“You Ain’t No Denzel”: African American Men’s Use of Popular Culture to Narrate and Understand Marriage and Romantic Relationships

Abstract

Beyond the scholarship citing the proliferation of negative media representations of African Americans, Black males in particular, little is known about the ways in which these men understand media and use them to make meaning of their lives. To fill this gap, the current study analyzes qualitative interview data from 33 African American men focused on the their expressions and demonstrations of relationship commitment, whether they perceived idealized relationships as either models or unattainable goals and their conceptions of how Black men are framed in the media. Findings reveal that our participants consume many mediated representations of Black men and, more importantly, they encode and decode these images to understand, describe, and narrate their own romantic, heterosexual relationship experiences. Furthermore, the findings from this study demonstrate the need to include Black men in conversations about media, relationships, and their lived experiences. Implications for future study also are also discussed.