Black male college students feel pressured to fulfill media-spun social expectations to be overly sexual, aggressive and athletic in college.
In an ongoing study I’m conducting on Black manhood in college, Black male students across 12 different colleges unearthed hidden pressures to fulfill social expectations to be overly sexual, overly aggressive and athletic in college. Most study participants claimed or suggested that the stereotypical yet dominant images of Black men in media, particularly in television and movies, are linked to these pressures. A key question emerges: When Black college men are represented in media, how do these characterizations fail to represent a fuller, truer depiction about this group?
White men in college receive multiple representations in television and movies as White men’s interests still remain standard in American society. One need only visit a neighborhood video store to locate media in which the following models of White men in college are clear: the “everyman” and “common-man” in movies like “Animal House” and “Rudy”; the heroic and virtuous men in movies like “Good Will Hunting” and “With Honors”; the privileged men of “The Skulls”; and the exaggerated intellect of characters in the “Revenge of the Nerds” series, “Real Genius” and even “Soul Man” in which actor C. Thomas Howell portrays a White man who masquerades as a Black man to receive a scholarship earmarked for Black students.
These, and other “mainstream” films like them, entitle White men to a range of characters that manage to be “White,” “collegiate,” and “men” simultaneously. However, Black college men characters are absent in the media unless they follow a storyline formula of manipulating women and forcefully overpowering other men. For example, consider films like “School Daze,” “Higher Learning,” “Drumline,” and “Stomp the Yard” in which Black men in college are consistently portrayed as angry, overly sexual and domineering. Recently, reality television is doing much to further the prominence of these stereotypes.
Black Entertainment Television’s most recent installment of its “reality” series, “College Hill Atlanta,” plays out stereotypes described in my ongoing study of Black college men’s manhood and masculinities. In its most recent season, Drew, a dreadlocked, tattooed rapper, spent night after night engaging in sexually promiscuous and risky behavior with different women or writing misogynistic and sexually explicit rap lyrics. Also in the house was Dorion who, unashamed of being nonintimidating and intellectual, assumed key roles in the cast’s creative and community service projects.
Drew appears focused on his “coolness” (i.e., player-of-women status, defiant posture and aloofness), which almost instantly appears to earn admiration from the other Black college men in the house. However, Dorion is forced to clarify his sexuality to this group of men and, after doing so, is still largely unaccepted in that group. Dorion’s story symbolizes the suspicion that some nonstereotypical Black college men are found to endure generally and in the media. As “College Hill” showed, these suspicions include perceptions as asexual or gay and/or perceptions as acting White or otherwise racially inauthentic. Why does being anti-intellectual, belligerent and disrespectful seem to afford Black college men social privilege and popularity? Black men in college, particularly those in groups, report that college enrollment does little to push against stereotypical ways of thinking about Black men.
