Tags: inequality, media, prejudice/discrimination, race/ethnicity, individual racism, institutional racism, internalized racism, interpersonal racism, racial justice, structural racism, systemic racism, subtitles/CC, 00 to 05 mins Year: 2014 Length: 4:38 Access: YouTube Summary: In a recent report by Race Forward: The Center for Racial Justice entitled "Moving the Race Conversation Forward," researchers compiled nearly 1,200 articles from major news sources and identified seven "bad habits" that the media falls back on when talking about race. In this video, Jay Smooth focuses on just one of these bad habits, which is the tendency to focus on individuals at the expense of systems. In order to nuance the conversation, Smooth reminds viewers that it's important to recognize that there are different levels of racism, and he outlines the properties of four different types: internalized, interpersonal, institutional, and structural. Delineating across types is important, as it allows Smooth to explain how some forms of racism are easier to focus on and recognize than others; namely, the individual forms of racism--internalized and interpersonal--are among those more obvious types. The systemic forms of institutional and structural racism, however, are more covert and less readily visible. Smooth defines institutional racism as "the racist policies and discriminatory practices in schools and workplaces and government agencies that routinely produce unjust outcomes for people of color" and structural racism as "the unjust racist patterns and practices that play out across institutions that make up our society." Race Forward's report documents how news outlets fail to adequately talk about these systemic forms of racism in their coverage of race-focused media, thus resulting in an incomplete picture about racism and racial justice. As Smooth says, "When we constantly focus on individual stories it distorts our sense of how racism works." The report offers recommendation strategies for talking about racial justice in a more holistic way. After watching the clip, viewers can be encouraged to think of examples of each type of racism. Given the salience of colorblind forms of racism in the contemporary context, viewers might challenge themselves to think of examples of colorblind racism for each of the four types, thus illustrating how colorblind forms of racism can transcend both individual and systemic domains. Viewers can also reflect upon why, if at all, it is easier to come up with examples of some types of racism rather than others. Submitted By: Valerie Chepp
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Tags: culture, discourse/language, knowledge, marketing/brands, media, race/ethnicity, charity, stereotypes, subtitles/CC, 00 to 05 mins Year: 2013 Length: 3:27 Access: YouTube Summary: This clip comes from the creators of Radi-Aid, which is a group that seeks to draw attention to the problematic ways charity media campaigns often represent aid recipients from Africa. As was vividly Illustrated by Invisible Children's Kony 2012 campaign, many charity and relief organizations manufacture images of Africa that foreground extreme instances of poverty and dependency. Images of malnourished children and primitive housing are propped up as the monolithic representations of the entire African continent, and more often than not, a white Western aid worker is shown interacting with black, African children, delivering her compassion with a warm embrace. The above video begins with what seems to be a poor black child walking along a rural dirt road, At first, it appears to be just another fundraising video, but then a director yells "Cut!" The child is revealed as an actor, and soon it becomes clear the video is actually a spoof of the fundraising campaigns aimed at a saving Africa. All joking aside, the video works quite well as a means of drawing attention to the fact that when well-meaning charity campaigns deploy stereotypical imagery to gain the sympathy of Western audiences, they may be doing more harm than good to the African communities they depict. Organizations like Invisible Children claim to be concerned about the well being of millions of Africans, but it is arguably just as important to consider the message these campaigns promote to millions of people in the West. To be blunt, the images of starving and dependent Africans in these fundraising campaigns may trigger sympathy and donations, but the campaigns do not cast the Africans they claim to represent in a dignified light and leave viewers with a lasting impression that Africans lack agency. In contrast, whites are depicted in the campaigns as compassionate saviors, and as I wrote in an earlier post, it is truly an unearned privilege for Western whites "to be able to wade through the media pool each day, soaked by the various incarnations of this narrative, a day full of subtle reminders of one's intrinsic goodness and extraordinary abilities." Submitted By: Lester Andrist Tags: children/youth, crime/law/deviance, discourse/language, gender, immigration/citizenship, inequality, intersectionality, media, prejudice/discrimination, race/ethnicity, sex/sexuality, stereotypes, 06 to 10 mins Year: 2008 Length: 8:50 Access: YouTube Summary: Star Jones briefly hosted a live talk show from August 2007 until February 2008, and in one of the show's segments she covered the story of Kelsey Peterson, a 25-year-old teacher who sexually assaulted her 13-year-old student, who happened to be an undocumented immigrant from Mexico. The above video features a telephone interview, where Jones asks Peterson's attorney, James Martin Davis, whether he believes it is possible for a 13-year-old child to give consent. Martin responds, "I resent the word 'child.' You're baby-fying this kid. This kid is a Latino machismo teenager...Is there anyone in the world who has a higher sex drive than a teenage boy." Jones admonishes Martin for his casual racism and ends the interview. In a follow-up segment, she invites the attorney for the victim, Amy Peck, and scholar Marc Lamont Hill to discuss the racist exchange, as well as the impact of racial thinking on the case. Although Star Jones and her guests largely frame the interview in terms of race, this video offers a nice foray into a larger discussion about how multiple dimensions of inequality intersect to shape the way people experience the criminal justice system and whether victims of crime become the recipients of public sympathy. Jones suggests a useful thought experiment by asking people to imagine that the race and gender of the participants are reversed. The question can be usefully posed: How would the story be discussed and reported by the media and interested parties if the victim was a young white girl and the perpetrator an older Latino man? Also, what difference does it make that the teenager was an undocumented Mexican immigrant, and how might the current discourse surrounding Mexican immigrants shape sympathy for the victim? Submitted By: Lester Andrist Tags: art/music, culture, media, race/ethnicity, bell hooks, cultural appropriation, othering, popular culture, racism, representation, 00 to 05 mins Year: 2013 Length: 3:33 Access: YouTube Summary: The music video for Miley Cyrus’ hit 2013 song “We Can’t Stop” is full of hip-hop tropes, from beats and backtracks to the twerk dance move for which Cyrus became infamous. Instructors can use this clip as a touchstone for classroom discussions about cultural appropriation and representations of otherness in popular media. Instructors can direct students to watch the video while keeping an eye out for how Black women are represented. Black women appear in the video, but only as a backdrop for Cyrus’ twerking along to the line “all my homegirls here with the big butts.” Cyrus' performance at the MTV Video Music Awards also featured Cyrus performing on stage with all Black female dancers around her. Although the use of hip-hop and Black culture by white musicians isn’t anything new, Cyrus’ performance functions as the appropriative practice bell hooks calls “eating the other.” In hooks’ terms, ethnicity serves as a spice or seasoning to give more flavor to an otherwise bland and mainstream/white performance. In the context of mainstream consumer culture, otherness is commodified and used as a way of adding value to a product. For example, when Cyrus was asked about the song, she said, "I want urban, I just want something that just feels Black.” Instructors can have students consider: What does it mean for something to “feel Black” in the context of popular culture? Is Cyrus’ appropriation of twerking problematic? Why or why not? Submitted By: Anya M. Galli Tags: gender, inequality, media, double bind, feminism, rape culture, 00 to 05 mins Year: 2013 Length: 3:39 Access: YouTube Summary: This video from The Representation Project summarizes media images of women in 2013. The video begins by highlighting that "there was a lot to celebrate this year for women in the media," pointing to media images of women in political leadership roles (Malala Yousafzai), heroine leads (Jennifer Lawrence in The Hunger Games), scientists (Sandra Bullock in Gravity), female-centric casts (Orange Is The New Black), and ESPN's coverage of women's sports. The video then recognizes that media images "aren’t changing fast enough," spotlighting much more problematic and sexist portrayals of women, including: women who were hypersexualized in advertisements, music, television, and film; women criticizing other women’s appearances; sole attention on women’s physical appearances as opposed to intelligence; and stereotypes of women being hysterical and overly-emotional. This video can be shown when teaching about gender oppression, and it can specifically help students grasp teachings on: (1) rape culture and how the media normalizes and desensitizes audiences to rape through, for example, comedic discussions and scenes of such violence toward women; and (2) feminism’s double bind, as the clip captures media scenes where women are told, for example, that it is nearly impossible for them to be both attractive and intelligent, or successful at home and work. Instructors can ask students: (1) Based on the video, what can we celebrate about gender equity in media representation? Can you think of other examples not mentioned in the video? (2) What media images of women can we critique? (3) Using an intersectional analysis, are women of color portrayed differently than white women in these examples? If so, how? The video would pair well with Ariel Levy’s (2005) Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture, which also addresses changing representations of women in the media, including how women internalize misogyny by, for example, objectifying each other and themselves. Submitted By: Maegan Zielinksi and Beverly M. Pratt Tags: bodies, emotion/desire, gender, marketing/brands, media, beauty standards, representation, subtitles/CC, 00 to 05 mins, 06 to 10 mins Year: 2013 Length: 3:01; 6:36 Access: YouTube (clip 1; clip 2) Summary: For some time now, advertisers have employed a powerful strategy to peddle their wares. They sell men and women on the idea that a woman's value and worth is bound up with her beauty, then, with the aid of lighting, cosmetics, and digital technology, the advertisers construct an ideal beauty standard that is forever out of reach. The media landscape is populated with images of women with flawless skin, perfect postures, and perky busts—a mirage that perpetually lies on the horizon. Dove's "real beauty" campaign claims to address the harm of encouraging women to base their self worth on something which is unattainable by design; yet a critical analysis of the campaign reveals that it is reinforcing the very issue it claims to critique. In one of the campaign's latest videos (there is a short version and a long version), an FBI trained forensic artist sketches a number of women based on their own descriptions of themselves, then the artist sketches the same women based on how others describe them. The finished sketches are hung side by side, and the women subjects examine the difference. Each is shocked to discover that others apparently describe them as more beautiful than they describe themselves. Laura Stampler's article for Business Insider provides a nice summary of all that is wrong with the ad, but it is worth mentioning two of the more common critiques here. First, the video focuses on a small group of women, who are mostly thin, mostly young (the oldest woman is 40), and mostly white (In the six minute clip, people of color are onscreen for less than 10 seconds). Any campaign that seeks to lift the veil on the harm of unrealistic beauty standards would do well to stop perpetuating the practice of excluding fat women, old women, and women of color. Second, while the video is wrapped in a heartwarming message that women are more beautiful than they realize, the deeper message is still that physical beauty can be the basis for true happiness and satisfaction. At about the 5:10 mark, the sketch artist asks one woman, "Do you think you're more beautiful than you say?" She replies, "Yeah," How different the message of the video would be if instead she flipped the script and asked the artist, "Why should my sense of being whole and satisfied hinge so much on my physical appearance in the first place?" Submitted By: Jeehye Kang Tags: aging/life course, children/youth, crime/law/deviance, discourse/language, health/medicine, inequality, media, prejudice/discrimination, race/ethnicity, crack, cocaine, drugs, moral panic, war on drugs, 06 to 10 mins Year: 2013 Length: 10:10 Access: New York Times Summary: In their book, Policing the Crisis, Stuart Hall and his coauthors investigate what was reported to be a sharp increase in muggings that occurred in Britain at the start of the 1970s. In fact, despite much public concern, a rash of criminality could not be verified, leading the authors to consider a far more likely scenario, that British society was gripped by something called a moral panic. "When the official reaction to a person, groups of persons or series of events is out of all proportion to the actual threat offered, when 'experts', in the form of police chiefs, the judiciary, politicians and editors perceive the threat in all but identical terms, and appear to talk 'with one voice' of rates, diagnoses, prognoses and solutions, when the media representations universally stress 'sudden and dramatic' increases (in numbers involved or events) and 'novelty', above and beyond that which a sober, realistic appraisal could sustain, then we believe it is appropriate to speak of the beginnings of a moral panic." The public fear about widespread muggings in Britain can be likened to the sudden swell of concern in the U.S. regarding the spread of crack cocaine in the 1980s. Unlike muggings, cocaine use was truly on the rise, but in many ways the dilemma was similarly blown "all out of proportion." The above video chronicles the role played by the media in exaggerating the scale of the cocaine problem and the dire health consequences predicted for the children of women who used the drug. As expressed by one politician, there was a belief that crack babies would "overwhelm every social service delivery system that they come into contact with throughout the rest of their lives." As the video explains, many people born to mothers who were addicted to crack have been able to lead lives free of the health complications foretold by newscasters. So if the actual threat posed by the growing use of cocaine was something different than the one portrayed in the media, why did the moral panic about "crack babies" take hold in the public consciousness? One explanation is that the preliminary research, which first raised the issue of potential health consequences for these children, coincided with President Ronald Reagan's War on Drugs. As the legal scholar Michelle Alexander notes, in an effort to secure funding for the new war, Reagan actually hired staff in 1985 to publicize the emergence of crack cocaine, and a national tragedy involving "crack babies" was just the kind of story they sought to promote. A second explanation for why the moral panic took hold ties in the fact that the War on Drugs has been a racist war from the very start, and the idea of a scourge of crack-addicted pregnant mothers aligned well with long held, racist stereotypes of black welfare queens who raise children in crime-infested neighborhoods. Submitted By: Lester Andrist
Tags: capitalism, consumption/consumerism, corporations, culture, economic sociology, marketing/brands, marx/marxism, media, theory, apple, commodity fetishism, emotional branding, enchantment, 00 to 05 mins
Year: 1998; 2008; 2011 Length: 0:30 Access: YouTube (clip 1; clip 2; clip 3) Summary: Branding plays an increasingly important role in contemporary capitalism. Marketing industry experts describe a brand as a vision, a vocabulary, a story, and most importantly, a promise, which consumers experience through ads and products. One form of this is emotional branding, and in his book named for this approach, Marc Gobé argues that understanding emotional needs and desires, particularly the desire for emotional fulfillment, is imperative for corporate success today. Consumers unknowingly experience emotional branding throughout Apple’s wildly successful marketing. Based on a content analysis of more than 200 Apple TV ads (1984-2013), Gabriela Hybel and I found various expression of Apples’ emotional branding. They inspire feelings of happiness and excitement with playful and whimsical depictions of products and their users. This trend can be traced to the early days of the iMac, as seen in an ad (clip 1) from 1998. A 2008 iPod Nano ad (clip 2) combined playful imagery and song. In a more recent commercial (clip 3), actress and singer Zooey Deschanel, known for her “quirky” demeanor, performs a playful spin on the utility of Siri. Commercials like these — playful, whimsical, and backed by upbeat music — associate these same feelings with Apple products. They suggest that Apple products are connected to happiness, enjoyment, and a carefree approach to life. In George Ritzer’s words, they “enchant a disenchanted world.” They open up a happy, carefree, playful world for us, removed from the troubles of our lives and the implications of our consumer choices. Importantly, for Apple, the enchanting nature of these ads and the brand image cultivated by them act as a Marxian fetish: they obscure the social and economic relations, and the conditions of production that bring consumer goods to us. Now more than ever, Apple depends on the strength of its brand power to eclipse the mistreatment and exploitation of workers in its supply chain, and the injustice it has done to the American public by skirting the majority of its corporate taxes. For additional analyses of Apple’s commercials, see how they promote sentimentality, cool youthfulness, and the promise of social mobility. Note: this post was adapted from Dr. Cole’s original blog post at SocImages. Submitted By: Nicki Lisa Cole, PhD Tags: bodies, gender, media, sex/sexuality, violence, music video, rape culture, sexual violence, 00 to 05 mins Year: 2013 Length: 4:32 Access: YouTube Summary: [Trigger Warning for sexual assault] As defined in Transforming a Rape Culture, "A rape culture is a complex of beliefs that encourages male sexual aggression and supports violence against women." Robin Thicke's huge summer hit, Blurred Lines (it reached #1 in 14 countries), has been widely discussed as an example of rape culture. In fact, it has been so controversial that at least 5 universities in the UK have banned the song. They argued the song objectifies women, and "is a man suggesting that there are ‘blurred lines’ when it comes to sexual consent" ; the ban is meant to “end rape culture ... on campus.” While Thicke states he wrote the song about his wife (who nonetheless can be raped by their husbands), and that the lyrics have been misconstrued, the lyrics are strikingly similar to the words rapists have often told their victims. This argument was made in an excellent blog post by Sezin Koehler at SocImages, where Koehler linked the song lyrics to testimonies from Project Unbreakable, an online photo exhibit of "sexual assault survivors where they are photographed holding a poster with a quote from their attacker." For example, the main lyrics (repeated 18 times) of "I know you want it" is a line given to many victims, and implies that women really want sex when they say they do not. As he sings "Nothing like your last guy, he too square for you. He don’t smack your ass and pull your hair like that," Thicke's misogynistic fantasy conveys that "a woman doesn’t want a 'square' who’ll treat her like a human being and with respect" (Koehler). Even if viewers give Thicke the benefit of the doubt concerning the intention of his lyrics, one still has to consider the effects of the video's message on its audience. As this video excerpt from Dreamworlds 3 illustrates, music videos (like other forms of popular culture) socialize us into prescribed gender roles regarding sexuality. And in a video where the women are all scantily clad (or nude in the unedited version of the video), and never speak, they reproduce a view of women as passive objects meant to fulfill men's fantasies. Meanwhile, men are trained to think of themselves as dominating figures meant to aggressively pursue what they desire, and to disregard women's stated sexual preferences. Viewers may also be interested in the many parodies of the video, including the Law Revue Girls' "Defined Lines" where they respond “Yeah we don’t want it/ It’s chauvinistic/ You’re such a bigot ... You can't just grab me/ That's a sex crime.” Submitted By: Paul Dean Tags: crime/law/deviance, knowledge, media, psychology/social psychology, violence, cultivation theory, terrorism, tsa, subtitles/CC, 00 to 05 mins Year: 2013 Length: 4:45 Access: The Colbert Report Summary: Neuroscientist Steven Pinker shares his book, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. This video explains (without mentioning it) cultivation theory, which is the idea that the more you watch the news, the more you have a tendency to overestimate the crime rate. Specifically, the video discusses terrorism, and Americans' fixation on it as a source of danger, when more mundane sources like flammable pajamas and peanut allergies cause far more deaths. This video works well as a means of introducing cultivation theory, but it is also a good starting point for a more general conversation about how the media misleads the public about how dangerous the world is and from where dangers come. Note that The Sociological Cinema has previously explored the way media is used as a tool for dispersing propaganda in a democratic political system (here), and also as a supplicant to the demands of corporate power (here). Submitted By: Nickie Michaud Wild |
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