Racism and Media
- Gavan Titley - National University of Ireland Maynooth, Ireland
Digital media have radically altered understandings of racism, so that an issue that has too often been assumed to belong to the past has been thrust into contemporary mainstream debates, news and popular culture. In light of the importance of traditional communications and social media to such events as Brexit in the UK and the Trump Presidency in the US, it is imperative for students of media and public discourse to examine the role played by the media in the generation, circulation and contestation of racist ideas. In Racism and Media, Gavan Titley:
- Explains why racism is such a complex and contested concept
- Provides a set of theoretical and analytical tools with which to interrogate how media dynamics and processes impact on racism and anti-racism
- Demonstrates methods’ application through a wide range of case studies, taking in examples from the UK, US, and several European countries
- Examines the rise and impact of online and social media racism
- Analyses questions of freedom of speech and hate speech in relation to racism and media
This book is an essential companion for students of media, communications, sociology and cultural studies.
This book is important. It builds on an astonishing array of writers on race and media to develop an original perspective on what it calls the ‘debatability’ of racism. Its arguments are well illustrated. It is theoretically sophisticated. It is also politically sharp. All that’s left is for you to read it.
Racism and Media addresses one of the major challenges of today’s world: the continuing racisms propagated, reproduced and reinforced via different genres and media in many context dependent ways. This book is an excellent, well argued, and comprehensive overview, with several in-depth case studies, which illustrate how pervasive racist attitudes, strategies, and practices have become and how they are disseminated both in formal and informal everyday interactions. A most valuable contribution to media studies, discourse studies, and political science.
Media logics are integrated into the formations of racism which are, as Titley argues, “simultaneously everywhere and nowhere in our public culture”. In calm and measured prose, he unpicks numerous conceptual issues around postracialism, the domopolitical and Islamophobia. using case materials about the Charlie Hebdo affair, the English Defense League and others. This is a sophisticated contribution to both understanding and acting against the re-emergence of the far Right.
As a scholar and journalist who feels rather familiar with ideas about race, I found this book refreshing and clarifying. It helped me see patterns in the fog of racial claims, to connect developments in the U.S. and Europe and to better understand how change and continuity are unfolding in mediated racial politics. Ultimately, Racism and Media will inform how I craft arguments about the relationship between media and race and how I think about what we are fighting for.
