Portrayal of Black Women in Media: A Discussion

The Black Public Relations Society hosted a general body meeting titled, “Black Women in the Media” in the Tuttleman Learning Center. The meeting was conducted by two of the black female students one of which was the president. Going into the meeting, I felt eager to get talking about the negative stereotypes on women. Now that I look back, I didn’t even think about the black women of the LGBTQIA+ community and how they are portrayed in the media.

The overall idea of the meeting was to discuss the different representations we see and do not see in the media including reality shows, cartoons, social media, etc. Also, they stressed the point of hypersexualizing black women of the LGBTQIA+ community. Finally, we compared the black woman portrayal to people of other demographics including gender and race. The event did a perfect job addressing blackness being that it was about black women. We spoke on the stereotypes writers use when creating a new show or the story lines reality shows focus on. Unfortunately, most of these stereotypes are negative and force black women to suffer.

This was the most interesting topic of the discussion because it is not something I would usually talk about. Now I ask myself, “why not?” I believe it is because I don’t have black friends who are queer and the conversation never really came up. Also, discussing the topic taught me about the different portrayals of queer black women. I found the portrayal of queer women in the media to be very interesting because they are hypersexualized. One example we talk about was Cleo, in “Set it Off” and how she was the most sexual out of the four friends. Stony had sex with the car dealer, but she was doing it so her brother could go to college. Whereas we see Cleo continuously touching and kissing on her