another links for the weekend:
Local news has been dying for generations, pretty much since the dawn of the fully commercial internet, so for there to be a book confirming that in 2020 probably could not be a more Captain Obvious book. Nevertheless, Margaret Sullivan's forthcoming book is the topic of some writing at The Atlantic.
https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2020/07/ghosting-news-margaret-sullivans-alarm-bell/614011/
I found out first-hand there was not really a local news job market over the last twenty years so none of this news about the news has been news to me. A giant portion of this blog consisted of journalistic/historical blogging covering some local news in the realm of religious non-profit corporate activity that I thought was not adequately covered in the mainstream or indie press. Call it citizen journalism if you will, but I did, at least, have a journalism degree that got put to some use from 2011-2015. :)
Evangelicalism has been a key focus in the age of Trump, particularly white evangelicalism. I confess some skepticism about the ease with which mainlines and progressives look on United States history and manage to find ways to impute the sum of American white supremacy on contemporary evangelicalism. It's not that I can't think of neo-Confederate polemics or of Christians who regard Lincoln as a war criminal and one of the worst executives in the history of the republic, it's more that with half my ancestry being Native American progressives in the here and now find it a bit too easy to skip past enforced sterilization projects championed by eugenicists who were progressives a century ago. More to the point, contemporary race discourse tends to collapse racism into an "all or none" approach in which one is an anti-racist or a racist with racism redefined to mean a prejudice combined with institutional power.
That within evangelicalism there are white and black groups could be easy to forget (if even known) and the thirty years since the Cold War ended have introduced aspects to white evangelicalism and coverage of it in academic and journalistic contexts that make it a fairly wide-open target.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/07/white-evangelicals-black-lives-matter/613738/
On the other hand, that there are socially conservative people of color can get skated over. Sherman Alexie used to complain that the average American Indian was more socially conservative than the most socially conservative white guys. Anthony Heilbut has remarked upon how virulently homophobic the reggae community has always been and how within black churches anti-homosexual stances and campaigning is far more robust than it is in even conservative white evangelical groups, and Heilbut went so far as to name T. D. Jakes and Creflo Dollar in The Fan Who Knew Too Much.
For my part, I am skeptical about the recent claims that racism requires institutional power to be racism as distinct from simple prejudice. What kind of institutional power? For instance, on a Native American reservation would a Native American regarding migrant Mexican workers as job stealing rapists be a racist on the res but not be a racist in a city in the state where the res is located simply because of jurisdiction and institutional power? Why would that be the case? Would the American Indian who says that Mexican migrant works are job-stealing rapists on a res in eastern Washington be a racist on the res but not in Spokane? The argument that racism depends on institutional power could potentially argue that a Native American cop working for a tribal government could be a racist against blacks or whites or even against other Native Americans who are not from the officer's tribe (this could especially be the case if you consult the history of inter-tribal conflicts in Native American histories) but that outside the tribal jurisdiction the officer would not be a racist in some predominantly non-Native urban center. Whatever racism is as a sin in heart and mind, I am skeptical that it requires access or association with institutional power to be what it is. My understanding of Jesus' parable about the good Samaritan is that anyone who asks "and who is my neighbor" is self-justifying and needs to be told that if you follow Christ you don't get to decide who isn't your neighbor.
Julia Duin contributed a piece to GetReligion recently about how NPR coverage on religion and race tends to zero in on white evangelicalism, particularly in the South.
https://www.getreligion.org/getreligion/2020/7/7/religion-and-race-npr-targets-sins-and-struggles-of-southern-evangelicals-alone
Having recently finished Adolph Reed Jr's withering The Jesse Jackson Phenomena, he wrote a bit about how black and Jewish political activism had a long history in which Jewish liberal patronage tended to keep black activism in a subordinate position in the realm of education. I.e. Jacobin had a piece in the last ten years that ran with a theory that the emergence of neo-conservative Jewish intellectuals basically came about because Jewish academics feared that the introduction of affirmative action for blacks would weaken their disproportionate advantage getting into academia, which I take as a reminder that squicky race-baiting and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories have been the domain of the left as well as the right (and, for anyone for whom this is the very first WtH post, I try to make a firm distinction between left, progressive, and liberal/centrist and even within the left I try to distinguish between explicitly Marxist socialists and socialists who are not actually Marxists because anyone with even a smattering of Cold War history should know the U.S. backed plenty of non-Marxist socialists but I digress).
Terry Mattingly wonders whether mainstream journalists will catch on that the McCarrick report has not been released.
https://www.getreligion.org/getreligion/2020/7/11/does-it-matter-that-journalists-have-quit-asking-about-the-missing-mccarrick-report
1 comment:
I clicked for the McCarrick report. It's disturbing to say the least how uncooperative this whole ordeal has been since, at least in the US, 2002. It makes me think of all the hostile things about Catholicism from the Byzantine East through the Reformation into the 19th/20th c. Sometimes it's just ignorant bigotry (especially when directed against run of the mill people, like the Irish), but I am starting to appreciate the points various groups made. The Know-Nothings are usually blasted as racist reactionaries, but they had a point. I found out recently that a major issue was the fact that only the Church hierarchy could own specifically Roman Catholic properties (churches, but also schools), meaning this could create a powerful real estate network quickly (as the laity were forbidden from owning it). So the idea of powerful churchmen sweeping into American politics was not just hysteria (at least in places like Boston, New York, Charleston, and New Orleans). And all of the hand-wringing cancel culture from the left reminds me of how nasty Roman Catholic critics (usually churchmen) have been in trying to get "anti-Catholic" things cancelled, lashing out at anything that upset them.
While Fox News types like Tucker Carlson (someone I have some respect for, in terms of some of his investigative reporting) rightly lambast this rhetorical Jacobinism, it's quite easy to forget that it originated from Moral Majority types. Catholics have tended to be the whiniest, but conservative Jews and Evangelicals have not been far behind with calls for the government to repress "offensive" speech.
This insanity with pederasts makes you appreciate Conciliarist-to-Reformation criticisms about the Church acting as a country within a country. Such critiques were not necessarily "anti-Catholic" (most people making them were Catholic), but the stakes are quite visible when it comes to children.
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