Race and Visual Imagery Split Reel • 08/06
It’s long been said that perception becomes reality, and for much of our nation’s history, mass media has not been kind to minorities — in particular, the African-American community. From Birth of a Nation (where the Ku Klux Klan were portrayed as crusading heroes) to the bumbling, shiftless TV characters of Mantan Moreland and Stepin Fetchit, early film and television did much to portray black America as an underclass deserving of pity and ridicule. But images were also used as weapons to advance the cause of civil rights, as evidenced by the power of photos of the horrifically-beaten Emmit Till to news coverage of Martin Luther King Jr.‘s “I Have a Dream” speech in D.C.
We’ll be talking about landmark TV shows and films that have inspired discussions on race — from All in the Family to The Cosby Show to Spike Lee’s Bamboozled — as well as look at how race has been used in the political arena.
My guest is Maurice Berger, senior research scholar at the Center for Art, Design, and Visual Culture at the University of Maryland Baltimore County, and senior fellow at the Vera List Center for Art and Politics of The New School. He’s also the author and curator of the new book and exhibit titled For All the World To See: Visual Culture and the Struggle for Civil Rights. You can access the online portion of the exhibit here.
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Most of you know that I’m fascinated by culture, media, and politics… but I’m also intrigued by the subject of race. As a Colombian/Irish kid growing up in a majority African-American school system, I never thought much about race during my formative years. (With a couple of notable exceptions… such as after winning a Black History Month essay competition one year, and getting selected for a “Minorities in Engineering” program during another — an experience which should’ve been a Red Flag that perhaps a career in science was not to be my destiny.) I had friends of all different nationalities, and thought it rather odd when kids from outside my town would look at me funny when I told them where I lived.
Then I got to college, and there I saw segregation — self-segregation — for the first time. Black students sat together in the lunchroom. As did Asian students. And white students. People of various backgrounds didn’t seem to mingle much at all, and the interaction that did take place appeared rather stilted. (It was also something of a culture shock for yours truly, since, to be honest, I’d never been around large numbers of white folks before.)
Most of my classmates had hailed from populations that were quite homogenous, and while it seems obvious now, it hadn’t really dawned on me that folks of different ethnicities would often have vastly different cultural tastes. Ever take a look at historical Nielsen TV ratings by race? Seinfeld was nowhere on black America’s radar in the ’90s, and neither was The Simpsons. Musicially, the differences among college students were even more pronounced, and outside of your occassional white rap fan (like my friend Chris, who mainly kept this sort of thing to himself, having not wanted to be identified with the other Caucasian hip-hop listeners he’d encountered in high school), you might as well have been looking at the Balkans.
Where am I going with this? Well, for large chunks of white America, how they’ve felt and what they’ve thought about African-Americans have stemmed primarily from the mass media they’ve ingested over the years. If you don’t encounter a particular group of people on an everyday basis, you’re going to take your cues from what you witness on television and in film. Chuck Klosterman has a great essay in his latest book, Killing the Dinosaur, where he asks readers to imagine various scenarios, such as “Eskimos in an Alaskan village.” I don’t know any Eskimos, and chances are you don’t either, but you’re still able to conjure up an image, right? How are you able to do this? Because of mass media. You’re drawing upon what you’ve seen on a screen.
So on top of the fact that African-Americans in this country had to deal with the legacy of slavery and segregation, but they also had to combat a Hollywood that, for decades, depicted the black community as a population of servants, loafers… or worse. Sometimes much worse. (see: Birth of a Nation) If your knowledge of the black community began and ended with the weekly Amos n’ Andy programs that were aired on your radio or television, you probably weren’t going to have an incredibly enlightened attitude regarding minorities or civil rights issues.
Images matter.
[By the way, it’s ironic — and painful to many — that while white America has grown at least a bit more sensitive about its depictions of minorities in recent years, various negative stereotypes are now being perpetuated by members of the African-American community… through everything from gangster rap to the comic stylings of one Tyler Perry. Here is an interview with Spike Lee where he equates Perry’s caricatures to the unflattering, shuffling personas of Mantan Moreland and Sleep n’ Eat. And here’s a dated but insightful look at the depictions of blacks on television throughout the years: Part 1 and Part 2 .]
For more information on Split Reel, visit www.kevinfullam.net.
