Red Light Politics
Welcome to my short form Tumblr blog. My name is Flavia Tamara Dzodan, I am a business developer, writer, public speaker, ideas instigator, content creator, media facilitator and trend watcher living in Amsterdam.
This Tumblr is about the spaces and intersections between politics, culture, race and gender matters with some humor and pop culture thrown in the mix.
My long reads blog is Red Light Politics.
I also blog at Tiger Beatdown.
If you would like to know more about me, visit this page .
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Noted Elsewhere
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“There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.”— Audre Lorde in Sister Outsider.
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I’d be very upset if I worked at Fage USA and had to drive every (Monday) morning to:
1 Opportunity Drive.I suppose that neighbourhood has...
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“Prison relieves us of the responsibility of seriously engaging with the problems of our society, especially those produced by racism and,...”
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When the Lesser Of Two Evils Isn't Enough
by Mia McKenzie
Yesterday, I wrote a post called Michelle Obama...
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Try not to forget why they came to the United States of America, and though the specific circumstances may differ, you’ll find that hundreds of...
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Taken with Instagram
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Haarlem, Netherlands (by Epicantus)
Tag Results
86 posts tagged media
“I understood she is convinced that she [Ed: Anne Sinclair] and her husband [Ed: Dominique Strauss-Kahn] belong to a class of masters of the world. She made the statement I reported in my book: “There is no harm in getting sucked off by a maid.” For her, the world is divided between master and servant.”
Anne Sinclair : DSK était son “caniche” selon Marcela Iacub - L’Internaute Actualite
(Translation from French mine because I haven’t seen this covered in English even though I googled extensively trying to find an already translated quote)
This is not new but since I have already covered so many pages on Dominique Strauss-Kahn, I believe it is important to add further context, especially the kind that illustrates the type of culture he is part of. The quote above is from an interview with Marcela Iacub, a former lover of DSK who wrote a book about the affair (awful book, I might add, where there is so much vile I wouldn’t even know where to begin to unpack it).
Anne Sinclair, the woman who so nonchalantly mentioned “there is no harm in getting sucked off by a maid” is DSK’s ex wife, to whom he was married when he was accused of raping Nafissatou Diallo, an immigrant maid from Guinea at the Sofitel New York. Sinclair is no ordinary rape enabling wife, though. She is currently the head of the French edition of the Huffington Post.
So, when media shows a clearly racist and/ or classist bias, we shouldn’t wonder how it is possible for this bias to exist. We should go back to this quote and remind ourselves of the kind of people who run our media. I know better than to expect fairness when Sinclair claims “there is no harm” in a vulnerable working class Black woman “sucking off” her abusive ex husband.
“In 2011, the Netherlands shifted away from its longstanding policy of allowing immigrants to lead parallel lives within society, and instead began vigorously urging immigrants to learn Dutch and abide by Dutch cultural mores.”
Language Distance: The Reason Immigrants Have Trouble Assimilating - Olga Khazan - The Atlantic
Here’s how media normalizes racism: take a statement created and spread by racist politicians (first Pim Fortuijn, then Rita Verdonk, now Geert Wilders if you want the genealogy of this myth) and then repeat it as fact.
There is no actual evidence outside the racists’ minds that people ever lived these often touted “paralel lives”. There is actually, a very well documented history of Dutch white people refusing (to give one example) to send their children to schools populated by non whites. There is also a well documented history of temp agencies openly discriminating against non white candidates. There are also instances of public services reporting WoC to authorities just on the basis of their skin color and their obvious foreignness.
In short: there has never been a “paralel society” like The Atlantic would have us believe. This has always been the go to justification to further promote policies of alienation and stigmatization for minorities. Now The Atlantic presents it as “fact” and this is how a racist lie becomes an accepted truth.
“In his day job, Adan works in a restaurant, but the money he makes acting the pirate is far greater.”
The ‘Somali pirates’ who are not what they seem - Channel 4 News
Wherein an investigative journalist from the UK uncovers that “Somali pirates” interviewed by, among others, Time Magazine, are actually men from Nairobi pretending to be pirates.
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Herman van Campenhout, CEO of Telegraaf Media Groep, is leading nothing but an immoral and racist corporation that puts the lives of Black people and all minorities in this country in danger. The unethical standards employed by De Telegraaf Media Groep’s properties in order to “invent” news endanger people’s lives, disturb them in their homes and uses children to further push vile ideologies. This media company is not reporting news. They are making up situations that they later on pass as “news” in spite of the fact that the people involved did not wish to lend themselves to their blatant invasion of privacy.
This media corporation shows an utter contempt for the safety and well being of Black people and minorities in The Netherlands, going as far as filming children in a sad, racist spectacle, effectively profiting from the exploitation of Black people for corporate gains. No matter whose lives are stake or who gets to pay the price for it, all that matters for this corporation is that they increase their profits and incite their audience. News? The only news in this performance is that they have no care or interest in anyone’s humanity, after all, the CEO needs to justify his bonuses.
”Dutch media business model: racist harassment of Black people for profit | Space Invaders
My latest at Space Invaders on the way media corporations in The Netherlands incite racism and violence against People of Color to increase their profits.
I wrote about the unprecedented protests in Mexico against corporate media and some of the similarities between Mexican media’s modus operandi to Murdoch’s scandal in the UK.
While in the UK, a media scandal involving Rupert Murdoch’s multinational corporation, News Corp, continues to unfold, investigators point at complicities and involvement of the highest echelons of the British government in phone hacking, spread of misleading or false information and manipulation of the public for electoral gain. Eight people with close ties to David Cameron’s administration stand accused of using media as a tool of deception towards the British people. The similarities between the way Mexican media utilized their power to exert influence over the electorate point to a certain modus operandi, replicated across borders, in which some corporate owned media appears to be part of a systematic effort to maintain and support certain political ideologies in places of power.
“Progressive” comments sections
I think the comment sections of many “progressive” media should be renamed to “white and wealthy middle classes judge other people’s lives devoid of context of survival strategies or personal circumstances while hiding behind the alibi of “social commentary”“. (see the comments on the post about waxing I already raged about for a glaring example).
Slate does a story full of gender essentialism about male heroism during the Aurora shooting (queue in phrases like ”Throwing your body in front of your girlfriend when people all around you are getting shot is an instinct that’s basic, and deeper.”). The article focuses on the men who gave their lives to save their girlfriends, partners, etc.
Not even once does the author mention (not even in passing, not as an afterthought or a footnote) the young Black man who saved an entirely family who wasn’t his own.
Heroism for Slate = white heroism. Let’s be clear here.
“But this idea that we are trading the offline for the online, though it dominates how we think of the digital and the physical, is myopic. It fails to capture the plain fact that our lived reality is the result of the constant interpenetration of the online and offline. That is, we live in an augmented reality that exists at the intersection of materiality and information, physicality and digitality, bodies and technology, atoms and bits, the off and the online. It is wrong to say “IRL” to mean offline: Facebook is real life.”
Also: value (an addendum)
Addendum to my post of earlier (and the topic of my ongoing pondering). Not all value is equal.
If PoC find value in a given knowledge or toolkit, that value is not going to be perceived/ promoted/ “valued” (bear with me, the redundancy applies here) in the same way as if the dominant culture considers said knowledge valuable. Media is key in the reproduction of these hierarchies of added value and editors* are, more often than not, the ones who sanction these hierarchies by “allowing” or not the taking of space.
(* mostly referring to how media works in The Netherlands and not as an overall observation of all media everywhere, which I am not familiar with).
“When journalists go to work in a country where they do not understand the language or the culture, they typically make use of the invaluable services of fixer interpreters, whose impact on global public opinion is invariably underestimated. They are the ones who, while remaining largely invisible, offer clear guidance as to how conflicts should be interpreted, as well as which sources should be chosen and which words used.”
Myth of Norway’s lost innocence | Presseurop (English)
From the article, well worth revisiting on the first anniversary of the massacre perpetrated by Anders Breivik:
When Norway, which is a country that rarely makes headlines, became the theatre of a global event, the international press adopted the following method: world renowned writers like Jan Kjærstad, Anne Holt and Jostein Gaarder were drafted in to serve as cultural interpreters within the framework of interviews, while Jo Nesbø was invited to write an article which was published in the major newspapers of several continents.[…]
He [Martin Sandbu, a Norwegian economics columnist] continued: “There is a widespread perception, for instance, that Nordic countries are more tolerant of immigrants than others in northern Europe. Yet their governments may simply have been better at camouflaging hostility.” In short, what was destroyed on 22 July, 2011, was perhaps not paradise, but simply a mirror that we had created for ourselves.
Also, eerily appropriate vis a vis my questions regarding media editors as a ruling class earlier today.
Interrogating media
Last week an interviewer asked me who finds value in what I write and who “learns” from me. The interviewer added that “they didn’t learn anything so they were wondering if anyone did”. Starting from the fact that I have nothing to teach (duh!), I have been thinking about the role of media in the administration of critique and dissent. In turn, as is often the case, I have been left with more unanswered questions of my own.
- Who cares?
- What matters? (Nothing? Some “stuff” matters? Who gets to define that?)
- Whose feelings?
- Whose discomfort? and simultaneously, is there a discomfort threshold? (“I can bear so much of your rhetoric, after you passed the discomfort threshold of what is allowed as “critique” or resistance”, etc).
- “Crying without tears” is often referred to as a mockery towards the performance of emotion without emotion but what happens when, after crying all the tears one is left with a rictus and how is that represented in media? (mostly, the tearful trope of the wronged member of the dominant culture who is played against the “callous” outsider)
- Anger as both the shunning and the path towards political gain (whose anger is a site of obturation and whose anger is an electoral gain?)
- Silence. Silence. Silence. (the administration of “topics that matter” etc)
- How much of what passes for my local mainstream media is nothing more than “cognitive pollution”?
- Mainstream media as a site of strategic/ active isolation (nobody is expressing what you feel or live or experience; hence, you are alone; hence, you are wrong, etc).
- How does the dominant culture operate in “the administration of dispute” (whose voice is allowed to break the silence and subsequently, the management of dissent in media).
- The editor as a ruling class (again, on the management of dissent, how is this dissent allowed to be expressed and how is that administration enacted).
I am fine with the fact that nobody “learns” from me. Actually, I’d be alarmed if anyone thought I have something to teach to begin with (I am not comfortable with being anyone’s “didactic experience”). However, I am left with the ultimate question: how do we subvert the role of media as one of the main sites of epistemic injustice?
“Britain’s biggest black newspaper has been denied access to the Olympic stadium.”
From the article, about The Voice’s denied press accreditation at the Olympics:
Should the exploits of Team GB, Jamaican and African athletes only be chronicled by mainstream, white-dominated media? Is there no room for anyone else, who can offer a different perspective based on a closer understanding of the athletes’ life stories?
Read the rest at the link.
When did Gawker start reporting “fictional news”?
I mean, I get the snark and their overall hipster “beyond good and evil” tone, etc. I get that their “news reporting” is meant, however poorly, to be taken as quasi comedic. However, this piece is just fiction. I mean, aside from the fact that the Olsen twin in question is dating someone, the rest is just a fabrication.
And then there is this little gem right at the end:
In a related story, Ashley Olsen and President Obama’s half-brother Malik Obama were recently spotted shopping for windchimes on Fire Island.
What is this even supposed to mean?!
Non Western economies as wild animals
I just got an email advertising the conference “Africa Works”. The first sentence in their website illustrates the premise behind the event:
Africa in the 21th century has already proven to be the source of endless possibilities and trends. In the first decade of the 21st century, the perception of Africa has changed dramatically from being the ‘hopeless continent’ to being a continent of ‘lion economies’, analogous to the Asian tigers.
“African lions”! “Asian Tigers!”. And of course, because I love to look for context, I checked who’s in the board of the Netherlands-African Business Council organizing this. And then I shook my head to the point of dislocation.
“Too radical for Dutch media”
And “unpublishable”. Those were the words of two editors from two separate major media outlets in The Netherlands in response to something I co-wrote about racism in this country, as a social ecosystem (leaving out incriminating details to protect the innocent). And to think we had even tried to simplify our ideas to make them more accessible for a general audience.
Maybe this should now be my byline?
