I love watching reality TV shows like The Apprentice, Goggle
Box and Big Brother. However one thing that gripes me year on year is that
these programmes repeatedly insist on putting black people into one of two
boxes. We are all either ‘difficult’ or there purely for comedic value. Let’s
take Stephen on the latest series of the Apprentice for example, he is one of
only two black people on the apprentice and, three episodes in, has already
been portrayed as the ‘argumentative’ one. Whilst it is clear that he must be
well qualified to have made it to the final stages of the show, his
professional successes being overshadowed by an unfair edit.
Whilst I can only assume that The Apprentice has thousands
of applicants from all ethnic backgrounds there must have been hundreds of
other rational black people who are equally well qualified who were not chosen
by the producers to compete on the show. It is bad enough that the amount of
black people shown on reality TV is already limited without producers feeding
into these damaging stereotypes. It is offensive that whilst there are also
white contestants that are shown to be argumentative; the sheer amount of them
on the show doesn’t do as much damage to the representation of their ethnicity.
Goggle Box is also an offender of this stereotyping of a
whole ethnicity. Let’s take a quick look at Sandy and Sandra; they are a pair
of black women who feature on the show amongst a number of other families from
a range of ethnicities. Whilst I am aware that the premise of Goggle box is
that it is comical, I feel that Sandy and Sandra stand out as the people for
everyone to laugh at instead of with. Due to their eccentric characters and the
only two black people featured which again makes it easy for the public to
assume that all black people are like that.
Again, year on year on year on year Big Brother fail to
recognise that black people aren’t ready to fight nonstop or there to look like
idiots. I remember watching the first show of every series every year and my
mum saying look ‘they’ve put another stupid black person in there’. For as long
I can remember there has only ever been one or two black people on the show and
they’ve fallen into these categories, I’m thinking of Brian Belo, Makosi
Musambasi and Victor Ebuwa to name a few. It's as if black people can’t be
shown to be rational human beings.
I am aware that as of 2011 only 3% of the population of GB
was black, therefore there is a massive possibility that a lot of people in
this country would have never come across a black person in real life,
therefore their only opinion of us will be formed via interaction with the
media, and when the media only has one intention when it comes to representing
us, it becomes very easy for people to generalise that all black people fall
into one of the above mentioned categories. Even as a third generation
immigrant I have firsthand experience the ignorance of some people. When I was
15 years old and walking home from school in my uniform a white male of about
30 years old rolled down his car window and shouted ‘coon’ at me. I also once
walked into a McDonald’s only 20 minutes from my multicultural home town of
Leicester to be confronted with confused stares and a child turning to her
parents to ask why our skin colour was different.
Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t me hating on white people, or
people of any other ethnicity. This is just me airing my frustrations about the
way my ethnicity is always portrayed on reality TV and why I think something
needs to change, and quickly.
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