by Heather Louise Lawton
(circa 2013)
Many pundits have been adamant about eliminating racism due to the first African-American president elected not once but twice by the American people. During Barack Hussein Obama’s presidency, how the world views Afro-Americans has not changed. Racism still exists. The proof is incontrovertible—racist emails about the first family passed around in congress, President Obama mistaken for the valet parking attendant in Cuba, and an erroneous assumption of his wife, First Lady Michelle Obama as the sales associate in a store. There is a sundry of reasons why racism is so prevalent in the United States. Still, when different races are stereotyped internationally, the media in all forms often create, support, and move images of people that are so immensely powerful, these depictions place individuals, particularly black people, in one category regarding racism—enemy.
Late comedian Richard Pryor gave a very heartfelt description of his visit to Africa. He was an entertainer who practically binged on the word “nigger” in his performances preceding his trip to the motherland. After his return to America, he vowed never to use the epithet again. In a 2005 New York Times article titled, The N-word and Richard Pryor, Derrick Z. Jackson writes, “Richard Pryor’s death puts hip-hop’s exploitation of the N-word into painful relief. In 1993, Snoop Dogg said he used the word because ‘it’s me.’ In 1996, Def Jam founder Russell Simmons said, “When we say ‘nigger’ now, it’s very positive. Now all white kids who buy into hip hop culture call each other ‘nigger’ because they have no history with the word other than something positive…When black kids call each other ‘a real nigger’ or ‘my nigger,’ it means you…have your own culture that you invent so you don’t have to buy into the U.S. culture that you’re not really a part of. It means we’re special…”
Hip-Hop music has done nothing to ease the tensions of racism. It constantly perpetuates the myth that everything black is woeful. These untruths and stereotypes hip-hop and rap music create pulls at the filament of the African-American fabric to a point where we are seen globally as a people to be devalued and unworthy of respect. From Habermas to Get Rich or Die Tryin’: Hip-Hop, the Telecommunications Act of 1996, and the Black Public Sphere, Akilah N. Folami details the global societal impact of hip-hop. Folami refers to Chris Richburg & Clarence Burke’s, Oprah Responds to Hip Hop Criticism stating, “Oprah described a trip she made to South Africa, in which a security guard for African political leader, Nelson Mandela greeted her and her group by saying ‘Hello, Niggas!’ She explained… "The guard thought it was the norm because rap music and videos had a global and international audience who may not be aware of the long history of the word in America, or its arguable entertainment value…(p. 284).” Along with the word “nigger” permeating the airwaves in music and embraced by all groups of people, but only used against black people, the degradation of black women is boldly present in hip-hop.
In his 1962 speech, Who Taught You to Hate Yourself, late Muslim leader, Malcolm X exclaimed, “The most disrespected and unprotected person in America is the black woman.” Hip-Hop music has ensured Malcolm X’s proclamation on a global level. Nearly 24 hours a day on the radio, black women, specifically, can be heard calling themselves and identified by others as bitches and ho’s. The global sales of hip-hop, according to Billboard.com, are approximately $1.1 billion annually. Along with an assorted mix of online commercial music streaming services such as Spotify, Napster, and SoundCloud, the mediums for globally obtaining and sharing music glorifying the dehumanization of black women are endless. Many defenders of hip-hop music claim violent images in film have a much more negative impact on the reputation of black people than any images they could ever record in a music studio.
D. W. Grifith’s, Birth of a Nation, a 1915 film that is filled with racist stereotypes, portrays black men as white-women-hungry animals that scurry around capturing and raping the white man’s woman. The film shows a pre-reconstruction era where black men sit in congress eating fried chicken and throwing the bones onto the floor. These idiotic depictions may have been how Griffith saw black people, but his most important feat was that the world view black people as uncouth buffoons who are reckless savages and need to be on a tight leash guided by intelligent civilized white men with character.
Walt Disney characters are not innocent in their indoctrination of race either. In Disney’s animated production of Pocahontas, the audience sees darker-skinned Indian women who are depicted as asexual. Their features are not as fine as Pocahontas’ (not that this is a negative), and one female character is overweight, always being made the undesirable buffoon throughout the film. In Susan J. Douglas book, Where the Girls Are, her theory is that Disney stereotypically describes the black woman drawn in The Little Mermaid, "...an older, overweight woman with too much purple eyeshadow and eyeliner, a female octopus who craves too much power and whose nether regions evoke the dreaded vagina dentate (p.295).” Douglas continues with her address of race differences, “…But since the sexuality of black people has always been deeply threatening to white folks, black characters in polar culture also have been desexualized, the earth-mother mammy being a classic example (p. 95).”
From Hattie McDaniel —consistent in playing the role of the overweight maid with broken grammar and caretaker of white women and their children in films—to Sherri Shepherd and Sheryl Underwood—the overweight, loud, obnoxious black women on the talk-show circuits. The message from Hollywood and television executives appears to be that the black woman is not only asexual but is present merely for comic relief. One would think news publications would be slightly more responsible, considering they are “news” publications.
But, sadly, they have added to the black and white pathology regarding race, which hasn’t been as effective as they could have on an international level. In 1994, America became polarized by the O.J. Simpson trial—a black athlete, Simpson, was accused of a double homicide, included his white wife, Nicole Brown Simpson. The country's deep divide was apparently too tempting for the media to pass up without toying with a few stereotypes.
Time Magazine featured the O. J. Simpson story and profiled the athlete in their weekly issue. The cover caused much controversy. It appeared that Time darkened Simpson’s LA Police Department mugshot. Some critics said it made him look extremely “menacing.” On Arogundade.com, Ben Arogundade wrote, “The photo manipulation of Simpson rendered his blackness both unequivocal and menacing, in a murder case already infused with race—with Simpson, the black defendant, accused of murdering his blonde white wife." Dark skin has always been somewhat frowned upon and does not seem to be deteriorating, partly because of antics like the Time Magazine debacle. Arogundade furthers his theory...“Time’s controversial cover would probably have gone unnoticed if Newsweek’s version had not appeared simultaneously, allowing readers to instantly compare the two mugshot executions… the bosses at Time gave the photograph to graphic artist Matt Mahurin to ‘interpret.’ ‘I wanted to make it more artful, more compelling,’ he suggested.”
A decade later, The Onion's online paper called 9-year-old black actress and Academy Award-nominated Quvenzhane Wallis, a “cunt,” giving the world the notion that they [media] have been comfortable with stereotypes and offensive labels when referencing black people for years.
In the United States, athletes are treated like gods, and children are supposed to be off limits. But, neither have been able to escape the racist clutches of the media when their desire is to perpetuate hackneyed ideas about people of color.
On January 19, 2009 Barack Hussein Obama was sworn in as the 44th as the first African-American President of the United States. Prior to that, The New Yorker placed a cartoon of Obama and his wife on its cover. The illustration showed the the senator donning a turbine and Michelle wearing a large afro with an AK-47 in her hand and a round of bullets draped over her chest. The publication's idea was to lampoon every insane untruth U.S. citizens had about the candidate. But, could this stunt be one of the reasons more threats on the former senator’s life had been made than any other president and candidate before him? The media also reported that most of those death threats were racially charged. With the world watching, we read news about his uphill battles with republicans; the emails passed between senators about chicken and watermelon being served at the White House; images of the First Family portrayed as apes.
The media obliged businessman Donald Trump, putting a microphone to his mouth, allowing him to publicly humiliate the president by demanding Mr. Obama show his birth certificate. President Obama eventually acquiesced, becoming the first and only president to date to prove his citizenship. When our president visits foreign lands, how is the world supposed to acknowledge him after such a debasement? A recent trip to Cuba should at least make eager liberals who believe that racism everywhere is oblivious because America has elected its first black president doubtful. On his visit to Cuba, President Obama was mistaken for a parking attendant.
Twenty four-hour cable news stations are the lead in reporting breaking news. Social media is growing every day and many content creators have stepped into the role of investigative journalists, reporting stories and humanizing the subjects in a way legacy media fails to.
The death of Eric Garner, a Long Island man who allegedly was selling cigarettes, was approached, put in a chokehold, and killed by New York City Police Officers. The action was captured on video, giving the public a virtual snuff film, with visual and audio of Garner telling the officers, “I can’t breathe.”
International media gives us a window into different corners of the world and the reactions of its inhabitants to human behavior in America. Blacks, Whites, Hispanics, and people in other countries feel the pain of the disenfranchised and the weary in the United States. The media does not bear the responsibility of eradicating racism. But they should.
