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AFAM 162: African American History: From Emancipation to the Present

Lecture 23 - Public Policy and Presidential Politics (continued). In this lecture, Professor Holloway discusses the connections between media and high politics during the late 1980s and 1990s and reveals the ways that race was replaced by a series of keywords - such as crime, drugs, and welfare - that acted as racial signifiers in our national discourse. An examination of the political rhetoric from the George H.W. Bush/Michael Dukakis campaign, including the infamous Willie Horton advertisement, as well as racially-infused persons and incidents such as Bernhard Goetz, the "Subway Vigilante;" Charles Stuart; the Central Park jogger case; Senator Jesse Helms's "Angry Hands" advertisement; the murder of Latasha Harlins by Soon Ja Du, a Korean shopkeeper; the Rodney King beating; and the riots and rebellion in South Central, Los Angeles following the acquittal of the white policemen who beat him all reveal the special coding that linked people's awareness of race and crime and the ways that the media reinforced the stereotype that crime was the special province of the black male. In the remainder of the lecture, Professor Holloway discusses the Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill controversy, essentially a manifestation of the three-ring circus that was racial politics in the 1990s. (from oyc.yale.edu)

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