African American Women’s Representations on Television

Despite advances in technology that have eliminated or drastically reduced the impact of some traditional media in the US society, television has largely adapted from a small selection of traditional networks like ABC, CBS, and NBC to hundreds of cable networks and online streaming platforms, including Netflix and Hulu. The objective of this study was to explore the prevailing stereotypes within African American women portrayals. The media landscape has drastically changed over the last 50 years, and thus, a need to understand how this impacted representations of African American women was critical to understand. Findings showed that while representations became more complex, layered, and “cool,” the performances were largely static. Furthermore, despite studies noting the issue of underrepresentation largely disappeared and African American women moved to levels more in line with their US population, this gain did not erase what those images do and have done to viewers–who are African American women and not–over decades.