Lost In The Shuffle

With the hustle and bustle of our day to day lives and the rush to get only the most important and pertinent news what do we sacrifice? What gets lost in the shuffle?

Stephanie Larson discusses in her book Media and Minorities the coverage or lack thereof of social movements of racial minorities as well as its effects on society. Did the media coverage change peoples’ views? Did the coverage reflect existing views? Larson critically examines the Civil Rights Movement as well as the Native American, Chicano, and Asian American Movements.

She begins by examining the nature of social movements and their dependency on media coverage. Without media coverage, the movement practically doesn’t exist. On page 146, she says that “the idea here is that even if politicians are willing to ignore an intense minority of people, they will not dismiss the will of the majority” so if the minority protesting can create enough stir to be put on national news, gain supporters, and become the majority, then how could those with political power to create change ignore the pressing need? However, many times the only way a social movement can get coverage in a national attention is if there is “conflict, violence, familiarity, and novelty” (147). Otherwise, the news may not even cover the story, and if it is covered, it may not get the attention it necessarily deserves.

Larson continues by examining the Civil Rights Movement, as well as the Native American, Chicano, and Asian American Movements. As I was reading, I was not as shocked in the Civil Rights Movement section, as I felt I generally knew a lot of the events about which she spoke; however, in the chapter regarding the other movements, I felt so ignorant because in many of them, I did not recognize the events let alone their effects on society. While it was interesting to learn about the effects of the events in the Civil Rights Movement, I felt like I couldn’t even begin to understand the effects of the other Movements because I had never even heard of some of the events. I believe this furthers her point that the Civil Rights Movement is the main and central movement remembered not only in American classrooms but also in society as marked by a specific holiday (178).

I believe that although Larson brings light to the issues that have been lost in the shuffle, society and the mass media are definitely not pushing for more coverage of these issues. For example, the issues in Africa, especially in the Darfur region took years to hit the mainstream media and, while the name is now, hopefully, recognizable, the full extent of what is going on in that area may never be known. While injustices occur all throughout the world, our media still does not cover the issues unless someone dies in the riots around it. Larson explains that in order for an event to be covered it needs to have “drama, tension, and the ever present whiff of real and threatened violence, all concentrated into a manageable geographic area and relatively brief time frame” (164). Too bad for all those other social movements. If you don’t fit the criteria, good luck making it into Americans’ priority list.

Ax or Ask?

So I found this video online after we discussed ebonics in class. It's an interview about a book called "Ax or Ask? The African American Guide to Better English" by Garrard McClendon. There's a lot which I agree with and definiately some things I disagree with. I thought I'd post it and let everyone see for themselves. There are rather racist and discriminatory comments writen all over the page which I definately don't agree with. I just thought McClendon raises some interesting points.

Click on the book, watch the clip, and let me know what you think!

Native Americans Without a Voice

I think it’s safe to say that the media definitely does not do an amazing job of presenting minorities in the appropriate way. However, the Native American image is a huge problem.




In Media and Minorities, Stephanie Larson talks about how the news portrays Native Americans. One of her most profound arguments is that “stories about Indians rarely include their voices. They are talked about, rather than talked to” (108). By not including the voice of the Native American, the news media portrays the image that they are an other group that have nothing valuable to add to society. Also, this gives all the power to the white mainstream media. By completely excluding voice, it continues to allow white culture to dominate in America. While in the past Larson notes that the media gave Native Americans two options good Indians and bad Indians, and “who was ‘good’ and who was ‘bad’ depends on how much trouble particular Indians were giving whites in power at particular times,” (109) she says that now, there are “some more varied representations are joining the stereotypical ones even in the national press” (112). Progress is being made, although it is not perfect.

For example, the show Family Guy did an episode featuring Native Americans and they sarcastically looked at the image of the Native American in mainstream media. This is the only clip I could find and it doesn't really illustrate all of what I'm talking about, but it does give some examples of how the show uses stereotypes. It’s titled “The Son Also Draws” and basically this is what happens (although I’m a little fuzzy on some of the details, so forgive me): While taking a road trip, the main characters, the Griffins, end up on an Indian reservation where there is a casino. For one reason or another the Griffins find themselves in trouble with the heads of the casino, who are also supposed to be heads of the tribe. In order to get out of trouble, Peter, the husband, pretends he is also Native American. To prove it, the men in charge of the casino send Peter out for a spiritual journey of some sort which is a true Native American custom, although the men are portrayed as simply trying to come up with a daunting task that Peter will never complete so they can keep the car they towed from the Griffins. They say that they themselves have never completed this task and hardly know anything about it; they just want the car. Anyway, Peter is sent on a spiritual journey where the Native American is sent out into the wilderness to fend for himself until his spiritual guide, an animal or other such element of nature, speaks to him. The Native Americans who whole-heartedly believe in this tradition believe that the spiritual guide will speak to the person on the spiritual journey and that is the moment he becomes a man. The heads of the casino send Peter out on this journey and he takes his son with him and the two fend for themselves in the wilderness for several days. After a while they don’t return and it comes out that the heads of the casino really didn’t know what they were doing and someone has to go in search of the two. As all episodes go, it ends with a happy ending: the family being reunited, the ‘terrible’ bad guys getting what they deserve, and the family driving away into the sunset (or something equally as cheesy).

However the point is that the Native Americans are being portrayed as greedy casino owners who have forgotten their own traditions in exchange for the white man’s beliefs. All the while, the Native Americans are using their heritage as a way to maintain the casino and make money. These stereotypical images are constantly seen on television today and are generally the only image we have of Native Americans in our culture. Because they are not even interviewed when we talk about them in the mainstream, I think it is safe to say that the Native American has been one of the worst cases of symbolic annihilation by the mainstream mass media today.

Dann Cuellar

Every night before I go to bed, my dad and I look to see what story Dann Cuellar will report on. The headline reporter for channel 6 ABC news, Dann always gives the most intense look at the hot issue of the night. After watching so many of his stories, my dad and I refer to him as if we know him personally. No matter what, we always look to see what Dann has to say.

In Media and Minorities, Stephanie Larson discusses the effects of having minority personnel as journalists. She says that “to succeed and advance in predominately white organizations, minority journalists must conform to norms and perspectives” (86). In doing this, the minority can lose touch with its original culture, Larson fears. She explains that to add to this separation between the cultures most “tend to be college educated and middle class. Thus, their familiarity with new immigrants, non-English speakers, and the lower class may be similar to that of white middle-class journalists” (87). By not being able to completely identify with their culture, having minority journalists may not be as profound it may have once seemed.

After reading this and watching Dann Cuellar, I wonder how true this really is. How much did Dann really have to give up in order to become the headlining reporter in the field? I then began to wonder how much of his presentation style affected my interest in watching him. If he would have presented the story differently, in a style I wasn’t used to seeing, would I not enjoy his reporting? My dad and I joke about how he uses the stereotypical reporter voice. Did he do this because that was the only way he felt he could get ahead in the industry?

I believe that Larson presents some very interesting questions. Do we look at a person’s race when they subscribe to the our cultural ideas? Does race even matter as long as the person acts in accordance with what we believe to be the best course of action? Does race supersede all of these questions and continue to dominate our society?

A Sample of Dann's work can be found here:

http://abclocal.go.com/wpvi/video?id=6513450

http://abclocal.go.com/wpvi/video?id=6507359

http://abclocal.go.com/wpvi/video?id=6505370

Is the future a one way street?

Can one race ever be culturally aware enough to be able to speak on behalf of another race? Can we ever have a politician that can work for the benefit of the majority and the minority? Does his/her race matter in that ability?

In my hometown of Reading, Pennsylvania, the city is set up in a way very similar to other cities in that one way streets are everywhere. Unlike the suburban and rural areas where two-way streets are the standard and it almost shocking to find a one way street anywhere, city streets tend to be one way, at least in Reading. This can be really frustrating whenever I try and travel through the city because I get confused and lose my sense of direction when I have to continually use one way streets. It’s so much more work making three left turns in order to make that right turn. And if I miss the left I was supposed to make in order to turn right, then I have to wait until the next one way street going left is available in order to turn around again because the every other road is a one way in the opposite direction. This may seem unnecessary and highly confusing, which it is, but its reasoning is not as much. When Reading was a booming town in the early days of railroads, there was much more delivery activity for the thriving businesses. Although this does, in part, remain true today, it is not as prevalent. However, when delivery trucks would have to stop in front of a store to unload product, the effects on traffic could have been detrimental. If a two lane road had a delivery truck double parked on the right hand side, the entire street would have been cut off to any drivers who needed to get past. So the streets were made two lanes wide, but going one way. This way, when a delivery truck would stop, cars could easily pass this truck and continue using the road. Therefore, the majority of the roads were set up in this fashion. As a result, the majority of the city is set up with one way streets.

When I was reading in Stephanie Larson’s Media & Minorities: the Politics of Race in News and Entertainment, I began thinking about these one way streets. While she critically looks at the news media’s portrayal of race in political elections, the point that stuck out the most to me was in the section where she discusses the ideas that are presented as to whether a minority candidate can have the interests of the majority white. Larson talks about how using the “race card” in an election can have pros and cons to it. However, she says that “by focusing on black candidates’ and politicians’ positions on racial issues, the media serve some white candidates’ strategy of suggesting that their black opponents will only represent blacks to the exclusion and detriment of whites” (213). In other words, she is saying that if the black candidate makes a point of discussing race, he is immediately questioned as to whether he can understand the white perspective simply because he understands the black perspective. However, I cannot remember the last time a white candidate was questioned as to whether or not he could appropriately lead a country filled with minorities. Apparently it’s a one way street for minorities; they can only see in one direction.

Along those same lines, I began to question how black leaders are looked at in the mass media. When Martin Luther King, Jr. began to speak about issues other than the suffrage of blacks, he was called out for speaking where he didn’t belong. The media boxed him into a label “black civil rights leader” and apparently that meant that he couldn’t have an opinion on anything else. When Jesse Jackson was running for president 20 years later, he was constantly portrayed as “the black presidential candidate” which, as Larson says “may have enforced an impression among whites that Jackson was a candidate only for blacks” (213). It almost feels as though we have simply covered up the idea of racism to show that it doesn’t exist, but ideas like these and questions like “Are you a black man who happens to be an American running for the presidency, or are you an American who happens to be a black man running for the presidency?” being asked of then presidential candidate Jackson, make me feel that we may have covered it up, but when we try to begin writing the American story on this paper we’ve used to cover up racism, we come to find that the racism appears again, but simply in a different form. Like the leaf rubbings, I used to make in my elementary school art classes, the shape and the outline of the leaf would appear on the paper I colored because of a leaf underneath. If we continue to see racism as a thing of the past and pretend that by covering it up we’ve actually fixed it, then we will continue to see race as a one way street where people of the opposite race could never begin to understand the culture of the other, and we will never be able to have reconciliation as a nation.

Creating Cultural Diversity Today

The representation of minorities on television is a continual discourse in the media industry. In her book Media and Minorities, Stephanie Greco Larson writes about the different portrayals, in particular blacks, on television and in movies. She goes through several exclusions and stereotypes that are consistently found in black characters.

She notes that systematic nature of the media industry does not allow for black actors and actresses to break into the industry. For example, she notes that “genres and narratives promote certain narratives. Entertainment genres (such as Westerns, horror movies) are predictable to audiences” and therefore the people that portray these images are also predictable (17). This system also encourages the ideas that “all men are created equal” and other such American ideals. In doing this, the responsibility to do well implicitly falls on the individual rather than allowing for closer examination of the system and related institutions.

Later, Larson gets into the different types of characters that Blacks are consistently boxed into and how these characters exclude Blacks from being represented in a well-rounded and complex way. Larson explains this as “selective exclusion” because it “[occurs] when people of color are included in films and television without any of their cultural distinctiveness” (16). She discusses how many times black characters lack a cultural identity, a family, or a unique quality (24-25). Many times the hero of the story is a white character with a black character supporting them furthering the idea that blacks in media are most often put in subservient roles. Larson argues that this forces blacks into a particular image outside of the mainstream media. Blacks are supposed to follow the social codes that are acceptable, such as being quiet and subservient, and these ideals are magnified in the mass media.

While I do not completely disagree with Larson’s perspective, I believe that she spends a lot of time discussing the negative images of the past. This is very important to understand and recognize. Knowing the history and being able to understand the magnitude of where we come from is a huge part of improving race relations. I also think that knowing what racism in the media looked like in the past can help us identify racism in the media today.

That being said, this book was copyrighted in 2006 and so far, there are very few references to current media texts. As I read these chapters, I was reminded of a quote that Isaiah Washington said in an interview on the Oprah Show. While I wish I could have found the entire quote and a video to go with it, I could only find the quote written on Oprah’s website. At the time, Washington was a member of the show Grey's Anatomy and he is discussing his views on the show and its effects in society. He says that:

I look at our show as that culmination, literally, of [Martin Luther King's] 'I Have a Dream' speech," he says. "Really, that's how I look at it. Because no one has ever walked up to me and said, 'Yo, bro' … They say, 'Mr. Washington, I love Dr. Burke.' And they've never questioned my race."

I found this to be quite profound. In this primetime series, there is a substantial portion of the cast that is a minority. While I have no statistic for it, as a viewer, I feel like many of the patients are from very diverse backgrounds. Even if not by race, their ideas and beliefs are greatly differing from week to week showing more and more diversity in a hit prime time show in America. While this in no way solves all the problems with race in the media, I do believe it is important not to just criticize those times when the media has failed, but to learn from the times when the media has succeeded and created an environment of cultural diversity.

Ambivalence in America

One of the nineties most popular shows, as well as one of its most provocative, was “Will and Grace.” Most people are generally familiar with the show, especially with one character, Jack McFarland. Jack is a gay man who all but defines superficiality. Most episodes consist of him waking up one day and deciding he wants to change his career or find a new boyfriend or start a new adventure. While he does end up with deeper character development, he generally can be found throughout the series creating grand schemes and becoming overly dramatic about particular issues that no one else shows any real interest in.

In one episode in season three entitled “My Uncle the Car,” Jack continues his search for his father. He gets a letter from his mother telling him “"Jack, I know this may come as a shock to you, but your father is a black boy. Gotta run. It's coconut shrimp night. Kisses, Mommy." After hearing this, Jack is instantly shocked. He immediately decides that he must “go out and find out what it means to be black like [him].”

The fact that Jack can say this sentence, shows that there is racial differences conveyed in America. Whether or not this is biologically true, it is clear that the general perception seems to be that there is some sort of difference between Whites and Blacks. In Entman and Rojecki’s discussion of race from their book “The Black Image in the White Mind” and Stuart Hall’s “The Whites of their Eyes,” it is clear that Americans tend to see differences between Blacks and Whites as a result of several influences, one of which is media.

Entman and Rojecki argue that there are several ways that people feel about race: comity, ambivalence, animosity, and racism; the majority of white Americans being ambivalent. The ambivalent perspective, according to Entman and Rokecki, means that “whies bring complicated combinations of assumptions, misinformation, emotional needs, experiences, and personality traits to their thinking about race” (21). In doing this, it creates confusion and dissonance in their perceptions of race in real life in relation to media. When asked about specific incidents and race, many of the whites interviewed had trouble stating bold generalizations because of conflicting viewpoints that were affecting their beliefs.

I found this section to be very interesting. I began thinking about the way I view race. Initially I immediately wanted to jump into the comity category where “a White person… believes it is not possible to generalize about African American individuals any more than Whites” (17). While the description goes on to explain that the comity end of the spectrum does not really see any difference between races in society, I feel like to be on the comity end of the spectrum is to deny that racism still does exist in this country. I think on an individual level, yes, it is very possible to not see a difference between the quality of a black person and a white person, but I think it is too much of a stretch to say that this can translate across the country. Then I began to look at the ambivalent perspective more. I feel like this perspective more closely relates to the status of American society. For every stereotype that someone can give me about a black person, I can find an example that breaks it. For every stereotypical white person someone can find, I can break it. I think that because of this, our society is at a loss for where to stand on race issues. While the media may be behind in portraying a broad range of roles for minority roles, society is advancing, slowly, to see that there are more roles than primetime sitcoms provide. While the media is pouring out stereotypes, our life experiences are pushing back with exceptions to the media’s powerful rule.


However, because the media has such power in our lives, the identities they show do have a surprising rule over our thoughts. Jack McFarland is a prime example of this. Jack’s character, throughout the episode, deals with his new identity. Throughout the episode he shows examples of what he thinks the black man must go through. Although nothing physically has changed, he believes that he now exudes blackness and his entire life has changed. Meant as a joke, Jack’s character uncovers what the media has been putting into society for years as to what a black man must go through. Because he is such a superficial character, he can show how much he does not really contemplate or reflect about what he really believes is his role as a black man. Instead, he, in my opinion, lives the life he thinks he’s supposed to lead “now that he’s black.” Considering there are no steady or consistent black actors on the show, it is obvious that he is not getting these ideas from real life examples. Instead, he is showing how the media can portray an image so strongly that it affects the perceptions and beliefs of the people who watch it.