Gates, Obama and Stories of Race and Class in the Media
Gates, Obama and Media Imagery and Narrative about Black Men
Yesterday on the Huffingtonpost.com, the Wall Street Journal's Thomas Frank published a piece called The Gates of Political Distraction (1). As has been much discussed this summer, African-American Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates was arrested by a White police officer after he and his African-American driver tried to get into Gates' own locked home upon the professor's return from a trip to China. In the article, Frank suggests two narratives are being reported about the incident. Liberals, Frank says, "plugged the event into their unfair-racial-profiling template." Conservatives "were following their own ‘narrative,' the one in which racism is often exaggerated and the real victim is the unassuming common man scorned by the deference-demanding ‘liberal elite.'"
As a media psychologist, I'd like to dig more deeply into these mediated narratives, images and constructed ideas of race. Images of race have been one of my particular areas of study. For example, my colleagues and I (2) showed how African-American men are portrayed in top-selling video game magazines and on video game covers. We found that these portrayals tended towards being negative stereotypes of African-American men as aggressive and powerful street criminals ("gangstas" and "thugs") compared to men of other races. Studying hundreds of game covers and magazine pages, Black men were typically shown as physical and not intellectual beings. In an experiment, we saw that White college students associated Black, male video game characters with violence compared to White, male video game characters, regardless of whether the game itself was violent.
Here is an image from Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas that illustrates the kind of characterization of Black men uncovered by our study. And below is a youtube video showing a gangsta rap from the same video game, with the same type of young, Black male stereotype:
Melinda Burgess and I followed up on this research, wondering if evoking the stereotypical video game image of a violent Black man had ramifications for an unrelated black man (for a discussion, How Fantasy Becomes Reality (3), Chapter 7). We chose two disparate images of Black men in America - one was the negative image our research had revealed was a common video game character portrayal, the other was the positive image of Black, male leaders, including Barack Obama.
What we found was intriguing. Evoking the image of Barack Obama caused White participants to favor an unrelated Black, male political candidate over a White candidate with identical credentials. In a complete reversal, evoking the image of the violent Black thug, as documented in our earlier research, caused White participants to favor the White candidate over the Black candidate with the same credentials.
When it comes to media, we can tell a story different ways. Whether it is with imagery, with narrative, with specific phrases, like calling Henry Louis Gates an elitist or a victim of racial profiling, we are telling a story. Even the use of terms like liberal and conservative involves spinning a narrative. Research shows (4) that when you paint a picture of an elitist African-American man, the emotions you evoke in many people are anger, envy and resentment. Emotions such as these are much more likely to form the basis of opinions than are reasoned facts. Furthermore, anger can lead to aggression in the form of discrimination.
The stories we digest through the media make a difference in how we feel and how we think about and act towards others. Unfortunately, the people who deliver media messages are well versed in these ideas, while the American public largely is not. That makes the average citizen vulnerable to the agenda of those who write and produce media. We can work on this problem by advocating for media literacy training (media education) in our schools. When the average American child spends more than 40 hours a week exposed to media, school is a good place to start to create more informed citizens. With technology exploding, we all would benefit from understanding more those who are telling our stories and thus helping write our history.
Bibliography 1 Frank, T. (July 29, 2009) The Gates of Political Distraction. Retreived 7/29/09 from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/thomas-frank/the-gates-of-political... 2Burgess, M. C. R., Dill, K. E., Stermer, P., Burgess, S., & Brown, B. P. (2009). Playing with Prejudice: The Prevalence and Consequences of Racial Stereotypes in Videogames. Under revision at Media Psychology. 3Dill, K. (2009). How Fantasy Becomes Reality: Seeing Through Media Influence, New York: Oxford University Press. 4 Cuddy, Amy J. C., Susan T. Fiske, and Peter Glick. "The Bias Map: Behaviors from Intergroup Affect and Stereotypes." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 92, no. 4 (2007): 631-48.
