Thread by @AnechoicMedia_

CNN reports on a horrific story of "church leaders" enslaving homeless people, imprisoning them, and harvesting their welfare benefits.

But they left part of the story out -- they didn't include a single defendant's name. Why might that be?

CNN is exploiting the racial coding of religion in America to prime the reader to imagine white Christian people, to associate them with nonwhite crimes.

Naming or showing the abusers would have the opposite effect as intended.

CNN story here:
cnn.com/2019/09/10/us/…

What a diverse crowd of offenders we have here. Some are named Gonzales with an 's', others are named Gonzalez with a 'z'. Huge difference!

This story is appalling, and its political salience is undeniable.

We all know how this story would be framed (and amplified) if the abusers imprisoning poor people, robbing them, and telling them to focus on the bible instead of complaining, were white Americans.

The story is having the intended effect - Reddit frontpaged it and top comments focus exclusively on white-coded aspects of "religion", complaining about "values", Jesus, Christians, etc -- completely missing that this "church" mainly existed on paper, to benefit Mexican abusers.

This is far from the only "immigrants bringing slavery back to America" story in recent years.

Migrants from beyond the Americans continue the tradition of bondage when they arrive, buying poor workers from families in their home countries, keeping them as unpaid help for years.

Sorry, that should say "beyond the Americas".

Household "help" from the home country that doesn't get paid is less of a South American thing, and more of an overseas thing.