race and media – Susan X Jane

Build Media Mind Muscles

Learning to think about media, or media literacy, is both fun and functional. Sure we live in a media saturated world, straight mainlining image and messages 24.7–but do you think about it? Do you ask yourself why are there 1000 channels and nothing on? Why is the news so bad at the news? What is the payoff to tastemakers to work so hard to manufacture our tastes? Thinking critically about the content we see and the conveyer belt that shoves images our way can help us make meaning out of the mush.

Media messages shape the way that we think about ourselves, our planet, and each other. The unreal world created by movies, TV and new media can define for us what is real, what is happening, who deserves the very best, and who deserves what they get. Big issues, like the definition and redefinition of race class and gender

the state of the planet and our responsibility in it

and even the line of right and wrong

are framed for us but the media that surrounds us.

You can combat the consequences of believing everything you see and hear by thinking about the media that surrounds you. Start to notice what media tells you about who’s who and ask if that lines up with the real wold we inhabit. Notice the way that music, images and words are combined to create stories–that may or may not be true. Watch the way one story can stand in for a whole group of people. Be aware of how media sells you some dangers while helping others hide in plain sight. Start small, but just think.

Here are a couple of sites that are finding interesting ways to get us to think about the media that we see every day and encourages us to explore that most critical of questions: why?

If we live in a country with nearly 40% people of color, why are the movies like another country? If you think they aren’t, try out Every Single Word. Actor and playwright Dylan Marron has edited down Hollywood films to only the words spoken by a person of color. You can check out some of of your favorite movies and–spoiler alert–it won’t take you long. Here my favorite, Noah. As you see the movie cut to include only utterances of people of color, I remind you this story is set in Turkey.

In the middle of summer nothing is more pleasurable than a dip in the deep blue. Just in time, the discovery channel gives us a one week dose of shark fear in Shark week programming. These shark horror stories along with sensational news reports of shark attacks highlighted in the news makes it seem like Jaws is hiding behind every wave.

But what if we thought of sharks as beautiful and majestic and mostly uninterested in eating people–which they are. VW gives you a chance to remix the shark-track and wha-la a kinder friendlier shark is just a few string instruments away.

Keep looking for ways small and big to think about the messages you see. Media literacy is a practice, and like knitting or running, the more you think about media, the more you’ll build your critical thinking, and free yourself from unnecessary shark nightmares!

Diversity: No Pie For You

Vanity Fair’s Hollywood issue seems to show the joyous post-racial status of Hollywood. But hold on to your popcorn. The fine people from Lee and Low books put together an infographic breaking down the diversity–or lack there of–in the Academy Awards. The numbers show when it comes to Hollywood, you may need a passport because it’s a different country.

The numbers clearly show a lack of diversity. Numbers, though, are just the beginning. Both quality and quality are key to better media representations.

Cheerios Graces Superbowl With Interracial Family’s Return

Sunday’s Super Bowl is here! If you can’t decide between the Seahawks and the Broncos then you’re probably one of millions of Americans that tune in to the big game to see the commercials. The Super Bowl is the single biggest draw for advertisers all year. With a $4 million price tag for every 30 seconds, all the advertisers are going to want the biggest bang for their buck. Cheerios is making their first Super Bowl ad debut in the 48 year history of the game.

This spot, entitled Gracie is a follow up starring the interracial family from this summer’s spot, discussed right here on smntks. So when General Mills finally decides to pony up the $133,000 per second for an ad on the big day, they choose to feature a family that created more controversy than any other Cheerios pitchman. What gives?

What gives is that Gracie and her interracial TV Mom and Pop turn out to be good business. When Gracie first appeared in the summer, trolls tweeted out a host of hateful comments about the ad and interracial families in general. That would have been a sad end to the story, but haters weren’t the only ones that took to the web.

Many more thousands of people weighed in with their support for the positive representation of interracial families. Cheerios themselves celebrates We are the 15% , a real world group formed in support of families like Gracie’s own fictitious folks. Social media and mainstream talk also weighed in to support what is increasingly a portion of the continuum of normal families in America. The moral of this story? The changing face of America has a place and space in mainstream media.

Gracie’s return to the airwaves should come as no surprise to her many supporters. What is more interesting is that General Mills is willing to put 4 million cheerios front and center Super Bowl Sunday to bet on the mass appeal of a multiracial household. Running the ad on the biggest day of the year tells us that when all was said and done in the summer, customers responded positively to the representation of interracial families.

Is the Gracie series racist? No. True, they are leveraging public support to improve their brand, but that’s all about green, not just black and white. So Sunday, pour out a little salsa for Cheerios’ fan favorite fam. And General Mills, since it’s working so well to show families stereotype free, maybe you could stop with the cool-ed up Nelly-Bee…or did you mean to play both sides?

Shasheer’s Here But Drake Takes the Cake

This week Saturday Night Live debuted their latest cast member, Shasheer Zamata. Her addition to the 39 year old comedy ensemble came after well-publicized and deserved criticism led to the show ~~bowing to pressure~~ listening to the criticism and—surprise, surprise—finding the talent they thought was so elusive. Shasheer brings the total women of color on the show to 4 of 138 cast members over 39 years, or almost 3%, still well below the 18% that women of color make up in the general population. Hype bubble busted.

Shasheer’s talent is undeniable, but let’s take a look at the actual episode. First let us say that this talented young actress has earned her spot on the show, with a solid track record in comedy. Shasheer appeared in several of the opening skits to satisfy the hungry eyeballs. But making media diversity work is about two things—the number of people of different races and also the quality of the character that they portray. While Shasheer did make it into 4 sketches with 5 characters—more than some of the other new cast member added in the fall–I’m not so sure we really got to see her stretch her wings.

In her debut episode, Shasheer played Keenan Thompson’s wife at a bar mitzvah, a dancing smoking Rhianna-as-Blossom, Two Chains’ younger sister, a backup singer, a girl hosting a slumber party and a student in detention. Ground breaking? Not yet. So while SNL did ~~finally get it together and try to do the right thing~~ incorporated more diversity into their line-up by adding a black female, the jury is still out to see if they will provide the opportunity for her to play characters that go beyond stereotypical roles.

Here’s the bigger story: stealing the diversity card for the show was the guest host Drake. Of course he appeared in more sketches, but what made the night his was the diversity of roles he played. Drake himself has a background that breaks stereotypes: rapper but not gangster, Canadian, multiracial and, as he told us, polite. Because we know him to be all these things, SNL played with the kinds of characters he portrayed with barely a nod to playing a chain-wearing gang banger.

It seems like SNL was able to write interesting roles for Drake that asked us to question racial boundaries as we laughed. The range of charters he played brought a sparkle of diversity into an otherwise typically stereotypical episode. Now if they can just learn to keep those roles coming for their regular cast members, they may be on to something.

Free to be Bad Part 2: Dear Congress, Love, Zombies

Just in time to fill the hole in our life left by the death of Walter White, AMC premieres season 4 of The Walking Dead. If you’ve never seen it, the Walking Dead, based on the graphic novel of the same name, is an action drama set in the zombie-infested near future. Like Breaking Bad, The Walking Dead has us riding shotgun next to an antihero navigating a world made of bad choices and worse situations.

Rick, former cop, zombie killer extraordinaire, wears the badge of the classic western sheriff when we first meet him. He takes on the noble task of shepherding a group of people, a newly formed family collected on the road, through an America destroyed by a zombie virus. Where once the hero in the white hat stood, The Walking Dead places a man, fallible and frightened. Rick does his best, and then decides there is no best in a world where right and wrong have been devoured.

What is most fascinating about Rick, Walter, and AMC’s other bad boy Don Draper is that these men are complex and flawed, even as they put a brave face to dealing with a new reality. What is not new is that each of them is all too willing to throw everyone around them under the bus as they search for the new world.

Whether it is Peggy toiling under Don Draper’s tutelage on Mad Men or Glenn running interference for Rick in the Walking Dead, our new anti heroes have fresh faced side kicks. Diversity is blooming across some of televisions great scripted dramas. While it’s great to see new kinds of characters representing the struggles of women and people of color too often absent from the scene, the characters too often end up as chattel, red-shirt wearing secondary character who are ground up to serve in our antiheroes wild plans.

The challenge facing the group in the Walking Dead is the same challenge we face in a world of increasing diversity–how can we all live together and share this fragile planet? The Walking Dead shows us the problems of hammering out new leadership. In order to avoid the pitfalls of the past, leaders have to run on something other than ego and hubris. Leaders need to embrace diversity not just for show but for the valuable ideas and important vision diverse voices can bring to the table.

So some advice for Rick in this season’s Walking Dead? Take some time to listen to the people you are working to lead– their voice matters. Surviving in any crisis takes teamwork, collaborative problem solving and critical thinking. Even in a world of bad choices, people together can make the world a livable place whether that’s a prison surrounded by zombies, or, say…..congress.

We Ain’t What We Ought to Be

Today is the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s I Have a Dream speech. The 50 years since that famous speech stand today as a measuring stick to place blackness in America against. To paraphrase MLK himself, it’s 50 years later and the negro is still not free. Now I can hear you shouting “Black President !” from here, and I’ve seen Obama hanging around, so I know lots has changed. Even with all the change, the needle for black people–and poor people– that the civil rights activists fought so hard to move seems to point to the same old numbers.

By every metric of social well being , blacks lag behind their white counterparts. While civil rights gave legal rights to blacks that were long overdue, the last 50 years has witnessed the slow erosion of these gains. Stop and Frisk, Stand Your Ground, and the Supreme Court’s decision on the Voting Rights act all remind us that racism lives on in the heart of the American justice system, while discriminatory financial and educational policies bring the fight to our homes and schools.

What about in the fantastical world of mainstream media? Surely the media does a much better job of representation now, right? Well……

In 1963 there was not one network show–and there were only major networks and no cable, young ones– that starred or featured a character of color. Films, much the same. This is not to say that people of color were excluded from media. Of course westerns like Bonanza and Gunsmoke filled screens with feathered savages, and there were more than a couple of black entertainers popular that year. The racist show Amos and Andy, cancelled years earlier still ran in syndication in over 50 markets. Whatever popular representations of race there were by and large were would not be acceptable by today’s standards….right?

Fast

forward 50 years. We have handfuls of big blacks filling up our screens, and incidentally draining our pockets. Beyonce and Jay Z are the reigning king and queen of a kingdom full of rappers, runners and ratchet weave wearers. We even have some young white ladies who I refuse to name here doing their best to play out their own tilted image of what it is to be black.

There’s no doubt that there are hundreds more black characters in media today, but just as in 1963, media representations show blacks as lazy and crazy, violent and vixenish. When we fight mainstream media for representation, we can’t stop with appropriate quantity. Quality matters. High visibility celebs who push a self-centered materialistic life, and images that reinforce the worst of classic stereotypes aren’t progress.

MLK’s I have a dream speech resonates so strongly all these years later because still we strive to be a better more perfect union. Until the words that echo off the water of the mall are the same that make up the stories on our screens, we still have the fight in front of us. As the old saying goes, we ain’t what we used to be, but we ain’t what we ought to be. Lets not take another 50 years to get there.