Author’s Note:
This is a long read (30 — 60 minutes)—a deep dive into how scientific racism shaped the world’s view of Blackness. This diary is meant for research, as well as the casual learner. First published on Medium.
Introduction
Ask people why the world sees Blackness the way it does, and most won’t have an answer. They might talk about the things they saw growing up — a man watched in a corner store, a teacher clutching her purse, a neighborhood described as “bad” without explanation. They might remember how their parents locked the car doors at a red light in a certain part of town, or how the news seemed to show the same faces whenever the story was about crime. Some will recall jokes told quietly at school, warnings whispered by relatives, the look a stranger gave them — or refused to give at all.
They may think these images just “happened,” the way weather happens — by chance, by repetition, by some force of nature no one controls. What they almost never see are the men and women who made those images on purpose: the men who wrote the textbooks, edited the newspapers, lectured from the pulpit, and stood at the front of the classroom, passing down a picture of Blackness that was designed to last. They don’t see the hands arranging the photographs, the committees approving the science books, the editors choosing which stories to run on the front page and which to bury in the back. They don’t see the laws debated and passed to draw boundaries around where Black people could walk, live, learn, or even dream.¹
For centuries, powerful men in white coats and black robes — doctors, lawmakers, writers — decided what Black people were supposed to be. They didn’t just study Black bodies. They labeled them, measured them, put them in jars and photographs, and wrote whole books trying to prove Black people were less than human.² They passed these ideas down as fact, printing them in schoolbooks and spreading them in churches and newspapers. When that wasn’t enough, they put their beliefs into law — making sure Black people could be owned, counted as less, or locked out of rights entirely.³
The people who did this were not confused or naïve. They were determined. They knew that to build a country on stolen labor and stolen land, they needed a story that would make the theft seem natural. So they gave Blackness a script: always the problem, always the threat, always the reason for more control. It didn’t matter if a Black person was a farmer, a doctor, or a child. The labels came first, the facts came after.⁴
What started in America didn’t stay there. The same stories, the same fake science, traveled overseas. They landed in Europe, South America, Africa — anywhere people wanted a reason to keep Black people out or down. Colonial leaders and missionaries used American books and “studies” to draw color lines of their own.⁵
You can still see the fingerprints today. When a headline blames Black people for crime, when a policy keeps neighborhoods apart, when people assume the worst for no reason — that’s the same old story doing its work. The words and pictures have changed, but the message hasn’t: Blackness is to be controlled, watched, doubted.⁶
This isn’t just about the past. It’s about the roots that are still alive — shaping who gets a job, who gets followed in a store, who gets listened to or left behind. If you want to know why, you have to look at how the story was made, who wrote it, and why so many people still believe it.⁷
Building the Myth — Science, Law, and the Invention of Race
If you want to see how the picture of Blackness was made, start with the men who claimed the power to define it. They weren’t working in the shadows. Their names appeared in school reading lists and medical libraries — Samuel Cartwright, Josiah Nott, Benjamin Rush. Cartwright, in the 1850s, became famous for describing so-called “diseases” unique to Black people. One was “drapetomania” — the urge to escape slavery. In Cartwright’s world, any Black person wanting to be free was seen as sick, not sane.¹⁵
Josiah Nott, a doctor and slaveholder from Alabama, published articles in which he claimed Black people were created as a separate species. He filled lecture halls in the South with skulls and bones, showing diagrams he said proved Black inferiority.² The message was simple: the facts were settled; the “science” had spoken. Nott’s books, and others like them, were translated and shipped across the Atlantic to reinforce colonial rule in Africa and the Caribbean.
Even “enlightened” doctors like Benjamin Rush in Philadelphia — sometimes called the father of American psychiatry — insisted that Black skin was the result of a curable disease called “negritude.” The cure, in his view, was more discipline and assimilation.¹⁶ The experts were building a world where whiteness was health, Blackness was pathology, and racial differences could be measured and treated.
These ideas landed in the classroom and the courtroom. School science books included lessons on the “races of man,” always placing whites at the top, Africans at the bottom. In A Coon Alphabet, each letter reinforced the lesson: A is for “Aunt Jemima,” B is for “Bones,” C is for “Coon.” Children learned not just their ABCs, but the hierarchy of humanity.⁶
In courtrooms, these so-called facts became law. In 19th-century Virginia, Louisiana, and Mississippi, laws stated that anyone with “one drop” of Black blood was legally Black — a single ancestor could strip away rights, property, and legal standing. In many states, Black people could not serve as witnesses in trials involving whites, making them silent in their own defense.¹⁷
Newspapers were filled with warnings about “Negro criminality.” In one year alone, southern papers ran hundreds of editorials predicting chaos if Black men were allowed to vote or serve on juries.⁵ Political cartoons showed Black men as monkeys, brutes, or buffoons — images that would be picked up decades later by Hollywood and advertisers. Blackness became shorthand for trouble, ignorance, or comedy, and those lessons shaped not just one generation, but a whole culture.
This wasn’t accidental. Advertisers and publishers realized there was money to be made in Black caricature. Tobacco ads featured “Sambo” or “Mammy” faces, promising that their products were “as pure as a white man’s word.”⁴ Soap companies sold the idea that whiteness was not just cleaner, but closer to God. Even insurance ads used these images to warn white customers about “dangerous neighborhoods.”
Everywhere a Black child turned — in school, at the movies, on the side of a box of soap — they saw reminders of where the world thought they belonged.
At the same time, lawmakers used this new “science” to justify taking land, jobs, and freedom. Black families who built wealth after Emancipation found themselves targeted by white neighbors and officials. All it took was a rumor or a false accusation, and an entire community could be burned out or run off. Newspapers called these attacks “race riots” — as if both sides were to blame — when in reality they were often organized campaigns of violence to drive Black people away and seize their land.¹⁸
By the dawn of the twentieth century, these images and ideas had become part of the air. The picture of Blackness as dangerous, inferior, or expendable was everywhere — so deeply woven into the law and culture that even many Black people came to question what was possible for themselves.
The Role of Literature, Media, and Education
A Black child in 1910 might wake up and see herself on a cereal box — not as a hero, but as a cartoon, grinning wide for someone else’s breakfast table. Walk to school and pass shop windows lined with postcards showing “funny” Black babies in barrels, grown men with bones in their noses, or “mammies” serving white children.¹⁹ These images aren’t rare. They’re everywhere — on soap wrappers, posters, and the pages of a primer.
Sit in a classroom and listen as the teacher reads from a history book that calls Africa “the dark continent,” full of people waiting to be rescued or civilized. In science class, the lesson for the day is “the races of man.” There’s a chart at the front of the room, and at the bottom — after the Anglo-Saxon, the Celt, the Teuton, the Mongol — comes the “Negro,” drawn with a sloping forehead and thick lips.²⁰ Some teachers skip the chart, but many don’t. They follow the book.
At home, if there’s time for a story, it might be Negro Tales: stories about tricksters and fools, told in dialect, drawn with wild eyes and stumbling feet.²⁵ These books get passed around the neighborhood, read aloud at parties, shared in Sunday school. White children laugh and repeat the stories at recess. Black children learn to laugh, too, because it’s safer to go along than to protest.²⁶
When these children grow up, they’ll see the same story on the big screen. At the movie house, white actors in blackface play crooks and cowards. On the radio, comedians tell “coon jokes” that always end with the punchline that Black people can’t be trusted, can’t be smart, can’t be brave.²⁷
It’s not just entertainment. Newspapers make it official. When a crime happens, the headline uses the word “Negro” before the facts are known. When a lynching happens, the story is told as if the victim brought it on himself, or the mob couldn’t help itself. Editorials explain to readers that Blackness is a danger to the neighborhood, a drain on the economy, a threat to the future.²¹
Even the ads are part of the script. Buy this pancake mix, and you get a friendly “mammy” to serve you. Buy this insurance, and you’ll be protected from “Negro crime.”²⁸ Blackness is used to sell things, but never to sell hope.
This world is not imagined — it’s documented, page after page, ad after ad, lesson after lesson. Every image, every joke, every fact taught as truth adds another layer. And when the next generation arrives, they find the script already written and the stage already set. Most never get to ask who wrote it, or how it could be changed.
Global Export — From America to the World
American ideas about Blackness were never meant to stay put. They were made for export — marketed, mailed, and modeled for anyone who wanted to draw a hard line between themselves and “the Negro.”²⁹
Start with the textbook. American publishers sold their “race science” primers across the Atlantic. British, French, and German schools used the same illustrations — charts of heads, color plates showing “progress” from so-called savagery to civilization.³⁰ In South Africa, students learned from American books that defined whiteness as intelligence and Blackness as backwardness. The message wasn’t just taught; it was tested. Exam questions asked students to rank the races by “natural gifts” or explain why certain people were fit to rule.
In the colonies, American methods offered blueprints for control. British officials in Lagos, Kingston, or Calcutta read American studies to justify segregating schools, banning interracial marriage, and creating entire bureaucracies for tracking bloodlines and ancestry.³³ Reports home to London or Paris borrowed American language: “Negro criminality,” “Negro labor,” “the Negro question.” The myth was local and global all at once.
Brazil, a nation still wrestling with slavery’s legacy, took cues from America’s “one-drop rule” and Jim Crow policies.³¹ Social scientists there cited American journals to debate whether Black people could ever become “white” — and if not, how best to encourage “whitening” through immigration or forced assimilation. Plantation owners in Cuba and the Dominican Republic lobbied their governments for laws and police practices modeled on the Deep South.
Even the world’s fairs — the grand stages of modernity — played their part. At the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris, visitors paid to see “living villages” where Africans, Filipinos, and Black Americans were put on display.³² American experts were often on hand to explain the differences, reassure anxious audiences about the wisdom of white rule, and lend scientific legitimacy to the spectacle.
Missionaries and teachers, armed with American textbooks and Bibles, arrived in Africa and the Caribbean ready to “uplift the race” — teaching reading and writing, but also discipline, obedience, and a respect for white authority. Some of the first schools in Ghana and Nigeria used the same stories, illustrations, and lessons found in Mississippi or Alabama. The script was the same: Blackness was a problem, and whiteness was the answer.
International newspapers and magazines spread these messages further. Stories about American lynchings ran in Paris, Berlin, and Johannesburg. Some papers treated the violence as a cautionary tale — evidence of what happened when “Negroes got out of hand.” Others used it as an argument for stricter laws at home.
And the current ran both ways. As European, South American, and colonial officials experimented with segregation, passed laws, and race-based restrictions, Americans took note — sometimes copying “innovations” in race management from the colonies and bringing them back to the United States.³⁴
By the time World War I ended, the world’s appetite for American race science had created a global marketplace of stereotypes, policies, and images. Blackness, as defined by American hands, became the universal mark of exclusion — a category to be policed, studied, and pitied, but rarely welcomed or believed.
Woodrow Wilson: The Scholar Who Drew the Color Line
At Princeton, Wilson made his stance clear. He blocked Black students from admission, arguing that integration would disturb the “atmosphere” of the university. There was no attempt to hide this policy. In speeches to alumni and faculty, he warned that “the presence of persons of the Negro race would not be of service to Princeton.” This was not mere prejudice; it was policy, cloaked in academic authority and exported through every graduate who carried a Princeton diploma into the world.³⁵
His writing sealed the lesson. In A History of the American People, Wilson devoted entire chapters to the supposed failures of Reconstruction, using phrases like “unschooled, unpracticed, save in the arts of Africa, the negroes were a danger.”³⁶ He described Black voters as “childlike” and “incapable of political responsibility,” repeating claims from Southern newspapers and “scientific” journals of the time. Wilson’s volumes were not only used at Princeton — they became standard reading in high schools, colleges, and even some British and Canadian classrooms.
Once in the White House, Wilson’s private views became federal policy. In 1913, soon after his inauguration, the federal government issued orders to segregate restrooms, lunchrooms, and workspaces in every federal building in Washington. Black civil servants who had been promoted during Reconstruction and afterward were now demoted, transferred, or forced out altogether.³⁷
The Post Office, Treasury, and Navy all followed Wilson’s lead. Black employees found themselves isolated behind screens or glass partitions. Some had to use separate bathrooms in basements or even outdoors. The message was unmistakable: the President believed Black people were a contaminant, a threat to order and efficiency.
When civil rights leaders protested, Wilson dismissed them. “Segregation is not a humiliation but a benefit,” he insisted, and he claimed that the new rules would “prevent friction” between the races. But Black newspapers called it what it was — a return to Jim Crow, written into the very heart of American power. Government officials around the world took note: if the White House could enforce segregation, so could they.
Wilson’s voice reached beyond U.S. borders. During the Paris Peace Conference, delegates from colonized countries watched as Wilson’s vision for the League of Nations excluded any language about racial equality. The Japanese delegation proposed a clause for racial equality in the League’s charter; Wilson’s refusal helped doom it. Black leaders from the U.S. and Africa, who had traveled to Paris in hope, left with a clear message: white supremacy had the blessing of the American president.
The reach of Wilson’s example grew with the movies. When The Birth of a Nation was screened at the White House, Wilson’s praise was trumpeted in news articles worldwide.³⁹ The film, with its lynching scenes and white-hooded “heroes,” was banned in some European cities — but in others, it drew record crowds, and was studied by future propagandists as a model for shaping public opinion with spectacle and fear.⁴¹
Wilson’s legacy did not fade after he left office. His histories continued to be reprinted, his views on race cited in debates about immigration, colonial policy, and civil rights. Princeton’s traditions, like its exclusive eating clubs and all-white graduation ceremonies, echoed his doctrine for decades. And whenever America’s racial policies were criticized abroad, diplomats and politicians pointed to Wilson’s record as both explanation and excuse.
Endurance and Modern Echoes
Long after the textbooks changed, the policies shifted, and new faces appeared in old places, the picture of Blackness drawn by the past refused to fade. The world that Wilson and his generation built is not gone. Its fingerprints are still on the glass — sometimes smudged, sometimes repainted, but always there when the light hits a certain way.⁴²
Look at a city map: the neighborhoods once redlined as “dangerous” and “undesirable” remain separated by wealth, schooling, and policing.⁴³ A Black family buying a house still faces suspicion, higher interest rates, or quiet refusals.⁴⁴ Police officers — often trained on the same narratives about Black “threat” — are more likely to stop, search, or use force against Black citizens. This is not new; it is simply the modern uniform of a much older policy.
Turn on the news. When a Black person is accused of a crime, the mugshot comes first, the presumption of guilt arrives before the facts, and the language in the headlines echoes a century-old script: “dangerous,” “out of control,” “threat to order.” When a Black person achieves something extraordinary, they are celebrated as an exception — never allowed to be ordinary, always an outlier.⁴⁵
Education is not immune. History textbooks in some states still downplay the violence of slavery, skip the hard facts about Reconstruction, and praise the “good intentions” of Jim Crow reformers.⁴⁶ Novels by Black writers — when assigned at all — are sometimes taught as “special topics,” not as part of the mainstream story. Black children still rarely see themselves in the heroes of the classics.
Pop culture and advertising have changed, but not always as much as we’d like to believe. “Mammy” syrup bottles and “Sambo” cookie jars have mostly vanished, but their spirit lingers in reality TV, social media memes, and blockbuster films. The “dangerous Black man” and the “loud Black woman” are as easy to find as ever — just wearing new clothes.
The old arguments even travel new roads: scientific racism, once dismissed, now reappears online as “race realism,” “IQ studies,” or debates about “culture” instead of “biology.”⁴⁷ These ideas are exported across the globe through viral videos, policy reports, and the talking points of populist leaders. The story has changed its name, but not its point.
Even resistance — art, protest, scholarship — still happens in the shadow of the myth. Every fight for justice begins with a battle over who gets to define reality: who is dangerous, who is deserving, who belongs. Every demand for change is, in some way, a demand to rewrite the old script Wilson and his peers wrote so carefully.
But there is hope. With each new generation, there are more people willing to name the lie, show the receipts, and write a different future.⁴⁸
Modern Echoes: Old Myths, New Masks
Housing and Neighborhoods
Consider Ferguson, Missouri. In 2014, the killing of Michael Brown sparked nationwide protests — but the city’s divisions were set much earlier. Ferguson, like hundreds of American suburbs, was shaped by redlining and “restrictive covenants” that kept Black families out for generations. Police patrolled these boundaries, often acting as gatekeepers, enforcing not just law but a racial order written decades before.⁴²
A 2020 study found that homes in majority-Black neighborhoods are appraised, on average, at far lower values than similar homes in white neighborhoods — even when crime rates and amenities are the same.⁴⁹ Black families see their equity drained not by chance, but by the same suspicion and policy that Wilson’s era made normal.
Policing and Criminal Justice
The headlines keep coming: Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice, Sandra Bland, George Floyd. Each story is presented as a tragedy or a “split-second decision,” but behind each is a pattern — Blackness is treated as danger.⁵⁰ Body cameras and cell phones now document what newspapers once only hinted at: police shootings, profiling, and the different responses depending on the color of a person’s skin.
A 2016 Department of Justice report found that in Baltimore, Black residents — making up 63% of the city — accounted for over 90% of those stopped and searched by police. The same report described how officers routinely used language and tactics that echoed the logic of the past: Blackness meant suspicion.⁵¹
Media and Entertainment
Flip through the channels or scroll social media, and the tropes persist. Black men are more likely to be shown in handcuffs on local news, more likely to be labeled “aggressive” or “out of control.”⁵² A 2019 study showed that even children’s programming features Black characters as sidekicks or comic relief, rarely as heroes or leaders.
When “The Central Park Five” were accused in 1989, newspapers ran their mugshots and called them a “wolf pack.” Decades later, DNA proved their innocence, but the damage — carefully built by headlines and repeated on television — was done. Donald Trump called for the death penalty in paid ads, echoing the “dangerous Negro” language that fueled lynchings in Wilson’s time.⁵³
Education
Textbooks remain a battleground. In Texas, a 2015 history book described enslaved people as “workers” brought to America to “help” in the agricultural economy. Black parents and teachers fought to correct it, but the error was no accident — it was the continuation of a long project to soften the realities of American racism and make Blackness invisible except as a problem.⁴⁶
College admissions debates today often invoke “merit” and “fit,” coded ways of questioning whether Black and brown students belong. The same doubts that kept Princeton closed to Black students in Wilson’s era now appear in debates about affirmative action and standardized testing.⁵⁴
Health and Science
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Black communities were more likely to suffer higher infection and death rates — not because of biology, but because of where people live, work, and what care they can access. Some pundits blamed “lifestyle choices” or “culture,” dusting off the old logic of inherent deficiency. But the evidence pointed to something older: a system built to keep Black people out, and then to blame them for the outcome.⁵⁵
Even in medicine, stereotypes persist. Black patients are less likely to be prescribed pain medication or referred for specialist care — doctors still act on beliefs about Black bodies as less sensitive or more “resilient” to pain, myths first taught in nineteenth-century classrooms.⁵⁶
Global Echoes
Outside the U.S., the script has been learned well. In Brazil, police killings of young Black men are often justified in terms that would be familiar to Wilson or Cartwright: “public safety,” “criminal element,” “threat to society.”⁵⁷ In the U.K., Black Britons are more likely to be stopped and searched, more likely to die in police custody, more likely to be depicted in tabloids as outsiders.
Immigration policies in Europe and Australia use coded language — “integration,” “assimilation,” “public order” — that traces back to the same logic exported from American books and lectures a century ago. The words have changed, but the shape of the story has not.
Media Coverage — Old Scripts, New Headlines
Walk into an American newsroom in 1915 and look at the day’s paper. If a crime happens in the city, the headline is likely to read, “Negro Man Arrested for Robbery,” or “Colored Youth Attacks White Woman.” The story itself is short on facts and long on suspicion: unnamed witnesses, descriptions of “large, unruly Negroes,” and a photo or drawing with exaggerated features.⁵⁸ There is rarely a quote from the accused, or from any Black resident. The victim’s story is taken as gospel; the Black community’s voice is left out entirely.
Now open a modern paper or website after a major incident involving a Black suspect or protester. The formula remains. The mugshot appears before the facts are clear. Code words — “urban,” “gang-related,” “thug” — replace “Negro,” but the message is the same: danger, disorder, a threat to the status quo.⁵⁹ When protests erupt after a police killing, coverage focuses on property damage, “outside agitators,” and crowd size — not the reasons people are marching. If a white person is killed, their photo is a graduation picture; if a Black person, it’s from a traffic stop, a party, or a grainy cellphone video.
This isn’t new. In 1919, as “race riots” swept the country, newspapers blamed “Negro mobs,” barely mentioning that the violence usually started with white attacks on Black neighborhoods. When Black men were lynched, the press ran stories about “Negro fiends” or “beasts,” justifying the violence as necessary for community safety.⁶⁰ Editorials called for calm — but only after the streets were cleared, the homes burned, and the lesson delivered: Blackness was to be policed, feared, and punished.
Fast forward to the coverage of Black Lives Matter protests. Major cable networks run footage of burning cars and broken windows on repeat, but give little airtime to peaceful marches or the voices of those calling for justice. Law enforcement and government officials are quoted first and last; the families of victims get a sound bite, if that. Social media can sometimes break through — showing what happened from the inside, amplifying voices left out of mainstream news — but it also becomes a breeding ground for rumors, doctored images, and “fake news” designed to reinforce old fears.
Look at how stories are amplified. When Black people are accused, the story leads; when they are the victims, the case gets less attention, or is quickly dropped if the suspect is not caught.⁶¹ Black victims’ criminal records are published, even when irrelevant. When the suspect is white, the story is told in softer language, with talk of “tragedy” or “mistakes.” The cycle turns: each generation sees the same pattern, but with new technology and slightly different words.
The logic remains. The “problem” of Blackness is posed, dissected, and debated — but rarely allowed to speak for itself. It’s the same script Wilson and his generation put on stage, simply rewritten for a new era.
But there are cracks in the foundation. Black journalists, activists, and artists now call out the double standard — on Twitter, in podcasts, in op-eds. Sometimes a headline changes, a story is corrected, a network issues an apology. It’s progress, but the machinery is slow to turn. For every breakthrough, there is backlash — a reminder that old stories do not die, they adapt.
To see how far we still have to go, it’s enough to look at the headlines. The names and faces change, but the story the world is told about Blackness is still built from the same, familiar parts.
Selling the Script: Corporate Advertising and Manufactured Black Identity
It’s not just the news or the old cartoons that tell people who Black Americans are supposed to be. Today, corporate advertising shapes and sells Blackness as a brand — what to wear, how to talk, what to eat, what music to listen to, even what it means to be “authentic.”⁶²
On television, in magazines, and now on every phone screen, companies compete to capture the “Black market.” But the story they tell is rarely written by Black-owned firms. From soda commercials to sneaker endorsements, white-owned corporations pick the faces, set the soundtrack, and script the attitude. The look is polished, the moves are rehearsed, but the power — and the profits — stay with the company.⁶³
For decades, ads used familiar tricks: the soulful voice selling fast food, the “urban” edge selling athletic gear, the hip-hop beat behind a car commercial. Today, this has only grown more sophisticated. Social media influencers — often chosen for their ability to look or sound a certain way — become the model of “real” Blackness. Billboard after billboard, feed after feed, tells Black youth what’s cool, what’s desirable, what’s expected. Clothing brands build entire campaigns around the idea of “street” credibility, but the executives making the decisions rarely live in the communities they sell to.
The music industry is another engine. Hip-hop and R&B — once underground forms of resistance — are now multi-billion-dollar businesses dominated by a handful of record companies.⁶⁴ Corporate executives decide what songs get airplay, which lyrics are promoted, and which artists get signed or dropped. The most visible images — guns, drugs, sex, defiance — are pushed not just because they “reflect reality,” but because they sell. And while Black artists can and do challenge stereotypes, their work is often filtered, edited, or sidelined unless it matches the profitable narrative.
Food and beverage giants do the same. Ads for sugary drinks, fast food, and alcohol are targeted more heavily at Black and Latino neighborhoods, a strategy known as “predatory marketing.”⁶⁵ Meanwhile, the same companies run campaigns touting health and wellness to white suburban audiences. The message is clear: Blackness is a flavor, a style, a risk, a market to be mined.
The cycle runs both ways. These images don’t just influence how white America sees Black America — they set the terms for how Black people are seen by each other and by the world. Who is “real”? Who is “too white,” “too soft,” “too successful,” “too angry”? The lines are drawn by corporate hands, not by community voices.
What’s left out is just as telling. Black-owned businesses, neighborhood restaurants, independent designers — these rarely get the ad buys or national exposure. The power to define, to frame, to amplify is held by a tiny group of corporations, most of them run by white executives and boards.
Globally, the script is exported as easily as any product. A sneaker ad shot in Atlanta plays in Johannesburg. A rap video produced in New York is shown in Paris, Tokyo, and Rio. The faces are Black, but the story and the profits are controlled elsewhere.
There’s no denying that Black creativity, style, and language have changed the world. But when the gatekeepers remain the same, the “identity” on offer is just another costume — one more version of the story Wilson’s generation began.
Flipping the Script: Black Resistance and Self-Definition in Media and Business
For every ad campaign or record deal shaped by outsiders, there have always been Black artists and entrepreneurs who refuse the script and write their own. The tradition is older than TV, older than the radio — rooted in the first Black newspapers, bookstores, record labels, and theater troupes that gave Black people a stage and a voice on their own terms.⁶⁶
Early Black newspapers like The Chicago Defender and The Pittsburgh Courier didn’t just report the news — they called out racist caricatures, campaigned against lynching, and promoted Black-owned businesses. When mainstream papers ignored or distorted Black life, these papers offered truth and hope, mobilizing entire communities to migrate, organize, and vote.⁶⁷
In music and publishing, artists carved out their own paths. The rise of Motown Records in the 1960s — founded by Berry Gordy, a Black entrepreneur — put Black artists in charge of their own sound and image. Motown’s success wasn’t just musical; it built a model for Black business in America, showing that control and ownership mattered as much as talent.⁶⁸
Hip-hop, born in the Bronx and South Bronx in the 1970s, was created by young Black and Latino artists locked out of the mainstream. Before it was commercialized, hip-hop was a voice for the voiceless — telling stories the networks wouldn’t air, making art out of struggle and survival. Even now, as big labels shape what hits the radio, independent rappers and producers use social media, mixtapes, and grassroots networks to reach their audience and keep their message alive.⁶⁹
In film, directors like Oscar Micheaux in the 1920s and 1930s made “race films” for Black audiences, hiring Black actors to play fully realized characters long before Hollywood allowed it. More recently, filmmakers like Ava DuVernay (Selma, 13th), Ryan Coogler (Black Panther), and Jordan Peele (Get Out, Us) have broken through the Hollywood system — insisting on creative control and telling stories that challenge stereotypes, explore history, and center Black experience without apology.⁷⁰
Entrepreneurship has surged, even against enormous odds. Black-owned clothing lines, beauty brands, restaurants, and tech startups now use their platforms to reclaim identity and promote positive images. Brands like FUBU (“For Us, By Us”), The Lip Bar, and Uncle Nearest Premium Whiskey don’t just sell products — they tell stories, invest in their communities, and challenge what “Black business” is allowed to look like.⁷¹
Social media has been a double-edged sword, but it gives unprecedented power to bypass corporate gatekeepers. Hashtags like #BlackGirlMagic and #BuyBlack connect creators and consumers across continents, promoting local artists, authors, and businesses. Activists use Instagram, YouTube, and Twitter to expose injustice, share knowledge, and set the record straight — often forcing mainstream media to respond or correct itself.⁷²
Even as corporate giants still shape much of the landscape, these forms of resistance — whether subtle or loud, commercial or community-based — remind the world that Black identity cannot be manufactured or contained by outsiders forever.
Flipping the Lens: Black Horror and the Truth of American Racism
When Jordan Peele’s Get Out hit theaters in 2017, it changed more than the horror genre — it flipped the script on how Blackness and racism are shown on screen.⁷³ For decades, Black characters in horror movies were either absent, first to die, or comic relief. Peele put a young Black man at the center, made his experience the core of the fear, and exposed the everyday terror beneath the surface of “liberal” white spaces.
The film’s genius is in its details. The microaggressions — the awkward questions about “athleticism,” the forced friendliness — feel familiar to any Black viewer, but unsettlingly invisible to the white characters around them. The true horror isn’t the supernatural, but the trap: a world where Black people are objects, their bodies and minds desired, envied, and ultimately stolen by those who see themselves as “colorblind.” The villain isn’t a monster in the shadows, but a system built on control, entitlement, and erasure, masked as progress.
Get Out isn’t just entertainment; it’s critique, confession, and warning. Audiences are forced to confront their own assumptions — what’s scary isn’t just what’s on screen, but what’s reflected back at them. The film became a touchstone, starting conversations that Hollywood and society often avoid.
Then came Them (Amazon Prime, Season 1, 2021), a series that refuses to look away from the trauma and violence at the core of American suburbia.⁷⁴ Set during the “Great Migration,” when Black families fled the South for what they hoped would be safety in the North and West, Them follows a Black family moving into an all-white Los Angeles neighborhood. What they find isn’t peace, but terror — stares, threats, slurs, and eventually violence from neighbors who will do anything to drive them out.
The brilliance of Them is its refusal to sanitize history. The racism isn’t subtle or “old-fashioned”; it’s a daily siege, made monstrous not by ghosts, but by ordinary white Americans acting with impunity. The supernatural elements only amplify what’s real: the trauma, the fear, the sense of being trapped in someone else’s nightmare. There are scenes so honest they are hard to watch, and that’s the point — the horror is not exaggerated, but revealed. The show’s most chilling moments come from ordinary people, smiling as they enforce the rules Wilson’s America wrote long ago.
Both Get Out and Them show the power of Black creators reclaiming the tools of American culture — film, suspense, horror — to tell the truth about what it means to be seen and defined by someone else’s gaze. They force the audience to recognize how old myths still live, not just in policy, but in the most intimate corners of American life.
Unlike the advertisements or news headlines, these works don’t package Blackness for comfort or profit. They ask the viewer to sit with discomfort, to see what is usually hidden, and to reckon with the reality that the scariest monsters aren’t make-believe — they’re the systems and stories we inherit, live, and sometimes create ourselves.
Conclusion: Learning to See Anew
This isn’t just an effort to set the record straight, or to air old grievances. It’s about teaching and learning — about giving ourselves and others permission to question what we think we know.
For generations, America (and much of the world) has learned the same lesson: that Blackness is a problem to be solved, a danger to be managed, an identity to be shaped by someone else. We’ve seen how laws, science, media, business, and even entertainment have told the story over and over — changing only the costumes, never the plot.
But history is not just what happened; it’s what we choose to remember, to teach, and to carry forward. The images we inherit shape not only what we see in others, but what we see in ourselves. The machinery of stereotype and exclusion is real, but it is not inevitable. Every generation has the chance to ask: who wrote this script? Who profits from it? Who is left out? What happens if we refuse the old answers?
Real learning begins when we question what feels like common sense. It deepens when we listen to those who have been silenced, when we search the footnotes and the headlines, when we look for the story behind the story. It grows when we admit what we don’t know, and when we’re willing to be uncomfortable with what we find.
If there is a lesson here, it is that no one has to accept the world as it’s handed to them. Black artists, entrepreneurs, teachers, and everyday people have always found ways to flip the script, to push back, to create and claim space on their own terms. Those who benefit from the old stories will resist, but the questions — the real questions — never go away.
So let’s keep asking:
1. Who gets to define the world we live in?
2. Who benefits when a single image is allowed to stand for a whole people?
3. What are we still refusing to see?
That’s the work ahead — not just for Black America, but for all of us. To see clearly, to learn honestly, and to never stop questioning what we think we know.
W. Smith III writes about race, justice, and memory. His essays and books examine the history and lived experience of exclusion, belonging, and Black resilience in America.
If you’ve learned something new, or if these stories mirror your own experience, I’d love to hear from you in the comments. Please consider sharing this essay, and follow for more conversations about race, memory, and justice.
Sources and Further Reading
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4. Riley, B. F. (1910). The White Man’s Burden: A Discussion of the Interracial Question with Special Reference to the Responsibility of the White Race to the Negro Problem. Birmingham, AL.
5. Myrdal, G. (1944). An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy. New York: Harper & Brothers.
6. Green, R. L. (1915). America’s Greatest Problem: The Negro. New York: Academy Press.
7. Washington, B. T., Du Bois, W. E. B., & Trotter, W. M. (1903). The Characteristics of the Negro People. In The Negro Problem (pp. 1–46). New York: James Pott & Company.
8. Bean, R. B. (1906). Some racial peculiarities of the Negro brain. American Journal of Anatomy, 5(4), 353–432.
9. Hunt, H. A. (1912). The Biology of the Negro. Boston: Richard G. Badger.
10. Bruce, P. A. (1891). The Negro Problem. New York: Harper & Brothers.
11. Grier, W. H., & Cobbs, P. M. (1968). Black Rage. New York: Basic Books.
12. Anonymous. (ca. 1900s). A Coon Alphabet. University of Florida Digital Collections.
13. Green, R. L. (1915). America’s Greatest Problem: The Negro. New York: Academy Press.
14. Riley, B. F. (1910). The White Man’s Burden: A Discussion of the Interracial Question with Special Reference to the Responsibility of the White Race to the Negro Problem. Birmingham, AL.
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