My Sources

All of my sources may not have been included in my annotations. I used the Powerpoints on Moodle as my sources and I used Google for images.

Tyler Perry and Intra-Stereotyping

1.       

Tyler Perry is a popular film director known for his popular Madea plays and his movies. His movies surround the lives of mainly Black women, having trouble with their counterpart(s), and they ultimately seek help from this “Madea” character. Madea stems from the Mammy, an overweight, loud expressive Black caricature from Minstrel Shows. Yes, Tyler Perry may be Black but he is still underrepresenting his race because he is misrepresenting them. Sure, if you look at the bigger picture, Perry’s work may be debated as positive but if it is positive, why aren’t his characters shown in a positive way. According to Pehl’s article, Latinos in the Media, “There are simply too few players in this game to create new positive ideas and eliminate old negative ones.” Perry continues to make these movies that project Blacks in a negative light because people, time after time, keep supporting these types of films. Hopefully, not all of the Spike Lee’s have died out and there is hope for positive Black film. 

Blacks in the Media

1.       According to Week 10 lecture, some researchers argue that various minority groups are unfairly represented in the media. They are portrayed in the media through reinforcing negative stereotypes. If you were to turn on the news right now, what would you see? “Today in South Central, a young man was shot to death while standing in front of a liquor store. The shooting is suspected to be gang related. Witnesses say the suspect is a Black male in his mid-twenties.” Or would you see something similar to: “Today, Paris Hilton was just arrested for robbing jewels from Nicole Richie’s Malibu apartment.” Pehl’s article describing the negative stereotypes reinforced by the media goes hand in hand with the roles Blacks are given in our entertainment. Everybody loves the classic movie, Friday, and everybody quotes the movie. Why couldn’t Craig and Smokey be two White men from Calabasas? Because that is not what media wants to reinforce. Racial minorities are always depicted as subtle, second-class citizens in film. Even with networks like BET, the forms of entertainment shown on the channel, still exhibit that Blacks should be ghetto and live in the ghettos of their neighborhoods in order to be Black. This epidemic is similar to Pehl’s concern about channels like Telemundo. They do not reinforce true life. They only reinforce the fantasy lifestyle that the media wants you to have based on their standards. 

Hip-Hop

1.    

   Rewind to the inner cities of New York, during the mid-1970’s/early 1980’s. Break-dancers and emcees would entertain the crowd while deejays would spin the hottest records. Fresh graffiti would be on the walls, subways, and every other public place paintable. This was the roots of hip-hop. As time went on, hip-hop became more commercial and by the 1990’s the original aesthetics of hip-hop were diminished by the representation of hip-hop in the media. The media felt Black men had various women always surrounding them, with large chains, and fat/“phat” wallets. Now hip-hop has evolved in rap. According to Week 10 lecture, cultural appropriation is the adaptation of some specific elements of one culture by a different culture group. In this case, hip-hop was taken over by the media and once it rose in popularity, it began to decline in authenticity. Because of hip-hop’s evolving, rappers are shown in a negative light more often than actors. The original meanings of hip-hop have been destroyed while its reinvention attempts to take over the hip-hop game.