Race to be not black but human

After the Civil Rights Movement it wasn’t uncommon for a black child to be asked ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ with the intention of answering, ‘I wanna be the first black, fill in the blank’. There was a heaviness to be great with the hope that success would humanize blacks. However, if children were treated with humanity and encouraged to be themselves then naturally they would just demand it as necessary.

Recently, cable television series Madmen exemplifies the need to react to a current panic within show business. Producers are answering the cry for a great white hope with stories from a time where people of color did not have a voice, therefore casts consists of only whites. The show is stylized and naturally audiences are literally going gaga for it. It is fair to say that the American identity is no longer just the handsome blue eyed blond haired fellow but rather a mix of who knows what. That’s a threat to say the least and studios are responding even with cheap labor reality shows such as The Hills.

Although African American youth are discriminated economically and socially nowadays with labels such as ‘at risk’, there are a plethora of media solutions which eagerly attempt to solve the racial identity crisis with complex characteristics. Nickelodeon’s television series Ned’s Declassified School Survival Guide offers Cookie a chic geek and Saturday Night Lives’ Kenan Thompson in Good Burger are some examples of the identity changes in the American Black experience.