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MediaMatters did an important recent report on the rather extreme racial and gender bias in the distribution of experts/guests who appeared on three major cable news networks (Fox, CNN, MSNBC) during the prime-time hours for one whole month (May 2008). Examining nearly 1700 guest appearances, they found that

67 percent of the guests on these cable programs were men, while 84 percent were white. MSNBC showed the greatest gender imbalance, with 70 percent of its guests being male. CNN and Fox News were not far behind; each of those networks featured 65 percent male guests

It comes as no surprise as to who had the worst record, the most monolithic guest roster:

Fox News was the whitest network, with 88 percent white guests. CNN and MSNBC were close behind, with both featuring 83 percent white guests.

The representation of Latinos, who now makeup 14-15 percent of the U.S. population, was very poor. They

made up only 2.7 percent of cable news guests. The worst of the three networks on this score was MSNBC, which featured only six Latino guests out of 460 prime-time appearances during the entire month.

Asian Americans and Middle Eastern Americans were all but invisible on the networks:

During the month of May, Fox News and MSNBC each featured a single Asian-American guest. Across the three cable networks, there were only four appearances by guests of Middle Eastern descent, two on Fox and two on CNN.

And not one Native American was a guest on any of the networks during that whole month. However, the affirmative action “quota” for white men on the programs was quite high, as it has been for centuries:

Though white men make up only 32 percent of the population, they made up 57 percent of the guests on prime-time cable during this period.

And Americans of color as a group were only represented at about half their proportion in the U.S. population. Again, not surprisingly:

Every prime-time cable news host is white, and all but two . . . are men.

It is interesting how just how “diverse” the U.S. cable new media really are not. In effect, the communications networks called the “mass media” are part of a larger white-dominated societal networking system.

In recent decades white elites—especially white male elites—have continued to dominate the construction and transmission of new or refurbished racial ideas and images designed to buttress the system of racial inequality, and they have used ever more powerful means to accomplish their ends. The mass media now include not only the radio, movies, and print media used in the past, but television, music videos, satellite transmissions, and the Internet. Given that most whites have little recurring, sustained, or equal-status contact with African Americans and other darker-skinned Americans, their views of such groups are significantly reinforced and created by those of their informal networks and those racial stereotypes in the white-generated media images of the still white-controlled mass media. (See here)

Native American issues and actions get very little attention from the white-run media these days, but the Associated Press finally paid some attention to the 100-person “Longest Walk 2,” which has trekked (photo: AP photo)

from San Francisco to Washington, D.C. to draw attention to the effects of environmental devastation on American Indians and all people. The walk … is expected to end July 11, when organizers plan to present a 30-page manifesto of American-Indian environmental concerns to Rep. John Conyers, a Detroit Democrat who advocates on a wide range of minority issues, on the U.S. Capitol steps…. national organizer Dennis Banks … founded the first walk in 1978.

The accent is on the environmental impact of Americans’ waste and trash, but numerous other important Native American issues are also being accented by the march:

Along the way, Banks said they’ve picked up 3,800 bags of trash. They’ve also gathered a running list of American-Indian worries — everything from concern about burial grounds under threat in Kentucky to fears about the future of Arizona mountains threatened by ski resort development.

There is a great interest in the presidential campaign too, because of the first not-white candidate:

Their concerns gained renewed attention in May as Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama visited Montana’s Crow Indian reservation and was adopted into the nation during a private ceremony.

Why is there so little attention to Native American issues these days? Yet another sign of a white-controlled mass media? And in this case the media reporters and editors did not know enough about US and Native American history to inquire about the name, “Longest Walk,” of this march.

Consider the history of the destruction of Native American societies, which accelerated in the late 19th century. In the Southwest, Indian resistance was substantial. Military expeditions against Navaho and Apache communities in the Southwest attempted to destroy or hem them in. Establishing headquarters in Navaho territory, Col. Kit Carson began a scorched-earth program, destroying Navaho fields and herds. He herded his captives three hundred miles to a reservation—the infamous “Long Walk” that is central to the Navaho collective memory of oppression. By 1890 most of the remnants of Native American groups had been forced onto reservations. Most attempted to maintain historic cultures, including language and religion, and drew on their cultures to resist pressures of acculturation to white folkways, as they still do today.

Michael Medved, syndicated talk radio host and conservative media figure , has decided now that he has the scholarly credentials to lecture Americans (and apparently Senator Obama for bringing the subject up in his famous speech on race) about how North American slavery’s impact is so often exaggerated. Slavery, it appears, is not a really major part of this country’s foundation, and has little real significance for Americans today. Medved begins a recent commentary with this panegyric on U.S. goodness:

Those who want to discredit the United States and to deny our role as history’s most powerful and pre-eminent force for freedom, goodness and human dignity invariably focus on America’s bloody past as a slave-holding nation. Along with the displacement and mistreatment of Native Americans, the enslavement of literally millions of Africans counts as one of our two founding crimes—and an obvious rebuttal to any claims that this Republic truly represents “the land of the free and the home of the brave.” According to America-bashers at home and abroad, open-minded students of our history ought to feel more guilt than pride, and strive for “reparations” or other restitution to overcome the nation’s uniquely cruel, racist and rapacious legacy. . . . . Unfortunately, the current mania for exaggerating America’s culpability for the horrors of slavery bears no more connection to reality than the old, discredited tendency to deny that the U.S. bore any blame at all.

Notice that Medved begins by playing down with tame language (“displacement and mistreatment”) the very long and often genocidal history of white government actors and citizens killing off a great many indigenous peoples and by various strategies stealing their lands—often in violation of official U.S. laws (“treaties”) usually with no remorse–and still with little in the way of reparations. The many millions of African Americans who died too young because of the slave trade or North American slavery are played down. This bloody past is not just “past,” but very much part of the American present, most especially for Native Americans and African Americans who are still suffering the longterm consequences of such violence (for full data and citations see chapters 6-7 in this recent book). The level of illiteracy about and cover-up of the U.S. racist past is very high, including from ill-informed media types. He soon makes this absurd statement (his capitals):

SLAVERY EXISTED ONLY BRIEFLY, AND IN LIMITED LOCALES, IN THE HISTORY OF THE REPUBLIC – INVOLVING ONLY A TINY PERCENTAGE OF THE ANCESTORS OF TODAY’S AMERICANS. . . .Given the fact that the majority of today’s non-black Americans descend from immigrants who arrived in this country after the War Between the States, only a tiny percentage of today’s white citizens – perhaps as few as 5% — bear any authentic sort of generational guilt for the exploitation of slave labor. Of course, a hundred years of Jim Crow laws, economic oppression and indefensible discrimination followed the theoretical emancipation of the slaves, but those harsh realities raise different issues from those connected to the long-ago history of bondage.

Actually he fudges his argument by dating the bloody economy of slavery from the Declaration of Independence and not from its actual beginning in 1619 at the hands of the early English colonists who started the American enslavement process at Jamestown. Dating it from its actual beginning to its end in the 13^th Amendment (1865) means that the enslavement of African Americans (and some Native Americans in early decades) lasted more than half this country’s history. Counting the colonial period is usual in assessing this country’s history, except to play down its bloody origins as here. Deep structures of racial oppression that last 60 percent of a country’s history, and are then followed, as he admits, with nearly 100 years of legal segregation (more racial oppression and a type of near slavery for those targeted) mean this: that nearly 90 percent of this country’s 401-year history (1607-2008), indeed recently celebrated nationally, was characterized by the extreme oppression of slavery and segregation. A good social science analysis accents the fact that the impact of a societal foundation this lengthy and oppressive will still be felt heavily in a society’s contemporary reality–a point Senator Obama made in his recent speech on racial matters.


In addition, a great many white Americans, and far more than five percent, are the descendants of whites who benefitted in one way or another from slavery. During the 240 years of slavery, many non-slaveholding whites (for example, merchants, seamen, lawyers, teamsters, overseers, shipbuilders, bankers, skilled craftspeople, and so on) benefitted greatly from slavery, in the North and the South, a fact many conservative commentators wish to ignore. And the white immigrants exculpated here often benefited in similar ways from Jim Crow. (For much evidence and documentation of this, see chapters 6-7 in this book and early chapters in this book.) Later on he continues with other false assertions like this one:

IT’S NOT TRUE THAT THE U.S. BECAME A WEALTHY NATION THROUGH THE ABUSE OF SLAVE LABOR: THE MOST PROSPEROUS STATES IN THE COUNTRY WERE THOSE THAT FIRST FREED THEIR SLAVES. . . . The notion that America based its wealth and development on slave labor hardly comports with the obvious reality that for two hundred years since the founding of the Republic, by far the poorest and least developed section of the nation was precisely that region where slavery once prevailed.

Actually there is general agreement among social scientists that slavery-generated wealth was a major pillar of the wealth of this country. The large slave farms and the plantations and related slave-linked enterprises generated much of the surplus wealth for the colonies, and later the United States, for some decades. A majority of the famous founders (Jefferson, Madison, Washington) were wealthy mainly because they were slaveholders–and other founders, South and North (even Franklin), were slaveholders at some point in their prosperous lives. Americans benefited in many ways from the slavery economy of the Atlantic. Much of the oats, corn, flour, fish, lumber, soap, candles, and livestock exported by the continental colonies went to West Indies slave plantations. In 1770 no less than three-quarters of all New England exports of foodstuffs went to the West Indian plantations or to Africa. A substantial proportion of the wealth of the New England and Middle Atlantic colonies came from the trade with slave plantations in southern colonies and the Caribbean. From the early 1700s to the mid-1800s much surplus capital and wealth of North America came directly, or by means of economic multiplier effects, from the slave trade and slave plantations. With the growing demand for textiles, U.S. cotton production expanded greatly between the 1790s and the beginning of the Civil War. Cotton was shipped to British and New England textile mills, greatly spurring the wheels of British, U.S., and international commerce. By the mid-nineteenth century, New England cotton mills were the industrial leaders in value added in the United States. Without slave labor it seems likely that there would have been no successful textile industry, and without the cotton textile industry—the first major U.S. industry—it is unclear how or when the United States would have become a major industrial power. In the first half of the nineteenth century many northern merchants, bankers, and shipping companies became, as historian Douglass North has noted, “closely tied to cotton. New York became both the center of the import trade and the financial center for the cotton trade.” Slave-grown cotton became ever more central to the U.S. economy and accounted for about half of all exports, and thus for a large share of the profits generated by exports. In the North the profits from the cotton economy and sale of products to slave plantations stimulated the growth of investment in financial and insurance enterprises, other service industries, and various manufacturing concerns, as well as, by means of taxes, of investment in government infrastructure projects. Cotton-related activities were perhaps the most important source of economic expansion before the Civil War, and most of the cotton was grown by enslaved African Americans. Before the American revolution, trading in slaves was an “honorable” profession in northern ports, and after the revolution it was equally as honorable to trade in products made by slaves or in products traded to plantations. One biographer of leading merchant, T.H. Perkins, concluded there was not a New England:

“merchant of any prominence who was not then directly or indirectly involved in this trade.”

As the nineteenth century progressed, the sons and grandsons of the earlier traders in slaves and slave-related products often became the captains of the textile and other major industries in the North. The business profits made off enslavement were thereby transmitted across numerous generations. (For more data and references for the points, see Chapters 1-2 in this book .)


Slavery and the wealth it generated is indeed the foundation of this nation. One can even speculate as to whether the American revolution could have been fought without the wealth that slavery had generated for the white colonists–and thus whether there could have been a United States (at least when it happened) without the huge North American wealth generated by the massive slavery-economic complex sprawling across the Atlantic basin.

         We talk a lot here about the ideas of systemic racism and the white racial frame. Let me develop these ideas a bit, mainly from several recent books. See here and here and here and here . The North American system of racial oppression grew out of extensive European exploitation of indigenous peoples and African Americans. It has long encompassed these dimensions: (1) a white racial framing of society with its racist ideology, stereotypes, and emotions; (2) whites’ discriminatory actions and an enduring racial hierarchy; and (3) pervasively racist institutions maintained by discriminatory whites over centuries. White-generated oppression is far more than individual bigotry, for it has from the beginning been a material, social, and ideological reality. For four centuries North American racism has been systemic–that is, it has been manifested in all major societal institutions.

        The white racial frame is a generic meaning system that rationalizes the system of material oppression. The white racial frame has long been propagated and held by most white Americans–and even, in part, accepted by many people of color. For most whites, the racial frame is deeply held, with many stored “bits,” including stereotyped knowledge, racial images and understandings, racial emotions, and racial interpretations. Not all whites use the dominant frame to the same extent, and in everyday practice there are multiple variations. By constantly using selected bits of the dominant racial frame to interpret society, by integrating new items into it, and by applying its stereotypes, images, and interpretations in many discriminatory actions, whites imbed their racialized frame deeply in their minds.

        Take this key example from the early development of the dominant white racial frame. Among the self-named “whites,” who also named “black” and “Indian” Americans, were US founders Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and George Washington. They had conceptions of black Americans as very inferior to white Americans, who were seen as greatly superior in civilization. In Jefferson’s only major book, Notes on the State of Virginia, the white framing of African Americans is fiercely racist: enslaved black Americans smell funny, are natural slaves, are less intelligent, are uglier in skin color, are lazy, are oversexed, not as sophisticated in serious music, cannot learn advanced knowledge, and can never be well-integrated into white America. Significantly, most of these racist elements are still operative in much current white thinking. (See also here.)

       This frame was, and still is, designed by whites to rationalize an extensive system of racial oppression, with its central racial hierarchy, one with whites on top. The old racial hierarchy is rooted in coercive exploitation and resource inequality and is rationalized by the deeply held white racial frame. First centered on African Americans, and to some extent Native Americans, the white racial framing placed later groups of color–such as Chinese Americans after the 1850s and Mexican Americans after the 1840s–well down the already dominant racial hierarchy. Whites were central from the beginning to creating the North American system of racial oppression and its dominant racist frame, including all key words (“white,” “black,” and almost all racist epithets) and interpretations in that frame. Today, as in the past, the white racial frame is not just in the United States, but is fundamentally constitutive of it.

        Another key idea I suggest we need to analyze US racism is that of resistance and counter-framing. Counter-frames are grounded in counter-system thinking and have been important for groups of color to survive and resist oppression over many generations. Certain leaders and thinkers in racially oppressed groups, such as W. E. B. Du Bois and Frantz Fanon, have developed articulated counter-frames, but so do ordinary people, the “organic intellectuals” in these oppressed groups. In these resistance/anti-racism counter-frames whites are defined as problematical, and ideas and strategies on how to deal with whites and white institutions are developed. Among other things, a developed counter-frame includes understandings of how discrimination and racial hostility work, examples of dealing with discriminatory whites from family and friends, and teachings about safety and various passive and active strategies of resistance to a variety of white discriminators.

It is rare that indigenous peoples have the opportunity to celebrate the actions of governments. On February 13, one of those rare historical moments took place in Australia. Newly elected Prime Minister Kevin Rudd opened his first session of Parliament with an apology to the indigenous peoples of Australia:

To the stolen generations, I say the following: as Prime Minister of Australia, I am sorry. On behalf of the government of Australia, I am sorry. On behalf of the parliament of Australia, I am sorry. I offer you this apology without qualification. We apologise for the hurt, the pain and suffering that we, the parliament, have caused you by the laws that previous parliaments have enacted. We apologise for the indignity, the degradation and the humiliation these laws embodied. We offer this apology to the mothers, the fathers, the brothers, the sisters, the families and the communities whose lives were ripped apart by the actions of successive governments under successive parliaments.

You can listen to the exceptionally eloquent and impassioned speech, in its entirety here.  And, you can read a synopsis of the history and speech excerpts here.    The conditions for which the Prime Minister apologized are not Australian oddities, they are mirrored across the ocean in a land called the United States.


Two British colonies (actually Canada and New Zealand could be included in this tale as well but we will stick with a tale of two countries), inherited the racial frame and eradication policies of the British Empire. Two sets of “freedom” loving white populations threw off the yoke of British power from their own necks and created democratic governments, the United States in 1776 and Australia in 1901. Two sets of founding fathers continued policies that dispossessed indigenous peoples of their land and culture. Both formed policies to eradicate the indigenous peoples or assimilate them. These policies were designed to eradicate religious practices, languages, land claims, natural resources, and indigenous peoples themselves. As a final solution, the future was stolen as well. Children were forcibly removed from their families and sent to be raised in church missions. Rudd chronicles the Austalian genocidal legacy:

But should there still be doubts as to why we must now act, let the parliament reflect for a moment on the following facts: that, between 1910 and 1970, between 10 and 30 per cent of Indigenous children were forcibly taken from their mothers and fathers; that, as a result, up to 50,000 children were forcibly taken from their families; that this was the product of the deliberate, calculated policies of the state as reflected in the explicit powers given to them under statute…

The American numbers are significantly larger no matter which of the dozens of estimates one chooses to use. The following from Wikipedia :

An Indian boarding school refers to one of many schools that were established in the United States during the late 19th century to educate Native American youths according to Euro-American standards. These schools were primarily run by missionaries. It has been documented that they were traumatic to many of children who attended them, as they were forbidden to speak their native languages, taught Christianity instead of their native religions and in numerous other ways forced to abandon their Indian identity and adopt European-American culture. There are also documented cases of sexual, physical and mental abuses occurring at these schools.

Attendance in Indian boarding schools generally grew throughout the first half of the 20th century and doubled in the 1960s . Enrollment reached its highest point in the 1970s. In 1973, 60,000 American Indian children are estimated to have been enrolled in an Indian boarding school. From 1879 to the present day, hundreds of thousands of American Indians are estimated to have attended an Indian boarding school.
In 1973 alone, there were more indigenous children in boarding schools in the United States than in the entire time for which Prime Minister Rudd issues his apology in Australia. In discussing the Australian situation, Rudd notes that “the 1970’s is not exactly a point in remote antiquity.”


The apology does not offer reparation and indeed concedes that none could be adequate. It does not fix the problems of Australian unjust enrichment policies or indigenous unjust impoverishment realities. Rudd points out the “obscenity” of an indigenous infant mortality rate of 4 times the national average. Recall a recent post where we discuss a U.S. indigenous infant mortality rate of 3 times the national average and the promised veto by President Bush of funds to alleviate the problem. (See The Genocide that Never Ends). In Australia infanticide is obscene, in America it is unnoticed. Rudd’s apology though intensely symbolic is much more. He discusses the historical policy of denial and objectification of indigenous peoples:

…a view that, instead, we should look for any pretext to push this great wrong to one side, to leave it languishing with the historians, the academics and the cultural warriors, as if the stolen generations are little more than an interesting sociological phenomenon. But the stolen generations are not intellectual curiosities. They are human beings, human beings who have been damaged deeply by the decisions of parliaments and governments. But, as of today, the time for denial, the time for delay, has at last come to an end.

At least in Australia it has come to an end. Bravo, Minister Rudd, Bravo. In the United States, it has not even come to the radar screen. Some have suggested that a petition drive in the United States to ask for an apology to indigenous peoples in the wake of the Australian example might be a way to bring the subject to the table. What do you think?  Should the U.S. apologize to indigenous peoples here?  Drop a comment.


~ Shari Valentine
PhD Candidate, Sociology Department
Texas A&M University

The headline on the New York Times Editorial on January 28 reads “Vetoing History’s Responsibility.”  The story unfortunately is not about history, but the entirely too current engagements in the 400 year old American Holocaust against American Indians. The latest strategic strike is a Presidential Veto of Indian Health Services Legislation.  Here’s the opening paragraph from the NYTimes editorial:

“President Bush’s threat to veto a bill intended to improve health care for the nation’s American Indians is both cruel and grossly unfair. Five years ago, the United States Commission on Civil Rights examined the government’s centuries-old treaty obligations for the welfare of Native Americans and found Washington spending 50 percent less per capita on their health care than is devoted to felons in prison and the poor on Medicaid.”

The NYTimes piece goes on to make note the fact that:

Studies have established that Native Americans suffer worse than average rates of depression, diabetes and cardiovascular disease. The Senate bill would improve treatment for these problems, as well as address alcohol and substance abuse, and suicide among Indian youth. It would expand scholarship help so more American Indians could pursue careers in health care.

Actually according to Indian Health Service and the National Center for Health Statistics  “worse than average” is a gross understatement.  American Indians have:

• Infant mortality rate 300% higher than the national average
• Tuberculosis rates 500% higher than the national average
• Diabetes 200% higher than the national average
• Cervical Cancer 170% higher than the national average
• Maternal death in childbirth 140% higher than the national average
• Influenza and pneumonia 150% higher than the national average
• Teenage suicide rates 150% higher than the national average
• Overall suicide rates 60% higher than the national average

These rates have increased over the rates reported by the IHS in 1996.   Only diabetes has declined and that only slightly.  These are diseases that are highly preventable and treatable, unless you are a Native American held hostage to a centuries old policy of genocide. Native American health expenditures are half as much as that spent on prisoners and Medicaid patients and we are all too familiar with the intolerable health care provided to those groups.


Federal appropriations are the only source of health care funds available to Native Americans. Outside philanthropy is bureaucratically prohibited. Some years ago I worked with an organization that donates medical equipment and supplies to underserved populations. A retiring doctor wanted to donate cutting edge mammogram, catscan and MRI machines as well as some other equipment to serve Native Americans. A national corporation agreed to transport the equipment free of charge and a medical supply company agreed to set it up and service it. The appraised value of the equipment was over 3 million dollars. For months working with then Senator Ben Nighthorse Campbell, we waded through red tape and forms to get permission for the equipment.  In the end, the equipment was sent abroad because the Bureau of Indian Affairs would not approve the $575 necessary to build a pad for the MRI machine and $700 to upgrade a room for the catscan. When we raised the money to pay for these items, we were told that the individual clinics could not accept contributions and the BIA would need more than 9 months to process the contributions and could not guarantee expenditure of the funds on the purpose for which we were raising them.


In spite of the investigation and recommendation of the Civil Rights Commission the President will continue this long tradition. Native Americans have only the Indian Health Service. No amount of public concern or private philanthropy can even be offered to mitigate the health effects of the government’s centuries of racist policy. The American public likes to think that tactics like giving smallpox infested blankets to native people are “history.”  The centuries old oppression and systematic extermination of Native Americans continues and remains invisible to most Americans.    In Germany, Turkey, Sudan, we call that genocide.


For more information about reservation conditions and issues, interested readers can go visit the Tribal Resource Center, Friends of Pine Ridge Reservation, and Russell Means.

~ Shari Valentine,
PhD  Candidate, Sociology
Texas A&M University

“Saygo,” a roughly anglicized version of the word for “greetings” in the Seneca and Ojibway languages, seems like an appropriate salutation for this Thanksgiving holiday in the U.S. Although the holiday has been almost completely overrun by the commercial interests such as Macy’s, the christmas-industrial-complex, football and the travel industry, it’s important to remember the history behind the event. This “open letter” to Senator Dodd and the people of Connecticut from Lawrence Otway, Tribal Court Judge, Golden Hill Paugeesukq, Tribal Nation is one reminder. And, Jacqueline Keeler, a member of the Dineh Nation and the Yankton Dakota Sioux, writes powerfully about the tradition of the “First Thanksgiving”:

In stories told by the Dakota people, an evil person always keeps his or her heart in a secret place separate from the body. The hero must find that secret place and destroy the heart in order to stop the evil. I see, in the “First Thanksgiving” story, a hidden Pilgrim heart. The story of that heart is the real tale than needs to be told. What did it hold? Bigotry, hatred, greed, self-righteousness? We have seen the evil that it caused in the 350 years since. Genocide, environmental devastation, poverty, world wars, racism.


Where is the hero who will destroy that heart of evil? I believe it must be each of us. Indeed, when I give thanks this Thursday and I cook my native food, I will be thinking of this hidden heart and how my ancestors survived the evil it caused. Because if we can survive, with our ability to share and to give intact, then the evil and the good will that met that Thanksgiving day in the land of the Wampanoag will have come full circle.


And the healing can begin.

Hold a good thought today that each of us can move toward that healing vision. Peace ~