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Media Racism: The Impact of Media Injustice on Black Women’s Lives
Description
Media Racism: The Impact of Media Injustice on Black Women’s Lives is a foundational scholarly intervention that names, defines, and systematically analyzes media racism as a structural mechanism of anti-Black governance. Marquita M. Gammage advances a comprehensive framework demonstrating how mass media news, television dramas, reality television, film, advertising, and digital platforms operate as sites of racial production that disproportionately target Black women’s bodies, identities, health, and citizenship.
Drawing from Africology, public health discourse, media studies, and Black women’s intellectual traditions, the text traces the historical continuity between early racialized print culture, scientific racism, and contemporary media infrastructures. Gammage establishes how distorted portrayals of Black womanhood, ranging from welfare policy archetypes to hyper- pathologized television narratives, translate into tangible outcomes in public policy, medical treatment, criminal justice, and social legitimacy.
Each chapter combines historical analysis, media content evaluation, and empirical insight to examine how Black women are framed as dangerous, unhealthy, irresponsible, or socially deviant, while systemic forces shaping these conditions are rendered invisible. The work critically interrogates reality television and scripted dramas as sites of cultural instruction, revealing how normalized portrayals of stress, violence, and risk function as public health interventions against Black women rather than reflections of lived reality.
The concluding chapters advance a future-oriented intervention, emphasizing culturally conscious media ownership, narrative sovereignty, and ethical production as necessary conditions for transforming representational economies. Media Racism is both diagnostic and directive: it equips scholars, educators, and practitioners with analytic tools to identify media injustice while advancing a vision for narrative systems rooted in accountability, accuracy, and
Black epistemic authority.
