Historian John Hoberman’s, Darwin’s Athletes: How Sport has Damaged Black America and Preserved the Myth of Race (Mariner Book, 1997), provided a much needed indictment of race and racism in the big-money American sports. Dave Zirin, a sports scholar we are unlikely to hear on National Public Radio, has also deconstructed the racial mythology in sports by articulating a capitalistic fixation on African Americans athletes.

Not even United States Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor was able to avoid the Hollywood generated stereotype of the hot-tempered Latina. Republicans challenged Sotomayor, a woman of Puerto Rican heritage, to cool her alleged temper in service to the Court during her confirmation hearing in summer 2009. These staunch believers of rugged American individualism could well have been channeling the image of early movie actress Lupe Velez (1908-1944) known as the Mexican spitfire. The tragic and assertive Velez was reduced to drug and alcohol dependency and committed suicide at age 36.

Now that Oprah Winfrey has bequeathed her blessings to the motion picture Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire (2009), we can all rest assure that this is a film we all must see. On September 28, 2009, National Public Radio featured the diva of the TV talk show giving gushing praise to director Lee Daniels' new movie featuring a brutally frank depiction of incredible insensitivity being inflicted on an overweight African American teenage girl in Harlem by her own family. The long title reflects not just film’s source but is probably employed to distinguish it from several other films with the same name.

President Barak Obama and Michelle have re-ignited a vision of marital concordance that is seldom seen in popular cinema. This assessment does not come from a rigorous, scientific analysis of a random sample of Hollywood films, but is more an impression from a critical viewer. Gender problems exist between couples of color in real-life and on the screen, but Hollywood has not by and large given us anywhere near the romantic realities of couples such as Will and Jada Pinkett Smith or Denzel and Paulette Washington. No wonder then that a predominant image left in the public psych might be the dysfunctional Bobbie Brown and Whitney Huston and the domestic violence of Chris Brown toward Rihanna.

For all that can be said for racial imagery in Hollywood, the cinematic representations of African Americans continues mainly as clowns. An empirical assessment of comedy vis-a-vis dramatic images is not the point of this perspective, but an argument can be made that a 21st Century buffoonery in motion pictures seems to be very prevalent. I argue that movie-goers continue to be inundated with up-dated depictions of African Americans cut from the cloth of Jim Crow as in Coon Town Suffragettes (1914). Such a legacy of racist cinema seems to have made little difference to the disrespect Cedric the Entertainer showed Rosa Parks or the bug-eye antics of the late Bernie Mack. The irritating performances of the likes of Eddie Murphy, Martin Lawrence, Chris Tucker and the glad-to-be absence Whoopi Goldberg, overwhelms the dramatic impact of actors the caliber of the always impressive Denzel Washington.

African Americans are 13% of the U.S. population but make-up 28% of the arrest made and are 40% of the inmate populations in U.S. prisons and jails. Whites comprise 67% of the US population and are 70% of arrests made yet are only 40% of the inmate population. Hollywood propaganda is disguised as popular entertainment and operates to floods the collective psyche with images of incorrigible African Americans and Latinos. Policemen are more often seen as being forced to trample over Constitutional rights in order to protect the greater public from the hoards bent solely on perpetuating total anarchy.