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Chapter 4 teaching you to love Fear: television news and racial stereotypes in a Punishing Democracy Travis L. Dixon Because I am one of the few African American professors my students have ever met, I am often asked to speak to various student groups about my life and work; one of the questions I address regularly is “why do you study racial stereotypes in the media?” I usually respond that my scholarly work is inspired by my personal experiences, for I grew up in South Central Los Angeles , that Hollywood symbol of projected racial stereotypes and fears, and later attended a college where I encountered white students who had been taught by the media to see me as a problem requiring careful scrutiny, perhaps even punishment. I had grown up fearing the police and the violence of angry white men, but my classmates were afraid of me. While growing up, even though I was a hardly imposing “geek,” I was often harassed by police officers who assumed that I was up to no good simply because of my race and my neighborhood. On one occasion I was attending a church barbecue. When it was time to head home, I borrowed my grandfather ’s truck (with his permission, of course). I was soon pulled over and confronted by two white police officers with their guns drawn; although I was a good kid returning home from a church function, they thought I was a violent predator. It turns out that I was dropping off a friend who lived near a store that had been burglarized earlier that day, and so the Los Angeles police were on a manhunt, looking for a black man, any black man. One inappropriate move, including any verbal protest against my mistreatment, and I might have been beaten, arrested, or even shot. And so my childhood unfolded in South Central, where, on more than a dozen occasions, I faced profiling behavior, was handcuffed, or was pulled over for no reason other than the color of my skin. I thus learned to be careful around the police, to know when to shut up, and both to recognize and fear the inarticulate fury 107 of those who had been trained to see the world through the lens of massmediated racial stereotypes. Later in life, I came to realize that the same fear and misunderstanding that drove some white police officers to target me also encouraged many of my teachers and then professors to expect little from me in the classroom. When I was a freshman in college, I recall a mathematics professor who talked down to me when I attended his office hours and who seemed to be systematically rude to all the women and people of color in his class. While pacing in front of the class during the final exam, a black student turned in his exam somewhat early, prompting the professor to exclaim: “Now I know this test is too easy!” Perhaps he thought he was being funny, but many of us heard the comment as yet another racial slur. While walking across campus, I remember the familiar question posed by my classmates: “Are you an athlete?” This was a question I would have never been asked while attending my predominantly black high school, where I was known as a geek, not a jock—I was not an athlete; it was self-evident that I was the nerd, not the sports star. Nonetheless , mediated stereotypes led my classmates to believe that black people are either criminals or athletes, not scholars. I eventually overcame this institutionalized racism to obtain a Ph.D. and become a professor. As I pursued my degree, I was dogged by a persistent question: “Why do people use stereotypes to guide their decisions?” As I read others’ research and undertook my own investigations, I became convinced that support for policies that hurt the life chances of young black men is tied to either a tacit or explicit endorsement of racial stereotypes. Furthermore , because we live largely in a segregated society, many of these stereotypical conceptions are perpetuated not by individuals reflecting upon their interpersonal contacts with others, but by the mass media. Unfortunately, these mass-mediated racial stereotypes may be teaching us to love fear by prodding us to support a punishing and racist democracy rather than an empowering one. Neil Postman famously worried that we Americans have fallen so in love with our televisions that we are “amusing ourselves to death”; in that...

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