(1981) - The Whites of their eyes: racist ideologies and the media - Stuart Hall

Cultural theorist Stuart Hall argues in his 1981 essay "The Whites of Their Eyes: Racist Ideologies and the Media" that racism in media doesn't only appear as open prejudice, it also operates through what he calls "inferential racism": assumptions so embedded in everyday coverage that they pass as neutral fact rather than a point of view. Hall shows how news and entertainment routinely encode racial hierarchy into decisions that look purely editorial — who gets interviewed, whose perspective is treated as objective, what goes unquestioned. He argues that this kind of racism is harder to see or challenge precisely because it isn't framed as an opinion that could be wrong — it's framed as simply how things are.