Discrimination Lies in the Media
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In the past week, we researched and surveyed
black Americans in the media. We saw and read
that black people are encountering discrimination
to television media. We have arrived at this thesis
after examining sample television shows and movies
that appear to portray black people as being violent,
ignorant, and racist themselves.
Movies have played a major roll in stereotyping black people as violent, ignorant, and racist. Such movies as _Hard Cover_, and _Point Blank_ have shown black people as a group infatuated with guns and drugs. This puts an image in the mind of the public that all black people fall under this stereotype. As one African-American youth stated in Oprah Winfrey's video special entitled _Shades of a Single Protein_, "take a thousand black men. One of them will do something unjust. The others abide the laws like every one else. People only see the bad side of the black race." Perhaps, if people who watch movies were shown the good side of Black America, then maybe people might change their point of view. In the movie _Sister Act II: Back in the Habit_. There is a clip were a young African American boy named Amal talks about his culture in his classes. There is a young white boy who talks and sings the way a black person is portrayed in the media. Amal gets angry and makes a comment: "First the white man takes away our freedom, now he is taking away our talk and walk." In this scenario, Amal is expressing an anger often felt by blacks: that whites do not respect their history or their culture. And this is what causes fights or arguments about racism. Both _Time_ and _Newsweek_ featured a story on the O.J. Simpson case. In both of these magazines O.J. is on the cover. In Time's _Seventy Years in Review_, there are only two black women shown on the front cover. Eight black men were featured on the cover of Time in seventy years. Martin Luther King Jr. graced the cover twice along with Nelson Mandela, who had the cover twice in the year 1990. That is very weird that there have been so few on the of Time Magazine. Black Americans in the media are portrayed as violent and ignorant characters. Television, television shows, and movies take black Americans make them look like terrible individuals. Only if the public would see the good and passionate side maybe they would see them differently. In magazines black Americans are slighted in fame. It seems that the only blacks featured on magazines are the famous ones themselves.
Hunter C. Please read a review of this essay by Russ Meritt To
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