A moral panic counts as a crisis when it is experienced as one

Evidence

It’s a kind of symptomatic reading of the crisis, because the race problem is only symptomatic of the violence problem, which is only symptomatic of the drug problem … You know, everything is symptomatic of something else. That is why in Policing the Crisis we felt justified in calling it a crisis because it was experienced as a crisis, that’s a breakdown of the whole society and you don’t really … you don’t understand Powell’s speech until you understand that it comes out of that vision. — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 1117

Categorization

Category: Definitional Content

• XREF: This is Hall’s own definition of moral panic/crisis via symptomatic reading — exactly the scaffolding mechanism the reader is assembling; connects to Cohen’s moral panic concept and to how Islamophobia is characterized as panic-like.

Related

• Moral panics link disparate fears into one ‘hydra-headed other’ (similarity 0.84)