Unit 12
A Ca of "Severe Bias"
Patricia Raybon
jeffery1 This is who I am not. I am not a crack addict. I am not a welfare mother. I am not illiterate. I am not a prostitute. I have never been in jail. My children are not in gangs. My husband doesn’t beat me. My home is not a tenement. None of the things defines who I am, nor do they describe the other black people I’ve known and worked with and loved and befriended over the forty years of my life.
2 Nor does it describe most of black America, period. dead汉语什么意思
3 Yet in the eyes of the American news media, this is what black America is: poor, criminal, addicted, and dysfunctional. Indeed, media coverage of black America is so one-sided, so imbalanced that the most victimized and hurting gment of the black community － a small gment, at best － is prented not as the exception but as the norm. It is an in
抗议的意思sidious practice, all the uglier for its blatancy. 版图的意思
4 In recent months, I have obrved a steady offering of media reports on crack babies, gang warfare, violent youth, poverty, and homelessness － and in most cas, the people featured in the photos and stories were black. At the same time, articles that discuss other aspects of American life － from home buying to medicine to technology to nutrition － rarely, if ever, show blacks playing a positive role, or for that matter, any role at all.六级满分
5 Day after day, week after week, this message － that black America is dysfunctional and unwhole － gets transmitted across the American landscape. Sadly, as a result, America never learns the truth about what is actually a wonderful, vibrant, creative community of people.
6 Most black Americans are not poor. Most black teenagers are not crack addicts. Most black mothers are not on welfare. Indeed, in sheer numbers, more white Americans are poor and on welfare than are black. Yet one never would deduce that by watching television or reading American newspapers and magazines.
7 Why do the American media insist on playing this myopic, inaccurate picture game? In this game, white America is always whole and lovely and healthy, while black America is usually sick and pathetic and deficient. Rarely, indeed, is black America ever depicted in the media as functional and lf-sufficient. The free press, indeed, as the main interpreter of American culture and American experience, holds the mirror on American reality － so much so that what the media say is is, even if it’s not that way at all. The media are guilty of a vere bias and the problem screams out for correction. It is wor than simply lazy journalism, which is bad enough; it is inaccurate journalism.
8 For black Americans like mylf, this isn’t just an issue of vanity booklet－ of wanting to be en in a good light. Nor is it a matter of closing one’s eyes to the very real problems of the urban underclass － which undeniably is disproportionately black. To be sure, problems betting the black underclass derve the utmost attention of the media, as well as the understanding and concern of the rest of American society.
9 But if their problems consistently are prented as the only reality for blacks, any othe
r experience known in the black community ceas to have validity, or to be real. In this scenario, millions of blacks are relegated to a sort of twilight zone, where who we are and what we are isn’t bad on fact but an image and perception. That’s what it feels like to be a black American who lifestyle is outside of the aberrant behavior that the media prent as the norm.
10 For many of us, life is a curious ries of encounters with white people who want to know why we are “different” from other blacks － when, in fact, most of us are only “different” from the now common negative images of black life. So pervasive are the images that they aren’t just perceived as the norm, they’re accepted as the norm.
11 I am reminded, for example, of the controversial Spike Lee film Do the Right Thing and the criticism by some movie reviewers that the film’s ghetto neighborhood isn’t populated by addicts and drug pushers － and thus is not a true depiction.
12 In fact, millions of black Americans live in neighborhoods where the most common sights are children playing and couples walking their dogs. In my own inner-city neighbor
hood in Denver － an area that the local press consistently describes as “gang territory” － I have yet to e a recognizable “gang” member or any “gang” activity (drug dealing or drive-by shootings), nor have I been the victim of “gang violence”.
13 Yet to students of American culture － in the ca of Spike Lee’s film, the movie reviewers － a black, inner-city neighborhood can only be one thing to be real: drug-infested and dysfunctioning. Is this my ego talking? In part, yes. For the millions of black people like mylf 偶数是什么意思－ ordinary, hard-working, law-abiding, tax-paying Americans compactednaturalism－ the media’s blindness to the fact that we even exist, let alone to our contributions to American society, is a bitter cup to drink. And as lf-reliant as most black Americans are － becau we’ve had to be lf-reliant heiji－ even the strongest among us still crave affirmation.
