Think and Write...

...with a nod to Bjelic and Baudrillard.

The issue of racism is one of perception. Orientalism, for example, is problematic because we in the west only understand the orient through the works of Western men who explored the lands during the colonial era. Thus, all knowledge created at this time of intellectual exploration, and all subsequent knowledge built off of the initial corpus, was written and interpreted from the hegemons perspective. This means that we only have a single, ideologically infused, perspective from which to analyze the data, to acquire and understand the information.

Reality is created through the relationship between the signifier and the signified: the signifier is the language that creates the object, the signified is our experiential understanding of the object (our understanding via interaction). In other words, we know it is coffee because we have language to define it (the signifier), we have our understanding of it through language (the signified), and the third component is its physical root / manifestation, the referent.

Hyper Reality is when reality becomes more real than reality itself. Said differently, this is when the signifier becomes the referent to its self. Reality in this context is totally detached from any actual physical reality. Mickey Mouse has no physical referent, rather it is real only because of its signifier: a drawing of a mouse. Yet, you can now go to Disney Land and chill with the Mouse, shake its hand etc. Hyper Reality occurs when the signifier tells us how to understand an image that has no referent.

We can watch a media image totally unconnected to the narrative, but assume it fits the narrative by virtue of its ‘representativeness’ of the the narrative, and through the language of the narration. In one news report the sniper is a Serb, but when the same image is recycled on another channel, the sniper becomes a Bosnian-Muslim. Thus our racism must also be only a flawed perception of this other. Our perception is not rooted in reality, particularly when our understanding of the other is created through portals of hyper reality such as mass media.