" There is something called black in America and there is something called white in America and I know them when I see them but will forever be unable to explain the meaning of them because they are not real even though they have a very real place in my daily existence." Carl Hancock Rux in “Eminem: The New White Negro”“I have always suspected that nothing else matters; nothing is important except what I deem important not even conspiracies the media puts out everyday”–Anon “My work brings history forward through framing our experience of race, class, and gender as conditioned by popular culture then and now. Ultimately, my goal is to subvert the common perception of ‘black history’as somehow separate from American history, and to reinstate it as indivisible from the totality of past social, political, and economic occurrences that make up contemporary American culture”–Hank Willis Thomas

In view of the last quote, Thomas’s images may make you uncomfortable but incite you to a second look at race, identity, violence and the prejudices of black stereotyping reinforced by decades of advertising. Using the first quote in this paper, we see race as a social construct in