* So many decry tribalism today, but it’s just about all people have left, and that’s why it’s coming back with a vengeance.
* This is a key insight. The declining importance of religion means that people don’t really identify that way. High geographical mobility means, first, that your neighborhood is more like a hotel room than your home—Paul Kersey memorably called modern suburbs “drifter colonies.” But it also means that your contact with your family is dramatically curtailed. It also means that your contact with the people you grew up with is dramatically curtailed. The homogenizing influence of mass culture, imposed legal uniformity, and neighborhood disruption ensures that there is nothing for most to identify with at a sub-national level.
Because of they way we are wired, we are going to take sides and fight each other. Our elites think they can keep that urge channeled into sports, loyalty to your job and co-workers, and ridiculous, abstract ideological conflicts over “muh freedumbs” and “social justice.” The way to bet, however, is that they lose control and more normal genetic interests re-assert themselves. Or, maybe that’s what they want. They seem to be happy with the Nazi freak show in the Ukraine.
* Growing up I always heard through the media that blacks had been stereotyped as criminals by the movies and television. Is this really true? I know that in the past two decades, tv shows ignore reality and feature white criminals almost exclusively, e.g. CSINY, Law and Order, etc.
Additionally it even came out that the producers of COPs manipulated the content to ensure blacks are not over overrepresented. And we know feature films have turned to the blond, English-accented guy as the villain of choice.
I also know if you go back far enough in films, blacks are hardly in the movies at all. And if they were cast, it was usually as servants or maids. In fact blacks claimed that at a certain point in time, the media ignored them altogether and made it appear they didn’t even exist.
I now have been watching some classic over-the-air tv channels with reruns of Perry Mason and other shows from the 1950s-1960s. And from what I can tell most do not show blacks at all, let alone stereotype them as criminals. Heck, I even saw an early 1960s Twilight Zone were a town was going to hang a man and the preacher was trying to convince them to not hate. The preacher WAS black and guy about to be hung WAS white.
Of course the only exception I can think of is Birth of a Nation from 1915. But was that the lone exception?
So my question is this. Did blacks ever get stereotyped in the media as criminals, and if so, when? I sure can’t find it. Is this whole media-stereotyping-blacks just another myth like the blacks-are-overrepresented-in-the-infantry or the Tuskeegee-Airman-never-lost-a-bomber-they-escorted memes that get repeated until people take them to be true?
