Media sympathy for accused terrorists is distributed along racial lines

Evidence

The government and news media have constructed a politics of affective worthiness that delineates persons worthy and unworthy of human feeling, inflected by the politics of race, class, religion, gender, and sexuality. In particular, Euro-American subjects are granted a more thorough explanation than men of color. Their trajectories toward terrorism are punctuated with brief moments in which viewers can feel sympathy, based on the notion that they once had a bright future as white middle-upper class males. For Padilla and other men of color such small windows are not available because they never had a bright future to begin with. Race inflects sympathy as does gender and sexuality. Gender inflects sympathy by framing Muslim women as deserving of an abundance of sympathy and Muslim men as undeserving of sympathy. — Evelyn Alsultany, Arabs and Muslims in the Media, 1096 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Media framed a humanitarian’s conviction as a web of terror uncovered.; Media sympathy for terrorists is allocated by race, class, and gender — Evelyn Alsultany, Arabs and Muslims in the Media: Race…, 1096; Media sympathy for accused terrorists depends on their social identity markers — Evelyn Alsultany, Arabs and Muslims in the Media: Race…, 907

Broader Connections

• Media sympathy for terrorists is allocated by race, class, and gender #expands (0.92) — Evelyn Alsultany, Arabs and Muslims in the Media, 1096