This wonderful piece of news reporting is written using the highly troubling term of “illegal immigrant.” This is consistent with The New York Timesand the AP stylebooks, which recommend the term illegal immigrant over other terms. I believe the use of this term makes both institutions complicit in the normalization of nativist language. Ironically, nativism, which proposes that the United States should remain mono-ethnic, is clearly not a majoritarian political position, but nativist language has become the rule in the public sphere and Alabama is its product. Mr. Robertson may indeed not embrace nativist principles, but his newspaper will not allow him to write this into his news and instead will force him to write his piece with nativist terminology.

Being attentive to the public sphere means also being attentive to the ways in which self-regulated media industries, such as printed news, regulate racialized discourse. Since 2005 to the present, the discourse of nativism has dominated our news landscape and has strongly influenced institutional policies, foreclosing the possibility of using majoritarian news outlets to launch a pro-immigrant rights offensive. This is evidenced in the way the basic terminology of “illegal immigrant” has become regulated intothe normal journalistic practices of printed news outlets. In 2008, the AP Stylebook, one of the key sources for journalistic language use, approved this problematic term and assured that the term “illegal immigrant” should be preferred over illegal alien or undocumented worker. Although the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, Asian American Journalists Association, Native American Journalist Association, and National Association of Black Journalists have strong guidelines on the matter (always avoid “illegal immigrant”, “illegal”, and “illegal alien”), these organizations have clearly lost the battle and today these terms can be heard in Fox, yes, but also in ABC, CNN, they can be read in The Washington Postand even the paper nativists love to hate, The New York Times. The result is a public sphere that normalizes derogatory language against the advice of all minority journalistic organizations.

These uses have real effects in the public sphere, shaping the way discourses about immigration are created and recreated. I teach a class called Latina/o Media Studies, and my students cannot immediately see the logic of why I am asking them to use “undocumented” instead of “illegal” in their papers. “They did cross the border illegally, didn’t they?” is often their argument. Moreover, in the last few years I have witnessed my students reproduce the notion that there are only two types of people, citizens and “illegals,” often forgetting that most Latina/o immigrants who are not citizens are here with legal documents such as green cards. So, when they hear the term non-citizen they also hear “illegal,” a racialized mental schema that proves that the normalization of nativist terminology and the tone of hegemonic discourse around immigration have profound repercussions in their juridical subjectivities. Why should the subjectivities of people in Alabama be any different?

I encourage readers of this post to read the reasons why these terms matter at the National Association of Hispanic Journalists.

At the Movies

The few, which include Scott and Phillips, are a dying breed, a group of often academically trained critics who tend to place film within histories, industrial traditions, aesthetic structures, and broad social and political concerns. They are being replaced by a new generation of young technocrats whose sole expertise seems to be to summarize, to decide whether they liked the film or not, and to put together websites. I think I know where these young technocrats come from.

Some of us suspect, and Scott let’s on that much, that Siskel and Ebert, the creators of At the Movies, were the beginning of the end. With their attempts at creating criticism for the masses who apparently needed the final dictum to be a binary sign, the “thumbs up” or the “thumbs down,” Siskel and Ebert redefined criticism. Who could imagine that a film critic, a master of words and images, would resort to the crudest form of communication to do final praise or condemnation? Siskel and Ebert, who perhaps mistook their task to popularize as a task for diluting the intellectual and affective power of criticism, benefited from this and their thumbs became the brand of their intellect.

Why did they allow it? Who would want her/his intellect to be represented by thumbs up or down? For years, these thumbs affected box office success and were reproduced in other media to signify film curatorial arbitration. These thumbs made careers and broke them, but their power went beyond; these thumbs came to be equated to film criticism.

For roughly ten years I have taught film classes in three fine institutions of higher learning (University of Texas at Austin, Southwestern University, and University of Virginia) and in all of these institutions I thumb-wrestled with Siskel and Ebert and, too often, they won. My students have regularly reduced the task of criticism to making flipping remarks on taste and writing petulant evaluations of film quality based on gut-feelings, a la Romanesque. My job doubles, for I not only have to teach to understand criticism as the intellectual practice of locating a film text into historical and contemporary contexts, but I also have to help my students unlearn the vices and schemas about criticism that they have grown up with, thanks to popular film criticism.

I am sorry Scott. I also thumb-wrestle with you and I do not feel particularly sorry for having your show cancelled. But of course, I did not win. The technocrats won.

Metacritic.com is one of the most popular places for people to go and make sense of movies. I cannot call it criticism; not even the creators of metacritic.com can. But it performs this role just the same; with simple signs and colors, metacritic.com scouts a world of signs and evaluates them using algorithms and mathematical formulas that end up signifying taste. From 0 to 100, they have 50 times more subtlety than Siskel and Ebert.