Who I am...so far

            This was such a tough assignment to do. How do I begin to answer this question: Who am I? Well, since my entrance into adulthood, I stopped consuming so much media. I stopped watching much television (prime-time dramas, teen dramas, sitcoms, talk shows, tabloid journalism, etc) and stopped listening to much of commercial radio (corporate-owned radio stations playing the same pop songs on heavy rotation). I stopped tuning into them because I reached a point where I felt and wondered: there must be more out there than this. I felt unhappy, dissatisfied, offended, and completely disillusioned with the same messages, same images, and same stories I was being exposing to and was somehow being manipulated into believing them as truth, whether subliminally or overtly.

Before I entered adulthood, I, like Anna, was a child of the 90s. Although I would not have then self-describe as a media junkie, in retrospect, I kind of was.  A lot of the media and pop culture phenomenas during the 1990s shaped my childhood and adolescence. In the early ‘90s, I watched Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, the Cosby Show, A Diff’rent World, TGIF line-up and began watching daytime soap operas and prime time dramas: all the ABC soaps, 90210, Melrose Place and Dangerous Women. I loved En Vogue, Bel Biv DeVoe, Boyz II Men, Mariah Carey, Marky Mark and Paula Abdul. I listened to freestyle music, then New Jack Swing, then onto some grunge, Ace of Base, SWV, Aaliyah, and R. Kelly. My icon was Janet Jackson; I wanted so badly to look like (when she started to sexify her image, had the long light brown weave, and showed off her belly button). In the mid ‘90s, I remember coming home from school and watching The Ricki Lake Show, Richard Bey, sometimes Jenny Jones, Maury and Sally Jesse. Yeah, I know; I can’t believe it either. I’m so embarrassed and I can’t believe I’m admitting this. I also watched Martin and Living Single. Knowing what I know now, I would never dare to watch these shows. I don’t have the patience. By that point, music was changing and so too were the images on TV. Radio airwaves were taken over by Gangsta Rap, R&B music started to become overtly sexualized, then neo-soul music was starting to emerge. In addition, the images of black people on tv began to dwindle and became very narrow. “Blackness” became a commodity and was socially reconstructed through Rap music.

By the mid to late 1990s, pop music was “in” again. I watched Ally McBeal and the almost all of the WB’s line-ups: their teen dramas (Dawson’s Creek) and their supernatural shows (Buffy, Angle, Charmed). I didn’t go to movies much because my parents were strict about me going out, anywhere. I lived a very sheltered life. It is not until I began to write this and look back at my childhood and adolescence that I realized that, yes, I was a media junkie; although I would not have described myself in that way then.  We didn’t have cable, but I passed way too much of my time in front of the TV, and not enough in after-school programs and extracurricular activities  where I would have develop social, inter-personal and leadership skills. It’s embarrassing to realize now how much television I had consumed.

By the time I graduated high school and reached the end of my teen years, I had lost much interest in television. I think it was because I was getting older and my interests were changing. In the process of coming into my own, I was growing very dissatisfied and tired with mainstream mass media and my passive participation as a uncritical viewer. From its lack of diversity, its “invisible” yet omnipresent white supremacy to its complete erasure, absence and/or narrow representations of black women like me, I reached a point where I began I stopped relying on and looking to mainstream media to see reflections of myself looking back at me. I stopped looking to TV to fulfill me and affirm my identity and self-growth as a young woman. I reached a point where I was no longer allowing mass media to dictate to me what I should like, wear, look, listen to and/or buy.

Although it took some years, through much life experience, self-actualizing, college, then research, I know now that mainstream media is a “white-dominated patriarchal capitalist system” to quote bell hooks, and it will never have show complex and mulch-dimensional images of women like me (unless it gets ratings and sells). Since taking Intro to Women’s Studies last fall, I, as a female consumer had been a lot more aware of how I have been manipulated into thinking about myself, women, men and people of color. The most media I consume is checking my email, social networking (mainly facebook), late-night news (CNN, MSNBC, BBC, Euro News), feminist and/or women-centered media and literature (Bitch Mag, Clutchonline.com, essence.com, Ms. Online, etc), music channels (MTV Hits, VH1 Soul and Classic) and alternative back media (Afro-Punk). I am also an artist: I paint, draw, dance, act, and model. I go to museums, plays, and queer shows.

            This ended a much longer response than I had originally planned. But this is who I am as a consumer right now.

Links:

http://clutchmagonline.com/2011/09/watch-this-the-misadventures-of-awkward-black-girl-ep-8/

http://www.afropunk.com/video/afro-punk-ladies-1

http://www.bust.com/blog/2011/08/31/sexist-tween-shirt-challenges-girls-intellect.html?utm_source=BUSTline&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=BUSTline+9.8.11&utm_content=marilynl992002%40yahoo.com