legitimisation and control. [28] The analysis of news discourse has often combined quantitative analyses (as described above) with qualitative analyses of smaller sets of news discourse (EBEL & FIALA, 1983; VAN DIJK, 1991). These are used to show how news definitions build on the dominant perspective of the powerful and on a mutual reinforcement of official and popular perspectives on the definition of social problems. More precisely, it is shown how news reports regarding ethnic issues reproduces dominant “situation models” which support and confirm negative beliefs about other ethnic groups (VAN DIJK, 1991, 1993). [29] In order to analyse the role of news discourse in reproducing stereotypical ethnic beliefs and prejudiced attitudes, this approach builds on analytical categories borrowed from social psychology, social representations theory, and social cognition theory. It uses notions of in- and out-group definitions, and assumes that beliefs about out-groups are organised in schemata (prejudiced attitude schemata). For example, the schema for beliefs about refugees is composed of several propositions having to do with claims that refugees are “bogus”, “the victim of criminal organisations/smugglers”, that they “come in large numbers and cannot be controlled”, that they are “welfare scroungers”, and “are likely to end up in illegal, deviant or criminal activities”. Through an analysis of argumentation strategies and quotation patterns it is shown how such beliefs or claims are used to justify law and order policies or the restriction of the right to asylum (TER WAL, 1996; VAN DIJK, 1991). [30] The socio-cognitive discourse theory of Teun VAN DIJK (1991) claims that the representation of ethnic groups in news is influenced by pre-existing beliefs and attitudes about the general threat and particular deviant behaviour of migrants that are stored in the “social memory”. Beliefs and opinions about ethnic issues are revealed in the presuppositions, assumptions and meanings that are expressed in news discourse through— among other things—topical organisation, lexical choice and syntactic style, and argumentative structures. Similarly, in critical linguistics, studies of the ideological functions of news discourse have been applied predominantly to the syntactic and local semantic levels of discourse (KRESS & HODGE,

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1979; FAIRCLOUGH, 1989, FAIRCLOUGH, 1991; FOWLER, 1991). Local semantics are discussed in the section on techniques for analysis. Discourse analysis is nonetheless directed not only at the local level of word and sentence structure and meaning, but also at the level of larger units of meaning, such as paragraphs, and the global organisation of text structure and meaning (topics) (VAN DIJK, 1988ab, 1991). The latter can also be used as a basis for quantitative analysis. [31] A study of news discourse production and text features in the criminalisation of ethnic groups may include an analysis of the following (see also research techniques, Section 2 below): [32]

Headlines and Topics The social and institutional routines of newsmaking are related to structural properties of news reports, such as the summarisation of global meaning or the highlighting of salient information in headlines. The appearance of official actors in more prominent positions than non-official and minority actors in the news is also related to these criteria of newsmaking. That is, the most crucial problem definitions are found in the most prominent and recurrent elements of the structures of news reports, such as headlines and other news schema categories (VAN DIJK, 1988b). Therefore, the representation of in- and out-groups and the use of argumentative strategies in headlines and leads of news reports deserve special attention. The textual function of headlines is to represent the global theme or topic; articles are characterised by a biased schematic or thematic organisation when a piece of information with only minor importance in the main body of the article is fore-grounded, i.e. expressed in the headline. [33] In addition, news outlets tend to “tag” their services as a means to give a first “framing” for the events and situations described. In newspapers this is the “tag” at the corner of the newspaper page or at the beginning of the headline, citing the rubric/subject area within which the news is covered, such as “foreign affairs”. For special issues there can be use of more specific tags such as “emergenza immigrati” (“migrant emergency”) or “banlieue” (“ghetto”), which can be telling about the framing of these issues in mainstream media. In North-American television news the words “the war on terror” show a similar use of tags. [34]

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Quotation Patterns Quotation patterns reveal the assignment of speaking and social roles to actors with different levels of power and status within, and access to, newsmaking (ZELIZER, 1989; VAN DIJK, 1988b). This means the roles attributed to different actors involved in ethnic issues can also be revealed by the position and way in which they are quoted. In primary news accounts official and expert discourses are frequently set apart to provide the news reports with authoritative statements which signify the importance of the events or the issue at hand. Editorials frequently contain different forms of reported speech and indirect quotation or other forms of “inter-textuality”. Finally, interviews offer yet another form of speech interaction that can be analysed in terms of turn-taking, sequencing, and strategic moves. Qualitative discourse analysis of reported speech may identify forms of indirect and direct quotation, several ways of (de)legitimising or up/ downgrading statements made by different actors and their confirmation/ contradiction, or repetition. This indicates not only the different news value and access of actors, but also the “reading of events” which is consequently imposed on the audience. [35]

Argumentation The text structure of editorials is composed of argumentative categories. Editorials do not just comment on immediate events; they also address wider moral and political issues in what could be interpreted as ideological moves. Because of their focus on argumentation, and their giving voice to elite group representatives, editorials play an important role in the justification and/or challenge of official definitions and policies. The use of argumentation strategies in news reports may also show the way in which power relations are embedded in news discourse. That is, it may reveal that arguments produced in a specific format or by a specific group of news actors are likely to be deemed valid/invalid, credible/questionable or functional/ dysfunctional to the justification of a particular response to immigration by a potentially large group of people. Common argumentation strategies in news discourse about crime are: •

•

the presentation of violent incidents as “riots” or conflicts between different minority ethnic groups, thereby denying White involvement and responsibility and adopting “division tactics” among the minority groups; “blaming the victim”, i.e. attributing responsibility for “Black

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crime” to the lack of motivation and lifestyle choices of Blacks (personal instead of circumstantial attribution), or, where there is circumstantial attribution, the tendency to blame migrants for the conditions in which they find themselves; • the use of a discourse on riots as a means to justify restrictive immigration measures or residential segregation (dispersal of immigrant settlements and avoidance of migrant concentrations); • divisive tactics (i.e. division between “good” and “bad”—i.e. illegal, criminal—migrants); • the justification of public order interventions by depicting ethnic groups in a negative light. [36] In order to unravel the thematic and argumentative links between discourses on issues of, for example, poverty, housing, “race”, and crime, analysis could focus on discourse on the broader theme of illegality. Illegality is often used in public discourse as a container concept for these different forms of categorizing “problem groups”, even when not of the same ethnic mi (or majority!) background. It can be interesting to look at the links between arguments and themes in order to unravel incongruences, gaps in argumentation, or camps in the debate. [37]

Narrative Analysing the narrative organisation of the various elements of a text (topics, episodes, and other narrative functions) is another way to reveal the constitution of meaning. In news, a chronological account of an event is rarely given. Rather, in hard news in the quality press, the order of elements proceeds as their news value decreases. The systematic downgrading of a topic or episode is an indicator of its lesser news value. In news with a dramatic construction, such as many feature stories, some narrative sequences may favour interpretations that would be unlikely if the order of the elements presented was different. [38] In Italy, for example, local protests against migrants were reported following a script that presented a typical ordering of four elements: disorder brought by migrants—neighbourhood protest—police intervention— resolution of the problem. This ordering was suitable for blaming the victims of the protests and presenting policing of migrants as a natural action in the course of events reported (MANERI, 1995). [39] The theoretical assumptions underpinning discourse analysis regarding the role of dominant ideologies and power have been questioned and criticised. The reason is that if power is

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taken as an a-priori given, then the results of research tend to simply confirm this role without further qualification. Explanations in terms of power do not allow for qualified comparative research to be made. They rather favour the collection of further evidence used for the purpose of an anti-racist critique. Some feel that this critique is based on a presumption of “intellectual hegemony”, by which the critical scholar imposes her/his “own frame of reference on a world already interpreted and endogenously constructed by participants” (WETHERELL, 1998, p.388). Indeed, in recent research, neither the dominant ideologies theory adopted in discourse analysis, nor the primary-definers thesis of the social constructionist approach, have been taken for granted. [40] For example, HARGREAVES (1996) shows that constructions of difference found in the reporting of the French press on the “banlieues” did not correspond to the official definitions, and that the social movement of immigrants was what first attracted media attention to these areas. However, the outcome of stereotypical and negative representations of immigrants was the same. Indeed, although “primary definers” do not always set the agenda, nor necessarily provide the first definitions adopted in the media, their preferential access and roles nevertheless tend to contribute to a marginalisation of opposing discourses, in particular the discourse of the immigrants themselves. Still, even within discourse analysis it is now generally agreed that media analysis should pay more attention to variety and diversity, in order to account not just for dominant views and reproduction but also for the role of media in the transformation of culture and society (for example, FAIRCLOUGH, 1995). [41]

News and Public Attitudes Approach As a final approach we will discuss the difficult problem of the study of effects in the communication research tradition. Findings of earlier analysis of press coverage combined with attitude analysis suggested, in agreement with the agenda-setting hypothesis, that “the media do not determine how people think, but mostly what to think about” (HARTMANN & HUSBAND, 1974). This important piece of research on the portrayal of ethnic minorities in Britain analysed the recurrence of themes and linguistic devices with predominantly quantitative methods. Other studies found interesting divergences between the representation of different migrant community crimes in the news, on the one hand, and the cognitions of readers about migrant crime, on the other (GRABER, 1980). More recent examples of divergences between minority audiences’ perceptions of their own group’s

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representation in the news as compared to actual news contents can be found in DEVROE (2004), ROSS (2000), and POOLE (2001). [42] Research within the discourse analytical tradition has indicated that media coverage does shape the way that people speak and think about immigrants. On the basis of qualitative analyses of interviews in inner-city neighbourhoods in the Netherlands and the US, VAN DIJK (1978) found that the media, along with personal experience and hearsay, formed one of the main sources for White people’s stories about ethnic minorities and thus for the acquisition and reproduction of socially-shared knowledge about ethnic minorities. “On many occasions, people refer to the media as a source of information or as a source of ethnic opinions with which they may agree or disagree. […] interpersonal communication about ethnic groups, especially in the lowcontact areas, is heavily dependent on media information. People mention the media in general, or the press in particular, for “evidence” about the negative characteristics of ethnic groups. Crime is the major topic in this case, although sometimes also other themes are mentioned, such as cultural differences or favourable treatment”. (VAN DIJK 1987, p.153) [43] Most research in this field has opposed the assumptions of traditional attitude research that measures opinions using fixed questions and categorisations. Instead, discourse analysts have stressed the need to understand the variability of attitudes as they can be found through qualitative analyses of sequences of text and narratives, in particular in applications of conversation analysis (BILLIG, 1991; POTTER & WETHERELL, 1988; WINDISCH, 1990). [44]. As part of the analysis of the construction of negative out-group representations and boundarydrawing practices in the news, and their possible effects on public attitudes, it might be possible to examine the correlation between public perceptions of different ethnic groups (and related degrees of racism/xenophobia) and the amount of news coverage on certain ethnic groups (campaigns), and also the amount of political resonance given to transform this into a political issue (for a quantitative study on asylum issues, see KOOPMANS, 1996). In order to research this qualitatively, one would need to combine media analysis with fieldwork or other techniques such as focus group or in-depth interviews. With these same techniques it would be interesting to analyse individual, interpersonal, and organised group discourse before and after the media coverage of foreseeable important issues, such as the arrival of large numbers of refugees (VERKUYTEN, 1997). [45]

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OPERATIONALISATION: RESEARCH TECHNIQUES Given the state-of-the-art as roughly sketched out in the preceding paragraphs, we can now evaluate the techniques used for research in this area as follows. Firstly, content analysis is a useful approach because it makes it possible to generalize newsmaking features (frequency of news subjects, actors, and their quotes) for a large amount of articles. Secondly, in order to examine the structures and meanings of news, a detailed qualitative discourse analysis is needed. This approach also allows for questions to be asked about the sorts of social identity, the versions of “self” and “other”, that the media project (and about the cultural values that these projections entail). Thirdly, discourse analysis can be complemented by ethnographic field work/observation, interviews with privileged actors, analysis of official data and documents, and possibly by semiotic analysis (cf. VAN LEEUWEN, 2000). [46] In some studies two or more approaches have been incorporated. The general question about the presentation of news, which is studied by asking who was talking about what, in what way, in which position, can indeed be answered by using a variety of approaches. The most obvious combination is that of content and discourse analysis, used as separate but complementary research methods. For example, one can analyse not only the frequency of quotes by various (minority/majority) actors, but also how they are quoted. In this section the analytical categories of the two main techniques of content and discourse analysis are listed and explained further. [47]

Content Analysis Content analysis is a quantitative technique used to study large corpuses of text. Although some indications for the development of a “qualitative content analysis” have been suggested, we will consider it here in its classic quantitative orientation, since such new qualitative elements either transform this technique in something completely different (but similar to what we will describe in the section on discourse analysis) or do not change its quantitative status in a significant fashion. When doing discourse analysis the researcher can chose between two main procedures: • •

Lexical indices: the units of analysis are linguistic units such as words, “key symbols”, or, less commonly, sentence units Coding categories: the units of analysis correspond to the communication units (such as articles) or are subsets of them

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(such as actors or claims made by actors, defined in non-linguistic terms) [48]

Lexical Indices Words and key symbols (metaphors, slogans, stretches of discourse) are chosen according to the research hypothesis, counted, generally classified into more general categories and then analysed using different techniques. The words most frequently selected to study migrants and crime are those used to name (designations) and qualify (epithets and qualifiers) the actors involved. A comparison between British and Dutch newspaper headlines published between August 1985 and January 1986 shows, for example, that the British press preferred racial terms (“Black”, “race”) while the Dutch press made reference almost exclusively to national or generic terms (“Turks”, “refugees”) (VAN DIJK, 1988c; 1991). Studies in which all significant words are analysed, generally from headlines, are also frequent. In VAN DIJK’s (1991) study of the British national press the most common words found in headlines were “police”, “riot”, “Black” and “race”. [49] Lexical categories may be cross-tabulated with other variables (for example newspapers, years, countries, migrants’ origins) or treated with statistical techniques. The analysis of lexical correspondences is frequently used because it makes it possible to present results graphically (with a scatter plot) in a synthetic and efficient manner. What is shown is the structure of the mutual associations of the words studied and/or of the associations with a categorical variable. In this way it is possible to see indicators of the most common discourses (represented by clusters of words) and to individually associate them with, for example, their origin (different newspapers, years, nationalities, countries). Analyses that use lexical indices work mainly at a thematic level and, since they start from simple linguistic indicators, do not allow for the consideration of complex questions. [50]

Coding Categories With this technique it is possible to obtain quantitative data simply by filling out a (electronic) standardised questionnaire (or codebook) that includes questions about communication units (newspaper articles, TV news items, etc.). The variables may measure frequencies of topics, subjects, actors, and quotes. In this case, a list of possible values (typologies of actors, for example) must be arranged after an initial exploration of the materials to be analysed. A possible alternative is to build such a list following an examination of

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open-ended questions. The use of a residual “other” at the end of a value list is preferable as it allows certain values to be maintained within existing categories. Variables may also try to measure dimensions of the portrayal of the actors (more or less “racialised”, threatening, inclined to crime, and so on) and processes. They may also measure the attitude of the journalist towards the actors involved (more or less favourable, sympathetic, etc.), or their perspective on, or “framing” of, a specific issue. In order to achieve a reliable and valid set of variables, the codebook needs to be accurately pretested. Especially for variables considering representations and attitudes, codebooks must include detailed explanations of the dimensions studied as well as instructions for the analysts. [51] Compared to lexical indices, coding categories allow for a deeper investigation of content and a broader range of research questions, but do so in a way that leaves perhaps too much space to the subjectivity of the researchers and their interpretations, meaning these will need to be controlled for reliability. Data produced by codebooks are limited by not being grounded in linguistic indicators. Besides, the more they aim at enquiring into complex dimensions such as the representation of actors, attitudes of the journalist, and so on, the more likely it is that they will come up with vague and abstract conclusions, and the more difficult it will be to achieve inter-coder reliability. Moreover, from such an analysis it may be possible to conclude, for example, that in 30% of the articles migrants are portrayed as a threat without it being possible to further qualify this finding. [52] Whereas lexical indexing forces the researcher to address simple questions or to draw complex conclusions from rough data through uncontrolled inferential processes, the use of coding categories leads to the recurrence of the problem. The inferential work is done at the beginning, and the results bear no trace of the (linguistic) material used. This is why content analysis should preferably be restricted to the provision of (quantitative and reliable) data at a (simple) thematic level, or at the level of the presenceabsence of actors, quotes, and sources. [53]

Discourse Analysis As stated earlier, discourse analysis differs from traditional content analysis and lexical indexing. In lexical indexing the evaluation of a word, and the different meanings assigned to it in different contexts, cannot be assessed unless the contexts are checked for every occurrence (a very time-consuming

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exercise), and only at a local level, of co-occurrences of words in the same sentence parts. The influence of structure, ordering, etc. on the meanings of language is completely lost with lexical indexing. In discourse analysis, text is analysed in context, and so words are analysed together with their specific syntactic and pragmatic functions. In addition, the ordering of and coherence between larger chunks of text is considered, something that is not possible in content analysis. Discourse analysis is thus directed at meanings at the pragmatic level of communication underlying local and global semantic structures. [54] Discourse analysis usually works with a checklist of analytical categories, which are divided into different levels of analysis. The analyst usually starts by writing up a “summary” (following specific rules of global meaning composition) of the text that represents the semantic macrostructure. He or she then passes to the level of local textual analysis, always keeping in mind the context and function of the analysed fragment in the text as a whole. [55] Although discourse analysis does not allow for large amounts of text to be analysed, it is possible to use quantification to summarise the recurrence of particular discourse analytical indicators, such as topics, argumentation strategies or “topoi”, or syntactic choices for particular actions. [56] A checklist may contain the following levels and elements of analysis: [57]

Global Semantics The production and processing of news texts is assumed to require cognitive operations, the activation of previous knowledge, and the updating of existing situation models and group- and event-schemata (VAN DIJK & KINTSCH, 1983). Cognitive relevance is revealed in the physical organisation of news texts. The superstructure of news reports or news schema consists of a number of conventional categories, which exhibit a special linear order as well as hierarchical organisation. Superstructures determine what content typically comes first, second, or last in a text (VAN DIJK, 1988a). Some basic elements in the analysis of the global semantic level could be: •

•

the topical organisation of news reports. Compare this semantic macrostructure with the information in headlines: is it an adequate summary or does it highlight certain statements, actors, or claims? (see also Section 1.4 on headlines); the order and the prominence of topics within a single news story and among several stories. This may be relevant for an

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understanding of the ideological orientation of news stories and agendas. For example, in the front-page coverage of an anti-racist demonstration the news on a contemporaneous event, which associated a particular ethnic group (Roma in this case) with crime, was upgraded, whereas topics related to the demonstration were downgraded. As a result, the actions of the out-group as a whole were cast in an unsympathetic light; • the connection of different thematic areas to the crime theme (entry, asylum, cities, poverty, unemployment, cultural difference) in causal explanation, to be derived from an analysis of coherence relations in text. For example, in a study on the Dutch press VAN DIJK (1988c, p.244) noted “crime and deviance may combine with cultural differences (in particular, treatment of wife and children in Islamic culture)”. [58] Local semantics (lexicalisation, perspective, implicature) •

•

•

•

the denominations used for immigrants and the traits attributed to them to depict them as different, so as to construct an image of, for example, racial violence, which obscures and stigmatises; the description (or picturing) of details—such as national origin, (religious) dress, accent, hairstyle, skin colour, or other phenotypical or cultural features—that are irrelevant for a description of the events or situation at hand, but supportive of prevailing stereotypes and/or prejudices about the described outgroups; the use of an abundant number of near-synonyms to describe the same group, issue or phenomenon—also called overlexicalisation—as an indicator of the importance attributed to a specific trait or issue; the credibility of quoted speakers may be enhanced or lowered by the strategic use of verbs or adverbs with different presuppositions or other forms of implicitness. Migrants—when quoted at all— tend to be assigned lower credibility and less prominence than majority group speakers, whose credibility is more frequently enhanced and taken for granted. When presenting quotes, journalists may choose verbs, adverbs, or other style markers which reinforce negative stereotypes though the representation of the out-group as a threat and as not respecting “our” norms for civilised debate (TER WAL, 1996; for quantification c.f. TER

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•

•

•

WAL, D’HAENENS & KOEMAN, 2004); the journalist’s perspective can be evaluated by considering how she/he positions her/himself with respect to the various actors involved in the discourse through the use of particular linguistic devices, for example those expressing distance vs. identification. Pronouns that can express so-called “relational meaning”—for example, common belonging (“our traditions are threatened”)— are particularly important. Another example is the use of irony as a stylistic marker of distancing, or the use of quotation marks to distance oneself from a particular formulation or expression; the absence/presence of explanations that may impose an interpretative framework on the events either implicitly or explicitly; the ways in which responsibility is attributed/downplayed. In the analysis of explanations of crime, for example, a distinction can be made between circumstantial and personal attributions. The latter form involves a blaming-the-victim strategy, while the former may allow for an analysis of wider social problems and responsibilities (including those of the in-group). Other distinctions that may be relevant for the analysis of the attribution of responsibility are those that categorize agency in personal or impersonal terms, that qualify migrants as individual or collective realities, or that construct processes as abstract or concrete entities (VAN LEEUWEN, 1995, 1996). [59]

Syntactic Style Nominalisations, use of intransitive verbs and of the passive voice, and omission of the agent are used in order to conceal in-group agency in the portrayal of negative acts. For example “Eleven Africans were shot dead [...] when Rhodesian police opened fire on a rioting crowd” is a wellknown example used by FOWLER, HODGE, KRESS and TREW (1979), to show how syntactic choices may be used to conceal agency, in this case of the police, and to frame the events as racial conflict (for an example of a quantitative analysis of syntactic choices cf. MANERI, 2001). On the other hand, agency and ethnic identity are used in headlines in which “they” are associated with negative topics (illegal entry, protests, and crime). Minorities may thus be portrayed as active, responsible agents, even when they are actually the victims of repressive policing, community measures

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or other restrictive policies (GRABER, 1980, FOWLER et al., 1979; VAN DIJK, 1991). [60] Rhetoric (metaphors, metonymies etc.) Among the discursive devices through which restrictive measures are justified and populist intolerance represented as a natural expression are metaphors of flood, war, walls, and metaphors representing immigration as a pathology, etc., which work to “emotionalise” the facts (CHILTON, 1994; TER WAL, 1991). Rhetoric also functions at the textual level, for example in the organisation of argumentative structures in editorials (see above). [61]

SOME ISSUES IN RESEARCH DESIGN Data Gathering A common criticism of studies of press discourse is that the impact and audience size of the press are minor when compared to those of television. It is true that much research on the press is done in part because the gathering of newspaper materials is much easier than that of TV news items. However, there is reason to believe that the print media still plays an important role. They are cited as a means of credibility enhancement in interviews (VAN DIJK, 1987); they also generally set the agenda for the other media and can play a crucial role in local mobilisations and the definition of most local issues related to crime and migration, which have been shown to have great influence in the construction of discourses about racialised “others” (TER WAL, 1996; MANERI, 1998a). An interesting focus of analysis might be the analysis of the incidence of TV news coverage and TV documentary and talk shows within the development of larger issues in the national and local press, and vice versa. Another interesting task would be to track the “migration” of news scripts, utterances, and interpretative frames from one medium to another. [62] In addition to news texts, further analysis of related sources such as press releases and news agency dispatches may provide useful insights into newsmaking and social constructionist perspectives. It makes it possible to compare news texts with actual sources, e.g. to verify to what extent journalists actually rely on these sources. Similarly, the special role of the police and court statements, and their specific news value and formulations, may be further investigated by examining police wires or press releases. [63]. Researchers can gather audio-visual data personally, by scheduling recordings of television news, but this is time-consuming and must be planned

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in advance. For the analysis of large datasets or for periods further back in time, electronic archives must be considered, although the possibilities of accessing archives varies across countries and broadcasting organizations and can be very expensive. For written news, especially in large sets, electronic data seem attractive but are not available for all newspapers, which can lead to ad-hoc justification for choosing those sources that do have electronic versions available. Not all newspapers are available on CDROM or accessible via archives or databases. Another problem concerning electronic data regards the graphic format and sometimes the content: web or CD-ROM version of newspaper articles may be different from those of the printed version, which supposedly reached a larger audience. [64] In fact, in the case of newspapers, data gathering does not often benefit from access to electronic archives or databases. Article retrieval using keywords or subject fields, or even the combination of both methods, gives poor results, unless the research topic is defined in such a way as to match only a few commonly occurring keywords. Even in this case, articles gathered from electronic archives are just a part of the set of articles that can be selected manually, although the gap consists mostly of short articles or local news reports. Electronic data can be very useful at the analysis stage, although only for some quantitative studies. For the analysis of audiovisual material transcription is needed, and in the case of TV discourse, conversation or content analysis must be integrated with analysis of nonverbal communication. [65]

Data Selection: Extensive Analysis or Case Studies? Analyses of news discourse on ethnic issues have often focused on case-study materials. The problem with case studies is that they may be representative only of the particular (not the typical or paradigmatic case). Attempting to generalise from specific and or particularistic data is unsatisfactory: although similar results and patterns do recur across time and in different countries there may still be selectivity in the examples or cases chosen. The advantage of case studies is that they allow the analyst to focus immediately on the most-debated and interesting aspects of the material, to reduce the amount of data, to go more in-depth, and to study the dynamic relationships between the discourses and activities of the various actors at play. For comparative research, case studies also have the advantage of allowing for a selection of the data that makes comparison meaningful. [66]

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Case studies have generally dealt with high-profile events of notable policy or institutional relevance, such as the arrival or expulsion of large numbers of refugees (TER WAL, 1997; WODAK, MATOUSCHEK & JANUSCHEK, 1993), or crime incidents elevated to national emergencies (MANERI, 2001). Specific incidents, such as the Rushdie affair (VAN DIJK, 1991), the “race riots” in inner-city areas (MILES, 1984), “racial violence” in London’s East End (KEITH, 1995) and, more recently, analyses of the Rodney King beating (US) and Stephen Lawrence case (UK) have also been studied. [67] The news material for such case studies may differ to a considerable extent from the day-to-day routine coverage of ethnic issues in urban areas. The latter are as important for the cumulative effects of the reinforcement of negative stereotypes and opinions about ethnic out-groups as the former. Nonetheless, MANERI (1995; 1998a) has shown how, in the 1990s, Italian press campaigns against migrant crime, which were originally covered as individual crises, increasingly became part of routine daily coverage. In such instances, a case study can give insight into everyday dealings with “race” and deviance, making it possible to study, in press and TV, the transformation of the daily local crime news into political and national issues. [68] The reasons for undertaking an extensive analysis are clear: doing so makes it possible to summarise large amounts of data and to produce easily readable/convincing quantitative results and monitor everyday coverage. The problem of extensive analysis is that it is hardly possible to do anything other than quantitative analysis, with the limits underlined in the previous and the next section, unless one concentrates on a subset, such as a particular format or theme or, alternatively, uses a large research team. One would have to be very selective in extracting interesting data for qualitative analysis. However, from within a corpus of selected news texts for extensive analysis one can adopt the selection criteria of primacy (news peak days, page number) and prominence (headlines and position in the article, quotes, and portrayal of the main actors involved). It is also possible to focus on questions such as when daily crime reporting starts receiving political attention, when reporting is used for social/protest mobilisation, and who does this. [69] As suggested by research in Italy, another problem may be that coverage of ethnic affairs, especially initially, may pass through long phases of latency, with issues being picked up as emergencies only occasionally, either as a result of political agenda-setting or of media campaigns (MARLETTI, 1989; MANERI, 1995). In these cases choices in the sampling method

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(for example the selection of particular weeks or days) or in the period of time covered by the research design may produce results valid only for that particular sample or period. [70]

Problems and Possibilities for Cross-national Comparative Research There seem to be more problems than possibilities for comparative research. Some possibilities for comparison within one set of data were mentioned earlier. It is also possible to compare news coverage and discourse at different points in time; such studies do exist (see above). In order to make such time comparisons less descriptive, it might be interesting to account for changes over time and across countries in terms of the discursive management of anti-racist norms, i.e. in norms about what a person can and cannot say about migrants without being accused of “racism”. [71] However, cross-national comparison, as the most widely accepted form of comparison, is more difficult to operationalise, in part because it is not always clear what exactly is meant by this term. There is little consensus as to which analytical categories and which terminology should be used, even within a single approach such as that of discourse analysis, where the similarities across countries are readily observed. This is mostly because there have so far been few attempts at collective and comparative research efforts. The existing results are part of larger monitoring efforts that only look at the position of migrants or ethnic minorities within the framework of studies about news in general, or sometimes with an additional focus on gender and race issues (for example, the WACC Media Watch content analyses; c.f. SPEARS, SEYDEGART & GALLAGHER, 2000). In addition, existing national research tends to use established nation-specific datasets and selection/analysis methods and indicators, so it cannot be used for posthoc comparative purposes. [72] Recent attempts at comparative research in this area have been restricted to quantitative analyses. Recently TER WAL (2004) conduced a crossnational content analysis using the same coding instrument in 15 EU countries, in cooperation with the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia and On-Line More Colour in the Media. This quantitative analysis adopted a new approach, in that the same coding instrument was used in all participating countries. The focus was not only on news involving “coloured” people, but included all domestic news stories. This inclusive approach made it possible to compare the impact of deep-seated news values

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and other recurrent newsmaking practices on general news contents with that on news stories about ethnic minorities. The analysis showed frequent stereotypical images of minorities being relegated to areas of negative societal coverage linked to crime and deviance, as opposed to the appearance of ethnic minority celebrities on the positive end of the spectrum, or members of minorities being portrayed as ordinary people mostly in relation to asylum and migration issues. In addition, ethnic minorities or migrants became a focus when identity issues such as fundamentalism and religion were discussed. Everyday ethnic relations were often covered without reference to the views and perspectives of the minority protagonists themselves. Even in stories about their own job position, minorities were quoted less than their majority counterparts. In the regional press, integration and identity topics were counter-balanced more than elsewhere by the predominantly negative attention paid to minorities in crime news. The study did little to confirm the hypothesis, implicit in discussions about fair portrayal, that local or regional press would pay (or could more easily be persuaded to pay) more positive attention to ethnic minorities. [73] To date, few comparative studies exist that make any form of systematic qualitative comparisons. VAN DIJK (1989, 1991) did a study of both the Dutch and British press using the same time span and analytical categories. Here, general patterns of discourse and discursive functions turned out to be very much alike, within the limits of different journalistic traditions and the ideological affiliations of the newspapers examined. Quantitative results varied, although similar patterns in topic use and use of quotes were found. The limits of cross-national comparison in discourse analysis lie in the descriptive character of this approach. The discourse theoretical framework accounts for the structure and organisation of text and underlying beliefs, attitudes, and communicative constraints, but not for the variation in social representations. Moreover, the main aim of the discursive studies done in this area has generally been to denounce the unfair representation of migrants, and evidence from various countries was thus primarily gathered to test the recurrence of negative representation. However, techniques such as topic, lexical, and frame analysis do allow for cross-national comparisons with a more explanatory orientation as well. It is recommended that such research be undertaken in the future to analyse the specific features of news media coverage of migrant crime and its relation to the general coverage of migrant issues. [74] Whether qualitative or quantitative, cross-national comparative research in news analysis works with a number of given differences: countries with

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different journalistic traditions; different divisions in (political) orientation, editorial policy of newspapers, and programming policies. Also, each country presents different issues related to ethnicity, as well as differences in terms of the position and treatment of migrants, and related categorisations of migrant or minority population groups. Furthermore, there is a problem with different languages, and different denominations for “migrants” (indeed, the term itself is not unproblematic). The signification and significance of the “race” dimension may also differ widely from one country to the other: this could be an interesting focus of analysis in combination with discourses on crime and deviance. Also, in some European societies—partly due to different histories of immigration and integration—explanations for the reported predominance of crime or deviance among specific sections of minority populations may be connected more often to questions of cultural difference (e.g. generational differences or upbringing according to the religious and cultural orientation of migrant parents), while in others they may be linked more with socio-economic problems (deprivation, segregation, and/ or discrimination). Informed questions about differences in the definition and treatment of migrant crime by different actors in society, including the influence that European policy and lobby or protest group agendas may have on the definition of such issues, will constitute an important starting point for future research in this area. [75]

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York: Longman. Fairclough, Norman (1991). Discourse and social change. Cambridge: Polity Press. Fairclough, Norman (1995). Media discourse. London: Edward Arnold. Fishman, Mark (1978). Crime waves as ideology. Social Problems, 25(5), 531-543. Fowler, Roger (1991). Language and the news. London: Routledge. Fowler, Roger, Hodge, Bob, Kress, Gunther & Trew, Tony (1979). Language and control. London: Routledge. Galtung, John & Ruge, Mary (1965). The structure of foreign news: the presentation of the Congo, Cuba and Cyprus Crises in four foreign newspapers. Journal Of International Peace Research, 1, 64-90. Gans, Herbert (1980). Deciding what’s news. A study of CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, Newsweek and Time. New York: Pantheon Books. Garofalo, James (1981). Crime and the mass media: A selective review of research. Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, 18(2), 319-350. Goode, Erich & Ben-Yehuda, Nachman (1994). Moral panics. The social construction of deviance. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Gordon, Paul & Rosenberg, David (1989). Daily racism. The press and black people in Britain. London: Runnymede Trust. Graber, Doris A. (1980). Crime news and the public. New York: Praeger Greenberg, Bradley S. & Mazingo, Sherrie L. (1976). Racial issues in mass media institutions. In Phyllis A. Katz (Ed.), Towards the elimination of racism (pp.309-340). New York: Pergamon Press. Hall, Stuart, Critcher, Chas, Jefferson, Tony & Clarke, John (1978). Policing the crisis: Mugging, the state and law and order. London: MacMillan. Hargreaves, Alec (1996). A deviant construction: the French media and the “Banlieues”. New Community, 22(4), 607-18. Hartmann, Paul & Husband, Charles (1974). Racism and the mass media. London: Davis-Poynter. Holland, Patricia (1981). The new cross fire and the popular press. Multi-racial Education, 9(3), 61-80. Hufker, Brian & Cavender, Gray (1990). From freedom flotilla to

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CHAPTER

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MEDIA IMAGES AND EXPERIENCES OF BEING A JEW IN THE SWEDISH CITY OF MALMÖ

Anders Wigerfelt and Berit Wigerfelt

Malmö University, Sweden

ABSTRACT A series of high-profile incidents in and after 2008 placed Malmö in southern Sweden on the national and international map as a place that was unsafe for people identified as Jews. The primary aim of this article is to explore and exemplify what it is like to live with Jewish identity in Malmö within a framework of how the media reports anti-Semitism and how this group copes with being the potential target of anti-Semitic harassment and hate crime. Based on interviews with people with Jewish identity in Malmö, we analyze and discuss their experiences using different themes, such as violent Citation: Anders Wigerfelt and Berit Wigerfelt SAGE Open https://doi. org/10.1177/2158244016633739 First Published March 4, 2016 Copyright: This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access page (https:// us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).

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and everyday anti-Semitism, the local impact of the Israel–Palestine conflict, how media images affect their lives, and how exposure and vulnerability are dealt with. The findings are important in terms of both possible long-term measures against anti-Semitism and as immediate support for those targeted. Keywords: anti-Semitism, hate crime, harassment, media images, Malmö

INTRODUCTION “I’m hated in Malmö!” This is the headline of an article in southern Sweden’s biggest daily newspaper, Sydsvenska Dagbladet (SDS), in which a young woman with Jewish identity expresses why she has moved from Malmö in southern Sweden to Israel. In the article, she describes how she has been regularly called a “bloody Jewish whore” at school and is increasingly afraid of being exposed to anti-Semitic hate crime (SDS, July 19, 2015). Other people and their families have also moved from Malmö to other parts of Sweden or to Israel in recent years and have talked to the media about Jews’ vulnerability and their decision to move, which has attracted international attention. Although anti-Semitic incidents have occurred throughout Sweden, most of the focus has been on one city in particular, Malmö. Located in the south of the country, Malmö is Sweden’s third largest city (300,000 inhabitants) and is well known from the television series The Bridge, which is seen across large parts of the world. Since 1994, the Social Democrats have been the dominating party in the city. More than 170 nationalities are represented in Malmö. The largest groups come from Iraq, Denmark, ex-Yugoslavia, Poland, and BosniaHerzegovina. According to statistics published in 2013, 30% (about 92,000) of the population of Malmö were born outside Sweden and about 11% were born in Sweden to parents originating from another country (www. malmo.se, February 19, 2014). As religion and ethnicity are not listed in the Swedish statistics, it is difficult to say exactly how many Jews there are in Sweden and in Malmö. The Official Council of Swedish Jewish Communities estimates the number of Jews in Sweden to be around 20,000 (www.judiskacentralradet.se). According to the information provided by the Jewish community in Malmö, there were 2,000 members in the 1970s. Ten years ago, the number was 1,000, while today there are only 600. However, not all Jews living in Malmö are members of the community (www.jfm.se, May 15, 2014).

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White power groups (neo-Nazi) are active in Sweden today, and some anti-Semitic hate crimes are committed by their members. In Malmö, however, White power groups are very small. But the right-wing populist party, the Sweden Democrats (Sverigedemokraterna), which was a very small party around 15 years ago with strong connections to the White Power Movement, is now an important actor in the Swedish Parliament. The Sweden Democrats received 12.9% of the votes in the parliamentary elections in 2014, including 13.5% of the votes in Malmö, and have a political manifesto that prioritizes reduced immigration, resistance to multiculturalism and to Islam, which resembles the agendas of similar popular parties in Europe (Borevi, 2013). The party is divided in attitudes toward Jews—that are primarily Muslims who are considered a danger for Sweden—but there are party members who openly declare anti-Jewish positions (Ravid, 2013). A series of high-profile incidents in and after 2008 placed Malmö on the national and international map as a place that was unsafe for people identified as Jews (see, for example, Sunday Telegraph, January 29, 2010). In the Swedish and international press, Malmö has been described as a city in which anti-Semitism flourishes; an anti-Semitism that is fueled by the Israel–Palestine conflict and which targets Swedish Jews as responsible for the actions taken by the state of Israel (see, for example, Aftonbladet [AB], August 14, 2014; Göteborgs Posten [GP], February 27, 2010; Skånska Dagbladet [SkD], January 25, 2010). In 2012, the situation in Malmö was considered so serious that Barack Obama sent his special envoy, Hannah Rosenthal, to gather more information about the situation there. Since 2010, the international Simon Wiesenthal Centre has been advising Jews not to travel to Malmö because their safety cannot be guaranteed due to the high risk of exposure to hate crime (SDS, October 1, 2012; SDS, March 8, 2013). The focus on Malmö can also be discerned in newspaper headlines, such as “USA’s envoy reaches hateful Malmö” (Kvällsposten [KvP], April 24, 2012) and “The eyes of the world are focused on Malmö” (SDS, February 27, 2012). Media exposure like this could have affected both the image of Jews’ exposure to hate crime and the Jewish experience of such exposure. The media’s contributions are important when it comes to structuring the images and discourses that help people to interpret the world (Golding & Murdock, 2000; S. Hall, 1997). Based on a combined interview and media study, this article examines Jews’ experiences of vulnerability and anti-Semitic hate crime in Malmö in a framework of how the media reports anti-Semitism of the city of Malmö as a special place for hate crime. The connection between

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the media’s news reporting and the experience of anti-Semitic harassment and hate crimes is, to our knowledge, not previously researched. We are aware that ethnic identity and positions are not always the most important aspects, but that dimensions such as gender, race, class, religion, and age can interact intersectionally in complex ways. We all have multiple identities. Identity is a positioning that is dependent on a specific context and can be chosen or forced (Börjesson & Palmblad, 2008; Chancer & Watkins, 2009; Hammarén & Johansson, 2009). As there are major differences among and between Jews, generalizing Jews as a group can be dangerous. Despite the difficulties associated with generalizations, we have chosen to use the identity position Jews in the text. This categorization could help to identify the vulnerability of specific groups, even though there is risk of stereotyped notions being reproduced (see Strömblad & Myrberg, 2015, for a discussion about the dilemmas of categorization). The primary aim of this article is to explore and exemplify what it is like to live with Jewish identity in Malmö within a framework of how the media reports anti-Semitism and how this group copes with being the potential target of anti-Semitic harassment and hate crime. In the study, this aim is broken down into three specific questions: •

How do people with Jewish identity experience their lives in Malmö? • How is vulnerability dealt with in cases of obvious and potential hate crime? • How is the media image of Malmö as a city that is especially prone to anti-Semitic hate crime? Listening to victims’ stories is vital and enables us to gain access to and understand openly manifested anti-Semitism as well as the more subtle expressions of prejudice and stereotyping. Based on interviews with people with Jewish identity in Malmö, we analyze and discuss their experiences using different themes, such as violent and everyday anti-Semitism, the local impact of the Israel–Palestine conflict, how media images affect their lives, and how exposure and vulnerability are dealt with. The findings are important in terms of both possible long-term measures against antiSemitism and as immediate support for those targeted.

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PREVIOUS RESEARCH AND THE THEORETICAL POINT OF DEPARTURE In recent years, reports of anti-Semitic hate crimes against Jews and Jewish institutions have increased in Europe as a whole and range from the vandalism of Jewish burial grounds to murder (Iganski, 2013, Rich, 2014; Smith, 2012). In December 2013, the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA) published the report titled Discrimination and Hate Crime Against Jews in EU Member States: Experiences and Perceptions of AntiSemitism. Around 5,500 Jews in eight member states, of which Sweden was one, responded to an online survey about anti-Semitism and hate crime. The survey showed that many Jews had been exposed to anti-Semitism and hate crime in the examined countries. On average, 66% of the respondents regarded anti-Semitism as major problem. In Sweden, the figure was 60%. Eighty percent of the respondents in Sweden said that anti-Semitism had increased in recent years. Of those responding in Sweden, 22% said that they had personally been subjected to verbal or physical attacks in 2012, although 75% said that they had not reported this to the police because they did not think that it would lead anywhere (FRA, 2013). Some of the anti-Semitic incidents/hate crimes in Sweden are reported to the police, although the number of unrecorded cases is probably great. The Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention publishes annual statistics on the number of reported hate crimes,1 including those with an anti-Semitic motive. The statistics show that more hate crimes were reported to the police in 2014 (270 cases) than in 2013 (190 cases; Brå, National Council for Crime Prevention, 2015). It is difficult to say anything definite about the intensity of anti-Semitism based on reports to the police and online surveys. The only thing that we can be sure about is that being Jewish in Sweden in 2015 is problematic, even though many regard Jews as part of the “white” establishment in Sweden (Nylund Skog, 2006). The influence of anti-Semitism on Swedish thinking and acting in a historical perspective is well documented in research (see, for example, Andersson, 2000; Bachner, 2009; Berggren, 1999; Carlsson, 2004; Tydén, 1986). Kvist Geverts (2008)uses the phrase “background noise” to explain that while most people condemned anti-Semitism in Germany, antiSemitic notions were “normal” in society and were always present, like a constant murmur. However, Kvist Geverts’s metaphor has been criticized. Tydén (2010) claims that Kvist Geverts takes anti-Semitism for granted, and thus does not examine whether the different treatments of Jews can be

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due to various causes. Åmark (2011) explains that there was a change in the beginning of the 1930s toward polarization of views on anti-Semitism. For example, Swedish Nazis use vulgar anti-Semitic propaganda, while others previously involved in everyday anti-Semitism reacted by distancing themselves from the anti-Semitic speech. After the Second World War, anti-Semitism was regarded as something that belonged to the past. However, in many parts of the world, including Sweden, anti-Semitic hate speech and violence are again on the rise (Bergmann, 2008; MacShane, 2008; Salzborn, 2010). Studies report that Jewish communities continue to experience violence against people and their property—synagogues, cemeteries, businesses, and homes (Bunzl, 2005; Salzborn, 2010; Smith, 2012). The growth of new communication and transport technologies facilitates the dissemination of anti-Semitic ideas between different countries and leads to the creation of local and international anti-Semitic ideological networks (Judaken, 2008; Watts, 2001). Such tendencies are visible not only in the Middle East, where antiJewish sentiments are often linked to hostility toward Israel, but also in the West, where in the last decade incidents of anti-Semitic expression and violence have become more visible (Balogh, 2011; Bergmann, 2008; Cohen et al., 2009; Iganski, 2013; Iganski & Kosmin, 2003; Partington, 2012; Peace, 2009; Smith, 2012). The academic literature on anti-Semitic hate crime in Europe is extensive. Much of the literature argues that today’s anti-Semitic hate crimes are triggered by the conflicts in the Middle East—often referred to as “new anti-Semitism” (e.g., Bacquet, 2009; Bunzl, 2005; Chesler, 2003; Forster & Epstein, 1974; FRA, 2013; Glazer, 2010; Iganski, 2013; Iganski & Kosmin, 2003; Levy, 1991; MacShane, 2008; Marrus et al., 2005; Rensmann & Schoeps, 2010; Silverstein, 2008; Smith, 2012; Taguieff, 2004). Many of these authors argue that a new wave or outbreak of hostility toward Jews in Europe began with the start of the second Palestinian intifada in September 2000 and is still making its presence felt. This “new anti-Semitism” manifests itself as hostility toward the state of Israel, which implies that there is a parity between individual Jews and the state of Israel (Cohen et al., 2009; Fine, 2009; Glazer, 2010; Judaken, 2008; Klug, 2003).2 Several researchers claim that if the “old” anti-Semitism mainly had been advocated by the extreme right, the new wave of anti-Semitism was spread partly by the left (see, for example, Ulrich, 2013; Wistrich, 2010). This also applies to Sweden according to Bachner (2000), who contends that it was certainly

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only extreme right groups who stood for open anti-Semitism, but from the 1960s variations of anti-Semitism have also been expressed by some left groups. Some scholars emphasize that anti-Semitism stems from prejudices, ideologies, and conspiracy theories portraying Jews as powerful, cunning, and dangerous (e.g., Bergmann, 2008; Bilewicz & Krzeminski, 2010; Byford, 2003; Kersten & Hankel, 2013; Rensmann & Schoeps, 2010; Rudling, 2006). Much of this literature argues that understanding the causes of anti-Semitic hate crime also means recognizing the conspiratorial and mythical nature of the anti-Semitic ideology. As Bergmann (2008)notes, the core feature of anti-Semitic conspiracy theory and prejudice is that Jews are regarded as the embodiment of supranational modern phenomena, such as international financial markets, communism, and liberal values. Accordingly, their rapid social advancement in most European societies is interpreted as confirmation that Jews secretly dominate the economic and political world (Byford, 2003). According to these studies, the causes and persistence of anti-Semitic hate crimes in Europe cannot be understood if the mythical and conspiratorial nature of anti-Semitic ideologies is not accounted for. In line with scholars like Bachner and Ring (2005), we argue that traditional anti-Jewish thinking has contributed to the intensification of antiSemitism in Europe, which is explained by its deep historical and cultural roots. However, latent anti-Semitism is fanned into life by external events and developments and the reactions they trigger (Bachner & Ring, 2005; see also Klug, 2003). Similarly, Iganski (2008)argues that the Israel–Palestine conflict sometimes serves as a catalyst for the venting of prejudices that for many people are simmering below the surface. The literature on anti-Semitism in Sweden today tends to view anti-Semitism as something that is mainly manifested among Muslims (Bevelander & Hjerm, 2015; Tossavainen, 2005). However, Bachner (2014) warns against reducing anti-Semitism to a “Muslim problem” and thinks that anti-Semitism should be understood as a wider social problem. This is also one of our points of departure. What a victim perceives as anti-Semitic harassment is not always regarded as a crime from a legal point of view, although this does not negate the victim’s lived experience of the event. Even though the media often highlights and focuses on violent hate crime, many victims say that it is not the violence that is “psychologically worst” but rather the everyday “low-level” nature of the crimes (McClintock, 2005). Studies, such as that

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conducted by Iganski (2008) on the different categories of people exposed to hate crime, show that such crimes are often committed as part of the normal everyday routine. If harassment is part of everyday “normality,” it is less likely to be reported to the police and becomes part of the victim’s everyday life (see also Wang, 2002). This so-called “everyday anti-Semitism” has been underexplored so far. The modes of oppression are in some ways similar to what is called “everyday sexism” (Bates, 2014). From a legal point of view, anti-Semitic hate crime and hate crime in general are often regarded as well-defined and separate events, although according to Bowling (1999)they should be seen as part of a continuous chain. Hate crime is generally based on prejudice, and it is difficult to say where a hate crime starts and stops. It is rather an ongoing process with a cumulative effect; a dynamic process that develops over time in a specific social, political, and historic context (Bowling, 1999). Iganski, Kielinger, and Paterson (2005) maintain that like hate crime in general, anti-Semitic incidents do not occur in a vacuum but take place in a cultural context in which prejudice and violence are used as social resources. Many scholars claim that hate crime is worse than many other crimes because it signals that the group to which the victim belongs should “know its place” and that compared with other categories many hate crime victims suffer from long-term psychological problems such as fear, depression, anxiety, panic attacks, a loss of self-confidence, and sleeplessness (Ehrlich, Larcom, & Purvis, 1994; N. Hall, 2005; Herek, Cogan, & Gillis, 2002; Iganski, 2008). McDevitt, Balboni, Garcia, and Gu (2003) mean that the consequences of hate crime are different from those of other crimes, in that the victims are replaceable, that is, anyone in the targeted group could be a victim. In addition, it is not only the victim who experiences problems later on but also the group to which the victim belongs or is seen to belong. Some victims of hate crime are afraid of being targeted again because they belong to a certain group (Boeckmann & Turpin-Petrosino, 2002). According to Craig (2002), hate crime is a unique form of aggression that prevents targeted individuals and groups living a “free” life. Potential victims experience that they need to be careful and perhaps even conceal their identity, which restricts their movements and lives. As one study on anti-Semitism in Sweden (Nylund Skog, 2006) shows, hiding one’s Jewish identity by concealing symbols like the Star of David and the kippah is common. The fear of being exposed to hate crime due to group affinity can also be strengthened by the media’s descriptions. The extent to which different target groups are portrayed in the media depends on a number of

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factors. Some groups have stronger voices than others, and can therefore be regarded as more exposed. It is therefore difficult to determine which groups are most vulnerable to hate crime as a result of media reporting. The media in turn can influence opinion by setting the agenda for which type of hate crime is featured (Strömbäck, 2009). According to Munro (2014), the media plays an important role in this process, in that it can choose which hate crime victims to report on and which to ignore. Our knowledge about hate crime is often limited to what we read in the newspapers or watch on TV, which can give us the impression that hate crime victims are exposed to extreme violence. Drama sells and the media often focuses on the most extreme cases. Behind the reported incidents of extreme violence are thousands of other, more everyday, incidents that do not make the news (see, for example, Tiby, 2010). Serious crimes are often overrepresented in the media, and the reporting of crime can reinforce the fear of being exposed (Chermak, 1998; Gunter, 1987; Reiner, Livingstone, & Allen, 2000). According to Haavisto and Petersson (2013), although our attitudes may not change as a result of a newspaper article or blog spot, if a way of thinking or perspective is repeated and hammered year after year from many different directions it can affect our self-image and understanding of the world. Research (see, for example, Demker, 2014; Sandberg & Demker, 2014) indicates that there may be a connection between how people experience a concern, for example, anti-Semitism, and how often the media highlights the different events linked to it. There could thus be a connection between the extent of the media coverage of hate crime incidents in Malmö and Jewish people’s concern about being targeted. This connection is one of the issues that we examine in this study. We use aspects of agenda-setting theory to analyze the media’s representations of anti-Semitic hate crime in Malmö. Agenda-setting theory is about which social issues are given most attention in the media. The first level concerns which objects—factual matters, organizations, and people— are high on the media’s agenda. The second level concerns how the media reports certain issues and how the general public understands them. This shifts the focus to how prominent the different attributes are on different agendas. By attributes, we mean the qualities and characteristics that are associated with various objects (Strömbäck, 2009). Hate crime as an object has attracted considerable interest and been high on the media’s agenda in recent years, with Malmö being especially highlighted as a city in which anti-Semitic hate crime has escalated. A number of incidents, which we call here key incidents, have put Malmö on the map both nationally and

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internationally. What is known as priming is found at the second level of agenda-setting theory and concerns the interplay between the media content and a person’s cognitive state (Strömbäck, 2009). The mind can be seen as an associative network consisting of different nodes and links that connect the nodes to each other, as per the associative network model (Fiske & Taylor, 1991). The links between the different nodes are both cognitive and affective, and relate to which objects are associated with each other and how a person feels about the links (Strömbäck, 2009). The object Malmö acts as a node, which for many people is connected with the nodes of anti-Semitism and hate crime. The more often we hear about Malmö and anti-Semitic hate crime, the more likely we are to connect Malmö with this.

MATERIALS AND METHOD This article is mostly based on in-depth interviews conducted within the project titled “Hate Crime—A Challenge to Democracy.” This is a multidisciplinary study on hate crime in Skåne that focuses on the causes, consequences, and support initiatives, and is financed by the Swedish Research Council and the Swedish Crime Victim Compensation Support Authority. The project studies groups that are often exposed to crime, such as Jews, Muslims, Afroswedes, Roma/Travelers, and the LGBT community, and this article is based on one of the project’s substudies. As our primary aim in this article is to examine how people who identify themselves as Jews in Malmö experience and deal with anti-Semitic hate crime in a framework of media reporting of anti-Semitism, we have interviewed people with some connection to the Jewish community in Malmö. All the interviews were semistructured, concentrated on a number of fairly wide themes, were tape-recorded, and later transcribed. An important intention with the interviews has been to try to capture the informants’ own meaning making, that is, how they describe their own and others’ experiences of violation and hate crime. To formulate the relevant research questions, we first presented our project at a meeting (March 15, 2012) of the Jewish community in Malmö in connection with a discussion about the subject of hate crime. On that occasion, we were able to listen to different people’s experiences of anti-Semitic hate crime. We also met with a Jewish cultural association (June 19, 2014). After a few introductory interviews, the authors made contact with other informants via the snowball method (Bryman, 2008). As this method builds on other people’s social contacts, the informants are not representative of the group in a statistical sense (Bryman,

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2008). The people we choose to interview all had experiences of antiSemitism. In one case, we contacted a woman we had identified through the media. It should be pointed out that very few people are convicted of hate crimes, which makes it very difficult to contact informants who have been officially recognized as hate crime victims. However, despite the lack of convictions, we know that the number of people affected by hate crime and similar incidents is great. For this reason, we have been both broad and explorative in our projections. In this substudy, a total number of 11 people between the ages of 16 and 67—seven women and four men—were interviewed separately and are presented here with fictitious names. All the informants identify themselves as Jewish and are proud of it. All except one of the informants are well established in Swedish society and were also born in Sweden. They can thus be said to have a high social, economic, and cultural capital. As the study does not include all Jewish individuals and groups in Malmö, the findings cannot be generalized, although they can contribute to a deeper understanding of the vulnerability that many experience. We stopped collecting data when we considered that a “saturation” point had been reached and when the results of the themes raised in the interviews began to show similarities with each other (Bryman, 2008). In the article, we have chosen to allow many of the informants to speak for themselves by making use of short, yet representative quotations from the conducted interviews. We have also used longer narratives to illustrate our conclusions and thereby create a better understanding of the problems. Miller (2000)maintains that in studies based on life stories or biographical research, narrative interviews are more oriented toward eliciting the informants’ perspectives than objective facts. To a great extent, the interviewer is part of the process, in that he or she is included in the construction of the informant’s story. All the interviews were conducted in Swedish, and the individual interviews lasted between 1 and 2 hr. The informants were told about the purpose of the study and that participation was voluntary. Anonymity was also guaranteed. We have made minor revisions to the language used when translating from Swedish to English but have tried to stay as close as possible to the original wording. Data were collected, and analyses were conducted throughout the research process. The interview guide was frequently revised to suit the varying circumstances, in that questions were added and some were omitted. The analysis began by listening to the taped interviews and reading the transcriptions and documentation. The interviews were then coded according to the central themes that had been identified.

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Comparisons were made between the researchers’ interpretations and the coding revised accordingly. Theoretical concepts were then applied to analyze the interpretations. This led to new questions, which were addressed by returning to the empirical material—an abductive process (Alvesson & Sköldberg, 1994) that was enhanced by alternating between the theory and the empirical material. Attacks on Jewish buildings and individuals, for example, the rabbi, are things that affect Jews as a group (see, for example, Boeckmann & Turpin-Petrosino, 2002, on how hate crime spreads fear). The image of Malmö as an anti-Semitic bastion emerged at the end of 2008/beginning of 2009 and can be linked to the conflict between Israel and Palestine. In the interviews, the informants often referred to incidents that had been reported in the media, and that these events and the media coverage of these events have affected their experience of vulnerability, which led us to conduct a media survey and content analysis of a qualitative and interpretive nature. We searched a variety of databases for Swedish newspaper articles on antiSemitism and hate crime published between January 2009 and September 2015. This search yielded 126 articles from a total of 31 different Swedish daily newspapers at both the local and national levels. The reporting mainly focused on news events but also included in-depth interviews with Jews who in various ways have been exposed to hate crime and contributed to debates. In our analysis of the material, the main focus has been on how the connection between the city of Malmö and anti-Semitism is construed in the media. We began the investigation by sorting the material chronologically, which enabled us to follow the media’s portrayal of anti-Semitic hate crime over time. We then tried to identify important key incidents, that is, events that took place in Malmö and attracted wide media coverage. It became apparent that these incidents had also been reproduced intertextually in different newspapers and in some cases also internationally. It also became clear that different key incidents were reproduced over time. When a new incident that could be linked to anti-Semitism occurred in Malmö, the media connected it with earlier incidents, which added to the image of a town in which anti-Semitism was strong. Finally, we analyzed and interpreted the media material in relation to the interviews.

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RESULTS AND ANALYSIS An Increased Vulnerability and Vigilance Independently of each other, most of the informants describe and share the experience that the situation for Jews has worsened in recent years. John, now in his late 60s, was born and bred in Malmö, and remembers how people were very quick to respond to anti-Semitic demonstrations when he was growing up: “It simply wasn’t tolerated by society” (John, December 5, 2012). Susan, a woman in her mid-50s who has lived in Malmö all her adult life, agrees with this and says that the situation for Jews in Malmö has become much worse over the last couple of years and that nowadays anti-Semitism is much more tangible and visible (Susan, April 18, 2012). Today, the limits have been stretched, and the general level of acceptance of abusive language is much greater. The view of hate crime is related to the use of language—the discourse—that is accepted at any given point in time (Cowan, Resendez, Marshall, & Quist, 2002). According to several of our informants, the acceptance of verbal anti-Semitic harassment now seems to be greater than ever before. In addition, several of the informants say that anti-Semitic feelings have grown not only in neo-Nazi circles but also in minority groups from the Middle East (John, December 5, 2012). The younger informants are not sure whether the targeting of Jews has increased in recent years, but say that awareness of the problem and watchfulness has increased. For example, Sara says, “My awareness has increased and I am now much, much more vigilant in town” (May 30, 2012). The Internet is an important source of information for those wanting to remain informed and updated about hate crime. On the more negative side, social forums on the Internet are a haven for the spread of hatred (Wigerfelt, Wigerfelt, & Dahlstrand, 2015). All the younger informants are extra vigilant when surfing the net because they never know when they might come across an anti-Semitic website or be unexpectedly exposed to anti-Semitic propaganda. They all share the experience of being at the receiving end of offensive comments in social forums or being threatened, including death threats, on social media sites such as Facebook, via email or text messages (Adam, May 30, 2012; Anna, May 30, 2012; Christopher, June 12, 2012). Several of the informants describe incidents that have occurred in connection with two children’s camps at a Jewish conference center located outside Malmö. On the first occasion, in 2008, a small group of young people suddenly appeared shouting abusive insults but disappeared when the police arrived on the scene (Susan, April 18, 2012). Two years later, in 2010, a

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group of about 15 young people appeared on the first evening of the camp shouting “Jewish pigs,” “Kill all Jews,” and “Heil Hitler” outside the center. On the following evening, the youth, aged around 14 to 15, reappeared, and this time kicked down the fence, behaved in a threatening manner, and threw eggs and glass bottles at the building. The incident came as a shock to those present and, according to one of the informants, the younger children cried and were afraid (Filip, May 30, 2012). The perpetrators on these occasions were local youth with “Swedish” backgrounds, and the motives for the attacks seem to have been anti-Semitism in connection primarily to prejudices as well as conspiracy theories. The local school arranged a meeting with the assailants’ parents and measures were taken (John, December 5, 2012). The quick reaction to the incident is something that several of the informants regard as very positive and worthy of imitation (Susan, April 18, 2012; John, December 5, 2012). The area in which the conference center is located is one of the most prosperous in southern Sweden. Although very few inhabitants are born outside Sweden, the area has had problems for several years with explicit racism. In other words, anti-Semitism is not just a phenomenon that can be linked to segregation, outsiderhood, and the conflict between Israel and Palestine. Its manifestations and extent differ at different times and in diverse places.

Everyday Anti-Semitism According to Bachner (2000), the term anti-Semitism has become “overcharged” and often implies an intensive, open, and action-oriented hate, as described above. However, the connection between Nazism has resulted in a partial blindness to other kinds of anti-Semitism, such as culturally determined prejudices and inherited negative attitudes. In a similar way, Iganski (2008) argues that many hate crime incidents have nothing to do with people’s violent hate, but rather indicate a kind of latent anti-Semitism that in many people simmers below the surface. Anti-Semitism surfaces at random and can be triggered by a conflict or everyday irritation in the encounter with a Jewish person. At a more everyday and subtle level, general anti-Semitic prejudices seem to have been passed down through the generations and have spread to other circles. This anti-Semitic prejudice can erupt in different situations, sometimes from friends, neighbors, school- and workmates, which many of the younger informants have experience of. Jokes and ironic remarks about Jews are common phenomena for those we talked to, are part of

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the respondent’s everyday life, and something that is almost seen as “unavoidable.” As they are impossible to predict, people are forced to be constantly on guard. Our informants found it increasingly difficult to accept jokes about Jews, partly because they felt more vulnerable now and partly because the jokes reproduced old, classic, anti-Semitic stereotypes about Jews. The younger informants told us that it can start with someone telling a joke about Jews, which then escalates to people openly expressing a menacing anti-Semitism, which can be seen as an interrelated process. As the Jewish group in Malmö is small, Jewish youth are more vulnerable in certain situations. There is a power aspect to this, where the number of Jews in relation to other groups is significant. According to Ben, being a single Jew in a public place can feel particularly vulnerable, even though many regard Jews as part of “white Sweden”: “There are so few Jews in Malmö that people can shout whatever they want” (Ben, May 30, 2012). Sara gave an example of meetings in which she had been verbally attacked because she was Jewish and where the aggression had spread to other people: “If they are supported by 3-4 people I cannot defend myself at all. I am outnumbered when I am alone. If I am not with my Jewish friends then I am alone” (Sara, May 30, 2012). The fact that the Jewish presence in Malmö is small and appears to continue to diminish contributes to a vicious circle, where young people who want to live a richer Jewish life move to Stockholm or Gothenburg because the Jewish communities are much larger there and it is possible to “keep the traditions alive.” The Jewish community thus continues to diminish, and those who remain can experience themselves as part of a diminishing minority and therefore more vulnerable.

Jewish Identity and Spatial Limitations Our informants said that as Jews in Malmö they were forced to reflect on where and in which situation their Jewish identity could or could not be exposed. Some of the informants thought that they could choose their Jewish identity, whereas others, like John, said that they looked like Jews on the outside: “Nobody could have failed to notice that I am a Jew” (John, December 5, 2012; see also Börjesson & Palmblad, 2008). An obvious Jewish symbol that is very uncommon in Malmö is the headwear known as the kippah, which can be seen as a mark of identification. The interviewees experienced this as a “stigma symbol” (Goffman, 1963/2007). Other important “stigma symbols” include Jewish jewelry/ necklaces that many are careful about wearing openly in different situations:

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I usually wear a necklace bearing my Hebrew name. I always wear it, but if I’m in Lund [an academic city close to Malmö] it doesn’t matter where I have it. It’s always there. But if I go out on an evening in Malmö I usually take it off. I put it in my pocket. And if we are in Malmö on a weekday afternoon or evening I always check where it is. If it is in front I turn it round. (Sara, May 30, 2012) According to Craig (2002), targeted individuals/groups are prevented from living a “free” life. Potential victims feel that they have to be careful and, if possible, conceal their identity, which restricts their lives. Although Andrea (June 21, 2012) has not personally been exposed to harassment as a result of her Jewish identity, she has heard a lot about it from friends and relatives. These narratives have made her much more cautious: “I don’t tell everyone that I’m a Jew because I don’t want to be a target myself.” Christopher is also cautious about revealing his Jewish identity: “I don’t hide my identity but I don’t tell everyone that I’m a Jew. You have to be careful who you talk to” (Christopher, June 21, 2012). The spatial consequences of hate crime can be that vulnerable groups create mental maps of a town and where it is safe, which affects the everyday situation (Iganski & Lagou, 2009). It is clear that the informants are very conscious of spatial limitations. The majority of hate crime takes place around the synagogue and assembly hall in Malmö—places where attacks have occurred and where safety measures are in place. These are places of symbolic significance and where hate crime is clearly against Jews as a group. The likelihood of being exposed to hate crime here is greater than anywhere else. The Jewish community’s rabbi, Shneur Kesselman, is the most vulnerable and is regularly subjected to abuse, insults, and gestures from passers-by and people driving past in cars. Most of the reported antiSemitic hate crimes are directed against him. But other members of the community also know that they need to be vigilant on their way to or from the synagogue, because the likelihood of being attacked is greatest there.

The Israeli–Palestinian Conflict, Its Local Imprints, and Media Images There was a significant increase in the reporting of hate crime against Jews in the Swedish media, with a special focus on Malmö, at the end of 2008/ beginning of 2009, which was largely associated with the conflict between Israel and Palestine. An attribute that was ascribed to Malmö was that hate crime was increasing. This was reflected in newspaper headlines such as

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“Jewish hatred is rampant in Malmö” (SDS, February 7, 2009) or “Jewish hatred drives them away from Malmö” (SkD, December 12, 2012). In 2008/2009, the conflict in Gaza escalated due to the Israeli military operation known as Cast Lead. In Sweden, Jews began to feel threatened. The Council of Swedish Jewish Communities wrote to the Swedish Government to ask for help in stopping an increasing threat toward Jews in Sweden. The background to the letter was that threats, violent actions, and arson attacks had been directed at Jews and Jewish institutions (Dagen, February 4, 2009). The worsening situation on the Gaza Strip had local imprints. In Malmö, a Jewish network/association organized a demonstration demanding Israel’s right to exist, which ended in chaos with demonstrators being pelted with stones and eggs. Some of the demonstrators were reported to have shouted “fucking Jews” and “Heil Hitler.” The police were unable to guarantee safety and security, and many people, including Jews, sought shelter in the streets and alleys adjoining the square (Dagen, February 4, 2009). This incident—an important key incident in the media images of Malmö as a city especially characterized by anti-Semitic hate crime—was reported in both the national and international media. In the weeks and months following this turbulent demonstration, Jews experienced an escalation in the number of harassments. In an interview, a spokesperson from the Jewish community described the incident as a kind of collective trauma for its members, and perhaps also for the inhabitants of Malmö (SkD, January 27, 2010). In March 2009, shortly after Cast Lead and the demonstration described above, the city of Malmö hosted a Davis Cup tennis match between Sweden and Israel. Due to the turbulent nature of the demonstration, the increase in reported anti-Semitic hate crimes and lobbying by anti-Israel groups, the police decided that the match should be played privately and not be open to the public. This decision resulted in a polarized and heated debate, both nationally and internationally. For example, the Israeli media accused Sweden, and specifically Malmö, of anti-Semitism (Nordvästra Skånes Tidningar [NST], December 7, 2012). This can also be seen as yet another so-called key incident that recurs in both the informants’ narratives and media reports. Without exception, the informants living in Malmö stress that they all are affected by the Israel–Palestine conflict but that over the years they have developed strategies to cope with it. They emphasize the importance of being informed about what is happening in Israel and do this by reading daily updates on the Internet, accessing information via Facebook, from

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friends living in Israel, and so on. All our informants in Malmö experience a clear connection between increased anti-Semitic harassment and open conflicts between Israelis and Palestinians. They feel themselves to be held collectively accountable for the events in the Middle East. Sara said that she and other Jews were held responsible for what happened in Israel: When anything happens people don’t distinguish between Israel and us. The conclusion is that Israel plus Jews equals one. But it isn’t. I can’t be held responsible for a whole country’s actions. I have to stand up for my own actions. (May 30, 2012) Over the years, Susan has learned that certain subjects are charged and no longer gets involved in discussions about, for example, circumcision, or the Israel–Palestine conflict, at her place of work. The discomfort increases when the situation in Israel heats up: What I have come up against and is very unpleasant is at work when something happens in Israel. It’s discussed at work and it feels as though I have to shoulder the blame for everything that happens there. I make a hasty retreat. I’ve learned not to get involved in such discussions. (Susan, April 18, 2012) Petra said something similar in another interview: You are singled out as guilty. “Why are YOU firing missiles?” And then you hear on the radio that of course they don’t like Jews here in Sweden because they murder their families in the Middle East. I get so very angry. What have we, I am 16 years old, done? Have I shot someone there? They see us as a group and mix it up with the state of Israel. They don’t see us as individuals. (June 21, 2012) Ben thought that it was people from different backgrounds who hurled insults, although in the main it was people from the Middle East: At school there are also Swedes (who insult us), but in the main it’s people from the Middle East. It’s not just Palestinians, but others too. Some may have friends who are Palestinians. (May 30, 2012) Students with a Middle Eastern background attend many of Malmö’s schools. Some informants told us that their children have been exposed to hate crime incidents initiated by some of these students. As a result, many Jewish families have chosen to send their children to schools where there seems to be less risk of them being targeted. Jewish teachers also talked about their vulnerability in school, which in some cases has led to teachers leaving the profession due to harassment and threats.

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Anti-Semitism and Segregation According to Bachner and Ring (2005), the anti-Semitism that is evident in certain Muslim groups in Europe is sustained by the Israel–Palestine conflict but is probably also fueled by the social and economic marginalization and outsiderhood that characterizes many of the migrant groups in Europe (see also Bergmann & Wetzel, 2003; Taguieff, 2004). Several of the informants point to the city’s increased segregation as an explanation for why Jews feel more exposed in Malmö than in other parts of the country (John, December 5, 2012; Petur, July 19, 2014). Susan reasons in a similar way and thinks that the most important factor for Malmö in combating anti-Semitism is to invest in a good integration policy. In this, she points to the major schisms in the city, where many people are unemployed and live in socially vulnerable areas (April 18, 2012). Sophia is a Jewish woman in her late 30s. She lives in Malmö but was born and brought up in a small village outside the city. For several years, and especially in connection with the intensification of the conflict between Israel and Palestine, she has been repeatedly harassed; an experience that began when she moved to Malmö. For more than a decade, she has lived in a segregated area that is populated by a large number of people from different parts of the Middle East, where it is well known that she and her friend have a Jewish background. She has experienced harassment in her everyday life. For her, taking the dog out for a walk and going to the supermarket are everyday situations in which she is constantly exposed to physical and verbal harassment. Both the woman with whom I share a flat and I have had stones thrown at our heads. My friend even had a mug of urine thrown over her from an upstairs balcony. . . . I have been called a “fucking Jew,” a “Jewish whore” and a “Jewish cunt.” (Sophia, May 28, 2013) One experience that was particularly painful and upsetting for Sophia was a late-night burglary in her home. When she realized that the things that were missing were sacred Jewish artifacts of great sentimental value, she connected the theft with anti-Semitism. Attacks like these have affected both women’s health—especially psychologically—and restricted their movements, to the extent that they are now afraid to leave their home and mix with other people. The effects of hate crime go beyond the immediate victim. Others in the same group who hear or read about the hate crime can react angrily and/or with fear (see, for example, Boeckmann & Turpin-Petrosino, 2002; Craig,

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2002; Craig-Henderson, 2009; Wachtel, 1999). Several of our informants said that they felt vulnerable as Jews even when something happened in other places: When something happens that is directed at Jews in other places the tension increases, because the threat is always there. We are always vigilant and this affects us a lot, especially when the threat is real. We can’t “keep looking over our shoulder” but have to try to live a normal everyday life. (Judith, March 22, 2012)

The Media Images of an “Anti-Semitic City” The Jewish community’s rabbi became something of an “official face” and “object” for the anti-Semitism manifested in Malmö. Rabbi Shneur Kesselman, clearly identifiable as a Jew with his black clothes and long beard, has talked about his vulnerability in Malmö in several newspaper interviews. Kesselman’s appearance singles him out as especially exposed. He describes being spat at on the street, having soft drink cans thrown at him while walking through the streets and almost being run over by a passing car. The rabbi usually reports most of the hate crime incidents he is involved in to the police. As yet, none of the reported incidents have led to any legal action being taken (Dagen, February 4, 2009; Dagens Nyheter [DN], November 7, 2011; KvP, March 5, 2010; KvP, October 28, 2011; KvP, April 24, 2012; SDS, February 7, 2009; SDS, July 17, 2011). What about our rabbi? He looks like a Jew. He walks around town and is harassed, spat at or whatever. But imagine if we’d all looked like him! Would we be able to live here at all? I don’t understand it. He hasn’t even done anything. He’s not even from Israel. He’s from the USA. (Petra, June 21, 2012) Ilmar Reepalu, the former mayor of Malmö, who has received a lot of negative attention in the debate on anti-Semitism and has been accused of anti-Semitic rhetoric in his public utterances about Jews living in the city, can also be seen as an “object” with negative attributes in the media descriptions of Malmö as an anti-Semitic city. For example, Reepalu has said that Jews in Malmö ought to distance themselves from Israel’s actions. This has been criticized and discussed in the media by politicians and other actors. Reepalu has thus become an official representative of Malmö, and his utterances have contributed to headlines such as “Hate of Jews is greatest in Malmö” (Tidningarnas Telegrambyrå [TT], January 29, 2010). Reepalu’s statements have also been strongly criticized in the local press

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(SDS, September 29, 2012), as exemplified by the headline: “Reepalu is the Problem” (SDS, September 30, 2012). Reepalu’s statements have been reproduced and discussed in several newspaper debate articles and have been taken up in contexts in which Malmö is described as a city characterized by anti-Semitism. Reepalu has come to personify the critique that government agencies and politicians do not do enough to combat and stand up to antiSemitism. A consequence of the key incidents described above and one’s own and others’ experiences of harassment is that many Jewish families have moved away from Malmö. According to both the media and our interviews, it is clear that some Jewish families have decided to leave Malmö in the hope of finding a better life elsewhere. Some families have even talked openly to the press about why they want to move. In one newspaper article, a family was interviewed about why they wanted to move from Malmö to Israel. The main reason that was given was an increasing anti-Semitism. “My children are not safe here. It will only get worse,” said the man in the family. Some of his relatives have lived in Malmö since the beginning of the 1800s, while others who had survived the extermination camps came in 1945. The man said that people had shouted “fucking Jew” at him, and he had witnessed how his friend had been seriously violated and threatened. He said that if someone shouts “Kill the Jews,” it also affects him and pierces his heart. The man did not know of anyone who dared to wear visible signs of Judaism, such as the Star of David or the kippah. He was critical of those in power in Malmö, and thought that they did not openly distance themselves from antiSemitism (SkD, January 25, 2010). In an interview, one of the informants said that it was not only anti-Semitic hate crime that made families leave Malmö but also dissatisfaction with politicians who did not take the problem seriously. If they had, the families might have stayed (Eva, September 25, 2012). In 2014, the conflict between Israel and Palestine flared up yet again in Gaza, which in Malmö meant that anti-Semitism was refueled and used by certain individuals to activate hostility toward Jews and Jewish symbols/ buildings. Windows were smashed in the synagogue, and at one point five people shouting anti-Semitic slogans tried to force their way into the Jewish assembly hall next to the synagogue (SDS, August 3, 2014). The rabbi was attacked twice in the same day. On the first occasion, a bottle was thrown at him and on the second a cigarette lighter. A man shouted “Jewish pig” and other derogatory words at the rabbi (SDS, August 5, 2014).

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FINAL DISCUSSION The reporting of anti-Semitic hate crime has increased in Europe as a whole in recent years. This anti-Semitic current has also affected Sweden, where the city of Malmö has been highlighted by the media and by the Simon Wiesenthal Centre as a dangerous city for people with a Jewish identity. Our examination of the Swedish media’s reporting of anti-Semitic hate crime incidents shows that in recent years the focus on Malmö and some of the key incidents that have taken place there has increased. An attribute that is ascribed to anti-Semitic hate crime in Malmö is the city’s unique position in Sweden. Objects like anti-Semitism, hate crime, and Malmö’s politicians serve as nodes that are interconnected with other nodes and key incidents. The links between the different nodes are both cognitive and affective, in that they deal with which objects are associated with and how one feels about the links. In short, the more the media reports on Malmö and anti-Semitic hate crime, the more likely we are to connect the city with this. Also, the more often certain objects or attributes are highlighted in the media, the more often these objects are activated and attributed in our minds (priming) and the more likely we are to think about these particular objects or attributes. The events described above have been intertextually repeated in other parts of Sweden’s media and have contributed to a view of Malmö as the bastion of anti-Semitism; a stigmatization that the city finds difficult to shake off. This has also had international repercussions. The effect of this could be that anti-Semitic incidents in other places are ignored. The fear that is spread by the media is reinforced and accumulated by the so-called key incidents that many of the informants themselves, or their friends and relatives, have been exposed to. The key incidents that are particularly highlighted are harassment and threats in connection with demonstrations; for example, Jews being chased on the street, hate crimes committed against the rabbi, attacks on youth camps, and teachers and children with a Jewish identity being harassed at school—events that are distressing and confirm increased vulnerability. There is great disappointment among the informants that politicians and government agencies do not intervene forcefully enough. The majority of the informants think that they have been collectively blamed for the situation in the Middle East, to the extent that has become more difficult to be a “visible” Jew in Malmö. This is most obvious in the case of the rabbi in Malmö, but in Sophia’s story it is also clear that she and her friend are singled out as Jews in their neighborhood. The stories also show that Jews in other cities are forced to adjust to a kind of latent threat that

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tends to increase when the conflict between Israel and Palestine escalates. Some of the informants connect the perpetrators of hate crime with young men from the Middle East who mainly act when the conflict between Israel and Palestine is at its most acute. The presence of large population groups from the Middle East in relation to the small Jewish minority can lead to feelings of insecurity. Many point out that Malmö is a socially vulnerable and segregated city, and that it is also relatively compact, where encounters between people take place in a more direct way than in larger cities, for example, Stockholm, with its large geographic spread and suburbs some distance from the center. However, the informants’ stories also reveal a more complex picture of who the perpetrators are. One example of this is the prosperous area outside Malmö where Jewish children and young people are confronted by extreme right-wing Nazi slogans from local young people. The stories about antiSemitic prejudices and stereotypes of friends, neighbors, and colleagues who are Jews indicate another, more widespread, abuse. For several of the informants, everyday anti-Semitism is very distressing. Iganski (2008) argues that most anti-Jewish incidents are what are sometimes called commonplace incidents—a kind of latent anti-Semitism that becomes manifest when the opportunity to ventilate prejudices presents itself and is triggered by simple schisms. It is often difficult to judge when an anti-Semitic hate crime starts and ends, because it is an ongoing process with a cumulative effect (Bowling, 1999). The situation of Jews in Malmö has changed, and many experience that openly revealing their Jewish affinity is problematic due to the latent threats. Jewish symbols are often spontaneously hidden and, even if one has not been personally affected, there is concern and deliberation about where and when one’s Jewish identity can be revealed. The synagogue, the Jewish community’s premises, and the Jewish cemetery are obvious material symbols for the Jewish group and are targets for hate crime attacks. As a Jew, one is forced to be extra careful around these areas and be constantly on guard. The consequences for the individual can be very serious. Restrictions in how one lives one’s life also affect the entire group (Iganski, 2008; McDevitt, Balboni, Garcia, & Gu, 2003). When someone is affected by hate crime incidents, the entire Jewish group is affected. Anti-Semitic acts can also be described as “message crimes,” in that they announce to the victim’s group that they can also become targets (Lawrence, 2003). Doubts as to whether society can protect and support these members and the feeling of abandonment are some of the reasons as to why hate crime is seen as

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worse than crimes that are not motivated by hate crime (see also Tiby, 2009). It is therefore very important that hate crime is explicitly condemned by leading politicians and government agencies, and that special measures are introduced.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The Swedish Research Council and the Swedish Crime Victim Compensaton Support Authority. Notes 1. Swedish legislation relating to hate crime and stiffer penalties is based on the motives of the perpetrator in a criminal action. The ruling about harsher sentences was introduced in Sweden in 1994 for crimes committed against a person, ethnic group, or other groups of people on the grounds of race, skin color, national or ethnic origin, faith, sexual orientation, or other similar circumstances (The Swedish Penal Code Ch. 29 2 §7 p). 2. Some scholars argue that the term “new anti-Semitism” is part of an increasing Islamophobia (Fekete, 2012), or that in any case Jews in general are seen as a less exposed group than most other minorities in the West (Kushner, 2013; Lerman, 2003).

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SEXUAL VIOLENCE, RACE AND MEDIA (IN)VISIBILITY: INTERSECTIONAL COMPLEXITIES IN A TRANSNATIONAL FRAME Vrushali Patil 1 and Bandana Purkayastha 2 Department of Global & Sociocultural Studies, Florida International University, 11200 SW 8th St, DM 212 Miami, FL 33199, USA 1

Department of Sociology, University of Connecticut, University of Connecticut Unit 1068, 344 Mansfield Road, Storrs, CT 06269, USA 2

ABSTRACT Intersectional scholarship argues that women of color have distinct experiences of rape compared to white women and highlights their relative invisibility as victims compared to white women victims in news media. While the bulk of intersectional work has examined such issues Citation: Vrushali Patil and Bandana Purkayastha Societies 2015, 5(3), 598-617; doi:10.3390/soc5030598 Copyright: © 2015 by the authors; licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

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within one nation and particularly within the US, in an era of increasingly transnationalized media content, we explore such intersectionalities in a transnational frame. That is, we explore the treatment of the rape of a local Indian woman in New Delhi, India, and the rape of a white woman in Steubenville, USA, in the New York Times and the Times of India. We find that contra assumptions in the intersectional literature, the racialized Indian victim is hyper-visible across both papers while the white US victim is relatively invisible. Situating both newspapers within the global histories of the development of news as a particular genre of storytelling, we argue that their respective locations within larger processes shaped by colonial, imperial and neo-colonial histories have critical implications for the coverage each paper offers. Thus, we argue that issues of race and visibility in media operate very differently depending on the space and scale of analysis. In an increasingly globalized world, then, we must start paying attention to the transnational and its implications for rape, race and (in)visibility in news media. Ultimately, our approach brings together processes of racialization at multiple scales—both below the nation and above the nation—to offer a more complex, multi-scalar understanding of how racialization processes impact rape coverage. Keywords: news media; intersectionality; rape; US; India; transnationalism

INTRODUCTION Rape has been a central feature of intersectional analysis and critique since Kimberle Crenshaw coined the term in her seminal 1989 essay, “Demarginalizing the Intersection…” In this piece, Crenshaw outlined how, in opposition to the mainstream feminist treatment of rape as primarily the manifestation of male power over female sexuality, for black women “sexist expectations of chastity and racist assumptions of sexual promiscuity combined to create a distinct set of issues” [1] (p. 159). In “Mapping the Margins…” Crenshaw further discussed the marginalization of black women in anti-rape discourses and argued that “women of color rape victims tend to be ignored in media” [2] (p. 1268). A considerable literature on race, sexual assault and media since then has generally confirmed Crenshaw’s findings, such that the invisibility of black and other minority women compared to white women as victims of sexual assault in the media has become a truism in the literature. In this paper, we extend this concern regarding media, race

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and rape to recent cases of sexual assault in the media. In particular, we explore two rapes that emerged in the US media toward the end of 2012—the rape of a white college student at a party in Steubenville, OH and the rape of a local psychotherapy student aboard a bus in New Delhi, India. In contrast to the bulk of intersectional work on this matter which has examined issues of media representation within one nation and particularly within the US, we examine such questions in an era of increasingly transnationalized media content (not to mention media distribution and consumption). We compare coverage of both cases in two “world” newspapers [3,4,5]—The New York Times (NYT) and the Times of India(TOI). We find that contra assumptions in the intersectional literature, the woman of color victim in the Delhi rape case is hyper-visible across both papers while the white Steubenville victim is relatively invisible. We situate both newspapers within the global histories of the development of news as a particular genre of storytelling. We argue that their respective locations within larger processes shaped by colonial, imperial and neo-colonial histories have critical implications for the coverage each paper offers. While operating differently for each paper, for both papers these broader logics are central to understanding the greater coverage of and focus on the Delhi case, as well as the relative neglect of the Steubenville case; moreover, such differences are also fundamental for understanding the variation in terms of content of the coverage provided by each paper. Thus we argue that issues of race and visibility in media operate very differently depending on the space and scale of analysis. While intersectional work has typically focused on such questions at the scale of the nation and in terms of space, particularly one nation—The US—patterns of representation and visibility at this US-national scale do not necessarily hold at the transnational scale or in other places. In an increasingly globalized world, then, we must start paying attention to the transnational and its implications for rape, race and (in)visibility in news media. Such an approach shows how differentially racialized groups such as particular groups of women of color within the US or Orientalized women in South Asia may be impacted very differently within these processes. Ultimately, our approach brings together processes of racialization at multiple scales—both below the nation and above the nation—to offer a more complex, multi-scalar understanding of how racialization processes impact rape coverage. In what follows, we begin with an overview of feminist and especially intersectional approaches to rape in the media, arguing that this work has typically focused on national news within the US and neglected global or international news. We then outline the history and development of global

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news, highlighting how its development in the context of North-South power relations and nationalism has shaped this news, including news coverage of rape. We then examine coverage of each newspaper from the date of each event (11 August 2012 for the Steubenville case and 16 December 2012 for the New Delhi case) through 16 March 2013, 1 and ask the following questions: how many stories are published for each case, and how do the coverage, analysis and opinions offered in the two publications for each case compare? Are the papers differentially oriented toward each case? Furthermore for each paper, does the national location of the rape case matter and if so, how? Finally, how do historical and contemporary crossborder processes shape how each case is constructed in each space? We end with a discussion of our findings and implications for transnationalizing intersectional analyses of rape, race and media.

FEMINIST AND INTERSECTIONAL APPROACHES TO NEWS COVERAGE OF RAPE As Gaye Tuchman wrote over forty years ago, news socially constructs reality [6]. Thus the news media have a tremendous power in shaping and reproducing as well as contesting norms having to do with gender and sexuality. Of course one central way in which power operates in news media is in terms of coverage and visibility. That is, what is covered gains an aura of legitimacy over what is not, as that which deserves public attention and is noteworthy. Such visibility or relative emphasis in news “creates a hierarchy of moral salience” [7] (pp. 23–34). Regarding rape in particular, mainstream media coverage is said to be shaped by a series of “rape myths” [8]. These are a core set of assumptions which distinguish “real” or “ideal” rape from “not real” rape: that “real” rape occurs in a non-domestic setting typically at night, in which the rapist is a monstrous (male) stranger who attacks a (female) victim with a weapon, where the victim’s appearance, dress and behavior are unimpeachable, and where the victim physically resists and sustains visible injuries. The closer a rape comes to this ideal, the more likely that it will be recognized as “real” rape and the offender will get the blame, while the further away it is, the more likely that it will not be recognized as real rape and the victim will get the blame [8,9,10,11]. Thus, such rape myths serve to neglect marital and acquaintance rape and fail to recognize the mundane and interpersonal settings within which rape typically occurs. (Obviously such rape myths also neglect same-sex rape, as well as rape that occurs in institutional settings such as prisons and the military.

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Indeed, Burt argues that in most cases, perpetrators are known to the victim, no weapon is involved, and there is no visible physical injury beyond mild bruises [8]. Wilson et al. also add that rather than being “monsters”, rapists also tend to have a more “normal” psychological profile than any other kind of criminal [9] (p. 14). Beginning particularly in the late eighties, intersectional critiques further highlighted the race, class and other power relations beyond those of gender which shape dominant notions of rape, victimhood and perpetrators in media and society at large. By intersectionality we specifically mean the nationfocused literature that has examined the multiple axes of power within the country that make marginalized and racial minority women’s rape invisible. Critical transnational scholarship has also examined intersecting power hierarchies and the imageries and texts that have sustained these power hierarchies [12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19]. However, while the latter (particularly the feminist work within this transnational literature) build on fundamental intersectional insights and extend them to the transnational scale, feminist transnational insights about power hierarchies across countries have not consistently influenced the nation-focused scholarship on intersectionality (For more on tensions between these approaches, see [20,21,22,23]). Situated within critical transnational scholarship, then, we direct our discussion here to the nation-focused scholarship on intersectionality. By bringing intersectional insights to cross-border processes, we demonstrate how the sub/national and the trans/national actually work together to perpetuate gendered racialization in news media today. From the beginning, intersectional interventions complicated the mainstream feminist focus on gendered power relations within rape myths to highlight key racial, class and other dimensions of these myths. These dimensions include, for example, the notion that white men, especially prosperous, educated and/or handsome ones, do not commit such crimes; that violence against white women by men of color is bad; and that violence against women of color by white men is not crime [24] (p. 81). In terms of victims, while most cases of gender violence are not covered at all, female victims that are young, or old and frail, or rich, white, and privileged are more likely to lead to coverage [24] (pp. 81–82). In terms of perpetrators, Wilson et al. write that legitimate victimhood status also tends to be ascribed more when the perpetrators are lower class men or men of color [9] (p. 214). This is because “members of the lower-classes, including people of color (who are usually assumed to be lower class even if they are not), are

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constructed as both naturally more prone to perpetrating violence and as less legitimate victims… Specifically, men of color are usually portrayed as natural perpetrators and women of color as ‘un-rape-able’ because of dominant racist stenotypes regarding the animalistic nature and sexual promiscuity of blacks” [25] (p. 49) and parallel images of other people of color [26,27]. On the other hand, offenders get less blame when they come from higher class backgrounds than their victims or are white [11] (pp. 16– 17). 2 Indeed, as Moorti writes in a study of television news, the news in the United States is enunciated from a white [male], normative standpoint ….When the rape coverage is concerned with nonwhite participants, the news tends to foreground race-based assumptions of sexuality… where black masculinity is demonized. Indeed, racial difference becomes the primary explanatory framework for the crime. When the coverage is concerned with white participants, the news foregrounds gender-based assumptions of sexuality [28]. (pp. 71–73) The racialized dimensions of news coverage mean that while most rapes actually occur within a particular “racial” group (and within a particular class), the rape of a white woman by a black man is the most commonly covered type of rape, while the rape of a black woman by a black man is the least covered type of rape [9] (p. 214). A central point that is reiterated in intersectional scholarship, then, is the argument that women of color are invisible as rape victims in the news media compared to white women [2,9,24,25,29,30]. However, as legitimate as such an argument seems to be for the US generally, it leaves us at a loss to explain the particular visibility of the Delhi case within the US media. Certainly, the Delhi case aligns more closely with problematic notions of “real rape” than does the Steubenville case. Hence while the Steubenville case is a classic example of the sort of acquaintance rape not taken seriously in media, the Delhi case involves a number of key “requirements”, including perpetrators unbeknownst to the victim; occurrence in a public setting; no drinking involved, particularly on the part of the victim; and racialized perpetrators. We argue, however, that the transnational is a key dimension of this visibility, something that intersectional work on this issue has typically neglected. From this perspective, the 2009 edited volume by Cuklanz and Moorti makes some fundamental contributions. That is, this volume moves beyond the US to look at the “complex cartographies of oppression [in the Global South] that cannot be reduced to the sex binary...[as well as the]

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particular ways in which ‘gender and violence’ must be situated within a historical context, specifically the complicated and interconnected histories of western colonialisms and global capitalism” [31] (pp. 3–10). The volume has a number of pieces on media treatments of rape and sexual assault outside of the US, including in Pakistan [32], in Okinawa [33], and in South Africa [34]. While the piece on Pakistan examines local media, the other two examine both local and extra-local media. And yet, none these discuss tensions between local and extra-local media or how a particular case of sexual assault may be treated differently in media whose primary audiences are in different countries. Hence, none of these pieces are able to explore how a rape incident in one country might be covered in another and the intersectional complexities that might shape such border crossings. In this paper, then, this is precisely our goal. We begin first with a short overview of the colonial, postcolonial and nationalist politics of news media.

Situating News Media: Colonial, Postcolonial and Nationalist Dimensions Scholars have highlighted that journalism as a particular set of discourses and practices, along with its associated formats, genres, institutions and organizations, including professional news organizations and the news agencies which create news reports and sell them to various news organizations, has its origins in the Global North [35,36,37]. Developing especially in the heyday of nationalism in Europe and the US, moreover, news media played a significant role in the consolidation of national boundaries there. Silverstone points out that “they enabled the fixing and spreading of vernacular languages and, through that emergence, the boundaries and identities of the embryonic modern nation-state” [38] (p. 19) in the west. One long term consequence in terms of content, then, is that “news is principally about the nation, with most news across countries focusing primarily on the domestic arena [39] (pp. 19–31). In this vein, Gans” study of the news media in the US in the seventies makes the case that foreign news tends to be reported only for countries of national interest, with other countries covered only when there are “unusually dramatic happenings” [39] (p. 31). Through this primary focus on the nation, then, the media construct the moral order of the nation [38]. Like other cultural texts, media discourses “legitimate a given distribution of power, both within and beyond the borders of the nation” [16] (p. 7). Journalists manage, along with others, “the symbolic arena, the public stage on which national, societal and other

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messages are made available to everyone who can become an audience member. They highlight stories of moral order and disorder, which “frame the news as morality plays”. As Klein has discussed about cultural texts, journalists are involved in “the creative use of language and deployment of shared stories” [16] (p. 6). In this way, they act “as a kind of Greek chorus for nation and society” and guard the moral order. This sort of moral disorder news therefore reinforces and re-legitimates dominant national and societal values by publicizing and helping to punish those who deviate from the values” [39] (pp. 293–298). In these tales, news tends to emphasize melodrama, turning complex processes into morality tales of battle between antagonists, often between good guys and bad guys, with clearly identified individuals standing in for large and more difficult-to-grasp social forces [7] (p. 42). Furthermore, the globalization of news beyond these western and nationalist origins has been critically shaped by North-South power relations. For example, Machin highlights that central to the global spread of news in terms of content (and also as a genre) has been the news agency. News agencies started in the middle of the 1800s to supply newspapers with news items from across the world. They first started in Germany, France, and the UK. While national news agencies also emerged, the three major agencies managed to monopolize the flow of news and “form a cartel that divided up the world in the same way as empire-building nation states in that same period divided up the world to form their colonial empires” [37] (pp. 1–2). In the 1930s, the “cartel” of European news agencies collapsed but the dominance of Europe was only replaced by the dominance of the US. 3 Not surprisingly, then, many news agency subscribers in Southern spaces have been troubled by the mostly negative news about them; and in the sixties, some newly independent African countries set up their own news agencies [37,40]. The “geographic inequality” represented by these Northern-dominated global news agencies is further buoyed by a number of other interrelated structural factors. For example the location or home base of major media companies today tends to be in G-7 countries, which as some of the wealthiest and most powerful countries in the world, comprise the heart of the Global North. Thus most global media organizations are primarily geared to the interests and views of audiences in these countries. The unevenness of global news coverage is further shaped by where news organizations locate their foreign correspondents, with these tending to be split about evenly among North America, Western Europe, and the rest of the world. Finally,

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regarding the nationalist feature of news, regardless of how international a news organization purports to be, it’s primary audience tends to be within one country. For example, although the NYT is one of the most international news organizations in the world, with more foreign news bureaus than perhaps any other news organization, it still primarily targets the home audience of the US [41]. What this means in terms of foreign content is that news organizations domesticate extra-national events in terms that will make sense for their national markets [40]. The geographic inequality and nationalist dimensions of global news thus have deep historical rootsand continue to have far-reaching consequences. In the seventies, such tensions came to a head in UNESCO, where representatives of newly independent countries sought a “New World Information and Communication Order”. Northern countries such as the US, UK and Netherlands balked at such discussions, however, and withdrew from UNESCO for almost twenty years [40]. In recent years, however, some scholars have pointed to the rise of Asia as formative of a shift in some of these patterns. Numerically, eight of the world’s top ten paid for daily papers are produced in Asia, and the largest national newspaper markets are China, Japan, and India [40,41]. Indeed, Thussu argues that the recent rise of China and India are interrupting historical European and US-dominated processes and having significant impact on global media content and media flows [42]. What are the implications of these global histories for news around the world today? Some scholars argue that there are “remarkable similarities” in “what is defined as news across cultures”, as the globalization of news as a particular genre of discourse has had critical consequences for news values [36]. And yet, given the North-South tensions elaborated above, it is also important to note differences. In her work on news dailies in India in the eighties for example, [43] argued that being of the Global South implies a fundamentally different role on the part of the national news media. In particular, she identified a distinct “Indian perspective” across different dailies which cut across differences in readership, language and region wherein there was much more of an emphasis on assisting the postcolonial government in the task of nation-building, distinct categories of news such as development news, and a greater balance of positive stories compared to the US media. More recently, however, others have pointed to a shift since liberalization, with news media now much more oriented to the market. Indeed, in India this shift was led in particular by the TOI, which

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in the eighties started to target the individual urban, middle class reader as consumer with news that would provide this consumer with use value and that was more “youthful” and “optimistic” [44]. However, Mody’s fascinating study supports the idea that there are important distinctions: in her work on the treatment of the Darfur crisis in ten papers across the world, she finds that the major predictor of how a paper covered the event is current national interest. While this may be in conformity with the idea that there are “remarkable similarities” in what is defined as news values, Northern and Southern states can have quite distinct national interests. Indeed, she argues that memories of colonial history in particular are critical in the Southern media [40]. Thus, while we can expect certain continuities in news media across countries in terms of institutions, organizations, and discursive and practical conventions, particularly given the historic Northern dominance and influence in these arenas globally, we can also expect key discontinuities. This is especially the case given memories of colonial rule, particular concerns such as development in the Global South, and the growing influence of Asia. To be clear, we are not implying any stark binaries between North and South. The Global North, for example, certainly includes diasporas from the Global South, and the Indian diaspora is a critical player within the NYT coverage of India (For more on issues of migrant and post-migrant children’s knowledge of “some” countries, see [45]) 4. Nevertheless, we find this distinction between Northern and Southern media in terms of memories and experiences of post/colonial relations useful for explaining key distinctions across these media.

Sexual Violence in “Other” Places: The Role of North-South Power Relations in Media Coverage Regarding global or international coverage of rape and sexual assault, we can also ask how North-South power relations and consequent geographic inequality in news have shaped such coverage. We contend that the histories of colonialism, imperialism, and neo-colonialism, and their related racialized constructions of the sexualities of black and brown bodies, have provided the lenses through which such coverage has emerged. One early such example is that of the “Indian Mutiny” of 1857 (or alternatively, the First War of Independence), wherein a series of uprisings and rebellions over the colonial territory which were violently quashed, came to be known in the metropole largely via press coverage of the so-called savagery of the

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indigenous people. Specifically, the British press represented the incident through the frame of the alleged (and unsubstantiated) sexual violence of Indian men toward white British women. In doing so, the media justified the severity of the colonialist response to the uprising and of the “civilizing values” of the colonial project more broadly [46,47]. Likewise, scholars have pointed to the colonial origins of US media as well [48,49]. Block, for example, shows how newspapers in colonial North America similarly demonized men of color, associating black and Native American men with the crime of rape in particular while framing rape committed by white men as atypical or extraordinary [49]. These early examples are a window onto the history and development of global news as situated within transnational, racialized, and gendered relations of power. We submit that these early moments were also key in providing the narratives or repertoires from which later explanations of sexual violence in post/colonial spaces would draw. For example, such emphasis on the sexual savagery of racialized men has also been evident in more recent media characterizations of particular countries within the Global South from South Africa to the Democratic Republic of Congo to India as the “rape capital of the world” (See for example [50,51]), despite notoriously unreliable and incomparable data across states. In fact, Geertsema identities several different journalistic stances on the part of western and other journalists toward the foreign and their implications for news about the diverse contexts of women’s experiences globally. First, she identifies a nationalist orientation, wherein journalism takes a “clash of civilizations” approach shaped by colonialism and ethnocentrism. Here, “postcolonial women are forced to remain silent partly because of “the Western press’s inability to envision such women as speaking subjects on public issues” [52] (p. 153). The above discussion of rape in the “Indian Mutiny” approximates such a stance. Second, she identifies a “cultural globalization” orientation, where journalism is less oriented to the nation and more oriented to the globe. Regarding gender and women, however, this sort of journalism typically takes a problematic “global feminist” stance where women’s experiences globally are understood from a western, neo-colonial perspective. While issues such as sexual and other forms of violence may be reported on, there is a dearth of historical context, with stereotypes about “third world” cultures and traditions reproduced. The above discussion of different countries as “rape capitals” of the world may be seen as an example of such a stance. Finally, she identifies a third possibility of a “glocal” journalism where local perspectives and voices are more fully included

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and the approach toward gender is a more complex transnational feminism that takes into account transnational and other power relations having to do with class, race, nation, culture, sexuality, and so on [52]. Such an approach might consider rape in “other” places in terms of complex local and global histories of colonialisms, postcolonial nationalisms, global capitalism and so on. We find these distinctions useful here for thinking about the kinds of journalistic orientations exhibited by the NYT and the TOI toward the two rape cases we are interested in. Additionally, while Geertsema’s typology points to the transnational dimensions and consequences of histories of racialization, we contend that the intersectional emphasis on the hyper-visibility of men of color as perpetrators and invisibility of women of color as victims within the US is a manifestation of such processes at the level of or within one nation. We suggest, thus, that national media orientations to the trans/national and to the sub/national are but two sides of one nationalist coin and as such, are more fruitfully studied together. Below, we consider the differing orientations toward both rape cases on the part of the NYT and the TOI, given the colonial, post/colonial and national histories of journalism; the implications of the recent rise of Asia; and the varying orientations to gender and the foreign identified by Geertsema. In particular, we highlight how media portrayals at the sub/national level are intimately interconnected with portrayals at the trans/national level, as both are integral to nationalist constructions of self. Thus, a multi-scalar approach provides a better explanation of racialized, sexualized media practices today.

DATA The structure of the NYT online paper includes standard sections, such as World, US, Sports, Opinion, etc., with the World further subdivided into regions such as Asia Pacific and Europe. The online paper is also comprised of a number of blogs, including The Learning Network, which is a blog that uses NYT content to create lesson plans for students and fosters discussion amongst students; the Lede, which is a “blog that remixes national and international news stories, adding information gleaned from the Web or gathered through original reporting to supplement articles in The New York Times and provide fresh perspectives on events” (See [53]); India Ink, a blog specifically on news (articles, opinion, interviews, etc.) of India which ran from 2011 through 2014; and IHT Rendevouz, which was a blog “dedicated to analyzing the news for a global audience” (See [54]), retired in June of

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2013. The structure of the TOI online paper also has a number of standard sections, including City, India, World, Business, Entertainment, Opinion, and so on, with sections like the World also having further subsections like US, Pakistan, South Asia, UK, China, Middle East and a section called Rest of the world. We looked at online newspaper coverage, including articles, interviews, analysis, editorials and blogs on either case from the date of each event (11 August 2012 for the Steubenville case and 16 December 2012 for the New Delhi case) through 16 March 2013. While we were primarily interested in pieces that were directly concerned with our cases, we included all pieces that at least directly referenced one of the two cases. The total number of pieces we found for each case, in each paper for the period of interest, is indicated in the table below.

NEWS MEDIA AND THE GEOGRAPHIES OF RAPE Table 1, below, shows that despite the extended time period allotted for the Steubenville case, this case received far less coverage than did the Delhi case. While the TOI covered Steubenville only once during the time period under question, the NYT also spent only 11% of its coverage on Steubenville. Furthermore, for the NYT coverage of Steubenville that is evident, this coverage does not begin until 16 December 2012, a full four months after the event (incidentally, it began its coverage of Steubenville at about the same time that it began its coverage of Delhi, though in the case of the former the coverage was quite belated). For the one piece on Steubenville published by the TOI, it emerged even later, on 10 January 2013. Table 1. Coverage of Each Case in NYT and TOI Number and Percent of Pieces Published NYT %

TOI

%

Delhi %

129 89%

45%

155 99%

55%

Total for Each Story 284

Steubenville %

16 11%

94%

1 1%

6%

17

Total for each paper

145

156

Given such unevenness in the coverage of the two cases, we argue that Delhi is very visible across both papers, while Steubenville is significantly less

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visible. Thinking of these cases as national news, since TOI is an Indian paper it is not surprising to see the number of pieces on the Delhi case. The relative invisibility of Steubenville can, at least on a preliminary basis, be attributed to the same factor—it is not part of India’s national news. The large number of articles in the NYT, however, gives it a kind of visibility that cannot be explained on the same terms. Indeed the hyper-visibility of Delhi compared to the relative invisibility of Steubenville leads to the next question. What sort of visibility is provided within the coverage given? To answer this question, we examined the central themes or points of emphasis within the coverage provided. We found some stark contrasts in each paper’s coverage of each case. Chart 1 below summarizes key patterns on the Delhi case.

Chart 1. Central Themes on Delhi Case across Both Papers.

Both papers offered the most pieces on ongoing details in the investigation in terms of specific features and actions of the police, criminal justice and government institutions. Beyond this predominant theme, for the NYT, the central theme that recurs is one of patriarchy and women’s oppression within India as a whole: “The brutal gang rape of a young woman in New Delhi this month has cast a cold light on how badly India treats its women” (“Rape in the world’s largest democracy,” NYT, 28 December). Two discursive tactics help frame this rape case as a larger cultural or societal problem. First, the Delhi rape case is repeatedly referenced in connection with other rape cases in order to point to a larger societal-level rape culture that transcends

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individual cases. For example, in one piece, a story about a different rape is interrupted in the middle to bring in details on the Delhi case. After these details, discussion of the rape in question ensues (“As Protests Sweep Delhi, Another Gang Rape in Bihar,” NYT, 19 December). Second, this rape culture is placed on a continuum of sexual and physical violence Indian women are said to suffer, from sex selection and son preference to acid attacks, dowry death, sexual harassment, child brides, discrimination against the girl child, and inadequate government and police responses to women’s issues, all of which together comprise “how badly India treats its women.” For example, one author writes “While a horrific gang rape in New Delhi has transfixed India and drawn attention to a violent epidemic, rape is just one facet of a broad range of violence and discrimination that leads to the deaths of almost two million women a year, researchers say. Among the causes are not only sexual violence but also domestic violence, family disputes and female infanticide, as well as infant neglect and poor care of the elderly that affect girls and women far more than boys and men” (“India’s new focus on rape shows only the surface of women’s perils,” NYT, 12 January). Beyond this societal-level rape culture and patriarchy, a second theme is of anger and protests in Delhi around the particular rape case, which are demanding changes to the culture of patriarchy and violence against women elaborated above. A connected third theme is that of an uneven modernity or an incomplete modernity. Consider, for example, the following statements: “India basks in its success as a growing business and technological mecca but tolerates shocking abuse of women”. (“Rape in the World’s Largest Democracy,” NYT, 28 December) “Just a tiny sliver of India’s population can afford a computer or has access to the Internet, but the young, educated subset of this group has become increasingly galvanized over the New Delhi rape case”. (“Six charged with murder in India after rape victim’s death,” NYT, 29 December) What emerges in this coverage of the NYT, then, is a discursive framework wherein the protesters represent the modern (and egalitarian) against the patriarchal tradition that sanctions violence against women. Further, the Delhi victim is posited as a symbol of the modern as well. For example, in a piece on her life, the author writes, “The idea of career first and then marriage is a relatively new one in India, where women, even professionally trained ones, often quit their jobs when they wed”. (“An ambitious woman from a Delhi neighborhood of migrants”, NYT, 9 January). Thus for famed

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NYT columnist Thomas Freidman, both the protesters and the victim are members of the “virtual middle class” (“The Virtual Middle Class Rises”, NYT, 2 February; “Thomas Freidman answers your questions”, NYT, 18 February). As members of this virtual middle class, they are the vanguard of a modernity still very much in progress. Examining the construction of the perpetrators as well, Roychowdhury points out that in contrast to the construction of the victim as “modern” the perpetrators are associated with “traditional culture”—A binary which elides the significantly overlapping class and caste backgrounds of both [55]. Thus, in the NYT, the predominant juxtaposition of the protestors and the victim on the one hand versus the perpetrators and especially patriarchal rape culture on the other can be seen as a staging of a grand battle between Tradition and Modernity. Uma Narayan [56] discusses the notion of “death by culture” to talk about colonialist constructions of particular cultures as especially prone to violence against women. We argue that the coverage of the NYT advances an explanation of “rape by culture” to suggest that the primary culprit in the Delhi rape case is Indian culture. If Indian rape culture is the antagonist, the protagonist is the victim and the protesters, who represent modernity and associated notions of women’s rights. We examined whether the discourse of the NYT was differentiated by whether authors were of Indian descent or not. Echoing the point made in endnote viii, we found that this distinction did not make much of a difference in terms of the deployment of notions of Indian rape culture and insufficient modernity. In clear contrast to this coverage, the most prominent emphasis for the TOI Delhi coverage after the coverage of police, government and criminal justice is that of agency at a variety of levels, first in terms of collective responses to the gang rape around the country and second in terms of individual women’s agency. On the first of these, the paper spent significantly more space on protests and responses to the Delhi case not just in Delhi but in cities and (relatively smaller) towns across the country including in large and small urban areas, such as Guwahati, Shillong, Silchar, Dhanbad, Chandigarh, Patiala, Ghaziabad, Kolkata, Mumbai, and Thiruvananthapuram. It detailed group efforts by political party affiliated groups, groups not affiliated with political parties, students, workers, homemakers, and celebrities. It listed activities such as protest marches and art projects, as well as new civil society and government projects at multiple levels having to do with education, policy and infrastructure. Second, the paper elaborated individual actions taken by women, such as enrolling in self-defense classes, as well as carrying pepper spray, chili powder, knives, and guns. While the paper

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did discuss a culture of violence and rape, the discussion of patriarchy and women’s oppression in the TOI is not framed discursively in terms of a dichotomy of tradition versus modernity as it is in the NYT. Rather, while patriarchy is acknowledged as a larger long term issue that must be dealt with, the focus of the TOI is on what can and is being done in the wake of the Delhi rape. Perhaps this distinction between the coverage of the NYT and the TOI is best illustrated by the fact that while the NYT published over 100 pieces on the themes listed above, just three days after the Delhi rape incident, the TOI published a piece entitled “Enough talk, let’s make women safe” (TOI, 19 December). Regarding the Steubenville case, the NYT coverage of Steubenville is quite instructive in its contrasts to the NYT coverage of Delhi. In the 16 pieces published, there is no overarching discussion of a culture of violence or of tradition versus modernity. The predominant theme, rather, is the noteworthy social media/online dimension of the story wherein portions of the assault had been reported by witnesses via photos, videos and on Twitter and Instagram, and the case was politicized online before there was a significant police response (for an academic treatment of this online/ social media dimension, see [57]). A second dominant theme was that of a problematic football rape culture which sought to excuse heroic sports players and blame victims. Notably, unlike the nationalized discussion of culture in the Delhi case as pertaining to Indian cultural and national tradition, the discussion of culture for the Steubenville case was localized to football culture within the town of Steubenville: “residents argue that adulation for the football team, one of the few jewels left in a city eroded by economic decline, has fostered a culture that allowed such a thing to occur” (“Case already tried in social media heads to court”, NYT, 12 March). 5 In this fashion, a rape in the city of New Delhi was “scaled up” to the Indian nation as a whole and connected as it was to cultural tradition, was also projected back in time. A rape in the town of Steubenville, on the other hand, was “scaled down” to a particular town’s football culture and associated as it was with exigencies of the moment, was removed from any meaningful historical context. This discursive nationalization of Delhi as a problem of Indian rape culture and localization of Steubenville to a particular town’s football culture was further reinforced in terms of where the paper placed both sets of stories. That is, the NYT published the Steubenville story as a “sports” story in its Sports section until 12 March, when it was moved to the US section of the paper. In contrast, Delhi was mainly covered in the India Ink blog, as well

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as in the Asia Pacific section. From the beginning, then, while Steubenville was framed as less about the US and more about an incident involving a particular set of actors in a specific locale; Delhi was framed as about Asia and particularly India, 6 as one among a long history of inequities. On the one piece on the Steubenville case published by the TOI, the framing of the case is quite instructive on the distinctive politics of the TOI. The title of the piece is “The US has its own Nirbhaya”—Nirbhaya being the nickname given to the victim of the Delhi rape and translating as “fearless” in English. The piece is an interview with the blogger who first brought the case to the public’s attention. The piece begins, “As India grapples with the gang-rape and death of the 23-year-old student in Delhi, the US is coming to terms with an equally disturbing case on its own soil (TOI, “The US has its own Nirbhaya”)”. In the framing of the TOI, then, there is no hierarchicalization between the US and India in terms of these two cases and their associated rape cultures, as they are understood as “equally disturbing”.

Intersectionalities in a Transnational Frame Contra the assumption that women of color victims of rape are more invisible compared to white women in news media, then, the above patterns demonstrate quite the opposite. Some of this uneven coverage of Delhi versus Steubenville may be explained by the fact that the former comes closer to the problematic “real rape” image that underlies news media depictions. However, the rape myths elaborated above which dichotomize assaults into “real” versus “not real” rape cannot explain the framing of the Delhi case in terms of Tradition versus Modernity—Neither can intersectional elaborations of early feminist work on rape myths. Indeed, in order to understand the peculiar treatment of the Delhi rape in the NYT, we need to turn to transnational histories of racialization. In particular, we need to examine larger histories of colonialism, imperialism and neocolonialism which have produced a civilizational narrative in which states in the Global North are always and inevitably further along on the scale of progress regarding democracy, freedom, and gender and sexual equality compared to states in the Global South [14,16,19,58]. The dichotomy of Tradition versus Modernity conveniently captures this differential location on the scale of progress. Finding a similar discourse in her examination of the treatment of the Delhi case in some other US media, Durham argues that the “mediated deployment of space and place” are “potent signifiers of gender and sexuality” [59]. From within this discursive framework then, understanding

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the Delhi rape requires an elision of cases such as Steubenville, whose very existence in the site of progress and modernity “at home” threatens civilizational assumptions about us as opposed to them. Relatedly, the sociology of news literature argues that domestic news tends to be prioritized over foreign news. We argue that this is not always the case and that the kind of story matters. Specifically in the case of sexual violence against women in states that identify with the civilizational narrative above, the nationalist underpinnings of national news dictate that whatever the problem is regarding women and gender here, it is not as bad as it is “over there”, thereby requiring more attention be paid to the foreign over the domestic for this particular type of crime. A good example of this is an article titled Is Delhi so different from Steubenville? by Nicolas Kristof (13 January 2013) which acknowledges “some” similarities in terms of the Steubenville and Delhi cases, but concludes that the US has made very significant progress in reducing violence against women and that for India and other countries and that “(T)he United States could help change the way the world confronts these issues,” thus rendering invisible the efforts underway in India, over decades, to address sexual violence (For even a brief historical overview of such efforts, see [60]). Contra some basic assumptions of intersectional and sociological approaches to news, then, racialized victims and the foreign can both be foregrounded for the sake of (re)securing colonialist civilizational and nationalist objectives. In fact, combining the insights of the transnational literature on the media imageries that create and sustain gendered racial hierarchies across nation-states, and the nation-focused literature on the invisibility of women of color in the US, we would argue that in an increasingly global world, both elements are important for upholding the supremacy of a racial nation-state. Thus the Delhi case serves as a marker of disorder over there, while the invisibilization of non-white women’s rape contributes to the myth of how well things are over here. In contrast to the NYT, the TOI does prioritize domestic over foreign news, which helps explain its lack of coverage of the Steubenville case. As some have suggested, however, news media in the Global South have quite distinct concerns shaped by memories and experiences of anticolonial and postcolonial struggle [40,43]. Such a perspective of postcolonial nationalism—However refracted through neoliberal, global capitalist, and related prisms—May help to explain not only the TOI’s unwillingness to engage in an extended discussion of cultural sources of sexual violence against women but also its determined focus on agency and change.

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Reflecting further on the hypervisibility of the Delhi case, beyond these post/colonial histories and identities, can we not say that the Delhi story is simply more newsworthy, or simply more sensational, or simply more likely to sell within the marketplace, especially in the US? After all, the Delhi case was much more physically violent and the victim in that case did lose her life, while the one in Steubenville survived. We argue that this is too simple. After all, sensationalistic stories of rape routinely emerge for other post/colonial spaces as well, yet they do not receive the kind of extended coverage the Delhi story has received. Rather, we argue that the Delhi story has become more “newsworthy”, more sensational and more likely to sell in light of recent political economic and cultural shifts which themselves gain their significance in the context of larger colonial histories. Firstly, the increased coverage of the NYT and a number of other Northern media outlets regarding China and India has emerged in the wake of the economic rise of China and India as well as a US Indian diaspora that is now perceived to be the most economically successful minority in the country [61,62]. 7 Regarding India, the bulk of NYT coverage of India occurred via its Indiaspecific blog, India Ink, which was the first country-specific blog the newspaper ever created (and which lasted from 2011–2014). In this new and specific attention to India, the NYT was joined by other publications such as The Wall Street Journal, The New York Daily News, and The Huffington Post (some of these have since shut down [63]). This increased news coverage has been accompanied by an increased visibility in popular culture, from transnational Bollywood to US films and television shows [64,65]. It is within this context of heightened visibility, perceived economic success of Indians within the US and the rise of Asia that the Delhi case becomes newsworthy, sensational and sellable within the Global North. Even more, we suggest that such dynamics have brought to the fore deep anxieties about Asian emergence and Northern and particularly US decline. The rise of Asia and the perceived success of the diaspora present challenges to the long-held civilizational narrative and its assumptions about cultural-racial superiority, progress and so on. From this perspective, cases such as the Delhi case and its truth about “how badly India treats its women” provide some reassurance and solace about the ongoing significance of older civilizational hierarchies and who belongs where.

CONCLUSIONS We argue that the NYT and the TOI have significantly different orientations

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to the rape cases examined here, due to the colonial, post/colonial and nationalist histories of journalism as well as the recent rise of Asia. For the NYT on the Delhi case, older civilizational discourses of the excessive and aberrant sexuality of brown bodies, barbarism and static tradition combine with newer discourses of economic modernization in the new India to construct a framework of an incomplete modernity where some within the nation represent modernity while others represent tradition. A problematic global feminist discourse further reproduces this binary of tradition and modernity in the name of feminism and women’s rights. While such a nationalist construction of the US as a site of progress, freedom and so on requires an elision of the racialized power structures which enable and perpetuate the rape of victims of color within the US (and an overemphasis on white victims), this same nationalist construction of the US also requires an elision of white victims in relation to racialized, Orientalized victims abroad. Such an elision renders instances of gender and sexual violence in the Global North out of place and out of time—insignificant, unremarkable, and so forgettable exceptions to the rule. This relative invisibility of violence against women of color in the US and the hypervisibility of women elsewhere perpetuates the civilizational narrative and its profound implications for collective memory regarding sexual assault, space and race. Significantly, while global power relations propel the NYT’s presumed entitlement to speak on a case half way around the world, these same power relations inhibit any such inclination on the part of the TOI. That is the TOI, situated within an uneven North-South tapestry of power, has no space to make a similar transnational civilizational superiority claim on behalf of India. Thus, the TOI’s postcolonial nationalism focuses largely on the Delhi case and emphasizes women’s agency and social change, with its scant Steubenville coverage stressing similarities between India and the US. As such, the TOI provides a powerful local, perhaps “postcolonial feminist” counterpoint to the global feminism produced by the NYT. In the case of both papers, then, their differential locations within global power relations produce particular kinds of nationalisms, particular kinds of feminisms, as well as particular kinds of orientations to both the sub/ national and the trans/national. Relatedly, their differential locations also produce particular kinds of visibilities and invisibilities which themselves shift depending on the scale of analysis. Ultimately, then, there is an urgent need to expand our frameworks beyond the nation and even more, to pay attention to multiple scales of analysis simultaneously. Following Chowdhury, contesting global feminism’s disappearance of the concerns of

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US women of color requires a “braiding together” of US women of color and transnational feminist frameworks [20]. At stake is the potential and possibility for a collective praxis of a “feminism without borders [59]”.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This research has not received any funding.

Author Contributions Both authors conceived of the idea, collected the data, conducted the analysis, and wrote the paper together.

Conflicts of Interest The authors declare no conflict of interest. Notes •

•

•

•

While we initially sought to examine the coverage of each rape for a period of three months after each event, this was not possible because there is no coverage of the Steubenville rape case, dated 11 August 2012 until 16 December 2012. Thus we decided to make our cut off point three months after the Delhi gang rape (dated 16 December 2012) in order to have cases to compare. 2 Interestingly, Valerie Smith found that in contrast to such tendencies in the dominant media, the black press can do the opposite and focus on the racialization of rape while discounting the crime itself. 3 Mody points to one study that thus found even in the 1980s, the news agency of each area’s former colonizer dominated the inputs and outputs of news for that region. 4 As Purkayastha writes, the role of diasporas in acting as “native informants” for “home countries” is a fascinating research topic in its own right. For the purposes of this paper, based on the insights of Purkayastha and other immigration scholars, especially those who study post-migrant generations, we wish to insert a cautionary note. Migrants who have lived away from their countries of origin for a long time, and their children who are molded by the country in which they live their lives, rarely retain or develop in-depth knowledge or understanding of the migrants’ country of origin (unless it is their subject of work or study). Thus the use of migrants and their children as native informants creates a type of racialized confirma1

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•

•

•

381

tory echo chamber for some already constructed news “realities’. 5 In a separate examination, we also looked at the local coverage of the Steubenville case in the Pittsburg Gazette. Here the news focused primarily on the incidents and the sentencing. Except for two articles on the outrage against CNN which appeared to sympathize with the rapists, there was no coverage of any protests or commentaries about local cultures. 6 The framing is particularly interesting because our search through the academic literature—62 social science articles which included the word sexual violence—published in 2012 or 2013 shows that a significant numbers of authors were writing about the college rape culture in the US. In other words if the journalists sought to reach out to experts in the field, college rape cultures in the US would inevitably have been a theme they encountered. 7 Of course, the focus on Asian Indians as the most economically successful minority is problematic in that such a construction erases the considerable diversity within the group.

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INDEX 338, 339, 340, 341, 343, 345, 346, 347, 348, 349, 350, 351, Aboriginal language 5 352, 353, 354, 355, 356, 357 accusations 38, 39, 41, 43, 44, 46, archetypes 252 47, 50, 51, 52, 53, 55 articulations 120 Adam Goodes 62, 64, 72, 77 assets 231 advertising text 243, 248, 259 Australian Football League (AFL) Africanity 98, 99, 100, 105 64 African journalism 97, 98, 100, 102, Australian Human Rights Commis104, 107, 108 sion 162, 183 agonism 62, 65 Australian Human Rights Commisagonistic publics 61, 66 sion’s ‘Racism 73 Alt-Right 10, 29, 30 Australian Research Council 10 altrightmedia 21 authenticity 81 antagonism 191 autochthony 80, 81, 83, 93, 109 Anti-Fascist Never Again FoundaB tion 208 antisemitic 10, 18, 19, 21 biographical research 337 anti-Semitic harassment 327, 330, black African immigrants 96 333, 339, 344 black African migration 96 anti-Semitic hate crime 328, 329, black and white binary paradigm 330, 332, 333, 334, 335, 336, 229 338, 343, 347, 348, 349 blackface 37, 39, 40, 47, 49, 50, 55, anti-Semitism 327, 328, 329, 330, 56, 58 331, 332, 333, 334, 335, 336,

A

388

Media Reporting and Racism based Crime

blackface tradition 39, 49, 50, 56 Black Lives Matter 233, 234 black people 225, 227, 230, 232, 233, 234, 235 black population 204, 205, 218 British Cameroon 208 British National Party (BNP) 151 broadcast media 62, 72, 74 buffoons 38 bureaucratisation 97 BuzzFeedNews 20, 30

C centralisation 97 Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre’s (CEOP) 150 child sexual abuse 12 child sexual exploitation (CSE) 144 civic engagement 62, 65, 66 civilisation 82, 93, 95, 100, 196 civilising’ 10 civilized race 229 civil society 9, 10, 13, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 193 colonialism 368, 369, 376 colonial racism 49 colonisation 3, 41, 42 commentators 38, 50 Commonwealth 17 communication function 245 communication management 167 community 1, 2, 4, 5, 160, 167, 171, 172, 174, 175, 176, 180, 183 Conceptualising citizenship 66 conflict managers 242 content analysis 290, 292, 293, 294, 296, 300, 307, 309, 314, 316 cosmopolis 67

cosmopolitanism 83 councillors 175 Covert Racism 2 credibility 213 criminal activities 301 criminalisation 90, 96, 289, 290, 298, 302 criminality 172 critical discourse analysis 190, 191, 192, 194, 200, 201, 290, 300, 324 Cronulla 167, 171, 172 Cronulla riots 167, 171, 172 Crown Prosecution Service 148 cultural heritage 5 culturalization 272 Culture 5 culture clash 172 Cyber Racism 9, 10, 32, 33

D data familiarisation 47 decentralised despotisms 82 decision making 162, 181 dehumanisation 90, 91 Demarginalizing 360, 382 democracy 63, 65, 191 democratic political organisation 103 democratic values 65 digital citizenship 62, 63, 65, 69, 74 digital space 15 digitextual aesthetics 244 discobus 280 discourse analysis 167, 186 discrimination 2, 3, 4, 5, 121 Discrimination and Hate Crime Against Jews in EU Member

Index

States 331 discriminatory effect 206, 218 discursive analyses 122 discursive contextualizations 124 discursive strategies 205, 208, 218 distorting policy 144 documentaries 195 dominant community language 2 domination 194

E economic welfare 120 English Defence League (EDL) 151 ethnic 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 ethnic cleansing 2 ethnic groups 1, 3, 289, 290, 291, 292, 293, 296, 301, 302, 303, 304, 306 ethnicity 80, 84, 87, 98, 105, 106, 109, 110, 121, 125 ethnic minorities 83, 110 Ethnocracy 20 ethnomasochist 20 European Commission against Racism and Intolerance (ECRI) 24, 30 European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights 331, 353

F Facebook 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 21, 25, 33, 35, 62, 63, 68, 76 false impressions 2 fear discourse 171 Federation of Ethnic Communities Councils of Australia (FECCA) 27 feminist 360, 361, 363, 369, 376, 379, 380, 382, 383

389

Fitna 195 forensic DNA technologies 277, 278, 284 formal documentary style 245 freedom 191 front-page coverage 11

G Gazeta Wyborcza 204, 208, 210, 221 Geertsema’s typology 370 gender 121, 126 genocide 2 grievable lives 270 grooming 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 152, 156

H hegemonic ideology 235 high-profileness 263, 265, 267, 268, 272, 274, 277, 280, 282 homophobic 11 Humanitarian Settlement in Regional Australia Program 160 humanity 81, 84, 88, 89, 91, 92, 96, 100, 101, 106, 107 human rights 191 humour 37, 39, 42, 43, 44, 45, 47, 48, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56 hybridity 83 hypervisibility 378, 379

I ideology 119, 121, 122, 123, 126, 132, 133, 135, 136, 137 ignorance 234 immigrant groups 299 immigrants 42, 44, 54

390

Media Reporting and Racism based Crime

immigration 44, 45, 56 imperialism 368, 376 incrimination 197 information and communications technologies (ICTs) 83 information transfer process 249 injustice 229 international newspapers 38 International Telecommunications Union (ITU) 12 Internet 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 18, 21, 22, 23, 25, 26, 27, 30, 31, 35 intersectionality 360, 363, 383 inter-textuality 303 Intolerance 3 Islamic religion 190, 191 Islamophobia 190, 191, 192, 196, 198, 199, 200, 201 Israeli Palestinian conflict 197 Israel–Palestine conflict 328, 329, 330, 333, 343, 344, 345

J Jewish identity 327, 328, 330, 334, 341, 342, 348, 349 jouissance 120, 133, 134, 135, 136 journalistic style 241, 244, 246 journalists 86, 87, 97, 98, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 106, 108, 163, 169, 174 juxtaposition 267, 280

L Lebanese rapists 147 Leeuwarder Courant 264, 269, 270, 271, 272, 273, 275, 276, 278, 279, 281 legitimacy 121

lexicalisation 195 linguistic 203, 205, 207, 208, 211, 218, 219 linguistic discursive landscape 194 linguistic moulding 121 linguistic research 245, 247, 260 linguists 242 literature 243, 248, 252, 258

M Machiavellianism 15 mainstream Fairfax press 11 Makwerekwere 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 95, 96, 117 marginalised groups 40, 42, 44, 48 mass communication 248, 250 mass-communicative text 248 mass media 80, 241, 243, 247, 249, 250, 261, 262 media communication 243, 250 media content 290, 291, 299 media text 242, 243, 248, 249, 250, 251, 252, 257, 259, 261 mega case 265 metaprograms 252 Metropolitan societies 16 micropublics 62, 67 migrant crime 295, 299, 305, 315, 317, 318 migrants 290, 291, 293, 294, 298, 301, 304, 308, 309, 312, 316, 317, 318 mission civilisatrice 82 modernisation theory 82, 84 modernity 227 multicultural 145, 147 multiculturalism 83, 162, 181 multinodal communications system 12

Index

multiple identities 83

N narcissism 15, 16 national group 1 naturalization 216 Négropolitain 105 neocolonialism 376 Newsmaking routines 294 news media 289, 290, 291, 295, 317 New York Times (NYT) 361 Nominalisations 312 non-standard variations 2 normativities 267

O Office of the Children’s Commissioner for England’s (OCCE) 150 Online Hate Prevention Institute (OHPI) 10 online neo-nazism 10 online print media 163, 165, 179 online text 248 Orientalism 190, 192, 200 over-lexicalisation 311 Overt expressions 40 Overt Racism 2

P Palestinians 197 paternalistic stereotyping 160 pathologizing 216 PepsiCola 11 perceptual neighbourhood 131 personality traits 15 phenotype 227 phenotypical variation 228 physical traits 227

391

polarization 192 policy differentiation 54 policy makers 193 Polish media 203, 204, 205, 206, 218 political economy 9, 13, 14, 15, 31 politicisation 84, 87, 97, 109 power inequalities 1 prejudice and stereotyping 330 problematization 266 prosumer 13 provocations 66, 73 provocative assault 265 PR-text 248 psycholinguistics 243 psychological attributes 15 psychological automatisms 252 psychologists 242 public broadcast services 68 publicistic text 242, 244, 246, 247, 248, 250, 251, 254 Public Prosecutor 275, 276, 277, 278, 283

Q quantification 149 quasi-geneticism 153

R race 119, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 128, 130, 132, 135, 136, 137 racial body 119 Racial Discrimination Act 63, 75, 76 racial equality 226 racial formation 204 racial groupings 227 racial harassment 2 racial hierarchy 225, 226, 229, 234,

392

Media Reporting and Racism based Crime

235 racial inferiority discourses 225, 227 racialisation 146, 289, 290 racialised hierarchy 92 Racialising criminal justice 151 racial minorities 83 racial objectification 122 racial slander 2 racism 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 119, 120, 121, 122, 124, 125, 126, 128, 130, 134, 135, 136, 137, 141 racist abuse 2 Racist attitudes 1 racist crime 271 racist prejudices 206 racist propaganda 2 racist rhetoric 144 racist stereotyping 234 Rawlsian model 65 readership 242, 244, 257 Refugee 163 refugeehood 180 refugees 160, 161, 167, 169, 170, 172, 173, 174, 175, 177, 178, 180, 183, 184, 186 Regional Humanitarian Settlement Pilot programs 160 regional resettlement location 160 religious groups 10, 24 reverse-racist 147 ridicule 2 Russian language 243, 251, 260 Rzeczpospolita 204, 208, 210, 213, 216

S Science and Technology Studies (STS) 265, 266 self-confidence 4 self-control and autonomy 229 self-perceived discrimination 122 semantic inequalities 120 semiotics 243 senseless violence 267, 269, 270, 271, 272, 274, 280, 281, 283, 285, 288 sexuality 121 sickeningly hypocritical Britain’ 147 smugglers 301 social citizenship 80, 109 social inclusion 63 social media network 11 social media sites 61, 64 socioeconomic challenges 225, 227 sociologists 242 stereotypes 80, 84, 94, 96, 205, 206, 218, 225, 227, 235 stigmatisation 80 structural racism 120 subjectivization 124 subjugation 227 Sunni-Shia relations 191 Sydsvenska Dagbladet (SDS) 328 symptomatic racism 122 Systemic Racism 3

T Tamworth 159, 160, 161, 162, 163, 165, 166, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176, 177, 178, 179, 180, 181, 182, 183, 186, 187, 188 teletext 248

Index

terror attack 196 terrorism 190, 191, 194, 195, 196, 197, 198 Teun van Dijk’s socio cognitive theory 207 The Right Stuff (TRS) 19 thoughtlessness 234 Times of India(TOI) 361 traditional media 249 transnational dimensions 227 transnational feminism 370, 383 transnationalizing intersectional analyses 362 Twitter 62, 63 Typological features 243

U unwitting prejudice 234

393

verbal communication 245 victimhood 176 Victorian Health Promotion Foundation (VicHealth) 27 violence and discrimination 373 vocal disillusionment 145 vulnerability 328, 329, 330, 337, 338, 344, 346, 348

W Wal-Mart 11 West European nations 205, 218 whiteface 47, 49 World Wide Web 12, 35

X xenophobia 79, 80, 83, 84, 87, 88, 96, 109, 110

V

Y

Vaatstra case 263, 264, 265, 266, 267, 268, 271, 272, 273, 274, 275, 276, 277, 278, 279, 280, 281, 284

YouTube 61, 62, 63, 64, 66, 68, 69, 70, 72, 73, 74, 76