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African-American Gangster Culture

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(1575)Racism in American Culture: The Framing of Gangster Culture in the Visual Image of Snoop Dogg: St. Ides Advertisement (1992)

This media study will define the impact of framing in African-American gangster culture through a visual analysis of Snoop Dogg. In 1992, the image of the Snoop Dogg selling an alcoholic beverage presents a negative image of a black African American in gangster culture. Snoop Dogg’s image as a gangster rapper provides a popular image that reinforces the dominant white view of black men as “street people” that encourage alcoholism, drug addiction, and sexual exploitation. Franz Fanon’s (2000) analysis of framing provides a racial evaluation of Snoop Dogg’s image that reinforces negative stereotypes about black …show more content…

In addition to this image, Snoop Dogg, and other rappers, such as Ice T and Tupac Shakur, also made mass media commercials that would be used in conjunction with magazine media advertisements. In this manner, Snoop Dogg is representing a collective promotion of gangster rap as part of a way to “frame” black people into a certain type of socially deviant category. This is part of the long historical tradition of promoting black people as alcoholics, drug addicts, and gangsters throughout the 20th century, which Bell Hooks (1992) identifies as part of the framing of African Americans as being non-represented in a racialized …show more content…

Surely, Snoop Dogg’s image is one way to misrepresent or ignore the fact that many African Americans may view gangster rap culture as disdainful to healthy and moral lifestyle, yet positive images were continually denying black people a positive view of their own ethnic and racial identity in this type of racist media culture: “To stare at the television, or mainstream movies, to engage its images, was to engage its negation of black representation” (Hooks 117). In this passage, Hooks (1992) is actually defining the complete absence of black representation in the media, but she is also identifying the severity of racialized advertisements, films, magazine articles, and other white mass media presentations that “frame” black people as social deviants. These are important aspects of the conceptualization of framing that identify Fanon’s argument that the white hegemonic white media continually promotes racially denigrating images of black people as drug addicts, bootleggers, and gangsters in Snoop Dogg’s advertisement

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