Media sympathy for terrorists is allocated by race, class, and gender

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

Categorization

• SEED: Angle: a piece on the ‘politics of affective worthiness’ — how media grief and explanation are rationed by race, using white and non-white terrorism suspects as case studies.
• DEFINE: Introduces the useful concept ‘politics of affective worthiness’ — who gets narrated as deserving of human feeling.
• DEEPTHINKING: The asymmetry is striking: sympathetic explanation is reserved for white subjects who ‘had a bright future,’ while the same violence from a man of color requires no explanation at all because none was ever possible. This reframes the grammar of media sympathy itself.