The Media & Racism

created by: Claudelle Busano

Racism in the United States and internationally is alive and well. It can be seen in the media, the community, at work, and at school. It is much more discreet now, than it was in the past. Yet, it is still there. It restricts the opportunities of minorities in politics, media, and the family.

Families are dysfunctional due to racism. The way the media portrayed many black families in the past were rather exaggerated. Certain television shows also had violence, which can have negative effects on a child’s fragile perception. Several television programs and the stereotype blacks as gangsters and ruffians that have nothing better to do other than cause chaos and devastation. The mass media also does not elaborate on stories involving blacks.

In most black communities, it was “bad” to be too black. This made it hard for black young men and women to look past their skin color and focus on their potential. The invisible skin barrier halted their eagerness to be successful. It landed them with minimum waged jobs, that have despicable benefits and roach-infested apartments.

The participation of African Americans in mass media was said to be on a rise. “Beginning in 1986, the Washington Post decided that 25 percent of new journalists hired would be minorities. In the first nine years, the paper brought in 98 minority group members and 232 whites…” (208). However, a survey was taken by the Minnesota Opinion Research Institute that discovered that minorities are pessimistic about their scenario. Minorities spend more time at the bottom than whites do. They even confront higher job standards than whites.

In all of mass media, blacks have a low representation. Minority journalists become enraged because they feel that their work is held in low esteem. When it comes to leadership positions like editors and owners, 2.7% of the nation’s broadcasting stations are black owned and are failing at their positions. Statistics show that 58% of African Americans want reporters of their ethnic group to cover reports on them. The reason being, that they believe a black reporter would give them more representation.

By 1997 a survey (distributed by the American Society of Newspaper Editors) was taken that showed that the number of minorities working in the news business had steadied. Five point four percent of African American was working in the newsroom. Many factors may have contributed to the decline but one significant reason would be that African Americans do not trust the media.

White Americans are afraid of African Americans. Their fears are so vast that it inhibits them from using common sense. In the end of 1989, a greatly publicized Boston murder took place. The wife of Charles Stuart was shot and killed and he was wounded. Mr. Stuart claimed that the attacker was black.

The police thoroughly searched a African American neighborhood that Mr. Stuart said the killer made him drive through, without asking any questions to verify his claims. Although Stuart’s story seemed suspicious, the newspapers and radio stations still publicized it without any doubts. However, evidence proved that Charles Stuart was the primary suspect. He ultimately killed himself.

Many African American leaders were infuriated by the police and media. They promptly sought out a black assailant even when there was evidence that verified who the murderer was. “The cultural camouflage for modern racism was apparent here: Apparently Stuart’s account of a brutal murder produced by an unknown black killer resonated for many journalists, encouraging them to succumb to racist interpretation” (214). The white society of Boston was so scared that they wholeheartedly believed that blacks were the root of all evil.

Blacks were stereotyped when it came to television. They were given small, non-important roles and were portrayed as dim-witted and deceitful. Racist overtones existed in many of the roles that African American played. When blacks were given those types of roles, it pushed people to believe that all blacks were like the ones on television. However, in 1956, the Nat King Cole Show debuted. It showed a black man in a no stereotypical way, but the program never excelled.

African Americans perceive a false identity when watching stereotyped shows. “Television can produce other distorted impressions. A study of African Americans concluded that heavy viewers were more inclined than light viewers to have mistaken impressions that, in real life, racial integration is extensive and most blacks are middle class”(220). These shows support no political activity that involved social justice and equality. They even promote confronting racism.

A child’s mind is like a sponge, it soaks up anything in its path. It is disturbing to see a child watch a stereotyped television show. African Americans in children’s shows are likely to be underprivileged, unemployed, or have a job with low income. Black parents and other concerned individuals are worried by the negative effects that these shows will have on their children’s self-esteem.

In 1997 to 1999, there was controversy over how to implement the Unites States Census for 2000. The issue was how many individuals would be counted. The Republican Party wanted to use the head by head method. However this method led to complications. In the 1990 census, the white middle class was over counted plus the underprivileged, the homeless, and African Americans were undercounted.

The problem the 2000 census faced was not actually how to count but whom to count. The Census Bureau, in 1997, recommended adding more ethnic classifications such as other, “multiracial” people. The “multiracial” possibility had mixed reviews. A trivial amount of people would call themselves “multiracial”. Also, the “multiracial” choice would require that uncounted races such as, Native Hawaiians, Creoles, and others, to be counted.

Opposition came from African American civil rights groups. Due to slavery and interracial marriages, Blacks were mixed with other ethnicities. It would ultimately lead up to great fractions of the black populace to be eradicated. “This was of particular concern since employment discrimination suits have often invoked census data when certain populations are seriously underrepresented in certain jobs compared to the proportion of those groups nationally”(2). This means that when is came to lawsuits; lawyers used the census to show that minorities were not denoted.

In addition to that, the government wondered if people of mixed background should be counted. Yet, who is the government to decide who is to be counted and who is not? “To put it bluntly, according to the Federal Government, multiracial people do not per se exist. Their bodies are evidence not of a new kind of racial identity, but the combination of pre-existing, knowable classes” (3). “Multiracial” individuals do not exist not because they are people of mixed race but because the government won’t count them.

The media has also caused dark African Americans to downplay their skin color. Light skinned African Americans could pass. Meaning they could cross the invisible color border. Light skinned African Americans could progress in the world. They could be successful entrepreneurs. Light skinned African Americans could be socially acceptable.

Dark African Americans were color conscience. Their dark skinned caused them to believe that they were inferior. In their opinion, dark skinned implied unattractiveness, inferiority, and archaic. A novel by the name of, The Blacker the Berry, is about, Emma Lou Morgan, a dark skinned child of a light skinned African American family. She becomes color conscience as he high school career comes to an end and her college career begins.

For Emma Lou, color is both causally connected to race and in excess of it. In some ways, color substitutes for race in Emma Lou’s understanding of hierarchy: being “too black” is evidence of a different identity from “Negro”. It separates her from her community and even her own family.(83)

As you can see, being “too black” gave Emma Lou a bad impression about herself and other dark African Americans.

Being “too black” was also like a curse. It allowed white people to hold the bar just out of their grasp. It kept dark African Americans from excelling in politics, their careers, and even in raising their families. Having a dark skin color also separated blacks from the public. Eventually dark African Americans wore “masks”. Their “masks” were their skin color and it shielded their pain and suffering. Women of dark color used cosmetics to “whiten” their skin tone. Yet, instead of embracing their rich, dark skin color they let it control and overrule their perception of themselves and others.

It is seen in South Africa that there is conflict between black and white journalist. Human rights violations occurred that these journalist had to report. Yet, the question was whose side to take? That was an easy decision to make in the past, but now with the end of apartheid it became harder for journalist to understand and report racial behavior.

In a situation where the victim becomes the attacker, it is not startling. Luckily black South Africans have not become racist towards their violators. Whites want forgiveness and reconciliation and white reporters say that “the story” is getting clichéd. However, black journalist want their story to be exposed so that the public can no the real truth. In Media and racism in Mandela's rainbow nation by Buy Berger, it states

All this means that the challenge for journalists is to report the whole process for the whole society, to find points of entry for the different race groups, and to try and take them to the whole multifaceted, multi-racial story from there.

So, there is this substantial communication challenge in understanding and reporting racial reconciliation - getting beyond the stereotypes and the racial divisions. But there is also the question of journalists' moral stand towards such an enterprise. For the media is not simply a bystander in this whole process. It has a history. And even though few journalists see a connection, there is a strong link between how journalists covered (or did not cover) racism and gross human rights violations in the past, and how they are responding now.

What the author means is that journalist lacked moral in the past. They chose not to reveal what their white counterparts did to innocent black South Africans.

The matter at hand for these journalist is how to convey the message of the past “in all their complexity”. Now, journalist wonder whether the media was a victim of racism or did it victimize. This a important question for them because if it was a victim then it should end racism between the people of South African, but if persecuted then should it not compensate for its’ actions?

Whites despise the fact that they may have African ancestry. The picture of a black God or the image of a black Uncle Sam is frightening for whites. It was said that our own president had relations with his black slave, Sally Hemings. For years people have wondered if the stories are true. There is only one way to prove if the stories are true and that is DNA testing.

Sally Hemings was brought to the Jefferson household by Jefferson’s wife, Martha Wayles Jefferson, who was also Sally’s half-sister. In 1786, Maria Jefferson went to France to join Thomas Jefferson and was accompanied by Sally Hemings. Around this time it was said that the liaison between Jefferson and Sally began. Sally gave birth to one child in Paris and gave birth to her daughter, Harriet (1795-1796) in Monticello. She had a son named Beverly (1798) and another daughter in 1799, but she died in infancy. She also gave birth to three more children, over a nine year period: a next Harriet (1801), Madison (1805), and Eston a boy (1808). Every single one of her children where conceived when Thomas Jefferson was in Monticello. The book, Technology And The Logic of American Racism, by Sarah E. Chinn reveals,

In the two centuries between the birth of Hemings’ children and the discovery of probable genetic connections between Jefferson’s and Hemings’ descendants, a bitter dispute raged over whether that involvement produced children. Muddying the controversy was the fact that the first suggestion that such a relationship had existed came from James Callendar, a previous Jefferson supporter, who in 1802 spread the story about Jefferson’s “------ children” with his slave “Ducky Sally” in an attempt to smear the then President …Jefferson’s “defenders” set the pattern for subsequent
biographers, claiming that such a relationship would have een “impossible.” (162)

As you can see, Jefferson supporters were under the impression that their president was honest and would not do such a thing.

However DNA testing can prove that Sally’s children were Jefferson’s sons and daughters.

…in late 1998, Eugene A. Foster and his colleagues revealed in Nature that the Y-chromosome DNA haplotypes (that is, specific sets if genetic arrangements) from male line descendants of Thomas Jefferson’s paternal uncle matched those of descendants of Hemings’ youngest son, Eston Hemings Jefferson. Foster and his team took samples from five male-line descendants of Field Jefferson, Thomas Jefferson’s uncle, five male-line descendants of the two sons of Thomas Woodson, who was identified as the child Sally Hemings conceived in France, and one male-line descendant of Eston Hemings Jefferson, as well as samples from three male-line descendants of the three sons of John Carr, the grandfather of Jefferson’s nephews Samuel and Peter who were also rumored to be the father(s) of Hemings’ children. Because a substantial amount of the Y-chromosome is passed relatively unchanged through generations from father to son, it is a reliable indicator of male-line relationship (Foster et al., 1998:27).
Jeffersons and the Woodson or Carr descendants, but did find significant correspondence between the Jefferson and Hemings descendants. (163)

What you may conclude from this is that Thomas Jefferson is most likely to be the father of Eston Hemings Jefferson.

The media is a terrifying tool. It can either glorify you or put you to shame. Unfortunately, it has made a mockery out of African Americans. They are seen are filthy, uneducated bastards. Futhermore, when violence erupts in the black community and pours out into the public, the media uses their ill-fated lives that they have, as an excuse.

In an essay by Stephen Balkaran, called Mass Media and Racism, he explains the causes of the riots in 1992, Los Angeles.

The media have not studied important events in the African-American community today. Issues such as urbanization, education, poverty, and other elements have a significant bearing on positions of the black community. A good example of this is the media portrayal of the Los Angeles riot in 1992.

Race was the visible catalyst, not the underlying cause, as media portrayed it to be. The portrayal of this individual event encouraged the perception that the black community was solely responsible for the riots and disturbances. According to reports, of those arrested, only 36% were black and of those arrested, more than a third had full-time jobs and most had no political affiliation. Some 60% of the rioters and looters were made up of Hispanics and whites. Yet the media did not report this underlying fact.

The media had a big role to play when reporting this story. They could have depicted the riot as the cause of racism, but they choose to show it in a negative light. As you can see, thirty-six percent of the African Americans that were involved in the riot were captured and a whooping sixty percent were Hispanics and whites.

The media ignored the underlying elements of the riot. Why would they not pay attention to the major fact, because of racism. Their bias view of blacks are seen in how they portray and treat them.

Finally, the media stereotypes the African American public. Racism is the leading factor that helps to contribute to the numerous amounts of stereotypes. Society cannot accept the fact that blacks can prosper and contribute much good to the world. Racism can affect a black individuals perspective of their community, themselves, and the future that they have. Needless to say, black and whites should try and see beyond color and try to look for harmony.

Works Cited List

1. Balkaran, Stephen .“Mass Media and Racism”. The Yale Political Quarterly . An Undergraduate Publication, Vol. 21, #1. October 1999. http://www.yale.edu/ypq/articles/oct99/oct99b.html

2. Berger, Guy . Media and Racism in Mandela's Rainbow Nation. http://journ.ru.ac.za/staff/guy/Research/Racism%20in%20the%20media/mandela.html

3. Chinn, Sarah E.. Technology and the Logic of American Racism. Sally R. Munt. London and New York: Continuum, 2000

4. Doob, Christopher Bates. Racism: An American Culture. Priscilla McGeehon. Addison New York: Wesley Longman, Inc., 1999