Black Youth and Mass Media: Current Research and Emerging Questions

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Black Youth and Mass Media: Current Research and Emerging Questions
S. Craig Watkins, Associate Professor of Sociology and Radio-Television-Film, The University of Texas at Austin Introduction Young African Americans have not participated as long as their white counterparts in the media culture industry (Nightingale 1993). In truth, it is difficult to discern a substantive relationship between black youth and the mass media prior to the 1960s. The initial exclusion of blacks from popular media culture is attributable to two main factors: 1) a lack of discretionary income on the part of black youths and their families and, 2) racial exclusionary practices on the part of the culture industries. Important economic and educational advances since the 1960s have sharply increased black household and discretionary income (Farley and Allen 1987) and also help to establish a viable African American consumer culture. By the late 1960s and early 1970s the film (Guerreo 1993; Watkins 1998) and television industries (Gray 1995) began responding to the shifting sensibilities of black youth culture by creating products that specifically targeted black youth. It was also during this time that the wider distribution of television occurred, thus exposing black youth to American consumer culture in ways unknown to previous generations (Nightingale 1993). A primary aim of this paper is to outline some of the important research findings and emergent issues that examine the changing relationship between black American youth and the mass media industry. Black Youth, and Media Stereotyping: The Media Effects Paradigm The widespread distribution and consumption of mass media continues to generate intense debate concerning the extent to which products like film, television, and music video affect youth behavior and social development. A primary aim of the “effects paradigm” has been to explore how media socializes youth into behavior that impairs their ability to mature into socially

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