Black people in media: How we are portrayed

I recently sent this email to friends on a listserve about my perceptions of black media portrayals. I've heard people mention that the negative images of black people in media are due to black people behaving badly. The reason this is a flawed analysis is because the media only focuses on less than 1% of what is going on with a particular group of people. The camera can't be on everyone. So, if there is a negative portrayal of a black man on CNN, it's because the producer has chosen to focus on that person. For every group, there is always going to be one idiot you can shine the light on to make the entire group look bad.

Anyway, here is the email. Enjoy!

Media is run and controlled by "others". There is not always racist intent, but the disease of racism has a long history and is quite strong in America and thus leads media executives and producers to see us in ways that are not quite accurate or versatile. Additionally, the likelihood that any minority group (whether it be African-Americans, pastors or pig farmers) being portrayed in a multidimensional, dynamic sense is quite low. The media picks a niche for each group and usually stays with it.....ie. I am rarely called by CNN because I am a finance professor (even though they know what I do for a living)....I am usually called because I am a black man and they have a black story and need a black guy like me to talk about it....a niche that I was placed in and not invited to step out of. I didn't mind it though, since I have been a black man for quite a while now. But when they've needed financial experts, their perception of a Finance Professor is a white man with a beard. I am not very good at being a white man.

So, black people end up fighting to keep rappers and athletes off the air so that we can present ourselves as a nation of doctors and lawyers (i.e. Oprah's approach). The truth is that we are all of these things, but that versatile nature of our existence is typically constrained by the media bottleneck created through our lack of access to radio and television networks. That is why I agree with Jesse Jackson's fight to get the FCC to open up media access for people of color, so that we can see every angle of our people, from the glorious and glamorous to the gritty and the grimy. I also support Bob Johnson and Oprah's recent filmmaking efforts, as this may have been why there were so many great black Christmas movies this year. All aspects of blackness are getting more airtime, and it's not the white execs that are choosing to do this. They are actually being educated by Oprah, Tyra, Johnson and Perry, since they are as much victims of historical racism as we are.

The only group that gets potrayed in a diverse fashion by white media, in my opinion, are white men. We see the best and worst of them in media (from Dog the Bounty Hunter and Scott Baio to Stephen King and Lou Dobbs - 35 of the 37 shows on the major networks are hosted by white males, 2 of them by white females, and none of them by African-Americans, Latinos or Native Americans). But black people shall remain one dimensional until and unless we find our own channels of media access. When you continue playing the game on someone else's court, you will probably never win.