THE ASSASSINATION OF THE BLACK MALE IMAGE...

THE ASSASSINATION OF THE BLACK MALE IMAGE by Earl Ofari Hutchinson (Middle Passage Press: $9.95; 152 pp., paperback original). Hutchinson offers an angry rebuttal to the media images of black men as absent fathers, gang members, felons and drug users. He doesn’t deny that African-Americans who fit these descriptions exist, but he objects to the lack of balance. The mass media seldom--if ever--focus on Afro-American males who are nurturing fathers, honors students or ordinary, middle-class family members. Hutchinson occasionally gets carried away by his own rhetoric and he doesn’t really tackle the issues involved in the controversy over Louis Farrakhan’s speeches, but his basic argument is irrefutable.