So Fox Sports hired a comedian to go to the USC campus and make fun of “All American” Asian students in a video welcoming Utah and Colorado to the Pac 12:
You’re already thinking everything I could possibly say about this one, which makes it that much worse that it actually emerged from an editorial process at Fox Sports. Fox has now apologized and pulled the video from its website after The Daily Camera reported on it.
This is one of the most overtly racist things I’ve seen from the Murdoch media—and that’s saying something.
Heads should roll.
Let me guess. It's anti-black, anti-white, anti-Arab, and anti-hybrid because it excluded African Americans, European Americans, Mideast Americans, and mixed-race Americans, right? Wait a minute. Did I exclude an ethnicity? My bad. (Let's see. There's the native Americans and the ...) In any case, I wouldn't call it "overt racism." Perceivable racism, okay. Still, how do we know whether the interviewee demographic betrayed the actual demographic of the location? And have you ever managed to make it through five minutes of FOX's "Red Eye" w/o puking or throwing a brick through your TV screen? Nothing on FOX comes close to the social depravity of that show. Shame on the mess.
#1 Posted by Dan A., CJR on Wed 7 Sep 2011 at 07:37 PM
Daily Trojan USC: One Comment on “Fox causes stir with controversial video”
Clayton Burns Commented Today at 10:08 AM (4 minutes ago) | Reply
This story is chock full of ironies. (Columbia Journalism Review posted a comment and the video). Strangely, nobody bothered to examine admissions standards at USC. Out of delicacy, I will not yet call those practices racist.
SAT English is atrocious. TOEFL English is an embarrassment. USC should cooperate with American, Australian, and UK universities to establish an accurate world admissions curriculum for learners of English.
If I say “I talk…talk about what?” then I am a victim of silly English teaching and testing (the default English “curriculum” in many countries is IELTS or TOEFL). There is a powerful way to teach ESL at this level: reading out loud from the Penguin Kipling’s “Kim” (Edward Said) and the Penguin Kipling “Selected Stories,” ed. Andrew Rutherford. Searching words and grammar in the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English. Absorbing the COBUILD Intermediate English Grammar. Columbia might be the best university to teach these texts to Asia via distance education.
Yale, since it has some experience in Internet education, might be effective in teaching an advanced English learner’s course with the COBUILD English Grammar, the Arden “Hamlet,” “The Turn of the Screw,” “Heart of Darkness,” and the poems of Emily Dickinson.
The USC admissions procedures for international students, whether intentional or not, are deeply racist. They are paternalistic and absurd. They expose the cognitive limitations of the admissions people. (If you want focus on cognition so as to help design English language systems for international students, you could assimilate Mark Ashcraft’s great text “Cognition”).
Fox, ironically, is part of the company that owns COBUILD. Instead of posting racist video, Fox could reveal the depredations of TOEFL English and promote COBUILD. English is the Exxon Mobil or Walmart of languages. The massive gravitational attraction of ETS, Kaplan, TOEFL, IELTS, SAT, and ACT costs students the opportunity to learn. The opportunity costs of English are those of a virtual predatory corporation larger than Walmart.
Now, it would be possible for admissions at USC to ask questions about my post. Instead of going to ground or hiding in a cardboard box.
#2 Posted by Clayton Burns, CJR on Thu 8 Sep 2011 at 01:16 PM
Isn't systematic humiliation that targets a particular ethnic group against the law? Somebody please give me a reality check here.
#3 Posted by Joanie, CJR on Fri 9 Sep 2011 at 04:49 PM