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Women of color in the media.

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The history of Birmingham, Alabama.

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Birmingham ( BUR-ming-ham ) is the most populous city in the U.S. state of Alabama and the seat of Jefferson County. The city's population was 212,237 in the 2010 United States Census. As of 2010, the Birmingham-Hoover Metropolitan Statistical Area had a population of about 1,128,047, approximately one-quarter of Alabama's population.

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This is a video of Michele Norris discussing race in her family.

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TODAY Video - Latest TODAY show clips, news & video - TODAY.com

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Watch the latest TODAY video at TODAY.com

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This article talks about how media portrays race.

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Posted on

I'm no longer sure that seeing is believing.

As a former newspaper journalist, I'm disheartened to say that what you now see in the media isn't always an objective reality. Even when an article or broadcast reports the truth, the accompanying pictures and images can sometimes impress upon readers or viewers another set of facts that may be at odds with the story.

Harvard University professor Henry Louis "Skip" Gates, for example, delights in detailing how he used the gross distortion of media imagery of black men in sports to win a bar bet with the folks at the Veterans of Foreign Wars, or VFW, post in his hometown of Piedmont, West Virginia.

In an essay written for Sports Illustrated, Gates, an authority on African American literature and culture, told his drinking buddies that there were approximately 35 million black people living in the United States. He then wagered $5 to anyone who could tell him how many African Americans make a living playing professional sports in the United States.

The group of sports-loving men smiled, knowing they had a sucker in their midst. Everyone at the VFW post knew that blacks dominate some of the most popular sports in America. All they had to do was turn on their televisions, right?

Gates, a great raconteur, tells the story:

"Ten million!" yelled one intrepid soul, too far into his cups.
"No way ... more like 500,000," said another.
"You mean all professional sports," someone interjected, "including golf and tennis, but not counting the brothers from Puerto Rico?" Everyone laughed.
"Fifty thousand, minimum," was another guess.

At the end of the day, nobody won the money-all of the men grossly exaggerated their numbers. As Gates reported in Sports Illustrated, the facts about black athletes in America at the time his article was published were stunningly low:

There were 1,200 black professional athletes in all U.S. sports.

There were 12 times more black lawyers than black athletes.

There were 20 times more black dentists than black athletes.

There were 15 times more black doctors than black athletes.

Arkansas Gazette sportswriter Jon Entine surveyed all professional sports teams in 2008 and figured that while 13 percent of the nation's population is black, 80 percent of the players in the National Basketball Association and 67 percent of the players in the National Football Association are black. Or, to put it another way, Entine calculated that the odds of a black teenager in America becoming a professional athlete are 4,000-to-1.

Such hard-to-believe facts contradict what so many Americans imagine they know based on what they see on TV. After all, this is a sports-crazed nation, and what sports fan doesn't watch ESPN-and especially its popular "SportsCenter" program-where black people are overrepresented as athletes and announcers? The sports media industry doesn't have to say explicitly that black athletes dominate sports. They just show an endless highlight reel of slam dunks and touchdown runs, and the pictures speak for themselves.

But a picture can-and often does-lie.

Which brings me to the cover art of last week's Bloomberg Businessweek magazine. Illustrating a story about the rebounding U.S. housing market, the Bloomberg editors chose inexplicably to run a cartoonish drawing of people with overt racial and ethnic features apparently swimming in a cash-filled house.

The cover drew almost immediate-and all negative-reactions. My colleague at ThinkProgress, Alyssa Rosenberg, described the cover as "awful as art" and quoted media critic Ryan Chittum's description of the cover in the Columbia Journalism Review as "awful as journalism."

Of course, a Bloomberg Businessweek editor soon apologized. "Our cover illustration last week got strong reactions, which we regret," Josh Tyrangiel, the magazine's editor, wrote in a statement sent to several news outlets. "Our intention was not to incite or offend. If we had to do it over again, we'd do it differently."

But that's not good enough. As Rosenberg argues, the magazine's editors and publishers need to come clean, not issue a mealy mouthed apology. "If you want to walk a line and publish edgy covers, you have a particular obligation to think about where the line is," she writes. "And if you want forgiveness, you need to actually look at yourself and your practices in a systemic way."

The NAACP, the National Council of La Raza, the National Fair Housing Alliance, and the Center for Responsible Lending have taken up the charge as well, demanding a full explanation and apology for the offensive cover. In an email sent to NAACP supporters, Dedrick Muhammad, senior director of the NAACP Economic Department, condemned the magazine:

The insulting part of this cover isn't just the derogatory and cartoonish depiction of racial and ethnic minorities, but rather the insinuation that homeowners-coincidentally all people of color-are somehow greatly profiting today as the housing sector slowly recovers ... We know where the fault really lies: unscrupulous banks and predatory lenders who exploited our most vulnerable citizens with reckless abandon. It is these institutions who have had a "Great American Rebound" as the article itself notes.
Sam Fulwood III is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and Director of the CAP Leadership Institute. His work with the Center's Progress 2050 project examines the impact of policies on the nation when there will be no clear racial or ethnic majority by the year 2050.
But that's not what the image shows. Whether in professional sports or big business, stereotypical images steep into the collective consciences of those who view them and mistakenly believe they've seen the entire truthful picture.

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The Media's Stereotypical Portrayals of Race - Center for American Progress

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Posted on I'm no longer sure that seeing is believing. As a former newspaper journalist, I'm disheartened to say that what you now see in the media isn't always an objective reality. Even when an article or broadcast reports the truth, the accompanying pictures and images can sometimes impress upon readers or viewers another set of facts that may be at odds with the story.

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“Until the end of his life, Dad was an infernally cheerful man, always trying to make others feel at ease”(59).

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"Back when i spent hours sunning and daydreaming, if I had truly centered myself and listened even more intensely, I might have also heard a gossamer whisper: the flowers, speaking for my father, saying to his neighbors,'I belong'"(51).

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Another picture of her parents when they were younger.

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This is the father of Michele when he was younger.

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This is a picture of Michele's parents.

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In doing the research for the book I uncovered a treasure trove of old photos. Here are some of the images that you will see reproduced in The Grace of Silence. I have a lot more historical photography, newspaper cuttings and documents that I will gradually add to the the Album pages of my website. Please feel free to send me your comments on the materials or if you have anything you would like to add to Your Stories.

You can either click on the images, or click on slide show to sit back and watch them run automatically.

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In doing the research for the book I uncovered a treasure trove of old photos. Here are some of the images that you will see reproduced in The Grace of Silence. I have a lot more historical photography, newspaper cuttings and documents that I will gradually add to the the Album pages of my website.

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If there was a place where michelle felt at home it was in alabama. Birmingham was the city where her dad grew up in. Birmingham was not only a city to it’s residents it was a community. Everyone you turned to was nice to her and respected her. Birmingham gave her more than just a home it was a community that showed her what family was about.

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Growing up Michele Norris learned a lot from her parents. Some of these things she learned at a young age others she didn't learn until later in her life. Around the time Michele was entering junior high her parents had gotten a divorce and her mom moved out of her house away from her and her dad. Although they did end their relationship they never argued or made a big deal about it in front of Michele, they actually rarely talked about it to her. This bothered her for a long time throughout her life and when she later confronted her mom about it she realized why her parents stayed quiet about this. She realized "I am grateful for this gift from my parents, who could not make a go of their marriage but still managed to teach me the importance of love, the importance of grace,"(49). While she did learn about her parent' marriage she also learned about each of her parents individually. She grew up believing her mom had left her dad she never knew it was her dad whose personality made her mom feel the need to leave. She always thought of her dad as a kind, calm man but she learned from her mom that "The man she was describing was not the man I'd known. I'd been living with confusion and anger for decades, for I'd assumed that mom had run out on dad to live her own life by her own rules. I didn't know she'd thought she was running for her life"(48). It took her many years to learn some details about her parents but in the end whatever negative or positive information she learned she was thankful for the things she did and did not know as she was young.

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This Padlet was created by Sophie Anderson, Sammy Dickenson, Bharath Muniraj, and Nimeo Dolal

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This Padlet was created by Sophie Anderson, Sammy Dickenson, Bharath Muniraj, and Nimeo Dolal