EC - Suarez's "Holding Up a Mirror to a Classless Society"

Ray Suarez’s “Holding Up a Mirror to a Classless Society” provides a critical outlook on the way the media portrays and misrepresents certain aspects of class. He argues that not only does the media give a skewed view of our society as one where everyone can afford everything and where there is an extremely diminished reality of debt, he also makes the point that the media plays into the racial divides that have been a problem within our society for such a long time. Nighttime news programs play into our stereotyped images of a black and Latino culture and its relationship with poverty and crime.

What is interesting when reviewing this article is to reflect on the many institutional and structural factors that we’ve been learning about for the past month and how they apply to Suarez’s argument. He asserts that those with enough money have the power to control the images and messages that the media conveys. Well, here we can see a vicious cycle emerge. White wealth, advantage, and privilege has allowed a white-centric and normative lens to cover and filter media images, purporting negative images of already impoverished minorities (such as blacks and housing discrimination). These negative images may play an important role in the labor market when employers have job applicants lined up for hiring. With a cultured image of blacks v. whites in their mind, an employer may unfairly advantage whites in the labor market over blacks. Through this cycle, we see several institutional and structural factors that play into and intermingle with the power and effects of the media.