Racial and Ethnic Stereotypes - Essay Example

Introduction

Members of a community regard popular culture by the sets of practices, beliefs, and objects dominant in that society at a specific time. They encompass the activities and feelings that arise due to the interaction with those core objects available in the community. Popular culture has a lot of influence in swaying people towards specific topics (Julie 32). The most commonly known popular culture types worldwide are entertainment, which encompasses (film, music, and television), sports, news, politics, fashion, technology, and slang. In the olden days, popular culture was stereotyped with lack of education and poverty (Peter 24), so it was the opposite of the official culture. Popular culture being notably spearheaded by the media has been linked to shaping how people view the world.

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Media's Racial Imageries

The media's racial imageries have effects on the society of how they view the world and others. Biasness of the media in portraying some specific groups should not be regarded as entertainment, but it ought to be analyzed how the racial portrayals impact the youth. Therefore, this paper aims to discuss how popular culture has often reinforced ethnic and racial stereotypes among the people and how it affects society.

Prolonged television exposure has been associated with causing low self-esteem in African-American girls and boys. This is because they are portrayed in movies and television while boosting self-esteem among white boys because they are shown as bright. In Hollywood movies, white men are portrayed as courageous and heroes and represent the other races as villains and sexual properties. This tends to lower the self-esteem of the other races when they see how they are negatively portrayed.

Popular culture in Hollywood movies tends to portray and show images of the indigenous Americans as Mascots. Over the years, this has been linked to lower the self-esteem of Native American teenagers, and this negative portrayal has been said to be the one that is causing many suicides among them.

Racial images branded as part of the entertainment can cause biasness the way listeners perceive and categorize a particular group of people. Popular media portrays people of color as non-verbal characterizes and their facial expressions; body language depicts racial stereotypes among white people. Additionally, they exaggerate pre-existing racist fears making the whites to start viewing the Hispania's and people of color negatively.

Media also makes different races start having and formulating negative stereotypes about each other. The portrayal of Latin immigrants in Hollywood movies most makes people associate immigration with poverty, unemployment, and criminal activities.

Mainstream media, especially in the past, greatly portrayed racial stereotypes in the adverts, which led to public backlash, for example. An advert of Frito Bandito was one of the stereotypical adverts that ran on television across the United States. Frito Bandito was portrayed as speaking broken English and stealing from people. Frito was drawn as a Mexican cartoon man, and it targeted consumers to buy the Corn Fritos before Banito gets them, for he loves them. This was stereotyping the Mexican by being lazy and prefers to steal instead of working (Smithsonian American Art Museum 2).

Reality Television Shows

The growth of "reality television shows" had greatly popularized the popular culture images as mere factious but as actual factious. The primary stream media reinforcement of white supremacists and capitalist ideologies in news and entertainment shows makes a social control where people of color are negatively perceived, exemplifying racial and ethnic stereotype as poor and uneducated and that the best places where they can work best are in the field and industries to offer hard labor the way they used to do during slavery times and not in leadership positions or offices (Mari 5).

The rise of Western-style popular music has greatly been linked to the spread of cultural imperialism, modernization, Americanization, homogenization, and globalization. Hip pop music superstars’ portrayal of parting and drug usages such as smoking and drug usage tends to make African–Americans portrayed as drug dealers and criminals by the white people.

Media also promulgates other racial stereotypes among African –Americans and Latinos. The Latin women are portrayed as Sexualized maids; their men are portrayed as gardeners and alcoholics, African-American men are portrayed as gangsters and drug smugglers. On the other black women are perceived as prostitutes, and many other cultural stereotypes developed to show the Native Americans and Canadians (Mari 5). These stereotypes have greatly influenced some groups because the media has greatly transformed them and made those representations look as if they are real.

The Hispania’s who are also regarded as Latinos despite the majority of them being American citizens, the mainstream media keeps on advertising their expulsion and deportation from America's united states when they are either taken back to Mexico or other parts of Latin America (Mari 5). This act tends to be perceived by many people as economic and political instead of being viewed as a racial issue.

Negative Effects

The negative effects of these negative racial and ethnic stereotypes are that they tend to create the belief among the white supremacists that the Hispania and African-Americans cannot farm in the vast fertile fields and indulge in politics. But whites are the ones who are capable of exploiting the available resources (Mari 9).

There are many other effects of racial stereotyping in America and Canada. For example, the negative stereotyping of African-Americans and the Hispanians by the popular media makes them be given the least privileges in society. This means that the groups which feel as if they are superior want to control the minority groups and even unwelcome them in their social places. This has resulted in racial discrimination in government offices and even in private organizations. For example, whites are more likely to be recruited in job interviews than blacks and Latinos who are turned away or never called. The impact of controlling them is also experienced when Latinas go shopping in stores. They are highly monitored because of the negative stereotyping of perceiving them as lazy and not working and opting to steal. Additionally, every day, African–American men are victims of police brutality and are highly targeted because of the negative perception that they are gangsters and drug peddlers.

There are still other harms caused by popular media when it portrays other groups negatively. For example, African-American boys' and girls' morale is lowered when they see that their people are described as drug smugglers, sex workers, and gangs in video film fictions. This also applies to Hispania’s and Latin teenagers when they also see their people being portrayed as lazy and thieves, which leads to the majority of them.

Students who are treated unfairly in schools because of their race are more likely to fail and perform poorly in schools when they are compared to other students and hence limit their career progression in the future, therefore putting them in the margin of the community as less vulnerable to poverty and crime(Charles 4).

Conclusion

In summary, the media's popular culture has led to the creation of more divisions and racial stereotypes of the minority communities than the positive outcomes. This is because people consume what the media portrays and tend to believe it’s right. This is because the images displayed in the media have many cumulative effects on people, especially young people who spend a lot of their time watching entertainment segments.

Works Cited

Charles Crabtree, Black Americans are experiencing widespread discrimination in the United States, Dartmouth College 2020.

Human scope 62, 1970 Mel Casas Smithsonian American art museum, stereotypes, and popular culture.

Mari Castedia, The power of (MIS) Representation: Why Racial and Ethnic stereotypes in the media matter, 2018.University of Massachusetts Amherst
https://scholarworks.umass.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1059&context=communication_faculty_pubs

McGaha, Julie. "Popular Culture & Globalization". Multicultural Education 23.1 (2015): 32–37. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1090398.pdf

Per Adam Siljeström. The educational institutions of the United States, their character and organization, J. Chapman, 1853, p. 24

Manuel, P. "Pop. Non-Western cultures 1. Global dissemination", Grove Music Online, retrieved 14 March 2010. https://sites.google.com/site/jaimecancercom/pop.