African American Women in the News - 9780415875721

Marian Meyers (communication, women's, gender, and sexuality studies, Georgia State U.) has written this new book on portrayals of African American women in contemporary news. The book's goal is not simply to document popular sterotypes of African American women, but to look at how news stories portray African American women in various media and countries, and how these portrayals have changed or remained constant over the last twenty years. There are eight chapters: an introduction on the missing black woman in the news; local TV news; cable network news (CNN and FOX); Michelle Obama on YouTube; portrayals of a domestic violence case involving Juanita Bynum (a prominent African American woman preacher) in black and white press outlets; Freaknik (a spring break party in Atlanta that attracted many students from historically black colleges) as a case study of how violence against African American women is portrayed in local news; crack moms and the narrative of paternalistic racism; a conclusion on finding African American women in the news. Much of the focus on local news is in Atlanta. Meyers identifies older core sterotypes (sexual Jezebel, emasculating Sapphire, respectable church lady, criminal black bitch) and a newer one (dangerous Black Bitch with economic or political power). She also finds that news portrayals are often more complex than the stereotypes, and often realistic in black-majority communities like Atlanta. She reports the primary reality for African American women in the news is that visibility only happens as an unnamed person, either in a crowd scene or as a representative of a class of people affected by a story. Annotation ©2013 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)