Representation: African Americans

1. African Americans are either represented weaker in films or in a power position.

2. One film in which African Americans are put in a more powerful position is BlacKkKlansman. The film tells the story of how an African American lead is able to infiltrate the KKK with the aid of a white partner. This film strives to show the power that the African Americans by putting him in control, as well as other African American actors within the film. However, the film does keep its historical accuracy with the negative African American slang, thus having a truthful aspect.

However, the news media does tend to portray African Americans negatively. Oftentimes, the media negatively enforces the stereotype of African Americans being frequent criminals. This is often seen by the skin color being referred to after crimes in news reports. Additionally, the media tends to view African Americans as lower since they embellish much of the smaller accomplishments. This is likely due to African Americans being prejudiced against throughout history, thus making their accomplishments more grandiose than a white individual.

3. I feel these representation characteristics poorly presents the African American community as it usually has negative connotations connected to it. I do not believe it is fair since there is a large disproportionationality between the amount of African American and white crimes emphasized. Even though in the past, this data may have been true, the representation currently is inaccurate. Additionally, the representation of African Americans typically being associated with gangs is inaccurate to the majority of the African American population. This representation shows the constant emphasis of the negatives of African Americans, as opposed to providing more representation of their relativly equal status.

4. In regards to represention aspects that I would keep, I believe most are poor at providing a correct representation, except for their strong attempts at turning the perception of the public into a more positive one.

In regards to the representation aspects that I would challenge, most representation in the media is greatly inaccurate and poorly represents the African American group. For example, aspects such as the crime affiliation and low intelligence paint a poor picture for modern day African Americans considering their evolution in social acceptance. I believe African Americans today are held at a much lower regard than what they should be, but that is slowly changing with an increase in the representation within films.