Caucas-o-vision: White portrayal of African Americans in television
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document in English
international relations
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published 17/07/2008
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Summary
With the rising number of television sets in American households post World War II, came hope that this unprecedented tool of mass media would bridge the socioeconomic, racial, and cultural divides splintering the county. However, since television’s conception in the late 1930’s, it has further alienated racial minority groups from the consumer oriented, white hegemony dominating the American stratum. With a few exceptions, television has vastly contributed to a sort of unconscious racism, fortified by prejudiced stereotypes and under representation of minorities, and in particular, African Americans. W.E.B. Du Bois, the revolutionary black civil rights activist and author wrote in his The Souls of Black Folk (1903) that “the Negro is … born with a veil, and gifted with the second-sight in this American world, –a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world.”(3). A featured article in the Journal of Popular Film and Television titled “African Americans in Film and Television: Twentieth Century Lesson for the New Millennium,” Jannette Dates and Thomas Mascaro refer to the same Du Bois piece, highlighting his notion of a “double consciousness … [the] sense of always looking one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that look son in amused contempt and pity.” (Du Bois, 3). Though Du Bois obviously wasn’t speaking of television when he wrote these words (as it hadn’t been invented yet), they nonetheless, can be applied to the manner in which black people in America have been treated with regard to popular media – without a voice of true self-expression in a white-run medium.
Table of Contents
- Portrayals of African Americans in early television.
- Increase in the television series featuring black casts in 1950?s.
- Stereotypes and perceived American ideals and race relations.
- May 1991- Jump Cut Magazine, Elizabeth Jackson's interview of Barbara McCullough.
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