SHAME ON THE MEDIA

METRO.co.uk is a news outlet in the United Kingdom. I think of it as tabloid news for the English.

Using Terminology

I did warn you years ago that the terminology of “mixed-race” would lead to newspaper headlines of “mixed up,” which is exactly what a new METRO series is about. In fact, it’s called Mixed Up. A current headline is “Mixed Up: ‘Racism made me feel subhuman. I used to pretend to be anything but black.’” It’s about a poor woe-is-me woman who grew up confused about her multiracial identity, but finally found she could say she was black without any problem. These are some other titles in the series:

Mixed up: “I have been accepted by black people and distanced by white people.”

Mixed up: “I would ask my parents multiple times to prove that I wasn’t adopted.”

Mixed up: “Saying you love mixed-race babies is creepy.”

Can’t they say anything good about being biracial or multiracial? What’s so hard about telling both the positive and negative points of a story? With a new biracial baby due in the royal family very soon, you would think times have changed.

In the U.S.

But it’s not just England; it’s the United States, too. A story in BET has come out called, “Who is Black? Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Erasure of Blackness in America Dismisses the Fight for Social Justice.” The sub-heading is, “Blackness is only blurry when beneficial.” Give me a break.

The writer, DeMicia Iman, reprimands U.S. Representative Ocasio-Cortez for her recent comments on reparations and asking who is black and who isn’t in this increasingly multiracial society. The writer says, “Of course, if reparations were to be enacted, tons of non-Black people would flock to DNA labs and ancestral records, claiming the one-drop rule to get their share of the metaphorical, “forty acres and a mule.”

Bad Reporting

What really infuriates me is that she quotes the late F. James Davis, author of Who is Black correctly about the one-drop rule, but I knew Davis and he liked what was happening with the Multiracial Movement in his later years. He must be rolling over in his grave. Who is Black was published in 1991 and certainly there have been and will be more current books written and people who can be quoted for more up-to-date eyes on race. Let’s not allow the media to get away with bad or inaccurate reporting and publishing.

 

Susan Graham for Project RACE

 

 

Photo Credits: mercurynews.com and enwikipedia.org