Agenda Setting and Priming: African-American Male Stereotypes in Contemporary Media

Degrading African-American stereotypes have permeated the American entertainment industry for as long as blacks and whites have cohabited the country, beginning with the exploitation of African-American slaves in the 16^th century and their later “blackface” representations in 19^th century minstrel shows at the theater. Contemporary American culture was therefore built upon a foundation of racism toward African-Americans and other minority groups alike, which continues to stain both the news and entertainment media to this day. Specifically, African-American men have continuously been over-represented in the media as deviant or criminal members of society and as a consequence, white members are continuously over-represented as the victims of black crimes. While these agenda setting techniques do not accurately reflect the demographics of criminality in the U.S., they are often used by both the news and entertainment media—intentionally or not—as a way of normalizing and apparently legitimizing African-American stereotypes within contemporary American culture.

Franklin D. Gilliam, Jr. and Shanto Iyengar discuss the media’s use of agenda setting and priming effects in the article, “Prime Suspects: The Influence of Local Television News on the Viewing Public.” According to Gilliam, Jr. and Iyengar, “Typically, what viewers learn about suspects is limited to visual attributes, most notably their race/ethnicity,” which ultimately creates and reinforces ideas about what it means to be a criminal. Given that African-American men are over-represented as criminals in the news, and that their race/ethnicity is more often noticed by hegemonic viewers than is the race of Caucasian perpetrators, the scholars discovered that the perceived correlation between black men and criminality is fabricated as a result of priming. In other words, exposure to black men as the face of criminality in the U.S. often leads to future judgments about African-American men as a group. These judgments, of course, vary depending on the space white members of society share with their black male counterparts. A white woman, for example, might feel uneasy or threatened in the presence of an African-American male alone on a street corner in the middle of the night, but she might feel somehow protected from him if she were walking with a white male by her side. The woman's perceived danger, in this case, is determined solely by the effects of priming, or the subsequent judgments she has made about African-American men due to her exposure to the black "face" of criminality in the U.S. 

Yet, not all priming stems from exposure to the over-representation of African-American men as criminals in the news media. In fact, the entertainment industry is arguably more responsible for the perpetuation of black male stereotypes in contemporary society. Take gangster films like Boys n the Hood, American Gangster or Pulp Fiction, for example. All of these films feature black men as the primary perpetrators of theft and violence, in addition to being heavy drug users/dealers. Exposure to this misrepresentation of African-American men as thugs and criminals only propagates the unfair treatment of black men in real life, as members of the hegemony continue to fear and condemn them due to the effects of priming. This begs the question: If gangster representations of African-American men in the media results in white fear, why are white Italian mobsters like those played by Al Pacino so revered? Just as Herbert Marcuse states in One-Dimensional Man, it seems that we are stuck in an "ever-more-comfortable life for an ever-growing number of people who, in a strict sense, cannot imagine a qualitatively different universe of discourse and action, for the capacity to contain and manipulate subversive imagination and effort is an integral part of the given society" (pg. 23). It seems that this way of thinking is more comfortable to hegemonic members of society because it reinforces their position of power over African-American men as a subordinate group.