9/26 Presentation

September 26 Blog Post

Introduction – Torres

 

Summary:

Torres analyzes the stereotypical representation of African Americans in television and how it has changed overtime.  She discusses how the depiction of blackness in television is the very thing that restricts political change for them through this platform.  These stereotypes are created and perpetuated by whiteness to maintain cultural power within the social structure of society, or to sustain white supremacy.  There exists a “split image” portrayal of African Americans in the media in which the “positive images” created by black image makers are counteracted and overpowered by the “negative images” created by white image makers.  “Negative image” blackness is represented in media alongside categorizations of menaces and immoral beings.  The news especially reports criminality, addiction, and irresponsibility associated with blackness.  Negative depictions usually represent one individual, but they are emphasized and generalized to the African American community.  The “positive images” counteractively marginalize the black community because the positive image represents an anomaly of the typical “negative image” perspective created by whiteness. This limits the television medium as a possibility for black political possibility because both images perpetuate white hegemony.  The obvious stereotypes, which provide an unconcealed platform to counter the injustice of African American portrayal, act as a distraction to the audience from the subtle, deeper racial issues presented in television. Torres poses that this relationship between the media, blacks, and whites is more complex than it appears on the surface – as the Civil Rights Movement became more widespread, television coverage and profits increased.  The politics around racial relations were recoded and organized around a central role reversal where whiteness initiated color blindness to be “fair” to African Americans, however it provided them the upper hand to argue against the issues argued for in the Civil Rights movement.  Brutalized bodies were widely covered during the movement to augment urgency to the cause, but the repositioning of whiteness shifted this to seem like it was “vicious self-interest” amongst blackness to eradicate the movement’s moral authority and ultimately sustain white power; whiteness reframed the protests as civil disobedience in order to victimize themselves.

 

 

Critical Questions:

1. How have black stereotypes on television perpetuated white supremacy? Categorize traditional stereotypes, “positive images,” and “negative images” into overt or inferential racism?  Why?
2. Torres discusses how Even the NAACP’s fifteen-year campaign against Amos ‘n’ Andy could not prevent the black community from viewing it. How did viewing television with stereotypes and harsher racially discriminant content amuse such a large audience, black and white?  How was the reaction of the black community to the show and the campaign to ban it constrained by agency and structure?  How does the media contribute to these tensions?  What is the structure that the NAACP was working against?
3. “Practically every aspect of black life was determined by efforts of those in power to maintain white supremacy,” how does the power structure cause and perpetuate racism? How does the media facilitate white hegemony?
4. How have stereotypes of African Americans developed since their origins in the antebellum period in minstrelsy? How has the stereotype of criminality/thug evolved? How has this stereotype counterbalanced the positive representation?
5. Why do the “negative images” produced by whiteness fail to explain the actual conditions of African Americans and the relations that caused their production?
6. How did white reframing of black protests as civil disobedience contribute to the central reversal for whiteness to counteract the very rights they protested for? How was this an argument of “reverse discrimination”?   Was the central reversal of who was the victim a conscious agency within the white ideology structure?  Was it overtly racist?

 

Outside Media:

 

1. 2001 Survivor: Season 1, Episode 1

https://www.hulu.com/watch/438172

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_k_jt30gUVg

 

2. The correlating Reebok ads

http://www.michellesassa.com/adweek-critique-reeboks-big-survivor-hit/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BS5Bj5McSqI

https://vimeo.com/121906427

 

Torres alludes to these media on page 3 of her introduction.  Survivor is organized in “racist and ethnocentric” ways.  Even in the first episode, viewers can observe how the African Americans (Ramona and Gervase) on the show are portrayed as incapable and lazy.  Richard, an older, white corporate man, beat them and won the whole show.  The Reebok commercials undermined Richard’s playing and made the game about how schemas of whiteness enabled the white man’s conquest of the wilderness, but in the advertisement the character’s stupidity is pointed out by women, or African American bystanders. This is demeaning because in the commercials these bystanders convey the common sense that the dumb survivors lack, suggesting that these skills should be common knowledge. However, in the real show it is reversed because the African Americans are depicted as the ones struggling with the skills when the commercials emphasize that it should be simple.