Surely this sentence could be simpler, and more effective in getting the reader's attention: "The TV programs I watched when I was a little girl did more to teach me about the world than anyone or anything else, except my family," for example. Some readers might hear this as a statement that your schooling failed you, and wonder why. Others might wonder what the theme of the essay is. But at least "impact on the way in which I live my life" would no longer be stopping their progress along the route you've chosen for them.

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.

"Impact justice"? Try to nip this bureaucratic blossom in the bud.

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 (were) guaranteed to have a profound effect on my views.

Does this imply that if you had been reading instead Abraham Lincoln, William Shakespeare, Charles Darwin, Leo Tolstoy, WEB duBois, Karl Marx, Henry James and John Locke instead of watching Law & Order SVU, those writers would have been as influential in shaping your mind? Would that have been an improvement, in your view, or is Scooby Doo better than early exposure to serious thinking for young people?

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 (me) 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.

Why make a reference list in web writing when you could link to the sources and help the reader use them, instead of piling them up in a heap?

Your first point of two here is that popular culture was more influential in shaping your view of the world than the substance of your formal education. Even though that popular culture was made in the image of a white-supremicist society, from your point of view, the lessons that you extracted from it were not those lessons, in your telling. You didn't learn what the culture of white supremacy teaches white people, you say, because they were refracted through the lens of your personal experience. This, in turn, apparently led you towards something else deeply embedded in the cultural context of our society: a Christian outlook towards crime based on concepts of sin and redemption, and a belief in the frailty of human nature in the presence of oppression, deprivation, and hopelessness.

Your second point is that the same culture presumably works differently on everyone else, or at least on white people, reinforcing a supposed attitude on their part that criminality and blackness are uniquely related. This could be right, but even bringing the two portions of the essay more closely together, so that other peoples' individual experiences also have the same priority in shaping how they understand the world that yours had in you, will make the problem you are thinking about more complex and interesting, while remaining just as serious and important. To grant others' experience the same interpretive power to remake what they read, see and are told that you grant your own will change the nature of your conclusions, not to make them less pressing, or less about injustice, but for sure less about Law & Order SVU. Perhaps the Marxist social theorist would be wrong to say you should start from the material base rather than the symbolic superstructure of social relations in understanding racism's effects, but reading Eric Williams is worth a ton of bullshit television any day, anyway. Surely reading "Soul on Ice" is a different experience for you now than it was for me reading Eldridge Cleaver first at age 11, but if we have both read that, and maybe also Manning Marrable on Malcolm X, will we not have learned more about the issues that concern you than we can get from the stuff they use to sell beer and toilet paper?

It is good to know what set a child on the road to educating herself and realizing the extent of her powers. But it is even better to put away the childish things and perform in self-questioning, insecure, doubtful young adulthood the task that our child-self could only imagine performing. Your writing here, like your first essay in its current draft, is a clear, powerful, sensitive evocation of the beginning of the journey you are now on. We agree that your very powerful child mind got quite a lot out of the television that was there. If you had grown up, as I did, in a house with ten thousand books in it, something else would have happened instead. But now we are here, and all that has become what happened before the curtain went up. We too, like Barack Obama, need to heed Martin King on the fierce urgency of now.

To make the essay better, use it to bridge from your past to your present in a more direct way: not as a last sentence of aspiration about what you hope to do in law school, but as an example of doing it.

-- 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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