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Kaplan: I’ve heard people complain that the media covered Trump too much, that he gets too much exposure.
Lowery: I don’t agree. We can’t say that Trump or DeSantis should not be covered, but we can’t cover them as normal people. We can’t be robots and say, ‘Oh this is just a candidate, a candidate is a candidate.’ We need to ask, who are they and what are they saying? When someone constantly lies and dehumanizes other people, we shouldn’t put them on live TV. I don’t think that’s a radical or a crazy idea.
Prejudice is not a vampire that dies in the light when it’s exposed — it’s like a weed, it grows. We in the media have to think about, what is our job? We should not do anything that isn’t informative. Something can be news in that it just happened, but it’s not of consequence. We need to slow down, widen the aperture, not follow whatever sensational thing has just been said.
Kaplan: One of the incidents of racial violence described in Whitelash is the murder of a Latino man in Patchogue, Long Island, in 2008 by a white teen who was out wilding with his friends, looking to attack Mexicans. The case raises a question that troubles us now: Why would a white person who seems tolerant and normal, like this teen, commit an obviously racist murder? And when he says he’s not racist, why do we believe that? There’s a parallel here in how people vote for Trump, but say they don’t approve of his racial views or actions.
Lowery: It means very little to insist you don’t have personal prejudice when you choose candidates who weaponize language to hurt people. It doesn’t really matter to me if you’re voting for a racist person because he’s a racist or for some other reasons that appeal to you. You’re making a choice. You actually can trace how prejudice goes from being interior and personal to being expressed publicly. In Patchogue, the jury selection for the trial of the guy who murdered the Latino immigrant was interesting. A lot of people confessed to being anti-immigrant and therefore couldn’t judge things fairly. It was another case of how public rhetoric results in violence or resentment. Steve Levy, the Long Island official at the time in Patchogue who criticized immigrants, insisted he was simply responding to his constituents’ uneasiness about the impact of immigration.
Kaplan: On the other end of the spectrum is Simi, a white researcher who becomes conscious of racial realities early in his life through seeing it up close as a teen among white friends and realizing, ‘Oh my god, that’s the world I’m going to live in when I grow up.’ He chose a career in studying white supremacist groups. Three years after the ‘awakening’ of George Floyd, are more white people becoming like him?
Lowery: I’m not optimistic. There are very few people in our society who are willing to see our world for what it is, who recognize that there is a strong avowed white supremacist movement, and that that movement is often strengthened by our mainstream politics. There are people in my book who are willing to look at this and engage it, to call things by their name. But there’s not a critical mass of those people. The majority of white people want to believe the world is better than it is. That doesn’t sound terrible, but it’s a big problem.
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