TELEVISION

Television In our society, we like to think of the television as nothing more of a form of entertainment. But do we really believe that? Maybe when television was first introduced, that is all that it was. That certainly is not the case today. It tells us what to buy, what to wear, how to act, even how to think. In other words, people are relying too much on television as a source of information. There are very few television stations that are black oriented. This hurts blacks because it causes them to lose race pride and to conform. More and more, they lose their pride and start taking in more information that whites provide to them. On television, there are white women with straight, blond hair, tiny noses, and a skinny figure. This is the “worst sort of Americanism”(Early, 225). When a black woman straightens her hair, this is because she thinks that she will look better if she does this. But who tells her this? The commercials on television that now have black women who do not look so black anymore. This connects to one of the essays that I read by stating, ‘when offered a choice between a black doll and a white doll, little black girls invariably chose the white doll because they thought it “prettier” ’(Early, 226). This causes psychological damage to black girls because they will never think they are pretty enough until they are white. Toni Morrison writes, “Adults, older girls, shops, magazines, newspapers, window signs----all the world had agreed that a blue eyed, yellow-haired, pink-skinned doll was what every girl treasured.” (Early, 225) They took this information in from things just like television, which are all run by whites in a white world. Television is starting to get better for blacks in some ways, but also even worse. There are stations that are not trying to unite the blacks and move ahead.