Our existing media ecosystem continues blithely treating all this as a series of scarcely related piecemeal developments, and reflexively consigns each new element of the reassertion of antidemocratic racial power to the comfortable, numbing template of both-sidesist orthodoxy. Ever since one of our major parties began descending into racialized and antidemocratic political violence, this zombified press consensus acts as though this is but one more rational political choice, to be weighed for costs and benefits, and assessed on an undeviating grid of news-cycle wins and losses. The result is a full-on Weimar parody of public discourse in deliberative democracy.  Operating in its thrall, our press ensures that overt campaigns of racial exclusion and antidemocratic seizures of power get miniaturized into performative and ephemeral talking points, treated as inconsequential attack-ad rhetoric, and flattened out into the fodder of daily political news coverage and Beltway-grade gossip.

 

At the African American Policy Forum, we’ve gained painful firsthand experience in this destructive discourse of normalization. We’ve fought back hard as unhinged attacks on critical race theory and efforts to ban the teaching of our actual racial past have gained traction in the daily news cycle. We’ve organized to counter and refute outrageous agitprop claims, censorship campaigns and organized hatemongering—and seen at the same time how the mainstream press mischaracterizes these efforts to revive American apartheid as expressions of respectable positions in reasoned political debate. We’ve all seen this movie before—going back to the vicious caricatures of Black political activism at the heart of the Redemptionist era, and the false narratives of endangered white impunity that fueled the rise of Jim Crow and the backlash against the civil rights revolution.