You are intelligent, logical, well-educated people, and yet you can’t stop the most absurdly overt bigots from being given leadership positions so they can implement programs to end bigotry. This isn’t a slight, I just think you’re in a fixed fight and might not see it. I’m worried you’ve been lured into it so you can be drained of everything you have while swinging at shadows you were never going to hit. The goal is to leave you broken – whether it’s your spirit, your finances, your heart, or all three.
Since I just read Shannon Watkins’ article on the UNC Journalism School, I’ll use communications/media studies theories to illustrate how outflanked I think you are:
First, your opponent capitalized on the already present conditioning that only conspiracy theorists and obnoxious people who think they know better than professionals disagree with the news, then for the last five years the news has also told us the kind of person who would disagree or oppose x, y, or z – constructing and reinforcing symbols so that the moment one dissents, no matter what their reason, someone calls them a Trump supporter, someone else calls them a racist, someone else calls them a communist, someone else tells them they’re not an epidemiologist, someone tells them they are a racist because they said they weren’t a racist, someone asks them weren’t they ever taught to think of the greater good, someone says not to mansplain them while they’re angrily defending that they’re not sexist. The result of all that, as any Media Studies student knows, is some portion of people will stay silent even if they disagree for fear of being shamed or being called antisemitic or racist – but it doesn’t really matter because who will hear those that speak up when their Facebook and twitter accounts are banned? Certainly CNN won’t be giving them a voice.
I don’t think it’s a lost cause, but I do think there’s a different approach needed, as right now you are letting their moves constrain you and dictate the discussion, which is bad, because that’s what they want, and when no one can see they just hired the obnoxious bigot guy to head the end bigotry program…
Do you mind telling me something please? How come Shannon’s article about the woke program at the journalism school acts like some Dean’s diversity curriculum is a problem? How come when she gives the title of the Dean’s paper – “Teaching Media Ethics in a Multicultural Setting,” – she doesn’t ask what kind of megalomaniac has the audacity to use the phrase “Media Ethics” while teaching people how to manipulate, cheat, violate the people’s trust, and enslave every man, woman, and child alive? And how come, if you are so supportive of freedom of speech, you don’t seem concerned that one can’t even be free if they are living in a manufactured world, because what they think, what they do, what they care about – it’s all a result of the manufacturing they’ve been fed. So, who knows what any of us would have felt like or thought like or been like? Can you see how it’s hard to grasp that magnitude of theft of people’s lives? I ask because I don’t know if it’s blindness or if you mean to misrepresent what matters to you.
Nick Staff
New York, NY
