Or, Study Confirms What Feminists Were Saying The Whole Time, News At Eleven.
White men tend to feel better about themselves once they watch media; however, black men and women of all races tend to feel worse about themselves.
And the gender aspect is interesting. Both black girls and white girls tended to see the same roles, which concentrated more than their looks than their abilities. However, black boys tended to see roles where they were depicted as “hoodlums and buffoons” who couldn’t be expected to aspire to anything in life.
Even worse, the black children spent on average ten more hours a week watching TV, so they get even more time to absorb helpful messages about how worthless they are. Yay.
Racism is gendered! It’s gendered in a way that sucks for men (and also, of course, sucks for women. Racism just kinda sucks in general). Because we don’t have a whole lot of characters of color that don’t fit in horrible, embarrassing stereotypes, we don’t have a lot of black men for young black boys to look up to. (Or people of other races– I’m pretty sure Avatar singlehandedly tripled the number of Asian characters on American children’s television.)
Whenever people have this sort of discussion, other people will be all “why can’t you just identify with characters that don’t look like you?” But the thing is it’s a natural urge to want to see your stories, your voices, represented in the media. Just look at the number of people with more invisible marginalizations who end up declaring characters to share their marginalization. Mentally ill people diagnose characters with mental illness. Asexuals cling to Sherlock. And you should see how possessive I get about every character that could conceivably be read as nonbinary.
But it’s not like you can declare “this character over here? He looks totally white, but he’s actually black.” In that case, TV actually has to be diverse, a task which it is by no means up to.
And not only do black boys watch television and feel like hoodlums and buffoons, but people of other races watch television and learn that black boys are hoodlums and buffoons. Even if a black boy manages to escape the self-esteem-lowering barrage, other people have not learned that he’s equally worthy as a person. This is not the sort of thing that can be solved by a lesson about Martin Luther King Junior in February, guys.
Solution: seriously, at this point, I think we’d do better if we literally assigned characters’ races randomly according to their prevalence in the population. At least then we’d stop having to put up with the Thuggish Black Guy. Maybe we could have Geeky Black Dudes! Or Wise, Noble Prince Black Dudes Who Are Just Trying To Do The Best For Their Country! Or Black Dudes Who Are The Villain’s Boyfriend! There are literally infinite possibilities here.
seriously, am I the only black person who doesn’t give a rats ass if he see’s other black people on TV? When I was a kid, not being white didn’t stop me from identifying with Jean Luke, or Cisco, or Janeway, or Marty Mcfly… I get the “people who don’t feel encouraged to do something probably wont” standard feminist perspective but I never did buy into the feminist concept of (we can measure oppression within subgroups by representation of participation). There are tons of reasons why a certian group might not be represented within another, saying a group is oppressive… Read more »
People still watch TV !?
I’m as baffled as you.
I can dig it. I remember, I waded into some murky territory about Green Lantern being written as gay and I took some flak. But when I was a little kid, absorbing every superhero that I could find, none of them looked like me. Sure there was Blade, but when you watch the x-men cartoon from the 90s, he’s lighter than Drake. I didn’t even know he was black until the movie came out and Nestle Snipes was the lead. Storm is black but yet again, she’s kinda high-yellow and racially ambiguous. Racial ambiguity seems like a noble cause except… Read more »
Can you explain the nestle snipes joke (if it is one?) Never heard that term used for a person before.
Oh, ha. It’s a comment on how dark he is. I’m not sure how many people call him that but I know my brother and I do.
Wow, I definitely forgot how much they lightened up Storm in the 90s cartoon. 🙁
Wait, Blade was in the X-men cartoon? I know they did a lot of Marvel crossovers, but I don’t remember this, just Wolvie and Beast showing up in Spiderman.
Oh, I think you’re right. Blade was in the spiderman cartoon. he shows up to hunt Morbius the ‘vampire’
Wait so here you’re saying that black males are always depicted as hoodlums and buffoons on TV. That kinda contradicts this, doesn’t it?
https://goodmenproject.com/featured-content/every-black-man-that-hollywood-thinks-exists/
I don’t think it’s much of a contradiction. Most of those tropes fall into the hoodlum or buffoon category. Or they’re just unrealistic. I’m not magic and I’m not that inspiring—I firmly believe that turning socks inside out doubles their uses between washes. Not much inspiration to be drawn from that. And purely anecdotal I know, but I can’t think of any black characters that I wanted to be when I was a kid. The first black guy in a movie that I can think of looking up to was Sam L. as Mace Windu. The rest of them just… Read more »
Maybe I’m just weird, but I’ve never really identified with people on TV. I’m not sure if it’s because I prefer to watch people who are not at all like me, or because I primarily see them as fictional characters and I don’t consider myself fictional. (That doesn’t mean that I don’t feel for them if they’re well-written and well-acted, I just don’t identify with them.)
(I have no idea why this is in response to Abucaba, it was supposed to stand alone.)
Pretty awesome (the article, not the absence of racially diverse characters on TV). This makes me want to support the Tyler Perry franchise the way I support televised women’s athletics.