Black Demons: The Media's Depiction of the African American Male Criminal Stereotype

It was posited in this thesis that the negative stereotypes that many people have of African American men are created to a significant degree by the mass media, and mass media particularly seems to be obsessed with the idea that there is a fundamental weakness in African American families that can be traced to their experiences as slaves. The black demon stereotype was thus created especially in connection with the inaccurate notion that African American males have a very high propensity toward wanting to rape white women. These images are especially purported by newspaper crime articles, Hollywood films, gangsta rap music, and news talk shows hosted by ultraconservative media personalities such as Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, and Patrick Buchanan; such media have taken the lead in equating young African American males with aggressiveness, lawlessness, and violence. Hence, a historical analysis of African Americans was presented to illustrate the origin and extent to which media and personalities, as such, especially those who purport to represent America's “moral majority, ” have used negative stereotypes to retain African Americans as second-class citizens.

Next, the theoretical schema coined “conceptual entrapment by media imagery” was introduced to illustrate how the public conceptualizes, and consequently believes, the stereotypes depicted in the media of African American males as criminals. According to this schema, the world of crime the public believes exists is based on individual knowledge, from knowledge gained from

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