After watching the documentary last week, I realized that racism in the media has progressed, not extinguished. In Ethnic Notions, we see television displaying blatant racism without any worry because it was the norm. There were many examples of belittling, emasculation, minstrelsy (and on and on) that the modern audience is horrified by. This is because white Americans, as depicted in White Boy Shuffle, have gone through a phase of exaggerated color blindness. This made for a situation where people were pointedly displaying how they ostensibly did not care. On the outside, this may seem to be a positive development to avoid racist behavior, but it created a new dynamic of racism that is well depicted by Beatty. This translated to the media where everyone went out of their way to avoid the mention of race. However, this has progressed further as the colorblind behavior was found to not be the best solution to the problem as is evident from the description by Gunnar. Many people have identified the problems with a colorblind approach and have become increasingly paranoid about how to correctly approach the topic of race. This makes for many awkward conversations as people try not to ignore the issue but to find a politically correct way to say it. The documentary also points out how the portrayal of racism in the popular media can have an impressive impact on how the audience views the world and acts. Therefore, this obsession over not being offensive has spread to be a very pervasive issue, even when we do not think about it. In class, we often mention stand up comedy to illustrate our point so I wanted to throw in a very explicit example of this dynamic although it does not involve exclusively black racism. This is from popular 2014 tv series Silicon Valley. I thought of this scene when we watched the documentary and decided to investigate how what was depicted in the documentary related to modern television.
This is a very broad topic that I have only scraped the surface on. Any thoughts on our modern racism in the media?
I feel like it is a bit harder to spot modern racism in the media today, probably because it is more subtle. If any of the stuff that was being discussed in Ethnic Notions happened in the media today there would be outrage and major criticism. I think that one way that racism is depicted (again standup comedy comes to mind) is in people being racist or derogatory towards their own race. To some I guess it seems "okay" to make fun of that race because they are a part of it, so if anyone should be taking offense it should be them. But, in my opinion, this is still a form of racism. Maybe originally meant as a joke, this stuff still propagates derogatory stereotypes and depictions of people of a certain race or ethnicity.
ReplyDeleteI think this also gets into the minstrelsy dynamic, even though the one making the joke might be clever. They are still making a fool of their race/culture for the entertainment of others, which can be potentially damaging.
DeleteAs an aside to Neil's actual post (good job by the way), I think this discussion is relevant to the fairly new trend of hyper-politically correct people (especially on the internet) using their "knowledge" to condemn others and raise their social standing. As old issues fade, new ones rise up. Perhaps they are more irritating than actually infuriating though.
I definitely agree with Joaquin. Racism today is much more complex then it has been before. I do definitely agree with Joaquin that there is a very weird aspect to "racist comedy" that is against your own race, but I feel as though the race of the people in the audience matters too. This of course brings back the visions of minstrelsy that we've been talking about for the past while. The entire idea of idea of Jim Crow was a comedic black character, who through his actions was making black people look foolish and dumb. By doing this "Jim Crow" was bringing a largely if not exclusively white audience to laugh. This is could be seen as the same exact thing as what happens to many black comedians once they become more "mainstream" or gain a large contingent of white watchers. Then again, some of the situations that are racist are sometimes very funny, whether our consciousness makes us feel guilty for laughing at it or not, so we get back to that whole elisonian complex of "so what it's a stereotype if I like it" or "if it's funny".
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