| 
  • If you are citizen of an European Union member nation, you may not use this service unless you are at least 16 years old.

  • You already know Dokkio is an AI-powered assistant to organize & manage your digital files & messages. Very soon, Dokkio will support Outlook as well as One Drive. Check it out today!

View
 

Rhodes, Jane

Page history last edited by corey williams 14 years, 11 months ago

 

Rhodes, J. (1993). The visibility of race and media history. Critical studies in mass communications, 10 (2), 181-190.
 

Jane Rhodes, the author of this article, is currently a professor at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota where she serves as Dean for the Study of Race and Ethnicity and Chair of the American Studies Department.  Professor Rhodes has also taught at Indiana University and the University of California, San Diego. Before coming to academia, Professor Rhodes worked as a journalist.

 

Professor Rhodes is the author of two book: Framing the Black Panthers: The Spectacular Rise of a Black Power Icon, and Mary Ann Shadd Cary: The Black Press and Protest in the Nineteenth Century. She currently lives in St. Paul, Minnesota.  

 

The article is about media history.  Rhodes says that race is central to the history of media, yet it’s a subject that’s rarely discussed.  As the author points out, “racist society also requires a racist media to disseminate [its] values and beliefs to a mass audience … [yet] students of mass communication receive little exposure to this legacy” (Rhodes 34).     

 

Rhodes begins this article with a look at racist ideas and images “of America’s subordinate groups [that] nourished the nation’s popular culture and helped fuel the rise of mass media” (Rhodes 33).  Rhodes says that from America’s beginning, white society has dominated the culture of Africans, Asians, and Native Americans.  She says ideas of white supremacy first took shape in seventeenth century Britain.  That’s when “whites sought to account for the physical and cultural differences between themselves and Africans by employing explanations based on religion and mythology” (Rhodes 34).  Africans were thought to be inferior to whites.  Anglos used the mass media to disseminate their idea of racial superiority.  The mainstream media served to tell the white race that they were dominant and better than blacks, while at the same time letting blacks know they were subordinate to whites.

 

Rhodes spends the second half of this article examining two instances when mainstream media was created to disseminate racist ideology to white America, and an alternative press was created at the same time to counter the mainstream press’s racist views. The first occasion was the creation of the penny press and the coinciding formation of the black press in the early nineteenth century.  The second was the beginning of major motion pictures in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century and the coinciding creation of black films. 

 

Penny press newspapers like the New York Sun and the New York Herald used many stereotypes about blacks and Native Americans in their articles.  By using racial stereotypes, the penny press confirmed and spread the assumption that whites were superior.  In contrast, the black press, led by newspapers like Freedom’s Journal “hoped to counter the stereotypes that prevailed in American culture” (Rhodes 36).  Rhodes says the black press was not widely successful in these efforts.  Instead, newspapers like Freedom’s Journal “functioned primarily as a medium to develop a sense of fraternity and consciousness for freeborn African Americans” (Rhodes 36).  Instead of changing a lot of white’s views of blacks, the black press created a sense of identity within the black community.  

 

Before the civil war, blacks were stereotyped as harmless slaves who needed their masters to care for them.  By the time motion pictures arrived in the late nineteenth century, black men were seen as cruel and violent and black women were either temptress who seduced white men or simple, child-rearing women.  Rhodes says silent films such as The Watermelon Contest, The Wedding and Wooing of a Coon, and The Nigger perpetuated these stereotypes and “ridiculed and debased black life” (Rhodes 37).  The author says the most prominent mainstream movie to portray the racist ideologies of white America was Birth of a Nation. 

 

In response to these films, blacks began small film companies which produced movies to combat racial stereotypes. However, these black films struggled to offer a viable alternative point of view.  They struggled financially and their films had a hard time breaking free of the racist stereotypes themselves.  For instance, black films would often cast black actors as gang members and “reinforce white standards of beauty with their use of light-skinned performers” (Rhodes 38).

 

In this article, Jane Rhodes provides a much needed look at the importance of racism in media history.  Whites have often created media outlets to spread their racist ideology.  In contrast, alternative media outlets have formed to fight racial stereotypes. Rhodes gives two examples of racism shaping the creation of both mainstream media and alternative media.  Scholars and students would do well to read this article and follow its example by studying other times when racism affected the formation of mass media.   

 

Reviewed by Corey Williams

 

Comments (0)

You don't have permission to comment on this page.