The Media: Warped Representations
By: Jelani Spencer-Joe
Madelyn Saddler is a mother of two children and a woman of mixed race. She is both African American and white, but she grew up with her Irish grandmother in the suburbs of Connecticut.
"I identified with white music and white culture because I was always around white people." Saddler said. "I wasn't treated differently and I didn't experience prejudice because most of my friends I had known since I was about four."
As a young woman of mixed race growing up, Saddler didn't really have many African American role models to look up to.
She understands that there are constant stereotypes of black people in the media.
"I didn't really look up to actors or actresses. I was strictly into fashion," she said. "I was always reading fashion magazines so some of the people I looked up to were black models like Iman and Beverly Johnson."
Over the years, portrayals have changed toward the depiction of African Americans who have made their mark in society, but it still falls short, according to experts.
Since African Americans weren't really portrayed much in the media, they had to come
up with their own ways of getting their culture out there and letting others see and learn about it.
Dr. Charles P. Henry, is the chair of African American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. In an email interview with him, he stated, "Whites have had their own magazines for many years," he said. "That is why Ebony and Jet were created by John Johnson. The white magazines only carried bad news about blacks and nothing socially uplifting."
But even though Africans Americans have done this to overcome the prejudice as a race, they still struggle in many ways.
The distorted images of blacks had been highlighted in the Doll Theory experiment, which was conducted in 1940 by Kenneth and Mamie Clark. They asked children about white and black dolls. The results of this experiment were that 63 percent of the children would rather have played with the white dolls and 44 percent of the African American children identified more with the white dolls when asked which doll looked most like them. Today in society, "Blacks would be more likely to identify with a black doll today," stated Henry.
However, mainstream media have continued to present a distorted image of black culture.
The constant negative portrayal of the black community could have an adverse impact on the economics of black families.
According to the Agence France-Presse (AFP), an international news agency, blacks continue to earn far less than whites. The median annual income for a black household in 2009, the most recent year for which statistics were available, was $33,463 while for whites it was $54,671, AFP states.
It also states that homeownership is affected. For instance, less than half of blacks and Hispanics owned their own home, compared to two thirds of white families, the report found. In fact, the only areas in which inequalities have narrowed between minorities and whites are negative issues such as unemployment, lack of health insurance and the incarceration rate.
