Henry A Giroux
Channel Surfing: Race Talk and the Destruction of Today’s Youth
South Yarra, Victoria: Macmillan, 1997
ISBN 0-333-72025-3
224pp
A $39.95

Uploaded 16 April 1999

American society currently “exudes both a deep-seated hostility and chilling indifference toward youth,” (37) according to Henry A. Giroux. Why? In large part because the dominant media in the United States have created a culture that denies youth opportunities to participate meaningfully in society. They have excluded student activists, appropriated their history to sell Nike shoes, and have demonized the young by linking them to unsafe sex, illegal drug use, and social instability. They have portrayed “a generation mired in nihilism, sloth, and narcissism.” (66) Moreover, they have given support to “the right-wing agenda toward race relations” (173) which has had devastating consequences for African-American youth. (83)

Little doubt exists in these pages about who is responsible for creating this bleak media culture. The villains include Newt Gingrich and the “Bob Dole/Ralph Reed crowd,” (71) Jesse Helms, William Bennett, and in general, the “culture of Reaganism” (13). They also include “the profit-driven world of advertising and fashion” (21); Hollywood film makers who create entertainment “devoid of the moral and political obligations of citizenship, social responsibility and democracy” (37); and such writers as Dinesh d’Souza, author of The End of Racism , who together with Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein, who wrote The Bell Curve, have given a pseudo-scientific veneer to contemporary racism.

Channel Surfing is based on published sources and is divided into seven uneven chapters. Chapter One discusses ads for Calvin Klein jeans. Giroux believes that such advertising contributes to a popular culture that “increasingly teaches kids to gaze inwardly at the body as a fashionscape, a stylized athletic spectacle, or as a repository of desires that menace, disrupt, and undermine public life through acts of violence or predatory sexuality.” (32) The following chapter considers the demonization of the young and discusses Larry Clark’s film Kids (1995) and the British picture Trainspotting (1996). The treatment of movies continues in Chapter Four, “White noise”. At forty-seven pages, this chapter is much too long, but does contain an interesting discussion of how “whiteness” is defined in such films as Suture (1993) and Dangerous Minds `(1995). In the latter picture, Michelle Pfeiffer’s character portrays whiteness “as the archetype of rationality” while the movie suggests that consumerism can motivate students. (112) The consideration of mass media’s treatement of race carries over into Chapter Six, “Playing the race card”, which is perhaps Giroux’s weakest chapter. Here he argues that media response to the verdict in the O.J. Simpson murder trial betray “the complicitous role of the dominant media with right-wing conservatives who are intent on mobilizing white anxiety and racial panic as part of a broader assault on democratic public life.” (174)

If a healthier society is to be created, then public intellectuals must play a more decisive role, Giroux believes. He sees the student activism of the 1960s as a valuable model for engaging contemporary youth in social and political issues. Chapter Three, “Bashing the sixties”, attempts to restore that decade as a time of genuine “democratic public culture” (80) and it serves as prologue to his discussion in chapter five of public intellectuals, people he argues who must be willing “to contest the cult of professional expertise and specialization with its emphases on heirarchy, competitiveness, and objective, dispassionate research” (168). Among Giroux’s heroes are Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Edward Said, Toni Morrison, Henry Louis Gates Jr., and others who have been willing to “use their scholarship as a tool in order to address the most pressing social issues of the time” (166) Needed, in the author’s opinion, are intellectuals who can resist the temptations of media celebrity, universities that are more than cheering squads for the corporate sector, and academic life that is linked “to the moral horizon of public responsibility and progressive social change” (140).

This book suffers from a lack of rigorous analysis and historical perspective. Just who “the dominant media” are is never fully explained. Does it make sense to talk of “the dominant media” when, as the author acknowledges (82), new electronic technologies are making it increasingly possible for young people to create their own publications, music, and television programs? While there is surely some truth in the author’s assertions, about popular culture, his examination never goes deep enough to prove a causal connection between it and the neoconservatives he vilifies, nor does it establish the repreentativeness of the films that are discussed. Fears that popular culture damage the young are much older than this work suggests. In 1912, for example, the social reformer Jane Addams wrote that movies filled youthful minds with that which was “filthy and poisonous”. Nor did the vilifacation of the young begin again with the Reagan years. The association of youth with social unrest appeared in 1968 with campaign ads for then presidential candidate Richard Nixon that linked student protests and riots with the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

Some of Giroux’s most interesting and important points are buried in this work. One of the wisest pieces of advice appears on page 33, and urges educators and other reform-minded people to teach media literacy to students. This task involves not only learning how media messages are constructed, but also how to use the new multimedia that since the 1960s has revolutionized communications.

In his call for filmmakers to reflect more on the moral and political implications of their work (61), and for them to pay more attention to the values of citizenship and democracy, the author may share more ground in common with Bob Dole and other like-minded convservatives than he might care to admit. Unfortunately, any effort to explore that common ground is obscured by a narrative that divides issues so sharply between two camps, one right, the other wrong.

Stephen Vaughn