ICC celebrates black heritage through engagement and teaching

EAST PEORIA — This February, Illinois Central College took the opportunity to celebrate Black History Month by spreading both knowledge and understanding about the Black Community through the use of various media.

At noon on February 11 at the East Peoria Campus, there was a presentation called “The Media’s Assault on Black Images” presented by visiting professor and author Bryant K. Smith, who holds a master’s degree in communications and has taught at the collegiate level for several years.

The presentation opened with Smith revealing to the audience that “what [we] have learned up until this point about [black people] may not be true” and that “the media is portraying [them] incorrectly.”

To validate his points, Smith showed the audience an edited clip from the Fox News Network where a young child of color had stated that he wanted to own a gun, implying to the audience that the child wanted to be a gangster. However, the unedited clip reveals that the reason the child wanted to own a gun was because he wanted to be part of the police force when he grew up.

Smith informed the audience that this kind of racism was not necessarily a new phenomenon in America. According to Smith, racism in mainstream American pop-culture has been a trend since Quaker’s syrup brand Aunt Jemima (c. 1893) and the book Black Sambo by Helen Bannerman (c. 1899) first made their appearances and gained popularity.

This kind of racism has evolved over time, as Smith later revealed that “contemporary pop culture says that all black people aspire to be rappers or have some sort of drug background.”

Smith also said that he himself grew up watching a cartoon called Speedy Gonzales, a show directed at children which depicts frequent racist Mexican stereotypes, and that because of this “it’s a wonder [he’s] not more racist than [he is].”

At the end of the presentation Smith provided a list of steps ICC students can take to combat these instances of contemporary racism. The first step students can take would be to reduce mainstream media sources such as Fox News or CNN and instead watch independent news sources such as Al Jazeera. It is also recommended that students try to advocate for fairness in portrayals in the mainstream media.

The second step students can take to combat this issue would be to identify biases in both school environments and places of work, where they are then encouraged to work to eliminate them. The final steps in this list would be for students to both travel more and to work to diversify their friendships and experiences.

Smith concluded the presentation by saying that “we have created an anti-intellectual society” and that “Black History Month is necessary for America if we ever hope to move ahead.”

February is a month in which Americans celebrate Black History Month, a month-long celebration originating as a week in February in the early 1900’s as Negro History Week.