Saturday, December 20, 2008

The Media’s Misinterpretation and Effect on Black America

There is a part of me that doesn’t want to let the last blog post go (see below: “Intelligent Black People…an Oxymoron?”) - partially because the relationship between the media and Black America has always fascinated me, and partially because the media’s warped interpretation of Black America (particularly how it chooses to portray it) has boggled my mind for quite some time.

The most recent situation that hit this particular nerve of mine happened several months ago, when I sat down with a group of young African-American girls, who upon being asked what they wanted to be when they grew up, stated that they wanted to be singers. Out of some frustration with that answer, I gently suggested, “how about a doctor or lawyer?” (This isn’t because I have a particular bias towards those two careers – I just figured I would throw something else out there on the table!). One little girl smushed up her nose at me and said, “Eww! Doctor? Gross! I don’t want to deal with blood!” Feeling empathetic to her response, I suggested: “How about a lawyer?” This adorable little girl just looked at me with somewhat of a blank stare, and shrugged. When I asked someone from the community about their responses, the individual basically said, "What else do you expect when these children don't have other major examples in their community or in society that would suggest that they could be something other than a singer or basketball player?" When I responded that women like Condoleeza Rice or Colin Powell could potentially serve as role models (leaving their politics out of it), he politely told me that their potential effect has been slight in urban America.

I have to admit – I don’t think that the media is completely to blame for how it portrays Black America. Why? Because on some level, Black America doesn’t completely reject it. In fact, I would argue that on some level it absorbs the media’s interest in shaping what it means to be “cool”: which pretty much means, mirror the image and perhaps the career of Michael Jordan, Keyshia Cole, Beyonce, Ashanti, or Lil’ Wayne. Many people complain about the misogynistic lyrics in rap/hip hop lyrics, and wonder what happened to the old school flavors of hip hop and rap “back in the day” (the 1980s and 1990s ☺). Many people also wonder why black youth label sometimes label their friends who want to pursue an education as “trying to be white.” Despite this discomfort sizzling and buzzing about among Black Americans, there seems to be little effort to fight its very image in the media. Perhaps they figure its not worth the effort, they may not win, or perhaps they don’t care enough to bother.

If change is going to happen in the media, perhaps the reality in Black American culture has to take a dramatic paradigmatic shift before positive changes reflect back through the television set and radio. I’ve recently heard a few people emphatically suggest that more Black Americans truly have to embrace the value of education in order to create the paradigm shift. And yes, they then followed that statement up by suggesting that the election of Barack Obama to the Oval Office could have potentially marked the beginning of the shift. I hope so – only time will tell what really happened, and where Black America goes from here, and how its image is shaped through various media channels in society today.