Channel Surfing: Racism, the Media, and the Destruction of Today's Youth - Softcover

Giroux, Henry A.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0312214448 ISBN 13: 9780312214449

Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin, 1998

Synopsis

Kate Moss wears a sexual pout in a Calvin Klein ad. Kurt Cobain's suicide is held aloft as the archetypal example of teen alienation. What truth, if any, is contained in these depictions of today's youth? What message about our children is being transmitt

About this title

Review:

The two sections of Channel Surfing, dealing respectively with youth culture and racial politics, may not appear to have much in common with each other at first. But Henry A. Giroux has an underlying class critique that binds them together. Young people are being barraged, he argues, by consumer culture messages that consistently identify them as alienated outcasts. They are also being assaulted by racial messages "targeting black youth as criminals while convincing working-class white youth that blacks and immigrants are responsible for the poverty, despair, and violence that have become a growing part of everyday life in American society." Although the balance between academic jargon and pop culture is somewhat precarious, Giroux's thesis is packed with the consideration of detail that marks useful cultural criticism.

About the Author:

Henry A. Giroux holds the Global Television Network Chair in Communications in the Faculty of Humanities at McMaster University in Canada. He is the author of many books, including Stealing Innocence, The Abandoned Generation, and Take Back Higher Education

About this edition

• Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0312214448
• ISBN 13: 9780312214449
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 256