How this project shapes culture/social justice
Within this project page under “Publications” then “Viral Texts Blog,” I found the following titled “The Virality of Racial Terror”:
“‘The Virality of Racial Terror in US Newspapers, 1863-1921.’ VRT will employ text-mining methods to trace the circulation of reports about anti-Black violence in US newspapers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and develop a series of exhibits demonstrating how such reporting fueled both subsequent violence and acts of resistance.”
Analysis will be targeted towards tracing the circulation of reports about anti-Black violence in US newspapers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Within this segment of the project, the author states that their focus will be on racism towards the Black community. As said in the quote below, they are specifically focusing on calls for lynching.
“In her call for Truth and Reconciliation, legal scholar and NAACP Legal Defense Fund director Sherilynn Ifill notes the complicity of newspapers and their need to atone for roles in encouraging, advertising, and otherwise aiding the perpetration of lynching.”
- Racial violence was recontextualized for specific regional, political, or trade readers through editor’s choices while selecting and revising stories
- Reporting of racial violence correlated to racist content in other newspaper genres (e.g., popular science, humor, poetry)
- Derogatory and anti-Black content drew upon and forged white supremacist networks
- News about racial violence correlated with the spread of new racial terror events
- Discussion of racial violence diverged in the Black and white press.
