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.
