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Media Viewing Paper
Throughout the course of the semester, I have learned a tremendous amount from SOC 209 Race Class Ethnicity. After growing up in a predominantly white town, having only a handful of African American classmates, I was generally unaware of the issues that existed. This course taught me the meanings of words I have often heard but never fully understood. I learned that there was a difference between prejudice and discrimination, which I often wrongly used interchangeably. Prejudice is simply a thought, while discrimination is an action, generally from someone of substantial power to enforce the discrimination. I also learned the term matrix of domination, which explains that each person experiences oppression of many fronts whether it be through race, glass or gender. This took me by surprise because after growing up in a predominantly white community, I seldom faced such obstacles. For the media viewing paper I decided to watch a movie and a television series. I chose the movie The Help, which was directed and written by Tate Taylor, and adapted from Kathryn Stockett's 2009 novel. I also chose the Showtime television series Shameless, created by Paul Abbot and developed by John Wells.
The Help is about an aspiring author during the civil rights movement of the 1960s in Jackson, Mississippi, who decides to write a book detailing the African-American maids' point of view on the white families for which they work, as well as the hardships they go through on a daily basis. This movie showed the many differences in the ways in which black and white people were treated during this time period. Eugenia "Skeeter" Phelan is the white journalist who returned to the family plantation after graduating from the Univers...
... middle of paper ...
...inforce notions of the middle class being the standard class because the main characters are lower-class citizens.
For the media viewing paper I decided to focus on two separate obstacles. From watching and analyzing the movie The Help, I focused more on the racial differences that existed between blacks and whites. Although it was more prominent in the 1960s in which the movie took place, many differences still exist between the two races. The Showtime series Shameless, focussed more on homosexuality and how the lower-class lives in the current time period in which we live. I enjoyed writing this paper because I felt as though connecting the many concepts we discussed in class to a movie and TV series made learning more enjoyable.
Works Cited
Taylor, T. (Director). (2011). The Help : Dreamworks ;.
Wells, J. (2011). Shameless [Television series].
The Help is a novel written in 2009 about African-American maids working in Southern homes in the 1960’s and a young white woman pursuing to write a book about the maid’s lives. Stockett was born in 1969 in Jackson, Mississippi. She worked in magazine publishing in New York before attempting to publish The Help, which was rejected by 60 different literary agents. Stockett’s personal background played a major part in her ability to tell this story so well. She grew up with African-American maids working in her household and grew up shortly after the decade in which this novel takes place. The society that she grew up in and her experience working in a magazine helped her to write from the personal viewpoint of African-American help and a woman striving to become a journalist in America during the 1960’s. In The Help, Stockett uses specific setting, point of view, and allusions to tell the incredible story of three young women of different ages, backgrounds, and race that join together in a work that readers will never forget.
Kathryn Stockett's book The Help has sold over five million copies and has spent more than 100 weeks on The New York Times Best Seller list. Stockett's book has also been made in to a major motion picture. The Help is a story about African American house maids based in 1960's Jackson, Mississippi. The story is told by three main women, Minny, Aibileen and Skeeter. Aibileen and Minny are both African-American maids, while Skeeter is the daughter of a privileged family. Aibileen is raising another white child by the name of Mae Mobley whose mother does not participate in her care. Minny is working for an outcast, newlywed, white woman who is keeping her employment a secret from her husband. Skeeter is working on becoming a journalist and takes the risk of interviewing Minny and Aibileen for her book that she publishes. All meetings are done in secret. All of the maids Skeeter interviews talk of a woman named Hilly, who holds the ideal that whites are superior to African-Americans and intends to get everyone in her “ladies group” ( in which Skeeter is a member) to join in the ideal and embrace it. Hilly is one of the specific antagonists in this story, which ends in her demise. This story describes everyone in Hilly’s circle to a T, but it is published with an anonymous author and the names get changed so that no one can figure out who wrote it. Most people will “rant and rave” that Stockett's book is an amazing story of the struggle for African American's in
Mantsios, G. (2013). Media magic: Making class invisible. In M. L. Andersen & P. H. Collins (Eds.), Race, class and gender: An anthology (pp.386-393). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.
The Help is a perfect example of a book that has a lot of strong characters who are being held down by segregation. Specifically this book is talking about the unfair discrimination against colored people in the U.S. in the early nineteen sixties. Many people, mostly those being discriminated against, were angry about the injustices that they had endured and had a breaking point at some part of their lives. This was the point when those people decided that somehow they would change the wrong doings that affected people like them and make others see things their way, “it weren’t too long before I seen something in me had changed. A bitter seed was planted inside a me. And I just didn’t feel so accepting anymore” (Stockett 2). It was a tough time fo...
For this assignment, the movie “The Help” was chosen to review and analyze because it presents a story of fighting injustice through diverse ways. The three main characters of the movie are Eugenia “Skeeter” Phelan, a young white woman, Aibileen Clark, and Minny Jackson, two colored maids. Throughout the story, we follow these three women as they are brought together to record colored maids’ stories about their experiences working for the white families of Jackson. The movie explores the social inequalities such as racism and segregation between African Americans and whites during the 1960s in Jackson, Mississippi.
According to Poverty & Prejudice: Media and Race, co-authored by Yurii Horton, Raagen Price, and Eric Brown, the media sets the tone for the morals, values and images of our culture. Many whites in American society, some of whom have never encoun...
Zinkhan, G., Qualls, W., & Biswas A., (1990). The use of Blacks in magazine and television
Dines, Gail, and Jean McMahon Humez. Gender, Race, and Class in Media: A Text-reader. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1995. Print.
She is tired of white people looking down on her and at the end of the day she wants change, not for her, but for her children. Minny knew what they were doing was for the greater good. “The Help” by Kathryn Stockett is a story that takes you through the ups and downs of living in Jackson, Mississippi in the 1960’s. With the bravery of these 3 brave women they were able to write and release a book about being the help. The help of the.
One of the greatest exports of American culture is American media. American media is one of the most widely distributed and consumed cultural forms from the United States. This means that not only do Americans consume large quantities of their own media, but many other countries in the world consume American media, too. People in other countries will not interpret or understand the media in precisely the same ways that Americans will and do, nonetheless, many aspects of American culture and American reality are communicated to numerous viewers as part of the content in the media. The media is an important tool in the discussion of race, class, and gender in America. It takes a savvy viewer to discriminate between and understand what media accurately represents reality, what media does not, or which aspects of experience are fictionalized, and which elements ...
The movie The Help was an inspirational film that has opened the minds of the audience to the harsh reality that African Americans faced. Ethical issues portrayed in the movie is the way which all
The Help chronicles a recent college graduate named Skeeter, who secretly writes a book exposing the treatment of black maids by white affluent women. The story takes place in 1960s Jackson, Mississippi, during the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement. The death of Medgar Evers triggers racial tension and gives the maids of Jackson the courage to retell their personal stories of injustice endured over the years. The movie depicts the frustration of the maids with their female employers and what their lives were like cleaning, cooking, and raising their bosses’ children. The Help shines a light on the racial and social injustice of maids during the era of Jim Crow Laws, illustrating how white women of a privileged society discriminated not only against black women, but also against their own race. The movie examines a very basic principle: the ethical treatment of other human beings.
In the film The Help, directed by Tate Taylor, an important scene is the scene when Eugenia whose nickname is Skeeter confronts Charlotte her mother about Constantine their old loyal, loving maid. Skeeter wishes to know the truth about how Constantine left their family. The main purpose of this scene is to show the difference of coloured and whites in the 1960s in Jackson, Mississippi. Also love between Skeeter and Constantine in particular when Skeeter finds out that her mother fired Constantine, only to die before telling her the truth. Four significant aspects the director used in this scene are cinematography, music, characterisation and dialogue.
Gail Dines, and Jean M. Humez. Gender, Race, and Class in Media: A Critical Reader. SAGE, 2011.
Media technologies are becoming an important aspect of today’s society. Each and every day, people interact with media of many different forms. Media is commonly defined as being a channel of communication. Radio, newspapers, and television are all examples of media. It is impossible to assume that media is made up of completely unbiased information and that the media companies do not impose their own control upon the information being supplied to media users. Since many people use media very frequently, it is obvious to assume that it has affects on people. According to the text book Media Now, "media effects are changes in knowledge, attitude, or behavior that result from exposure to the mass media," (386). This leaves us with many unanswered questions about media and its influences. This paper will look at how the effects of media are determined and explore the main affects on today’s society - violence, prejudice, and sexual behavior.