David Berman wrote that, if the story of the grasshopper and the ant had ended in the summer, the grasshopper would have been vindicated and the ant would look foolish. The placement of an ending is important to a narrative. One of the best strategies that Ive learned for maintaining a skeptical analysis of media is refusing to just take for granted a prime mover in a news story--and particularly refusing to just accept the authors biased account of where the chain of causality terminates. What I mean is that its helpful to see if theres another step you can take back beyond the narrative as presented--to violate the boundaries of a given accounts bias. The trick is to do this every time, even when youre otherwise satisfied with a given story. Lots of white folks are perfectly happy to stop climbing a causal chain in the narrative of a crime once they reach the element that the alleged criminal is black. We are content to stop digging when we find out that the terrorist was a Muslim or the protester was a lesbian. The tendency to frame narratives with these sorts of details around the borders are what leads, over time, to the false sense that these qualities are the prime movers of a given set of behaviors. The end result is that we are trained by repetition to dismiss without consideration the motive forces at work in the lives of such people as do things we consider provocative.
Posted on: Wed, 08 Oct 2014 21:54:26 +0000
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