By: Kamal Apatira When Disney’s The Princess and the Frog premiered in 2009, little black girls around the world were elated because for the first time ever, there was a Disney princess that they could identify with. Little girls, including my sister, bought tickets and flooded the theaters to show support for the film. This is just one example of how, even for children, representation in media matters for Black people. The media today fails to correctly represent the world around us and as a result, black people must take any victory that they can as they are far and few between. This victory some years later would be tainted as Disney took its one Black princess and decided to lighten her skin and give her whiter features. When Wreck it Ralph aired its princess trailer for its sequel, viewers young and old were excited to see what the film was to bring to the big screen. This specific princess trailer was Disney attempting to show that it was ready to...
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By Yongjie Li When I firstly asked Americans about the impressions of Asians, Kung Fu and Jackie Chen are the things that they came to their minds. In fact, it cannot fully represent Asians, especially in recent developing years. According to government datas, the number of Asian Americans in USA is 21.4 million in 2016 and 6.4% of total populations (Asian-American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, 2018), however, they are invisible in media. In order to better analysis of this situation, the impacts and stereotypes of Asians are the focuses especially in the movie Crazy Rich Asians. Both of typical Asians and the tag of them is unchangeable during centuries. During 1840s, Fu Manchu and Charlie Chan were famous persons for Americans and represented the feminization of Asian American men, while Asian females were depicted as hypersexuality (Chyng, 2015). During 1970s, due to influences of Bruce Lee, Kung Fu became another tag on them (Chyng, 2015). Unfortunately, based on t...
By Faith Blakey My nighttime routine consists of scrolling through my Facebook timeline. More recently, it has been filled with social issues that are both domestic and international; from fashion, politics, to personality tests. One of the most striking posts that I have come across recently was a clip from a documentary; “So when you bleach it makes you look more nicer, look more sexier, and look more cuter than you once was”. These words from a middle aged Jamaican women describes the sentiments that are sold with the global trend of skin bleaching. Her opinions towards skin bleaching, or “bleaching” as they call it in Jamaica, are common. This 2012 Vice documentary explores the idea that skin bleaching and colorism are practices that have become well known and respected in popular Jamaican culture. Although this documentary reveals the deep seated colorism that is prominent in Jamaica, it seems as if colorism has developed into a worldwide epidemi...
By: Graham Jaeger Minorities have always been misrepresented and stereotyped within American media. More specifically, Indians have had a very hard time getting past these false depictions of themselves, especially because of how they are portrayed on television. One show that does a great job of provoking thought on the treatment of how Indian men are represented comes from the Netflix Sitcom titled Master of None . Within this show, they make it clear to the audience that the media heavily relies on a prejudiced view of Indian men. This is mainly because Indian men are often objectified as “weird and amusing” (Pfeiffer, 2016). A lot of times, the media uses these stereotypes about the Indian culture as a joke in order to make the audience laugh. Racism has been around for hundreds of years and will constantly linger for as long as I live because of this exact culture that we live in today. A major problem with racism is how the media portrays Indian men through these stereotypes...
By Aleysha Ward “You are just as dark as the bottom of my shoe”, “Your skin color is not light enough to hang with us” and “You're so pretty for a black girl.” These are just some of the comments that black women have had to listen to while growing up. As a brown skinned black women, it is frustrating to know that my skin color will always be viewed as negative by society. Why? Well, because it is not close to a Caucasians skin color. Skin tone is a characteristic that can affect a person’s life in both positive and negative ways. Often times, our society has shown us that being of a lighter complexion or closer to a Caucasian’s skin color will provide us with benefits such as higher educational and career opportunities, a greater chance at marriage, and having the ability to be less conscious about your skin color. Although this is not true, factors as such do affect a black women’s self esteem and self efficacy. The issue of colorism continues to divide and shape the ...
By: Cailey Griffin It would be extremely difficult to make the argument that the media doesn’t have power. The media has the power to foster a sense of community amongst people by bringing friends and family together to view a television show. The media has the power to regulate the emotions of individuals by creating fictional characters the average viewer will become attached to. The media also has the power to serve as a representation of the different “types” of people in society. In media platforms there’s usually a clear representation of what it means to be a man, what it means to be a woman, what it means to be a person of color, and what it means to be a person from a particular socioeconomic background. These media representations of different groups and types of people are not always incorrect or negative. In fact, I would argue that media representations are largely positive for certain people. However, the group that seems to consistently get ...
By Ryan Scott The world is tough enough to navigate but when you factor in sex, politics, religion, and race it is even more combative and not a level playing field. For African-Americans within media, and even the world that views them, there has been a long-standing debate about colorism: Do dark skinned people have it worse than lighter skinned? It has been well documented for decades and even longer, that the misconception or perhaps the belief in beauty lies in the pigmentation of skin color or lack thereof. The Abstract by Ashraf Esmail and Jas M. Sullivan emphasizes their research based on family heritage and the skin colorism of their parents. It was said that partners will choose spouses or life partners based not just on light or dark skinned but; specifically, men will choose marriage partners based on the color of their father and women will choose a skin color of a spouse suitable to a complexion based on their mother. This was the finding of the study. Are we...
By: DaBreonna Doss I ran across Jane the Virgin one day in hopes of finding a new series on Netflix. It is about this Latina girl who grows up on strict religious views. She lives with her grandmother and mother, whom was in the country illegally, and she falls in love with a white cop that one night crashed her party. Later, she goes into the doctor for a checkup but instead received an artificial insemination in place of a wife who could not get pregnant. The storyline exaggerates from there, however, there are a few themes that I specifically want to point out. These themes include Jane’s love story, her childhood background, and circumstances her Latina body is placed in. The chapter Mobilizing the Latina Myth by author Priscilla Peña Ovalle in the book In Dance and the Hollywood Latina: Race, Sex, and Stardom exposes the myth of the Latina body and the ways in which Hollywood media and popular culture further these themes. Ovalle begins her analysis by exploring th...