Over the past week, we watched a documentary called Color Adjustment (1991) directed by Marlon Riggs. This documentary analyzed racial relationships through television sitcoms, and how stereotypes and portrayals of African Americans are framed in the media. The documentary went further into discussing how certain stereotypical roles of African Americans influenced and imposed certain frames and ideas on its viewers. The film went back to tracing the beginning times when African Americans were integrated into roles on primetime sitcoms after WWII, and analyzed the way their role was framed. Many of the beginning roles were silent or very little spoken characters depicted as musicians, clowns, crooks, or maids to white authority. The film used Andis and Andy as one of their many examples. This was before the civil rights movement. Through the civil rights movement and beyond it, the roles of African Americans on television shifted somewhat, but it still pressed the boundaries of comfort with the white culture America was so profound of. As television became a more popular household item and family activity, white culture on television was depicted as pure, decent, and beautiful; the idea of African Americans playing this role at this time seemed very problematic.
America began to face the penalties of this racial suppression in their everyday lives, once the
civil rights movement had started. The first time in history, African Americans were being showed on the news, on the everyone's television leaving them a witness to their victimization. The brutality of reality was brought into peoples homes, and people began to side with them for their rights: whites and blacks. Because of this, the people who were against the idea, acted out in more brutality and backlash than ever before. Eventually African American gained equal rights after the civil rights movement; however, their portrayals on television sitcoms began to not only represent them equal in their commercial roles with the other characters on the show, but also depict them as being more "white" than before. A sitcom that trivialized this idea was Julia, where there was an African American main character, but she associated herself with mostly white individuals, and lived in a predominantly white neighborhood. This sitcom was a nice idea of hope for an American Dream, but it did not represent the reality of the hardships African Americans were still fighting to gain the resources to achieve. Many years later, The Cosby Show, had portrayed these same concepts of success, but incorporated a fully successful African American family, that associated with both white and colored people; therefore, more African Americans were featured in the sitcom. This did not change with the hardships of reality in attempt to gain equal resources to success levels so high. With that being said, The Cosby Show inspired hope for the American Dream.
Through the media stereotypes are imposed on the characters that portray anything but white, most of the time. Native Americans are portrayed as stoic and emotionless. Italians are portrayed as mobsters, brutality, silent yet have powerful social statuses. Polish are depicted as pollack, lack common sense, or stupid. Middle Easterns are depicted as dangerous, suicidal, and terrorists. Irish are short-tempered drunks, and violent. Mexicans are depicted as illegal immigrants, slave workers, gang members, or as a part of the drug cartel. Asians are depicted as kung-fu artists and great martial artists. Then going back to the documentary, African American have dad many stereotypes and myths imposed on their American identities through media. I could go on and on listing this list of imposed stereotypes the media structures around every full race that has a different heritage, religion, skin color, or origin, than the trivialized predominantly white American culture. This trend is nothing new, in fact, these stereotypes are embedded in the sole foundation of America and unfortunately its history, even before media. Media has just enforced these stereotypes to play off of people's levels of comfort and
make money off of it. It not only enforces these ideas, it spreads these preconceived ideas and judgements into the growing minds of future generations, not allowing the stereotypes to die off. I have included some pictures that enforce these stereotypes in today's mainstream media.
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