Desensationalizing Black Males: Navigating and Deconstructing Extreme Imageries of Black Males and Masculinities

• In Event: Assaults on Communities of Color: Transacademic Exploration of the Realities of Race-Based Violence

Abstract

This paper examines how Black males are painted with broad brushstrokes, compared incessantly to the gangsters, criminals, athletes, rappers, and even heroes that society believes us to be, creating an assaultive context that is anti-democratic and ultimately unsafe for Black males. The author explores how Black males suffer gazes tinged with media-informed perceptions, the lookers uncertain how to act, respond, judge, and manage a response to them.Black males, including himself the author suggests have own issues to wonder about in the assaultive “post-racial” climate:” Why is this white man following me? Why does s/he insist on complimenting my dreadlocks using the self-effacing caveat ‘my hair is so boring, but yours is so cool?’ Why does s/he always use sports metaphors to help me grasp a new concept? Through autoenthrographic exploration the author suggests that before we can diffuse and undo the sensationalism of Black males, it is essential to realize this is not just a media problem. We all create and re-create sensationalized images of Black males, good and bad, celebrity and convict, talent and thug, and that has become the mark of our so-called democratic post-racial reality. Subsequently the author suggests was that we can work to dismantle sensationalized notions through close consideration of how our biases and prejudices cause harm to others.

Author

• Roderick LaMar Carey, University of Pittsburgh