While growing up I was (and till am) an avid TV show and movie watcher. While consuming media I would see that there was not much representation of minorities and when there were the characters were always stereotypical of the representation. I was confused as to why the media always seemed to highlight stereotypes that had negative undertones and or were making fun of the culture that they were trying to represent. Here we will take a look at how the media’s consistent perpetuation of stereotypes has been feeding into racial biases.
A while back I was watching a show called The Sopranos. This TV series was on air from 1999 till 2007. This show followed an Italian American family (the sopranos) who were involved with the mob. Many Italian Americans have expressed their concerns with the show stating that it is misrepresentation of their culture and has harmed their image. Back in 2001 the American Italian Defense Association sued Time Warner Entertainment CO. for the series due the stereotypes that perpetuated Italians as being born criminals and mobsters. The lawsuit was filed under the claim that the show violated the Illinois Constitution’s guarantee of individual dignity. This lawsuit goes to show that Italian Americans felt violated by the representation that they were getting from this television series. The fact is that they felt so violated they decided to take legal action against the program that made The Sopranos.
According to Emarketer in 2022 people spent a little over 13 hours daily consuming media. With this immense amount of media consumption the media has an influence on how we view the world. If we are constantly being fed an image of a marginalized group then we start to believe that it must be true, as that is what we are constantly seeing. In an online survey done back in March 2020 in the U.S. 58% of people believe that the media plays a very big role in reinforcing stereotypes.
We can also take a look at an experiment that was done on children with the popular TV show Sesame Street. Back in 1976 (Gorn and colleagues 1976, as cited in Scharrer, E. and Ramasubramanian, S. 2015) There was an experiment where they had two groups of children watch two different inserts of an episode of Sesame Street. One group was shown a clip that had multicultural inserts of children while the other group did not. The group of children that were exposed to the multicultural inserts were more willing and open to playing with non-white children as opposed to the other children who were not. This experiment is the perfect example of how biases can be made based on what we are exposed to in the media. The kids in this experiment were exposed to positive multicultural inserts so this made them willing to play with non-white children. If the kids were exposed to a negative multicultural insert their openness to play with non-white children would have changed. Going back to the show The Sopranos, if your only exposure to Italian American culture was that TV show and the only way that Italian Americans were depicted in the show were criminals and mob leaders then that is how you would think all Italian Americans were because that is all you have known them to be. If you were exposed to Italian Americans being family oriented and very caring of their neighbors then you would assume that is how all Italian Americans are. Once again we tend to make generalizations based on what we have been exposed to.
Some might argue that at least these marginalized groups are being represented in the media. To that I say let’s not compare apples to oranges. It’s one thing coming from a marginalized group and knowing that a character is from a culture that you are from and it’s another when that same character is now being portrayed in a negative manner because of stereotypes. It leaves a sour taste in your mouth being represented in this way. I would much rather know that there is a Latino character in a show because they said that they were Latino. Rather than having a character walk in with a sombrero, shaking maracas and being loud so that we as the audience can infer that they are Latino based on those stereotypes.
You may now be asking yourself “How do we fix this issue”. One solution to the problem is by having writers of the culture that you are trying to represent write the characters. I believe that if we want an accurate representation of a marginalized group and not make a mockery then we should have people from that group give their opinions.
All and all we have seen that a great number of the U.S population agrees that the media does play an important role in reinforcing stereotypes. We have also seen with the experiment that was conducted in 1976 that with positive exposure to multicultural inserts there have been positive outcomes with children wanting to play with non-white children. All of these examples reinforce that the media’s consistent perpetuation of stereotypes has been feeding into racial biases.
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