I’m sure that we’ve all experienced in some way someone hating you for something you could not control. Perhaps you are a woman with some authority over a man in the work place, or you are a person of color in a town that is predominantly white. These day to day life experiences are already hard to deal with without the media continuing to bring these ideas into our mind.
Often things like movies, television, books and music tell stories of such hardships. Fortunately enough, for the most part it seems that you can find the affects of prejudicial language can go each way in the media. For example, a movie like The Hurt Locker can bring about fear towards arabs and spark the interest of racial slurs against them. The movie G.I. Jane, however, can bring up the idea that women can do something as good, or even better than men.
It does seem to me that more often than not we find the more negative effects of it. Rap lyrics for example, seem to have a lot of this. There are the rappers that talk about how women are unfaithful liars, use the n-word constantly, talk about how the white man puts them down. I’m a fan of rap music, but in general, not this kind. Yet, there it is, played on the radio at least once every two hours because it’s a big hit. Which begs to ask, who is listening to this? And what ideas are they getting about people from it?
The most viral place for hate speech in media however, is probably the internet. I only say this because of how quickly things get posted around and because everyone has access to post anything they want about it. You can see it in almost everything, even right down to news articles. My e-mail account is with Yahoo, so I get YahooNews. When I read an article about something that President Obama has said or done it somehow turns into how he is a black man. The article may be talking about the new White House dog, but the people writing comments below call him a “socialist nigger who should be shot.” The article might be talking about how the repeal of Proposition 8 is progressing in court, but the people in the comments are talking about how “those faggots should burn in hell.” It’s hateful, and it isn’t simply in people’s minds anymore. It’s in a forum online where hundreds of millions of people can access it and read it.
So yes, media plays a huge part in the way that hateful speech is being used or promoted and I think this mostly has to do with the fact that it isn’t just a small group of people controlling the media any longer, it is anyone and everyone. While the drama of such language makes for great entertainment, there is a fine line that I think we’re often crossing over. It’s something we as a society have to work against so that our already diverse country can somehow carry on in peace.
You wrote, “There are the rappers that talk about how women are unfaithful liars, use the n-word constantly, talk about how the white man puts them down. I’m a fan of rap music, but in general, not this kind.”
ReplyDeleteSomething I find interesting and a bit unfathomable is when I pull up alongside an SUV with a white suburban-looking housewife, sometimes with kids, and she has that kind of rap, blaring out of her speakers. If it only had happened once, I would think it an anomaly, but it has happened several times. It is more understandable when a young African American has it on, because whether he adheres to the morals sung about, there is a stronger identification with the culture and the artists. If it was just the syntax, the beat, the creativity, I could understand, but I don’t understand when a white woman uses as her entertainment raps that denigrate her as a white person and as a woman. Granted, there are racial, sexual, political, etc. overtones in probably every music form. I listen to the 60s and 70s music that I be-popped to, and I hear messages there that I never even considered as a kid. But when the insults are so flagrant, the person can’t insist that they don’t understand the message. So what is the draw? Is it exciting to be called horrible names and is it a death wish to hear about someone wishing you didn’t exist. I don’t really get it.