It seems like the most popular target for ignorant stereotypes is black women. Among the list of less-than-kind labels black women receive are that they have bad attitudes, are loud, promiscuous, and ultimately ratchet. It is not a secret; an overwhelming majority feel these are fitting adjectives for black women, even if the ones they are familiar with do not fit the description at all.

It does sound ridiculous that many people can shoot out these stereotypes much faster than they can find someone who validates them.The truth is, most of the perceptions that people have about black women don’t come from experience but rather how they see them in media.

Images of black women in the  media are very negative, hence the disrespectful assumptions mentioned earlier.  Black women are, more often than not, portrayed as angry, aggressive, uneducated baby mammas and gold diggers. This is one of the most prevailing depictions you will ever see in the media.

Take for example Fox’s new drama Empire, which aired on Wednesday night.The show includes award winning African American actors such as Terrence Howard, Cuba Gooding Jr., and Taraji P. Henson, who happens to be the leading woman of the show. However, despite her accomplishment of getting a dominate role on a prime time show, Hensen’s Character “Cookie Lyon”is less than admirable.  In fact, to sum her up, she’s ghetto.

Lyon is an ex-con and drug dealer, cusses like a sailor, demands people’s respect by slapping them around, and gives the most disrespectful attitude you’ll ever see. On top of that, she dresses like a hoochi mamma in tacky long white fur coats or skimpy leopard skin dresses with a pimp hat to match.

I could go on about Cookie’s image but I think that I have gotten my point across. Black women are rarely shown as doctors, successful business women, or simply respectable women for that matter. They can be seen, however, running around half naked in rap videos or mouthing off at someone with a dozen kids, whose father(s) are nowhere to be seen, trailing behind them.

These images fuel the way that society feels about Black women, sometimes absentmindedly. And sadly enough, a lot of people applaud the ridiculous images. Kerry Washington, a highly celebrated black actress, won an Image Award in 2013 for her performance as Olivia Pope in the drama Scandal. In the show, her character has an intense ongoing relationship with the president, a married man, which makes her a home-wrecker. I don’t know how great of an image that is because it sure isn’t anything to be proud of.
If black women were better portrayed in media, it is more likely than not that the majority’s opinion about them would change. People would be more accustomed to seeing a more intelligent and respectable kind of black woman, thus opening their views about them as a whole. It is worth mentioning that there are some positive representations of black women in media, just not enough.