Race, Nation, and News in the United States
******** SHAH ********** EJC/REC Vol. 5, No. 2&3, 1995 *****
RACE, NATION, AND NEWS IN THE UNITED STATES
Hemant Shah
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Abstract: Emerging demographic diversity in
the United States has raised a number of questions
about national identity and culture: What will
the "new" multiracial and multicultural America
look like? How will it be defined? What will it
mean to be American? Scholars of mass media and
race may be ill-prepared to answer these questions
unless the heavy reliance on traditional content
analysis is jettisoned in favor of (or at least
supplemented with) a more critical approach that
relates representations of racial and ethnic
minorities with larger contextual issues such as
identity, class, and culture. A more critical
approach would involve acknowledging that racial
ideology structures news coverage of race. This
paper illustrates how two manifestations of racial
ideology, namely racial hierarchy and temporal
distancing, operate in news articles to help
create racialized criteria for being an
"American."
This paper argues that most U.S. research on mass media
and race is too narrowly focused on traditional content
analyses and lacks a critical emphasis relating
representations of racial groups with larger contextual
issues such as identity, class, and culture. As a result,
our understanding of the relationship between mass media and
race is limited. In order to better understand race
relations and the role mass media plays in influencing them,
we need an approach to studying mass media and race that can
reveal the role mass media assumes in assigning cultural and
social positions and labels to various racial groups. The
purpose of this paper is to consider how best to examine the
role of news as it relates to the discourse about one
specific issue of importance to racial minorities in the
United States, the intersections of race and nation.
After briefly providing some background information,
the paper lays out the theoretical linkages between race,
nation, and news. Then, it describes three characteristics
of U.S. research on race and media that have prevented
critical examinations of questions related to race and
nation. Finally, it suggests an alternative approach to the
study of race and nation, drawing examples from three
ongoing research projects in which the author is involved.
Background
Defining the "nation" long has been a contentious issue
in the United States. Relatively clear and stable
geopolitically, the idea of "nation" becomes ambiguous and
muddled on the sociocultural terrain. Belonging to a nation
is both a legal and cultural issue. One can become a
citizen of a nation, yet never be accepted within it
culturally -- or socially or politically. For example,
Gilroy (1991) has documented the cultural exclusion of West
African citizens of Great Britain. In the United States, in
the early 1900s, immigration from Asia led to intense
nativism and, eventually, legislation that barred Chinese,
Japanese, East Indians, and other Asian populations from
moving to the United States. Members of those groups
already in the United States were denied citizenship; some
individuals were even denaturalized (Chan, 1991; Jensen,
1988; Takaki, 1989). The rationale for excluding East
Indians from becoming part of the nation was typical of the
reasoning offered by authorities: citizenship should be
granted only to those people whose ancestors had lived in
Europe and who would be "predisposed toward the United
States' form of government" (Jensen, 1988, p. 251).
During the 1980s, more than 9 million people entered
the United States. A majority of documented immigrants
between 1981 and 1990 came from Asia and Latin America. The
impact of this immigration on American society was described
in a recent Time magazine cover story. "Someday soon," the
magazine declared, "...white Americans will become a
minority group" (Henry, 1990, p. 28).
The demographic shifts that have resulted from the
recent wave of immigration from Asia and Latin America have
engendered conflict among racial groups for political power,
jobs, and other increasingly scarce social and economic
resources that historically have been controlled primarily
by whites. Among the most tense of these conflicts are
those between blacks and Latinos and between blacks and
Asians (Miles, 1992; Cho, 1993). For example, blacks have
asserted that Latino successes have come at their expense,
while Latinos counter that blacks will not share with other
minorities the benefits of civil rights victories. Tensions
between blacks and Asian Americans (especially Korean
Americans) in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles also have
increased.
The emerging demographic diversity in the United States
has raised anew a number of fundamental questions about
national identity and culture: What will the "new"
multiracial and multicultural America look like? How will
it be defined? What will it mean to be an American?
Race, Nation, and News
The meanings of the important sociological terms race
and nation are social and political constructions and
closely linked. The rhetorical arguments surrounding issues
of national unity, national development, national
citizenship, and national preservation, among others,
frequently (though not inevitably) contain racially based
arguments. Establishing and maintaining an imagined
national community (Anderson, 1991) requires not only
staking out geopolitical and cultural boundaries that become
the basis for forming collective identity, but also popular
agreement about who can and who cannot be considered
legitimate members of the nation's citizenry (Gilroy, 1991;
Schlesinger, 1991; Wolfe, 1992). Ideas about inclusion and
exclusion from the nation are often based on conceptions of
racial superiority and inferiority. And these conceptions
are, themselves, constructed ideas derived from perceived
sociopolitical, economic, cultural and other needs and
passions of a nation at a given historical moment (Balibar,
1991; Goldberg, 1990; Omi and Winant, 1994; Prager, 1982,
1987).
Discourses about race and nation help create a national
identity and racial hierarchy that often renders whiteness a
sign of superiority and inclusion while relegating "people
of color" to an inferior status, at times excluding them
altogether from the social, political and cultural life of a
nation. This racism can take two forms (Balibar, 1991, p.
38-9): Internal racism is directed against populations
regarded as "a minority" within the nation and seeks to
hierarchize and partition society. External racism may take
the form of xenophobia and may be associated with attempts
to exterminate or eliminate those deemed inferior or with
efforts to prevent them from immigrating. Because these
forms of racial thinking are social constructions, they do
not necessarily represent ideal types of behavior or
structural forms so much as they do historical tendencies.
Nevertheless specific articulations between conceptions of
race and the idea of nation can be identified. For example,
in Anglo-European countries such as Great Britain,
Australia, and the United States, the articulation is quite
specific: those designated as non-whites (within and
outside their nation-space) become distinct "Others" whose
perceived inferiority serves as the basis and justification
for exclusion or oppression.
The news media, as a major source of cultural
production and information, play a key role in the process
of constructing meaning for race and nation. Journalists
select certain issues, events, actors and sources for
coverage and emphasis over others, and transform their
selections into finished news items by identifying and
contextualizing them in recognizable frames of reference
(Hall, et al., 1978, pp. 60-62; see also Hall, 1981;
Hartley, 1982; Turow, 1985). As a result, news stories are
imbued with meanings that help establish and maintain
geopolitical and cultural boundaries of the nation and the
racial criteria by which people are included in and excluded
from it (Hu-DeHart, 1991; Omi and Winant, 1994; Steinberg,
1989; Winston, 1982; see also Anderson, 1991; Gilroy, 1991;
Goldberg, 1990, 1993; Gupta and Ferguson, 1992; Miles,
1989).
While the content of news stories tends to support
dominant definitions of key terms of social organization,
the news media should not be viewed as a "relatively
seamlessly reproducing apparatus consistently serving the
entrenched powers" (Bruck, 1989, p. 113). There is some
ideological flexibility in the extent to which the dominant
definitions are supported in certain types of writing
formats and publications. For example, columns and feature
stories can more easily raise questions about dominant
social definitions than can straight news stories.
Publications with clear political commitments can present
alternative perspectives more easily than can publications
that profess to be objective and neutral purveyors of the
news. Thus, the legitimacy of physical and cultural
boundaries, the rigidity of hierarchies and social
partitions, and vitriolic exclusionary rhetoric effectively
can be undermined and challenged (see Bruck, 1989; Meyers,
1992).
Research on Racial and Ethnic Minorities
in the United States
Before discussing how research on the journalism of
race and nation might most productively be carried out, we
should have a broad sense of the state of research on media
and racial and ethnic minorities generally. First, in the
United States, questions about racial and ethnic minorities
generally are not considered important outside the context
of their relations with whites. In most social science
research, the lives, culture and values of the racial and
ethnic minorities gain significance only in their
relationships with whites (Fanon, 1963; Ladner, 1973; West,
1993). In mass communication research, for example, there
have been a number of studies on how the press covered the
Rodney King beating and the subsequent fallout. But these
studies are almost always underpinned by a framework of
Black-White relations, although the role of Koreans,
Korean-Americans, and Latinos is usually acknowledged
peripherally. Significant exceptions are very recent
studies by Cho (1993) and Fiske (1994a, 1994b).
Second, research on racial and ethnic minorities often
tends to be considered problematic by the academic
community. The research is acceptable and more or less
accepted as valid only to the extent that the findings
conform to dominant conceptions (read: white conceptions)
of social organization and the place of the racial and
ethnic minorities within that organization. Robert Blauner,
one of the leading theoreticians of American race relations
writes that while his 1972 book _Racial Oppression in
America_, his account of persistent and entrenched cultural
and institutional racism against African Americans, was
well received by minority scholars and by
students, but not by mainstream [white]
sociologists, especially by my own colleagues,
whose dismissal of its merit resulted in my being
turned down twice for a full professor promotion
(1993, p. 15)
Blauner's story is not unique. A recent book by John
Stanfield (1993), _A History of Race Relations Research:
First Generation Recollections_ (from which the Blauner
anecdote is drawn), is full of similar tales.
Third, almost all studies of news and racial and ethnic
minorities are quantitative assessments (see a useful
overview by van Dijk, 1991). In these studies, race and
ethnicity are understood solely in terms of descriptive
categories: what group? how many? in what roles? doing what
activity? So, race and ethnicity exist as methodological
categories for coding and reporting of results. There is
little discussion in these quantitative approaches of how
those people to whom the categories refer are interacting
with one another or with the dominant groups in the context
of power and other social structures, such as class, gender,
nation, systems of representations, etc. Recently, however,
critical (as opposed to purely positivist, quantitative)
scholarship that closely examines structural issues in the
context of race and news has grown. In the United States,
research by Chris Campbell (1993), John Downing (1992),
Robert Entman (1990, 1992), John Fiske (1994a, 1994b) and
Herman Gray (1987), is worth emulating. The tradition of
critical research on race and news in Europe runs much
deeper and is best represented by Paul Hartmann and Charles
Husband (1974), Stuart Hall (1978), Peter Braham (1982),
Paul Gilroy (1991), and Teun van Dijk (1991).
In sum, the primary reason for a lack of studies in the
United States that critically assess news coverage of race
and ethnicity is that many media researchers keep race and
ethnicity at arm's length and generally avoid substantive
questions about distributions of economic and political
power; access to resources; and equality of opportunity
organized along racial and ethnic difference (see Gray,
1993). This problem is symptomatic of American society in
general: most people do not want to talk openly and frankly
about race and ethnicity because there is a popular
perception in the United States that racist thinking is a
thing of the past, eliminated by civil rights legislation
and increasing tolerance for diversity.
An Alternative Approach to the Study of Race and News
If research on news treatment of racial and ethnic
minorities is to be more meaningful, it must begin
systematically to expose the enduring contradiction of life
in the United States: the symbolic and material segregation
and degradation of the racial and ethnic minorities in a
liberal democracy that supposedly values equality and
difference (Marable, 1992; Lyman, 1993). To do that, media
researchers need not only talk seriously and openly about
race and ethnicity (and not at arm's length), but talk about
race and ethnicity in ways that go beyond descriptive
categories.
An initial step media researchers can take is to
document by qualitative means the ways mass media segregate
and degrade racial and ethnic minorities in the process of
creating a sense of nation. This documentation cannot be
done by counting heads and categorizing roles. Cultural
geography, which takes on as one of its interests the study
of the dispersion, interaction, and control of mobile
populations (see for example, Fabian, 1983; Gregory, 1989;
Jackson and Penrose, 1993; Massey, 1993) suggests the types
of questions that could guide qualitative work on news
coverage of the race and nation: How do news media assign
the racial and ethnic groups to certain spaces, places, and
times? How do news media form hierarchies among and within
groups? What are the implications of these spatial and
temporal placements of the racial and ethnic minorities in
terms of social control, public debate, and the meaning of
citizenship and nation.
An alternative approach to the study of mainstream news
media[1] coverage of race and nation should take as a
starting point that there is a particular racial ideology in
the United States that structures journalistic practice and
results in content that further perpetuates racial ideology.
As Jane Rhodes (1993) puts it, a racist society requires a
racist media to uphold prevailing racial ideas and beliefs.
The racial ideology (i.e., common sense notions and beliefs
about race; provides definitions of what race is,
circumscribes its meanings, suggests ways to classify the
world in terms of racial categories [Hall, 1982, p.35])
manifests itself in many ways in news coverage of racial and
ethnic minorities. In this section, I focus on two such
manifestations to illustrate how racial ideology operates in
news. These manifestations represent two strategies by
which journalists writing for mainstream news media portray
the intersection of race and nation: (1) the depiction of
racial hierarchy and (2) the process of temporal distancing.
Racial Hierarchy
One of the enduring elements of U.S. racial ideology is
the belief in a hierarchy of races with whites at the top
and other races arrayed somewhere below.[2] Racial hierarchy
is characterized by specific features that tend to
marginalize non-whites. For example, racial hierarchy tends
to homogenize non-white racial groups into stereotypical
overgeneralizations of their characteristics (Appadurai,
1988; Entman, 1992; Fabian, 1983). Racial hierarchy also
implies that the cultural features and sensibilities of
racial groups higher in the hierarchy are superior and more
valuable than those placed lower (see Fredrickson, 1988, pp.
189-205; Gray, 1987, p. 388; Miles, 1989, pp. 42-50; Omi and
Winant, 1994; van Dijk, 1991, p. 36). Finally, racial
hierarchy can "naturalize" superior or inferior positions
because the hierarchy is supposedly constructed through
"objective" methods, implying that the observed differences
among racial groups are somehow "real" (Fabian, 1983; Miles,
1989).
One way news depicts racial and ethnic minorities as
different from whites is through imagery that creates
distance and isolation between the groups. For example,
Shah and Thornton (1994) note that "[t]he dominant image of
the place where blacks and Latinos live is one of
destitution and danger. From this world, whites 'continue
to flee' (_Newsweek_, December 12, 1988, p. 28) to the
security and serenity of the suburbs." What is left in the
cities are "intraminority battles over urban turf (_The New
Republic_, June 10, 1991, p. 15)" that could result in
"armageddon (_Newsweek_, December 12, 1988, p. 28)" (Shah
and Thornton, 1994, p. 148). Thus city officials and law
enforcement agents are depicted as working hard to implement
a "strategy of containment (_Newsweek, May 20, 1991, p. 28)"
(Shah and Thornton, 1994, p. 148). These images of urban
isolation and containment create distance between minority
group, who are uniformly depicted as engaged in violence,
crime, and conflict, and the predominantly white readers of
the mainstream press, who, it is implied are living in
safety and with civility in the suburbs.
However, racial minorities do not always represent a
homogeneous bloc that is inferior to whites. There are
distinct differentiations among the minorities based on
perceived similarities between a specific racial group and
whites. For example, a study about U.S. mainstream news
magazine coverage of interaction among racial and ethnic
groups (Shah and Thornton, 1994), found that whites,
depicted as representing superior values, morals, and
temperament, are consistently at the top, while blacks, an
archetypical example of failed assimilation, are
consistently at the bottom. Asian Americans and Latinos,
however, hover somewhere in between whites and blacks, their
specific placement determined by the extent to which they
were perceived by the mainstream news magazines to be
abiding by the established (white) standards of thought and
behavior appropriate for inclusion within the nation.
Here is how newsmagazines depicted the relationship
between blacks, Asian Americans, and Latinos:
* [B]lacks are said to be "vying" for "permanent victim
status" (_The New Republic_, November 19, 1990, p. 16)
while Latinos are "upwardly mobile immigrants -- not a
permanent aggrieved underclass" (_The New Republic_, June
10, 1991, p. 17) (Shah and Thornton, 1994, p. 150).
* An explanation for differing levels of assimilation
between blacks and Latinos is found in some of the
articles containing the culture/values theme. Latino
success is attributed to strong family values and sense of
morality, which blacks apparently do not have. "Latinos
bestow great importance on the traditional extended
family" while "blacks 'tend to be haunted by the
disappearance of the male' from the family" (_Newsweek_,
December 12, 1988, p. 28) (Shah and Thornton, 1994, p.
150).
* "They [Koreans] extract their profit from family labor and
contrast their ferocious work ethic -- for many work
sixteen hours a day, six or seven days a week -- with the
relaxed attitudes of blacks (_The New Republic_, March 20,
1992, p. 17) (Thornton and Shah, 1994, p. 14).
* Koreans "resent the term 'model minority'. Instead we'll
call then old-fashioned seekers of an old-fashioned dream"
(_US News & World Report_, May 18, 1992, p. 34) (Thornton
and Shah, 1994, p. 15).
The process of differentiation is not limited to those
drawn _among_ racial or ethnic groups; there is some
differentiation depicted _within_ a racial or ethnic group.
A study that examines how East Indians were depicted by the
press during their fight for U.S. citizenship rights in the
early 1900s, found a differentiation along lines of caste
(Shah, 1994). News coverage shows that all East Indians
were despised by most white Americans, who supported
judicial and legislative efforts to limit or eliminate East
Indian immigration. However, there is almost a grudging
respect in the news coverage for East Indians of upper caste
backgrounds who are generally, academicians, philosophers,
students, clergy, etc., as opposed to the East Indians from
lower castes who immigrated to the United States as manual
laborers. Despite the differences in the depiction of elite
and working-class East Indians painted by the news media,
all were considered unfit for naturalization. "The Hindu is
not a good citizen" declared the Bellingham (Wash.)
_Herald_ (quoted in _The Literary Digest_, October 5, 1907,
p. 465). Therefore, the news media reasoned, the "tide of
turbans" (_The Forum_, June 1910, p. 616) must be excluded
from the nation: "The process of dumping human derelicts on
these shores will not be tolerated" wrote the editor of the
_San Francisco Call_ in 1910 (quoted in Jensen, 1988, p.
108). East Indians already in the United States were
depicted as the "hordes from India" (_San Francisco
Chronicle_, September 29, 1910, p. 1).
The portrayal of East Indians as belonging to a
community characterized by political and class differences
suggests that the process of inferiorizing is more complex
than depicting a group as homogeneously inferior by simply
listing a series of its undesirable characteristics.
Studies of mainstream news media depiction of interaction
among minority groups suggested that different levels of
"inferiority" are assigned to each racial minority (Shah and
Thornton, 1994; Thornton and Shah, 1994). The study of East
Indians suggests that news representations of even a single
racial minority group may differ along class divisions and
political orientations, creating ever finer distinctions in
racial hierarchy.
Temporal Distancing
Temporal distancing (Fabian, 1983) by the news media
comprises two steps. First, the generic Other (racial and
ethnic minorities; the Third World; women, etc.) is
symbolically isolated and placed at a distance from whites.
Entman (1990, p. 342) found in his study of Chicago area
television news that "[l]ocal news implicitly traces the
symbolic boundaries of the community [and] blacks are
largely cast outside those boundaries." In a study of
black-Latino interaction, separation was accomplished by
references to the "black ghetto" and to "Hispanic districts"
(Shah and Thornton, 1994, p. 147). Similar usage of spatial
imagery was found in a study of black-Asian American
interaction. For example, one magazine used the following
title in a article about Asian entrepreneurs in
traditionally black neighborhoods: "Asian Merchants Find
Ghetto Full of Peril: Koreans and Chinese Particular
Targets in Inner city (_U.S. News & World Report_, November
24, 1986, p. 30)" (Thornton and Shah, 1994, p. 10). During
the rioting in the aftermath of the Rodney King verdict,
_Time_ magazine claimed that black-Korean American tension
was inevitable because Koreans had "invaded the hear and
soul of black America [i.e. the South Central area]"
(Thornton and Shah, 1994, p. 12). Article titles about
black-Latino interaction such as "Minority vs. Minority,"
"Conflict of the Have-Nots" and (if that were not clear
enough) "Blacks vs. Browns" drove home the point that the
problems of the "inner city" are isolated and not to be
considered part of general (read: white) societal problems.
In the study of East Indians, they were depicted as living
separate, self-segregated lives away from the rest of the
community in what was labeled "Hindu towns" (_Colliers_,
March 26, 1910).
The second step in temporal distancing is introducing a
discourse of racial minorities as primitive,
unsophisticated, backward, etc. -- from a different time,
not the modern present. Again, in the study of black-Latino
interaction, blacks and Latinos are characterized as having
"been left behind" by whites, in "another world" full of
violence and conflict (Shah and Thornton, 1994; see also
Entman, 1990).
One way East Indians -- especially the manual laborers
-- were portrayed as inferior in news coverage was through
the use of temporal symbols and images. News stories of
diseased and dirty East Indians living in filthy shacks, of
turbaned beggars belonging to a mystical race suggested that
East Indians are primitive and belong in a different place
_and time_, not in civilized, rational and modern early-20th
century America. This racial "inferiorizing" of East
Indians further strengthens the sense that the nation is for
white Americans only and the brown East Indian, defined as
being culturally, physically and mentally inferior, from a
different place and time, and unwilling to assimilate, could
never be a part of it, could never be a citizen.
This temporal imagery invoking the past creates
_cultural_ distance between the conduct of black-Latino
interaction and the white majority while the imagery of
space and isolation create symbolic _physical_ distance.
Thus, the two types of distance are related because the
symbolic physical distance between Black-Latino interaction
and the reader can be understood as reflecting sequence in
time. As the symbolic physical distance between the reader
and racial minorities grows, they recede into the reader's
temporal past -- a culturally distant past. Thus, the
process of "temporal distancing" has the effect of making
the "here and now" of the racial and ethnic groups the
"there and then" of the reader.
U.S. mainstream news media coverage of racial
minorities helps to stake out a cultural boundary that
defines what it means to be American. And it means, at its
core, being white and being superior over non-whites. The
idea of Americans as superior is not accomplished by
explicit enumeration of superior qualities. Rather, it is
accomplished through the language of hierarchy and through
spatial and temporal tropes. Thus, by a logic of "we are
what they are not" (Kuper, 1988, p. 5), Americans (white
Americans, specifically) are defined not only as different,
but inherently superior. For example, East Indians (and in
some cases Latinos and Haitians) were portrayed as
undesirable immigrants who should be excluded by legislation
from the geopolitical unit called the United States (an
example of external racism). Blacks, Latinos, East Indians,
and other Asians were represented (to varying degrees) as
choosing to live apart and unwilling to assimilate, not
wanting to belong to the nation. This depiction of domestic
exclusion, an example of internal racism, was characterized,
in part, by a racial hierarchy buttressed by a culturally
and spatially distant privilege held by whites over
non-whites.
Discussion
The news depiction of racial hierarchy and the process
of temporal distancing are among the ways journalism
participates in the construction of race and nation. One of
the results is meanings for race and nation that are highly
institutionalized and profoundly ideological. They are
institutionalized in the sense that they attain, through
widespread dissemination and constant repetition, legitimacy
and credibility as almost unquestionable cultural truths and
are accepted as assumptions for formulating official and
unofficial policies of exclusion. They are ideological
because they serve to racialize the idea of immigration and
citizenship. In other words, the ideas attain a racial
meaning and become substitutes for talking directly and
specifically about race. Thus, racism _per se_ can be
denied, which makes it easier to argue that East Indians,
Latinos, Asians, and other immigrants are being excluded
from the nation not because of racism, but because the
immigrants just cannot or will not assimilate. The ability
to deny the existence of racism, then, is crucial for
sustaining the idea of a nation built on the normative
foundation of equality and fairness. The denial of racism
also makes it easier to ignore the contexts in which the
desire to exclude minorities arises. The lack of context,
the creation of classification schemes for excluding
immigrants from certain parts of the world, and creating
racial hierarchy (despite its internal complexities) among
already-present minorities all tend to make social
constructions such as race and nation appear somehow
permanent, persistent, and natural.
Conclusion
Cornel West (1993) has written that American political
culture doesn't have the conceptual resources to deal
intelligently with issues of race. The same can be said for
mass communication research on race and nation: at this
point in U.S. mass communication research we do not have
adequate conceptual resources to deal substantively and
meaningfully with race and mass media. West also says that
a serious discussion about race in America must begin not
with the assumption that the racial and ethnic minorities
are a problem, but with an understanding of the flaws with
American society -- flaws rooted in historic inequities and
longstanding cultural stereotypes. Mass communication
research on mass media, race and ethnicity also should start
from that position. And to do that, we (mass communication
researchers) need a new language, new frameworks, new (or
borrowed) concepts, and new approaches, such as racial
hierarchy and temporal distancing (but also ideas such as
racialization [i.e., extending the meaning of terms into
racial territory when the term has no racial meaning]; and
racial formation [i.e., the ideological genesis of the
multiple, fluid, and contextually determined meanings of
race]), that enable us to get beyond head counting and begin
exposing the more subtle and insidious ways that news
coverage marginalizes and disempowers racial minorities,
while at the same time masks the very processes by which it
does so.
Endnotes
[1] "Mainstream" news media is defined as those that
are owned and staffed primarily by whites, have no official
or explicit orientation toward any one racial or ethnic
group in their editorial policies, and produce news they
deem to be of interest to a general audience.
[2] The idea of formal hierarchies that purport to
describe the "natural" differences among peoples can be
traced back to the Enlightenment-era writings of Kant and
Hume. The earliest expression of _racialized_ difference
(though not proposed as formal hierarchy) is traced by
Goldberg (1994) to 16th-century Spain's treatment of
American Indians.
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-----------------------------------------------------------
Author Information: Hemant Shah
School of Journalism and
Mass Communication
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Madison, Wisconsin 53706
USA
hgshah@facstaff.wisc.edu
------------------------------------------------------------
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