Columnist Jamala Rogers
Like a monster with an insatiable appetite, its invisible tentacles reach out to penetrate our brains. Its food of choice is brain cells, the younger the better. The particular tasty part of the brain is the gray matter responsible for reasoning. It also manipulates the pleasure center, especially around food, making you eat even when you aren’t hungry.
This addictive beast is in virtually every household in the U.S. We must stop this demon.
I’m talking about the omnipotent TV.
The Nielsen Company which tracks Americans’ television habits says that in a 65-year lifetime, the average person will have spent nine years glued to the TV. According to Rutgers University psychologist Robert Kubey, millions of Americans are so hooked on television that they fit the clinical criteria for substance abuse. TV-Free America, a watchdog group, cites examples of this addictive behavior: Almost all U.S. homes have a TV, over 60 percent of us have three or more TVs and nearly 70 percent of American families can’t stand to eat dinner without watching the boob tube.
The average family watches almost seven hours of TV a day. This is an advertiser’s paradise that has turned us into mindless consumers and uncritical thinkers about the world around us. For African Americans, the portrayals of us on TV and the impact of TV has a particular negative effect. The lack of positive characters on TV programming and the negative stereotyping of black people in general provide the basis for how most Americans view us.
The number of hours African Americans spend in front of the boob tube far exceeds those of white families. We watch 20 more hours per week, and the effects are devastating – and I won’t even get into the criminalization of black people done by the networks, which is a stand-alone column.
The sedentary nature of TV watching is a major contributing factor to obesity among black folks, especially our children. Ads to kids about food ranked No. 1, and our children are bombarded with about 50 such ads during an hour of Saturday morning cartoons. At one time, children spent hours in play – running, climbing, swimming, forming relationships, learning how to resolve conflict, being creative about fun – that time is now spent sitting on their widening butts watching the square box of television or playing video games. Obesity leads to a number of health issues such as early diabetes and high blood pressure.
There are a growing number of studies that show a link between the hours children watch TV and their academic success. This should come as no surprise. Poor and working-class parents are often forced to use the boob tube as a human substitute that will keep their children captive for hours while they work or carry out other parental duties. Board games and educational videos could easily play the same role and be much more stimulating for the brain and social development.
Initiatives like the Children’s Defense Fund’s Cradle to Prison Pipeline Campaign should also be looking at the role of TV’s undermining of educational achievement. According to a Columbia University Medical School study of males, the likelihood of violent criminality increases up 116 percent for those who watched significant amounts of TV. This doesn’t trump the objective conditions black males, face such as racial profiling, lack of job opportunities and criminalization, but it needs to be considered, when one factors in that the average kid sees 200,000 violent acts on TV by the time he or she reaches 18 years of age.
April 21-27 is National Turn Off the TV Week. I say turn the boob tube off next week and the weeks after. Use the time to re-discover your family, do something positive in your neighborhood and learn to think again.