Erasure In The Media

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Throughout history, the oppression of minorities by the dominant race has been a prevalent theme no matter what race is in the majority. Currently, in American society, whites are the dominant and most privileged race and this reflects within American news media. American society has established a concept of, “whiteness, as an institutionalized and systemic problem, [which] is maintained and produced not be overt rhetorics of whiteness, but rather, by its ‘everydayness” (Chandrashekar 17). In addition, “whites participate in, and derive protection from, a system whose rules and organizational relations work to their advantage” (Chandrashekar 17). American society relies heavily on the use of specific frameworks to maintain this idea that being
Folk theory is “an explanatory framework adopted by a society to provide everyday understandings of the world” (Hodges 403). Specific to crimes committed by a certain race and the reporting of said crime, folk theory supports the idea that the media and the society viewing the media uses the process of erasure to create bias (Hodges 403). Erasure is an ideological process that makes contradictory proof invisible through forgetting, ignoring, denying, or eliminating the distinctions or facts that don’t fit into the picture. In addition to the concept of erasure, folk theory maintains that there are a set of ingrained understandings about how race and racism play a role in society (Hodges 404). In essence, all discourses or reports that discuss race reaffirm race and racism’s role in society. Folk theory identifies racial differences as differences in features of biology and “it takes discrimination based on such differences to be natural and [an] inevitable aspect of the human condition” (Hodges 405). However, most theories who use folk theory make sure to establish that this, “does not justify racism … But it does provide the theory’s overriding explanation for why it exists: there will always be bigoted individuals who hate others because of their race, causing them to discriminate” (Hodges 405). Folk theory
Web. 11 Apr. 2016.
Chandrashekar, Santhosh. “Race and Violence: A Comparative Study of the Coverage of Virginia Tech and Northern Illinois Shootings by The New York Times.” Conference Papers—National Communication Association (2009): 1. Communications & Mass Media Complete. Web. 19 Apr. 2016.
Dorfman, Lori, and Vincent Schiraldi. “Off Balance: Youth, Race & Crime in the News. Building Blocks for Youth.” Berkeley Media Studies Group (2001). Google Scholar.
Web. 11 Apr. 2016.
Hodges, Adam. “Ideologies of Language and Race in US Media Discourse about the Trayvon
Martin Shooting.” Language in Society 44.3 (2015): 401-423. Communication & Mass
Media Complete. Web. 11 Apr. 2016.
Holody, Kyle J., Sung-Yeon Park, and Xiaoqun Zhang. “Racialization of the Virginia Tech
Shootings.” Journalism Studies 14.4 (2013): 568-583. Communication & Mass Media
Complete. Web. 11 Apr. 2016.
McCann, Bryan J. “On Whose Ground? Racialized Violence and the Prerogative of ‘Self-
Defense’ in the Trayvon Martin Case.” Western Journal of Communication 78.4 (2014):
480-499. Communication & Mass Media Complete. Web. 19 Apr. 2016.
Monahan, Jennifer, Sonja Brown Givens, and Irene Shtrulis. “Priming and Stereotyping:

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