There are very few television stations that are black oriented. This hurts blacks because it causes them to lose race pride and to conform. More and more, they lose their pride and start taking in more information that whites provide to them. On television, there are white women with straight, blond hair, tiny noses, and a skinny figure. This is the "worst sort of Americanism"(Early, 225). When a black woman straightens her hair, this is because she thinks that she will look better if she does this. But who tells her this? The commercials on television that now have black women who do not look so black anymore. This connects to one of the essays that I read by stating, 'when offered a choice between a black doll and a white doll, little black girls invariably chose the white doll because they thought it "prettier

the world had agreed that a blue eyed, yellow-haired, pink-skinned doll

" '(Early, 226). This causes psychological damage to black girls because they will never think they are pretty enough until they are white. Toni Morrison writes,

In conclusion, I believe that in our society today television has become too important to us. It is not used for the initial purpose. It is now used to try to get you to think the way they want you to. It seems that we have lost an interest in looking up information ourselves and having our own opinion. We want television to tell us what is right and wrong, and this is why many blacks are not becoming more independent, they are watching TV and uniting in that way. This is why people like Paige feel inadequate, and feel like they will never look as good as the models on TV unless they go and get their face fixed in surgery, which I feels takes away people's originality. What we need to do as a society is to stop having the TV an almost way of life and bring it back to just another kind of entertainment, not politics.

Television is starting to get better for blacks in some ways, but also even worse. There are stations that are not trying to unite the blacks and move ahead. Black Entertainment Television is a very good example of trying to unite the black community. Just look at the title of the station. If you are black, you are much more likely to tune into B.E.T. than if you were any other race. So this station knows what their following is, and through shows on their station and commercials, they try to get blacks to think the way the station wants them to think. For example, I saw a commercial on B.E.T. about the presidential election, but instead of including both the democratic symbol (donkey) and the republican symbol (elephant), they only included the donkey. This is telling the viewers that the only choice for blacks is democrats; the republicans have nothing to offer them. This is good because it helps the blacks to unite and a

Some common words found in the essay are:
Entertainment Television, , Miss Lewinsky, Culture Icon, Bill Clinton, Toni Morrison, nose job, Jaclyn Geller's, black girls, trying unite, feel feminine, media tried, hurts blacks, information television, source information, television stations, white doll,
Approximate Word count = 1349
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page double spaced)