Dillon Bannigan

Media and Race

3/17/14

Though in todays society problems such as racism is often viewed upon as one that we are near vanquishing, we could not be further from the truth. Racism is a virus. It is one that has long been the plague of Americas free society, putting people in a hole with walls that are impossible to scale. They are put down throughout life and kept there by stereotypes and profiling that is in no way taken from their character, but only from the color of their skin. This virus, that is racism, has lulled the American people into false sense of health while it only infects up deeper, using media as its most effective vector. We allow the media telling us We have a black president! distract us while racism digs deeper within us from images shown of Richard Sherman or Trayvon Martin being thugs. Media has driven stereotypes and profiling so deep into us that most do not even recognize when we are being racist. This new form of racism is so dangerous just for the reason that it so often goes undiagnosed and eventually just becomes a part of us. I will pull back the curtains concealing the subliminal racism living in media today as it exists in sports, court cases, or even simple news stories.

LeBron James, Michael Jordan, Barry Sanders, Tiger Woods, these are all names that have a lot of significance in even the newest sports fans mind. In fact, more people could probably tell you what Michael Jordan was famous for than the number of people that could tell you what Booker T. Washington is famous for. Dr. Henry Louis Gates, an African-American Studies authority, went to a local VFW post and wagered five dollars that no one there could guess how many African-Americans played professional sports out of the 35 million African-Americans that lived in the United States. It got answers such as 500,000. That number is 1 out of 70 African-Americans living in luxury as they make great money playing sports. Unfortunately, that number is not even close to reality. There are 1,200 AfricanAmericans being paid to play sports. There are twenty black doctors for every black professional athlete,

Dillon Bannigan

Media and Race

3/17/14

yet the media has given this gross misrepresentation that much of the African-American population is being paid for playing sports. A lot of those athletes that are playing sports are not necessarily well represented either. Take Richard Sherman for example, graduated from Stanford University and is a very active member of the Seattle community by helping the poor and disadvantaged. Sherman had just made the game-saving play in the biggest game of his career against his bitter rival. The ESPN reporter interviews him within seconds of him making that play where he called his counterpart, Michael Crabtree, a mediocre receiver. Now though this should easily be dismissed as some trash talk, it was blown way out of proportion with media outlets attacking his character and even some stretching to call him a thug. Sherman had an interesting response when asked about being called a thug. Sherman said, The only reason it bothers me is because it seems like it's the accepted way of calling somebody the N-word nowadays. I thought what he said could not have been more accurate. People were judging this mans character off of thirty words and the preconceived notions that we have of African-Americans to start calling him a thug.

Court cases are another great example of how media and racism sometimes go hand in hand, the Trayvon Martin case being a shining example of it. This story hit me hard because Trayvon was about my age and was unarmed and killed. Though the story goes deeper but the racism did not come in on the exact facts of the story, but rather the perception of Trayvon Martin. My family watches Fox News quite a bit and while they were covering this story a caught a little bit of the racism coming across. They were complaining because the original picture of Trayvon that came out was from when Martin was 14

Dillon Bannigan

Media and Race

3/17/14

years old, three years before his murder. They showed a picture of Trayvon when he was 17, flicking off the camera and he has a gold grill in his mouth. When I first saw the picture I thought of all the kids I know that are like that and theyre harmless. But Fox News attempted to use that as a basis for him being a thug. It is this subliminal racism where the black community has a different culture than ours, doing things such as wearing grills, where we immediately put it below ourselves and name them thugs. We are unknowingly identifying a lot of black culture, as well as black people, as being bad or a menace to society. They are often looked at as being the impoverished or the uneducated due to what media outlets and rap music feeds us. These ideals are driven into our children and that allows them to live on forever.

Racism is alive and well in todays society, but it is just much better at hiding its ugly face. Whether you like to admit it or not, media subliminally lends to the idea that minorities are the impoverished, the uneducated, or the thugs. It is a problem that we must fix, but we have to diagnose it first.