Virtual Integration: How the Integration of Mass Media Undermines Integration

In a scene from the film, "Do the Right Thing," the character, Pino, the son of an Italian pizzeria owner played by John Turturro, and Mookie, a Black employee of the pizzeria played by the film's director Spike Lee, discuss race. Mookie chides Pino for having racist ideas about Blacks while at the same time celebrating such Black athletes and entertainers as Michael Jordan and Prince. Pino justifies this contradiction as saying that it's different with Jordan and Prince because "they're not niggers." Because they were famous, he seemed to suggest, the standards to which he applied to Black folks in the community where his father's business was located were not applicable. "It's just...different," he inarticulately stated. This scene illustrates just how knotty, complex, and downright confusing racism can often be. In their essay, "Virtual Integration: How the Integration of Mass Media Undermines Integration," Leonard Steinhorn and Barbara Diggs-Brown reach the same conclusion. Many white Americans, they write, through the false intimacy of television, confuse the "virtual integration" in the media with the reality of American life, thus negating any notion that racism still exists; while at the same time, they continue to cling to stereotypical images of Blacks perpetuated by the way the evening news covers crime stories.