Media Representations of Race and Gender

After reading “The Reality of the Gaze” by Giannino and Campbell (2012), I feel compelled to dispute the authors’ opening description of Flavor Flav and the rise of Public Enemy. Flavor Flav then as he would later with the “reality” show Flavor of Love was exploiting a social issue and doing it in a provocative manner that would ensure sales for his corporate bosses. Public Enemy exploited the oppression of African Americans in society by fueling their rap with angst and angry lyrics, which kicked off a whole new subgenre in rap. This allowed the more media savvy members of the group—like Ice-T—to leverage their popularity and pursue a career in Hollywood. Flavor Flav finally got his chance to bring back his persona with his VH1 reality show, which exploits the harem notion of women from reality dating shows.
The intersection of race, gender and society in a study like this implicitly puts a great deal of validity on a show like Flavor of Love as though it were an authentic cultural expression. It is not and should not be accepted as such: it is a concocted corporate version of The Bachelor for the African American community as well as the white community that grew up listening to Public Enemy and feels a nostalgic warmth for Flavor Flav and his explicit and angry lyrics. The reality is not that this show represents any type of reality but rather that this show and Flavor Flav’s role in it represents the typical exploitation of minorities for money—just like advertisers do with their sexist advertising using women to promote an unrealistic image of womanhood. In this show, the producers are exploiting African Americans to promote an unrealistic image of relationships, and in doing so they hurt the concept of healthy human relationships in society. There is no real intersection of race, gender or society in this phenomenon because the whole thing is fabricated and concocted by the culture industry, as the Frankfurt School called it, in order to keep people oppressed by its superficial products.
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After reading “From Good Times to Blackish” by Hill and Kelly, I can see yet again another artificial way in which the media represents families. Hill and Kelly show that economic times tend to set the standard for fatherhood, and that race and culture inform ethnic families about what fatherhood should be like. Yet in shows like Blackish just like in The Cosby Show, the well-to-do African American family is basically like any other white family because it is cut from the same economic cloth, while the reality of most black families is that black men are “overrepresented among the poor, incarcerated, the unemployed, and the unmarried-all factors that shape their relationships with their children” (p. 188). This means that a realistic show would focus more on this reality of black relationships rather than on trying to exploit a proven method of applying black culture to a white framework and using the outcome to milk advertisers for ad revenue.
When compared to Flavor of Love, it can be seen how Blackish is really no different but just represents the opposite end of the spectrum of programming released by the culture industry. If Flavor of Love represents the so-called “reality” genre of programming, Blackish represents the so-called “entertainment” or “comedy sitcom” genre of programming pouring out of the culture industry, which has only one aim: to keep groups of people from thinking critically about their place in society, about themselves, about the ways that media uses them to keep them enslaved as consumers in a materialistic, superficial culture.