THINQon : Is the Discovery Channel racist?

The Chamber of Politics General Is the Discovery Channel racist?

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Jessica Rosen, Graduate student in Art History.

Is the Discovery Channel racist?

Latest Post: March 15, 2010 at 4:47 AM

9 followers

Hi All,

Reading the discussion on Do animals have rhythm (and its interesting continuation on our relation to animals and their consciousness ) I continued briefly with google and came upon this article in the Discovery channel.
I apologize to the Discovery Channel for bringing this article from them. As I'm mentioning it's from the Discovery Channel I hope they don't mind. But, can you believe the picture they chose???

The headline: Got Rhythm? Animals Do Too. And then that picture!
So that you don't think they are talking about people, notice it's in the Animals Discovery news. Talk about incredible.

(The article is scientific gibberish, and if philosophers are not the the people to help us think about the animal (as Arthur and Gregory, post post, mention) scientists, usually, aren't the people for animals and rhythm.)

Notice the article is from November 2006, so it's not like no one saw it, and yet no one complained to them to ask them to change the picture.

(I'm bringing an image of their page and not simply a link so that if they change the image, there will be a record of it.
Also, I'm bringing it to show that yes, the article mentions people dancing, but it is clearly not it's subject.)

How should one react to such things?

This post is referenced by the following other contributors:

Jessica Rosen	in "Animals / Do animals have rhythm? / Do animals have rhythm?"	(Safari & Garden)
Rick Murphy	in "How to deal with stereotyping people?"	(The Living Room)
John Stevenson	in "How to deal with stereotyping people?"	(The Living Room)
Virginia Bird	in "Is This African Enough?"	(Travel)
Jeremy Stone	in "Language, racism and colonialism"	(The Chamber of Politics)
Arthur Mont	in "Rise of the Planet of the Apes - Is it all that bad?"	(The Living Room)

susan rattray tagged this post as Insightful.

Reply to:

Mike Strong

February 2009

15 followers

WOW!

The line below the image – Feeling the beat. Astonishing!

I’ll mention that just a few days ago there was a huge scandal about the NY Post cartoon comparing Obama and monkey (a runaway chimpanzee was killed by police a few days earlier in Connecticut). The cartoon is wrong on so many levels, especially with the recurring question of will a black president be assassinated.

(cartoon by Sean Delonas/NY Post).
Perhaps they were thinking it is a criticism of racism, but to think that one must still see apes and blacks as connected.

(There was also Prince Harry recent comment to a black comedian that he didn’t sound black, but that’s more of a group affiliation thing than pure racism as in the Discovery Channel example.)

I think what I found the most troubling here is that the Discovery Channel article is from 2006, and even if not many people saw it, it has not gone unseen. What are these people thinking? Is the association blacks and monkeys so apparent to people that the image seems like a proof? That the cartoon seems funny?

I’m not sure myself how does one react to such things, besides personal outrage.

This post is referenced by the following other contributors:

John Stevenson	in "How to deal with stereotyping people?"	(The Living Room)
Arthur Mont	in "Rise of the Planet of the Apes - Is it all that bad?"	(The Living Room)

Reply to: or

Mia Vialti

February 2009

67 followers

to me what's amazing about this is the fact that many people will look at the original article and just NOT NOTICE that it is possibly offensive. I'm sure it just went below radar screens, including that of the person who chose the picture who probably just thought "oh-- tribal rhythm" without relating it to the headline. People's sensitivity to racism is really at the level of things which they know to look out for.

This came up in the recent (Annie Leibovitz) Vogue cover of LeBron James and Gisele Bundchen. There was a huge outcry that it was quoting King Kong and the people who thought not just didn't see *at all* why this would be a weird image. It's not racism on the level of seeing it and thinking it's right. It's just not seeing that it exists, a weird blindness which is much more problematic.

This post is referenced by the following other contributors:

Arthur Mont

in "Rise of the Planet of the Apes - Is it all that bad?"

(The Living Room)

Reply to: or

Jeremy Stone

July 6, 2009 at 6:23 PM

26 followers

I originally posted a response here, but then I thought better of it and started a new topic on Language, racism and colonialism. My example there (which concerns a visit to the zoo) is pretty closely related to this discussion, but I also wanted to focus on language and open the discussion to any theoretical responses people may have.