What Seems To Be The Truth

Remember in fourth grade, we learned about Rosa Parks? Well, it turns out that the story you were taught happened to be a bit over exaggerated. I remember being taught that she was a poor old African American woman who just got off a hard days work and was fed up with sitting on the back of the bus. Then out of nowhere, a scary white man told her she had to move. When she wouldn't that's when things got wild and people basically started the civil rights movement. The truth of the story is that she really wasn't an old women, she was in her forties and she didn't really pick a seat in the front, it was just that she was a minority and majority race got priority seating. This was also planned, it wasn't her just "having enough." It certainly wasn't the first time that someone refused to be treated second class, referring to the bus boycott in Louisiana. Event though the story was exaggerated quite a bit, I think that it's better that way, because it gave people the perspective that anyone could do it. If they knew that Rosa Parks was a secretary of the NAACP and had planned everything for so long, then maybe not as many people would have acted out.

TV Tokenism.. Is It Real?

Like it or not, it is a real thing. TV Tokenism is when a director is forced to hire an African American for a television show so that the television isn't 100% Caucasian. You will never in today's TV, find a drama starring an African American, but because they are needed on TV to prevent the network from being sued by NAACP, they will give them small parts and never as much screen time as they deserve. Whether or not this is a problem is up to you. Some thing to think about is the fact that an average American spends 14 years of their life watching television! That can change any one's perspective of a race or social group, and as a matter of fact, it does! When you are watching a show with the "black guy" always killing people and robbing the banks and the "white guy" there to save the day, or get him out of the slums of the ghetto, your feeling about people change no doubt. This is almost having the networks work against what NAACP stands for. Unfortunately the people in America with the most money are Caucasian and are between 25-50 years old, so they have to produce TV shows that catch their attention, many of them don't yet feel comfortable with an African American starring in a television show, saving the day. This brainwashing starts when kids are little even, starting from when they flip on the Disney Channel. There is a show that most kids are familiar called "The Proud Family" and what I have noticed is that the father eats chicken for dinner everyday, they have the friend that has 12 brothers and sisters under the age of 14, and their mother has never been married. Also the only sport that is ever played is basketball. This is just a great big exaggeration of what people have stereotyped them for a comedy effect. Another show on Disney would include "Suite Life of Zack & Cody" where these two little boys fool the hotel manager, who happens to be African American, so that they can get away with everything and anything. Is him being African American just a coincidence or could it be tokenism and the fact that they needed to pop an African American in there somewhere, so why not be the gullible one?