After becoming the first African-American woman to win an Emmy for best actress in a drama, “You can’t win an Emmy for roles that simply aren’t there,” Viola Davis said in her acceptance speech. Thanks to breakout shows like Empire, Scandal, and How to Get Away with Murder – the drama of which Viola Davis won her award for – demand for more diverse casts has risen and series lead by women of color i.e. Scandal and How to Get Away with Murder. Shonda Rhimes the creator of Scandal and the first show in decades to have a black woman as the lead character. Rhimes’s successful series has paved the way for new shows centered on the lives of people of color such as, the CW’s Jane the Virgin, ABC’s Black-ish, and Fresh Off the Boat. While cable TV …show more content…
Which is why it’s a problem, “NBC’s Diverse Staff Writing Initiative, directly pay series to employ a “diverse” staff writer every season,” states Aisha Harris. Networks are trying so hard to have diverse staffs that they are paying staffers to hire people of color. Which is why it’s a problem, these ‘diversity’ hires fill up a slot, one slot, like checking off boxes, staffers think the one ‘diversity’ hire is enough. But one black person on a staff of seven is not diverse, it’s unequal. “I am making TV look like the world looks,” says Shonda Rhimes (Greys Anatomy and Scandal) who insists on having a diverse cast and staff on her series (Bacle). Her series success has proven that black writers writing black characters is a successful formula. Not only is Rhimes’s writers’ room mixed, “Rosewood, Fox’s drama starring Morris Chestnut as a Miami pathologist, the writers’ room is mixed, with several black writers and a Latina, according to Jamie Turner,” writes Harris, in the writers’ room Chestnut was able to make a suggestion to change a line that he didn’t agree with and the group of writers’ were able to change it. That’s what these writers’ rooms can accomplish such as, “…Jane the Virgin’s liberal use of Spanish when Jane’s grandmother is speaking, forcing us non-Spanish-speaking viewers a bit out of our comfort zones with subtitles,” states Harris, explaining how …show more content…
How individuals construct their social identities, how they come to understand what it means to be male, female, black, white, Asian, Latino, Native American…Media, in short, are central to what ultimately come(s) to represent our social realities” (Brooks, Hebert 297). This is why it’s important to positively represent people of color in media, because negative imagery displayed can be mistaken for expectations. Medias’ stereotypical portrayal of people of color is a casual suggestion that that is what society expects. It tells that little black boy that he’s not the superhero but the superhero’s sidekick, it tells the Latina girl that she can’t be too bossy or loud and just the right amount of Latina. It says that Asian-Americans have to be smart and act a certain way, it tells the mixed kids that they are “other” and that they have to pick a race. Positive representation is important to the self-esteem of black, Asian, Latino/a, and Native Americans as Western culture sells the idea that straight hair, blue eyes, and light skin are the ideal body type. It can lead to children disliking their appearance, culture, and using skin lightening products that can damage their skin. Positive accurate portrayals of black, Latino/a, Asian-Americans, and Native Americans are truly
The requirement for a particular look and sound that is in conjunction with the white, upwardly mobile consumer base of corporate America, is pitted as a significant attempt at creating ‘new normals’ by mainstream mass media. In the process of casting diversity, aspects of constructing minorities and ethnicities as normal are brought to the foreground, with several instances pinpointing towards issues of ethnic stereotyping, miscegenation and racial naturalization. Even with increasing visibility of Asian Americans as consumers, talent and corporate professionals, their scope and representation, both linguistic and visual, are deeply coded by what would be understood as natural by economically mobile, middle class, white American standards. The concluding section of the book reflects upon the significance of sites of advertisement placements from broadcast media to digital and social media platforms, factoring in issues of audience testing and reactions, to indicate the shifting dynamics of creative power and knowledge production between Asian American and general market
The Murderers Are Among Us, directed by Wolfe Gang Staudte, is the first postwar film. The film takes place in Berlin right after the war. Susan Wallner, a young women who has returned from a concentration camp, goes to her old apartment to find Hans Mertens living there. Hans took up there after returning home from war and finding out his house was destroyed. Hans would not leave, even after Susan returned home. Later on in the film we find out Hans was a former surgeon but can no longer deal with human suffering because of his traumatic experience in war. We find out about this traumatic experience when Ferdinand Bruckner comes into the film. Bruckner, Hans’ former captain, was responsible for killing hundreds
Murder at the Margin is a murder mystery involving various economic concepts. The story takes place in Cinnamon Bay Plantation on the Virgin Island of St. John. It is about Professor Henry Spearman, an economist from Harvard. Spearman organizes an investigation of his own using economic laws to solve the case.
The media, through its many outlets, has a lasting effect on the values and social structure evident in modern day society. Television, in particular, has the ability to influence the social structure of society with its subjective content. As Dwight E. Brooks and Lisa P. Hébert write in their article, “GENDER, RACE, AND MEDIA REPRESENTATION”, the basis of our accepted social identities is heavily controlled by the media we consume. One of the social identities that is heavily influenced is gender: Brooks and Hébert conclude, “While sex differences are rooted in biology, how we come to understand and perform gender is based on culture” (Brooks, Hébert 297). With gender being shaped so profusely by our culture, it is important to be aware of how social identities, such as gender, are being constructed in the media.
Men do not have the benefits of equality either, they are also limited by societal expectations and having to fulfill the requirements of what it means to “be a man”. Gender roles shape the fabric of our society. In the documentary Tough Guise, Katz chronicles the socialization of boys from the moment they are born and as they grow up. Tough guise explains how the entertainment industry feeds messages about masculinity which exclude basic human qualities such as compassion, and vulnerability. These are portrayed as feminine with a negative connotation implied (Earp, Katz, Young and Rabinovitz 2013). In American modern culture children of both sexes are consuming large amounts of media on a daily basis. The documentary MissRepresentation explores the media’s role in the shaping of our society; specifically the media’s treatment of women. When it comes to girls and women, marketers have made substantial profits from objectifying women and setting an unattainable standard of what it means to be beautiful. Hyper-feminized women are all over the covers of magazines, hypersexualized in advertisements, and in movies. Women have to walk a very thin tightrope and the expectations for a good woman are contradicting (Newsom, Scully, Dreyfous, Redlich, Congdon, and Holland
Many people say they want to avoid drama, and this is due to the fact that drama emits certain dark emotions, like sadness and fear. These emotions are prevalent in everyone’s reality. In reality, the issue of race is drama filled and serious, and this is how these issue should be portrayed on TV shows. People need to realize that racial conflict is not a joking matter, because it causes pain for many people in society. One drama TV show that accurately portrays the struggle of race is Luke Cage. The setting of this TV show is dark, mainly due to what the show wants to accomplish. The show is trying to put its audience in the situation of a struggling black male, and this informs the audience of the severity of his issues. This show inspires people to speak out against race, because on the powerful words the show displays. For example, the shows use of the word ni**er brings up a certain nuance not between white people and black people, but within the black community. The use of this word is exactly the power drama shows have over comedy shows, because drama shows can portray these nuances, while comedy show portray a general
Marlon T. Riggs’ video, Color Adjustment, offers the viewer an exciting trip though the history of television, focusing on the representation, or lack thereof, of African-Americans. A perfectly chosen combination of television producers, actors, sociologists, and cultural critics join forces to offer insight and professional opinion about the status of African-Americans in television since the inception of television itself. As Color Adjustment traces the history of television shows from Amos n’ Andy and Julia to "ghetto sitcoms" and The Cosby Show, the cast of television professionals and cultural critics discuss the impacts those representations have on both the African-American community and our society as a whole. Color Adjustment continually asks the question: "Are these images positive?" This video raises the viewer’s awareness about issues of positive images for African-Americans on television.
...n American woman to be awarded the Sundance Film Festival’s best director prize in 2012 for her film “Middle of Nowhere” (Keegan). In the interview of DuVernay, she explains how even though only 9.9% of speaking characters are black, with a black director that percentage rises to 52.6% of black speaking characters (Keegan). This explains a lot of why there are is such a small amount of minority speaking roles in movies. This means that because of the majority of the directors being white, they therefore want to hire and have more whites speak in their movies rather than minorities. At the end of the article, Keegan elaborates on how people are now noticing this race and gender inequality in films and are trying to improve it. For example, as stated in the article, the Motion Picture Academy is working on making their company more diverse and not merely white males.
On December 18th 2015 Netflix aired with great popularity a 10 part documentary series called “making a Murderer” The documentary, written by Laura Ricciardi and Moira Demo, present the case of Steven Avery; a convicted murderer exonerated on DNA evidence after serving 18 years for the assault and attempted murder of Penny Beerntsen. The writers present the series in a way that suggest that Avery was framed by the Manitowoc Country police department. and present that the police planted evidence to frame Steven Avery because he had been exonerated from the previous crime. The ethical problem with this as is presented by Kathryn Schulz in The New Yorker, is that the documentary argues their case so passionately that they leave out important
As a group, we believe that popular culture does in fact perpetuates stereotypes. Television is a main source of information of popular culture. Television has forever changed how humans have interacted with another and introduce a world of diversity and knowledge. But with this profit, television has also harbored negative aspects. As a group, we studied how racial stereotypes are portrayed in television. In the history of television, different racial and ethnic groups have been widely underrepresented and television itself has been overwhelming represented by white figures. And when racial groups are presented on TV, the characters are often played in limited roles based on stereotypes. A stereotype isn’t necessarily untrue, but it is an assumption based on an incomplete and complex ideas that are oversimplified into something that isn’t what it meant to be, and it’s usually negative. For example, African Americans are often depicted as violent or involved in some kind of criminal activity. Their characters often portrays a person who is always sassy and angry or that isn’t intelligent and won’t succeed in life and inferior to whites in some manner. Asian characters are
In 2013, a new Netflix series called Orange Is The New Black was written by Jenji Kohan based on the book by Piper Kerman. The show almost instantly became a hit. The series takes place in a fictional women’s prison in upstate New York. It follows the life of Piper Chapman as she leaves her suburban life and adjusts to her new life in prison. The viewer, while seeing the past and present life of Piper, also gets to experience the past and present lives of the other inmates that Piper interacts with. The women represent a large variety of races/ethnicities, social classes, sexual orientations, and gender identities. Though Orange Is The New Black does show diversity, I would like to argue that despite the representation of diversity, the show portrays its characters in a way that propagates dominant ideologies and stereotypes.
Most media mainly focus their attention on violence, drug use, and crime. They only show what they feel will give them the most ratings by the end of the episode. Producers and directors do not really care about what they are making the African American community look like they only care about the money. It seems as if every reality show has to have a crazy black person, a black woman with an attitude or a thug like male role. Shaunie O’Neal, producer of hit reality show Basketball Wives, as well as an African American herself, continuously says the drama is too much and she wants a successful show, but by having people who do not really have much going for themselves or having people drama seekers on her show, what she says means nothing. She can fire whoever she would like to make her show how she would like it, but she keeps the cast the same for the ratings and the money. Shows that even African Americans do not care about how they are shown on television.
The Hurst book discusses in Chapter 8, that “whiteness is invisible to most whites,” this could be a reason that there is not a lot of diversity in Hollywood, but it could also be racism, and discrimination toward people of different ethnicities as well (Hurst, 183). According, to Hurst racism is “embedded in the structure and institutions, and defining racism individualistically rather than in structural terms, has allowed our attention to be defected from White privilege” (Hurst, 184). White privilege is present in Hollywood, everything is ran by white people, and it is the white writers and directors, they decided who they will cast in the show or movie. Racial and ethnic diversity in TV programming should not be a problem in the 21st century, this is a problem of the past and should not still be going on. The NPR article discusses the shift of more series with “non-white actors, and a more non-white cast, but that still is on 30% of all TV shows” that is a major improvement but there still needs to be more
It is also known that media impacts its viewers, modifying their judgments based on the information they receive. Substantial amounts of stereotypes broadcast through propaganda have similar effects. This essay will illustrate how stereotypes are generally portrayed and their function in propaganda. It will also further reveal how successful and well stereotypes can work when used in propaganda tactics. The media often uses and misrepresents stereotypes; however, they are significantly accepted by people throughout society.
Despite some opposing ideas, the stereotypes in the media have negative impacts for both men and women and also children. I personally think that the media should not place a huge barrier in between the genders because it only creates extreme confinements and hinders people from their full potential. Overall, it is evident that the media has had an important role in representing gender and stereotypes in our