Racism now operates through sympathetic representation and self-denial

Evidence

But at the same time, beyond this veneer of sympathy, many of the narratives in which these representations are located simply reinscribe, albeit more subtly, the logic that legitimizes suspending Arab and Muslim civil rights. Several interrelated logics converge in these TV dramas: racism is wrong but regretfully necessary at this exceptional time; the American dream is being threatened by Arab/Muslim terrorists; this moment of intensified racism will pass and the harmonious times that define the United States will soon return. The use of sympathetic representations to create the illusion of a postracial era is how racism operates now, through a denial of itself. — Evelyn Alsultany, Arabs and Muslims in the Media, 498

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that racism’s current mode is denial-of-itself through sympathetic representation is a dense, paradigm-shifting analytic frame that resists one-sentence summary and reframes a whole era of media criticism.
• XREF: Echoes critical whiteness studies and the ‘postracial’ critique; connects to the concession that representations ‘are indeed an improvement on the blatantly racist representations’ prior to the late 1990s. — connects to: Denouncing race itself becomes the new racism’s containment tactic. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1798
• SEED: Article angle: ‘how racism works through a denial of itself’ — the sympathetic portrayal as the new face of subordination, applicable to any minority group.