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trends in popular culture
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Currently, in the African American community, the enemy no longer lies in the Caucasian community but from within the trenches of the African American conscious. Music videos and song content only feature lighter-skinned women. The features of the “mixed girls” are exploited and the darker shaded women struggle to gain visibility. Recently Pharrell Williams released an album that featured one medium brown woman out of dozens of Caucasian, Latina, and other mulatto women and the media erupted with disapproving comments. The movie Dark Girls surfaced to shed light into the troubles of the darker women and deeply rooted tension between the different shades of women in the African American community. As a darker skinned woman—I’ve come across the comment, several times “You’re cute to be dark-skinned.” Although the comment is a compliment, and to be upset seems a bit trivial, it limits the quality of the expression. It causes one to feel beautiful within confines of constructed ugliness. Darker women are associated with ugliness and on an ugly scale from one to ten –ten being not so ugly—I just make it above water. These implications reveal a deeper issue within the cultural society.
Film not only portrays the surface level issues in a depicted society, but it also sheds light into the unconscious problems and social structures in a particular community. In the United States, in the 1700’s and 1800’s, privilege belonged to white people only. Later on the hierarchy of opportunity shifted, giving a select few the benefits of mobility, sexual preference, and economic superiority, and instead of the divide consisting of only black and white, it stratified even further into light and dark. The films Imitation of Life, Guess Who’s Coming t...
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...nn. Columbia TriStar Home Video, 1998. Film.
Howell, Llewellyn D. "Losing The Race To Erase Racism." USA Today Magazine 139.2790 (2011): 62-65. MasterFILE Elite. Web. 17 Apr. 2014.
Imitation of Life. Dir. Douglas Sirk. Perf. Lana Turner, Juanita Moore, John Gavin, Sandra Dee, Susan Kohner. Universal International Pictures, 1959. Film.
Lindsey, Treva B. "Black No More: Skin Bleaching And The Emergence Of New Negro Womanhood Beauty Culture." Journal Of Pan African Studies 4.4 (2011): 97-116. Academic Search Complete. Web. 17 Apr. 2014.
Shaft. Dir. Gordon Parks. Perf. Richard Roundtree, Moses Gunn. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1970. Film.
Watson, Stevie Thornton, Corliss G. Engelland, Brian T. "Skin Color Shades In Advertising to Ethnic Audiences: The Case of African Americans." Journal of Marketing Communications 16.4 (2010): 185. Advanced Placement Source. Web. 17 Apr. 2014.
Minstrel shows were developed in the 1840's and reached its peak after the Civil War. They managed to remain popular into the early 1900s. The Minstrel shows were shows in which white performers would paint their faces black and act the role of an African American. This was called black facing. The minstrel show evolved from two types of entertainment popular in America before 1830: the impersonation of blacks given by white actors between acts of plays or during circuses, and the performances of black musicians who sang, with banjo accompaniment, in city streets. The 'father of American minstrelsy' was Thomas Dartmouth 'Daddy' Rice, who between 1828 and 1831 developed a song-and-dance routine in which he impersonated an old, crippled black slave, dubbed Jim Crow. Jim Crow was a fool who just spent his whole day slacking off, dancing the day away with an occasional mischievous prank such as stealing a watermelon from a farm. Most of the skits performed on the Minstrel shows symbolized the life of the African American plantations slaves. This routine achieved immediate popularity, and Rice performed it with great success in the United States and Britain, where he introduced it in 1836. Throughout the 1830s, up to the founding of the minstrel show proper, Rice had many imitators.
Within the Black Community there are a myriad of stigmas. In Mary Mebane’s essay, “Shades of Black”, she explores her experiences with and opinions of intraracial discrimination, namely the stigmas attached to women, darker skinned women, and blacks of the working class. From her experiences Mebane asserts that the younger generation, those that flourished under and after the Civil Rights Movement, would be free from discriminating attitudes that ruled the earlier generations. Mebane’s opinion of a younger generation was based on the attitudes of many college students during the 1960’s (pars.22), a time where embracing the African culture and promoting the equality of all people were popular ideals among many young people. However, intraracial discrimination has not completely vanished. Many Blacks do not identify the subtle discriminatory undertones attached to the stigmas associated with certain types of Black people, such as poor black people, lighter/darker complexion black people, and the “stereotypical” black man/woman. For many black Americans aged eighteen to twenty-five, discrimination based on skin color, social class, and gender can be blatant.
Cox’s work is exactly the type of discussion that is needed to move the discourse on black women’s bodies from being regarded as part of a stereotype to being regarded as individuals with beautiful differences. This is not a ‘re-mirroring’ of the ‘un-mirrored,’ but rather a creation of a new image, void of previous misconceptions but filled with individuality. The stereotypes concerning black women’s bodies needs to be abolished, not reinvented like Hobson suggests in “Venus in the Dark: Blackness and Beauty in Popular Culture.”
Back in the early 1800’s, the color of one’s skin mattered amongst African Americans and Caucasian people. There was infidelity between the Caucasian slave owners and the African American slaves. Of course, the outcome of that produced a fairer toned child. In most cases the child could pass as white. The mixed toned kids got to be inside doing housework, while the dark Negroes worked in the fields, under extraneous work conditions,”their dark-toned peers toiled in the fields”(Maxwell). From the early 1800’s to modern day, there is controversy that light or bi-racial African Americans are better than dark colored African Americans. African Americans had to go through tests to see if they were able to receive priviledges that white people received,”light-skinned African Amerians receive special priviledges based off of their skin shade”(Maxwell). If an African American did not receive the priviledges similar to white people then they would try to change themselves to fit in,”African Americans are using bleaching creams so that they can make their skin lighter , just to achieve the standard beauty”(Brooke). As much as one will not one to discuss this topic, statistics shows how people are more lenient towards light and fair skin tones.Light oor fair coloredAmericans that poseess Caucasian features are prefiebly preffered.
Oppression disguises itself in various spheres, including Black womanhood. This classification includes societal pressures of Black women to conform to Eurocentric values, such as in beauty, gender, and families. The standard of European beauty is imposed on Black women, in which they feel subjected
It is sad to know that we cohabit a nation where you are frowned upon because of the content of your skin. This documentary depicts adolescent Black/ African American girl and boys, and women talking about their melanin. Society imposed on us that to be beautiful you must be of a fairly light complexion, have a sculpted body, perfect bone structure, and have nice non-kinky hair. This image has been imbedded in our society, and resulted in those in the Black/ African American community feeling as is they are ugly, non lovable, unwanted, not smart, less than, lacking self confidence, and wishing that they can change their skin tone (by bleaching) to be accepted and to be considered beautiful.
“As a young girl, I already knew the standards for a girl like me” is one of the most poignant lines in Kiri Davis’ respectively titled A Girl Like Me. The line itself is a strong punch to the standards we hold black women specifically in our society, with a sour aftertaste. Throughout the film there are plenty of other jabs involving stereotypes and standards of beauty. One of them being the retelling of how darker shades of black women felt the need to bleach their skin, even at the age of six, to try to fit a mold of black beauty. With these toxic standards of beauty in place, a six-year-old and a twenty-five-year-old can share the same bias that society ingrained in them. They can even say they love themselves—except for the color/shade
The book is not just about history of black hair. It contains quotes and information from a huge wealth of black hair resources, as well as political context of black hair styles and textures and why black hair comes in so many different textures.
Katz, Phyllis A. and Dalmas A. Taylor, eds. Eliminating Racism. New York: Plenum Press, 1988.
“Deeply negative attitudes about skin color have seeped into our own house, advanced by grandmothers who favor the light children over the dark ones; men who pass by the pretty dark-skinned sisters in the club; and music video producers who habitually cast racially ambiguous dancers” (Essence). Harvard Medical School psychiatrist stated “of course, most of us celebrate the various shades of mocha, caramel, cinnamon, peach and chocolate that make up African-American families, but..."The unconscious prejudices we have, where we think we 're going to have a better life if we 're lighter than if we 're darker, have not
The healthy relationships portrayed in the media are few and far between, which leaves Black women to make choices based on the options they have and perceive. For that reason, it is not complicated to understand why Black women are the least likely to marry in the environment of the over-sexed woman and a pimp. The portrayal of Black women as lascivious by nature is an enduring stereotype. To understand more fully the media’s role in shaping the culture of African-American experience, one must first examine the stereotypes projected by TV stations like, BET, MTV, and VH1. The songs and music videos created by such hip-hop artists as 50 Cent, Dr. Dre, and Snoop Dogg have built ...
In modern day society, popular culture has gained equal status to world issues and politics. Music, movies, and literature have started cultural revolutions and challenged the straight-forward thinking many individuals have accepted in the past. But while popular culture can advance new ideas and create movements, it also has the ability to challenge advancements society has made. Imani Perry’s essay, The Venus Hip Hop and the Pink Ghetto, focuses on hip hop and its negative impact on women and body image.
After watching Imitation of Life, it becomes quite clear that the race and gender of a person affects them gravely. These intersectional forms of oppression help to determine how society will treat a person, and how a person may treat/view themselves. Debuting in 1959, issues displayed within this film are still present within society in 2015. As woman are discriminated against, so are Black people, and while being a White woman in a patriarchal society holds some restrictions and privileges, being a Black woman in an racist patriarchal society welcomes constant hardships of struggles. Both within this film and in reality, issues concerning the way both White and Black women are treated and the roles they are allowed to play on screen (during
Will sexism ever come to an end in today’s society? Are women going to let men step all over them? Jennifer Mclune discusses in her article, Hip-Hops Betrayal on Black Women, how black male singers objectify and degrade black females in the music industry. The purpose of this article is to show how black women are being deceived in the hip hop industry and being used as sex symbols instead of showing them for their true colors. Mclune (2015) voices her strong argument in attracting her audience by using ethos, tones, and the use of word choices.
For young people, physical beauty has become an American value, a prerequisite for acceptance into a vein, racist and unethical American society. The story of Pecola, a young black girl, growing up in Ohio in 1941 clearly shows the fact that the “American Dream” was not available to everyone. Black children are invisible in this world, not special and almost nothing. The vision that the color of your skin somehow made you unimportant by both blacks and whites. White skin meant beauty, and cleanliness; that idea was not questioned at this time in history. In this book Toni Morrison presents that beauty is “The American Dream.”