Blackness

The films of this past module include Just Wright and Brown Sugar, these films suggest a larger connection, appreciation and respect for black communities and love interests by the expression of music. Both of the film’s tell a story about a particular love interest and have soundtracks that express the love shown on screen. Also, they both feature sings that express who a black community can survive under attack. There are songs in the films along with the scenes in the movie that suggest healthy black love. Connections and love interests are made in these films through music. A larger love of blackness is shown in these movies through their storylines. In the film Just Wright music tends to suggest healthy black love; for example, the scene where Leslie joins Scott on the piano shows how two people can connect solely based off of their love for music, even though they aren 't romantically together yet they still made a connection by singing and playing the piano keys together. The movie Just Wright has music in it’s soundtrack that emphasizes how a black community can survive under attack. The song in the movie called “dreaming” by Nikki Leonti and Rich Skillz has lyrics that talk about an angel losing her wings, falling from the sky and having her dreams forced to be hidden away; but then the angel saw above all the hate, kept dreaming and eventually rises again because despite falling she got back up again and rose above the pain. This song is an example of how a…

While I wasn’t experiencing a lot of the things that I saw in other shows centered around black families, The Cosby Show offered me a way to reconcile my identity crisis as a young adolescent raised in white suburbia. I saw black people who lived like me, talked like me, had friends that looked like my friends, and had parents with the same kind of jobs as my parents. The Huxtables presented America with another definition of blackness, as countless intellectuals in the discourse surrounding The…

we were not only influenced by black culture, we just weren 't, I 'm obsessed by Spike Lee, but I 'm also obsessed with Spike Jonze. And that 's something Justin is trying to address, that there is no one way to be black. You can 't define that for us because we are constantly redefining it for ourselves” (Olsen, 2014). This topic of defining blackness is unabashedly address with its two main characters Lionel Higgins (Tyler James Williams) and Sam White (Tessa Thompson). Lionel is an openly…

Redefining Blackness During the twentieth century, black people began to redefine what ‘blackness’ was and what it meant to be ‘black’ by reconnecting with African history and culture. This was a period of reflection and reconstruction of the black consciousness, and although the twentieth century didn’t produce a solidified interpretation of ‘blackness,’ it created the groundwork necessary to form an identity that was independent of the racist notions instituted by slavery and/or other systems…

The media’s criminalization of blackness The objective of my paper is to do a content analysis regarding the media’s portrayal of black crime, and how crime has become synonymous with blackness. I will explore through how the media effects discourse in society, and how black men are overwhelmingly depicted as “thugs” in television shows. More importantly, I will address how this representation of blackness in the media has direct effects on the lives of individual black people. The media’s…

Racism: Colorism and Anti-Blackness Many believe that racism is simply a black and white issue. While this is true in many cases, there is more nuance to the issue. White supremacy, the belief that the white race is above all others, is the root cause behind many racial problems. It contributes to colorism in black communities, in which lighter skinned black people are prized above darker skinned ones. It also led to the sentiment of anti-blackness among other communities of color: it is clear…

and the Pearson chi-square statistic (i.e., dependent variable - gendered racial identity clusters; independent variable -demographic characteristics). Though there were relative differences in educational attainment between clusters, these differences were not significant. No other significant differences were identified. Qualitative Analysis of Blackness, Womanhood, and Black Womanhood The qualitative data collected from the Self-Defined Gendered Racial Identity Questionnaire (S-GRIQ) was…

Racism is a mainstay at any school simply because the school is a microcosm of the larger macrocosm. Society is racist. Thus, schools are racist too. Consequently, even though racism is woven throughout this literature review (i.e. the definition of racial harassment and verbal bullying or the story of a white girl saying her Black classmate’s skin was “the color of poop”), I wanted to specifically address anti-blackness. Brady (2014) defines anti-blackness as “the paradigm that binds…

The ways in which blackness is addressed and used as the basis for creative visions of the word mutates over time. For a long time, white men were allowed to take on black masculinity, which is where the concept of a ‘wigger’ comes from. Although there were moments of white women incorporating elements of black style into their looks, it wasn’t in the same way. There was no appropriation of larger ideas of dress, attitude, speech, etc. As we enter the second and third(plus) generations of white…

Paper 6 In his book The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America, author Khalil Gibran Muhammad works to answer a series of questions surrounding the “statistical link between blackness and criminality” (1), focusing on the core historical actors and the circumstances that were constructed to allow for the current reality that while African-Americans make up 12 percent of the general population, they make up 30 percent of the prison population (4). The issue…