In today’s world, people of all ages are surrounded by media and pop culture.
“There’s so much of it coming at you,” said Nicole Lister, a Black woman who is an assistant prosecutor in Gloucester County. “It’s online. It’s in books. It’s on TV. It’s in music. It’s basically everywhere. You don’t have to even leave your house anymore, because the internet just brings it all to you.”
The year 2023 marked historic highs for diversity in film production, according to the University of California at Los Angeles’ Hollywood Diversity Report. Movies such as Barbie and Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse proved women- and Black-driven storylines could drive audiences to the box office. As movies and television shows feature more diverse talent, the experiences they depict represent more cultures, ethnicities, and identities than they did in previous decades. This, in turn, can foster self-love among traditionally underrepresented groups.
Consider a show like Reasonable Doubt, which follows Jax Stewart, a high-powered Black lawyer, as she tries cases in Los Angeles. It’s a show that Gloucester County assistant prosecutor Kernie Dennis, also a Black woman, loves.
“It show[s] a rich-skin-colored Black woman in a leading role who [is] confident in herself and her abilities,” Dennis said. “Black people need to see more examples of people that look like us on TV — positive examples.”
That type of representation in the media is inspiring, she said.
“It gives you a lot of hope that you can do much more than you think you can,” Dennis said.
The media can create — and reinforce — positive and negative impressions.
“It could be a subconscious thing,” Lister said. “If you’re consuming so much of a certain kind of image or a certain type of thing that’s said about a group of people, yeah, you can start to buy into that and think, ‘Well, maybe that’s true.’”
Marietta McDuffy, a 68-year-old Black business owner in Chicago, remembers a time when depictions of Black people in television and movies were rare, and rarely positive.
“The images that I saw were of white people. … White people were the standard of beauty,” she said. She recounted that “white images were everywhere,” including in advertising, in magazines and books, and on TV, where “there were very few Black actresses.”
As a result, McDuffy said, “it was very hard to love and accept my hair.” She said her journey to self-love was long and progressed in spite of the media around her at the time.
“I still had to learn how to love what I saw in the mirror,” she said. “I didn’t listen so much [to the media] when I realized that I couldn’t change anything about me. Not my skin tone, eye color, hair texture, how I looked or age. I have to accept me and love me for who God made [me]. That’s when I decided to look the way I wanted to, no matter what others think, as long as I liked me.”
She called self-love “a journey where you discover who you are and how to take care of yourself.”
Young people may be especially susceptible to comparing themselves to figures they see in pop culture.
In a 2021 opinion column on Pleasant Valley High School’s student news site, the Spartan Shield, student Muskan Basnet said, “Diversity and representation in media play a critical role in the development of children. When children watch movies or shows without aspects of their identity — race, gender, etc. — it can impact their self-esteem.”
“Additionally, the lack of representation and negative representation can and will lead young children to feel invisible,” Basnet wrote.
McDuffy agrees.
“You have to see yourself in order to build a future for yourself,” she said. “If you see only people who are dealing drugs in the media, or being the prostitute in the media, you figure, ‘OK, that’s all I can do.’ But if you see successful Black people, then you know, ‘Oh, I can do that too.’”
That’s why it’s essential media outlets and pop culture maintain and increase the amount of positive representation of Black culture, she said.
“It’s like planting a seed,” McDuffy said. “These images are like planting a seed for young Black children.”