Black People : TELEVISING BLACKNESS...

[Isaiah]

Alright peops, why do you suppose African Americans watch more than 70 hours of telelvision per week, the greatest number of hours of any ethnic group in America??? I have some ideas that I've had running around in my mind for a week now, and they aren't that pleasant to acknowledge...

For one, we are an oral culture, and oral cultures communicate and receive communications differently than literate cultures... We like our information to be spontaneous, alive, current, rather than static, and television provides that... Problem with television is that it is not programmed with us in mind, and does not always give us the best, most enlightened information... This is where I began to feel a bit depressed, because I realize how easy it is for this society to program African Americans to be what they want us to be...

We do not always filter and decipher the information being projected at us as being good or bad information... Last night, I saw some show where a brother is getting with a White Chick on prime time, and we're seeing a lot of these kinds of shows now... It is, in other words, a trend, and it is going to have some far reaching implications for African women, as well as, African men... As I said, there are a lot of us out there who believe that what they see on the boob tube reflects what's good, and what's goin' on in America... That goes across ethnic lines, too...

The Black Image in the minds of some whites has gotten positive even with the negative Rap Videos... Sisters are seen as beautiful and Voluptuous and mad different from white chicks... Brothers are seen as sexy, handsome, and virile because of the imagery of these videos, and now Taye Diggs with his white girlfriend... African people, clearly, we need to re-examine how televising Blackness is going to re-define how we look at the world, and how the world looks at us... We really need to deal with the fact that too many of us are not reading, and being versatile... Being literate is not the ultimate, but merely another way of communicating and learning... We are already a highly oral people, with complex ways of communicating, but we must become broader, and we must get our children's faces out from in front of that boob tube... Else you think we got brainwashed negroes now... Wait till y'all see the Next Generation...

Peace!
isaiah

 

[islander]

Honestly, I think that a lot of us simply want to be entertained. I'm pretty sure that the majority of African-Americans who do watch television aren't analyzing or processing the information being received as it applies to them socially or culturally. A lot of people don't watch television to get information, to some it's just something to do. If our people were really analyzing the info on the television, there would definitely be a lot less of us watching it. I also believe that television directly reflects what's current, hot, new, in style, etc. and that's what many people, especially our people, want to see. How many times have you seen something a celebrity wears on the red carpet on television show up on our backs shortly after? That's how fads and styles get started. It saddens me to know that our people have the capability of being so impressionable.