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AS Media Studies Study and Revision Guide

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AS Media Studies Study and Revision Guide

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This page explains the representation of all ethnicity in tv and film.

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This book explains all the representation of the Media that is broadcasted of African-Americans, this shows the effects of the stereotypes and really goes into detail about everything. (Google Books, 2017)

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This article shows the 5 most common roles that african american people play in films and tv shows. (ThoughtCo, 2017)

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Black people may be scoring more substantial parts in film and television, but many continue to play roles that fuel stereotypes, such as thugs and maids. The prevalence of these parts reveals the importance of #OscarsSoWhite and how Black people continue to struggle for quality roles on both the small and big screens, despite having won Academy Awards in acting, screenwriting, music production and other categories.

'The Magical Negro'

"Magical Negro" characters have long played key roles in films and television programs. These characters tend to be Black men with special powers who make appearances solely to help White characters out of crises, seemingly unconcerned about their own lives.

The late Michael Clarke Duncan famously played such a character in "The Green Mile." Moviefone wrote of Duncan's character, John Coffey:

"He's more an allegorical symbol than a person, his initials are J.C., he has miraculous healing powers, and he voluntarily submits to execution by the state as a way of doing penance for the sins of others. A 'Magical Negro' character is often the sign of lazy writing at best, or of patronizing cynicism at worst."

Magical Negroes are also problematic because they have no inner lives or desires of their own. Instead, they exist solely as a support system to the White characters, reinforcing the idea that Black people aren't as valuable or as human as their White counterparts. They don't require unique storylines of their own because their lives simply don't matter as much.

In addition to Duncan, Morgan Freeman has played in some of these roles, and Will Smith played a Magical Negro in "The Legend of Bagger Vance."

'The Black Best Friend'

Black Best Friends typically don't have special powers like Magical Negroes do, but they mainly function in films and television shows to guide White characters out of challenging circumstances. Usually a woman, the Black best friend functions "to support the heroine, often with sass, attitude and a keen insight into relationships and life," critic Greg Braxton noted in the Los Angeles Times.

Like Magical Negroes, Black best friends appear not to have much going on in their own lives but turn up at exactly the right moment to coach White characters through life. In the film "The Devil Wears Prada," for example, actress Tracie Thoms plays friend to star Anne Hathaway, reminding Hathaway's character that she's losing touch with her values. Also, actress Aisha Tyler played friend to Jennifer Love Hewitt on "The Ghost Whisperer," and Lisa Nicole Carson played friend to Calista Flockhart on "Ally McBeal."

Television executive Rose Catherine Pinkney told the Times that there is a long tradition of Black best friends in Hollywood. "Historically, people of color have had to play nurturing, rational caretakers of the White lead characters. And studios are just not willing to reverse that role."

There's no shortage of Black men playing drug dealers, pimps, con-artists and other forms of criminals in television shows and films such as "The Wire" and "Training Day." The disproportionate amount of Black people playing criminals in Hollywood fuels the racial stereotype that Black men are dangerous and drawn to illicit activities. Often these films and television shows provide little social context for why more Black men than others are likely to end up in the criminal justice system.

They overlook how racial and economic injustice makes it more difficult for young Black men to evade a prison term or how policies such as stop-and-frisk and racial profiling make Black men targets of the authorities. In addition, these productions fail to ask whether Black men are inherently more likely to be criminals than anyone else or if society plays a role in creating the cradle-to-prison pipeline for them.

'The Angry Black Woman'

Black women are routinely portrayed in television and film as sassy, neck-rolling harpies with major attitude problems. The popularity of reality television shows adds fuel to the fire of this stereotype. To ensure that programs such as "Basketball Wives" maintain plenty of drama, often the loudest and most aggressive Black women are featured on these shows.

Black women say these depictions have real-world consequences in their love lives and careers. When Bravo debuted the reality show "Married to Medicine" in 2013, Black female physicians unsuccessfully petitioned the network to pull the plug on the program.

"For the sake of integrity and character of black female physicians, we must ask that Bravo immediately remove and cancel 'Married to Medicine' from its channel, website, and any other media," the physicians demanded. "Black female physicians only compose 1 percent of the American workforce of physicians. Due to our small numbers, the depiction of black female doctors in media, on any scale, highly affects the public's view of the character of all future and current African American female doctors."

The show ultimately aired and Black women continue to complain that depictions of Black womanhood in the media fail to live up to reality.

'The Domestic'

Because Black people were forced into servitude for hundreds of years in the United States, it's no surprise that one of the earliest stereotypes about Black people to emerge in television and film is that of the domestic worker or mammy. Television shows and movies such as "Beulah" and "Gone With The Wind" capitalized on the mammy stereotype in the early 20th century. But more recently, movies such as "Driving Miss Daisy" and "The Help" have featured Black people as domestics.

While Latinxs are arguably the group most likely to be typecast as domestic workers today, the controversy over the portrayal of Black domestics in Hollywood hasn't gone away. The 2011 film "The Help" faced intense criticism because the Black maids helped to catapult the White protagonist to a new stage in life while their lives remained static. Like the Magical Negro and the Black Best Friend, Black domestics in film function mostly to nurture and guide White characters.

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The 5 Most Common Black Stereotypes in TV and Film

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This analysis of common ways Black people are typecast in film and TV reveals why stereotypical roles are detrimental to Black communities.

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This article solely focuses on the representation of Black women in tv shows and films and describes all the negative effects that it can have on the African American race. (Theroot.com, 2017)

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Viola Davis as Annalise Keating in How to Get Away With Murder
ABC screenshot

2016 started off great with lots of visible leading black women in television. In series including Empire, How to Get Away With Murder and Queen Sugar, black women continue to show that they can hold their own when it comes to leading a television series. But knowing that, I have to say something that I have felt since seeing the preview for Viola Davis' new film, Fences.

I truly believe that Hollywood hates black women.

My explanation? Well, in the words of Kel Mitchell, "Ah ... here it goes."

I remember earlier this year when Tajari P. Henson won a Golden Globe Award for her role as Cookie in Empire, and as she walked up to the stage, she calmly made a comment about her needing to play an ex-convict who sold crack in order to win the award. Hearing that comment, I started thinking, why is it that black women always have to play someone with a perceived negative identity-slave, housekeeper, a victim of domestic abuse, villain-in order for them to be recognized as great actresses?

Fall 2016 had its share of television shows starring black female characters. It can be said that Cookie is one of the most visible characters in black TV. Since the inception of the show, the character has continued to perpetuate the stereotype of what society believes black women to be.

You know what I mean: loud, vindictive, petty and always ready for some mess.

The same can be said about Davis' character on How to Get Away With Murder. Annalise Keating not only battles alcoholism but is also so vindictive that she is willing to kill someone to keep herself out of trouble with the law.

The most recent season of FX's American Horror Story: Roanoke was equally problematic, if not more so, when it comes to the portrayal of black female characters. Adina Porter's character, Lee Harris, in season 6 of AHS solidified my thoughts on why I believe that the media hates black women. From the beginning of the season, Porter's character was made out to be a pill-popping alcoholic who had anger-management issues. The show even went so far as validating her need to kill her husband so that she could have full custody of her daughter. Watching the show, I kept asking myself, "What are Ryan Murphy and these writers trying to say about black mothers and black women as a whole?"

It can also be said that Hollywood preys on the insecurities of black women, further pressing the idea that "not finding a good man" is the reason black women do not have successful relationships. This concept became popular years ago on scripted shows such as Girlfriends, on which Tracee Ellis Ross' character, Joan, spent most of the time depressed over not being able to find a good man.

Reality shows like Real Housewives of Atlanta perpetuate the negative stereotype of the angry black woman by featuring black women who are divorced, are going through a divorce, or can't seem to find or keep a man. To this viewer, the women's personas in many of these storylines exemplify elements of the angry black woman.

What's really sad is that this rhetoric, these stories, are not new.

We've seen the drugged-out mother storyline in Losing Isaiah and Moonlight. We saw Mo'Nique beat her daughter and throw a baby down the stairs in the film Precious, and Henson as a pregnant prostitute in Hustle & Flow. We saw a woman allow her children to die in For Colored Girls; and Octavia Spencer and Davis as domestics in The Help.

All of this raises the question: What does it say to us as a community that black male directors and writers participate in the creation of many of these storylines? When will sexism and misogyny be removed from such storylines?

As viewers, we must start demanding movies and television series that allow us to view black women in all their glory. I am all for art imitating life, but what about roles that represent and showcase positive characterizations of black women?

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Why Hollywood's Portrayal of Black Women Is Problematic

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2016 started off great with lots of visible leading black women in television. In series including Empire, How to Get Away With Murder and Queen Sugar, black women continue to show that they can hold their own when it comes to leading a television series.

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This video goes into the history of how African-Americans have been portrayed throughout the years. (YouTube, 2017)

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African American Stereotypes in the Media

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Race and Ethnicities. Consequences of racism.The historical transition of racial stereotypes towards African Americans/Black people in American media.

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The Guardian: This article in the guardian explains how hollywood films fail to portray the ethnic diversity in America. (Child, 2017)

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Hollywood is failing to adequately depict the increasing ethnic diversity of the US on the big screen, according to a new study. Latinos are the most under-represented, with African Americans also sparsely depicted, though the latter group is slowly gaining more screen time.

The report, carried out by the University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, studied the racial makeup of 3,932 speaking characters from the top grossing films at the US box office between 2007 and last year. In 2013 alone it found that just over a quarter of these parts were played by people from ethnic minorities, despite 37% of the US population hailing from these groups. A staggering 74% of the total characters across six years were white. Latinos, who comprise 16.3% of the US population and are regular filmgoers - they buy 25% of all movie tickets - only made up 4.9% of characters.

Despite a sense that more movies about the African American experience, such as the Oscar-winning race drama 12 Years a Slave and political biopic The Butler, are hitting the big screen and doing well at the box office, the study found the number of people from non-white backgrounds did not radically improve between 2007 and 2013. There were no African American speaking characters in 17% of the studied films, despite black people making up 12.6% of the US population.

"The voices heralding that 2013 was a banner year for black characters in film must be thinking of a few salient examples," report author Dr Stacy L Smith told Variety. "In reality, we saw no meaningful difference in the representation of characters from underrepresented backgrounds across the six years we studied."

The study also examined the likelihood of women from different racial backgrounds to be depicted in a stereotypically "sexy" way on screen, whether wearing skimpy clothing or being noted by other characters as attractive. It found that 36.1% of Latina characters were shown in sexualised attire, ahead of 32.2% of white women and 24.6% of African American women. Hispanic people were also more likely to be shown with exposed skin, though white characters were more likely to be noted as attractive.

Black women were the least likely group to find their way behind the cameras. The study found that in five out of the six years studied, there were no female African American directors in charge of any of the top-grossing films. In 2008, black women directed just 1.8% of top movies.
* Gender bias in the film industry: 75% of blockbuster crews are male
* BFI sets diversity rules for access to lottery funding

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Hollywood fails to represent US ethnic diversity, says study

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Hollywood is failing to adequately depict the increasing ethnic diversity of the US on the big screen, according to a new study. Latinos are the most under-represented, with African Americans also sparsely depicted, though the latter group is slowly gaining more screen time.

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This video gathers a few people from an American College and gets their opinion on how they think that African-Americans are represented in the Media. (YouTube, 2017)

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portrayal of african americans in television and film

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The Portrayal of African Americans in Television and Film

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This documentary delves into the multifaceted representation of African Americans in television and film - Justin Marshall

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This article explains and supports the theory of the "other" or "otherness". This is relevant because African-American are part of that theory. (The Other Sociologist, 2017)

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This page provides a sociological definition of otherness and how it works in societies. I will also include examples and resources for people interested in learning more about otherness. I will add to this page over time.

The idea of ' otherness ' is central to sociological analyses of how majority and minority identities are constructed. This is because the representation of different groups within any given society is controlled by groups that have greater political power. In order to understand the notion of The Other, sociologists first seek to put a critical spotlight on the ways in which social identities are constructed. Identities are often thought as being natural or innate - something that we are born with - but sociologists highlight that this taken-for-granted view is not true.

Rather than talking about the individual characteristics or personalities of different individuals, which is generally the focus for psychology, sociologists focus on social identities. Social identities reflect the way individuals and groups internalise established social categories within their societies, such as their cultural (or ethnic) identities, gender identities, class identities, and so on. These social categories shape our ideas about who we think we are, how we want to be seen by others, and the groups to which we belong.

George Herbert Mead's classic text, Mind Self and Society, established that social identities are created through our ongoing social interaction with other people and our subsequent self-reflection about who we think we are according to these social exchanges. Mead's work shows that identities are produced through agreement, disagreement, and negotiation with other people. We adjust our behaviour and our self-image based upon our interactions and our self-reflection about these interactions (this is also known as the looking glass self).

Ideas of similarity and difference are central to the way in which we achieve a sense of identity and social belonging. Identities have some element of exclusivity. Just as when we formally join a club or an organisation, social membership depends upon fulfilling a set of criteria. It just so happens that such criteria are socially-constructed (that is, created by societies and social groups). As such 'we' cannot belong to any group unless 'they' (other people) do not belong to 'our' group. Sociologists set out to study how societies manage collective ideas about who gets to belong to 'our group' and which types of people are seen as different - the outsiders of society.

Zygmunt Bauman writes that the notion of otherness is central to the way in which societies establish identity categories. He argues that identities are set up as dichotomies:

Woman is the other of man, animal is the other of human, stranger is the other of native, abnormality the other of norm, deviation the other of law-abiding, illness the other of health, insanity the other of reason, lay public the other of the expert, foreigner the other of state subject, enemy the other of friend (Bauman 1991: 8).

The concept of The Other highlights how many societies create a sense of belonging, identity and social status by constructing social categories as binary opposites. This is clear in the social construction of gender in Western societies, or how socialisation shapes our ideas about what it means to be a "man" or a "woman." There is an inherently unequal relationship between these two categories. Note that these two identities are set up as opposites, without acknowledging alternative gender expressions. In the early 1950s, Simone de Beauvoir argued that

Otherness is a fundamental category of human thought. Thus it is that no group ever sets itself up as the One without at once setting up the Other over against itself.

de Beauvoir argued that woman is set up as the Other of man. Masculinity is therefore socially constructed as the universal norm by which social ideas about humanity are defined, discussed and legislated against.

Dichotomies of otherness are set up as being natural and so often times in everyday life they are taken for granted and presumed to be natural. But social identities are not natural - they represent an established social order - a hierarchy where certain groups are established as being superior to other groups. Individuals have the choice (or agency) to create their identities according to their own beliefs about the world. Yet the negotiation of identity equally depends upon the negotiation of power relationships. As Andrew Okolie puts it:

Social identities are relational; groups typically define themselves in relation to others. This is because identity has little meaning without the "other". So, by defining itself a group defines others. Identity is rarely claimed or assigned for its own sake. These definitions of self and others have purposes and consequences. They are tied to rewards and punishment, which may be material or symbolic. There is usually an expectation of gain or loss as a consequence of identity claims. This is why identities are contested. Power is implicated here, and because groups do not have equal powers to define both self and the other, the consequences reflect these power differentials. Often notions of superiority and inferiority are embedded in particular identities (2003: 2).

Social institutions such as the law, the media, education, religion and so on hold the balance of power through their representation of what is accepted as "normal" and what is considered Other. British sociologist Stuart Hall argues that visual representations of otherness hold special cultural authority. In Western countries with a colonial history, like the UK, Australia and the USA, whether difference is portrayed positively or negatively is judged against the dominant group - namely White, middle-to-upper class, heterosexual Christians, with cis-men being the default to which Others are judged against.
https://www.instagram.com/p/thePWOG-0E/
The notion of otherness is used by sociologists to highlight how social identities are contested. We also use this concept to break down the ideologies and resources that groups use to maintain their social identities. Sociologists are therefore interested in the ways in which notions of otherness are managed in society. For example, we study how some groups become stigmatised as outsiders, and how such ideas change over time. As Dutch-American sociologist Philomena Essed argues, the power of othering includes opting out of "seeing" or responding to racism.

This article was first published on 14 October 2011 and it is a living document, meaning that I will add to it over time.

Here are some of the texts that have influenced my understanding of otherness. Although the concept of "otherness" may not be specifically referenced in these studies, and some of these works cut across several fields of otherness, these authors make an important contribution to the sociology of minority groups. These texts speak to the historical, cultural and discursive processes through which The Other is constructed in Western contexts. The Other is set up against the hegemonic "universal human being" - that is, white, middle class, heterosexual, able-bodied cis-men.

Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex. (France)

Floya Anthias and Nira Yuval-Davis, Racialised Boundaries: Race, Nation, Gender, Colour and Class and the Anti-Racist Struggle. (UK)

bell hooks, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Centre. (USA)

bell hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation. (USA)

Gill Bottomley, Marie De Lepervanche, Jeannie Martin (Eds), Intersexions: Gender/Class/Culture/Ethnicity. (Australia)

https://twitter.com/OtherSociology/status/469434749099184128 https://twitter.com/OtherSociology/status/139103144083853312 https://twitter.com/OtherSociology/status/277925022662799360 https://twitter.com/OtherSociology/status/449710998140624896 https://twitter.com/OtherSociology/status/480102594300620800 https://twitter.com/OtherSociology/status/571184669510795264 https://twitter.com/OtherSociology/status/851248265399943168
To cite this article:

Zevallos, Z. (2011) 'What is Otherness?,' The Other Sociologist, 14 October. Online resource: https://othersociologist.com/otherness-resources/

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This page provides a sociological definition of otherness and how it works in societies. I will also include examples and resources for people interested in learning more about otherness. I will add to this page over time. Defining Otherness The idea of 'otherness' is central to sociological analyses of how majority and minority identities are constructed....

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This video shows the negative effect that it has on the african american community as a whole when they are portrayed poorly in the media. (Youtube, 2017)

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The Roots of Negative Stereotypes I American Graduate (Long version)

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This powerful illustrated essay shows how history and negative stereotypes have contributed to the belief gap which affects African American youth today.

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This article shows that it isn't only african american that face negative stereotypes on TV and Film, matter of fact all races face the stereotypes. (ThoughtCo, 2017)

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Campaigns such as #OscarsSoWhite have raised awareness about the need for more racial diversity in Hollywood, but diversity isn't the industry's only problem-the way that people of color are persistently stereotyped on screen remains a major concern.

Too often, actors from minority groups who land roles in films and TV shows are asked to play stock characters, including maids, thugs, and sidekicks with no lives of their own. These racial stereotypes of various ethnicities, from Arabs to Asians, continue to persist.

Americans of Arab and Middle Eastern heritage have long faced stereotypes in Hollywood. In classic cinema, Arabs were often depicted as belly dancers, harem girls, and oil sheiks. Old stereotypes about Arabs continue to upset the Middle Eastern community in the U.S.

A Coca-Cola commercial that aired during the 2013 Super Bowl featured Arabs riding on camels through the desert in hopes of beating rival groups to a bottle of giant Coke. This led Arab American advocacy groups to accuse the ad of stereotyping Arabs as "camel jockeys."

In addition to this stereotype, Arabs have been depicted as anti-American villains well before the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The 1994 film "True Lies" featured Arabs as terrorists, leading to protests of the movie by Arab groups nationwide at the time.

Movies such as Disney's 1992 hit "Aladdin" also faced protests from Arab groups who said the film depicted Middle Easterners as barbaric and backward.

Indigenous peoples are a diverse racial group with a range of customs and cultural experiences. In Hollywood, however, they are typically subject to sweeping generalizations.

When they aren't being depicted as silent, stoic types in film and television shows, they're seen as bloodthirsty warriors who are violent toward White people. When Indigenous peoples are characterized more favorably, it's still through a stereotypical lens, such as medicine men who guide White people through difficulties.

Indigenous women are also depicted one-dimensionally-as beautiful maidens, princesses, or "squaws." These narrow Hollywood stereotypes have made Indigenous women vulnerable to sexual harassment and sexual assault in real life, feminist groups argue.

Black people face both positive and negative stereotypes in Hollywood. When Black people are portrayed as good on the silver screen, it's usually as a "Magical Negro" type like Michael Clarke Duncan's character in "The Green Mile." Such characters are typically wise Black men with no concerns of their own or desire to improve their status in life. Instead, these characters function to help White characters overcome adversity.

The mammy and Black best friend stereotypes are similar to the "Magical Negro." Mammies traditionally took care of White families, valuing the lives of their White employers (or owners during enslavement) more than their own. The number of television programs and films featuring Black women as selfless maids perpetuates this stereotype.

While the Black best friend isn't a maid or nanny, they mostly function to help their White friend, normally the protagonist of the show, transcend difficult circumstances. These stereotypes are arguably as positive as it gets for Black characters in Hollywood.

When Black people aren't playing second fiddle to White people as maids, best friends, and "Magical Negroes," they're depicted as thugs, victims of racial violence, or women with attitude problems.

Latinos may be the largest minority group in the United States, but Hollywood has consistently portrayed Hispanics very narrowly. Viewers of American television shows and films, for example, are far more likely to see Latinos play maids and gardeners than lawyers and doctors.

Furthermore, Hispanic men and women have both been sexualized in Hollywood. Latino men have long been stereotyped as "Latin Lovers," while Latinas have been characterized as exotic, sensual vamps.

Both the male and female version of the "Latin Lover" are framed as having fiery temperaments. When these stereotypes aren't at play, Hispanics are portrayed as recent immigrants, gang-bangers, and criminals.

Like Latinos and Arab Americans, Asian Americans have frequently portrayed foreigners in Hollywood films and television shows. Though Asian Americans have lived in the U.S. for generations, there is no shortage of Asians speaking broken English and practicing "mysterious" customs on both the small and big screens. In addition, stereotypes of Asian Americans are gender-specific.

Asian women are often portrayed as "dragon ladies," domineering women who are sexually attractive but bad news for the White men who fall for them. In war films, Asian women are most often portrayed as prostitutes or other sex workers.

Asian American men, meanwhile, are consistently depicted as geeks, math whizzes, techies, and a host of other characters viewed as non-masculine. About the only time Asian men are portrayed as physically threatening is when they're depicted as martial artists.

But Asian actors say the kung fu stereotype has hurt them also. That's because after it rose in popularity, all Asian actors were expected to follow in Bruce Lee's footsteps.

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Persistent Racial Stereotypes in TV Shows and Movies

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Campaigns such as #OscarsSoWhite have raised awareness about the need for more racial diversity in Hollywood, but diversity isn't the industry's only problem-the way that people of color are persistently stereotyped on screen remains a major concern.

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This movie is set in the poverty consumes part of New York (Harlem). This movie shows the peer pressure faced in the "hood" that the young black men have to face everyday. Stereotypes of African Americans are heavily broadcasted in this film.

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Comedy film set in another "hood" area. Even though the film is all for comedy purposes you can see the amount of stereotypes of African-Americans actually exist.

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This film is set in a central city where gun crime and murder is very high. A child faces peer pressure to join a gang, this shows the representation of all young african american boys to join a gang when they come to a certain age.

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This blog speaks about the limited roles that African americans can play when they are actually in films and tv shows. (HuffPost, 2017)

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Regardless of whether they believe in them or not, most people in U.S. society are well aware of the many visceral stereotypes and images surrounding black males. These negative representations of black males are readily visible and conveyed to the public through the news, film, music videos, reality television and other programming and forms of media. The typical roles are all too often the black sidekick of a white protagonist, for example, the token black person, the comedic relief, the athlete, the over-sexed ladies' man, the absentee father or, most damaging, the violent black man as drug-dealing criminal and gangster thug.

These stereotypical, one-dimensional characters in film negate the broader and deeper experience of black life and the lives of black men in particular. Reaching into people's homes through the media, these negative images influence personal opinions, ideas and racial attitudes. Once these representations of blackness become familiar and accepted, they fuel misperceptions and perpetuate misunderstandings among the "races." Indeed, negative understandings of black males are consistently used to justify the racial inequities they encounter in a number of institutions, seen in the form of inflated rates of school discipline, underachievement in higher education, and higher rates of poverty, homicide, unemployment, and over involvement in the criminal system.

Capturing our imagination as a society, film exemplifies how media images provide us with a manufactured reality of misrepresentations that guides societal perceptions of black men, whether real or imagined. Take the 2001 film Training Day, for example. Denzel Washington's role as Alonzo Harris provides one of the most enduring and threatening depictions of black men as violent criminals. The criminal mindedness of Washington's character is underscored by the contrast to his white partner, Ethan Hawke, who plays the role of good cop and a morally righteous man.

Will Smith, in successfully becoming one of film's leading men, has strategically flipped Hollywood's stereotypical notions of blacks as always violent and criminal. He is often seen starring as a protagonist fighting the good fight rather than the criminal to be apprehended. Although applauded for seeking and earning leading male roles in Hollywood, his often heroic and hyper-masculine characters play into the theme of protecting whiteness and its virtuous sub-themes of justice and freedom such as in the films Independence Day and I Am Legend. In fact, in extreme attempts to avoid the villain prototype, Smith frequently plays the role of the "magic negro" archetype in the films The Legend of Bagger Vance and Hitch, for example, where his efforts to save and teach whites about what it means to be good facilitates a mystical theme in the minds of many white people about the supernatural powers of a few exceptional blacks, among a people perceived as being closer to nature.

Popular media has a similar effect on white consciousness as film. News, written and conveyed by purportedly unbiased and objective journalist, are nevertheless, highly influenced by negative images of black folk in the selected news stories. Pictures of black men that flash on the screen leave an indelible image that anyone, with the exception of somebody white, is guilty.

Additionally, most popular shows or cinematic themes of American life reflect the interest of white people with strong white themes and often very little representation of difference with respects to writing and casting. Based on past and current Nielsen ratings, the most popular shows consist of the likes of NCIS, The Big Bang Theory, CSI, Friends, 2 Broke Girls and Seinfeld.

This is not to say that some African Americans don't participate in their own marginalization, from music videos and reality TV to roles on the big screen. Yet, for most black actors, the parts they are offered leave them with limited options. Conventionally, white screenwriters, who view the world through the prism of a white lens, write about subject matters that reflect their own narrow experiences living and existing in a highly racialized society. As a result, the predominately white film industry (from producers to screenwriters to directors), in the market of pleasing their predominately white consumer base, lacks diversity in the depth of their characters. Unfortunately, images and words wound and are difficult to erase from the mind.

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Regardless of whether they believe in them or not, most people in U.S. society are well aware of the many visceral stereotypes and images surrounding black males. These negative representations of black males are readily visible and conveyed to the public through the news, film, music videos, reality television and other programming and forms of media.

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This article goes into a little bit more depth about the theory of "the other" and explains the origin of it. (En.wikipedia.org, 2017)

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The founder of phenomenology, Edmund Husserl, identified the Other as one of the conceptual bases of intersubjectivity, of the relations among people.

Other is a term used to define another person or people as separate from oneself. In phenomenology, the terms the Other and the Constitutive Other distinguish other people from the Self, as a cumulative, constituting factor in the self-image of a person; as acknowledgement of being real; hence, the Other is dissimilar to and the opposite of the Self, of Us, and of the Same. The Constitutive Other is the relation between the personality (essential nature) and the person (body) of a human being; the relation of essential and superficial characteristics of personal identity that corresponds to the relationship between opposite, but correlative, characteristics of the Self, because the difference is inner-difference, within the Self.

The condition and quality of Otherness (the characteristics of the Other) is the state of being different from and alien to the social identity of a person and to the identity of the Self. In the discourse of philosophy, the term Otherness identifies and refers to the characteristics of Who? and What? of the Other, which are distinct and separate from the Symbolic order of things; from the Real (the authentic and unchangeable); from the æsthetic ( art, beauty, taste); from political philosophy; from social norms and social identity; and from the Self. Therefore, the condition of Otherness is a person's non-conformity to and with the social norms of society; and Otherness is the condition of disenfranchisement (political exclusion), effected either by the State or by the social institutions (e.g., the professions) invested with the corresponding socio-political power. Therefore, the imposition of Otherness alienates the person labelled as "the Other" from the centre of society, and places him or her at the margins of society, for being the Other.

The term Othering describes the reductive action of labelling and defining a person as a subaltern native, as someone who belongs to the socially subordinate category of the Other. The practice of Othering excludes persons who do not fit the norm of the social group, which is a version of the Self; likewise, in human geography, the practice of othering persons means to exclude and displace them from the social group to the margins of society, where mainstream social norms do not apply to them, for being the Other.

The idealist philosopher G. W. F. Hegel introduced the concept of the Other as constituent part of human preoccupation with the Self.

John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) introduced the idea of the in 1865 in An Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy, the first formulation of the other after René Descartes (1596-1650).

The concept of the Self requires the existence of the constitutive Other as the counterpart entity required for defining the Self; in the late 18th century, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) introduced the concept of the Other as a constituent part of self-consciousness (preoccupation with the Self), which complements the propositions about self-awareness (capacity for introspection) proffered by Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814).

Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) applied the concept of the Other as the basis for intersubjectivity, the psychological relations among people. In Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology (1931), Husserl said that the Other is constituted as an alter ego, as an other self. As such, the Other person posed and was an epistemological problem-of being only a perception of the consciousness of the Self.

In Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology (1943), Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) applied the dialectic of intersubjectivity to describe how the world is altered by the appearance of the Other, of how the world then appears to be oriented to the Other person, and not to the Self. The Other appears as a psychological phenomenon in the course of a person's life, and not as a radical threat to the existence of the Self. In that mode, in The Second Sex (1949), Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986) applied the concept of Otherness to Hegel's dialectic of the " Lord and Bondsman" ( Herrschaft und Knechtschaft, 1807) and found it to be like the dialectic of the Man-Woman relationship, thus a true explanation for society's treatment and mistreatment of women.

The psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan (1901-1981) and the philosopher of ethics Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995) established the contemporary definitions, usages, and applications of the constitutive Other, as the radical counterpart of the Self. Lacan associated the Other with language and with the symbolic order of things. Levinas associated the Other with the ethical metaphysics of scripture and tradition; the ethical proposition is that the Other is superior and prior to the Self.

In the event, Levinas re-formulated the face-to-face encounter (wherein a person is morally responsible to the Other person) to include the propositions of Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) about the impossibility of the Other (person) being an entirely metaphysical pure-presence. That the Other could be an entity of pure Otherness (of alterity) personified in a representation created and depicted with language that identifies, describes, and classifies. The conceptual re-formulation of the nature of the Other also included Levinas's analysis of the distinction between " the saying and the said"; nonetheless, the nature of the Other retained the priority of ethics over metaphysics.

In the psychology of the mind (e.g. R. D. Laing), the Other identifies and refers to the unconscious mind, to silence, to insanity, and to language ("to what is referred and to what is unsaid"). Nonetheless, in such psychologic and analytic usages, there might arise a tendency to relativism if the Other person (as a being of pure, abstract alterity) leads to ignoring the commonality of truth. Likewise, problems arise from unethical usages of the terms The Other, Otherness, and Othering to reinforce ontological divisions of reality: of being, of becoming, and of existence.

The philosopher of ethics Emmanuel Lévinas said that the infinite demand the Other places on the Self makes ethics the foundation of human existence and philosophy.

In Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority (1961), Emmanuel Lévinas said that previous philosophy had reduced the constitutive Other to an object of consciousness, by not preserving its absolute - the innate condition of otherness, by which the Other radically transcends the Self and the totality of the human network, into which the Other is being placed. As a challenge to self-assurance, the existence of the Other is a matter of ethics, because the ethical priority of the Other equals the primacy of ethics over ontology in real life.

From that perspective, Lévinas described the nature of the Other as "insomnia and wakefulness"; an ecstasy (an exteriority) towards the Other that forever remains beyond any attempt at fully capturing the Other, whose Otherness is infinite; even in the murder of an Other, the Otherness of the person remains uncontrolled and not negated. The infinity of the Other allowed Lévinas to derive other aspects of philosophy and science as secondary to that ethic; thus:

The others that obsess me in the Other do not affect me as examples of the same genus united with my neighbor, by resemblance or common nature, individuations of the human race, or chips off the old block. . . . The others concern me from the first. Here, fraternity precedes the commonness of a genus. My relationship with the Other as neighbor gives meaning to my relations with all the others. - Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence

Jacques Derrida said that the absolute of the Other is compromised, because the Other person is other than the Self and the group. The logic of alterity (otherness) is especially negative in the realm of human geography, wherein the native Other is denied ethical priority as a person with the right to participate in the geopolitical discourse with an empire who decides the colonial fate of the homeland of the Other. In that vein, the language of Otherness used in Oriental Studies perpetuates the cultural perspective of the dominantor-dominated relation, which is characteristic of hegemony; likewise, the sociologic misrepresentation of the feminine as the sexual Other to man reasserts male privilege as the primary voice in social discourse between women and men.

In The Colonial Present: Afghanistan, Palestine and Iraq (2004), the geographer Derek Gregory said that the US government's ideologic answers to questions about reasons for the terrorist attacks against the U.S. (i.e. 11 September 2001) reinforced the imperial purpose of the negative representations of the Middle-Eastern Other; especially when President G. W. Bush (2001-2009) rhetorically asked: "Why do they hate us?" as political prelude to the War on Terror (2001). Bush's rhetorical interrogation of armed resistance to empire, by the non-Western Other, produced an Us-and-Them mentality in American relations with the non-white peoples of the Middle East; hence, as foreign policy, the War on Terror is fought for control of imaginary geographies, which originated from the fetishised cultural representations of the Other invented by Orientalists; the cultural critic Edward Saïd said that:

To build a conceptual framework around a notion of Us-versus-Them is, in effect, to pretend that the principal consideration is epistemological and natural-our civilization is known and accepted, theirs is different and strange-whereas, in fact, the framework separating us from them is belligerent, constructed, and situational.

- The Colonial Present: Afghanistan, Palestine and Iraq (2004), p. 24.

The contemporary, post-colonial world system of nation-states (with interdependent politics and economies) was preceded by the European imperial system of economic and settler colonies in which "the creation and maintenance of an unequal economic, cultural, and territorial relationship, usually between states, and often in the form of an empire, [was] based on domination and subordination." In the imperialist world system, political and economic affairs were fragmented, and the discrete empires "provided for most of their own needs ... [and disseminated] their influence solely through conquest [empire] or the threat of conquest [hegemony]."

A manifestation of the Other in the form of scientific racism: In this 1857 illustration from his work Indigenous Races of the Earth, anthropologist Josiah C. Nott justified anti-Black racism by claiming that the features of African-Americans had more in common with chimpanzees than humans in comparison to white people.

The racialist perspective of the Western world during the 18th and 19th centuries was invented with the Othering of non-white peoples, which also was supported with the fabrications of scientific racism, such as the pseudo-science of phrenology, which claimed that, in relation to a white-man's head, the head-size of the non-European Other indicated inferior intelligence; e.g. the apartheid-era cultural representations of coloured people in South Africa (1948-94).

Consequent to the Holocaust (1941-1945), with documents such as The Race Question (1950) and the Declaration on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (1963), the United Nations officially declared that racial differences are insignificant to anthropological likeness among human beings. Despite the United Nations' factual dismissal of racialism, institutional Othering in the United States produces the cultural misrepresentation of political refugees as illegal immigrants (from overseas) and of immigrants as illegal aliens (usually from México).

To European peoples, imperialism (military conquest of non-white peoples, annexation, and economic integration of their countries to the motherland) was intellectually justified by (among other reasons) orientalism, the study and fetishization of the Eastern world as "primitive peoples" requiring modernisation the civilising mission. Colonial empires were justified and realised with essentialist and reductive representations (of people, places and cultures) in books and pictures and fashion, which conflated different cultures and peoples into the binary relation of The Orient and The Occident. Orientalism created the artificial existence of the Western Self and the non-western Other. Orientalists rationalised the cultural artifice of a difference of essence between white and non-white peoples to fetishize (identify, classify, subordinate) the peoples and cultures of Asia into "the Oriental Other" - who exists in opposition to the Western Self. As a function of imperial ideology, Orientalism fetishizes people and things in three actions of cultural imperialism: (i) Homogenization (all Oriental peoples are one folk); (ii) Feminization (the Oriental always is subordinate in the East-West relation); and (iii) Essentialization (a people possess universal characteristics); thus established by Othering, the empire's cultural hegemony reduces to inferiority the people, places, and things of the Eastern world, as measured against the West, the standard of superior civilisation.

The subaltern native is a colonial identity for the Other, which conceptually derives from the Cultural hegemony work of Antonio Gramsci, an Italian Marxist intellectual.

Colonial stability requires the cultural subordination of the non-white Other for transformation into the subaltern native; a colonised people who facilitate the exploitation of their labour, of their lands, and of the natural resources of their country. The practise of Othering justifies the physical domination and cultural subordination of the native people by degrading them - first from being a national-citizen to being a colonial-subject - and then by displacing them to the periphery of the colony, and of geopolitical enterprise that is imperialism.

Using the false dichotomy of "colonial strength" (imperial power) against "native weakness" (military, social, and economic), the coloniser invents the non-white Other in an artificial dominator-dominated relationship that can be resolved only through racialist noblesse oblige, the "moral responsibility" that psychologically allows the colonialist Self to believe that imperialism is a civilising mission to educate, convert, and then culturally assimilate the Other into the empire - thus transforming the "civilised" Other into the Self.

In establishing a colony, Othering a non-white people allowed the colonisers to physically subdue and "civilise" the natives to establish the hierarchies of domination (political and social) required for exploiting the subordinated natives and their country. As a function of empire, a settler colony is an economic means for profitably disposing of two demographic groups: (i) the colonists (surplus population of the motherland) and (ii) the colonised (the subaltern native to be exploited) who antagonistically define and represent the Other as separate and apart from the colonial Self.

Othering establishes unequal relationships of power between the colonised natives and the colonisers, who believe themselves essentially superior to the natives whom they othered into racial inferiority, as the non-white Other. That dehumanisation maintains the false binary-relations of social class, caste, and race, of sex and gender, and of nation and religion. The profitable functioning of a colony (economic or settler) requires continual protection of the cultural demarcations that are basic to the unequal socio-economic relation between the "civilised man" (the colonist) and the "savage man", thus the transformation of the Other into the colonial subaltern.

The social exclusion function of Othering a person or a social group from mainstream society to the social margins - for being essentially different from the societal norm (the plural Self) - is a socio-economic function of gender. In a society wherein man-woman heterosexuality is the sexual norm, the Other refers to and identifies lesbians (women who love women) and gays (men who love men) as people of same-sex orientation whom society has othered as "sexually deviant" from the norms of binary-gender heterosexuality. In practise, sexual Othering is realised by applying the negative denotations and connotations of the terms that describe lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people, in order to diminish their personal social status and political power, and so displace their LGBT communities to the legal margin of society. To neutralise such cultural Othering, LGBT communities queer a city by creating social spaces that use the spatial and temporal plans of the city to allow the LGBT communities free expression of their social identities, e.g. a boystown, a gay-pride parade, etc.; as such, queering urban spaces is a political means for the non-binary sexual Other to establish themselves as citizens integral to the reality (cultural and socio-economic) of their city's body politic.

The philosopher of existentialism Simone de Beauvoir developed the concept of The Other to explain the workings of the Man-Woman binary gender relation, as a critical base of the Dominator-Dominated relation, which characterises sexual inequality between men and women.

The philosopher of feminism, Cheshire Calhoun identified the female Other as the female-half of the binary-gender relation that is the Man and Woman relation. The deconstruction of the word Woman (the subordinate party in the Man and Woman relation) produced a conceptual reconstruction of the female Other as the Woman who exists independently of male definition, as rationalised by patriarchy. That the female Other is a self-aware Woman who is autonomous and independent of the patriarchy's formal subordination of the female sex with the institutional limitations of social convention, tradition, and customary law; the social subordination of women is communicated (denoted and connoted) in the sexist usages of the word Woman.

In 1949, the philosopher of existentialism, Simone de Beauvoir applied Hegel's conception of "the Other" (as a constituent part of Self-awareness) to describe a male-dominated culture that represents Woman as the sexual Other to Man. In a patriarchal culture, the Man-Woman relation is society's normative binary-gender relation, wherein the sexual Other is a social minority with the least socio-political agency, usually the women of the community, because patriarchal semantics established that "a man represents both the positive and the neutral, as indicated by the common use of [the word] Man to designate human beings in general; whereas [the word] Woman represents only the negative, defined by limiting criteria, without reciprocity" from the first sex, from Man.

In 1957, Betty Friedan reported that a woman's social identity is formally established by the sexual politics of the Ordinate-Subordinate nature of the Man-Woman sexual relation, the social norm in the patriarchal West. When queried about their post-graduate lives, the majority of women interviewed at a university-class reunion, used binary gender language, and referred to and identified themselves by their social roles (wife, mother, lover) in the private sphere of life; and did not identify themselves by their own achievements (job, career, business) in the public sphere of life. Unawares, the women had acted conventionally, and automatically identified and referred to themselves as the social Other to men.

Although the nature of the social Other is influenced by the society's social constructs ( social class, sex, gender), as a human organisation, society holds the socio-political power to formally change the social relation between the male-defined Self and Woman, the sexual Other, who is not male.

In feminist definition, women are the Other to men (but not the Other proposed by Hegel) and are not existentially defined by masculine demands; and also are the social Other who unknowingly accepts social subjugation as part of subjectivity, because the gender identity of woman is constitutionally different from the gender identity of man. The harm of Othering is in the asymmetric nature of unequal roles in sexual and gender relations; the inequality arises from the social mechanics of intersubjectivity.

About the production of knowledge of the Other who is not the Self, the philosopher Michel Foucault said that Othering is the creation and maintenance of imaginary "knowledge of the Other" - which comprises cultural representations in service to socio-political power and the establishment of hierarchies of domination. That cultural representations of the Other (as a metaphor, as a metonym, and as an anthropomorphism) are manifestations of the xenophobia inherent to the European historiographies that defined and labelled non-European peoples as the Other who is not the European Self. Supported by the reductive discourses (academic and commercial, geopolitical and military) of the empire's dominant ideology, the colonialist misrepresentations of the Other explain the Eastern world to the Western world as a binary relation of native weakness against colonial strength.

The non-white Other: The racist caricature The Yellow Terror in all His Glory (1899) is a British newspaper cartoon that depicts an armed Chinese man with a gun in hand and a knife clenched between his teeth, whilst astride a dead white woman. The caricature is Yellow Peril racism, attacking the Boxer Rebellion in China that killed white missionaries.

In the 19th-century historiographies of the Orient as a cultural region, the Orientalists studied only what they said was the high culture (languages and literatures, arts and philologies) of the Middle East, but did not study that geographic space as a place inhabited by different nations and societies. About that Western version of the Orient, Edward Saïd said that:

the Orient that appears in Orientalism, then, is a system of representations framed by a whole set of forces that brought the Orient into Western learning, Western consciousness, and later, Western empire. If this definition of Orientalism seems more political than not, that is simply because I think Orientalism was, itself, a product of certain political forces and activities.

Orientalism is a school of interpretation whose material happens to be the Orient, its civilisations, peoples, and localities. Its objective discoveries - the work of innumerable devoted scholars who edited texts and translated them, codified grammars, wrote dictionaries, reconstructed dead epochs, produced positivistically verifiable learning - are and always have been conditioned by the fact that its truths, like any truths delivered by language, are embodied in language, and, what is the truth of language?, Nietzsche once said, but a mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms - in short, a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which, after long use, seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are.

In so far as The Orient occurred in the existential awareness of the Western world, as a term, The Orient later accrued many meanings and associations, denotations and connotations that did not refer to the real peoples, cultures, and geography of the Eastern world, but to Oriental Studies, the academic field about The Orient as a word.

In "Cosmographia" (1570), by Sebastian Münster, "Europa regina" is the cartographic centre of the world.

In the Eastern world, the field of Occidentalism, the investigation programme and academic curriculum of and about the essence of The West - Europe as a culturally homogeneous place - did not exist as a counterpart to Orientalism. In the postmodern era, the Orientalist practices of historical negationism, the writing of distorted histories about the places and peoples of "The East", continues in contemporary journalism; e.g. in the Third World, political parties practice Othering with fabricated facts about threat-reports and non-existent threats (political, social, military) that are meant to politically delegitimise opponent political parties composed of people from the social and ethnic groups designated as the Other in that society.

The Othering of a person or of a social group - by means of an ideal ethnocentricity (the ethnic group of the Self) that evaluates and assigns negative, cultural meaning to the ethnic Other - is realised through cartography; hence, the maps of Western cartographers emphasised and bolstered artificial representations of the national-identities, the natural resources, and the cultures of the native inhabitants, as culturally inferior to the West.

Historically, Western cartography often featured distortions (proportionate, proximate, and commercial) of places and true distances by placing the cartographer's homeland in the centre of the mapamundi; these ideas were often utilized to support imperialistic expansion. In contemporary cartography, the polar-perspective maps of the northern hemisphere, drawn by U.S. cartographers, also frequently feature distorted spatial relations (distance, size, mass) of and between the U.S. and Russia which according to historian Jerome D. Fellman emphasise the perceived inferiority (military, cultural, geopolitical) of the Russian Other.

Orientalist art: The Reception of the Ambassadors in Damascus (1511) features wildlife (the deer in the foreground) that is not native to Syria.

In Key Concepts in Political Geography (2009), Alison Mountz proposed concrete definitions of the Other as a philosophic concept and as a term within phenomenology; as a noun, the Other identifies and refers to a person and to a group of persons; as a verb, the Other identifies and refers to a category and a label for persons and things.

Post-colonial scholarship demonstrated that, in pursuit of empire, "the colonizing powers narrated an 'Other' whom they set out to save, dominate, control, [and] civilize . . . [in order to] extract resources through colonization" of the country whose people the colonial power designated as the Other. As facilitated by Orientalist representations of the non-Western Other, colonization - the economic exploitation of a people and their land - is misrepresented as a civilizing mission launched for the material, cultural, and spiritual benefit of the colonized peoples.

Counter to the post-colonial perspective of the Other as part of a Dominator-Dominated binary relationship, postmodern philosophy presents the Other and Otherness as phenomenological and ontological progress for Man and Society. Public knowledge of the social identity of peoples classified as "Outsiders" is de facto acknowledgement of their being real, thus they are part of the body politic, especially in the cities. As such, "the post-modern city is a geographical celebration of difference that moves sites once conceived of as 'marginal' to the [social] centre of discussion and analysis" of the human relations between the Outsiders and the Establishment.

1. ^ The Oxford Companion to Philosophy (1995) p. 637.

2. ^ Hegel, G. W. F.; Miller, A. V. (1977). Hoffmeister, J. (ed.). Force and the Understanding: Appearance and the Supersensible World: Phenomenology of Spirit (5th ed.). New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 98-9. The relation of essential nature to outward manifestation in pure change ... to infinity ... as inner difference ... [is within] its own Self.

3. ^ Miller, J. (2008). "Otherness". The SAGE Encyclopedia of Qualitative Research Methods. pp. 588-591. doi:10.4135/9781412963909.n304. ISBN 9781412941631. Archived from the original on 21 November 2015.

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Other is a term used to define another person or people as separate from oneself. In phenomenology, the terms the Other and the Constitutive Other distinguish other people from the Self, as a cumulative, constituting factor in the self-image of a person; as acknowledgement of being real; hence, the Other is dissimilar to and the opposite of the Self, of Us, and of the Same.

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This film, has an african american in the film, however the director is white. I have chosen this movie because this supports my research of the 5 common roles that african americans play in the film. In this film the african american actor plays the role of the magical negro. No film with an african american director has an african american playing this role which shows that different ethnic characters portray african americans differently in films.

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Indy100: This magazine supports the black people winning an oscar and expresses how this is a good thing because it is rare. However, they show the reactions of social media which is very bad and racist. (indy100, 2017)

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The Academy Awards went from being a ceremony that had very little ethnic minority representation, prompting the hashtag #OscarsSoWhite, to something altogether different this year.
Black Muslim actor Mahershala Ali won Best Supporting Actor for Moonlight. The film also nabbed Best Picture and Viola Davis celebrated winning Best Supporting Actress for Fences.

Oscars 2017 was clearly a great year for diversity, and substantially recognised non-white actors and directors for their work.

People took to twitter to rejoice:

This year a black Muslim got the award for his performance in a movie as a gay guy.Celebrate that @moonlightmov
#Oscars #diversity
- Suraj Sridar (@SurajSridar) February 27, 2017

Love #FencesMovie The first black actor to ever receive an #Oscars , #Emmy , and a #tony . #violadavis #OscarsSoBlack #redcarpet #fashion pic.twitter.com/dnBKnPOYcb
- Gracie Opulanza (@gracieopulanza) 27 February 2017

I'm so so so glad Moonlight won. More diversity. More recognition for diverse stories written by people of color. #oscars
- Chelsea (@chelsdawnf) 27 February 2017

However, a swarm of keyboard-happy trolls also crawled out of the woodwork.

#OscarsSoBlack began trending on Twitter:

#OscarsSoBlack This is laughable. Nothing but blacks. The oscars were always a joke but they've notched it up!
- REP (@RichieRockit) 27 February 2017

Because Davis and Ali, who between them won a Bafta, a Tony Award, a Golden Globe, a Critics Choice Movie Award, a Screen Actors Guild Award...to name a few - are "untalented".

35% of nominees are black this year which is an over representation. Hollywood is forcing untalented actors down our throats.#OscarsSoBlack
- Archibald (@MeatheadBunker) 26 February 2017

Some are calling it "forced diversity".

The forced diversity makes the oscars look like a joke, Fear of social sanction is doing this, it hurts. #OscarsSoBlack #BoycottHollywood
- Graham Randazzo (@SicTransit55) 26 February 2017

And black actors won because, you know, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS.

Not because of talent.

The Academy buckles under political correctness. #OscarsSoBlack this year. #Oscars #OscarSunday #HollywoodLiberals
- Jim Clutter (@JClutt1) 26 February 2017

In fact, the hashtag stepped into racist territory really quickly:

I haven't seen a single film nominated for the #Oscars this year but there seems to be a disproprtionate number of black crap #OscarsSoBlack
- stefi (@stefiamico) 27 February 2017

But, we're happy to report, people have been reclaiming #OscarsSoBlack:

Diversity is a good thing. It allows a different perspective. If you shutout a culture you'll never understand or accept it #OscarsSoBlack
- nubianbrotha (@nubianbrotha) 26 February 2017

The Oscars went black and never came back! #OscarsSoBlack
- Captain Destroyer (@JohnnyScaletrix) 27 February 2017

#OscarsSoBlack YES, Yes they are ! pic.twitter.com/IOhv4b8miR
- g.💌. (@skyblushh) 27 February 2017

And it's quite simple, really:

And yes, I put #OscarsSoBlack... people are so mad hahahhahahhahahahahahahahha #WAHHHHNNN get over it, #WeMadeit ✊🏾
- Cameron X. Coleman (@TheVersatileEye) 27 February 2017

More: Miss Universe had the perfect reaction to the Oscars mix-up More: Ryan Gosling whispered in this woman's ear at the Oscars and we need to know what he said!

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Oscars So Black has started trending... And it's not necessarily a good thing

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The Academy Awards went from being a ceremony that had very little ethnic minority representation, prompting the hashtag #OscarsSoWhite, to something altogether different this year. Black Muslim actor Mahershala Ali won Best Supporting Actor for Moonlight. The film also nabbed Best Picture and Viola Davis celebrated winning Best Supporting Actress for Fences.

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In this chapter of the book the author goes on to speak about the black women in the media. She speaks about things like sexism, racism and oppression.

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This blog looks at the theory of Alvarado and the racial stereotypes in the films. The exotic, The dangerous, The humorous & The pitied. In this blog they include examples from films where you can clearly see these stereotypes which is very helpful. (Wearenotentertainment.wordpress.com, 2017)

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The Exotic: Ethnic Groups are seen as exotic or represented as being the "other person" and unusual or strange.

The Dangerous: Minority groups can be represented as a threat to society. They can be called criminals, rapists, drug dealers, or people who take advantage of society's benefits.

The Pitied: The representation of ethnic groups may be seen as deprived victims or groups that experience natural disasters or sometimes even conflicts.

The Humorous: In the 1970's race was a major vehicle for comedy. Programs removed the threat of different races by making them the butt of the jokes.

Manuel Alvarado's Book of "Learning the Media: An introduction to Media Teaching" analyzes media institutions and how the media represents several different groups based on class, age, gender, race, etc.,

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Alvarado's Theory 1987- Representation of Ethnicity

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The Exotic: Ethnic Groups are seen as exotic or represented as being the "other person" and unusual or strange. The Dangerous: Minority groups can be represented as a threat to society. They can be called criminals, rapists, drug dealers, or people who take advantage of society's benefits.

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The Guardian: This article from the guardian helps me to understand the concept of white gaze. This will be really helpful during my essay and it is a really good point. "The white gaze: it traps black people in white imaginations. It is the eyes of a white school teacher who sees a black student and lowers expectations. It is the eyes of a white cop who sees a black person and looks twice – or worse, feels for a gun." (Grant, 2017)

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The white gaze - it is a phrase that resonates in black American literature. Writers from WEB Du Bois to Ralph Ellison to James Baldwin and Toni Morrison have struggled with it and railed against it.

As Morrison - a Nobel Laureate - once said:

The white gaze: it traps black people in white imaginations. It is the eyes of a white schoolteacher who sees a black student and lowers expectations. It is the eyes of a white cop who sees a black person and looks twice - or worse, feels for a gun.

Du Bois explored this more than a century ago in his book The Souls of Black Folk, reflecting on his conversations with white people and the ensuing delicate dance around the "Negro problem".

Baldwin was as ever more direct and piercing, writing in his book Nobody Knows My Name.

The flame has passed to a new generation.

In 2015 three more black writers have stared down the white gaze. In their own ways Ta-Nehisi Coates, Claudia Rankine and George Yancy have held up a mirror to white America.

These are uncompromising and fearless voices.

Coates' searing essay Between The World And Me critiques America against a backdrop of black deaths at the hands of police. He says the country's history is rooted in slavery and the assault against the black body.

In the form of a letter to his son, Coates writes:

In Citizen - An American Lyric, poet Rankine reflects on the black experience from the victims of Hurricane Katrina, or Trayvon Martin, a 17 year-old black youth shot dead by a neighbourhood watch volunteer who was acquitted, or black tennis star Serena Williams. In each case Rankine sees lives framed by whiteness.

She writes:

Philosophy Professor George Yancy just last week penned a letter in the New York Times addressed to "Dear White America". He asks his countrymen to listen with love, and to look at those things that might cause pain and terror.

All white people, he says, benefit from racism and this means each, in their own way, are racist.

Their unflinching work is not tempered by the fact a black man is in the White House - that only makes their voices more urgent.

Coates, Rankine, Yancy - each has been variously praised and awarded, yet each has been pilloried as well. This is inevitable when some people don't like what the mirror reflects.

It takes courage for a black person to speak to a white world, a world that can render invisible people of colour, unless they begin to more closely resemble white people themselves - an education, a house in the suburbs, a good job, lighter skin.

In Australia, too, black voices are defying the white gaze. We may not have the popular cut through of a Morrison or a Baldwin or a Coates, but we have a proud tradition - Oodgeroo Noonuccal, Kevin Gilbert, Ruby Langford or more recently Kim Scott, Alexis Wright, Anita Heiss.

I have spent some time recently reading some of the most powerful works of Indigenous writers. Their styles and genres are many and varied but there is a common and powerful theme of defiance and survival.

This is a world so instantly recognisable to us - Indigenous people - but still so foreign to white Australia.

Natalie Harkin's book of poetry, Dirty Words, is a subversive dictionary that turns English words back on their users: A is apology, B is for Boat People ... G is for Genocide ... S for Survival.

"How do you dream," she writes, "When your lucky country does not sleep".

Bruce Pascoe's Dark Emu challenges the white stereotype of the "primitive hunter gatherer". He says the economy and culture of Indigenous people has been grossly undervalued.

He cites journals and diaries of explorers and colonists to reveal the industry and ingenuity of pre-colonial Aboriginal society. He says it is a window into a world of people building dams and wells and houses, irrigating and harvesting seed and creating elaborate cemeteries.

Pascoe's work demands to be taught in our schools.

Tony Birch is an acclaimed novelist and his latest Ghost River is remarkable. It is the story of two friends navigating the journey into adulthood guided by the men of the river - men others may see as homeless and hopeless. It is a work infused with a sense of place and belonging.

Ellen Van Neerven's Heat and Light is a genre-busting mystical journey into identity: sexual, racial and national. It is provocative and challenging and mind bending, and altogether stunning.

You won't find many of these titles in the annual best book lists. Occasionally they pop up, but not as often as they deserve. You probably won't hear much of Samuel Wagan Watson's Love Poems and Death Threats, or Ken Canning's Yimbama, or Lionel Fogarty's Eelahroo (Long Ago) Nyah (Looking) Mobo-Mobo (Future).

That these works are not more widely read is a national shame. In our busy lives, try to find time for some of these books in 2016 - read with the courage of these writers.

George Yancy asks white Americans to become "un-sutured", to open themselves up and let go of their white innocence.

Why is this important? Well, for white people it may simply be a matter of choice - the fate of black people may not affect them. For us it is survival - the white gaze means we die young, are locked up and locked out of work and education.

We hear a lot about recognition - acknowledging Indigenous people in the Australian constitution. But there is another recognition - recognising the pervasive and too often destructive role of race in our lives, and the need to lift our gaze above it.

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Black writers courageously staring down the white gaze - this is why we all must read them | Stan Grant

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The white gaze - it is a phrase that resonates in black American literature. Writers from WEB Du Bois to Ralph Ellison to James Baldwin and Toni Morrison have struggled with it and railed against it. As Morrison - a Nobel Laureate - once said: The white gaze: it traps black people in white imaginations.

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This article also helps me to understand the concept of "moral panic". This is how the media portrays a thing or person and can make the society be scared of this thing and create an overall panic. This is a very good point to add in my essay because it is still relevant to this day. (History Learning Site, 2017)

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Citation: C N Trueman "Moral Panic"
historylearningsite.co.uk. The History Learning Site, 25 May 2015. 16 Aug 2016.

Moral panic is a term used to describe media presentation of something that has happened that the public will react to in a panicky manner. Moral panic has a tendency to exaggerate statistics and to create a bogey-man, known as a folk-devil in sociological terms. In recent years moral panic and media presentation have covered a wide-ranging number of topics from HIV/AIDS in the 1980's to asylum seekers into the UK in the 2000's. Moral panic goes back as far as World War One when the wartime government used the media to portray the Germans in a certain manner in the hope of provoking a response. The same happened in World War Two. In this case, the media did not have to portray Hitler in a certain manner as the public already had its view on him and that was an identical one to the government. However, moral panic and the media was used to create a fear of Nazi spies in the UK.

Post-World War Two, moral panic and the media was directed against the Communist Bloc. In America, 'Reds Under The Bed' created an atmosphere of hysteria against anyone who was even remotely seen as being linked to communism. Hollywood hunted out perceived communists in the film industry and even an international star like Charlie Chaplin felt compelled to move to Switzerland to escape this. However, both media and government worked for a single agreed purpose - ridding America of all communists and this had the support of the vast bulk of America's population.

In the UK, social conformity was expected to ensure that social norms continued. In the 1950's 'Teddy Boys' were portrayed by the media as young men hell-bent of tuning society upside down. This continued into the 1960's with the media's portrayal of the clashes between Mods and Rockers. The whole idea of the media's coverage was to convince the general public that these youths were operating outside of the social norms desired by society as a whole.

Cohen (1972) found that minor fights between Mods and Rockers in beachside resorts were very much sensationalised by the media. One headline was "Wild ones invade seaside town - 97 arrests". In fact there were only 24 arrests. Cohen found that the media reporting led to increased policing which actually intensified the problem. More recently moral panics and consequent amplification have occurred about raves, football hooligans, girl gangs and terrorist threats.

In the 1980's a moral panic was created in the media over HIV/AIDS. The famous iceberg advertisement by the government clearly hinted that there was a lot more to HIV/AIDS than the public could possibly know about with the vast bulk hidden from view. Some media outlets nicknamed HIV/AIDS the 'gay plague' stigmatising a specific section of the population as being the primary cause and carriers of the 'gay plague'. While scientists gained a better understanding of HIV/AIDS as the 1980's moved into the 1990's and beyond, the illness was still seen by many as one either caused by or passed on by the gay community. When it became clear that this was not the case, the moral panic created by the media moved off in another direction blaming the general lax moral standards of the younger generation (both male and female) which then moved onto the next area of moral panic - the growth of the 'laddettes' - alcohol fuelled young ladies who attempted to copy the behaviour of young males. Statistically, the number of young people who behave in an anti-social manner at the weekend is dwarfed by the actual number of young people in the UK but the moral panic subculture created by the tabloid press would have the general population think differently.

Marxism sees the media in society as acting in the interests of the bourgeoisie by promoting the ideals and values which best serve them. The media is the single and most important part of the Ideological State Apparatus, (ISA), and is used to promote the notion of hegemony, the idea that society shares the same basic values and norms. Marxists argue that differences in politics, which is another part of the ISA, are there simply to promote the false ideas of democracy and freedom of choice, where as in the mainstream media, there is almost no difference in the portrayal of the generality of the morality of society, (Hard Work, marriage, national prise etc) as well as what exactly main stream political issues are. These issues, according to Marxists, are there to divide society and make it easier for the elite to maintain control. Stuart Hall's book 'Policing the Crisis' (1980) looked at the moral panic of mugging and its effects in the media. He found that the media in conjunction with the bourgeoisie create moral panics in order to perpetuate fear and maintain control over the whole of society. The bourgeoisie felt a lack of control due to a rise in "deviant" cultures e.g. free love movement, drug cultures and stronger unions. Moral panic was used to perpetuate fear which enabled greater control over the proletariat. Such fears make the public want more police, which, Marxists argue would allow for even greater control over the population.

From the point of view of Functionalists, the media is free from an overall controller, and as such serves an important role in maintaining freedom and different opinions throughout society. Functionalists make the argument that there are indeed collective norms throughout society. However, the media helps to present the different points of views and issues where opinion differs.

Courtesy of Lee Bryant, Director of Sixth Form, Anglo-European School, Ingatestone, Essex

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Moral panic is a term used to describe media presentation of something that has happened that the public will react to in a panicky manner. Moral panic has a tendency to exaggerate statistics and to create a bogey-man, known as a folk-devil in sociological terms. In recent years moral panic and media presentation have covered ...