poverty porn

The phrase poverty porn has become increasingly employed in the UK to describe film medias' growing tendency to exploit poor people for entertainment value (see this recent article in Tonight.) The most popular of this genre based on a reality-show format focuses on residents in a Birmingham neighborhood in the Channel 4 series, Benefits Street.

knockout game, media, and race

Racial political controversy is heating up again as the conservative press recently began keying off on the "knockout game," a pastime presumably perpetrated by black youths against unsuspecting whites encountered in public space. Two recent articles put this phenomenon into context. These NPR and NY Times pieces address it in terms of larger issues of violent assault and youth crime. The latter article also suggests it may well be simply "urban myth."

racist code-speak

In this Sociological Images post, Jason Eastman provides an example of Bonilla-Silva's contention that overt racist speech is no longer socially acceptable in public discourse, and therefore racist ideas are now generally expressed in coded terms.  In this segment from John Stewart's Daily Show, guest Larry Wilmore uses a mashup of Newt Gingrich public pronouncements about the poor and poverty to suggest that they are indeed racially targeted.

An abbreviated version is cross-posted at The Sociological Cinema.