How Media Perpetuate Racism Essay

When Willie Lynch wrote his letter to white slave owners in America in the 17th century, laying out the blueprint for the American Establishment on how to create racial tensions in order to facilitate the white slave owners’ rule over their African slave, he unwittingly laid the foundation stone for American elitism and racism that has since come to characterize the ruling class’ use of mass media in controlling the population (Heaggans). As Horkheimer and Adorno later showed in their analysis and dissection of the Culture Industry, the controllers of mass media have essentially used the basic framework of Lynch to perpetuate the idea of racism and to use race as a means of dividing and conquering the population, keeping the mass of men and women disunited and disempowered, turned against themselves, focused on their own external differences, and preventing them from uniting and standing up to the powers that be. As history has shown, whenever leaders stand up to end racism or to attack the elitism that perpetuates the system of racism in the U.S, those leaders are assassinated: from John Brown to Martin Luther King, Jr. to Malcolm X, it is the same story again and again. Today, leaders are simply prevented from being formed by a media that follows the playbook of Lynch, implanting in the minds of the African-American community the idea that the women should be independent and the men should be dependent on the government for support—a concept that Kanye West has rightfully come out against along with others like Candace Owens. Yahoo! Entertainment, for instance, has mocked Kanye West, particularly for wearing a MAGA hat in support of President Trump. The research question this paper will answer is: How does Lynch’s Letter to Slave Owners in the South foreshadows the role of the culture industry (i.e., Media)? Using critical theory (Adorno and Horkheimer’s theory to explain the Culture Industry), this question will be answered in the following pages.

Nina Simone’s “Strange Fruit” was released in 1965, the same year Malcolm X was assassinated in the Audubon Ballroom after criticizing the leader of the Nation of Islam for failing to live up to the ideals he propagated in his talks. Malcolm X had fortified many black men through his articulate, strong speeches—and his death was a serious blow to the black community, and particularly to Simone. The song “Strange Fruit” had been written by Abel Meeropol, a Jew who had gone to school with James Baldwin in his youth (Blair). A picture of a black man who had been lynched in the Deep South had inspired Meeropol to write the poem “Strange Fruit,” an ironic comment on the hideous incongruity of the practice of lynching (a practice named after the eponymous Lynch, whose letter on how to control slaves opened this essay) with nature. The poem was later turned into a song that artists from Billie Holiday to Nina Simone sung throughout the following decades. Simone’s came at a time when the problem of racism in America was at a fever pitch. Three years following the death of Malcolm X, Martine Luther King, Jr, would meet his end thanks to a bullet. Those leaders of black communities were sent to the next world in the 1960s. An entire generation of blacks was robbed of its unique, one-of-a-kind leaders—leaders who had defined their generation. By the 1970s, mass media and the Culture Industry had put the struggle of Black America back on the back burner. Black activists, if they existed in the media at all, were tied to radical groups like the Black Panthers or the Symbionese Liberation Army, the black group that abducted Patty Hearst and “brainwashed” her into joining the Liberation Army (Scott). Mass media, free of the articulate activists who had gained a following in spite of the Culture Industry’s directives, would continue on its way of giving audiences the image of blackness that the ruling class wanted Americans to have (Collins). This is evident in the drama that mass media presented with the Michael Jackson and O. J. Simpson stories at the end of the 20th century. As Cashmore notes, “images of blackness are power; the power to frame and affect. The images of Simpson and Jackson presented in the mid-1990s were not just images of black people: they were whites’ images, representations created and recreated anew over a period of several hundred years” (5). O. J. Simpson—accused of murdering his white wife; Michael Jackson, accused of molesting white boys: these were the images of blackness pushed upon the American public by mass media, endlessly, in the 1990s.

But they were not the only images. At the same time, hip hop artists were doing their part to perpetuate a negative stereotype of blacks as aggressive, thuggish and immoral (Guy). As Heaggans states, “hip-hop artists have taken on the tools of oppression and become the oppressor by perpetuating historically negative images and messages that many whites and others still hold true about black…

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…minorities in the mainstream media. Though the hip hop artists of the modern era have been criticized for propagating a negative stereotype of blacks, some have embodied the messages of black leaders of the past, as Aldridge points out: “since the early years of Hip Hop, SPC hip hoppers have continued to espouse many of the ideas and ideology of the Civil Rights Movement and Black Freedom Struggle, but in a language that resonates with many black youth of the postindustrial and post-civil rights integrationist era.” Ice Cube, member of gangsta hip hop group NWA even criticized the “nigga mentality” that he himself helped to popularize at the end of the 20th century (Decker 53). Ice Cube went on later in life to praise the Nation of Islam for giving him the self-awareness that he and other blacks needed to elevate themselves from a place of thuggishness and hoodlumism to a place where they could live with dignity and respect within themselves—much like what Malcolm X promoted (Decker). The “woke” Ice Cube of his later years spoke differently and more intelligently than the “angry” Ice Cube of his earlier years: “Soon as we as a people use our knowledge of self to our advantage we will then be able to become and be called blacks,” Ice Cube argued (Decker 53). By that point, however, NWA was already over and Ice Cube was on his way to be ushered out of the limelight. He was speaking truth to power, the same way Malcolm X was; the same way McKay was following his conversion to a life of spirituality and enlightenment; the same way West and Owens are doing today. When blacks begin talking about transcending the labels and ideas that the white establishment through the mass media and the Culture Industry puts into their heads, they are no longer promoted in the popular media. For people like West and Owens, who have developed their own brands via social media, they do not have to rely on mass media to reach an audience.

In conclusion, there is a lot of hype in the media over racism—particularly in news media, where Black Lives Matter is either sensationalized or vilified, depending on the network; and yet the mass media of the Culture Industry never seems to give a fair shake to individuals who actually want to point out the role of media and government in facilitating and perpetuating racist ideologies. Kanye West has pointed out the ideology that can be traced…