I. COMMON DEPICTIONS OF MEN AND BOYS OF COLOR IN CHICAGO

Chicago’s local media, but also media generally, does a poor job of providing its audiences with accurate or authentic stories about men and boys of color, participants said. The general national public perception of Chicago — as a place whose principal attribute is its violence — is the same story that the media tells local audiences.

Speaking about the kinds of stories that he sees in the local news, Bradly Johnson, now former director of external affairs at Build Chicago, said he sees “violence over and over and over and over again. It’s like this fear thing: Either it’s a fear [of] Black and brown men as terrorists or victims. It’s two sides to it but never really [men of color] exerting power.” Three main topics get too much negative coverage, Singleton said “Gangs, guns, violence.” both good and bad and sweet and mean, and there’s a lot of variation. [Those nuanced and complicated] narratives get flattened — either completely evil or completely harmless or completely good. There’s no space for true realness.”

One reason for this may be that simpler, straightforward stories are easier to tell. Often, journalists will look for a “perfect victim” to help tell the story in a simple, unassailable way, Ballesteros said. When something bad happens to a good person who did everything right but fell victim to an evil system, for example, that’s a perfect victim. “We’ve all read stories like that or seen some,” he said. “I’m guilty of doing it too. It’s a storytelling technique, and it draws readers in.” But reality is often complicated, and someone shouldn’t have to be an angel to justify a story, he said.

Participants share a common perspective about how the cycle of violence is inescapable for Black men. Latino and Black men are often portrayed as gang members, Harvey and Nole said in different conversations. Death seems to be the focal point of news coverage of men of color, McGhee said. “If the only time we see Black men in the newspaper is when they’re dead, that’s a problem,” he said. “We’re missing the human aspect if we’re [only] talking about death.”

Overall, media portrayals of Black and brown boys are “flattened,” said Carlos Ballesteros, a reporter at Injustice Watch. “In real life, I think we’re just very complicated,

Harvey agreed. “When you have an imperfect victim, it forces you to reckon with the systems that might’ve brought them to that point where they were imperfect,” he said. “It forces you to really reckon with those things, and I think we have a discomfort typically with really getting into the nitty gritty of those things. … We might ignore them, or we might not be giving the proper energy to them.”

Meanwhile, Latinos and Asians are often still regarded as newcomers in Chicago, and many people fear immigrants, Ballesteros said. “Latinos and Asians have been here for 100 years or more, but there’s still this kind of foreignness [in the perception of our communities], just regarding them as not truly Chicagoans, as not real Americans or whatever. It’s constantly having to prove that we belong.” When news organizations focus primarily on immigration when covering the Latino community, it doesn’t help combat those misperceptions, he added. “Immigration takes up so much of the news when it comes to the Latino community. It’s a big issue, but it’s not the only issue. Latinos also struggle with a lot of other stuff. But you wouldn’t know it if you watched the nightly news,” Ballesteros said.

Chicago Latinos are also missing from movies and shows, Ballesteros said, as Latino movies are usually based in California or Texas, and stories from the Latino community in Chicago are less represented. “There is no clear sense of how the community looks like here and what the stories are coming out of the community here in Chicago,” he said.

McGhee noted that part of the problem is not that editors and reporters are unaware of the stereotypes or even that they are unwilling to cover positive stories. The problem, as he puts it, is that “they’re bad at covering it.” The media’s preferred positive alternatives to the stereotype of the “violent criminal” are typically just as reductive: the exceptional athletic talent and the “one wonderful Black man that’s changing Chicago for the better,” as Harvey described it. McGhee captured this dichotomy in the media very succinctly: “You either make it as the basketball star, or you end up dead at 18, and there’s no in-between.”

This polarization of Black men into the stereotypes of angel or devil has several consequences. One is the erasure of their humanity, reducing the subjects of such stories to a supernaturally unique talent or a mug shot and a crime statistic. These stories also ignore the systems and social pressures that lead these young men into their circumstances and feed into the limitations on what audiences and communities envision as potential outcomes for the Black men in their communities.