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“Black-on-Black”: Race, Space and News of Africans and African Americans

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 August 2021

Jo Ellen Fair
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Extract

The word “black,” referring to Africans and people of African descent, is essentially a social and political construction, historically articulated and contemporarily invented and reinvented. As a social and political category, the meaning of “black” varies through contestation over the term. Yet, in its dominant use in white American and European culture, “black” refers to a static set of trans-cultural and essentialized racial characteristics. What is “black” is “not white.” As Frantz Fanon reminds us, “For not only must the black man be black; he must be black in relation to the white man.” Thus, “black” in relation to “white” is made different.

Type
Research Article
Information
African Issues , Volume 22 , Issue 1 , Winter 1994 , pp. 35 - 40
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 1994

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Footnotes

*

Jo Ellen Fair is an assistant professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication and a member of the African Studies Program, University of Wisconsin-Madison.

References

Notes

1. Fanon, Frantz, Black Skin, White Masks, New York, Grove Weidenfeld, 1967, p. 110.Google Scholar

2. It is important to note that for crime or violence occurring exclusively between or among whites, a racially labeled category such as “white-on-white” does not seem to exist. Rather, this form of crime or violence is not named or assigned a racial classification.

3. In an earlier study of media coverage of “black-on-black” violence in South Africa, the time frame used for the study was June 1986, the beginning of the second State of Emergency, through December 1990. See Fair, Jo Ellen and Astroff, Roberta, “Constructing Race and Violence: The Signifying Practices of Apartheid,” Journal of Communication, vol. 41, no. 4, 1991, pp. 58–74.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Stories of domestic crime or violence were subsequently added for this project for the same time period. The newspapers selected and analyzed as representative of the mainstream press were the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times. African-American newspapers used in the analysis were: the Atlanta Daily World, the (Baltimore) Afro American, the (New York) Amsterdam News, the (Cleveland) Call and Post, the Chicago Defender, the (Norfolk, Va.) Journal and Guide, the Los Angeles Sentinel, and the (Detroit) Michigan Chronicle.

4. Needless to say, the same is true for class, gender, sexual orientation and nation.

5. Bordieu, Pierre, Distinction, Nice, Richard, translator, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1984.Google Scholar

6. Giddens, Anthony, The Consequences of Modernity, Stanford, CA, Stanford University Press, 1990, pp. 77–78.Google Scholar

7. Orni, Michael and Winant, Howard, Racial Formation in the United States, New York, Routledge, 1986, p. 63.Google Scholar

8. Jameson, Fredric, “Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” New Left Review, no. 146, July-August 1984, pp. 53–92.Google Scholar

9. Bakhtin, Mikhail, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, Austin, University of Texas Press, 1986.Google Scholar

10. From a search of newspaper indices, all news stories using the term “black-on-black” to label and describe incidents of crime or violence in the United States or South Africa from June 1986 through December 1990 were collected. A total of 152 stories from the mainstream and the African-American press were analyzed. The mainstream press published 43 stories of “black-on-black” crime or violence occurring in the United States over the four-year period, while the African-American press printed 39. As for violence among blacks in South Africa, only stories originated and written by journalists working for newspapers included in the analysis were examined. For the mainstream press, 54 such stories appeared, while the African-American press carried 17 non-wire service stories.

11. Homer Hawkins and Richard Thomas, “White Policing of Black Populations: A History of Race and Social Control in America,” in Cashmore, Ellis and McLaughlin, Eugene, editors, Out of Order: Policing Black People, London, Routledge, 1991, pp. 65–86.Google Scholar

12. Washington Post, April 27, 1987.

13. Atlanta Daily World, June 7, 1986.

14. (Detroit) Michigan Chronicle, May 9, 1987.

15. Los Angeles Sentinel, June 1, 1989.

16. Daniel Hallin, “Cartography, Community and the Cold War,” in Manoff, Robert Karl and Schudson, Michael, editors, Reading the News, New York, Pantheon Books, 1986, pp. 133–134.Google Scholar

17. Words and phrases in quotations were found in both the mainstream and African American press.

18. See, e.g., the (Norfolk, Va.) Journal and Guide, Sept. 5, 1990; the (New York) Amsterdam News, Sept. 8, 1990; and the (Detroit) Michigan Chronicle, Sept. 12-18, 1990.

19. The inclusion of wire service stories without changes to the framing or language use also is another way that this reproduction takes place. Largely because of financial and staffing constraints, more than half of the news of violence among blacks in South Africa came from American wire services.