Black in America: Media Edition

During the first Race, Gender, Media class of the semester our discussion primarily focused on the perceptions of Blacks in the media. As a young Black female, I found this particularly interesting.

The video we watched in class confirmed the bias of the media. The bias being Black portrayed negatively in the media, more specifically prime time news. As the video progressed, I could only recount personal experiences and correlate them with the findings.

Growing up, I went to a school that was predominately white. I was part of a sprinkle of pepper in a sea of salt, so to speak. Many times, my friends would commend me on being the  "friendly black woman." They would mention a part of town as the "ghetto" and how only people who lived there were poor, on welfare, and black. Interesting enough, I had several family members who lived on that side of town. Some wealthy, some poor. But what bothered me was the lack of acknowledgement that other races besides Black lived in the "ghetto." Crime was being committed by people of all colors and races, yet the only race we heard about on a daily basis was African-American.

Surely one cannot miss the correlation between how the "White" part of town viewed the "ghetto" and the media's perception of the ghetto.

In my opinion, its like a self-fulling prophecy. Because Blacks were portrayed as weak, violent, uneducated people, that is how they felt they should act.