Thinking Critically About Race Through Visual Media

Rationale

The above quote reflects the goal of this assignment: to examine how the process of socialization through the media and other sources influences our beliefs and values about many aspects of society, including about groups that are unlike our own cultural group. Sociology has given these processes much attention, especially as it examines how the media shape the nature of public information, images, and ideologies. If we examine how we learn about other groups or social phenomena, the result would likely include visual media. Indeed, studies confirm that most of us get our information about social phenomena from television and film.

In this assignment you are asked to examine the process that shapes our understanding of “the other” (groups perceived as culturally different from our own group). Since we are interested in the ways that perceptions are shaped in our society, we can examine how negative and positive representations of non-whites in U.S. television programming influence the nature of public debate. This will be a group project that your members will present in class during the last week of the term. The goal of this assignment is to [Page 156]increase our awareness of both the overt and more subtle, covert messages about race and ethnicity that are embedded in television programming and feature films.

The most damaging visual images and messages about various groups are those that are negative but appear “natural” and therefore go uncontested. For example, women and men in television commercials have highly gendered roles. Men are seen as mostly working outside the home and women inside. Men are rarely shown in domestic settings, that is, pushing a vacuum cleaner, changing babies' diapers, or serving food to their wives and children. If, indeed, fathers are shown feeding the family, the wife is absent and he is serving fast food or microwavable fare. Therefore, while such commercials are not explicitly about gender relations (they are selling products), their portrayal of women in the home and men in the public sector reinforces traditional gender divisions and sends very subtle messages about gender. Moreover, such commercials reinforce the “normality” of traditional gender roles by ignoring the role of women in the labor market and men's domestic labor, including care of their children.

Usually the visual media are not specifically about race, gender, or other forms of inequality. For example, if you were interested in identifying unspoken assumptions that reinforce gender inequality, a film like The Hours would not be a good choice of film to use in this exercise on gender because in it, gender and sexual identity are critiqued and are the main focus of the film. There are better examples of the subtle, covert messages about gender if you examine action or adventure movies because in these genres, gender inequality begins with “manly” men and supporting roles for women.

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