Its hard to Relate: Black Social Stereotypes
Michael Omi in his writing, “In Living
Color: Race and American Culture,” talks about racism in society, but he also
speaks of how society supports it. He tells that the issue of race is not
confined to popular culture, but the symbols that the social life creates. This
means that the problem is not the race of the person, and the problem is not
the people that are onlookers to the media. The problem is the few that make
the spectacle of that race to start certain views about that race and the evils
they commit. An example of this is seen back during the times when prohibition
kicks in and the slaves are being freed. The white members of the Ku Klux Klan
go around and start burning crosses in the yards of black folks and begin
lynching them in claims that they raped their white daughters. The black men
had done nothing wrong, but where killed and they did not receive justice
because the white men made a claim against them that was not questioned because
of the effects of discrimination. This is seen in the book, “To Kill a
Mockingbird,” by Harper Lee. Tom Robinson, who happened to be a black field
help in the town, was accused of rape by Bob Ewell of his teenage daughter. No
Lynching had occurred, but a “fair trial” had taken place where the man was
tried. The end result of this trial though was in the favor of Bob Ewell. The
attorney, Atticus Finch, had proved that it could not have and that Tom
Robinson did not rape and injure Bob Ewell’s daughter and give her the bruises
she wore, and that it was her father that did it. The people though, still with
post slavery and discrimination lying heavily in their hands, they felt that he
was guilty still, and if not that they thought he was guilty, then that convicting
him guilty was the right thing to do anyway. This being only a book, but it
shows the true feelings of the white southerners at this time.
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If not the book then, the movie “A
Time To Kill,” shows more of the societal injustices that whites showed to
blacks and still do today in one way or another. The aspect though is that “we utilize
race to provide clues about who a person is and how we should relate to him or
her. In the movie, a little girl black girl named Tanya was brutally raped and
beaten by a couple of white southern men, and when they were going to court for
their jail sentencing, Tanya’s father shot the two men to death. This put the
man, Carl Lee Hailey on trial for the murder of two white men. The first job of
the lawyer for the accusers was to remove all black males from the selection
for jurors which he did. Without a black man in the juror box, there was nobody
that he could relate to. With only white jurors making the judgments, Hailey’s
lawyer had to try to relate the white jury to his black defendant, so he
attempted this by telling the story of Tanya’s rape and assault. Without saying
any names, the jury still knew it was Hailey’s daughter so insinuations of
course were that she was black. But at the end of the gruesome story, he told
the jury to imagine she was white. This put the jury in the black defendants
shoes, it made them realize the pain that the man sitting before them had to
feel and by thinking that the girl was white, they thought about their own
families and children and finally could relate to the terrible grief and fury
that put the man in front of them in such a situation.
In Omi’s writing, he also talks
about the stereotype of the black best friend. In a television show or movie
with the black best friend, it seems that the majority of the attention is on
the white friend and the black best friend is more for support. The black best
friend is there to help the main character out of binds, to back him up, but it
never seems that the black best friends has any problems of his own and does
not ask for anything in return. This is very strong in the Television series, “Blue
Mountain State,” where the main character, Thad Castle, gets in all sorts of
shenanigans, from good to bad, and in the end, he needs help to fix a problem.
The first person that always has his back is his black best friend, Larry, who
does everything that he can to help out in the situation, but he himself never
has a problem that he personally needs help with. Larry though, when he helps,
at times makes Thad appear less intelligent and claims so of the courage. So
although Larry himself asks for nothing in return for his help, he claims his
own victory and feeling of achievement from providing assistance. The other main
character, Alex Moran, is best friends with a white guy named Sammy, but both
of them have problems that both help solve, and at the times of assistance, neither
underscores the others intelligence or their courage. This myth is to show that
black friends are submissive and will do anything that they are needed to help
do, such as they had once done back during slavery. His act of racial equality
in movies by trying to integrate the cast, if written in a certain way,
contains an underlying form of discrimination. If you look hard enough, you
will inevitably find discrimination of race in articles of todays culture, but
that is because race is the views of people and that is what pop culture is.
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