Images

I just read a post on a message board that says that a particular family reality show on television is portraying a disrespecful image to the "black struggle." The argument that this person used to defend this claim is that "most black people do are not wealthy, driving Bentleys, they are poor to middle class." Of course there were no statistics to back THAT up but I had to wonder how many people actually thought that was the standard--poor to middle-class and WHY?

I had to seriously reflect and consider the source of this kind of thinking and the only sources I could come up with are schools and the media. In her article concerning social class, Jean Anyon (1980) highlights the differences between the way poor children are taught versus the wealthy. It is unfortunate that black people come up in many studies done about poor people but in very few about the wealthy. It is then no wonder why people think that most black people are either poor or middle class and that this is an OK concept. Why is it bad that some black people are affluent and can afford the Bentleys and the jets without going broke? This leads me to the second responsible source of this form of thinking: The media.

You know what annoys me the most? Pictures of starving children in Africa. Yes, more than the show Hollyhood or The Flavor of Love or I Love New York, pictures of starving children in Africa annoy me. Having traveled to the motherland three times and having the best experience of my life, I am appalled when the only image of Africa is suffering. This is not to say that there are not starving children in Africa (I personally didn't see any and I went to villages, towns, cities, schools, church, the market, people's homes) because I'm sure there are. But I have seen more homeless people in America than in the the developing countries I've visited. But I digress. The way that black people are depicted on television is nothing short of appalling. I grew up on the Cosby Show and A Different World and The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. Black people were part of families--successful families. A dual parent household was normal and children such as myself aspired to own brownstones in Brooklyn because we thought we could. College, success, stability, THAT was our reality. When did that change? When did having a family, a big house, and values become disrespectful to the black struggle? It was once the aim of the struggle! But money and the media have both influenced society's image of what being black is.

For two great perspectives on this issue, I recommend Dr. Bill Cosby's Come on People: On the Way From Victims to Victors and Dr. Michael Eric Dyson's Is Bill Cosby Right?