by Carona Micheal Davis

Created on: March 17, 2009   Last Updated: April 06, 2009

"FLava of Love". "Harlem Express" and "Bad Girls" are only a few of the reality shows that depict black woman as stereotypical gold diggers and man stealers. Television and radio which use to be informative and educational is now the stomping grounds for Reality shows, music videos and news reports which take black woman out of their light by stereotyping them.

African-American woman are seen as big lipped, big mouthed, gyrating hips and neck, wearing ten pounds of weave with one gold tooth, having limited vocabulary and ten kids with six baby daddies. Seems funny when you put it this way right? Well it isn't when you are seeing this on television everyday several times a day. It can get pretty frustrating like a bad joke told over and over again. The punchline is still the same. The shows have different names with different people only one thing, they are still the same in their efforts to exploit black woman. There are plenty of African-American woman that are independent, responsible and well educated so, why are they not depicted as such? To put it lightly, it is more entertaining and monetarily rewarding for television stations to stereotype us this way. The media basically tells us what we are going to sell, buy, wear, eat, listen to and watch and we for the most part follow. The media is the pied-piper that will lead us to disaster if we do not dare to be different and educate ourselves and each other.

Teens are a diamond in the rough, valuable, sensitive, out spoken, bright, articulate and the sky is the limit when you set your mind to it but television shows and stations such as BET, New York Goes to Hollywood and the numerous number of other exploiting reality shows don't do black woman any justice and is teaching our future African-American woman that it is okay to bare our souls.

There are numerous groups and organizations out there that want to inform as well as educate today's youth on this very topic. MySistahs.org, www.petitiononline.com, and National Council of Negro Women, Inc. at http://www.ncnw.org are only a few of the organizations and petitioners that can be contacted for information on the exploitation of the African-American woman.

For those of you who are interested in being involved in the fight against the exploitation of black woman there are several steps that you can take such as,

1) Researching African-American organizations via the Internet or the library.

2) Forming a group of people with the same interest.

3) Writing and signing

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