Thursday, May 08, 2008

The Media's love of the Stereotype

By Jared Trexler
The Phanatic Magazine

The media's written word is one walking literary stereotype.

As Philadelphia fades to black only to awake to a stream of cars, flags and tears at Police Sergeant Stephen Liczbinski's celebration of life on Friday, it is the very people that took away that life at the front of a city's unending battle with race.

Homeless people are black.

Murderers are black.

Drug dealers are black.

It's the white collar businessman's logical deduction of the facts. A simple, safe assertion made from a high rise office with an instant coffee coffee machine and a desk chair that doubles as a massage parlor (another stereotype).

White men get all the breaks.

They are rich.

They live in brick houses surrounded by white picket fences.

They coach tee ball.

Cut-and-paste statistics, otherwise known as a myriad of numbers jumbled together to prop up a straw man argument, support such claims. News stories dot the front pages -- articles of the next tax windfall and bank robbery.

The white man is swimming in money. The black man is sitting in jail.

And the woman? She's a bitch (a nasty, web-approved word for feminist) for fighting a system full of predisposed notions and land mines at each street corner. A love of opera and a menstrual cycle make you eligible to "buck the trend" and "become a benefit of the system set up to disenfranchise the powerful and cuddle the powerless."

You think stories about successful women don't portray this stigma because you never read about powerful females. Unless you turn to page 15, behind the black man's crime and the white man's success.

It all goes back to a family structure set up eons ago. The man brings home the bacon. The wife cooks it. And if there is any left over, the black man steals it.

It's disgusting. We are living in a time of unprecedented opportunity. A white woman and a black man are running for the leader of the free world. Both highly intelligent, highly successful, highly ambitious individuals with big hopes and grand dreams.

Yet, instead of soaking in the magnitude of the moment, the media drives a fork into the black church. It plasters exit polls on building walls and airplane banners -- any place where they can scream examples of sexism and racism.

Instead of unifying, the media again divides. It perpetuates the exact preposterous notions printed above. It enables a small, but vocal sector of society who nods at each of the blatantly racist, sexist statements in this text.

And it extends beyond politics. Beyond the streets of a big city or small town. Sports is another example of pre-existing stereotypes which still have not been overcome.

Black men don't play ice hockey because they can't skate.

White men don't make it in the NBA because they can't jump.

Golf and tennis are "white people" sports because they have the money.

Women aren't as good of athletes as men.

I have a news alert for the people who believe those statements.

The NHL's integration has slowly begun. Larry Bird. Tiger Woods. And Rebecca Lobo could kick my ass in the post.

The point is simple. Statistics may back up some of these claims. But those statistics remain only because people aren't doing enough to combat them.

After school programs in bad city neighborhoods is a start. The First Tee golf program is a solid beginning.

And the media can help by driving away such awful stereotypes. They can put stories about those last two programs on Page One.
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Jared Trexler is the author of an upcoming novel on Penn State football. He can be reached at jtt128@comcast.net

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