Blog Post Week 4

Oct. 7, 2025

This week went over how the stories we share and the stories we silence shape our culture’s understandings of race. From the incredibly misleading term “colorblindness” to the work of The Black Press, we learn that the media doesn’t just hold power in what it reports, but also in how it challenges our world’s norms.

At first, colorblindness does sound like equality: the idea that if we don’t “see”race, we treat everyone with the same regard. But as Lind’s chapter "Trust Me, I’m Not Racist (p. 212-217) says, we get into how colorblindness is hindering the progress of equality. The term is problematic, as it erases people of color’s experiences and turns a blind eye to racism in real time. Pretending race doesn’t matter allows racial inequalities to develop even more, and then it becomes a privilege- a privilege that lets white Americans turn away from the uncomfortable while others live through it.

The Black Press: Soldiers Without Swords tells how Black journalists built their own platforms to tell truths that mainstream white press outlets refused. Newspapers like the Chicago Defender and Pittsburgh Courier reported lynchings, the realities of segregation and Jim Crow laws when the white papers would not.

Key and Peele’s comedy sketch Is This Country Song Racist? does a great job at using humor to truly show that racism is still very much a problem even though laws have changed and it is wrong. By presenting a skit where country singers casually used racist innuendos and lyrics, the duo exposes white privilege and how it allows some people to ignore the racism in our very culture, especially Southern culture. This ties into Lind’s How Not to Interrupt the Intractable Whiteness of Late-Night Comedy (p. 154-159), which argues that satire is both a weapon and a shield: highlighting racial bias, but also limited by whiteness platforms that share it.

The Black Press wasn’t just another news outlet; it empowered people and gave them the confidence to tell their stories. The coverage helped so many movements come to fruition, like the Great Migration and the Double V Campaign. These papers gave Black people a voice for reason in a time where they felt unheard completely. The courage and grit of the journalists working under constant threat shows how powerful storytelling and reporting can be.