The lives of black men in the US have long been adversely affected by negative public perceptions. We are often turned away from jobs because we are not the “right fit”. While on the streets, we are regularly treated by police as dangerous suspects. Officer Darren Wilson, who shot and killed the unarmed black teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, described their alleged tussle by testifying: “when I grabbed him, the only way I can describe it is I felt like a five-year-old holding onto Hulk Hogan,” even though the two men had the same height.
In a 2011 study, Media Representations & Impact on the Lives of Black Men and Boys, conducted by The Opportunity Agenda, negative mass media portrayals were strongly linked with lower life expectations among black men. These portrayals, constantly reinforced in print media, on television, the internet, fiction shows, print advertising and video games, shape public views of and attitudes toward men of color. They not only help create barriers to advancement within our society, but also “make these positions seem natural and inevitable”.
Not much has changed since the 1970s when, as an undergraduate student at the University of Michigan, I conducted a study of two metropolitan Detroit dailies’ coverage of the 1967 urban riots. Pouring over those yellowing pages of archival newsprint, I discovered notable examples of blatant bias, misrepresentations of facts and poorly substantiated claims about particulars of acts of violence. In 1968, the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders reviewed coverage of the 1967 riots and faulted many newspapers for their “exaggeration of both mood and event” and “fail[ing] to report adequately on the causes and consequences of civil disorders and on the under lying problems of race relations.” The report went on to say: “They have not communicated to the majority of their audience – which is white – a sense of the degradation, misery and hopelessness of life in the ghetto.”
