Ethnicity, Race, and Journalism

Abstract

“Ethnicity,” “race” and “journalism” are each problematized in this article on the relationship among them. They operate in diverse discourses relating to particularity and difference, and are used as both “analytical and folk concepts.” As race and ethnicity have different trajectories, racism has taken different forms: “scientific,” “institutional,” and “cultural” or “new racism.” While Northern/Western scholarship acknowledges the foundations of race and ethnicity with modernity, arising with 15th-century European colonization, they are nevertheless understood as “aberrations” in Western journalism—itself a practice of modernity. But critical Southern scholarship has challenged the hegemonic narrative of modernity, pointing to its “darker side,” and thus its production of the coloniality of knowledge, power, and being worldwide. It explains European colonization as the source of “modernity,” nascent capitalism, and the control of labor—including its gendered racialization. This accounts for the dominance of both the content and the perspective of European research. Sports and crime journalism are the most popular news forms which sustain the mythic concepts of racial superiority and inferiority, expressed through scientific racism. But journalism on transnationalism has led critical theorists to question its underpinning of institutional, cultural, and new racism, and increasingly, marginalized subaltern groups are producing their own media to challenge the hegemonic media framings of them. The “Southern” theoretical approach poses a fundamental challenge to contemporary, hegemonic, and gendered understandings of journalism, race, and ethnicity.