I Never Stopped Looking

The Return

My interest in race and representation was first ignited in 1992, in response to the LA riots and the brutal beating of Rodney King by LAPD officers.

I was deeply disturbed by what had happened, but what stayed with me just as strongly was the way Rodney King was later presented. A Black man who had been beaten was reframed as a threat. The victim of state violence was criminalised in ways that seemed designed to justify the violence used against him.

That reversal caught my attention. It made me think seriously about media, power, and the stories told about Black people across the diaspora. I decided I wanted to work as a journalist and write about those injustices. Soon afterwards, I applied for a Media Studies National Diploma BTEC at Kingsway College School of Arts, submitting a journalistic piece on Rodney King, the LA riots, and the LAPD. I was accepted.

During the course, I studied filmmaking, film studies, scriptwriting, video production, photography, editing, and a range of other media practices, taught by tutors working in the industry. But one of the modules that affected me most was semiotics, the study of signs.

For my first semiotics assignment, I had to choose a visual image and decode it. The image I selected showed a family in a kitchen: a husband, wife, and young son. The man and child were covered in flour. The wife, dressed in business attire, looked shocked. The man looked helpless.

At first glance, the image seemed like a simple joke about a man failing to prepare a meal while his wife was away. But the closer I looked, the more another message began to emerge. Beneath the humour was a warning about gender roles. The image suggested that when a woman stepped outside her expected domestic place, disorder followed. The kitchen became chaotic. The man became incompetent. The child became part of the mess.

The joke depended on the restoration of a patriarchal idea: that women belonged in the home, serving husbands and raising children.

That assignment took me the whole Christmas holiday to complete, but I received a distinction. More importantly, my eyes were opened. I began to understand that images do not simply reflect the world. They train us in how to see it. They carry instructions, assumptions, warnings, desires, and hierarchies. Sometimes they do this so quietly that we mistake them for common sense.

That was my introduction to cultural criticism.

Although it has been many years since I worked directly in the field, I never stopped looking at images with a critical eye.

Now I am ready to write from that gaze again.

Learning to See

Seeing Black actors in film and television was rare when I was a child in the 1970s. I remember that whenever a Black person appeared on television, even for a few seconds in an advert, someone in the living room would call out to the rest of the household:

“There’s a Black person on TV.”

Everyone would rush in to see.

There was something both ordinary and painful in that moment. We wanted to see ourselves. We wanted proof, however brief, that we existed in the wider public imagination. Even a passing image could feel like a form of affirmation.

Long before I was introduced to semiotics in the classroom, my mother was preparing me to watch film and television with a critical eye. On Saturday afternoons, we would often watch matinee films together as a family. Sometimes the film would be a western, or what were then commonly called cowboy and Indian films. My mother would remind us that although the film presented Indigenous people as the savage villains, the real savagery belonged to the coloniser: those who came to another continent, killed its people, and took their land.

Watching those films, I learned to become a resistant spectator. I understood that what I was seeing was not truth, but a version of reality shaped by power. The image favoured one group and distorted another. It taught viewers who to fear, who to admire, who to pity, and who to erase.

I began to notice that this racial bias appeared across different forms of media. Programmes such as Love Thy Neighbour and Rising Damp featured Black actors, but too often Blackness became the butt of the joke. These appearances did not make me feel seen. They made me uncomfortable.

Children’s television could be just as difficult. I remember watching Lenny Henry on Tiswas, performing sketches in a Jamaican accent while wearing a red, gold, and green hat, pouring condensed milk onto bread and eating it on stage. At school the following Monday, children would echo his drawn-out catchphrase at me when I entered the classroom.

It did not matter that I was not Jamaican. It did not matter that I had never eaten bread with condensed milk. I was a Black girl, and as far as they were concerned, that televised caricature was somehow a true representation of my culture.

That was when I began to understand that not all visibility is good.

We were starved of seeing ourselves on screen, but when the image appeared as mockery, stereotype, or caricature, it carried another kind of harm. It gave white classmates language, gestures, and permission. What appeared on television did not remain on television. It entered the playground, the classroom, the body, and the self.

Black people are far more visible now than they were in my childhood. We appear across reality television, film, social media, beauty advertising, digital platforms, and algorithmic spectacle. But visibility alone is not liberation. The older racial ideologies that shaped earlier representations have not disappeared. They have adapted. They return through new formats, new platforms, new aesthetics, and new economies of attention.

Damaging stereotypes shape how Black people are perceived. They also shape how we are treated, and sometimes how we come to perceive ourselves. Representation can position people within a social hierarchy. It can justify suspicion, ridicule, exclusion, desire, punishment, and neglect.

In that sense, the framing of Rodney King as a threat after he had been beaten was not separate from the larger politics of representation. It was part of the same visual logic: turn the victim into the danger, then treat the violence against him as reasonable.

Visible but Not Seen

My own work is especially concerned with the representation of Black women. I am interested in this not only because I am a Black woman, but because Black women have often carried the weight of some of the most persistent and damaging stereotypes in visual culture.

Tropes such as the Jezebel, the Mammy, and the Sapphire are not simply relics of an earlier age. They continue to shape how Black women are read in the present: as excessive, endlessly giving, angry, sexually available, emotionally unreasonable, or useful only in relation to others.

These images do not only affect those who are represented. They also shape those doing the looking. They teach audiences what to expect, what to fear, what to desire, and what to dismiss. Over time, representation becomes more than image. It becomes instruction.

Through repetition, these visual codes help organise power. They create positions of authority and subjugation, innocence and guilt, desirability and disposability. They do not merely reflect social hierarchies. They help produce and maintain them.

The problem now is no longer only absence. Black women are far more visible than they were when I was growing up. But visibility does not automatically mean complexity.

Too often, Black women are made hypervisible through a narrow set of frames: attitude, labour, spectacle, strength, beauty, conflict, sexualisation, or trauma. These things take centre stage, while interiority is pushed to the margins. We are seen but not always known. Displayed, but not always understood. Watched, but not always granted the fullness of human complexity.

That is the danger of flattened representation. When the same images and ideas are repeated often enough, they begin to feel natural. They become familiar. Then familiarity is mistaken for truth.

Reality television is one of the places where this becomes especially clear. Love Island UK has long been criticised for its treatment of Black women, and Series 13 offered an instructive example in its second episode. Contestant Ope had publicly stated that his preference was for women who were blonde and Scottish. When the contestants were asked to select which attributes they found attractive in the opposite sex, not one of them chose Angelista, the only Black woman in the lineup. Ope himself only selected her after none of his stated preferences had chosen him in return. His justification was that she was “wifey material.”

That phrase carried more weight than it might appear to. It was not the language of desire or attraction. It was the language of utility. Angelista was not chosen because she was wanted. She was chosen because she was useful. The framing reproduced one of the oldest tropes in the representation of Black women: the Mammy figure, valued not for her desirability or interior life, but for what she can provide. The caretaker. The fallback. The safe choice when no other options remain.

The moment mattered not because it was unusual, but because it felt familiar. It belonged to a pattern: Black women placed inside romantic formats only to be overlooked, sidelined, or made to absorb public rejection as entertainment.

This is part of a wider visual economy in which white womanhood is still positioned, consciously or not, as the default ideal of beauty and femininity. Black women, if desired at all, are often desired through limited frames: sexual availability, strength, loyalty, or suitability as a partner in practical rather than romantic terms. Even that language carries the residue of old stereotypes, where Black women are valued for endurance or usefulness rather than desire, softness, or the simple possibility of being chosen first.

The issue is not simply that Black women are present or absent. It is how they are framed once they arrive.

This dynamic extends well beyond television. Misogynoir circulates heavily online, where Black women are routinely mocked, over-scrutinised, and punished for behaviour that reads differently when performed by others. Certain podcast spaces and social media accounts have built substantial audiences through the public criticism of Black women, turning hair, bodies, speech, tone, and relationship status into open territory for ridicule. These are not private conversations. They are public performances, part of a wider media environment in which Black women are constantly being explained, ranked, corrected, and judged.

At the same time, some Black female creators are rewarded by platforms for viral moments that play into existing stereotypes. The algorithm does not care whether a representation is fair or complex. It cares whether people watch, comment, share, and return. So the most extreme images can rise quickly: conflict, exposure, humiliation, spectacle. These clips may involve real people, but once they are lifted into the algorithmic machine, they become something else. They become fragments presented as evidence. For viewers already trained by racist stereotypes, a few viral videos can be mistaken for cultural truth. The behaviour of individuals becomes attached to Black women collectively. The old stereotypes find new clothes.

This is why cultural criticism still matters. Not because representation alone explains everything, but because representation helps shape perception. It teaches people how to look. It teaches them what to expect. It teaches them who deserves tenderness, who deserves suspicion, and who can be consumed without care.

The question is no longer simply whether Black women are visible.

We are visible.

The more urgent question is: under what conditions are we being seen, and who benefits from the frame?

Refusing the Image as Destiny

This is where Black Lens, Bright Light begins.

It begins with the decision to look again: at the films, television programmes, adverts, reality shows, beauty images, travel content, social media clips, and digital spaces that shape how Black women are seen.

My return to cultural criticism is also a return to a way of looking that has been with me for most of my life. It is shaped by study, by memory, by lived experience, and by years spent thinking about symbolism, adornment, the body, beauty, spirit, and meaning.

Reclaiming the gaze is about much more than looking back. It means identifying the frame, asking who benefits from certain images, refusing to mistake visibility for liberation, and reading the signs with care and attention.

For me, this work is not only about critique. It is also about self-definition. It is about asking how Black women have been represented, how we have been misunderstood, and how we continue to create our own images, narratives, and forms of freedom.

Black Lens, Bright Light begins here: with the decision to look again, to question what is seen, and to reclaim the frame.