Black Female Stereotypes in Media

For once I'm going to take a different spin on this topic because taking the obvious side is just too easy. Michael Eric Dyson once said that black women don't allow everyday folk to call them out of their name yet allow ministers in the pullpit to do so with impunity. I think the same can be said in general part due to the fact that we do have women who make he choice to actively capitulate to gross stereotypes portrayed in the media. Unfortunately, this operates at two central levels which are caryovers from the era of Reganomics, materalisim and devalued self esteme. Regretably, the character flaw with us black gen x ppl is that we have become our own worst enemy. Everything we want, especially if we never had it, we got to have it. We've allowed ourselves to buy into the media's Jedi Mind Trick where we link our idendity and social captial to what we have or lack their of. This materalisim in fact even operates within the construction of what we deem as masculine vs fem. If a man doesn't have a job, a place of his own, a car, benjamins stacked in the bank then he is he's not a man. Even more shocking is this same pateroical stereotype is thrust on to the women. If a woman is deemed too independent, she then is seen as a bitch, or if a woman chooses to be sexually permescious, have a voracious sexual appetite, she's called a ho. Now as Patracia Hill Collins points out, these gendered sterotypes in essence robs women of their sense of agency. If we go deeper, my thesis states with this lack of exposure to various acrutrements or even worse a prefrabricated planed introduction to certian segnafiers of "success" plants an early seed of materalisim, sexisim, racisim and a whole bunch of other isisms to germinate. Another aspect I offer as well is the latch-key effect. When children of the late 1970s came home from school, they took their key, came home to an empty apartment and anesthestized themselves with media-- be it video games, cartoons or reruns. Again, the economic component of this returns back to the parent or parents having to work a job that did not allow them the opprotunity to be home when their children came from school. The lack of after school programs or even the costs associated with them created a media problem where again, the media becomes the first point of contact for a large majority of black children. That said, media must be looked at as a caytalist for the larger problem: the social construction hypothesis. There are certianly other agents out there that reinforce stereotypes but again media operates as the initial spark. Now that said, the question of where to lay responsibility for this issue, to me simply is irrelevant. To me the bigger concern lies in breaking the cycle. How do we as an audience begin to excercise our captial to change the truth embeded in the lie, and reclaim our idendities within the hodgepoge of an overly saturated media society? If I can figure that out, I might get a Nobel peace prize.