Racism In Mainstream Media

Mainstream media such as movies and TV shows are two things that really influence children and teens alike. Directors and creators tend to forget about how they portray races especially black people. Many shows and movies often lack representation for black people or they tend not to show us in the greatest light. With having so much influence on small children and teens like myself it plays a part distilling internalized racism in them especially if they can’t see themselves as Queens or Heroes.
Growing up I didn’t see many superheroes or princesses that had dark skin like me until 2009. Which is quite sad since there are a lot of black people in the world. When I was a kid I didn't care if a show had black people in it or so I thought. My friends and I would just watch our movie Bratz go to Paris without a worry but then we started to talk about which brat we wanted to be. One of my friends chose Chloe because she has light skin and blonde hair and the other chose Jade because she was Asian and I chose jasmine because I thought Sasha was ugly. I didn't really see a lot of black people that were considered beautiful on my Television. Most black women were shown as ‘ghetto’ and loud. I didn’t want to
I hated watching black movies because they were stereotypical. I didn’t understand the deep meaning behind these movies, yet I judged them before watching them. I also judged every loud and ‘ghetto’ black person I’ve ever come across. I stopped hanging around a lot of my friends because they were too loud and I didn’t want to be thought of as such. I hated my skin because I saw all of those movies where the girls who got the boy was fair skinned with light eyes. Those girls were the ones who got everything and the black people were either their friends who had little to say or background characters that didn’t