By Jennifer Bailey Woodard, Middle Tennessee State University and Ilia Rodriguez, The University of New Mexico | AEJMC Minorities and Communication
The election of Barack Obama, a black president, symbolizes to many of our students that the United States is now a fair and color blind society where there is no need to discuss issues of diversity and racial relations. Therefore, they do not see the need to be bothered with class assignments like creating a diverse source bank or ethical case studies on how to enter multicultural communities and report on them.
Our nation wants to be one that is finished with the problem of racism, but unfortunately we are not yet at this point in our history. On the contrary, a cursory view of recent events offers ample evidence of the pressing need to address race and diversity issues in our teaching, research and advocacy.
Consider the implications of statements made by Rand Paul, the GOP’s and Tea Party-backed Senate candidate for Kentucky, when he recently said that a central piece of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was wrong. He told MSNBC news show host Rachel Maddow that he agrees with most parts of the Civil Rights Act, except for the one (Title II) that made it a crime for private businesses to discriminate against customers on the basis of race. It is his opinion that private businesses be allowed to discriminate against whomever they want because it’s their right as private entities. In the ensuing, mediated debates on Paul’s position, Fox news anchor John Stossel agreed with Paul and went on air declaring that the section of the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 that applies to business should be repealed. Stossel employed a twisted logic to explain his point: “It’s time now to repeal that part of the law because private businesses ought to get to discriminate. And I won’t ever go to a place that’s racist and I will tell everybody else not to and I will speak against them. But it should be their right to be racist.”
Another case in point: Arizona’s Senate Bill 1070. Since April 24, 2010, news coverage of the signing of SB 1070 into law has brought to center stage a debate on the legalization of racial profiling against Latinos. As citizens and civil rights groups inside and outside Arizona have begun to protest, organize boycotts, and challenge the law in the court system, other reports indicate that 17 other states are filing their own versions of SB 1070. And while SB 1070 has generated plenty of media attention, other recent decisions by Arizona state officials are signaling equally disturbing trends but remain relatively invisible on the national scene. Take, for example, recent decisions by the Arizona lawmakers to curb the teaching of ethnic studies courses in elementary or secondary schools (House Bill 2281) and the Department of Education’s move to exclude teachers with a “heavy accent” from teaching English classes.
These mediated debates on repealing the Civil Rights Act, using racial profiling as basis for law enforcement, or banning ethnic studies courses not only raise profound questions regarding our understanding of equity and civil rights in the 21st century, but also underscore the importance of interrogating the role of mass communication in the mediation of social relations in a culturally diverse and conflictive society.