That's So Black

I want to jump into this dicussion sparked by Darnell Hunt in "Making Sense of Blackness on Television" for a second. I feel like so much effort is focused on race in the world and as a person who has grown up outside the major civil right movement one thing that I always used to say to myself was, "Why don't people just stop talking about it so much? If we just stopped making a big deal about race it might not be such a problem. People aren't racist like they used to be." And on some level I think there is a bit of truth to that statement. However, there's a lot that I didn't consider up until that point. Racism exists in a different form today than it did in the generations prior. It's much less blatant and a lot more structural. It's kind of like racism in disguise. I read an article by an author named McIntosh entitled "White Priviledge" and another by an author, Crenshaw, called "Intersectionality" and they both deal with the some of the different forms of discrimination that exist in our modern society.

McIntosh talks about the term "passive racism." A lot of us don't see ourselves as racist people. It's a terrible thing to associate yourself with, so which such a negative stigma attached to it, none of us want to be labeled that way. However, we see racism as something more active than it really has to be--we see it as actively expressing hate towards another race by verbally or physically assaulting them. Though many of us are morally above such acts, we fail to consider the fact that we are structurally racist. By owning a house and accepting certain advantages that structurally disadvantage blacks and other minorities, we are feeding into a racist system. But it's hard to consider yourself a racist just because you want a good life for yourself. We think, "It's not my fault that owning a house in a rich white community is somehow indirectly inhibiting someone else from living a similar life style."

Crenshaw simply addresses the idea of intersectionality. The idea that someone can belong to more than one disadvantaged group and get double or tripley screwed over. For example, there are systems in place to help black people get a fair opportunity at jobs. In a way that's great. But what about when you are black and a woman. You go for an interview for a company who is trying to be fair racially and lose the job to a black male. Then you go to an interview to a job that is trying to be fair by gender and you lose to a white woman. You are at the intersection of two or more disadvantaged groups and there is little, if anything at all in place in society to work in the favor of someone at this kind of cross roads.

This shows that there are many forms of racism out there. Which leads to the question what exaclty is racism? Or even more, what is race? Well for one I beleive race is something that is far more socially constructed than a natural thing. Sure some people are clearly darker than others and many black people have signature features like thier tight curly hair, but there is SO much in between ground that it's hard to really create such rigid categories of race. Too often, black and white are seen as binary, mutually exclusive groups. Its like black way over here, and white way over there, and everything else in the middle kind of gets forgotten. Culture is continuously growing and changing, but somewhere along the line white became symbolic for European, civilized, and rational; while black became Africa, slavery, savage. This is anything but a natural interpretation. Humans have created these views through our history. In reality, race is made up by us. We then take it a step further by encoding terms like "good schools" or "bad neighborhoods" with racial implications when in reality it probably has a lot more to do with income level than race. The touble is that income level is not tangible or visible to the naked eye, but the color of your skin is. So a symbol is created. The signifier the color and the signified poverty and all th ehardships and problems that come with it. This is very inaccurate though and leads to poor judgement and stereotype within a society.

And that leads us to another question. If race is socially constructed, where are the messages coming from that are being used to construct it, or at least reinforce the construction already there. The answer is in large part the medium of popular television. I love Hunt's quote: (click)
It acknowledges that TV may not be trying to mold our society, but "for better or worse" it is. A large part of the message we get of what it is to be "black" or "white" comes from television. Just yesterday I watched an episode of Family Guy and Stewie (a talking infant) grabbed a gun and pointed it. Brian (his talking dog) said, "C'mon you don't know how to use that thing." Then Stewie replied, "Oh really? What if I hold it sideways like a black guy!" (as he turns his wrist). We are bombarded with both negative and positive images of race that without media interpretation are neither inherently good or bad. But when most of the criminals shown on TV are black, that has some sort of repercussion on our view of race. Races in popular media are seen as rigid groups you either belong to or don't, but the truth is most of us don't fit specifically into any one single grouping. Media and politics like to lump us together; it makes it a lot easier. How race is depicted on TV plays a big role in how we come to understand its role in society, so it is important that the images we are shown and stories we are told are accurate, althought they often aren't. What we percieve as a "black" way to dress is heavily influenced by media images. Unfortunately, messages on TV tend to stay the same because the people making the final decisions stay the same (usually rich white men). People's jobs depend on the industry that works--not changing it. So you can see why switching to a more comprehensive depiction of race on TV is not an easy task.