Race representation

I pondered on the thought Barker brought up…that race is a social construction and that without its representation it doesn’t exist. I believe there is a lot of truth in this. The very families we grow up in are the representations we need that shape our social constructions of race. It then makes me question how we come to define who we are within that race. Surely the people who look like us and are then represented on TV must have some kind of influence in how we end up viewing ourselves. I remember growing up and my dad loving the show “Sanford and Son” which really was about black unemployed men acting buffoonish. I would sit and watch attentively at the way everyone acted, how the black men were portrayed.

Surely this represented a notion of the black race and how they were seen. Without representation such as this along with many others, I probably wouldn’t have begun the thought process that some black people are ignorant, which is sad. This can also be seen as stereotyping which more than not Barker states is often negative. African amer icans have for a long time been represented as “naturally incapable” and lazy.
The sitcom Sanford and Son showed that exact negative stereotype of blacks.

Fast forward to now, and you have Tyler Perry with his black comedies like Meet the Brown, House of Payne and even the Madea series. Spike Lee recently stated that he thought Tyler Perry’s shows were a whole bunch of “coonery and buffoonery.” He thought that it brought him back to the days of “Amos n’ Andy,” another sitcom involving black men behaving badly. Though I know many people were outraged by this, I wonder how much of this is true. The black population back when Sanford and Son came out generally liked the show too and found it quite funny. It took a while for them to seen the negativity involved because it was “entertaining.” This is Tyler Perry’s claim to fame for his plays and comedies…they are entertaining and funny. One need only youtube any of the Tyler Perry shows to see what I mean. But how much of that goes a little too far?

The posted video is Tyler Perry’s response after the criticism made by Spike Lee on 60 minutes: