Television's role in shaping perceptions of gender and race

¶ … Television on Society

Television has helped to create and perpetuate perceptions of gender and race.

Television and Perceptions of Gender

How children form ideas about gender

Perpetuating gender myths through entertainment programming

Gender portrayals on prime time news

Racial Stereotypes on Television

Television in shaping the perception of black people

Television and stereotyping Asian-Americans as the model minority

Television played a great role in colonial domination of American Indians.

Conclusion and change - where to now?

In his famous dictum of the medium is the message, Marshall McLuhan illustrated how mass media, as an extension of human capabilities, has tremendous personal and social consequences (McLuhan: 23).

Television is in a particularly strong position to initiate such consequences. After all, the great majority of American homes have at least one television set, putting the medium in an unparalleled position to affect American society.

Television also has a power to shape an individual's perceptions of social reality. This paper examines how television affects people's perceptions of gender and racial inequity. In the last part, the paper explores how the same medium that limits our perceptions of gender and race can also provide a platform to challenge these stereotypes.

Television portrayals of race

American minorities were practically non-existent in the dawn of television programming in the 1950s. Since then, there has been increased presence of African-Americans, Native Americans and Asian-Americans in television programming have resulted in mixed racial messages.

An analysis of network news stories, for example, shows that Black people given airtime were often involved in politics or crime. Additionally, they were also depicted in human-interest news stories showing them as victims of poverty, disaster or crime. Stories that focused on African-American leaders were critical rather than supportive. One-third of these stories were about a leader's illegal activities, such as the cases of Clarence Thomas and Marion Barry (Entman, cited in Comstock and Scherrer, 123).

Another study claims that despite the lack of evidence of growing anti-Semitism among African-Americans, the media - including the broadcast media - has devoted inordinate amounts of airtime to Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam. In fact, Farrakhan has consistently ranked low in surveys among Black people asked about the best representative leaders (Rojecki, cited in Comstock and Scherrer, 124). By focusing on Farrakhan's diatribes and disregarding the political viewpoints of a majority of African-Americans, the news media contributed to a greatly exaggerated conflict between Black and Jewish people.

Local television news, with its emphasis on crimes in the community, can be just as guilty when it comes to framing racial stereotypes about African-Americans. A survey of news coverage in southeastern news stations shows that Black people were more often shown as accused suspects. They were more likely to be shown being handcuffed and led away from crime scenes (Campbell et al., cited in Comstock and Scherrer, 124).

The negative effects of these portrayals have been documented. A 1999 study looked at international student's perceptions of African-Americans based on television portrayals. The researchers found that students for students who did not have much contact with Black people, these television stereotypes contributed significantly to a negative image of African-Americans (Fujioka). This finding suggests that in the absence of social contact with people of other ethnicities, television stereotypes are a strong determinant of how people perceive members of different races.

Not all stereotyping, however, is overtly negative. Asian-Americans, for example, have often been portrayed as the model minority. The result is a positive stereotype of Asians as hard-working, skilled and diligent workers who are good at math. In fact, a survey of prime-time advertising shows that Asian-Americans are adequately represented commercials. Still, the great majority of Asian models in advertising play secondary roles to a Caucasian lead (Taylor and Stern).

Taylor and Stern propose that this positive labelling and token representations can mask an unspoken exclusion and undermine a group's attempts at acculturation. Creating a model minority niche for Asian-Americans also has the dual effect of maintaining Asians as a separate and distinct ethnicity.

This social construction of an ethnic identity is also evident in the case of Native Americans. Media portrayals of American Indians were constructed by Caucasians in accordance with the latter's needs. American Indians were initially feared and hated, giving rise to the image of savages who massacred white pioneers. This gave way to the lustful Indian savage who held white women and children captive. Eventually, there was the wise peaceful Indian who was a spiritual keeper of the land (Bird).

The most enduring image of the American Indian is that of an unemotional stoicism, a portrayal often recounted in television programs such as Northern Exposure and Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman. In one particular episode of Dr. Quinn, a lead character extols the unemotional behavior of a Cheyenne prisoner as a "Native American value." The words and portrayals were meant to be positive and favourable. Many Native Americans, however, were angered by how the Cheyenne character's emotions were suppressed. To them, not allowing the Cheyenne prisoner to react in anger stripped him of his dignity and manhood (Bird).

Television portrayals of American Indians also present a skewed view of sexual relations. Most Indian women are depicted as sexless squaws. On the other hand, when presented as the "noble savage," Native American men are virile, sexual beings, whose objects of desire are often white women. A 1997 CBS television movie is a typical example, where a captive white woman falls in love with her Cree captor. The movie showed several eroticized shots of the semi-naked Cree warrior sleeping or dancing around a campfire (Bird). This objectification presents the Indian man in a way that a White man could not be depicted on television.

The other stereotypical role of Indian men is that of the benevolent wise elder. Programs such as Walker, Texas Ranger and Touched by an Angel have regular wise Indian elder characters who wield tremendous power through communing with spirits. These characters are brought out to help or advice the lead characters. Unlike the young, scantily clad counterparts, elder Indian males wore robes and are usually desexualized. Their characters are often undeveloped, with no trace of family or identity (Bird).

Both the noble savage and the wise elder stereotype represent how a dominant white culture can co-opt another ethnicity's identity and foist an artificially created one in its place. The portrayal of Native Americans as either lustful or sexless men devoid of emotion presents them as caricatures and smoothes over the rifts and differences that exist between the various Indian nations.

What Can Be Done? The case of The Mary Tyler Moore Show

Mary Richards worked outside the home, but she was not a secretary. She was thirty, but was unmarried. Furthermore, she appeared to be unconcerned about being single. The heroine of The Mary Tyler Moore Show heralded the lifestyle of a growing number of single women in the 1970s, a lifestyle which television until then ignored.

The portrayal of Mary Richards has been criticized as a severely qualified feminism. While embodying the ideals of the new, liberated woman, for instance, Mary still fulfilled the familiar roles of caretaker and nurturer, albeit in the new setting of the workplace. In her critique of this show, Ella Taylor writes that the combination of new woman with old-fashioned values allowed the show to "endors (e) modernity at the same time it hallows tradition." (Dow, 25).

Despite its shortcomings, The Mary Tyler Moore Show was played an important role in raising feminist consciousness in the 1970. The qualified feminism it professed still brought the message about women in the workplace to people intimidated by feminist groups such as the National Organization for Women (NOW). For better or worse, Mary Richards became an accepted symbol of the new feminist woman. Perhaps the greatest success of the television program is seen how these days, the image of an unmarried thirtyish woman in a non-traditional female job is no longer jarring.

In conclusion, television portrayals have the potential to create limiting stereotypes of gender and race. The same medium, however, also has the potential for creating images that challenge and re-work prevailing notions of race and, as in the case of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, gender.