Media Racism and the Public Framing of Black Lives by Marquita Gammage, Ph.D. Full Professor Africana Studies Department California State University, Northridge
Examining the role of media in creating barriers to sustaining positive life outcomes among African Americans has proven pivotal over the past centuries. While media productions have evolved technologically, what I term media racism remains embedded in the fabric of American media productions, including television and film, news and radio broadcasts, and social media. Twenty-first-century media depictions of Black lives mirror past centuries’ stereotyped portrayals of Blackness and media injustice against African Americans. The content of contemporary media, including television shows, is entrenched with the systematic promotion of unhealthy lifestyles and negative images of Black communities. Assessments of the news media coverage of African Americans illustrates that media disproportionately represents Blacks within the tropes of race, class, and justice. Depictions of African Americans as criminal and violent in contemporary news media do not diverge from coverage of Blacks in past centuries. Instead, the racist media used during the launch of the war on drugs parallels the current mistreatment of African Americans amidst the Black Lives Matter movement (Dukes & Gaither, 2017). In recent years, the killing of unarmed African American men, women, and children by police officers and individuals acting as neighborhood monitors has sparked outrage across the nation and globally. Many of these incidents have been captured on video and shared on social media and through news outlets. A disproportionate number of Blacks killed by police officers have been unarmed, yet the majority of these cases have closed without indictments or convictions. According to Mapping Police Violence (n.d.), “Police killed at least 104 unarmed black people in 2015, nearly twice each week” and “nearly 1 in 3 black people killed by police in 2015 were identified as unarmed, though the actual number is likely higher due to underreporting.” Mapping Police Violence (MPV) also reports that “36% of unarmed people killed by police were black in 2015 despite black people being only 13% of the U.S. population” and “Unarmed black people were killed at 5x the rate of unarmed whites in 2015.” The organization went on to highlight: Only 13 of the 104 cases in 2015 where an unarmed black person was killed by police resulted in officer(s) being charged with a crime. 4 of these cases have ended in a mistrial 105
