The harder it becomes to find a positive view of a black male in the media, the harder it is to believe that all black males do not live a negative lifestyle.
For example, how people look at “hood films” versus how the people who are subjected to living in these ghettos really feel. ”Hood film” is a term in the movie industry that hints to the development of films where they show the lives of people who live in urban areas from an outside eye. They make money essentially by making fun of the environment, motives, vernacular, and even the names of people who are apart of the black community. Society keeps failing to see that people do not always make their environments.
The “hood” has so many people with marginalized perspectives who do not realize they could have better and they also have nobody to show or give them better either. The term that so perfectly describes this is institutionalism. It has been proven that the average development for the human brain can go all the way up until the age of 25 and starts as early as 11 months after birth. Laws of psychology say that it is not unlikely to be noncognitive about separating reality and fiction at a young age. Therefore, we can not expect that the films about black males and having to live as one will not put their brains into a boxed outlook on their life and opinions. Unfortunately, it's the males who are between ages 1 and 25 who are harmed the most by black male stereotypes.
Baby mamas, drugs, and gun violence on tv screens give the portrayals of our communities that are detrimental to our image and leads on viewers to take it as real life. The messages we get from these representations brought to us by way of the t.v screens in our own homes are a part of an ongoing power dynamic and systematic institutionalism that's stuck not only with our community but our entire country for years before us and probably will be around for years after us. The stereotypes fuel the minds of people outside of the community with misconceptions of our lives and intellectual standards. This creates an authority to feel the need to expel the members in those communities rather than help them. Specifically, “...these pervasive stereotypes have resulted in exclusion, alienation, joblessness, fear, ostracism, and intense punitive treatment in U.S public schools and the criminal justice system” (Smith, 2012).
And as a member of both the African American male community and the media what does it mean for your image personally? Dr. Darron Smith, a very verbal and cultured writer in the media, describes in a short essay the problems surrounding “Entertaining While Black”. Overall in the essay, he asserts that many of the societal struggles that black men have in general come from a predominantly pseudo-scientific background. Essentially arguing that theories about black culture and black masculinity are what the media holds on to in its creation of the misrepresentations and not actual stereotypes. But, is that not just racism as well. People being able to develop a thought process about a something, and acting on it inappropriately, and it causing damage to opposite force. These are the damages in a society that harm the community both physically and psychologically. They are the direct cause of things like police brutality, lack of education, and civil injustice.
Does this also leave room for black male entertainers to be labeled as hypocrites? Why do we laugh at oppressive behavior in our media system, then allow ourselves entitlement to the feeling of outrage when it's done in our criminal justice, education, or civil right system? It is a generational unbalanced. As black entertainers, we fight for these roles in these films, that disgraces the efforts and struggles of ancestors who have fought for us to feel free and appreciated in every human aspect as possible. This is almost like a very big slap in the face. The disenfranchisement of black people by black people will always be that big okay to develop a racist media.
