Salon.com > White people

Report: Cable news guests are overwhelmingly male, exceedingly white

Mon, 13 May 2013 21:09:00 +0000

Progressive media organization Media Matters for America reviewed guests on 13 evening cable news shows on CNN, Fox News and MSNBC during the month of April and found that, across the board, guests and experts featured on each network were overwhelmingly male and white.

Welcome to 2013, everybody!

As noted by Media Matters, white men make up only 31 percent of the population, but represented 62 percent of guests on CNN, 60 percent on Fox, and 54 percent on MSNBC:

Cleveland’s lost girls

Wed, 08 May 2013 21:05:00 +0000

“Put yourself in her shoes,” Cleveland hero Charles Ramsey told a not-terribly-helpful 911 operator, who was trying to get more information about Amanda Berry, after Ramsey helped her escape from her 10-year imprisonment, rather than just sending police immediately.

Ramsey did what Cleveland authorities over a decade could not: He not only helped Berry get free, but he put himself in her shoes; he empathized enough to intervene in what he first assumed was a domestic violence dispute. (Breaking news from the Smoking Gun that Ramsey himself served prison time for domestic violence charges doesn't negate Ramsey's role in freeing Berry.)

We still don’t know how much police are culpable for failing to find Berry, Gina DeJesus and Michelle Knight. Multiple neighbors say they called 911 to report seeing women in distress; the police deny getting their calls. Confronted with those police claims, neighbor Israel Lugo told MSNBC: “It’s a bunch of BS.”

Are the Tsarnaev brothers white?

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 11:45:00 +0000

In the wake of David Sirota’s hot-button essay last week, “Let’s Hope the Boston Marathon Bomber Is a White American,” conservatives swarmed to trash Sirota and Salon. I’m not here to defend or criticize Sirota’s piece – I get in enough trouble on these issues myself -- but the storm it provoked was revealing, especially once we learned the identity of the two suspects: Tamarlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, ethnic Chechens who grew up in Russia and came legally to the U.S., who were also Muslim.

Bill O’Reilly responds to David Sirota column, calls him a “loon”

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 14:42:00 +0000

Fox News anchor Bill O'Reilly does not seem to agree with Salon columnist David Sirota, after all. Sirota's post, "Let's Hope the Boston Marathoner is a White American," made the rounds on social media on Tuesday, prompting O'Reilly call the writer a "loon" on the "O'Reilly Factor" last night:

O'Reilly blasted David Sirota again at the 5:12 mark in the segment below, saying Sirota hopes it's a "right wing militia, neo-nazi nut" who perpetrated the bombings to push Sirota's own personal political agenda:

Let’s hope the Boston Marathon bomber is a white American

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 23:24:00 +0000

As we now move into the official Political Aftermath period of the Boston bombing -- the period that will determine the long-term legislative fallout of the atrocity -- the dynamics of privilege will undoubtedly influence the nation's collective reaction to the attacks. That's because privilege tends to determine: 1) which groups are -- and are not -- collectively denigrated or targeted for the unlawful actions of individuals; and 2) how big and politically game-changing the overall reaction ends up being.

This has been most obvious in the context of recent mass shootings. In those awful episodes, a religious or ethnic minority group lacking such privilege would likely be collectively slandered and/or targeted with surveillance or profiling (or worse) if some of its individuals comprised most of the mass shooters. However, white male privilege means white men are not collectively denigrated/targeted for those shootings -- even though most come at the hands of white dudes.

How to talk about white people

Wed, 03 Apr 2013 19:26:00 +0000

When I wrote “What’s the Matter With White People?” I chose the title for its many meanings. Talking about it during last fall’s election season, when 90 percent of Mitt Romney’s voters were white, however, only one meaning came through: What’s the matter with the GOP, that it has become, essentially, the party of white people? Less attention focused on the flip side of that question: Why were Democrats having a harder time with white voters, and what if anything could they do to change that?

With President Obama embarked on his second term, and Democrats seeing their future in the alliance of African-Americans, Latinos, Asians, college-educated women and young people he assembled, I sometimes find myself asking “What’s the matter with white people?” in a different way – as in, “don’t they have a place in this new multiracial coalition?” As whites become just one of several American minorities in the near future -- brown babies already outnumber white babies in the nation’s nurseries – I’ve been thinking more about the ways language can ease our transition to a multiracial America. The paperback version of my book comes out April 16 – you can pre-order it here -- and I got to take on a lot of these post-election thoughts in an afterword.

New data: Whites twice as likely to own guns

Wed, 20 Feb 2013 20:16:00 +0000

White Americans are more than twice as likely to own guns as blacks or Latinos, and more likely to oppose gun safety reforms, according to previously unreleased data from Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health researchers.

The survey, conducted by the Center for Gun Policy and Research and initially released without racial breakdowns in late January, showed strong support overall for many of the proposals being discussed in Congress to limit gun violence. But the researchers broke down the numbers by race this week and shared the results with Salon.

Overall, 22 percent of Americans were found to own guns, while another 11 percent live in homes with someone else who owns guns. Among whites, the number of gun owners is slightly higher, at 26 percent, with an additional 13 percent who live in gun-owning households.

But only 12 percent of African-Americans and 13 percent of Latinos own guns. Just 5 and 7 percent of each ethnic group, respectively, lives in a household with someone else who owns a gun.

That “White People” TNR cover has been done before

Fri, 08 Feb 2013 17:19:00 +0000

This time it's the New Republic, not Newsweek, who is trolling us all with sensationalist cover art. In its forthcoming issue, TNR names the GOP "The Party of White People," and has cleverly published the cover in all white to make a point that, hey, the GOP is jarringly, awkwardly white:

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But, as Salon's resident "white person" expert Joan Walsh points out, it's been done before -- and 20 years ago, at that. Who knew that American politics were (and continue to be) so whitewashed?:

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At that rate, you know who else is overwhelmingly white? The journalists who write cover stories for the New Republic:

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White people ... they're everywhere.

Romney: Not white enough?

Fri, 09 Nov 2012 16:58:00 +0000

Look, I didn't plan to do too much celebratory/mean-spirited "mocking the losers" stuff after Tuesday, besides of course joining in my favorite new American Electoral Tradition, "spending Wednesday retweeting funny pre-election tweets from people who were really wrong." But this Jay Cost column in the Weekly Standard is full of so much delightful Republican bubble analysis, and it has such a remarkable prescription for the party as a whole, that I think it deserves a quick look.

The headline is "Barack Obama and the Triumph of Identity Politics." "Identity politics" is a conservative term for "attracting the votes of women and minorities." (Mitt Romney's explicit plan to turn out as many white people as possible is usually not considered "identity politics" for reasons you can probably figure out on your own.)

First, we establish that Obama has no mandate:

Randy Newman: “I’m dreaming of a white president”

Tue, 18 Sep 2012 17:06:00 +0000

The multi-award-winning composer and singer-songwriter Randy Newman has released a satirical ditty: "I'm Dreaming." The title alludes to the line, "I'm dreaming of a white president" (sung with references to "I'm Dreaming of a White Christmas"), which digs at the racial undertones in the 2012 election. He talked to Slate about the impetus for the song:

Who’s to blame for NPR’s super-white book list?

Mon, 10 Sep 2012 21:13:00 +0000

NPR just wanted to ask its audience about their favorite young adult fiction. But this seemingly harmless gesture stirred up all sorts of controversy. Out of 100 books on the list, only three have non-white protagonists. Now people are angry, or at least politely clearing their throats.

Here's the question: Who is to blame?

Theory 1: The panel of experts is to blame
The panel of experts are suspiciously all white. NPR ombudsman Edward Schumacher-Matos wrote that “Much of the criticism was directed at the white panel of experts," but he added, "the censure is misplaced.” Panel member Pamela Paul, features editor and children's book editor at the New York Times Book Review, confirms Schumacher-Matos’ claim via email, writing:

Our role on the expert panel was simply to advise on how to make sure the readers' nominations fit the definition of "YA novel." Many of the readers' nominations were actually adult or middle-grade books, and we helped them weed out those titles. But I didn't make any judgment with regard to quality in determining the final list, which were all reader-generated.