Ownership, Diversity & Race: Confronting (Mis)Representations of Africa in the US Media
December 4, 2004 - Africa Action Baraza 2004
by Hugh Hamilton
In my line of work there is a well-worn maxim which holds that the media do not tell us what to think; they only tell us what to think about. By that measure, it is hardly surprising that so few Americans ever think about Africa at all.
And when they do, the images that come to mind are not of a vast and varied continent – the world’s second largest, home to some 700 million people in 54 different countries spread across an area three times the size of the United States. They are not images of a continent rich in history, culture and natural resources, the cradle of human civilization. Nor does our mainstream media coverage reflect the history of how the western powers systematically underdeveloped Africa for centuries. And rarely is there mention of the scandalous exploitation of Africa’s human and natural resources that persists to this day through an imbalanced and immoral global economic order based on corporate greed and imperial expansionism.
Rather, the dominant images of Africa in American mainstream media are of a dark and desolate continent, riven by tribal conflict, beleaguered by pestilence, poverty and disease, a place of fear and futility. They are images of despair and depression, of a lost people languishing in a lost land somewhere beyond the edge of modern civilization.
The global economic and political forces that conspire to disadvantage the African people are not unknown to media managers in America. Neither are the considerable accomplishments of many African states in the face of these structural impediments. Yet our media provide scant coverage of these issues, with little or no context to aid our understanding of the story. We are told, for example, that HIV/AIDS is rampant in sub-Saharan Africa but rarely is it explained that the ability of these nations to combat the pandemic through public health and education services is crippled by debilitating and arguably illegitimate debt. Seldom are we told that the ability of African nations to fend for themselves is frustrated by corporate welfare subsidies totaling nearly $1 billion a day to keep western agricultural exports dominant on the world market at the expense of small farmers in developing countries.
It goes without saying that for these and other reasons, many African nations are indeed trapped in profound crisis. But instead of comprehensive coverage that examines the full spectrum of cause and effect, we are inundated by one-dimensional images that dwell exclusively on the effect: stark, skeletal images of suffering that feed upon themselves to produce in our minds a misleading stereotype that becomes the face of Africa.
Alhaji G. V. Kromah, former assistant professor of International Communication and Media Law at the University of Liberia, summarized the frustration of many when he told students at University of Indiana, Bloomington, that “the problem of Western media reporting on Africa goes beyond professional inadequacies and structural bias. Socio-cultural factors have continued to account significantly for the stereotyping archetype, which has remained a hallmark of western collection and dissemination of information about Africa.”
He decried the western reliance on “fatalistic and selectively crude images of Africa to prove to their already misinformed audiences that they have visited the continent or are knowledgeable about its activities.”
“Ordinary people, including elders and children, must know that along with the huts, crocodiles and famine, African countries also have skyscrapers, multiple lane roadways and other manifestations of modern life,” Kromah said. “The reciprocal entrapment between the media and their western audiences on perceptions of Africa can only be dissolved if journalists and their institutional owners wake up and hear members of the same audiences expressing knowledge of Africa” beyond the overblown stereotypes and caricatures of African life.
CONSOLIDATION VS. DIVERSITY
Advocates seeking a more fair and balanced representation of Africa in American and other western media have long pointed to the consolidation of media ownership and lack of diversity in the newsroom as impediments to progress in that effort. Their argument rests on the presumption that so-called “minorities,” – in particular African Americans and others of African descent – would bring to the newsroom a better informed, more sensitive approach to coverage of African issues, and by extension, provide consumers with a more just and comprehensive and world view. This theory is supported by private advocacy organizations like the New York-based CEMOTAP – the Committee to Eliminate Media Offensive to African People -- as well as government agencies like the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), a division of the United States Commerce Department. The NTIA Minority Telecommunications Development Program, initiated 14 years ago to monitor diversity in American media ownership, clearly states that “diversity of ownership provides for multicultural expression and awareness, and helps bring focus to issues of particular importance to individual communities.”
The reality, however, has fallen far short of the desirable. A brief review of ownership and diversity figures in the radio and television industry will illustrate the magnitude of the challenge that confronts communities of color at this point in our nation’s history. (Bear in mind that nearly one-third of our nation’s population is non-white.)
The NTIA reports in its latest review of minority ownership in the broadcast and telecommunications industry that minority broadcast ownership totals in the United States have never exceeded four percent in the 14 years since the agency began compiling such data. The report points to a variety of reasons for this distressing state of affairs, including lack of access to investment capital, and a sharp reduction in policy initiatives and incentive-based programs for minority commercial broadcast ownership. “Moreover,” the report says, “changes in industry policies and government regulations have increased station prices, reduced ownership diversity, increased the challenges faced by minority commercial station owners in competing for advertising revenues, rescinded key incentive-based programs designed to encourage minority ownership in commercial broadcasting and ultimately, increased concentration of media ownership.”
This concentration of media ownership is reflected in the fact that four companies – Viacom, Clear Channel, ABC Radio and Entercom – now command 67 percent of news radio listeners. But the consolidation extends beyond any single medium, such as radio or television. As the PBS documentary “Frontline” reports, “The past decade’s wave of media mergers has produced a complex web of business relationships that now defines America’s media and popular culture. These relationships offer a massive opportunity for cross promotion and selling of talent and products among different companies owned by the same powerful parent corporation.”
AOL Time Warner, for example, controls an empire that includes assets and interests in television, film, publishing, recreation, music and the internet. Its business interests include such diverse media as CNN, TBS, TNT, Cartoon Network, HBO, Cinemax and the WB Television network; Time Warner Cable; New Line Cinema, Castle Rock Entertainment and Warner Brothers Studios; Time-Life books, Little, Brown & Company Publishers and the Book-of-the-month Club; AOL, Netscape and Mapquest.com; Warner Brothers Records, Rhino Records and Elektra Entertainment; People, Money, Life, Time, Fortune and Sports Illustrated magazines, as well as the Atlanta Braves, World Championship Wrestling and the Goodwill Games.
Similarly diverse empires are controlled by the Viacom, Walt Disney, and Rupert Murdoch conglomerates. The era of consolidation has all but foreclosed any minority presence in the development and ownership of media content and distribution, which progressive industry analysts consider indispensable to ensuring that a plurality of voices and perspectives are represented in our media.
According to the Center for Digital Democracy, “with the proliferation of media mergers and buyouts of minority-owned broadcast stations, the plight of minority media is more discouraging now than it was a generation ago.”
What’s more, not only are non-whites shut out from media ownership; they are also significantly under-represented in mainstream media employment opportunities as well. According to the Radio and Television News Directors Foundation (RTNDF) 2004 report, African Americans account for 10.3 percent of the national television news workforce, compared with 78.2 percent who are white. In radio, whereas whites account for 88.2 percent of the workforce, African Americans comprise a mere 7.3 percent.
The numbers are even more lopsided in management ranks, where decisions are made about which stories to cover, how resources are to be allocated for that coverage, and the overall slant or perspective that would inform the story. The latest RTNDF survey reports that African Americans account for a mere 3.2 percent of television news directors nationwide and 2.7 percent of news directors in radio.
RACE: A FOUR-LETTER WORD
I believe that an analysis of ownership consolidation and lack of diversity in mainstream newsrooms across the country, is helpful to our understanding of the way Africa and Africans are portrayed in our media. But I also believe there is a deeper, more fundamental problem at issue here. I have come to believe that our media’s relationship to Africa is but an extension of our nation’s dysfunctional relationship with people of African descent right here in America. It is the external manifestation of our internal struggle with the legacy of race and institutional racism, and the foundational role that race has played in the construction of our American society. If we will not come to terms with the legitimate aspirations of our own Africans at home, how can we be expected to respect the humanity of Africans abroad?
The crime against humanity known as Chattel slavery has been likened elsewhere to America’s “original sin.” It was a national transgression predicated upon the ideology of white supremacy on the one hand, and the myth of Black inferiority on the other. In a nation purporting to assert that all men are created equal, African enslavement could be justified in America only on the grounds that Africans were less than human. It was both a necessary and a convenient fiction maintained by a white slave-owning class seeking to enshrine its protected status and fortify its attendant privileges. It is a fiction that, sadly, informs our view of the world to this day.
Over the centuries, this protected status and its attendant privileges have come to be claimed by all whites through a series of compromises and accommodations described by New York University law professor Derrick Bell, as “silent covenants.” These covenants enter our everyday lives through the portals of public policy and become so much a part of our reality that we seldom take conscious note of their pernicious consequences.
“In ways so closely tied to an individual’s sense of self that it may not be apparent, the set of assumptions, privileges and benefits that accompany the status of being white can become a valuable asset that whites seek to protect,” Bell writes in his new book, “Silent Covenants: Brown v. Board of Education and the Unfulfilled Hopes for Racial Reform.”
Thus, in at least 10 provisions, the framers of our constitution enshrined language that both gave legitimacy to slavery and provided for its protection. For example:
· Article, section2 (clause 3) of our constitution provided for the apportionment of congressional representatives based on the population of free persons and three-fifths of the slaves;
· Article 4, section 2 (clause 3) prohibited states from freeing runaway slaves;
Other provisions vesting power in Congress to suppress insurrections and obligating the federal government to protect states from domestic violence are understood by many constitutional scholars to refer specifically to the threat of revolt by enslaved Africans.
These constitutional protections for slavery, and the institutionalized exploitation of Blacks in American society, were rooted in the duplicitous ideology of white supremacy and black inferiority. Thus, U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Taney, was reflecting both the historical record as well as the prevailing constitutional view in America when he wrote in Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) that Blacks “had for more than a century been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior, that they had no rights that the white man was bound to respect; and that the Negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his own benefit. …”
This opinion, Taney said, had been from the inception of the country “fixed and universal [among] the civilized portion of the white race.”
Though the court’s ruling in Dred Scott was overturned by the ratification of the 14th amendment in 1868, providing that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States … are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside,” the polarization of American society on the basis of race was not to be so easily relieved. By 1896, when the Supreme Court ruled in Plessy v. Ferguson that segregation in public facilities through “separate but equal” accommodations for Black citizens would satisfy the equal protection clause of the 14th amendment, any hope of a peaceful, post-slavery reconciliation between Blacks and whites had all but disappeared.
“The Supreme Court’s 1896 decision in Plessy v. Ferguson served to bring the law into a dismal harmony with the nation’s view of race in life,” Derrick Bell writes. “Corrupting law but relying on intimidation and violence, southern governments stripped Blacks of political power. Given meaningful if unspoken assurances that the federal government would not protect black civil rights, conservative southerners regained power utilizing racial fear and hatred … In addition to the disenfranchisement of Blacks, whites sought to secure their power through intensive anti-Negro propaganda campaigns championing white supremacy. Literary and scientific leaders published tracts and books intended to “prove” the inhumanity of the Negro. The purpose of [segregationist] policies was not simply to exclude or segregate but to subordinate those who, based on their color and without regard to their accomplishments, were presumed to be inferior to any white person no matter how low or ignorant.”
As if to underscore the point, in the same year that the U.S. Supreme Court upheld segregation, 77 Blacks were lynched
FIVE HUNDRED YEARS OF EUROPEAN SUPREMACY
The ideology of white supremacy is not a uniquely American invention. Dr. Molefi Asante, professor of African American Studies at Temple University, argues that “what we have today in every sector: art, education, economics, law and medicine – is the legacy of five hundred years of Western promotion of the ideology of white European supremacy.”
I would add to that list of sectors influenced by this legacy the mainstream media, which historically have enjoyed a relationship of privilege and partnership with the architects of American public policy.
Dr. Asante traces the escalation of this white, European supremacist ideology to the popular pseudo-scientific scholarship of the mid-to-late 18th century. Building on the even earlier Aryan Thesis of History that emerged during the European Renaissance -- a thesis which held that Europeans represented the highest forms of human evolution -- these 18th century scholars sought to advance a universal theory of racial hierarchy with whites at the apex of human development.
“So-called biologists, anthropologists, physiologists and medical doctors would advance theories of brain size, genital size and head bones to demonstrate their points concerning white supremacy.” Asante writes. “This would become the background for much of Western theorizing about the world. Popular culture would be created reflecting white supremacy and the degradation of the African.”
In his essay, “The Ideology of Racial Hierarchy and the Construction of the European Slave Trade,” Asante cites among others the work of the 18th century Dutch artist Peter Campier (1722-1789), who compared African facial and skull measurements to those of monkeys and developed a racial hierarchy claiming the superiority of the European form. His Swedish contemporary, Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778), widely regarded as the Father of Taxonomy and a much celebrated scientist of his day, similarly debased Africans in his early taxonomy. Linnaeus described whites as “clever, inventive and governed by laws”; by contrast, Africans were “phlegmatic, indolent, negligent and governed by caprice.” Moreover, the women were apparently “without shame,” as their “breasts lactate profusely.”
Also of note in this vein was the work of Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711-1776), who asserted in 1748 that he was “apt to suspect that the Negroes in general are naturally inferior to whites, [as] there has never been a civilized nation of any other complexion than white.”
It is a suspicion that would be echoed in 1790 by Thomas Jefferson -- our country’s second president and himself an owner of slaves -- in his Notes from Virginia. “I advance it therefore as a suspicion only,” Jefferson wrote, “that the blacks, whether originally a distinct race or made distinct by time and circumstance, are inferior to the whites in the endowments of both body and mind.”
By the early 19th century, the acclaimed French biologist George Cuvier would take that suspicion even further, flatly asserting that “the African is the most degraded of human races, and whose form approaches that of the beast and whose intelligence is no where great enough to arrive at regular governance.”
Errol Anthony Anderson, professor of political science at the University of Florida, points out that this pseudo-intellectual scholarship of white supremacy was particularly influential in shaping mainstream European thought precisely because its architects were among the most respected scientists and public intellectuals of their time. Cuvier, for example, was regarded not only as one of the three leading naturalists of the 19th century; he is also widely credited as the founder of geology.
As Henderson observes, “These were not marginal individuals in their fields. Many of these white supremacists had either been credited with founding their respective fields, or in great part, in fashioning the structure of enquiry in their fields.”
In his book, “Afrocentrism and World Politics: Towards a New Paradigm,” Henderson reports that “once Galileo challenged the intellectual basis of the Christian church with his scientific arguments, European society looked more and more to science to explain their environment.”
It was in this context that the new field of social science emerged, but much of this early work was itself conditioned by the very society that gave birth to it.
“Thus,” Henderson writes, “in the case of social science, social scientists were conditioned by the circumstances of their environments that provided the framework for their enquiry. Since social studies developed at a time when Europe began its great invasions into foreign lands, these disciplines were tempered with, at best, the conquest spirit which debased “foreign” cultures or, at worst, they were imbued with a singular white supremacist orientation with no regard to other people’s culture or humanity. Whole schools of thought were thus ordered. The white racist tradition of European religionists was handed down to the ‘naturalists,’ and as the naturalists evolved into the more rigorous anthropologists, the white supremacist arguments that formed the bedrock of their ‘science’ was expanded.”
Henderson concludes that “the substance of white supremacist dogma posing as science has diffused throughout the social consciousness of Europe, America and much of the world,” and further, that “the social policy emanating from white supremacist Eurocentric scholarship has contributed to the destruction of African peoples at home and abroad.”
It seems to me that the portrayal or depiction of African peoples in mainstream media is a direct consequence and logical extension of this historical reality.
Further, I have come to believe that any meaningful attempt to correct the negative stereotypes and slanderous misrepresentations of Africa in American media must involve simultaneous struggles on three separate fronts. First, there must be a sustained effort to restrain government regulations that make it possible for corporate media conglomerates to enjoy a de facto monopoly of the news and information industry. Second, concerned advocates must intensify their efforts to expose the scandalous lack of diversity in America’s newsrooms and demand urgent measures to address that politics of apartheid in American media. Third, we need to confront the fact that race still matters in 21st century America and we ignore its enduring legacy at our own peril.
*Hugh Hamilton is a New York-based radio host, policy analyst and public- interest advocate. His drive-time public affairs program, Talkback, is heard on WBAI Pacifica Radio, 99.5 FM in New York, Monday through Thursday from 3 – 5 pm. He can be reached via e-mail at : talktohugh@aol.com .
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