Night Owls, a themed open thread, appears at Daily Kos seven days a week
Nick Martin (a member of the Sappony Tribe) writes at The New Republic—And Now Back to Ignoring Indian Country. With the "arrowhead chop" Super Bowl coverage over and done, the media attention given to Native writers will soon dissipate, as it always does:
In the run-up to Super Bowl LIV, the issue of the Kansas City Chiefs’ appropriative fans and the San Francisco 49ers’ genocide-referencing team name was hashed out at least a dozen times over in the mainstream media, including here, Vox, The New York Times, the Miami Herald, The Washington Post, and The Hill. For a brief period on Saturday and Sunday, my social media feeds were a steady stream of articles with lead photos of fans dressed in redface and headdresses. It felt like it could have been a turning point as the pages of these national outlets found themselves in consensus about the wrongness of the team and the fan responses, a signal of an eventual change in how Americans empathize with their Native neighbors.
The pieces were mostly good, laying out how the Chiefs fans’ “arrowhead chop” and fake regalia are appropriative amalgamations of hundreds of Native cultures and should be instantly discarded. Too bad, then, that you likely won’t see those writers, or any meaningful engagement with those same arguments, in the regular, workaday coverage at these publications. [...]
Part of this has to do with hiring practices and the calcification of Native invisibility over centuries of American press development. In 2018, the American Society of News Editors reported that there were just 41 Native journalists employed at the 184 digital and print outlets that responded to its annual diversity survey. If one wants to read news on things going on in Indian Country that aren’t the latest social outrage—the legal and political matters that directly impact Native lives—it’s necessary to turn to Native-run outlets like Indian Country Today or Indianz.com or the Indigenous affairs desk of High Country News. This isn’t to short-change any of those outlets, which do the Lord’s work and are a vital part of my journalistic intake. But none of them have a sliver of the financial resources, political power, or social reach of their mainstream counterparts. And so hanging the necessary reeducation of the American public on these more regional, smaller sites is a tall order. [...]
TOP COMMENTS • HIGH IMPACT STORIES
QUOTATION
“It is a curious situation that the sea, from which life first arose should now be threatened by the activities of one form of that life. But the sea, though changed in a sinister way, will continue to exist; the threat is rather to life itself.” ~~Rachel Carson, The Sea Around Us (1951)
TWEET OF THE DAY
BLAST FROM THE PAST
At Daily Kos on this date in 2009—Obama Caps CEO Salaries of TARP Recipients: Who Will Work for a Paltry $500,000 Per Year?
Look, here's the situation: Bush may have wanted to bail out his backers in the financial services industry, and that may have driven his support for the $700 billion bailout. But most people who supported it did it in spite of the irresponsible CEO's who helped create the collapse of the credit markets. Most people who supported the bailout did so because it was too important to the entire economy to keep credit from completely drying up. It was a case of how people often refer to what FDR did during the Depression: it was saving capitalism from the capitalists.
But the guys (and they're almost all guys) who blew their companies' money on obscure "financial products" that were mostly just bets on bets on bets, they don't deserve any great rewards from the taxpayers. It's not in the public interest to make sure they continue to get over over 350 times the pay of the average American workers.
On today’s Kagro in the Morning show: The Iowa caucuses happened, not that can tell from the results. Joan McCarter shares her caucusing experiences, and joins in the general grousing. Do looser gun laws quiet "gun-free zone" critics? No, they don’t. So, maybe stop catering to them?
RadioPublic|LibSyn|YouTube|Patreon|Square Cash (Share code: Send $5, get $5!)