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African Americans: Racial Discrimination In Art

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African Americans have been a part of the United States from the very start, yet discrimination is still a very true thing for those people. Many white Americans would say they thought racism ended when Jim Crow laws and slavery was abolished, but just last month a black man and his family were asked to leave a restaurant because a white woman felt threatened by their presence. Is this behavior really necessary? Who can deny that racism is a thing of the past? Specifically, in the media, racism is very evident and African Americans are discriminated in news headlines, television series, and art portrayals.
First of all, African Americans are discriminated through the news and social media in different ways. Research assistant Kristine Lu acknowledges …show more content…

Kerry James Marshall, a black artist who focuses on portraying less discrimination, made an observation: “’When they did introduce the Black Panther in Fantastic Four [in 1966], I became acutely aware that the black superhero was a strange phenomenon – an exception to the rule. Then I started noticing the same thing everywhere else. Black figures were never the central subjects in art-history books’” (Sooke). African American symbolic heroic figures had not been introduced to art or society until 1966. This is a long time for no black people to be recognized to kids as being the same or a part of a white super hero group. Even now, there are not many super heroes represented as African American or with the stereotypical traits. This is sending out a negative picture that people of color aren’t as valuable or heroic in society. In another light, before and after the Civil war even, African Americans depicted in art are stereotypical and caricatured to make them seem like worse figures of society (Hayes). When anything has dramatized features in art, it is very inappropriate and a bad portrayal because it associates a negative connotation with what is being depicted. Even after the thirteenth amendment abolished slavery, people still depict African Americans negatively and it doesn’t make sense in saying racism was abolished with

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