Character assassination

By Isaac Howard

Rauner College Prep

In late July, Chicago’s CBS-owned WBBM-Ch. 2 aired an interview with a 4-year-old African-American child after a shooting on the South Side of Chicago. The child told the reporter that he was not afraid of guns and that he would have one when he got older.

The station then cut the tape, omitting that the child later said he wanted to join the police force. A week later, WBBM-Ch. 2 apologized, calling the edited broadcast “a mistake.”

This is just one of several instances in which television, movies, radio and even news outlets have portrayed blacks in a negative light.

Negative stereotypes of African-Americans have existed in these mediums for decades, from the always-angry black woman to loud, dim-witted men who are labeled as “coons,” said Claudette Roper, a Chicago-based media artist and writer. She called former Public Enemy frontman and reality-television celeb Flavor Flav “a modern-day version of a coon.”

Most of the time, these portrayals are used for the entertainment of everyone, including black people. But just because black people watch these images doesn't mean that they relate to them.

In fact, in a 2008 study sponsored by The Futures Company (formerly Yankelovich Partners LLC) and released by Radio One, 50 percent of the 3,400 African-Americans surveyed said they did not relate to the way blacks were being portrayed on television and film. Forty percent of them believed that black radio and television reinforces negative stereotypes.

Hard for black youth to discover cultural identity

Those stereotypes can have an impact on black youth, according to Dr. Ardis Martin, a psychiatrist based in Canon City, Colo. In a 2008 column she wrote for the bimonthly journal Academic Psychiatry, Martin asserts that because television and news outlets often act as a way for people to observe the world around them, negative portrayals can influence people’s attitudes toward one another. Because of this, negative stereotypes of blacks can create a negative outlook toward them as a whole.

Couple those images with the struggles they already face discovering their racial identity and black youth find it even more difficult to define what it means to black, according to Martin.

So who's responsible for stopping the negative stereotyping? And how can it be reduced? When it comes to the news, the responsibility falls on the reporters, said Dahleen Glanton, a national correspondent with the Chicago Tribune.

“The reporters must do a better job not being biased while reporting,” she said. “They must not assume that because something they are reporting or someone they are reporting on is in the South or on the West Side of Chicago that it will be a story that is going to be bad in terms of the event.”

Roper, the media artist and writer, took it one step further, saying that the responsibility falls on everyone.

“The people that watch the media have to be responsible enough to not watch it and agree with what they see,” she said. “And the people putting it out there must be responsible to know what they are putting out there and if it is professional, or necessary.”

Called a ‘lowlife ghetto girl’

Deja Brown, 16, a student at Von Steuben Metro Science High School, says that negative stereotyping exists. And while she believes it’s limited to mostly television shows and movies, Brown says she’s been unfairly judged by people because of it.

One day while trying to take a seat at a bus stop on Foster Avenue, Brown said a woman told her that she did not want to move her bags for “a lowlife ghetto girl.”

In another instance, Brown said a girl assumed that she was good at basketball because she was black.

“The woman said that because of something she had seen on television,” Brown said.