The Black Image in the White Mind: Media and Race in America.

• Author: Douglas, Susan
• Position: Brief Article

Fifty years after the NAACP succeeded in driving the TV version of Amos `n' Andy off the air because it perpetuated racial stereotypes, African Americans enjoy unprecedented visibility on television. Entire niche networks, like WB, UPN, and BET, feature programming with all-black casts. Blacks appear as surgeons, police lieutenants, and attorneys on the networks, and nearly one-third of ads have both black and white characters.

If we believe that increased visibility in the media leads to increased racial tolerance in everyday life, this should be progress, yes?

That's the question Robert Entman and Andrew Rojecki ask in The Black Image in the White Mind: Media and Race in America (University of Chicago, 2000), an important book about the advantages--and costs--of increased black representation in the mainstream media. Because we still live in a highly segregated society, many whites have little contact with African Americans except, possibly, for interaction at work. Such racial isolation heightens the influence of media imagery, which serves as a powerful stand-in for real-life exchanges.

So what attitudes and beliefs might this imagery be cultivating in white people who still control the country's economy and politics? Entman and Rojecki's research shows that most whites are ambivalent about African Americans; they sympathize with those who suffer from discrimination, yet they are impatient with ongoing black demands for racial justice. Because of this unstable brew of tolerance and intolerance, media imagery can often tip white attitudes one way or another.

Thus, the fact that African Americans are consistently overrepresented as...