'The Demonization Was Meant to Pacify Readers to Accept the Brutality'
SEPTEMBER 22, 2021
CounterSpin interview with Milton Allimadi on New York Times and Africa
JANINE JACKSON
Janine Jackson: Benighted. Backward. Tribal. Corrupt. Inherently violent, yet somehow also docile unto imbecility.
Listeners will be familiar with the imagery that corporate media have long used to talk about Africa and Africans. Not just tabloids that blare their racism in crude cartoons–elite media have been key in promoting the narrative in which Europeans represent civilization, which they feel moved to provide, on their own terms naturally, to Africans that could never otherwise attain it.
In 1877, a New York Times editorial explained that inferior intellectual development gave Africans “an old touch, a tertiary or pre-tertiary touch about them, affiliating them with the ancient hippopotamus and the crocodile.” It continued, “Surely this is a case where the introduction of European civilization would be most justifiable and might well repay the cost.”
That’s a long time ago, you say. OK, but the Times piece “Colonialism’s Back and Not a Moment Too Soon,” that argued that “the civilized world has a mission to go out to these desperate places and govern,” ran in 1993.
A new book makes the point, and illustrates it expansively, that dehumanizing coverage of African nations and African people has never been accidental or incidental, but part of efforts to justify violent colonization and resource theft, and to rationalize continued economic exploitation of Black people and the institutionalized racism intertwined with it.
More:
https://fair.org/home/the-demonization-was-meant-to-pacify-readers-to-accept-the-brutality/
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