ABSTRACT
People in developing countries oppressed because of their religion, class, race, ethnicity, and the like were, until quite recently, “invisible,” to borrow Ralph Ellison’s term (2002). This invisibility is similar for the oppressed in the American story. Cable news operating globally, cell phones, satellites, and the Internet operating twenty-four hours daily, seven days a week, link even the remotest corners of the planet. The modern media enable us to see America yesterday in today’s stories drawn from around the globe, particularly in developing countries. We seldom stop, however, to realize that it does match many aspects of the American reality at various stages of our development painful though that reality may currently be. Progress often appears to be slow and uneven as in our own program of building a more perfect union.
