Stereotyping In The Media

Stereotyping, in its various forms, plays a significant role in class divisions of our society but perhaps none more impactful than with the categorization of race as it relates to law enforcement. While statistics may seem to guide citizens to believe minorities commit more violent crimes, Mann suggests, “what types of crimes are defined, how they are defined, and who is defining them” are primary flaws in the overrepresentation of crimes committed by African-Americans (1993, p. 70). Perhaps the strongest influence contributing to the public perception of crimes committed by minorities is the racial stereotypes depicted by the media. I offer the movie trailer for “Whose Streets” advertising the aftermath of the Michael Brown police involved shooting in Ferguson, MO, from my white privileged seat, is a reminder of how the
The media’s drive to add racialization to acts of violence continue to stoke the flames surrounding topics such as hot spots and the Broken Windows theory, helping to keep in place the systematic racism in the hyper-segregated of urban areas. Potentially worse than the media is the government’s/law enforcement’s participation in the criminalization of the black culture as they hide behind their colorblindness, purporting that racial inequities had been abolished (Stabile, 2006). Floayan and Davis carefully tease us with excerpts from the film highlighting the disproportionate mix of white power to the black members of the Ferguson community as they capture the protester’s raw emotions of the moment laced with our society’s radicalized social systems fortified with prejudice and discrimination (2016). Sadly our society’s inability to first acknowledge the intersections of class, race, gender, and crime, the justice models of what “should” work will be relegated to simply how it “does” work (Barak, Flavin, and Leighton,