This video is a perfect example of Mills’ idea about “psychological illiteracy that is facilitated by the media” (311). With this idea, he explains that “very little of what we think we know of the social realities of the world have we found out first hand” and “most of the pictures in our heads we have gained from these media” (311). The media feed viewers information that may or may not be entirely true, but because the media “guide our very experiences” (311), viewers believe it is the truth. This has resulted in viewers’ inability to trust their own experiences without the media’s confirmation (312). This concept is exemplified in today’s hyper-criminalization of black men, who are, either consciously or subconsciously, associated with criminality because of negative images (as seen in this video) projected by the media. In her book, The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander discusses the 1980s drug war as an example of the media’s influence on linking black men to criminality. She explains that the media solidified the “public imagination of the image of the black drug criminal” (102), which left viewers with no doubt about “who the enemy was in the War on Drugs and exactly what he looked like” (102-103). She then presents a study about the effect of the standard crime news script, in which “60 percent of viewers who saw a story with no image falsely recalled seeing one, and 70 percent of those viewers believed the perpetrator to be African American” (103). The media has become so racialized that “viewers imagine a black perpetrator even when none exists” (103). Most viewers have labeled black men as criminals without having a personal experience that has revealed any truth behind this label.
Mills also expresses that the media has provided viewers with “new identities and new aspirations of what we should like to be, and what we should appear to be” (314). The media’s constant portrayal of black men as criminals is shaping their own self-perceptions. The media is essentially telling them that they are bad, that even if they do good, they will always been seen as criminal. This results in low self-esteem and, with continued exposure to these images, their identification with being a criminal before being a constructive member of society. Michelle Alexander explains that for black youth, “what it means to be black” (194) is to be constantly scrutinized by the police and seen as a criminal. She then presents a question raised by an African-American student, “how can you tell us we can be anything when they treat us like we’re nothing” (195)? If they are constantly being told they are criminals by the media, and treated like criminals by members of society, how are they supposed to dismiss this identity and to create a different life for themselves? They are trapped, and because of this, “more African American men are in prison or jail, on probation or parole—than were enslaved in 1850” (175).
The negative images of black men presented by the media have caused society to accept and to “normalize” these racial stereotypes and assumptions. These images are so engrained in our “collective consciousness” that, as explained by Alexander, the term “white criminal is confounding” while the term “black criminal is nearly redundant” (193). In this video, the boy’s response is altered to increase the station’s ratings, which makes me wonder, WHY? In other words, why are viewers more fascinated by this boy’s response, rather than the actual SHOOTING? Is it that viewers enjoy seeing the criminalization of this boy, or is it that it would be trivial to see him presented as anything other than a criminal? With this image already deeply rooted in public imagination, and knowing that the media will never be “de-racialized,” is it possible to transcend the media’s power and to form opinion through personal experiences rather than indirect experiences (what’s presented by the media)?