okay so i think um we'll get started good afternoon everyone um on behalf of myself katie my co-facilitator the faculty of um sbs we are pleased to welcome you to the first seminar of the spring semester we are quite excited to have with us today dr denise berry um she has a exciting presentation this year i'll just give a brief um introduction how we met i was searching on the internet one day for some scholarship looking at hiv prevention uh materials and i saw a really wonderful paper that she's published looking at edutainment as one method to provide um hiv intervention for young african-american girls and so we hopped on a call we started talking and then i realized like wow she's actually very prolific you know published several books which you have read um it's just doing some incredible stuff at the university and i was really um intrigued to about her most recent work racism in the media and i think it's quite different from what we have seen so far um from you know presenters and other different talks on racism in the media so i'm quite excited and i would say that this particular presentation is usually offered as a workshop and so she was gracious enough to turn this sort of format into a presentation and we are just really excited to welcome her today and we look forward to a discussion um at the end please um come out with your questions and join us today to welcome dr barry thank you thank you so much for inviting me um i am excited as well about this book this book is like 20 years in the making um i um saw a number of years ago that we we often yell racism and when i look at the problem or the issue i'm like is that really racism and at least as i define as i think about racism and so i started studying images and messages about african-americans in the media and kind of looking at some of the distinctions that i saw in relation to race uh the connection between race and media so i'm gonna share my screen um because i have my a presentation i want to offer on powerpoints because i like showing images and now let me see if i can make it feel the screen play from the start there we go oops okay so um i'm hoping that okay so basically i want to start off by thinking about two examples i want to compare and contrast two examples when it comes to racism versus a concept that i have developed called racialism the first is this uh lebron james cover of vogue magazine very controversial um very um there are a lot of people upset about it um los angeles lakers basketball champion lebron james is posed exactly like the king kong poster that you see there um he's got his arms draped about around the white model he's bouncing a basketball instead of holding a club and his mouth is open wide as if he's growling like king kong well now this image was like i said very problematic and it promotes several race racial ideas um such as you know the comparison of black men to apes the notion that black men are obsessed with white women and the historical myth that black people coming out of africa are like apes or animalistic or violent nature savage that kind of thing so the question is is this racist is um annie leibowitz the person who created this cover racist why would lebron james agree to pose like king kong is he okay with racism why would vogue magazine use this image on their cover are they comfortable perpetuating racism now i want to compare contrast that and those those are the questions i want to compare and contrast that image with this image from the most popular black panther movie um this movie came out in 2018 it was a blockbuster and basically it featured this is an image of imbaku he is the head of the jabari tribe of wakanda and he is called man ape and his tribe is called the white gorilla cult they use loud repeated grunts of the gorilla during conflict and uh in the movie he they display a good an aggressive and animalistic image so the interesting thing about this image though is that there was no controversy there was no outcry of racism and it's interesting because it's also interesting because the comic book the original comic book was written by a white man but the movie was adapted by a black director and a black writer ryan coogler and john robert cole so the question then becomes are coogler and cole racist and why would actor winston duke play a character where the black man is called a man ape is he okay promoting racism so i started you know i've been just exploring some of these ideas concerning racialism and racism i want to give you some examples one of the things that i've done is i've come up with this concept called racist racialism and what it does is it looks at it separates out four elements under this umbrella the concept is racialism and i've separated out four concepts one is stereotypes two biased frames three historical myths and four traditional racism okay so let me give you some examples of what i'm looking at um for each one and i do want to explain too you know of course there are still racists who practice ugly or racism but the perpetuation of racial stereotypes biased frames and historical myths through the media has it's become a normalized process and that's what i'm calling race racialism in the 21st century i believe we need a more nuanced understanding of race and racial constructions so again under the umbrella of racialism racism still exists but for me it involves a more malicious and purposeful intent and i'm really concerned that when we focus everything on racism um when we focus on those extremes only we miss some really important elements of racialism that are just as powerful and just as problematic so let me define racialism before we go into the examples um racialism involves racial ideas images and issues oops images and issues produced distributed and consumed repetitively and intertextually unfortunately stereotypes biased frames and historical myths about african-american culture are normalized in this process particularly through the media ultimately these media represent representations shape and form societal ideology and behavior okay so my first example of a stereotype is this kool-aid commercial where you have a young black couple the the logo is old school flavor and you have a young black couple who is drinking kool-aid sitting on the stoop well now the interesting thing about this piece and most people wouldn't even pay any attention but because i've been doing this for a while red flags go off all the time i'm looking at this picture and i'm finally and all of a sudden i say wait a minute why is there a basketball in this picture there's absolutely no reason for there to be a basketball in this picture except that's a stereotype of black men in athletics so you have the black male he doesn't even have on tennis shoes he has on hush puppies or something he's not on a basketball court but he has this basketball under his foot somebody said oh we need to put a basketball under his foot and they felt like that was acceptable now the question is is that racist okay that's that's my question here's an example biased framing um this is a ad from not an ad but an article from fox nation and basically when obama was president um his 50th birthday party was held at the white house and the um headline read obama's hip-hop barbecue didn't create jobs well that that's really an interesting biased way to frame his birthday party first of all when you tie it to hip-hop which to a lot of people particularly probably people who watch fox nation it's not considered a positive and um basically um when you look at the four images only one of them is a rapper so you've tied all of these black men to hip-hop um so the only one that's a rapper is jay-z and then you have the comedian chris rock you have president obama and then you have charles barkley who's an athlete so again the whole notion of framing something in a biased way so that it creates a certain kind of image or message in relation to african-american culture this is an example of historical myth beautiful beautiful image of naomi campbell racing a cheetah and the logo is wild things and this is a series it's a fashion shoot in a magazine but i wanted to include this because of course the historical myth for african americans is you know africa is wild africa's savage africa is animalistic so again this fashion shoot is tied into that notion but at the same time is it racist okay and finally of course traditional racism we all know what that is at least what i define it as kkk burning cross nooses you know the whole the n-word all those kinds of things to me are traditional racism and that can also be found in the media so i use the lens of critical race theory to examine examples of how racialism operates within specific media products um in critical race theory it's important for scholars to recognize that um the root causes of despair disparity are apparent in various systems structures and practices delgado and stefanik argue that it's the structural systematic influence of racial ideology that often creates oppression bias and inequality in society so racialism operates in the mediated experi mediated experience not only through image but images but also through words as we've seen um there are specific examples of powerful rhetoric that we heard over the last four years especially in the news dog whistle politics name calling blaming the victim i've got an example below that i think is interesting a couple of examples actually this is um this happened during hurricane katrina and it's one of the most obvious examples you could find um two articles in yahoo news in 2005 the image on the left is uh the white male and the white female wading through water and if you look at the storyline it says they found bread and soda from a local grocery store and then you have the black male who's also wading through water and it says that um he looted a grocery store so again looking at how different words create different messages and images and in my opinion of course this to some extent is racism because this is the traditional hatred the traditional malice and purposeful kinds of um problems that we see this is another example but i don't know if this is racist this is came out from h m and i mean there was a huge controversy but there this hoodie says coolest monkey in the jungle and a little african-american boy is uh modeling it and of course when you talk about african-americans and monkeys and jungles you're going back to the historical myth of africa but this is part of the um issue in relation to different images and messages is how effective commodification has been of black culture so again is it racist maybe maybe it's not um okay celebration so they're going to start thinking this month or next month and we feel that because is that somebody talking to me or oh no maybe they're talking to somebody else okay so um i wanted to cover each of my chapters real briefly just to let you know kind of what kinds of things i'm exploring chapter one deals with contemporary zip coons it's called contemporary zip codes the problem with funny and basically it offers a critical examination of the prominence of zip of the zip code stereotype in today's films and tv shows the zip code stereotype has been modernized yet the character still acts crazy dresses flamboyantly and talks inarticulately and so i've put a couple of examples here um meet the browns which is from tyler perry and again the interesting thing about this and then of course chris tucker from friday and from um the rush hour series and the interesting thing about here is chris tucker is created by an african-american man tyler perry but he is one of the most obvious modern-day zip [ __ ] stereotypes that we've seen in a long time um he basis basically dresses ridiculously as you can see in this image he's portrayed as stupid he doesn't understand the english language and his acting is over the top with a lot of whining and hand waving chris tucker is a little bit more unconventional but um in the friday series he's a slow-witted mumbling lazy [ __ ] and in the rush hour series he gives us the bug-eyed look um he constantly misunderstands and mispronounces words along with his loud talking and his high-pitched voice um i have a chapter two ghetto fabulous how low can you go and basically i examine um bias framing here in that you know ghetto has come to equal black and black has come to equal cool and so there's this focus on problematic representations in reality television rap music news urban fiction novels at the expense of other to me more interesting and relevant african american stories so when we think about um ghetto fabulous some of the images i have here are um wanda clark has a series of urban fiction books like thugs and the women who love them crackhead one crackhead two um we're all familiar with the real housewives of atlanta uh even though they have an class status they still act in a pretty raunchy ghetto kind of way and you can't really i don't think you can see and i don't know how to women get rid of it there there okay um and then this is a a wrapper i don't even know who he is i didn't bother to look it up but i just wanted to use him as an example of how rap music can give us a lot of ghetto images problematic images the bling bling and and all the different kinds of um uh commodification of um wealth uh uh conspicuous consumption and those kinds of issues fighting cursing all those issues okay why is this not um hold on this is not ah there it is okay so chapter three is advertising in black folks was up and it covers of course advertising african-americans i use barth's semiological chain of communication to explore meaning in advertising specifically when it comes to the inclusion of african-american images and messages there are exemplars below i want to go through a few exemplars of both positive and problematic frames in advertising um the first one is life cereals maple and brown sugar which uses an image of a young black girl and boy and then life cereal regular which uses a white mother and a white sun now of course race is used in this example but it's not racism so again just racialism kind of looks at these elements of race and media that are technically not tied to racism but it also includes traditional racism these two ads are interesting this nivea ad is called re-civilize yourself and the interesting thing about it is you have the african-american man with the short-cut hair and he's get he's about to throw away his bushy hair ahead with his bushy hair and i'm that is his head um with his natural hair and it says re-civilize yourself so of course the natural hair is seen as uncivilized and of course that ties to the historic myth about africa savage uncivilized uh et cetera and then on the right side is gerber uchu and they do a whole series of pictures so this is just one some of them are not don't have the same kind of problems or don't have the same problem this one has but i wanted to include this because i think this is an important area for us to pay attention to when you position the white child in front of the asian and the african child you're creating kind of a um a superiority uh you know um better than putting that child ahead of and so you have to be very careful when certain things are situated in a way that gives messages um that are prop that are um problematic and again sometimes you would see it as racism sometimes you might not and so i'm not sure that the person who was doing this ad who positioned it like this since i look at uh racism as something that's malicious and purposeful i'm not sure the person said oh yeah let's put the asian and the black baby you know behind the white baby that may not have happened but it may have unconsciously happened so you know because of course we know that most of society in most of society mainstream the mainstream is considered white and everything else is compared to and uh connected to that and then finally a couple of positive examples of reframing that i wanted to include in advertising on the left is the mammy image it's a kind of a re re-visioning re-envisioning of the mammy image this is a black woman advertising pine saw which of course the mammy is a maid that's the stereotype of a black woman is a maid she's usually a plus-sized black woman but that the normal mammy is not beautiful but this woman is in a satin gown her hair is done you know beautifully she has her makeup and her nails done you know just giving her that root that that alternative image to the typical mammy and on the right side of course we know the stereotype of black men is that they're thugs and criminals and drug dealers and they don't take care of their kids so this tied ad is a really beautiful alternative to those negative stereotypes chapter four deals with um a a tv show called blackish uh it's called blackish and the changing nature of black identity and basically i created discussion around a number of core ideas concerning the authenticity of blackness because that's what the movie does it demonstrates how black identity and authenticity clash when black people try to maintain their sense of culture while at the same time progressing in american mainstream so here's an image of um the family um drake they live in the suburbs and dre is an advertising executive rainbow is a doctor they have five kids blackness is changing in the johnson family and three generations of black cultural ideas are dissected in this tv show um it's interesting to see how this family transforms on a weekly basis above in this image the family is waving to a tour bus as the announcer says you know this is the perfect black family thriving out of their natural habitat of course the natural habitat is the ghetto or the inner city chapter 5 balancing stereotypes i really wanted to look here less at the stereotypes of black males and females on television the characteristics and more ad how those stereotypes are being balanced so what i did was i looked at three female characters from the prominent writer shonda rhimes and then i also looked at three positive black male characters and these characters are all working in the criminal justice system but they're providing a balance for the negative stereotypes of black men as gangsters or criminals or drug dealers so the images i have here of course the top left is uh carrie washington is olivia pope and scandal she's shown as a powerful black woman but you know she's having an affair with the married american president on the right top uh is chandra wilson played by miranda bailey and in the beginning she was linked to the stereotypes of the angry black woman and the mammy but they were soon balanced out with her excellent surgical skills she's a loving wife and she's a good friend um on the bottom left is um no the bottom right is um shamar moore and he's the head of a swat team in los angeles named hondo and they actually set it up so that we understand that he joined the force in order to create a better connection between the police and black neighborhoods that was his goal in joining the force and finally on the bottom left is l.l cool j who plays sam hannah a former navy seal working for ncis in los angeles and the interesting thing about sam and the alternative to the typical stereotype of black males is he speaks six languages he's a star trek fan he has a fear of clowns and he creates origami so they give him some really interesting unique details to give him to make him an alternative to the stereotype chapter six of satirical parody black jesus in the hood and this is a satire created by aaron magruder it's about black jesus living in compton with his four homies um loosely seen as disciples and the show basically connects religious ideology with the reality of living in poverty in the 21st century and black jesus is very controversial because he sports sandals with socks he quotes bible verses he smokes weed he curses and he calls god pops so the the interesting thing is that the show uses um a variety of different um um negatives in order to show us some of the problems in relation to the connection between religion or religious ideology i should say and the acceptance or the um continuance of poverty in black communities in black neighborhoods and as you can see you know these images show us things like um the police brutality because he gets arrested um he's drinking he actually in one scene turns some um water into wine and here he's holding beer and then those are his disciples on the top um left and his disciples include a woman which is also interesting um and black jesus constantly expresses angers about society's transgressions but he still accepts everyone as the imperfect people they are um basically um within inner city boundaries he highlights notions of morality and difference chapter seven is deconstructing intersectionality and crash it's an evaluation of the movie's complex depiction of racial racial relations my analysis suggests that the collision between different cultures and ideology um the dissection of issues of race gender class ethnicity culture identity they all examine various notions of social relations and the ensemble class you know is just outstanding um the twisted storyline and crash connects through real symbolic and ideological intersections it disturbs and challenges our normal perceptions of societal institutions as well as individual and collective racist behaviors it's a very excellent movie if you haven't seen it um the the director and the writer do a great job of introducing the stereotypes and then turning those stereotypes on their head which i think is an awesome um situation chapter eight is black twitter interpretive communities and cultural capital it looks at how twitter's redefined activism and protesting especially in the black community so what i did here was look at how interpretive communities have been developed through black twitter um things like hashtag black lives matter hashtag oscar so white hashtag black girl magic um these have become prominent ideas and um movements um nationwide worldwide actually in a lot of situations because of black twitter and then these are just some examples um these black twitter communities are generating shared experience and meaning by uniting under a collective discourse through social media so again showing some areas of race and media that are important that are relevant that are significant but that may not or are not racism um chapter nine president barack obama biased frames and microaggressions this chapter looks at media coverage of barack obama during his two presidential campaigns and two terms as president of the united states of america and it's really interesting because various visual and verbal media frames connected to the first black president in america are explained and i really wanted to look at the connection um with issues like white supremacy inequality racialism and racism so some of the examples i have here are um this is arizona governor jan brewer who disrespectfully wagged her finger in president obama's face which i never um imagined um or never i don't remember seeing that happen to other presidents and it's similar in my opinion to south carolina representative joe wilson when he screamed out you lie during the president's congressional address again never happened to any other president only a black president um down at the bottom on the left side is um a renege bumper stick don't renege bumper sticker this was issued during the 2012 election campaign um and of course we know that nigg is um short for the n word and it says at the bottom stop repeat offenders don't re-elect obama a very interesting look at traditional rape using traditional racism in a traditi in a tradition a contemporary way you can contemporary time actually and then finally on the right side is the new yorker cover that was so controversial that put uh president obama in um muslim garb and over the fireplace there's a picture of osama bin laden hanging and there's american flag burning in the fireplace michelle is set up as a created as a terrorist carrying ak-47 and they're doing um what the republicans termed a terrorist fist bump and of course the unit you new yorker magazine said this was satire but unfortunately there's a lot of people out there who um this simply confirmed their belief that um president obama was a closet race a closet muslim and that um they were outsiders they were the others in our society and then there were some examples i wanted to include of wording um again this comes from fox news coverage uh at one point the first lady was called obama's baby mama the fist bump between barack and michelle during the democratic primary was labeled a terrorist fist jab and then pundits insinuated that obama had a deep seated hatred for white people and wanted to settle low scores with rep reparations so again wording really understanding the impact of wording and finally chapter 10 uh in chapter 10 um i look at science fiction and fantasy and the subtitle is going where a few blacks have gone before and really i did a critical examination of various themes and characters and narrative techniques um in relation to afrofuturism these representations in film and television shows and novels and other media offers images and messages that show the future particularly as imagined for black people so some of the examples i have here is this image on the left the two images on the left are uh star trek star trek's lieutenant yahura and of course she was one of the first black female characters not to be stereotyped as a mammy or a jezebel um and then there's halle berry who plays storm and the x-men will smith who's at the top right uh is the most prominent black america male character in science fiction and fantasy he has 10 movies under his belt just science fiction and fantasy movies and here he poses this dead shot in suicide squad the robots on the bottom under um halle berry um skids and mud flap or two robots from the transformers series and they became very controversial because they displayed certain rhetorical and behavioral black stereotypes like talking in slang and the movements etc and then the last picture on the bottom right alien vs predator it's really interesting there's always been this joke in the black community that in particularly in sci-fi and fantasy if there's a black person in the movie they're usually the first ones to die so um this is one of the first movies where not only is the black character the only character left alive but it's an african-american woman which is also um pretty rare uh in science fiction pictures so um um sonalysin ends up i think breaking a stereotype so in conclusion um you know i wanna i wanna make sure that people understand this is not an effort to let racist and racism off the hook but rather means to expose deconstruct and critique other factors that make up the connection between race and media my goal in this book was to provoke serious change when it comes to the problematic racial images and messages that we have all come to know and love okay so i'm going to stop my screen share and take questions and answers see if i can get it here you've certainly given us a lot to think about um so thank you again dr barry i i'll open up um the question session because i'm quite fascinated by several of the stereotypes and things that you mentioned so in in the public health literature in particular we discuss a lot of unconscious bias as a way to kind of understand disparities and how yeah use healthcare utilization when we think about patient physician relationships and we've often kind of focused on these unconscious bias within the specific domain so whether it's in school or healthcare but you're sort of showing it that it's it's everywhere in a sense like when i think about the the commercial you show with the three babies i didn't i actually didn't really think about the psychological effect of seeing that ordering right so we kind of taken it now as i'm given as something that is just sort of natural or normal but again how is that over time sort of programming our minds to think about the ordering of who deserves um care or who deserves um treatment so i kind of want to open it up in terms of the context of health right so how do we see you presented also some unique opportunities where there it seems like there's a way to promote health or promote messaging that would lead to good outcomes so one example is the procter gamble um thai commercial with the black man like what do you see as ways that we can expand how we think of um unconscious bias to what sort of a larger platform and then what might be some ways in public health that we can begin to address some of these things in and and and particularly around the context let's say we want to be much more current around kobe so thinking about reasons for mistrust and things like that what might be some strategy that this public health audience can engage with to combat some of these stereotypes that we may not necessarily have been uh primed or familiar with sure right you said you got her chapstick in your wallet um well the first thing i think you absolutely have to do is people have to begin to recognize um the racialism implications um and that's one of the reasons why i think we have to move away from racism because the minute you call it racism people shut down if you call somebody racist they shut down they don't want to talk about it they don't want to think about it you know nobody wants to be a racist well most people don't want to be racist and most people don't want to practice racism so we've got to move away from that concept and i don't think it's hard to move away from that concept because we've got a lot of things that are going on that are not in my opinion and in my description of racism are not purposeful and they're not malicious they're things that like you said unconscious bias normalization we have to first identify those elements so we have to make sure that people recognize when they see you know the hierarchy of a white child in front of an asian and a black child or a foot uh not a football basketball stuck up under the foot of an african-american we have to begin to recognize these as problematic biases you know or problematic stereotypes and then once we do that we can create images and messages that actually change you know once you think about the fact that black men you know the stereotype of black men as gangsters and criminals and then you put out an ad like ty did of a black man with his sleep with his son on his chest that says it all i mean that's a powerful image that helps to uh it's a powerful alternative image that helps to balance out those negatives um so i think that we have to do that in public health we have to begin to help people understand where the negative ideas and images are or what the negative ideas and images are and we have to fix them we have to twist them we have to give them alternatives to those images and messages and you know part of it may be as simple as seeing our first uh african-american indian uh vice president female vice president take a a vaccine shot you know i mean that is an alternative to you know black people who say oh you know black people shouldn't take this shot it's probably going to be like the tuskegee experiment where they're giving us this stuff and you know giving us those kinds of alternatives or giving groups various groups those kinds of alternatives i think are important and it's interesting because what i'm doing i'm focusing on african-americans but a lot of racialism can deal with other groups as well you can find examples of historical myth and bias framing and stereotypes concerning asians and latinx and you know native americans i mean all of that is is significant i think and i'm not sure if i completely answered your question but i tried i have some follow-up questions but i'll open it up to the students and and others um so i'll be scanning the room but feel free to just unmute your mic and and jump in i always say i was just that good that nobody has any questions because i explained it perfectly right okay i'll see you guys questions comments you don't have any questions um i have a question so i was wondering thank you first of all for a great presentation this is just so interesting but i was kind of wondering if you could talk a little bit about how source matters so you touch on this at the beginning about like if um like if this came from chris tucker is it as racialized or as racist than if it came from like a white producer or something like that or use the example of black panther if like when the cr the author of the comic book created it is it one thing versus when ryan coogler does it is it another and i'd love for you to talk a little bit more about the importance of source and how that should be factored into when people are thinking about ideas of racialism well you know part of the argument there is and this was a brief conversation because i didn't have a whole lot of time but part of the argument there of course is you know some people say black people can't be racist but i don't know if i agree with that they say that racism deals with power and prestige and who has more power than tyler perry um so he could be perpetuating racism if you want to argue if you want to make that argument um excuse me so um i think that one of the things that happens is again because of racialism the normalization of certain images and messages and ideas um people don't see it as racism and if it's a black person they don't automatically jump to the racist area whereas if it's a white person they automatically jump to the races area and i think that's problematic and that's one of the things i'm arguing against as i said you know i'm not sure vogue magazine wanted to promote racism i mean i'm not sure they would want to promote racism if they saw that as a racist cover so then that tells us what are they seeing you know what's being seen if it's not if they promo produce that cover and then all of a sudden boom find out that you know there are these racist uh components that people are seeing it as racist they're seeing something different they're seeing the norm they're seeing accepted stereotypes and ideologies and historical myths and i think that's what we need to think about so you know again i call racism malicious and purposeful and so intent is important and whether you're black white asian latinx old young it doesn't matter i think intent is important and calling everything racist it really doesn't help us solve the problem because you know racism like i said or calling somebody saying somebody is racist or calling it racism pretty much shuts down the conversation you know everybody starts arguing at everybody and you don't have the discussion you need to have about how these images have been you know normalized and and perfected in our society to the extent that you know black people buy in too we love the stereotypes um we we watch just as much you know we accept black panther we watch as much medea and meet the browns and all that stuff as anybody else thank you that was a great answer i think maddie had a follow-up man he said to add to lexi's questions what role does reclamation and narrative reframing and racialization in the media okay repeat that please uh what role does reclamation and narrative reframing have in racialization in media i mean i think that's part of what i'm arguing is that um we need to reclaim um certain ideas and certain images and certain elements um and then of course the twisted the alternative mammy image shows us how effectively we can make different kinds of we can make differences in um these images and messages i don't i i also feel like you know we have a lot of like for instance the television character uh the prime time uh black and female television characters that i um talk about um we basically um you know you can't really look at them like i said shonda um rhymes uh created miranda bailey the doctor as a angry black woman and a um mammy figure because she felt like she had to take care of everybody but the interesting thing is that she basically evolves she becomes a human being and i think that's what's important is the complexity um i teach creative writing courses i've i've written several novels that have been published and stuff like that and one of the things i tell my students all the time is it's okay to start with the stereotype because you have to understand what the stereotype is but then you want to move away from it you want to start creating taking your character and having them evolve away from the stereotypes so that people see something different people see something that's not repetitive and not um negative in relation to you know a stereotypical image so i just think that narrative is crucial um in how we explain these images and messages but like i said until people begin to understand their unconscious acceptance of various images and messages and and how these images and messages are normalized in certain kinds of ways and how we accept them i don't think we can make any changes so that's the first step is we've gotta we've gotta begin to you know whenever i watch television or see a movie and a red flag goes off i know there's an issue there's something there i need to pay attention to and oh i teach a course called african-americans the media and i pride myself on the fact that when my students leave that class hopefully they all have the same response when they see something problematic it goes off in their head and they say ah that's a stereotype or oh that's a bias or that's a historical myth or that's racism and then i also tell them to share it you know if you're sitting in the movie you're watching a movie with somebody saying you know what that's a stereotype because or that's racial bias because so again just wanting wanting it to move forward so that we can make some changes so we can transform some of the issues and problems in this society if it is to follow up on that uh you know you you kind of talk about the the difference between racialization and racism particularly related to intent but i'm wondering if there's been any research related to the impact of like is there any difference in the impact of those types of categorizations or the types of categories that you kind of went over on the viewers are on the individuals kind of consuming this so because like even if there is a difference in intent if there's if the impact is similar then does it really matter what the intent is you know um and and you know so i think is there any kind of work looking at that i don't upset i actually have not um gone into that at this point um i um i am doing a current study that i'm looking at black women in mental health and what i did was i took um five examples of african-american women who are in different um shows television shows who are dealing with mental health issues and i did an online survey with african-american women to see if watching those images watching them deal with those mental health issues or talk to that therapist might have some kind of relationship or connection to them i'm currently working on that data so i don't have a lot of uh information yet on that but i thought it was interesting because uh so i guess in some way i'm moving in that direction because cookie lions and empire goes to see a therapist and annalise um keating and how to get away with murder is um dealing with alcoholism and and the loss of her child and therapy and um i think we also did beau on blackish who deals with there's an episode where she deals with postpartum depression um i can say based on the responses i've seen is that most people really had a stronger relationship with uh cookie because it's a dealing with a man then postpartum depression or the alcoholism issue which like i said i can't give you any details because i haven't done all the um analysis yet but i'm moving in that direction um i and i just haven't done any research yet to see what else is out there i do think though that people identify well let's put it this way i think once somebody is woke that's that new term right everybody's using i think once somebody's understands the distinctions of what's out there then maybe it won't roll past them the way it's doing now and that's and i would argue that that's what's happening in a lot of cases people would see that kool-aid commercial and they would think nothing of it the basketball is normal you know the stereotype of the black man and athletics is normal um so i think that once we get people i mean like i said the first step is just to get people to start seeing that there are these problems and like i don't know if it's racism i just really don't know if i don't want to call it racism i should say that and in my opinion a lot of it is not racism it's racialism because it's these images and messages that are normalized that we've accepted and we've got to begin to identify them and then we can change them to have um one question that might be related so one of the things is sort of a term we call internalized racism right so you have sort of three levels of racism the one that typically we all know which is the prejudice and actions the internalized racism that perhaps you mentioned might be what's going on in some of tyler perry's films but i want to i want to raise something in terms of moving us in direction of how we critique um you know these images so if we're working with companies etc or or think about intervention and so i there's a recent new york times article that was talking about the vaccine uptake and i think one person i forgot what the story was but someone said oh we just need a picture of beyonce um you know getting a vaccine and lebron james yeah my first response was that but that's not really even going to work like beyonce doesn't represent mainstream black america right and so even even you know something that's probably well-intentioned in quotation marks it's still unlikely to to resolve or to have an impact in you know disparities in terms of infection or even sort of an equitable approach to um um to getting vaccinated because again beyonce is it's quite different in terms of socio-economic status class like a whole you know there are several ways that that one will say that she's not necessarily she might be an icon in terms of music etc but definitely not the type of representation so so can you like maybe share with us in parting what might be some concrete approaches that again we can use in public health as we work with practitioners or as we work with even health communication teams that are putting out material to try to improve vaccination rates for example among coverage so just as you know sort of what might that look like that we can take away practically as students in public health or the field well part of the problem with the question you're asking is um what i'm arguing that we need to fix is not going to get fixed overnight and i think that's the same thing with the what you're talking about unfortunately you know now that we have a vaccine it's not as easy saying okay this is a good vaccine here or showing them images of somebody taking the vaccine here take it um it's going to take some effort it's going to take a variety of people a variety of approaches for people to people who are against the vaccine or people who don't want to take the vaccine to step forward i think part of it is just i mean we could they could put a series of psas together positive is talking about the vaccine talking about making sure people understand that it is a legitimate vaccine because of course because it was created so quickly and because of the rhetoric from the former president a lot of people have doubt in it you know doubt on the vaccine so if you put that together along with a whole series of ads um or psas um showing showing people like lebron like beyonce getting um shots talking about the legitimacy of it you know showing it in communities where you know in black communities or other minority communities where people are accepting it i mean part of it is repetition too i mean you have to understand that i mean a lot of times we may not we may not see it the first time or we may not think about it the first time we see it but if we see it two or three or four times it starts to resonate in our brain and we say oh oh okay maybe i should think about that maybe i should look at that so again it's not going to take just you can't just walk up to somebody and say hey you need to take this vaccine if it's somebody who doesn't believe in the vaccine or doesn't want to take the vaccine it's going to take some effort it's going to take some time it may take two or three different people it may take seeing some psas on the on the tv and also seeing somebody going by their house talking to them and also some family members talking to them i mean it's not an easy change and what i'm arguing changing the media and changing these images and messages is not easy because again we've all bought in we've all you know accepted them so it's just gonna be a it's gonna have to be a combination of things first of all and second of all it's gonna have to be repetitive we're gonna have to keep on you know um um pushing that message over and over and over again until it finally sinks in you know i'm taking it uh on wednesday matter of fact tomorrow i go and take my vaccine and my mother takes hers next week she's 82. and then my brother says he's not going to take it so i mean we all have people in our family who are like no i don't think so you know so it's going to take me talking to him my mother talking to him me getting it you know her getting it like i said if there's some kind of images like kamala harris and and taking it and you know and maybe somebody like beyonce or like lebron james taking it those kind that combination of things could help to um push a person in the direction you want them to go but again it's not going to happen overnight um and the changes i would like to see in the media are not going to happen overnight because this is something that's been going on for many many years i mean we have been developing we've been uh perpetuating and promoting stereotypes and bias frames and and historical myths for you know 50 at least 50 maybe longer than 100 years um because when we didn't have television we still had posters and we still had a lot of different things that they were doing so anyway thank you for that so i think you might have time for one last comment um i'll open it up one last time and if not we would just join again and i'm thanking dr berry for the talk um um i believe um information is on the flyer if you guys need to christians um should be more than happy i think the is there okay that's a club from here okay just making sure that thank you again