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. 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. Another study illustrations how an audience, wrongly links the overrepresentation of fictional TV 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 video footage of a guilty black man, they will transfer their 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. Seven and a half instances of physical violence per one hour of television entertainment altars a real life perception of 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. And to perpetrate this falsehood, TV shows 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 lacks the excitement of a 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. Ultimately it was meant to insure TV executives that a lucrative income from television advertising that represented southern viewers.
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 believe that blacks are the repositories for Americans fear of crime. Barnaby Jones, Cagney and Lacy, CHiPS and Hunter showed White television viewers who have become entrapped by these fictional representations of racism mistakenly identify blacks as perpetrators of crime.
Ironside, Kojak, Nash Bridges, and Starsky and Hutch had degrading 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.
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