Thank U Charlie Gibson
...or Elizabeth Vargas, rather, subbing for a vacationing Gibson on ABC World News and all the producers over there too, for living up to decades of media misrepresentation of Black folk on tonight's broadcast. You see apparently the brutal murder of three Black college students in Newark is the result of slack border patrols and ballooning so-called "illegal" immigrant populations. Taking cue from Republican presidential nominee Tom Tancredo's comments on news that one of the suspects was both undocumented and under indictment for 2 separate charges, ABC's small-minded producers pounced on the opportunity to scapegoat undocumented immigrants with the help of some representative "inner city" denizens, who uncoincidentally adhere to the familiar punchline of many a Comicview performer's go to joke. That is the housecoated, rollered haired, ashy, speech-impedified, drug addicted and/or chemically imbalanced that often seem to stand in for Black people in all our diversity.
Let's look to an excerpt from the report,
Beyond the finger-pointing is a rising hostility to illegal immigrants, not just among conservatives, but in the inner city.
"They should stop illegal people from coming over here," said Racheal Smith of Newark. "They're trying to make it legal for them to come over here and they shouldn't be, because they can't even keep track of these people, and they're going out committing all types of crimes." Another Newark resident, Jonathan Quarterman, told ABC News, "The federal government will do what they want to do, and we end up wearing the weight." "They should stop letting them in illegally. They should do something about it. Send them back," said another Newark resident.
You really have to see them. I downloaded the video podcast but whaddyaknow that segment wasn't included. Nor was it included in the webcast. 'Shamed are we ABC? Take it from me, Racheal Smith, Jonathan "we wearing the weight" Quarterman and the last unnamed Newark resident are not just rag tag, but cockeyed, in Quarterman's case, and clearly not even people you'd consult for directions much less commentary on immigration policy. How are they representative of Newark's inner city. I mean ABC didn't even get the name of Jane "Send them back!" Doe? Piss poor journalism, I say, that foments ethnic conflict. Immigrants that make their way into USA-the-global-resource-hog are not responsible for random acts of violence just because those kids were killed by one or more undocumented immigrants. Divide and conquer is an old strategy, here's hoping few more fall for it.
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Comments
1.
Joshua says:
To Jalylah: In any other instance of the "black neighbor syndrome" as I've heard it referred to, when some broadcast journalist grabs the first eager person to talk, we'd be on the exact same page. But again, this story is about people who feel this way about this subject. Who better to talk to than people who feel this way about this subject?
I'm not saying these people's fear of undocumented immigrants is rational, but it is real and as a second-day follow-up to the story about the shootings, it's worth doing. I just don't think it's right to marginalize people whose views on a subject don't match your own.
As far as the effect of undocumented people fueling American taste for cheap things, that isn't true. Undocumented people fuel corporate profits, that's it. Companies don't employ undocumented workers so they can pass on the savings to us consumerist Yanks, they do it to put cash in their own pockets. If they lost their undocumented workforce, would prices skyrocket? No, the market is in control of that. It would just mean less profit. The system as it is now doesn't benefit anybody except for greedy corporate America, and be sure that if there's anyone championing the rights of people to immigrate illegally, it's corporate America.
To Tavia: I do regret the fact that you wasted all that indignant, skillful sarcasm on a post that merely demonstrates the degree to which you misunderstood my comments. Keep at it though, people love sarcasm.
08/23/2007 at 10:04 PM
2.
jalylah says:
I don't hold a rosy view of undocumented immigrants and their relationship to the American economy; my mother is a long time urban transportation planner, an immigrant and recently naturalized American citizen and she frequently notes how service demands have expanded in her field while the tax base hasn't, in part due to the rise in undocumented in greater Seattle. I understand that it's not all good but then again there are myriad ways in which the undocumented fuel, if not our economy than American lifestyles and tastes for all things cheap: labor, food etc. With regard to criminality, if there is a study that links high murder rates to the undocumented--just a stand in for Mexicans, basically, and other non Caribbean Latinos--I have yet to hear of it and please advise. This is like one of the opening scenes of Crash (Sandra Bullock and her mayor hubby getting robbed by Luda and Larenz) and the thought process that informed it transformed onto Brown folk instead of Blacks. While its a concern that these young people were murdered the fact that their alleged murderers were undocumented is irrelevant and doesn't directly speak to the immigrant character as a whole. So I guess the undocumented can now join us in praying that the pictures of criminal on the nightly news don't reflect their image.
And I'm not bashing poor folks or even the ignorant and those two are not one in the same. See Newark may have a reputation for being hardscrabble but its residents are not fairly represented by the people in the abc report. I went to hear BB King the other day and he talked about how people, in some cases young black artists, always want to talk to him about the ghetto because he grew up poor and he said he always respond that he didn't grow up in the ghetto--literally he grew up poor in the country--but he elaborated to suggest that more than that he was speaking to a particular way of being that's come to be associated with poor blacks that is just not factual. This is not about the people in the report being of the so-called lower class or 'ghetto' its about the fact that they don't represent the so-called lower class but a cariacture of the lower class that the MSM among others looks for and is committed to portraying.
08/23/2007 at 3:09 PM
3.
Joshua says:
Eh...I dunno 'bout this one. I don't think you can fight one oversimplification with another. It's not "undocumented immigrants will lead to the fall of man" or "undocumented immigrants are not a problem." Y'know, it's somewhere in the middle, and in my humble estimation, more toward the former position than the latter.
That said, Tom Tancredo is a psycho, to be sure, so taking cues from him is never a good idea. But, as far as who they interviewed for the story, I don't think that's an issue for me. ABC is not creating a division, they're reporting one. Is that responsible? Maybe not, but it's a genuine reaction from Newark residents that shouldn't be ignored for the sake of maintaining a facade of interracial harmony.
I'm as big a critic as any of broadcast journalism's obsession with toothless black people, but here it seems apropos. Somebody in a higher social class with more education is going to take the same bird's-eye view of the issue that you did. But this story was about people just like the ones they interviewed who feel beset by undocumented immigrants. They feel like there is a finite amount of opportunities for people who lack education and skills, and said opportunities -- and in this case, lives -- are being taken away by people who are gaming the system. Those are not unwarranted fears.
Are there are other stories ABC could be doing, sure. On the other hand, we shouldn't be marginalizing people like the ones interviewed for this story because they're emotional reactions to violence in their community is at odds with our intellectual position on immigration policy. These people may be uninformed, but their feelings aren't invalid.
(Also, I gotta say, despite an eagerness to get in front of a camera, lower-class people are infamously suspicious of the media. If you interview five people from the 'hood, one is guaranteed to withhold his/her name.)
08/23/2007 at 11:57 AM