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Learning from the past: What yesterday's media can tell us about the times
If you want to get a real feel for what was happening during a certain period in history, how people really felt about the issues of the day, take a look at the media coverage.
For example, a recent study of how historically black newspapers covered the landmark 1967 Supreme Court case that legalized interracial marriage, Loving v. Virginia, found their coverage not that much different from their mainstream counterparts.
The team of researchers, including a journalism professor from Michigan State University, was surprised by the findings, as they hypothesized that black newspapers would be more sympathetic to the racially mixed couple who challenged the Virginia law.
Historically, said MSU’s Geri Alumit Zeldes, the African-American press is an advocate for civil rights.
“Just knowing how the ethnic press operates, we thought they were going to be very one-sided in favor of the Lovings,” she said. “But they followed the same pattern as the mainstream media such as the New York Times and others.”
Zeldes said one of the lessons learned from this, something that hasn’t changed since the first newspaper was printed, is that news is a cultural mirror of what is going on in society at that point in time.
“If you take a look at the newspapers at the time they were published, they will give you hints as to what the times were like,” she said. “So if we look at the black press at that time period, you can get a sense of what the black community was thinking because those reporters were part of that community.”
Zeldes said that by reviewing the newspapers’ stances on the issue, it gives us a clue to the political and cultural mood of the time.
“It indicates,” she said, “that some segments of society in the late 1960s were ready to lessen social and cultural marriage restrictions, but that other groups in the United States were still undecided.”
News as a Cultural Mirror: Historically Black Newspapers Reflecting Public Views of Loving v. Virginia (1967) (DOI: 10.1111/josi.12144)
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Wednesday December 30 2015, @01:58AM
They're pretty common around here, but they don't bug me. I'd blown plenty of chances with Black women for no reason other than that I was a coward. Sure, I was interested, but they were aggressive, and I couldn't play as rough as they did at the time.
Black people can be racist against White people though. Maybe it wasn't a symptom of Stockholm syndrome but that Blacks were as pissed-off at Whites as Whites were oppressive of Blacks, and they were in agreement that interracial relationships were a bad idea but for different reasons.
A White man getting with a Black woman evokes the old "master taking advantage of his slave" situation, which pisses Black men off. A Black man getting with a White woman may evoke disgust from the implication of a woman's choice which revolves around penis size and animal lust rather than long-term viability as a partner.
A man whose daughter becomes romantic with a man of the opposite color will wonder what he did wrong as a parent no matter how happy for the couple he will pretend to be.
It's mostly for historical reasons, though, that it's the Black-White pairing which receives the emphasis in the United States - though in East Asia a Chinese-Japanese coupling could be just as contentious, or perhaps in the Middle East an Arab-Israeli pairing would be contentious.
As a (mostly) White American I am always amused at my fellow Caucasoids who have fetishes for Oriental and Eastern-European/Russian women -- because it's obvious from their desires that they have zero experience with actually dealing with both.