Racism and Media Messages

Oregon is the whitest place I have lived. Growing up just a few hours from the Mexico border, San Antonio was more than 50% Hispanic in the 1970’s and Dallas and Houston are true melting pots, representing people of every background.

For four years, I taught in a racially tense school. It was a railroad town gone broke, with poor white kids who’d been there for generations. It was also a southern suburb of Dallas, an appealing area for Blacks who wanted to move out of the city. As so, the high school had about 1,000 White students, 1,000 Black students and 500 Hispanics. I was amazed at how mean the Black students were to each other. As Cook of the Boston Globe indicates, skin tone can be a huge factor in how people treat each other (his piece). In my school and by their Black peers, darker students were viewed as dumber, meaner, and somehow lesser. This totally blew me away. This seemed to be more of a Black-to-Black issue, but it could be that I was missing something. I often examined my attitudes and actions in that setting, but could not see that I shared the same faulty standards. I’d been around dark-skinned blacks in Mississippi before, but because they we all very dark skinned, I’d never seen this issue.

In a place like Oregon, though, where the Black population is minimal and mirrors the University of Colorado study summarized online, one might expect stereotyping to be somewhat automatic. Going off of limited or non-existent personal experience, how can people be fair? Don’ they have to rely on a faulty understanding, in the form of stereotypes, generalizations and falsely contrived notions? I, for one, doubt that the findings of the study are really representative of the truth about anything. If you were to ask me to match personal histories (or limited personal scenarios) with the right face out of 40 images, I’d tell you that the activity was ridiculous and walk away. It hard to guess someone’s age, let alone their life history! When we ask people to stereotype, they do. The 97% White undergraduate audience was put in an unfair position and they made unfair judgments. Duh!

As for the myths perpetuated in advertising piece, there’s probably more truth. People aren’t as happy, secure, confident, or thin as they would like to be, so they are happy to believe corporations care and product (and if that fails guns will do the trick) and that they can be more satisfied, confident, appealing, and wealthy if they have certain resources (even deodorant and insurance).

The bottom line is comes in the section on communication history, where it’s recommended that we look at images as a tool used to communicate with us. Like language, there are careful choices, edits and positioning that maximizes intended effects. We should be looking at images on several levels and analyzing who sends the message and why. There’s a lot to this idea of media literacy. I’m learning that I have more to learn and that the need to apply critical thinking about the visual messages I receive is vast.