Black Women In The Media

3 Pages 870 Words

Mainstream media’s affect on the credibility and imaging of the Black Woman

“Bend over to the front, touch your toes, bounce that ass up and down and get low!” blasts the latest rap song that seems to get a substantial amount of airtime. This particular song instructs a woman on how to perform an erotic strip tease. These lyrics are a small fragment of the images conveyed of Black women to audiences domestically as well as internationally. The American medium which includes radio, television, film, and other forms of advertisement continues to produce degrading, misleading, and destructive images of Black women. These images become unrelenting negative stereotypes that weaken the Political credibility of Black women in the White dominated patriarchic society.
Cultural images of African American women based on stereotypes are at the very foundation of the problem of African American women’s limited access to societal resources and institutions (Jewell, 1992, p. 12). Stereotype as used here “is an imitation, a copy of something of someone that is, by means of the media machinery, held up first as THE symbol or symbols to the exclusion to others; and then repeatedly channeled out to viewers so often that in time it becomes a ‘common’ representation of something or someone in the minds of viewers” (Blackwood, 1986, p. 205). The purpose of this piece is to briefly examine factors that contribute to the social and political disenfranchisement of the Black woman. In particular, I examine how the oppressors use imagery and ideologies to maintain their superiority, while consigning Black women to an unscrupulous societal status.
The media have been an effective instrument for conveying and proliferating cultural images (Jewell, 1992, p. 71). The “bad-black-girl” is depicted as alluring, sexually arousing and seductive. She fulfills the sex objectification requirement of White womanhood, although she is portrayed as...