Minority Stereotypes in the Media: African-American, Italian, and Jewish Portrayals

Introduction

The media has an influential presence in society. The images seen through the media are often not an accurate reflection of the true nature of people from various ethnic and religious minorities. Over the past two decades there has been a concerted effort to draw attention to the stereotyping of minorities in the media. The minorities most frequently targeted by such stereotypes include African-Americans, Italians, and Jews. The purpose of this discussion is to explore the phenomenon of minority stereotypes in the media. The research focuses on the types of stereotypes projected about various minority groups and how these stereotypes affect those groups in daily life.

The United States is often characterized as a melting pot, unique for the incredible diversity of ethnicities, nationalities, races, and religions represented across the nation. And yet, in many ways, its populations remain largely segregated, voluntarily inclined toward communities of their own kind and into social circles, organizations, and institutions where others are similarly situated. This is an experience common to many Americans, who have viewed other groups through the lens of their own homogeneous experiences. This contrasts with the experience of the dominant culture — a white ethnic spectrum that constitutes somewhere in the range of 70% of the population (Day, 2001). This racial dynamic facilitates a hegemonic approach to defining and conceptualizing other ethnicities, races, and cultures. The result is a set of cultural artifacts that perpetuate stereotypical composites of various minorities. These are constructed through various media to confirm hegemonic thinking and to sustain existing racial power dynamics.

Literature Review

According to Ramasubramanian and Oliver (2007), racist sentiments are remnants of shared cultural norms rather than individual characteristics. The authors also assert that socio-cultural influences — including friends, family, leaders, and the media — help create, maintain, and communicate cultural stereotypes to viewers. They further explain:

"Mediated communication such as news, in particular, plays an important role in creating and reinforcing cultural stereotypes about people and places when there is very little contact (Armstrong, Neuendorf, & Brentar, 1992; Fujioka, 1999). Through continual habitual exposure across genres and media types, media stereotypes become part of symbolic dominant ideologies… Exposure to even a single or a few media exemplars can often be powerful enough to create impressions about issues, peoples, and places, especially when little or no first-hand, non-mediated sources of information are available (Ramasubramanian & Oliver, 2007)."

Negative stereotyping is typically a product of limited interaction with members of another ethnic or cultural group, which accounts for the correlation between its presence in the media and the segregation that is generally pervasive in American culture. According to Fiske (2004), "stereotyping entails applying to an individual one's cognitive expectancies and associations about the group. As such, stereotypes represent one specific kind of schema" (Fiske, p. 398). Such schema are only made necessary by an absence of genuine understanding or awareness. In a society where segregation does not occur as consistently as it does in America — where races and ethnicities are often divided along socioeconomic and geographical lines — the tendency to rely on such schema would likely be reduced.

According to the study by Cuddy et al. (2007), "emotions predict behavioral tendencies more strongly than stereotypes do and usually mediate stereotype-to-behavioral-tendency links" (Cuddy et al., p. 631). In a very real and problematic way, media outlets tend to exploit these emotions by representing minority cultures in ways that either appeal to existing expectations or manipulate fears to greater heights. These effects suggest a reciprocal relationship between media and a culture's racial and ethnic biases.

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