I was really surprised after
watching the documentary to realize how much of an effect media has on our
thoughts and stereotypes. The cartoons showed at the beginning of the movie
were extremely offensive and over exaggerated many African American stereotypes.
It made so much sense why slavery was allowed to go on for so long when they
explained that most of the people in the North got their ideas about slavery
from cartoons. I thought it was somewhat amusing that they had to use cartoons
because the real African Americans didn’t look like the creatures that they had
drawn up. Even when they did use African American actors they made them color
their faces to be darker and drew big lips on them.
I started thinking about how this
kind of racial propaganda still exists today and realized that we are no better
today than we were a hundred years ago. Today racially stereotypical cartoons
and “memes” constantly reinforce the racial stereotypes that exist in today’s
society. Not only with the African American race but also with Asians,
Hispanics and Caucasians. There are many famous twitters making fun of races
including “Common White Girl” and “Common Black Girl”. These accounts each have
thousands of followers and post offensive and stereotypical pictures about race.
The two accounts are parallels of each other. For example each account will
post a picture with the caption “Dinner” and the White account will a plate
filed with caviar for example and the Black account will post a picture of a
bucket of KFC. Not only is this terribly offensive, but it perpetuates stereotypes
that are not true and by paralleling the two accounts it is trying to create a
wedge in between the two races and claim they are much more different than they
really are.
With younger and younger children
having access to things like iPhones, twitter, Facebook and racist and inappropriate
movies it really worries me for the future of our country. In the documentary
it stated that after the slaves were emancipated the new generation of White people
was poisoned against African Americans because they grew up watching cartoons
that painted them in an extremely negative light. Media has an extreme
influence on our thoughts and views especially when we are younger and if
children are being exposed to this racist material earlier and earlier I worry
what they will grow up thinking. Our society progresses really slowly in terms
of racial equality and open mindedness and I believe that if we got rid of all
offensive and racist media, our progression would speed up tenfold.
Sadly when I was looking online for
racist pictures hundreds of thousands of results came up. Here are a few of the
offensive but “appropriate” ones.
The "Common White Girl" according to Twitter
