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Originally Posted by isiahthomas
I can't believe nobody responded to this. Are ya'll ********? These statistics are serious and they need to be talked about.
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Twenty years ago when Different World was on enrollment at black colleges went up. Now there are more black males involved in the penal system than higher education. So a thing as relatively silly as tv can have an impact upon culture and society. I'm out of it with eatching current tv, but what current show has any kind of black male role models being depicted as being about something and getting somewhere - all I can think of Everbody Hates Chris which is set in the 80s and is on what is considered a cut rate network.
I've been watching an old tv series on DVD called Ironside. One of the characters was an African American ex-con who was the bodyguard of the main character. In the show when he's not out helping the police fight crime they show him going to night school and eventually going to law school and passing the bar exam. In a lot of the episodes on the dvd you see him sitting in the scene doing his HW while the cop characters are doing their detective work. By the end of the series he was an attorney. Dude was basically a 'boy' for the police chief and wore the same clothes in multiple episodes but was clean, well groomed, showed both street smarts and book sense and wasn't treated like an idiot who couldn't put two sentences together. In one episode it is said that he was paid $20 a week. Designing Women was another show with a black male character who went from being an ex-con to going to college and then law school.
What kind of potrayals are there in the current shows? You may see characters who have $$$, but it seems like they don't show how these characters sacrificed and worked their way up from class to class creating the illusion that they just 'got it like that'. TV in general now seems to glamorize wealth, fast money, an acquisitive mindset and excessive creature comforts.