Dead Giveaway: this ain't Shalamar

Dead Giveaway: I like that song by the 80s R&B trio Shalamar, but this is not about that. This is about Charles Ramsey, who may now have a mash up hit "Dead Giveaway."
Market driven media: this cat is good for ratings on multiple levels. He's Joe Everyman, albeit mashed up w- Amos and Andy and Sanford & Son. In this case, Ramsey is the story. He's unexpected "Easy Rollins" who stumbled up three missing white women and ushered them into safety. These women have been in captivity for 10 years. Nothing extremely heroic: Ramsey did what I hope many of us would do, examine a social frame, explore the problems, and eventually fix it. However with the culture of convergence, he's now become the newest African American Internet sensation. His interview has gone viral. Now he's in the ranks of Sweet Brown, the gay Black guy whose now straight and Ms. Kapowya, who says man them rocks was big. The common denominator I see as a Media Examined is that most of the folks who have the microphone and cameras really are not children of the Kerner Commission; they are white broadcasters and editors who have come out of lily white mass comm programs where the challenge of diversity or media literacy was never taken seriously. Entman and Rojecki talk about the politics of representation in Black Image in the White Mind. I think within the news cycle we live in, sensationalism brings in the cash. Not only are broadcast stations cashing in, but so too are would be record producers as they creatively take their sound bites and remix them if you will into catchy hooks. Sweet Brown who says, "ain't nobody got time for dat," and now Ramsey's "dead giveaway." It's quite interesting when we begin to analyze these themes beyond the tactile level. In the texts I've seen, there is a latent visualization of poverty, social neglect, and even "dysfunctionaliam" within the lower to underclass representations of African Americans at the center of sensationalistic news texts. Immediately what comes to mind is the text of the Cleveland bus driver and his infamous sound bite "you going to jail now!" right before he delivers the upper cut that was seen all around the world to an African American woman. What about the Black mall cop in Atlanta who tasered the belligerent Black mother in front of her kids. When I showed this to my students they were hysterical, but again going beneath the surface, the psychological effects of economic poverty are being played for ratings.
In matters of Black Sexual Politics
Ramsey normalizes the racial apartheid in this country in various levels. Not only does he normalize it but I think he reinforces it by saying a white woman running into the arms if a Black man is still considered forbidden, or in his language, dead giveaway. When we really break it down, he really articulates historical paradox which that African American men negotiate with in this country daily. We may never know his true motivations; was he disturbed to the point where he couldn't eat his hamburger in peace or did he see something and hear something that was beyond his "normal frame of reference" that something here isn't too normal? That is not a dead give away.