How Media Perpetuate Racism

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 people” (77). Simone’s recording of “Strange Fruit” had been different: it had been the soulful expression of outrage at a system that allowed such injustice to continue in so many ugly forms. The hip hop and gansta rap artists of the following generation embraced the ugliness: they essentially announced that if the racist system was going to treat blacks so abysmally, blacks were going to use thuggishness to elevate themselves over and above the system that whites perpetuated. In other words, it was a fable, a myth that black hip hop artists created in order to project toughness: as Jay-Z admitted to Letterman in an interview, hip hop artists pretend to be telling authentic stories about surviving the streets—their art is typically merely a projection of a fantasy of black toughness (Tucker). That hip hop street “edge” nonetheless found an audience with millions of listeners and in turn gave mass media a whip with which the ideas of Lynch could be beaten into the minds of the public. Supporters justified the rawness of the music as describing the hip hop artists as the spiritual descendents of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr.—people who celebrated blackness. But as Heaggans shows, they were selling hoodlumism to youths across America and further alienating blacks from themselves and from others.
After all, the entire purpose of mass media—i.e., the Culture Industry—was always to propagate ideas that would influence the public in such a way that the ruling class could maintain control over the public in the same way Lynch recommended that white slave owners maintained control over their slaves. Adorno and Horkheimer believed the Culture Industry was essentially focused on preventing the working class from rising up and taking power from the ruling class, the owners of the means of production. But the idea translates well to the issue of racism and the problem that Lynch addressed in his 18th century letter to slave owners—the problem of how to keep the black subjugated and oppressed without his realizing it. Lynch’s solution? Keep the black men separated from the black women: trick the black women into thinking they should be independent from the black men; emasculate the black men so that they never dare to question their oppressors; get the black women to raise up emasculated black boys and independent-minded black women so that there is never any sense of a black family in America (Lynch).
Jones showed how this idea of the Culture Industry using race to promote an oppressive ideology predated even the analysis of the Frankfurt School on the matter. Jones explains, for instance, the connection between race, racism and liberalism in the West by focusing specifically on the story of Claude McKay and how McKay was used by white elites and promoted in their publications so long as he was propagating the doctrine they wanted to promote to control blacks—but when he became Catholic later in life and started writing about God, morality, and truth, those same white elites ostracized him, marginalized him, and refused to publish his works. There is a similar treatment that one can see in the Culture Industry’s approach to McKay and its approach to Kanye West, who also has had his own “come to God” moment. Before West started telling the black community to get off the mental plantation that existed in their minds (put there by white elites); before he started promoting Trump and the likes of Candace Owens—another black activist responsible for promoting morality and family values as the solution to black poverty—before all this, West was lauded in the media: he touched upon nothing in his art that could undermine the oppressive methods being used by the Culture Industry to perpetuate systems of racism and oppression (Pegues). As soon as he started challenging the Culture Industry, the Culture Industry began depicting him as a buffoon, as crazy, and as a mockery. As Pegues points out, social media is the one place in the media that is difficult for the Culture Industry to control and wield overriding influence. Thus, Kanye West and Candace Owens have been able to have a media impact because they have become their own media by using social media to reach out to the public and get their messages across to their followers. Social media, in this sense has been especially useful in conveying alternative points of view that contradict the narratives put out by mainstream media. Pegues mentions the support for Candace Owens that Kanye West gave via social media when she attacked the liberal ideologies that both the Left and Right use to oppress black communities. This kind of support has an effect on the public similar to the self-delivered messages that men like MLK and Malcolm X were delivering in the 1960s: they did not rely on the Culture Industry to get their messages out to the public. Rather, they put their messages out there themselves. Their reward was assassination. Kanye’s reward appears to be character assassination by the Culture Industry.
Still, positive images of blackness are appearing in popular media, partially thanks to the strong demand of groups who are demanding greater equity for 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 back to Lynch’s racist approach to controlling blacks and has showed that it does indeed prevent the black community from being empowered. Candace Owens has pointed out the same thing by citing father absence, lack of education, and abortion as major factors in why the black community continues to be oppressed (Touchberry). Granted, there are other factors as activists like Angela Davis point out—like the fact that the prison industrial complex feeds on the lives of young black men and thus disrupts black community growth and destroys black families. The theoretical perspective of the Culture Industry shows quite well what is going on in America when it comes to racism and the media nonetheless. To answer the research of how Lynch’s Letter to Slave Owners in the South foreshadows the role of the culture industry (i.e., Media) in perpetuating racism today, one need only look at how people like Candace Owens and Kanye West are received in popular media. One need only look at how popular media sensationalizes negative images of blackness to no end. There is Lynch’s legacy.
Works Cited
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Aldrige, Derick. “From Civil Rights to Hip Hop: Toward a Nexus of Ideas.” http://www.thehiphopproject.org/site/pdfs/hhp_civilRights.pdf
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Cashmore, Ellis. The Black culture industry. Routledge, 2006.
Collins, Patricia Hill. "New commodities, new consumers: Selling blackness in a global marketplace." Ethnicities 6.3 (2006): 297-317.
Davis, Angela. The Meaning of Freedom. San Francisco, CA: City Light Books, 2012.
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Heaggans, Raphael C. "When the oppressed becomes the oppressor: Willie Lynch and the politics of race and racism in hip-hop music." West Virginia University Philological Papers 50 (2003): 77-81.
Jones, E. Michael. Libido dominandi: Sexual liberation and political control. St. Augustine’s Press, 2000.
Lynch, Willie. The Willie Lynch letter and the making of a slave. Ravenio Books, 2011.
Pegues, Conrad R. "Engendering Social Justice in First Year Information Literacy Classes." Communications in Information Literacy 12.2 (2018): 8.
Scott, Amy L. "Holding out for a hero: Patty Hearst and American culture in the seventies." Reviews in American History 40.1 (2012): 139-144.
Touchberry, Ramsey. “At White Supremacy Hearing, Candace Owens Says Black On Black Crime, Lack Of Masculinity Are The Real Issues.” Newsweek, September 20, 2019.
Tucker, Ken. “David Letterman's Jay-Z interview gets really, really awkward.” Yahoo! Entertainment, April 6, 2018.
Yahoo! Entertainment. “Letterman to Kanye on Trump support: 'You don't have a say in this'.” Yahoo! Entertainment, June 3, 2019.