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240 pages, Hardcover
First published April 10, 2010
"I grew up watching Archie Bunker, the ignorant racist character created by Norman Lear, who was, himself, famously devoted to advancing racial tolerance and progressive cultural values. Archie Bunker's racism was Lear's vessel for delivering comedy with a social message. Had Guy Aoki [the Asian American group rep] been operating in the '70s, he might have attacked Norman Lear as a racist. The bad news for guys like Aoki is that, not only are the progressive messages out there today more refined and sense-of-irony dependent, but racist message are more oblique, too. Right-wing Americans who appear in mainstream media are not out there calling black people 'niggers' or saying 'The Klan has good ideas.' Instead, they're questioning the legitimacy of Obama's presidency by accusing him of being born in Africa, or of being a Muslim. Or they're having tea parties and calling Obama a communist and a Nazi. The entire Fox News Channel is a twenty-four-hour-a-day racism engine, but it's all coded, all implied. Lou Dobbs used to scream on CNN about immigration, not 'filthy Mexicans.' I suspect the racist messages about Asians that permeate the media are even subtler, and therefore more difficult to combat."