African Americans in popular culture

This transformative mixed-methods research study, uniquely designed as a 12-week curriculum to facilitate critical media literacy, drew upon the principles of critical pedagogy to investigate Black adolescents ‘perceptions of the impact of media on their racial identities. Responding to the high rate of media consumption among Black youth, the Critical Encounters Unit engaged 79 Black high school students in the southeast United States in examining how they made sense of their media encounters. Data on participants ‘perceptions of the role media plays in constructing Black identities and societal perceptions of Blacks were gathered through pre-post study surveys of all participants‘ self-identities and media literacy, interviews with 15 participants, 467 student journals, and 15 video observation field notes.

This thesis focuses on the continuous misrepresentations that appear throughout different
outlets of popular culture and the negative impacts of these misrepresentations. In the
first chapter, the focus will be on the films The Last of the Mohicans and The Mission and
the origins and implications of the misrepresentation of Indians in film. The second
chapter uses rap music videos such as 50 Cent’s In Da Club, Nelly’s Tip Drill, LMFAO
and Lil John’s Shots, Where Da Hood At, Tupac’s Hit ‘Em up, and N.W.A.’s Straight
Outta Compton as primary texts to demonstrate the one dimensional and problematic
representations of African American Identity in the rap music industry. The third and
final chapter uses the video games Grand Theft Auto III and Gun as examples of the
negative representations that occur and are repeated quickly in the rapidly improving
world of video games. While the misrepresentations are achieved and perpetuated
differently in each medium, their ubiquitous presence in popular culture calls for
discussion.

This Project involves looking at African American culture as it relates to swimming, water safety awareness, and water skills. The paper explores the myths and cultural norms associated with drowning phobias in African Americans to discover the root causes. Through historic accounts of African American culture one begins to uncover reasons why this culture became, in a sense aqua phobic. The paper will show what water sport professionals are up against, when working with a culture that is several generations removed from the water and their water skills. The ultimate goal is to draw attention to the importance of water safety and the ability to swim as a life skill.