The Television Must be Revolutionized.

[allonevoice]

Once many plantations grew cotton; today, some grow movies.  But the imperatives remain pretty much the same.

Ed Guerrero “Framing Blackness” Chapter 1, page 9.

[allonevoice]

Rush Hour taught me the N word

Here’s a song and personal story that illustrates the ways that media can impact people, children and racial relations, and also how environmental ignorance about race makes these complicated matters more difficult to navigate and how the influences of media can be more pervasive and pernicious than they may be intended to.

 In the 1998 film Rush Hour, with Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker, there is a scene where Jackie Chan says the N-word to a Black bartender after watching Chris Tucker’s character do so.  This is the catalyst for Jackie Chan to get into an on-brand billiard-hall fight replete with pool stick violence and cartoonish karate-gymnastic theatrics.

My cousins and I loved the movie and laughed at so many scenes and segments of Chan and Tucker’s comedic chemistry and genius in the theater.  The following week while at my mostly-white school in Selden on Long Island, Jericho Elementary I was running around the playground and in my classes trying to get attention and acclaim by repeating lines from the movie I saw.  One of which was the “What’s Up My N****” line that I threw around to who-knows-how-many-people, as if it was an intrinsically funny joke that would suddenly prompt slapstick hilarity as it had on screen. Mostly people just looked at me with confused faces.  I said it to one of the Black students and his reaction was very different...his face screwed up as he processed something complicated and he ran off.  Later on I had a conversation with a teacher who pulled me out into the hallway (to my befuddlement) to talk with her about something I said and to apologize to the aforementioned child, now crying in the hallway.  I hadn’t understood why it hurt him more than anyone else...and she explained to my severe gut-wrenching embarrassment and shame.  Years later I remembered this experience and wrote a poem/song out of it called “Rush Hour 98′” that I put on an album I made under my moniker AllOne in 2016 called “I’ve Been Thinking....”

Here is a link to that song and the lyrics of it as well: www.allonevoice.bandcamp.com/track/rush-hour-98

Here is a link to an article discussing the creation of the song on my other blog “AllOneNetwork” on Blogspot: http://allonenetwork.blogspot.com/2016/05/rush-hour-98-ive-been-thinking-thought.html

Lyrics: 

It's 1998 and I'm ten, crunching mouthfuls of m&ms, Twizzlers and some Zours with my friends watching Rush Hour in the Cineplex, we were in stitches giggling Pretty much from the title right up until the end. A couple scenes had stuck with me, including the snippet when Jackie Chan had said some word beginning with an N And then the dude in the clip got super pissed and they fought doing the cool moves with the pool sticks At that we had a laugh! Returned to school sincerely happy to have some Gags to share during and after lunch.... foolish,

(Class clowns just acting dumb trying to be cool kids) Recess that Monday at Jericho elementary was treated like a talent show, We ran up to every kid on the field Reenacting classic knee slapping quotes, [Especially the one with the "N" word, hadn't known what it meant sure but we laughed like dopes.] Got outta recess, teach' was in a bad mood hollered my name “WHERE’S BRUCE?!”

I was grabbed rudely by the collar, enraged, she dragged me to the doorway and who's standing ashamed in the hallway But one of rare, few black students, Tears cascading down his cheeks, I asked why she had been “so mean” when forming this sad group and why it even needed to meet!? She scowled incredulous Asking if I had said some crass expletive That I'd like to say "sorry" for, Ingenuous, I asked if they could clarify or Help me understand the crime I was called outside for (All the while he just sobbed and cried more) He recalled the story the Rush Hour line of course (The one with the N mystery) I didn't get it so I said this and Timidly admitted I’d mimicked indiscriminately, and no one else exhibited misery, then they Explained the significance to me. I felt like a troglodyte, Honest, I apologized which moderately mollified his melancholy solemn eyes, I walked inside locking eyes on the hard tile floor horrified and unnerved With sickened wonder That my soft and bright tongue could turn on me and could do so much hurt with one word.

And with the bane of ignorance I tainted that little kid, Our exchange gave him His first racist experience And I wonder decades later How it resonates across the years he's lived.

[allonevoice]

"A pillar of the community"." A straight-A student who dreamed of becoming a doctor". "A loving father"."Here through no fault of their own". "She was hysterical and out of control." "He was no angel." The press, both local and national, humanizes some victims of state or corporate violence, while demonizing others. Despite good intentions and seemingly without noticing, the media all too often create tiered systems of moral worth by trying to find “the perfect victim.” The media’s search for the perfect victim, and its corollary desire to smear those with less than perfect pasts, makes humanity conditional, further entrenching negative stereotypes and destructive narratives about entire communities. In this episode, we dissect the real time auditing of those who die or are deported and how we can expand our moral vocabulary to protect all vulnerable people and populations. We are joined by both Joel Sati and Charlene Carruthers.

Here’s another hyper-relevant analysis from Nima Shirazi and Adam Johnson over at Citations Needed that I spoke about in a class discussion.  This episode is incredibly informative and detail-oriented, pulling no punches while pointing out the racist and biased way that Police and the Press depict Black victims of police violence.  Often People of Color are displayed as flawed and demonized in order to legitimate and excuse the tragedy of their murder.  There is also a meta discussion about the laziness of much local journalism in regurgitating Police reports and public statements without ever researching the circumstances further.  There is also more pointed out about this in article about Alexandra Bell’s work showing the New York Times’ coverage of Michael Brown vs. the coverage of the Officer who shot him.

[allonevoice]

According to one 2014 study, 75% of white Americans don’t have any non-white friends. Put another way, white people’s perception of African Americans and other people of color comes primarily from media representations rather than actual interactions. As such, how communities of color are portrayed in the media – from news and opinion pages to movie and TV screens – is tremendously important. Two newly-published reports reveal how these perceptions are consistently distorted to over-emphasize Black and Latinx criminality, center white people in sympathetic portrayals as either victims or heroes, and overwhelmingly lump immigration coverage in with coverage of crime and violence. In this episode, we discuss the bare statistics of how people of color, immigrants, and the poor are shown in media, why it matters, and the consequences of media makers from newsrooms to Hollywood perpetuating destructive stereotypes. We're joined by some of the people behind these reports, Lucy Odigie-Turley of The Opportunity Agenda and Nicole Rodgers of Family Story. *** The Guests Lucy Odigie-Turley is the Opinion and Media Research Coordinator with The Opportunity Agenda. An experienced communication researcher with training in both qualitative and quantitative methodologies, Lucy conducts and organizes multi-methods research to assess dominant media narratives and public opinion about poverty, immigration, and criminal justice. Nicole Rodgers is the founder and executive director of Family Story, a communications and research organization that elevates stories of diverse families. A strategist with broad expertise in communications, branding, and research in the public interest, Rodgers is also the founder and editor-in-chief of Role Reboot, an online magazine dedicated to storytelling and social critique from a new generation of Americans rethinking “traditional” family, breaking through stereotypes, and bucking expectations about gender roles. *** The Reports Redefining Sanctuary: Analysis of public attitudes and media coverage of sanctuary jurisdictions and related immigration policies Lucy Odigie-Turley | December 2017 | The Opportunity Agenda A Dangerous Distortion of Our Families: Representations of Families, By Race, In News and Opinion Media Dr. Travis L. Dixon | December 2017 | Color Of Change

This is an episode of an incredible media criticism podcast “Citations Needed” that I referenced several times throughout this course and found very relevant.  I had listened to it prior to taking AFS363 and found it added to the experience is incredibly poignant.

[allonevoice]

Paper Three: bell hooks and “Paris Is Burning”

In bell hooks’ analysis of the documentary “Paris Is Burning”, much is deconstructed in the film’s contents, and how it presents them as well as a offers a meta-confrontation with the racial and gender related issues in society.  The text also presents an adversarial framework scrutinizing the art of documentary film-making itself.  

The documentary subjects of “Paris Is Burning” view family as in the vein of “chosen family”, as one person in the film put it “a group of human beings in a mutual bond”.  This occurs because often the subjects of the film, the homosexual black men and those who participate in the drag balls, have a traumatic relationship to their heteronormative nuclear families that is wrought with perjury, intolerance and abandonment.  The subjects utilize the drag culture and its participants as an opportunity for a support system and a community of expression, even going so far as having assigned “mother” roles, overseers of the “houses”, matriarchal and patriarchal mentors.

           “Realness” as described in the film is the ability to construct and present yourself as a “passing” straight male or female, or a white person.  As one participant in the film says, “if you can not “look gay”, if you can look straight, then that is real”.  Another subject of the film says outright, “I’d like to be a spoiled rich white girl” and this is one of the many pellucid tragic moments of the film, where all the fanfare and celebratory drag-glam stops, and the crux of many of bell hooks’ arguments stem from.  The criterion for self-described “fem-realness queens” is all about being able to costume oneself effectively in the identity of the domineering heteronormative white society.  It is the hope to escape oppression and intolerance by trying to find perverse fulfillment in camouflaging with the culture and coding of one’s oppressor. Trying to attain safety and acceptance (therefore, problematically, self-acceptance and external validation) by presenting oneself as the idealized character.  Hooks is cunning to point out the macabre shadow of white supremacy that the subjects of the film (and the epistemic nature of the film itself, in its white-created gaze) are living in.  Hooks is concerned with the subjects’ idealization of white people and white culture (from the nature of pageantry itself, to the homogenized pantheon of publicized characters and famous stars they’re striving, seemingly self-deprecatingly, to emulate).  The consideration here may be that it could escape these performers that their goals and fantasies are all evidence of their subjugation by mainstream white culture while their masquerades also perpetuating and embody problematic stereotypes.

           I agree most with the idea (As I’ve discussed in previous papers) of bell hooks’ acerbic comments about neutral gaze and that Livingston’s view and editing choices do not originate in a vacuum.  The very medium of a documentary necessitates a subjectively curated experience.  On this “…it is precisely the mood of celebration that masks the extent to which the balls are not necessarily radical expressions of subversive imagination at work undermining and challenging the status quo.  Much of the films focus on pageantry takes the ritual of the black drag ball and makes it a spectacle” (hooks 150).  

Admittedly, “Paris is Burning” shares a handful of candid moments in the interviews where the subjects are very open about their struggles for acceptance, and their lack of safety or opportunities in the professional and social world.  These lachrymose and telling moments of the film could potentially allow the audience a chance to empathize and contemplate the plight of the subjects of the film and the ubiquitous ills of racial, sexual and social injustice, but Livingston’s edits distractedly opt to cut to extended scenes of the flamboyant fanfare over sober-minded poignancy.  Most of the film focuses on the festive and escapist expression that is the pageantry of the ball, which is an accurately regal presentation, but Livingston consistently cuts abruptly to these scenes after a sobering moment, almost as if a lighthearted panacea for the audience, to alleviate the intense reality of the subject’s harsh lives and dramatic experiences.  

           From a racial standpoint, hooks asserts that the very nature of peak femininity for the subject of the films “was that perceived to be the exclusive property of white womanhood” (bell hooks 147).  The act of drag, for hooks, is not a counterculture and subversive activity, if it participates in white-worship fetishism that has been oppressing people of color in the mainstream society all along. One of the subjects of the film even blatantly professes the viewpoint, “every minorities’ goal or wish is to be white”, with an un-ironic self-confident air of worldliness in their tone.  Not only is this subject’s statement a completely unfounded generalization, but it doesn’t get extrapolated and put under a microscope to be ransacked for political and social significance and nuance.  As earlier stated, the film does little to offer screen time for these sorts of people’s sentiments to be examined.  Presumably, the person who made that statement means that because of all of the proliferation of images in media forms of the glamorous white-washed homogeneous stars, models, actors, singers and on the alabaster Mount Rushmore of pop culture deities, the wishful and wistful drag-queens can only imagine themselves as successful, safe, secure and celebrated if they are white.  This examination opens the floor for some discussion about representation in media and the harmful effects that a lack thereof can have on people of colors’ viewpoint and aspirations and cultural pride/hopefulness. Presumably, the person who said that also meant that whiteness wasn’t in fact the end goal, but the perks and privileges that comes with the aspired-to white identity.  To speak of this offers an opportunity to speak of systemic biases and privileges that leave marginalized people in dire straits.

           I agree with hooks on her critical view of Livingston’s perspective influence as an outsider from this subculture (the innocent ethnographic view as a crutch and a harmful perspective) as well as the harsh assessment of the subjects’ portrayal.  I watched the documentary before I read her chapter on the film and felt it was overtly obvious (perhaps as a byproduct of this class and another that I am taking this semester) that the film is an artifact that has crystallized “a graphic documentary portrait of the ways in which colonized black people (in this case black gay brothers, some of whom were drag queens) worship at the throne of whiteness even when such worship demands that we live in perpetual self-hate, steal, lie, go hungry and even die in its pursuit” (bell hooks page 149) The image clusters of opulence are all that of whiteness and white people, and the documentary has a mostly-casual and “comedically-quirky” presentation to these tragic subjects and their subculture full of people struggling to live, struggling to understand themselves and feel happy, safe and expressive.  Livingston does a disservice to the subjects of this film and to the potential ambition and fervency of such a topic and an opportunity of such coverage by making the film a spectacle (to borrow hooks’ term). Rather, the documentary deserved a more biting and unapologetic tone not just covering a subversive and insular cultural phenomena but taking the time to exploring the struggle of these homosexual and transsexual people of color and giving a podium to a thesis that examines the historical and culturally oppressive and imperial context that created this scenario.  

[allonevoice]

Paper Two: The Oppositional Gaze

With an unprecedented degree of available media content for consumers to view, it is worth considering how these near-incessant streams of information impact us as well as our vision of the world and those who inhabit it.  Television, Film, Radio, Music and literature are not only reflections of the world but more importantly they are subjective representations of their creators’ reflection of the world.  They are a template from which all observers must assess the world as well as themselves and their lived experience.  The viewers and consumers of media, especially during this plugged-in era of the hypnotic, ever-present smartphone and earbuds, are rapaciously gathering data and ideas about the world they inhabit from curated fiction and non-fiction at an increasingly frenetic pace.  The desire to keep this autobahn-paced intake of entertainment harvesting and maintain the endorphin-high chaotic feasting of novelty has put a pressure on content creators to truncate nuance, in a world where more than ever, conversations of increasing complexity are necessary for progress and survival.  I mention this to emphasize the gravity of influence that media has over listeners and viewers as well as to underline the casual way that messages are consumed.  This casual, constant absorption of stories and ideas (be they fictional or non-fiction, a distinction that matters very little when talking about the very-real consequences that these influences can have) can leave the modern bewildered listeners susceptible to the subliminal (as well as the conspicuous) bedlam of messages they are bombarded with in their daily lives.  These points are made to exhibit that any forthcoming evidence or argument made for inequality-prompting trends in media are far from trivial and are more pertinent to observe and address than ever, not just for their pernicious nature but their pervasiveness.

           Issues of representation for People of Color have always been problematic in news/entertainment media and advertising in the U.S.  The Anglocentric and patriarchal representation of artists, entertainers, models, musicians, business professionals, scientists, actors is rampant.  Much of this comes about from majority white ownership of media and advertising companies. Entman and Rojecki suggest, for the most part, outright intolerance and racism of the many individuals, the moving parts and people in media businesses, be they newspapers or television companies, is probably not to blame.  More plausible is that the systems in which they are cogs, are flawed on this point.  Regardless of who is to blame, it is a white-majority and white perspective bias that result in People of Color being withheld opportunities to be on television shows despite having a wealth of talent, vision and intellect.  So too is it a belief in this racist system when historically and presently, Black filmmakers cannot get funding for serious projects discussing racial figures, or plights specific to the Black community, or non-comedic/action films that feature majority Black casts.  These decisions discussed as recently as Spike Lee’s post-2000’s struggle to get significant funding for a Malcom X biopic are the results of white-owned production companies’ misguided and racist conviction that there is no profitable majority audience for these films.  Not only does that assume that white audiences have no interest in learning about Black figures, and assumes that the emotional, psychological experiences of Blacks are so alienating to white people (a deeply dividing notion) as to be disinteresting, it also presumes that the only audience, and the most important audience to consider, is a white audience to begin with.  This presumption, when viewed in the reverse, negates the validity and existence of Blacks entirely.  In much of early radio, well into the 50’s until the Carter administration endeavored to amend the issue, the FCC wouldn’t greenlight Black radio stations or programs and wouldn’t fine any stations that exhibited blatantly discriminatory practices.  Sadly, there are countless examples of these sorts of exclusionary racially motivated acts over the decades.  

A lack of representation creates a disservice to those who go unrepresented as entertainers but also as consumers, not just for the inequality that the media is maintaining within the confines of its business practices, but also in the message that it sends to consumers.  To white consumers, with no Black-owned, black culture featured media, this insulates them and creates no understanding or available empathy or tolerance.  When Blacks are represented by white writers and curators of media, they are likely to be misrepresented when they are depicted at all.  For consumers, this normalizes whiteness to the point of invalidating the existence of Blackness, it creates a latent hostility from whites and a wrongheaded presentation of the world.  For Blacks, there is a great and terrible othering that occurs, either by misrepresentation or exclusion.  The writer of “The Oppositional Gaze” bell hooks talks about how Black female spectators would deal with the pain of this omittance, of this complete erasure of their existence, at times to attempt to “ignore race”, other times to ignore cinema altogether, as it obstinately decided it wouldn’t represent People of Color either at all, or accurately and honestly.  Bell hooks says,

“Not all black women spectators submitted to that spectacle of regression through identification. Most of the women 1 talked with felt that they consciously resisted identification with films--that this tension made moviegoing less than pleasurable; at times it caused pain. As one black woman put, l could always get pleasure from movies as long as I did not look too deep." For black female spectators who have "looked too deep" the encounter with the screen hurt. That some of us chose to stop looking was a gesture of resistance, turning away was one way to protest, to reject negation.” (bell hooks, The Oppositional Gaze, Chapter 7, page 121, paragraph 3).

           Fictional media creates inequality by presenting inequality, by creating a false reality bereft of complex People of Color as written and represented in good faith by employed people of their own culture to do their stories justice.  What is a person to do but, as some of those that bell hooks has interviewed, but to either turn away, or to swallow the pill that society rejects your experience, your history and your narrative, and you must engage on the most detached level with these white-majority pieces of biased media? There is of course the alternative that she suggests elsewhere in the text; resisting, critiquing and fighting to change these systemic problems that create a lack of relatability and accuracy for Blacks, a painful and exclusionary scenario, as well as engenders more division and lack of empathy from uninformed (and woefully uncultured, uninstructed) white viewers.

On another front, news media often (either out of cynicism or laziness, the maligning result is the same) perpetuates harmful stereotypes for men and women of color.  Whether representing issues of poverty with deriding image clusters equating poverty with violence and Blackness or the local-news media tendency to replicate biased police reports and announcements of arrests without any nuance or consideration to the alleged criminal, (statistically more likely to be shown in cuffs, in mugshots, and unnamed if they are Black) there are plenty of systemic habits that do nothing but to depict a negative (and wrong) view of people of color to the nation as a whole.  These misrepresentations are pervasive and harmful, they communicate an adversarial and dangerous picture of people of color which does nothing to show reality.  These blunt-force misdirected and wrongfully-presented ideas in news stories are not trivial, as I argued in the opening paragraph.  They have great consequence, people interact with others based on this media-born information, these harmful racial stereotypes.  People like Trump get into office on racist dog-whistling propaganda, on hate-speech genocidal language references to helpless refugees, because ideas have power, because representation matters a great deal. When news shows use euphemistic language to describe white nationalist statements, or don’t lead a quote where Trump is being entirely dishonest or inventing statistics with statements that point out that lie, that matters a great deal when you consider that 60% of people stop ingesting a news story after reading a headline.

The realm of ideas, concepts and conceits matters a great deal, as these things catalyze our perception of the world and the people that inhabit the world around us.  The out-of-context soundbite that we “learn from”, the catchy click-bait-motivated headline that we skim over, may just influence the hand that pulls the lever in the voting booth.  This sobering reality reminds us that Media, our pseudo-oracle, the influencing ever-blaring window to the “outside world”, is deeply influential in forming our opinions on public policy, our view on religion, our political outlook and more locally, our tolerance of a new neighbor, who we are likely to hire in the workplace, if we would grant a loan to a person whose name or race seems unfamiliar, or whom we suddenly associate with an alarming and unflattering news story.

In the era of Youtube, Vine, Twitter, Instagram and even higher-profile companies like Netflix, Hulu and so on, the broadened media ecosystem has given more people than ever are given a voice, which is great when it comes to representation, where on streaming sites and social media, comedians, artists, and models of all backgrounds are given a fair chance to represent and share their work and stories.  Conversely, again though, the trouble of curation comes in as Youtube and many news and social media sites have also given platform to nefarious thinkers and content creators.  Interestingly, the system breaks down when advertisements create click-motivated ad revenue, and sensational stories, misleading headlines and the “trolling” aspect of many content creators enter the fold.  Youtube specifically has been shown to have algorithms that the suggested video content will lead most people to more right-wing leaning and white-nationalist or conspiracy-oriented videos. Only terrifying and depressing motivations can be assumed from not just the creation of these venomous or at the very least, patently false and time-draining clips, but from a multi-billion-dollar companies’ impetus to promote content like this.  These systemic structures still exist, and they are inherently evil influences and perpetuators of white supremacy.  

These days, with media rampant, it is so important and difficult to communicate the power of a president’s words, or the angle that a writer would take, or the negative influence that a stereotyping or racialized character in a show would do to people young and old, of white or of color.  As we attempt to navigate this space, free speech ideologues who doubt in the power of words and ideas or who ignores the malevolent nature of dog-whistling and historical context take pleasure in smugly feigning ignorance (or exhibiting true ignorance) as they rebuke attempts to call out blatant racist pundits and propaganda.  Even centrist self-proclaimed liberals and generally rational/logical thinkers decry events of Twitter de-platforming of people like Alex Jones of the Far-right Infowars media site once he incited violence (aside from the appalling transgression of spreading hate speech and lies for years on his website) or refusing to give admitted nazis and white-supremacists such as Richard Spencer an opportunity to speak publicly or on campus as attempts to destroy “the first amendment”.  You can safely bet that most of these thinkers and skeptics are white men who have no (colored) skin in the game.  Media and those powerful people who manipulate it (in front of or behind the camera/the computer/the writing desk), greatly, terrifyingly shapes the world by shaping our understanding of it.  Media puts thoughts in our heads, opinions in our hearts, feelings in our psyche, and subsequently puts our action into motion, which if we aren’t careful can put our children into cages, our bodies into illness, our parents into addiction, our siblings into prisons, our families into poverty, our environments and our communities into disrepair, all of this and more culminates in our very humanity and moral, unifying aspirations into shambles.

[allonevoice]

Paper One: Representation with Stuart Hall

After reading Stuart Hall’s “Representation, Meaning and Language” I completely concur with the author’s inarguable assertions that language is much more layered and consequential than simply surface meaning.  In the parlance of the paper, Hall would say that denotation is important, but connotation is ever-present and always pertinent to consider.  I will expound on the weighty responsibility of media outlets as representatives of cultures and characters.  This is a given, as many viewer’s exposure to other cultures is limited to, or very nearly entirely channeled through media forms.  In the following paragraphs, the linguistic breakdown of language and symbols will be studied and applied to our relationship with entertainment forms.  Subsequently, there is a tension between real, lived experience and impressions gleaned from media that is worth discussing.  Perhaps more agonizing and convoluted than that tension is how the information and impressions given by media forms can conflict and how personal experiences can be influenced by the abstracted and thoroughly curated media channels.  A key word here is “curated” and begs the questions “who is curating” and “what image is being curated”?  

One troublesome aspect of media is that viewers may watch or absorb representations of a minority group as though it is an exact mirror of the world (a mimetic creation) while unaware of the inherent follies of these processes and the translation that occurs through these created channels.  Representation (and the authenticity intrinsic to it) is important when it comes to creating and sharing media because people know to accurately and sincerely present their own culture and lived experience.  Standpoint Theory reminds us of this and dispels the “view-from-nowhere” theory that objectivity exists in the creation of any fictional or non-fictional work.  The constructivist concept of language and symbols implies that if there are no inherent meanings to the objects, events and people innately in the world, then the words, symbols and other forms of communication by which we discuss and represent them are unavoidably subject to the agency of the creators.  There is poignant meaning behind every choice casting, framing and writing.  You are more likely to get a genuine presentation of the nuances and nature of a culture’s inner struggles, perspectives and subtleties if a person who originates from that culture produces the work in which their culture is described and depicted.  Consider that an anthropologist may have studied a culture very deeply, but they will always be evaluating the culture’s traditions and characteristics from an outsider standpoint and with all of their upbringing’s ideologies and perspectives as a counterweight to the lofty goal of alleged objectivity.  

In a news media example, if a white viewer knows very few black people or minorities, then forms of entertainment and media suddenly bear a very serious pedagogical burden of an entire culture for a consumer of said hypothetical piece. If most news stories that this white person sees emphasize depictions of blacks as criminals, it is unfortunately inevitable for them to glean that perhaps blacks are indeed criminals.  Their only impression and opinion of the reality of black people is dictated by various forms of media, even entertainment forms.  This demeaning impression is obviously not true, but in this situation the ignorant viewer’s only influential inputs read as a truth-bearing and didactic narrative for them.  A viewer will invariably confuse facsimiles of people, stereotypical fictional symbols of lifestyles and mannerisms with those of reality if they have no sincere realities and facts to contrast these images and stories with.  

Language and representation are arbitrarily assigned and are not pure and accurate reflections of the world and those that inhabit it, they are lenses of interpretation, mercurial and subject to distortion.  Language seeks to clearly describe the world but our relationship to the symbols therein are ephemeral, ever-changing.  The use of the languages and symbology we choose can therefore shape our perception of the world and those in it.  Media is comprised entirely of language and signifiers that are perpetually fluxing while influencing observers’ opinions on the world.  Media (particularly news media) proposes to be a simulacrum of the world, and the careless viewer is subject to feeling television or art is an informative, transparent window into reality. In truth, it is important to see media as a complex series of filters, full of contextual implications worthy of analysis and scrutiny.

           The text offers a binary example of contrasted associations between “black” and “white”. It highlights for us that in western cultures, for centuries the word “black” has been associated with darkness, evil, malignancy, pestilence and various other forms of negative connotation.  There is an inescapable taxing on the collective psyche for all this ingrained subconscious training.  These subliminal and consistent discursive formations create a historical burden on both the oppressors and the oppressed, a subconscious weight attached to these phrases and concepts.  The letters and phonetic syllables that comprise the word “black” are not inherently bad, nor is the color or tone that it describes, nor are any people of color who may associate with that color or identify it, that much is obvious. However, as Foucault would point out, because of this meaning being ascribed to the word, there is a historically imbued connotation and therefore a peripheral, latent disparaging connection made when one hears or experiences the word “black”.  As it is put in the text,

 “… in order to say something meaningful, we have to 'enter language', where all sorts of older meanings which predate us, are already stored from previous eras, we can never cleanse language completely, screening out all the other, hidden meanings which might modify or distort what we want to say. For example, we can't entirely prevent some of the negative connotations of the word BLACK from returning to mind when we read a headline like, 'WEDNESDAY - A BLACK DAY ON THE STOCK EXCHANGE', even if this was not intended. There is a constant sliding of meaning in all interpretation, a margin - something in excess of what we intend to say - in which other meanings overshadow the statement or the text, where other associations are awakened to life, giving what we say a different twist.” (Stuart Hall, The Work Of Representation Chapter 1, page 33)

This can, and does, impact both an outsider from the minority group (who may feel a recoiling in themselves, potentially identified as “implicit bias”) or as a minority group and person of color, (who may grow up feeling ashamed and/or aware of the persecution and scrutiny in both microaggressions and blatant racism/prejudice).  These life-shaping and psychologically transmogrifying influences can come from something as seemingly anodyne as the use of a word or phrase in a derogatory manner. While this seems a myopic or hyper-analytical extrapolation, it is in fact just one building block in an entire systemic viewpoint and issue that linguistics is attempting to prescribe an antidote for or at least give a blueprint for understanding how language and image and connotation can in fact do much harm.

Social media is an equalizer in a lot of ways in that there is a democratizing of message-sharing that has helped many cultures and underrepresented people share their stories and artwork.  More than ever; spokespeople, writers, politicians, musicians, artists, filmmakers and activists and so on have had an opportunity and platform where they can propagate their passions, skills, opinions and viewpoints to a multitude of consumers.  I would view social media as an overall boon to all cultures.  Social media-born protest and awareness movements such as #blacklivesmatter and #metoo are proof that this open forum and ubiquitous dialogue environment is giving more opportunities for oppressed groups to speak truth to power and raise awareness of causes and injustices.  Social media and international streaming services such as Netflix and Hulu have removed many of the artistically restrictive confines of television networks, and it seems we are seeing more diverse content and higher quality content than ever.  Whether or not the content is proportionally more representative of minority groups, I have not researched, but it seems to me that more people of color and more LGBTQ groups and international creative output is being proliferated to new audiences.  Television is surely in a revival currently, and so long as there are newer companies and perhaps representation and authenticity from more minority groups in the studios and writers’ rooms, then this revolution should result in more inclusion, which in turn, benefits everyone.  The more exposure that cultures get to each other (so long as the cultures are accurately and sincerely portrayed), the more unifying and empathetic audience will be. At risk of sounding too sanguine/saccharine, this would create a positive state of being for people and media whose fecundity is necessary for harmony and survival as a people.  

On the topic of whether ownership trumps authenticity, it would seem one begets the other.  Ownership seems to imply a subsequent authenticity in the content created, but this is not necessarily true, it is possible for someone to own a company and care very little for the verisimilitude and cultural accuracy of the outpouring inventions, however, it seems much less likely.  Both sources of content creation (that which is owned by the group, or that the authenticity of the message) would be seemingly healthy for people of color or any group.  To discern which one should prioritize, it may be pertinent to weigh the options or consequences of both.  Ownership equals independence, which is optimal especially in the creation of news and journalism.  No one wants to be breaking a story or sharing a deep truth only to find themselves muzzled due to a conflict of interest with the higher-ups.  Furthermore, for the owners and the observers, ownership is power.  The position of the owner may set an example for others, a good influence and aspiration to shoot for, when one sees someone from their culture who owns something, a position that instills pride, it is deeply galvanizing.  This is an inspiring, example-setting fortification that ownership may bring with it is a virtue unto itself.  However, authenticity, is a qualitative description of the output of an individual or company, calling into question the sincerity or genuineness of the piece and the author’s connection to it’s subject and it’s truthful mirroring or interpretation of that author or creator’s world. 

 Regardless of ownership, it is necessary that the creative output of news media or a record label or television company be authentically presented.  It makes for a more sincere and informative view of the world, it gives work to those who come from specific backgrounds and employs them and implores them to share their world, their culture and their standpoints.

[allonevoice]

Progress beyond Parallax

Beginning the experience of my “Blacks in Mass Media” AFS 363 class at Stony Brook was admittedly intimidating.  Immediately obvious was the empathy-inducing fact of being the relative minority as a white male in the classroom setting, and I was as aware as ever of my privilege.  The situation made me hyper-cognizant and deeply embarrassed and vicariously guilty of my heritage linking me to so many historical (and sadly not-so-distant) atrocities on a micro and macro scale whose maligning effects both culturally and pragmatically resonate to this day and affected the family and lives on so many levels, socially, financially, politically, to name a few.  I was uncharacteristically reticent throughout the duration of the class.  If I was to live up to the aspiration of an ally, and if I really wanted to learn something, my job was to listen.  

The students around me were so incredibly smart and bravely open when sharing their sincere and often painful illuminations into the Black American experience.  Everyone had so much historical knowledge and intense personal anecdotes to impart during appropriate lecture times that it was only right to listen and learn about life outside of my own and be taught more about the day-to-day trauma and violence done to people of color by oppressive systemic issues.  Of course, the true revelation comes from knowing my white guilt feeling of being “wrong for existing” in this classroom full of people hurt by my ancestors and through hegemonic white supremacist power structures, was nothing compared to the actual historical and reprehensibly ubiquitous feeling of that same self-evaluative wrongness and alienation felt by minorities.  These indoctrinated, colonized feelings of self-hatred, of ugliness, of unseemliness or lesser value that people of color were taught through centuries of subjugation an.  racist media, fiction, cultural artifacts (as highlighted at length by the Ethnic Notions documentary) and even racist pseudo-science was the topic of the class.  I read and highlighted meticulously two of the three excellent books Professor Miletsky assigned for the class, African Americans and The Media by Catharine Squires, Black Image in The White Mind by Robert M. Entman and Andrew Rojecki cover to cover.  I’m a chapter into the third text Framing Blackness by Ed Guerrero and it already promises to be another well-written informative and heartbreakingly frank look into the consistently abusive screen parallax effect for people of color across an all-too-slowly progressing continuum of media.  

The title reference to Parallax isn’t an entirely apt a metaphorical reference, because the screens themselves aren’t innately to blame for the distortion of the images of culture.  Rather the screen is merely the omnipresent viewfinder through which caricatures of minorities, born of corrupt, racist and prejudiced creative malefactors are proliferated. The lessons and books we read expounded on the various ways the media maintains and presents the homogeneous white “mythical norm”, through what symbols it does so, and what psychology and social study has shown about why and how this works to instill and take care of racial tension. A more human and immediately fervent and relatable compliment to all this intellectually rigorous and statistic-laden academically researched work, were the lectures and subsequent discussions of my peers throughout the semester.  As a part of my semester, the material in this class also conveniently dovetailed with a lot of what I learned about in another class I was taking, “Women’s and Gender Studies in Social Sciences”.  Often, I was getting an often-intermingled education through the cross- referenced myriad studies of concepts, writers, perspectives and ideals that also helped a lot with the writing of the following papers.  On account of the studies and conversations in this semester, I feel like a better person, a more astute, acerbic viewer of media, even more sensitive and empathetic regarding issues of race and inequality.  I am proud of the work I did for this class and grateful for how it helped me grow.  It has enabled me to have more articulate conversations about systemic issues and I think I will be a better journalist and person on account of it.