Introduction
During this course, I had the opportunity to watch several documentaries that enlightened men on different perspectives of cultural diversity. These documentaries contained a variety of different methods used to examine several cultural diversity issues within America. Racism, sexism, ageism, and social class were the main topics that were examined in these videos and documentaries. As part of the process, researchers creatively designed experiments that uncovered how people instinctively respond when it is not apparent that they are being watched. Reports such as these must be carefully crafted and presented in an objective manner. If critical steps are overlooked, this kind of research tactic can easily been interpreted as intrusive, dishonest, bias, or unethical. That might ultimately defeat the purpose and distract the viewer from understanding, and that may become counter-productive to the message the researcher is attempting to convey. All documentaries presented were necessary for us to gain a true consideration of the cultural diversity issues this country faces. Some documentaries contained the element of surprise by using hidden camera tactics. It is no secret that cameras have a tendency to change individuals’ attitudes, if they are conscious of the fact that they are being filmed. Though all of the video and documentaries were impactful, the two documentaries that had the most impact on my learning were:
1. “True Colors”, Diane Sawyer, ABC News, 1992
2. “Divided We Fall”, Valarie Kaur, New Moon , 2006
In this first mini-report, I will critique these two documentaries, and show why they had the most impact on understanding of cultural diversity.
True Colors: Racial Discrimination in Everyd...
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...these documentaries used hidden cameras in an attempt to give viewers could get an uncovered assessment of American’s true attitude about race. Valarie Kaur‘s documentary gave a more extreme example of hatred, which involved killing innocent people based on the way they look in an act of so called retaliation. Diane Sawyer’s documentary demonstrated the everyday discrimination that minorities encounter in certain parts of this country. Still the issue that both authors put foremost is racism. The Sawyer documentary took place in the early 1990s and Kaur’s documentary showed the same kind of hatred occurring almost 10 years later. America has made progress in changing the laws and defining the socially acceptable boundaries for racism. But these videos show that we still are far away from eliminating certain mindsets that generate this kind of racial tension.
In today’s world we tend to be caught up in our own personal bubbles. We don’t realize what goes on outside of our world and the myriad of subcultures that exist. The main problem with this is, once we become aware of the people that live outside of our culture and our norms, we tend to not understand their lifestyle and think that they are abnormal or psychotic. Through the various documentaries that we have explored this semester, I have experienced a change in emotion and thought. Every documentary we watched did not make sense to me. However, I realized that once you really dig deep and try to understand these people and their motives, you can uncover the way they affect our society.
I will cite examples of how intercultural imperatives relate to the 1995 American short documentary film, “The Shadow of Hate”, directed by Charles Guggenheim. I will define and describe two imperatives demographic and ethical imperatives.
Throughout, the documentary one can come to the conclusion that most of these African- Americans who live in this area are being judged as violent and bad people. However this is not the case, many of them are just normal people who are try...
This presentation related closely to political and economic justice; however, this documentary is certainly related to social justice too. It was evident that this documentary was educating us about the policies and laws in America that have oppressed people who are non-white. It was disheartening to learn that America has a history of making laws that segregate non-whites in our society. I was well aware that African Americans have been oppressed by the policies that were put in place; however, I was shocked to learn that other non-white people too were oppressed by these policies. The documentary talks about what it means to be white by law; I was shocked to learn that our government never
One of the article quoted “discrimination imposes a disadvantage on certain persons relative to others, and those who are treated more favorably are not to be seen as victims of discrimination.” (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/discrimination/#ConDis) The next video was “Is this your bike?” is a social experiment about gender and racial identity. They demonstrated discrimination. I admit, I never liked social experiment because it tends to be a bias subject. This experiment shows the first impressions. I truly believed after seeing this video, as we already judge or felt bad for the African American guy, we will judge or criticize Americans. Isn’t it ironic? In this situation, there is really no win-win situation. One of the video I watched by Jackson Katz “violence about women”, I was amazed on his introduction. This is sort of related in a way that he mentioned when the society tries to synonymous one subject to an identity. This video demonstrated that the African American was synonymous to crime or the lady is judge by her weakness, they even helped her. Why is that? As he said that the dominant group is not paid attention. This was illustrated by the Caucasian guy who tries to steal the bike. Therefore,
As an overall theme for my Media Montage I chose to analyze racism in Fox News. Racism is broken into even smaller categories such as how Fox News frames stories, says racist stereotypical comments, they race bait guests, and use people of color to be openly racist. Fox News uses the ‘race card’ to make their news stories bigger and more appealing to their audience.
In Michael Omi’s chapter “In Living Color: Race and American Culture”, he expresses his resentment towards the media and how they handle race relations. The essay discusses how the media in popular culture represents minorities, and how it leads to perception of race based on what the public views and hears (Omi 116). Omi believes that the way minorities are portrayed in visual media provides people with a false impression of their race, and media only adds to numerous judgmental stereotypes that surround minority races (Omi 117). Thus, creating a culture of citizens that have prejudices based on the stereotypes depicted on television or in movies (Omi 119). Discrimination and racism are still very alive in the culture of America, popular
Because Hollywood and the entire entertainment industry have such an impact on how the rest of society acts and almost serves as a moral compass of some sorts, it’s important that we spread this culture that moves away from ethnocentrism and emphasizes equality. However, this type of ideal world is nearly impossible where some people don’t even recognize the ethnocentric assumptions or implicit bias they have within them and how they act on them in their everyday life. To become closer to living in the ideal world, education about concepts such as ethnocentrism, implicit bias, and maybe even diversity are essential to recognizing the differences that distinguish different groups but also unite us all in this modern
Racism is a intricate, multidimensional construct that can be private and public, as well as institutional and personal. In other words, racism does not only consist of blatant racial insolence; subtle systemic racism is also alive and well. However, Americans are fixed on the notion that bigotry hasn’t been an issue since the 20th century mass lynchings. The United States’ distorted view of racism maintains the idea the country’s racial issues are behind us. In his article, “Between Colorblind and Colorconscious: Contemporary Hollywood Films and Struggles Over Racial Representation,” Jason Smith demonstrates the ways in which color blindness ineffectively addresses racial injustices within society. Although the logic behind this theory works towards a noble goal, color blind theory proposes that
How people have been both separated and divided simply based on the color of their skin has evolved tremendously over the years, but people’s definition of racism has stayed nearly the same. Americans today tend to believe that racism can be defined by two utterly contrasting ideas. While some surmise that racism is defined through discriminative actions taken by those who have power, others would like to elucidate that racism is solely the belief that one is superior to another based on their skin color. The documentary, 13th ,gave many examples of circumstances that were provoked by racism. Due to this, those who watch the documentary may be persuaded to conclude that racism is, in fact, merely discriminative actions. I myself belief that discriminative actions made by anyone would have to be based on initial feelings of racial superiority.
In Jonathan Markovitz’s Racial Spectacles: Explorations in Media, Race, and Justice he defines and argues the existence of racial spectacled in our society today. Through the reading and the general understanding of racial spectacle, I define it as the events that take place in massive media that virtually touches every realm of communication and popular culture in society. Interpretations may vary based on the event. The concept of racial spectacle is related to how Michael Omi and Howard Winant define racial project in their article Racial Formation. From my understanding of the reading, a racial project is a task, action, or law that is set in place in order to shorten or widen the racial divide in society. Racial projects are both positive and negative and in
An indigenous documentary is a documentary that is made by the members of an indigenous community, or in close interaction with the indigenous community. This native media is slowly becoming a form of entertainment and communication between present day tribes and their members. These newer forms of media aim to disassemble the mainstream media’s stereotypes about Native Americans. “They both preserve knowledge for future generations and communicate the group’s identity to the wider public,” (Leuthold; pg. 193). Although currently, many Native American media producers have tried to push their work further into the mainstream media, they face many difficulties with money, as most of the money for production of native media is loaned to producers through the government. However, the main goal of native media is “…focused on the concerns, practices, and beliefs of specific tribes…” (Leuthold; pg. 208), and “…indigenous media has, to this point, avoided the homogenizing tendencies of mainstream mass media,” (Leuthold; pg. 208). To prove that native media can become a popularized and common place form of media, three popular native media movies that have proven success include: Smoke Signals directed by Chris Eyre, Skins also directed by Chris Eyre, and The Business of Fancy Dancing directed by Sherman Alexie. What whitestream media does not understand is that they “…have a great deal of power in shaping—not just reflecting—public opinion, and, as such, media outlets must bear some of the responsibility of perpetuating racist images wherever they occur,” (Johnson; pg.
The African-American race is viewed negatively in this documentary. One aspect of race that stood out to me was the way people of color are negatively stereotyped. This stood out to me the most because it shocked me. At my high school in Chelan, people of color are associated with positive judgements. There are
Zheng’s research only further supports this suspicion of media’s role in raising public awareness of racism, or racially motivated violence. As Zheng notes, “...instances of everyday racism are only reported on if famous people are involved...The public has become...jaded with cases like these and the repeated media coverage of only high profile cases neither mitigates the everyday realities of racial profiling nor makes a difference in our society’s views on these issues (Zheng, Racial Profiling and the Media, berkley.edu).” Of course, the effective result of this is that the widespread influence of racism on American society, in its most common, every day occurences, goes unaddressed. Racism and the challenges of addressing it in the average American’s
The film that I decided to watch for this assignment was the show Jane the Virgin. The film is about a working and religious young Latina virgin, who becomes pregnant after being unintentionally artificially impregnated. The program humorously mocks commonly used figures and plans in Latin telenovelas. The show has never shied away from getting into political topics, which is why it is one of the most advanced shows on TV right now. The intersectionality aspect in Jane the Virgin is how the show gives us a lesson about abortion, teen pregnancy, and the institutional racism that Latino people face.