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Ethnic Notions
Marlon Riggs is keenly aware of the impact of stereotypes on real social norms related to race. In Ethnic Notions, Riggs enacts some of the prevalent stereotypes against African-Americans. The actors and comedians enacting these stereotypes often hid behind the veil of "comedy" or "humor" as an excuse for what is actually a racist reflection of prevailing social norms. Riggs uses the documentary format to showcase two main issues. The first issue is that stereotypical roles reinforce stereotypes and prevent social progress. Second, that the perpetuation of stereotypes has caused a corresponding lack of serious dramatic roles for African-Americans. A lack of dramatic roles reinforces stereotypes because it dehumanizes the "other," turning an African-American into a caricature.
According to Riggs, some of the prevalent stereotypical roles for African-Americans include the Mammy, the Sambo, and the Black Rambo While these stereotypical roles have been used to entertain, they can also exclude African-American...
Stereotyping was not present in the Cosby Show. Instead, the show revealed fresh ways of depicting race in America. Race was almost taken out of the equation in The Cosby Show, because the family was just ordinary Americans. Riggs is not suggesting to ignore race, but to allow for more realistic depictions of African-Americans.
The lack of dramatic roles for African-Americans has dehumanized and disempowered an already disenfranchised community. Actors like Morgan Freeman have shown that Hollywood is willing to overcome the racist stereotypes that permeated American society. Now, there is a greater awareness about the harm that stereotypes can do to actors and to the society at large.
2. In the lecture "The Danger of the Single Story," Chimamanda Adichie criticizes the one-sided story as…
She has seen it lurking in the eyes of all white people. So. The distaste must be for her, her blackness.... Phlegm and impatience mingle in his voice. (Morrison 49) but Pecola endures this discomfort and rejection, not so she can establish her empowered Blackness as a consumer, but so she can purchase candy. The candy is not to satisfy her bodily, physical sexual or even stomach's appetite. Rather,
Many scholars and scientists truly believed that physical beauty and grace were indicative of other "internal" traits, and that the "less beautiful" races (i.e. all non-whites, though there were gradients established in this regard) were of poorer moral quality and intelligence, and had other undesirable internal characteristics as well (Gibson 1990). This means that the concepts of beauty that are expressed in the book have both direct and symbolic
Eichelberger states that Morrison's work shows that the novel "in its particular cultural setting portrays domineering aggression as the true motivation for many cultural conditions that are commonly regarded as agents of freedom" (2). This ideology (i.e. The dominant mindset) is what characters use to destroy other characters' sense of self. Both the Bluest Eye and When the Legends Die have a resounding theme of homelessness and this relates to
Toni Morrison's novel The Bluest Eye is deals with the historical and psychological effects of defining beauty according to race. The Bluest Eye is essentially about how concepts of beauty are instilled from a very young age. It is about the life of the Breedlove family who resides in Lorain, Ohio. The novels focal point is the daughter, an eleven-year-old Black girl who is trying to conquer a bout with
On the evening of her first menstruation, for example, she asks, 'How do you do that? I mean, how do you get somebody to love you.' And, after a visit to Marie, Poland, and China, Pecola ponders, 'What did love feel like?... How do grownups act when they love each other? Eat fish together?' " (Bloom, 26) The question of how to get somebody to love you is significant for
Her mother, like her daughter, is said to be filled with a sense of self-hatred and rejection. "She [Pecola's mother] was confronted by prejudice on a daily basis, both classism and racism, and for the first time, the white standard of beauty. These experiences worked to transform Pauline into a product of hatred and ignorance, leading her to hold herself up to standards that she didn't fully understand nor