Portrayals of Prejudice In Media

I spent my long weekend catching up on some TV shows I hadn't been able to watch during the week. One of those was New Girl on Fox. I personally love New Girl; I think it is really funny. But, I was watching one episode from a couple of weeks ago, when the cast, at some point ends up at a police station. One of the characters, Coach wants to go in to confront a police officer about something. But one of the other main characters, Winston, who is African American, doesn't want to. He says to Coach, "Hey, did you hear the joke about the two white guys and two black guys walking into a police station? The white guys walked out."

We had been talking about prejudice against prisoners in class last week, and this just happened to catch my attention because of its relevance to the issue. In class, one of the questions we had asked was, Who do police profile? According to the NAACP, of the 2.3 million prisoners, nearly 1 million are African American. They also say that there are 5 times as many whites using drugs as African Americans, but African Americans are put in jail for drug offenses at 10 times the rate of whites. Why is this?

I did some research on this subject, and came across an article in which they talk about criminal injustice. They quote Michelle Alexander, from her book The New Jim Crow: the Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. She says, "The drug war has been waged almost exclusively in poor communities of color, even though...people of color are no more likely to use or sell illegal drugs than whites". According to studies done, white students use cocaine or heroine at 7 times the rate of black students, and use crack 8 times the rate of black students. I personally believe a big part of the reason African Americans are targeted so much more than whites is the media. So many TV shows portray their criminals/villains/bad guys as African Americans or Hispanics. There are many shows on primetime this year in which the villain is acted by a Hispanic or African American. What the media does is put a face to the bad guy/villain, and if that face is so often one of color, that is what we will start to believe is true in real life. Because these portrayals have been around for such a long time, it has become almost engrained in your mind. Therefore, maybe not purposefully, we start to imagine most criminals as African Americans. This has kind of sent our prison system into a downward spiral, because they are faced with the major issue of racial prejudice.