Sunday, July 31 – The best story of
the night was the first, about a series of recent voter ID laws that were
struck down. I was appalled by the
blatancy of the North Carolina law, whose makers requested data on voting
habits broken down by race and then
passed five measures that all
disproportionately affected Black people – so gross. Quick piece on the attempted coup in Turkey,
featuring their vacationing Prime Minister FaceTiming news channels to reassure
the people. The main story was on the Democratic convention, and after last week’s look at the RNC, it felt a little
aimless. It hit a lot of the highlights –
email leak, Sanders supporters, prominent speeches – but didn’t seem to have an
overall message, no important point it was trying to get across. Not until the very end, when John covered
Trump’s bigoted response to the Khans’ speech.
Then, he really let loose and there was nothing thinly-veiled about his
contempt.
No Daily Show this week – post-convention(s)
breather. In lieu of having new episodes
to discuss, I’d like to highlight another aspect I like about the series. I really appreciate how, in covering stories
related to race, the show doesn’t just cover the “big” issues. I mean, it does address hard-hitting topics like police shootings,
discriminatory laws, and xenophobic claims made by presidential candidates, and
it pretty much always knocks these stories out of the park, but it doesn’t stop
there.
The show
also looks at stories that are less devastating but which still effect the lives
of everyday people in real ways. The
fact that Asian men and Black women statistically face the most rejection on
dating/hookup apps isn’t something that’s endangering people’s lives or denying
their personal liberties, and it’s not something that has an immediate, obvious
fix, but it’s still something that happens that disproportionately affects
certain people based on their race, and that matters. It matters when a subset of the Internet
loses their minds over a Black man playing one of the leads in Star Wars, and it matters when the media
makes Cam Newton’s endzone dances out to be “inappropriate” and sullying the
good name of football. There can be a
tendency among some to think that America has essentially “solved” its racism,
that the major problems have been dealt with and “we’re all equal now.” Even if the “big” issues mentioned above didn’t
thoroughly demonstrate that that’s not true, these “smaller” stories would
still show that the U.S. has a long way to go.
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