Black Popular Culture

While Hall's reading was interesting and full of rhetoric on the post-modernist age and the barriers it broke, I think it could've touched on some issues of black culture in the modern age. Black popular culture in the media  today is often problematic to me. I think its become set in this stereotypical portrayal of the black community and furthers microagressions that we experience on a daily basis. Black popular culture has been boiled down to rather irritating portrayals and certain behaviors are celebrated where they shouldn't be. I miss positive black television like Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, The Cosby Show and A Different World. Black popular culture has become in my opinion boiled down to outrageous stereotypes that just make matters worse. "There is no escape from the politics of representation, and we cannot wield "how life really is out there" as a kind of test against which the political rightness or wrongness of a particular cultural strategy or text can be measured"(Hall, 8) From this quote from the reading I interpreted that once a certain representation is put out there, its harder to convey reality. It becomes an imprint, forever there and altering perceptions. Black popular of this day and age is so widely seen and consumed by a mass audience that the forms of media putting these messages out there must be careful not to fall in stereotypes.