Media and Race

For most of its history, U.S. television has been predominantly White—not simply in the faces it has portrayed but also in its support of White cultural norms. Until the 1990s, White media bias went largely unex-amined. This entry discusses media portrayals of race, examines critical theories of media and race, and reviews the findings of cognitive research in this area. Because Asian Americans, Native Americans, and Latinos have, for the majority of U.S. television history, been noticeable primarily for their absence, most of the discussion here deals with media portrayals of African Americans.

Concerns about the influence of electronic media on U.S. race relations predated television, and the roots of those concerns go back to depictions of [Page 881]Blacks in Western popular culture since the 17th century. In many respects, television simply extended and recycled these earlier popular forms. However, television's arrival in the late 1940s coincided with growing hopes among African Americans for greater inclusion in U.S. society. Television, it was hoped, could help speed that inclusion. The medium's capacity to expose viewers to supposedly unmediated reality helped stoke the belief that it would correct the distortions of earlier media. Moreover, its widespread adoption, with nearly 90% of homes possessing a set by the end of the 1950s, meant that realistic images of African Americans could be beamed into almost every U.S. household.

Given these high hopes, many African Americans were indignant about early fiction series starring African Americans. The now infamous Amos ‘n’ Andy, for instance, came under fire from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which passed a resolution criticizing the show at its 1951 convention. The NAACP's objections continue to shape research and thinking about media and race today. Eight of the NAACP's twelve objections addressed the lack of diverse African American characters and their reliance on received caricatures, including charges that “every character… is either a clown or a crook” and “Negroes are shown as dodging work of any kind.” The remaining four objections dealt with the perceived impact of these televisual characterizations on White viewers. “Amos ‘n’ Andy on television is worse than on radio because it is a picture, … not merely a story in words…. Millions of White children learn about Negroes for the fist time by seeing Amos ‘n’ Andy” These related yet distinct concerns—about the diversity of African American portrayals and the impact of such portrayals on viewers' attitudes—spawned distinct research traditions in media and race.

Concerns about diversity of African American portrayals were initially limited to distinctions between positive and negative images, with researchers chronicling disparities between portrayals of African American life and its realities. Under the influence of cultural studies, feminist theory, and African American literary theory, critical media scholars began moving beyond questions of positive and negative characters to examine how television as an aesthetic medium, encompassing settings, narratives, and generic classifications as well as characters, participates in ideological struggles over race. Contemporary critical research on media and race addresses three main areas: the role that African American audience members play in reinterpreting and reproducing the ideologies of popular television texts; the impact of network decline, globalization, and channel multiplication on African American portrayals; and revisionist histories of African American television, often looking at how African American creative workers actively shaped representational strategies.

...