MEDIA RACISM

A scholar explores the role of the media in perpetuating systemic racism in this nonfiction book.

“Overly employed culturally racist stereotypes of Blackness,” Gammage writes in the book’s introduction, erroneously place "the burden of health and life disparities” on Black women. Reality television, she argues, with ample examples at her disposal, too often presents Black women as violent and threatening and feeds into narratives popular among white audiences that Black women “are chronically unhealthy and in need of social control.” This racist imagery, she convincingly notes, draws on a long history of the media’s racism, the origins of which can be traced back 500 years to the enslavement of Africans in the Americas. Whether it’s newspapers and print advertisements of the colonial era or the television and social media of today, “racially abusive media” has long shaped and reflected institutionalized systems of racial subjugation. As evidenced by the nearly 20-page bibliography, not only does Gammage have a firm command of the relevant scholarly literature on media studies—the topic of her first book, Representations of Black Women in the Media: The Damnation of Black Womanhood(2015)—but also on the history of Black health care. From enslavers who believed Black women faked illness to avoid work to television images of “crack mamas,” racist stereotypes of Black women in the media have played a key role in denying equitable access to medical care. While much of the book surveys the sordid arena of racist imagery, the final chapter examines the ways Black women in contemporary society have co-opted social media as a tool for empowerment “that celebrates Black pride, beauty, resistance, and resilience.” A professor and chair of Africana studies at California State University Northridge, Gammage expertly blends her erudite analysis with an engaging writing style that avoids academic jargon. This emphasis on accessibility is complemented by an ample assortment of tables, graphs, charts, and other visual aids that provide an abundance of data that supports her arguments regarding racism in the media and health disparities among Black women.

A powerful, well-researched indictment of racist media in the United States.