Race And Ethnicity Through Televisions

c. Case study: race and ethnicity through televisions

This chapter will explain how television works to make the public collective memory. As discussing media, images and its representations, I’ll seek some concepts and ideas from Stuart Hall. This chapter will firstly explain who Stuart Hall is, secondly why I have chosen televisions, race and ethnicity, and finally how television conveys race and ethnicity focusing on images.

Stuart Hall is a sociologist and pioneer in the field of cultural studies. His work explored the concept of Britishness because he lived and worked in the United Kingdom, feeling blackness himself as he was born in Jamaica. For example, his study showed the connection between race and media, such as encoding and decoding

It is necessary to choose one medium in order to make the discussion specifically in this essay. Then, television would be a key medium among several media such as newspapers, radios, films, video games or Internet for these three reasons. Firstly, television is relatively new media. When On collective memory was published in 1950, television has not yet spread around the world and has not been popular as people in the middle class could not afford to watch televisions. Halbwachs were not able to expect the rise of mass media, and he did not include them in his logic. So it is worth taking television into considering. Secondly, television has many viewers around the world. A wide range of people sees the television, not only the young but also the elderly. So, it has a socially wide impact on the whole world. Thirdly, television tells the news through pictures. Newspapers tell a story with words and sometimes with pictures, but the pictures are only a part of information. On the other hand, television tells news through the movie, in other words, with continuous pictures. The use of pictures is a central debate on collective memory and on the next discussion of Stuart

At first, I would like to make my stance about race and ethnicity. I would not discuss what race and ethnicity mean here because there are huge discussions in Anthropology. Based on the course of Anthropology of Ethnicity and Race in KUL that I took last semester, in short, race and ethnicity are the concepts that socially and historically constructed. How they identify themselves is largely decided by how others look them. And Hall stated (1973), “For television or radio’s “mode of identifying social reality” is not and cannot be a wholly neutral and objective process.” and “viewers come, not simply to ‘know what is happening’, but to construct from that knowledge “pictures of the world”, scenarios of action.” Audiences make an image of the world that they don’t know, but in a way that they believe they should be. These images fix people’s views on how they see and how they are seen at the same time, as a result, that viewpoints identify others. Ethnicity or race are empty vessels that socially and historically constructed and they depend on their awareness themselves because nobody could clarify the meaning. For these reasons, they are one of the most changeable, fragile and easily affected identities among other