2014 archive

I’ve noted many times how, in news reports of gun deaths, guns seem to just go off all on their ownsome, without the interference of some human agency to cause their triggers to be engaged. It’s not just guns, folks.

In a much longer post about perception and perspective in reporting the events in Ferguson, Missouri, Mikhail Lyubansky gives a telling example–telling in its pettiness–of how the framing of an event affects reporting and consequent perception of it.

A few days ago, high school students in my local community were holding a rally outside the high school to protest the grand jury decisions in the police shooting deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner. The rally, which was approved by school officials, was designed to take place on school grounds but spilled over to the street in front of the school. While the students were on the street, a woman attempted to drive a car through the group of students [see video]. Students responded by hitting the car and apparently did some damage to the glass. The event was reported by the local newspaper:

Some of them [students] walked into Crescent Drive in front of the school. As that occurred, a vehicle travelled through the crowd. At least one of the students struck the vehicle’s window and caused damage to the glass, according to police, who were called to the scene.

Notice how the article places the damage to the car in the foreground. The car was not driven through the group of students, it just somehow “travelled through the crowd” — the passive voice. But when it comes to the damage to the car, it didn’t just happen. Rather “one of the students struck the vehicle’s window” — the active voice.

Do read the rest, and remember to read the news with several grains of salt.

Afterthought:

I take no responsibility for the Psychology Today blogger’s ignorance of basic grammar.

“Car traveled” is active voice, even though it is obfuscatory, in that it attributes agency to the car, which is a mechanical device without agency.

In the Bangor Daily News, Wayne E. Reilly reports on a debate that took place a century ago about whether women should be allowed to vote. It’s fascinating. Here’s a snippet:

Women’s ever-changing dress styles, including slightly shorter, tighter skirts that inhibited movement, had become mixed up with one of the great questions of the Progressive Era.

“Mrs. Huntington believed that the woman who had such a narrow skirt that she had to be lifted into a wagon was not fit to vote,” the correspondent for the Commercial reported. Getting into a wagon, of course, was a far more important exercise a century ago than it is today.

It’s a light-hearted little column, but illustrates well the utter bullshit that persons tell themselves–and others–to justify their prejudices.

At Psychology Today Blogs, Laurie Essig takes on the myth makers, in this case, those whose myths support and perpetuate racism. Here’s a bit:

Mass incarceration and the resulting policing practices in this country assume Black guilt. But none of this could occur without the racial innocence of Whites. Within the myth of the Black male beast lies the story of the innocent White victim, the delicate Flora running away from the newly freed (and therefore dangerous) Gus.

This uniquely American creation myth– writ not with lightening but a gender binary that marked White women as victims, Black men as dangerous, Black women as excessively sexual and White men as heroic saviors– planted the seed for everything we are seeing today. And therein lies the real danger for not bringing what feminist theory calls an “intersectional analysis” to the history we are witnessing.

An intersectional analysis insists that this is not just about the construction of Black men as beasts, but White women as needing saving by White men and Black women as never innocent.