Deploying flood-rescue photographs as masculinity propaganda.

At WaPo, Janell Ross has a long piece titled "How viral images of hurricane heroes are rebranding the ‘redneck’ identity." You can guess what photograph appears first: that handsome white SWAT officer carrying a delicate Asian woman who is holding a little baby. Maybe you can also guess the second photograph: a white man standing up in a boat and holding the hand of an elderly woman.

These pictures and others are widely shared, but Ross focuses on the sharing by "far right, alt-right and just avowedly right-leaning sites." These photo-sharers add captions like:

When disaster strikes, it’s what men do. Real men. Heroic men. American men. And then they’ll knock back a few shots, or a few beers with like-minded men they’ve never met before, and talk about fish, or ten-point bucks, or the benefits of hollow-point ammo, or their F-150.

That is, the disaster activated some men to get out there and rescue people and the photographs activated other men (and perhaps women) to get on the internet and tout masculinity. And the masculinity-touting photo captions activate and Janell Ross and me to analyze the masculinity propaganda (and perhaps you to comment on our propaganda analysis instead of getting out there in the real world and helping somebody in your town or region who needs to be carried or boated somewhere).

There's much more to Ross's column, and it's specifically about whiteness. Ross, we're told, "covers race along with the social and political implications of the nation's rapidly changing demographics." She says:

What appears to be taking shape in the national conversation about disaster recovery is praise not only of the individuals doing the work, but of a particular brand of white male masculinity. And with that has come an open attempt to dismiss legitimate concerns about the stereotyping and racism some self-identified “rednecks,” “country boys” and those who admire them engaged in before the storm.

The 85-year-old boxing promotor Don King is going to speak the way he speaks — even in front of that other Don who speaks in his own way — -ald Trump.

Don King — standing in front of Donald Trump and wearing a jacket weirder than a Hillary-Clinton jacket — said:

America needs Donald Trump. We need Donald Trump, especially black people. Because you have got to understand, my black brothers and sisters, they told me, you've got to try to emulate and imitate the white man and then you will be successful. We tried that ... I told Michael Jackson, I said, if you are poor, you are a poor Negro. I would use the n-word. But, if you are rich you're a rich Negro. If you are intelligent, intellectual, you're intellectual Negro. If you are a dancing and sliding and gliding n------, I mean Negro, you're a dancing and sliding and gliding Negro. So dare not alienate because you cannot assimilate. You know, you're going to be a Negro till you die.

I know the mainstream news focused on King's saying of the epithet that's censored in the above transcription — the epithet and the fixed grin on Trump's face in the background, but the old man was making his point, and it's a significant idea that he must have wanted people to think about. Reading it, I think it's perfectly lucid, and I even think he deliberately said the n-word and then corrected it, and he did it to criticize white people, who, he seems to think, are racist even when they show respect to an accomplished black person, such as Michael Jackson.

I saw the clip on television, and it was edited to exclude the name of King's interlocutor, so I was left wondering why he was saying "sliding and gliding." It made King sound wacky and maybe senile. But with the name Michael Jackson in there, the language all fits together, including the challenging of the audience with that word, the word he wanted white people to know is the word he uses — "I would use the n-word" he says before he actually says it — as he imagines how white people are thinking.

My link goes to a Washington Post column — sorry to throw you at the pay wall again — by the "race, gender, immigration and inequality" reporter Janell Ross. Ross seems to credit King with saying something that makes sense, though after aptly paraphrasing it, she appends: "Or, at least, that's what King may have been saying, as best we can tell." Ross proceeds to describe the predictable "outrage and umbrage expressed about King's language and his use of the n-word in a church, of all places." But she's critical of that kind of superficial coverage of racial problems:

That's race coverage around the edges — racial-epithet scandal to possible ethnic- or religious-group uproar. And, it's this coverage that overtakes or actually stands in where a more thoughtful, substantive examination of the undeniable role that race continues to play in housing, lending, employment, health care, education and every other major feature of American life should probably be....

"White Americans, their activities and ideas seem always to stem from a font of principled and committed individuals."

"As such, group suspicion and presumed guilt are readily perceived and described as unjust, unreasonable and unethical," writes Janell Ross, a WaPo race-and-gender reporter, in a column titled "Why aren’t we calling the Oregon occupiers 'terrorists?'"

You will note that while the group gathered in Oregon is almost assuredly all or nearly all white, that has scarcely been mentioned in any story.

Maybe because it's damned awkward to write "almost assuredly all or nearly all white." Isn't it a problem to just guess they must be white people?

You will note that nothing even close to similar can be said about coverage of events in Missouri, Maryland, Illinois or any other place where questions about policing have given way to protests or actual riots.

Close to similar to what? When reporters were directly seeing activities, they were put in a different position, where they would have had to censor part of the facts they themselves witnessed. But more important, the people engaged in the activities were themselves calling attention to race and specifically wanted to be seen as black and they framed what they were protesting in terms of race. We were told "Black Lives Matter" and criticized if we tried to race-neutralize it with "All Lives Matter." These protesters were regarded by many as "principled and committed" — principled and committed about racial issues. The press presented them in the terms they used, so that was in fact very similar to the coverage of the Oregon occupiers.

And, by the way, it's pretty absurd to say "White Americans, their activities and ideas seem always to stem from a font of principled and committed individuals." I mean, I believe that it seems that way to some people, but it's my observation that white Americans are often portrayed as stupid, ignorant, greedy, and bigoted.