Ethnics
Essay title: Ethnics
Powerful institutions like the media can influence our conceptions of race and ethnicity.
As advertising, cinema, news and TV play a bigger role in the socialization of youth, the images of minorities that they see as children will be the images that they reproduce as adults.
.What kinds of values are being passed to young people through media?
The effects of media on the socialization of our youth are more profound today than at any other period in history. Traditionally, stories and beliefs were passed on through the family, religion, tribe, community or school. Today, by the end of high school, the average student will have spent 15 000 hours watching TV and only 11 000 hours in the classroom (Davison, 1997). Media is becoming less of a form of leisure and more an agent for the communication of values in the lives of our young people. Media creates roles for people that are often accepted in society.
Hooks referred to examples of traditional black families on TV shows like The Jefferson’s and Sanford and Son as portraying and reinforcing a host of commonly-held connotations. The families are obsessed with upward mobility, material trappings of success, and lack creativity and imagination. Again, the underlying assumption is that whiteness is the norm and the only way to achieve success is by gravitating towards it. However, being that they are black, it is not quite possible. The humor in these shows is derived from the futile attempts of the characters to imitate white people.
Although considerable progress has been made in the fight against unfair and unflattering portrayals based on false information, nevertheless the mass media is often still guilty of insensitivity in this area — witness the continuing controversy over the portrayal of Black families in situation comedies. (Routledge)
“In the white imagination few images are as recognizable as Aunt Jemima. As a negative stereotype reinforcing both racism and sexism, Aunt Jemima symbolically valued the humanity of black women.” The racist image of the black mammy has had a powerful impact upon American culture and society. The figure of the mammy occupies a central place in the lore of the Old South and has long been used to illustrate distinct social phenomena, including racial oppression and class identity. In the early twentieth century, the mammy became immortalized as Aunt Jemima, the spokesperson for a line of ready-mixed breakfast products. Although Aunt Jemima has undergone many makeovers over the years, she apparently has not lost her commercial appeal; her face graces more than forty food products nationwide and she still resonates in some form for millions of Americans. We learn how advertising entrepreneur James Webb Young, aided by celebrated illustrator N.C. Wyeth, skillfully tapped into nostalgic 1920s perceptions of the South as a culture of white leisure and black labor. Aunt Jemimas ready-mixed products offered middle-class housewives the next best thing to a black servant: a “slave in a box” that conjured up romantic images of not only the food but also the social hierarchy of the plantation south. The initial success of the Aunt Jemima brand, Manring reveals, was based on a variety of factors, from lingering attempts to reunite the country after the Civil War to marketing strategies around World War I. Her continued appeal in the late twentieth century is a more complex and disturbing phenomenon we may never fully understand. Manring suggests that by documenting Aunt Jemimas fascinating evolution, however, we can learn important lessons about our collective cultural identity.
www.upress.virginia.edu/books/manring.html
Black slavery ended with the Civil War, but many white Americans still love plantation images. The grinning black chef on Cream of Wheat boxes, the reassuring, stately smile of Uncle Ben, who sells rice, and everybodys Aunt Jemima, on boxes of pancake flour for more than a century, evoke the happy servant images of by-gone days.
Racism in Sports:
“What is it about sport that helps some black athletes transcend the issue of race?”
The comeback of Michael Jordan in the 2001-2002 NBA season reminds me of a survey once done of people walking along Venice Beach in California. They were shown two photos and asked which one they recognized first. One was depicting Jesus Christ while the other was the back of Michael Jordans bald head. The fact that the more people said that they recognized the photo of Michael Jordan tells us a lot about our society. He is