MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

American Mass media are so influential because of their ubiquitous nature. Since movies, television shows and all other forms of media disseminate trends and help establish popular culture and modernity in society, the public is apt to be affected by the media eventually. There are many one-dimensional representations of minority groups and minority culture constructed by mass media. Sociological theory can be used as a frame of reference to identify the systemic approaches and ideologies that promote stereotypical and misrepresentative imagery of minorities in American mass media. This study specifically addressed mass media’s negative and inexact portrayals of black women and how the continuous propagation of stereotypical representations can become detrimental to how the public perceives black women, and how black women perceive themselves. In order to extract a concise understanding of how effective American mass media are at maintaining the marginal and diminutive portrayals of black women, a focus group comprised of college students of different ethnic backgrounds and genders was formed. The focus group viewed an episode of Scandal, a popular television series whose main character is a black woman at the forefront of Washington D.C.’s political scene. The purpose of this focus group experiment was to find out if the participants perceived the media’s negative representations of black women as accurate, while simultaneously gauging the participants’ opinions of the plausibility of a more positive multidimensional black female character. This method was used to emulate past studies on African Americans in media such as Jacqueline Bobo’s work on the The Color Purple. The participants noted that American mass media do proliferate negative imagery of black women and that it is possible for susceptible audiences to become misguided by such representations.