cop dramas

thomasjasengardner                                                Tuesday, July 30, 2013

COP DRAMAS

There has been a big hoopla about the racism of police, employers, hospitals, and politicians in American society. Conversations about institutional racism have reflected upon the role of families that encourage discrimination and communities that support segregation.  What is missing is a discussion about the fictional role of blacks in prime-time television storylines.  Whether its reality shows, news, sitcoms or police dramas, television gives people a window to a world that they can only imagine.

Such is the case, the prime culprit and instigator of new American racism is television. Hollywood movies directors repeated this same pattern of media racism when they extolled the virtues of Nazi Germany as Jews were led to death camps. With fact and fiction, corporate television disseminates information to millions of Americans. Unfortunately, with erroneous knowledge, the media cast blacks as a typical criminal protagonist. TV executives have created a mythical pattern of criminality that is being articulated within society’s preconceptions about race, class, and gender. News and entertainment media are fashioned so that images of black males are the first and most disproportionate examples of criminals, drug addicts, and homelessness. Additional studies illustrate how a TV audience, wrongly links the overrepresentation of fictional violent black criminals, with the safe reality of their personal lives.

When whites purposely misidentify a black man as a criminal suspect it illustrates that existing attitudes and beliefs about race are hazardous to our judicial system.

Research confirms that when jurors view fictional video footage of a guilty black man, they will transfer real harsh recommendations to a black man who is innocent of a similar crime.

Prime time television makes racism palpable to Americans through its seductive videos. Still, like the Internet, you cannot believe everything you see on TV. But like social media, the social effects of racial bias in television negatively influences and disturbingly reinforces irrational racist behavior. Television conglomerates have a FCC license to teach stereotypical attitudes and misconceptions about people which viewers ignorantly accept as truth.  Even on mute, television perpetuates racism with an actor’s negative predisposition towards blacks represented in body language and facial expression. Even on the news, blacks are shown as shufflin, shiny-faced, head-scratchin' simpletons with bugged out eyes who don’t work and who speaks bad English.

Yes, the role of black nannie mammies and slovenly black males was prominent during the birth of television’s early days.  Greasy black-faced white actors did not bode well on the black and white television screen. Blacks were better adapted to encoding black gestures or looks or postures that pigeonholed them as an inferior race, incapable of being civilized. How many of us remember the empathy for the inept but lovable black matriarch of the Beulah television show. Then you must also remember the comic antics of black butler Rochester on the Jack Benny Show.. Even when he saves the day, he does it by his natural incompetence, so his heroism is a sidekick joke, and what makes it more acceptable is he does it in the service of his white boss. Ah, the white mans burden.

These shows have very much in common with Differ’nt Stokes and Good Times. They have a central role in perpetuating the centuries old myths framed by white racists. Media stereotypes of blacks as lazy, stupid, foolish, cowardly, submissive, irresponsible, childish, violent, sub-human, and animal-like, were rampant in TV programs. These programs condone pervasive racism in American culture. Jim Crow has been reproduced and sustained in the mass media. These shows also give credence to whites that refuse to assimilate with a culture that they learned about from fictional TV.

But the caricature of those earlier black roles changed anew during the proceeding decades of cop shows. The resurgence of racist behavior and right wing political thought has its roots in TV programming. Television has reinforced the old bigoted notions of contemptible racism from reality shows and fictional cop shows. Black suspects on television are commonly over-represented as criminals in relation to actual arrest rates.  The programs narratives are booby trapped with stereotyped images of bad black men. On the opposite side of the pendulum, television’s white criminals are arrested less then the actual rates proven in federal statistics.

Most Americans watch as much as 4 hours of TV or more a day. Does seven and a half instances of physical violence per one hour of television entertainment alter a real life perception of black people? Only one percent of Americans actually experience crime and only 20 percent of that one percent is actually violent crime. But television uses dynamic means to attract our attention to ingrained cultural expectations that only highlights black indifferences to American justice. While fictional storylines portray blacks as the instigator of violent crimes, the reality is that blacks account for the largest share of non-violent offenders and the most obvious offender of property crimes.

But to perpetrate the falsehood of angry black men, TV shows display over 10 times as much black violent crime as actually reported to authorities. TV viewers believe in a false reality consistent with that found on television cop shows.  This steady stream of intense, violent, and threatening narratives creates an artificially heightened sense of danger. A heavy exposure to any cop drama indoctrinates viewers to believe that they are likely to be a crime victim of a black criminal anywhere at anytime.

Mistaken memories derived from television have created a black perpetrator even when the criminal is white according to social scientists. When in reality white victimization is more likely to be from a white criminals fraud and investment scam or a violent white criminal in their community. Hence, there is more white-collar crime that is underreported by the mass media because insider-trading convictions lack the excitement of a racist lynch mob.

During that era and beyond, television executives learned that viewers paid more attention to murder and mayhem then light hearted comedy or informative documentaries. Yes it is true that some viewers were more likely to watch a program that satisfies their paranoid images of lawless blacks stalking unsuspecting whites. Yet, let us not forget those young children who are indoctrinated early by televisions falsehoods of black men. Besides carrying such unsubstantiated fears into adulthood, they too have learned from television about the potentially threatening and violent black man from televisions misdiagnoses of facts.

These false images became intangible with the true images of black people.

Of course there were the shows of dysfunctional black families whose comic relief was to maintain a racist ideology. Without considering that blacks spent $1 trillion on commercial merchandise, TV surveys show that pacifying racist southern viewers with segregated programs was a in-house corporate goal. Why else would camera close-ups of racist tattoos on Sons of Anarchy actors be so prominently revealed again and again? Ultimately, racism is meant to insure TV executives a lucrative income from corporate advertising.

Even today, to maintain and encourage more viewers, television shifted the image of the docile and trusted black servant to an incorrigible black criminal. Both lifestyles reflected white societies images of black Americans. However, the imagery of television turned the black man into a believable threat with a uncontrollable urge for brutality, thievery and other unscrupulous behavior. Such behavior that is real or imagined produces a fight or flight response where adrenaline is priming, heart rates are elevated and blood pressure is increased. Like all animals with an instinct for survival we want to learn from the fictional program what to be cautious of. Lo and behold, it’s who my grandmother told me it was. Television made the false hypocrisy of equality easier to believe. The most damaging of prime-time broadcast television shows were the endless police detective and judicial displays of blacks as the worst and sometimes only criminal antagonist in America. Inciting fear of crime was a mainstay and still is a mainstay of broadcast television programing.

TJ Hooker, The Streets of San Francisco, and Dragnet represented cop shows where 60-90 percent of the perpetrators were black. Shows like the F.B.I., N.Y.P.D. Blue and Adam-12 tend to implicate all black men as purveyors of violent crime. Despite department of justice statistics that show the contrary, white television viewers falsely believe that blacks are the only repositories of American crime. Cop dramas like Barnaby Jones, Cagney and Lacy, CHiPS and Hunter placates television viewers who have become entrapped by these fictional representations of racism mistakenly identify blacks as perpetrators of crime.

Cop stories like Ironside, Kojak, Nash Bridges, and Starsky and Hutch had degrading black stereotypes that reinforced and enhanced the negative portrayal of blacks in the media. These negative racist stereotypes of thoughts and beliefs are the principals used when white people are presented with a real crime situation or are asked to judge a criminal event. Instead of showing the use of reason and the rule of law, When African American defendants were in court, their trials were overwhelmingly compared to TV cop episodes instead of documented facts.

Even if the black characters matched a viewers values and beliefs in terms of attractiveness, sociability, kindness and intelligence, white viewers still elicit negative responses to a black character. Is that why New York City television situation comedies featured no blacks?  Did the producers and stars on Seinfeld, Friends, and Sex and the City realize that people with a racial bias gravitate towards shows that pander to their beliefs? Social experiments prove to researchers that shows with an all-white cast are considered more profitable. The invisibility of black actors interacting with white actors in white environments has to be condoned by white corporations that advertise on these shows.

Yesteryear, when the black Nat King Cole show featured a mixed couple dancing, advertisers pulled their commercials. Today, when a Cheerio’s cereal commercial shows a mixed couple, the shows producers pulled the commercial. They claimed that the few racists it offended justified ending further exposure. Neither TV executives nor advertisers consider the wider audience of all Americans when considering profit revenue.

How can media advertisers of these whites only programs deny the presence of blacks in regions with large black populations? Integration would strip the show of its systematic homogeneous representation of American and restrict worldwide distribution. Potentially threatening and violent images of black men are invalid images that taint the quality of our cultural perceptions. Stereotypes convey ideological messages of racist clichés that are laden with ritual and myth. That blacks lack the optimism to empower him or her with success because they are incapable of growth, change, innovation or transformation. 

Black Genocide

 

Ethnic Cleansing:

thomasjasengardner           

1360 words                                                                           Monday, Jul 22, 2013                      

Black men, be afraid. Be very afraid.

Today’s patterns of black profiling are similar to the annulation of 17 million Jews in Europe. Today’s patterns of bigotry and hatred mirror the purification of the Cambodia Khmer Rouge against 2.5 million dead civilians. Todays pattern of cultural persecution is similar to the Bangladeshi war crimes where 3 million people were killed because of how they voted.  

This has also been a painful week of genocide for Americans black citizens. The ongoing saga of African-Americans in the United States draws a direct comparison to the extermination of blacks in Nazi Germany. The sterilization, isolation, incarceration, medical experimentations, brutal torture, segregation and sexual abuse of blacks in Germany follow the same pattern of black genocide in America. This nationalistic trend of black abuse is defined as white ethnocentrism by the United Nations.

The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was adopted by the United Nations in 1948 as a response to the extermination of and Germany’s Final Solution for Gypsies, Jews, and Africans. It took American politicians nearly 44 years to sign the genocide declaration. Why? Because Americans maltreatment of its black citizens was a hypocritical shocking testament of ethnic cleansing as viewed by European nations.

The Civil Rights Congress, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and the National Negro Congress separately petitioned the United Nations to act upon the many racist instances of lynching, incarceration and segregation in the United States. After each rejection, the presenters included more government statistics and examples of an established pattern of legal discrimination, and systematic inequalities in the health and quality of life for African-Americans. The petition argued that the US government is both complicit with and responsible for black genocide.

More today then yesterday:

Black men must realize that ethnic cleansing has taken many forms in this country. From the high rate of black infant mortality to the high number of black seniors dying from preventable illnesses. From the high number of incarcerated blacks to the high number of blacks on death row; from the high ratio of blacks who die from treatable tumors to the high number of blacks that die from prostrate, bone, lung and breast cancer; From the high number of blacks who die from misdiagnosed high blood pressure to the high number of blacks who die from preventable strokes and heart disease.    

These acts are examples of what the United Nations considered to be an attempt to purposely deny a race the right to exist by killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life that is calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part. Even today, Americans have become culturally conditioned to marginalize black people as second-class citizens.

It is apparent from these unorganized documented patterns of extermination, that black men are endangered of becoming destroyed. Currently, police racially profile one in four black men. Every 28 hours, a black man is either beaten or shot by a police officer in America. With stand your ground laws in 24 states; the number of blacks who are physically abused or murdered by cowboy civilians is expected to multiply every hour. In these same states, there has been a 360 percent increase in private citizens harassing black males without legal authority. Innocent blacks profiled, mistreated, and abused by civilians in jobs, housing, and healthcare mirrors the indiscriminate assassinations by Hitler’s Nazi brown shirts.

This categorization was giving trigger-happy racists a call to arms. Many gun stores in white communities reported an increase in weapon sales. Many civic gun license departments also saw an increase in concealed weapon permit applications. Because the court deemed that you know longer need a badge to kill a black man, every zealot with a gun could validate his or her provoked killing as an act of self-defense.

Just last week, a white woman jumped on a music stage and physically pummeled an old black blues musician. She later said that the musician’s dedication to Trayvon martin offended her. She was defending herself against a verbal discussion of Trayvon Martin’s human rights.. It’s a good thing she did not have a gun.  The idea of universal suspicion without individual evidence is what black men in America must constantly fight. Yet this example is evidence that a white woman with a purse may no longer clutch her purse from a black man passing her by on the sidewalk. Without any evidence, her learned behavior says that a black man will undoubtedly steal her purse without provocation.  And with this mindset she will use her gun to defend herself against an imaginary threat.

The same applies to that familiar racist sound of a white families car door locking as a black man walking his dog passes by. The same stereotyped suspension will encourage the car driver to perform a racially motivated action because of what he stereotypes as predictable behavior for a car jacking. Instead of the usual click of a car door locking, the victim will hear the sound of a gun’s hammer clicking before the bullet is fired at an unsuspecting pedestrian.

When Emmitt Till and Medgar Evers bodies were mutilated and killed under the ruse of civilian justice, it is the same reason a black man can be killed today. This masochistic cycle is steamrolled by Tea-Party citizens, but is inflamed by new conservative politicians who rebranded racism with the same rude and obnoxious behavior of the old south. In the new South, an innocent Trayvon Martin was killed under the ruse of vigilante justice.

Another judicial court proclaimed the innocence of another killer of black men is allowed to go free. This ongoing judicial consent to murder black men has given legal license for bigots to indiscriminately kill any black man. The court sanctioned murders of black men by police and civilians have triggered a wave of nationalist vigor among American’s white homogenous population. A spiral of escalating racism might be set in motion that will lead to various levels and forms of institutional discrimination against blacks.

The mass media and government aristocrats hide the high-intensity of black-white conflicts in America. The 400-year American fractionalization between whites and blacks has been a significant predictor of current ethnic conflicts. Political scientists assembled a large dataset that concludes American blacks are at risk of being exterminated because of government policies and the complex coalitions of the powerful white elite.

Black repression and intimidation has escalated into a nationalist apparatus forming all modes of bigotry and hate. The political mobilization of right wing organizations has championed the degradation of blacks as a brand of American theology and patriotism. Business lobbyists and high-level politicians oppose any federal support for blacks and reject any level of power sharing with black politicians or black constituents. Corporate powers have considered the election of a black president a reason to marginalize the economic and political power of black citizens into a powerless culture.

The Supreme Court has helped to exploit the unpopularity of blacks in hopes of restoring the ethnocratic regime of states rights to discriminate and segregate. Political elites have mobilized their members and forged corporate alliances based on ethnic similarity. The satisfactory arrangement with different ethnic groups to discriminate is directed by the total exclusion of blacks into an inferior culture of any ethnic group. While the right wing media tried to portray the murderer as a model minority, they forget that black exclusion by other ethnic groups is considered to be an important criterion for citizenship.

These new dynamics highlight a need for a new direction of liberation activism. The social and political opposition to policies designed to narrow and eliminate racial inequalities must be stopped.

The state of race relations in this country is horrendous. It will take more then a conversation about race to discrimination in America.

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