-- By BeulahAgbabiaka - 03 Apr 2016

“Hey Mr. Knickerbocker, boppity bop. I like-a the way that ya boppity bop”

The television shows I watched as a little girl have influenced my world view in a way that only my family’s cultural practices can rival in continued impact on the way in which I live my life. Barney & Friends, from which I get the delightful little didly above, taught me that “sharing is caring.” Blue’s Clues taught me that I should freely solve my own problems and that I could jump into a picture, book, or movie if I wanted to or needed to in my problem solving quest. Unfortunately, I unsuccessfully tested that theory, but I still held on to the idea that putting myself in a new situation or mindset could be invaluable in the problems I tried to solve. To quote someone far more eloquent than myself who has written on Scooby Doo, my favorite television show since age seven, “What Scooby Doo REALLY taught us is that once you pull off the mask, the real villain is usually an old white man thing to steal everyone’s land or money.” (“White People” http://whitepeoplethings.tumblr.com/post/97480857624/what-scooby-doo-really-taught-us-is-that-once-you) While that is a joke, Scooby Doo did teach me about believing in my own agency to solve a mystery, and the mysteries on Scooby Doo often had a criminal aspect. It is also true that the people engaged in illegal activity on Scooby Doo looked different than the people that I saw being criminally profiled on the news I watched with my mother while I was growing up. It may be a stretch to say that watching Scooby Doo made me want to be a lawyer, but it did peak my interest in the way in which I could impact justice as well as my interest in examining the justice or lack thereof in my surroundings.

I was intrigued by the criminality and carcerality I was exposed to early in life. The sources ranged from watching television, to interacting with the students at my mother’s charter school for system-involved youth in Richmond, CA, to visiting family friends in prison. Given the amount of time I spent watching television and movies, the entertainment media was guaranteed to have a profound effect on my views. What I was presented with on television shows like Law & Order SVU (that I probably started watching too young) and what I saw on CNN didn’t reflect the nuances of the people I knew that were labeled criminals. Being a criminal seemed unredeemable from television but my uncle’s best friend committed armed robbery for grocery money and the students at my mother’s school took time to play with my sister and I and teach us new things when we were on campus after our school day ended, despite whatever personal issues they were struggling with. I started realizing that people make mistakes but the implications of those mistakes and the extent to which someone is considered criminal ranges greatly and correlates with ethnicity and class. The news media, infotainment sources, and prime time television were major influences on my perception of what criminality is and what it means to look criminal or be a criminal person. Unfortunately for those who haven’t worked to keep their implicit biases in check, criminality has been coded as an issue that uniquely affects people of color and especially Black-American men. (Hurwitz and Peffley, 2005) Because of this, Black-Americans have been perceived as less deserving of justice and due process and more deserving of punitive crime policy to deter their inherent and generational criminality.

This perception of Black-American criminality fuels mass incarceration and is perpetuated by different media sources in different ways, providing a mechanism to divide Americans consistently used by politicians. The media portrayal of criminality as synonymous with Blackness in the United States dates back to slavery propaganda, and after the Civil War, the justification for the Black Codes. In Post-Civil War America, Black-American “shiftlessness” was criminalized with vagrancy laws that made unemployment illegal amidst refusal to hire Black-Americans in most industries, an unfounded belief in inherent Black-American criminality prevailed, and at the same time attempts at economic or social upward mobility by Black-Americans were strictly suppressed. The stereotypes expressed in The Birth of a Nation helped solidify in the eyes of white southerners that Black-Americans were especially predisposed (if not uniquely predisposed) to criminality that could threaten their lives, livelihood, and especially their women. (Wells-Barnett, 1895) The continued portrayal of Black-American criminality runs rampant today, and our current incarnation which is closely tied with to the War on Drugs dates specifically to the Willie Horton ad aired during the 1988 presidential campaign which capitalized on white fear of Black-American male criminality and sexuality. One of the reasons I am pursuing a law degree is to help combat the way perception of Black-American criminality has been codified and effectively targets people.

References:

(Entman, 1994; Hurwitz & Peffley, 2005; Oliver, 2013; Robinson, 2009; Stewart, 1998; Wells-Barnett, 1895)

Entman, R. M. (1994). Representation and Reality in the Portrayal of Blacks on Network Television News. Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, 71(3), 509-520. doi:10.1177/107769909407100303

Hurwitz, J., & Peffley, M. (2005). Playing the Race Card in the Post–Willie Horton Era: The Impact of Racialized Code Words on Support for Punitive Crime Policy. Public Opinion Quarterly, 69(1), 99-112. doi:10.1093/poq/nfi004

Oliver, M. B. (2013). African American men as “criminal and dangerous”: Implications of media portrayals of crime on the “criminalization” of African American men. Journal of African American Studies, 7(2), 3-18. doi:10.1007/s12111-003-1006-5

Robinson, B. B. (2009). Black unemployment and infotainment. Economic Inquiry, 47, 98+.

Stewart, G. (1998). Black Codes and Broken Windows: The Legacy of Racial Hegemony in Anti-Gang Civil Injunctions. The Yale Law Journal, 107(7), 2249-2279. doi:10.2307/797421

Wells-Barnett, I. B. (1895). A Red Record Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynchings in the United States, 1892-1893-1894. Chicago: Donohue & Henneberry.

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