Racing to the Bottom: Female Racial Minorities in Popular Culture

This is a video about women from racial minorities in popular culture. In the video we look at some examples of Latina and black women in movies and advertisements today and how women belonging to racial minority groups are consistently depicted as the "exotic other", animalistic, subordinate to whites, highly sexualized and objectified. We start off by examining representations of Latin American women in popular culture and find surprisingly little variations from the stereotypical standard. We look at a study by Angharad Valdivia of Hollywood movies and the portrayals of Latin American women that found that it is quite rare for the representation of Latinas to deviate from the stereotypical norm where Latinas are often portrayed as loud, heavily accented, uneducated, working-class, obnoxious and seductive as well as subordinate to the white woman.

Next we look at representations of Black women in popular culture and find that Black women are consistently commodified, racialized, fragmented, objectified and dominated. We look to an examination of the same topic by Bell Hooks and find that she says that American culture is obsessed with blackness, but primarily in a commodified form that can then be possessed, owned, controlled, and shaped. We find evidence of this in an ad for Easy Tone shoes which segments the black woman in the ad, and the advertisement effectively commodifies the woman as something that can be bought and sold. So we see that women of racial minority are marginalized, objectified, trivialized and sexualized in popular culture and that there are few alternatives to these representations, and also few objections from the public.

Category:

Education

Tags:

• Popular
• Culture
• in
• Communication

[tomatowatcher]

"Race" hmmm: cars, horses, motorbikes, bicycles, runnners etc. racing against each other to determin who is the fastest.

(response for the question posed in first 10 sec of the video)

[strawberrycampino]

@tomatowatcher So I'm not the only one who thought that's what she was talking about! ;)

[Cloudwolf40]

not a bad vid, did u write thre script yourself?

[strawberrycampino]

@Cloudwolf40 Yes, we researched and wrote it ourselves over the course of four weeks. Thanks for your comment!

[ExileDragon]

@fargonbastedge "I told your retarded ass to read the book "race an IQ". If you want to know more."

Actually, you didn't, and I am afraid that your reading suggestion only confuses me further. The text "race an[d] IQ" seems to have been written by a Jewish Professor who believes the exact opposite of what you are espousing here (IE he doesn't even think "race" is a thing).

Trust me, I am under no delusion that you are my equal.

[fargonbastedge]

@ExileDragon I told your retarded ass to read the book "race an IQ". If you want to know more.

But I've meet people like you before. You have the belief that "Were all equal" regardless of how much evidence you see before your ass of us being different.

But if you believe that "were all equal". Then your going to have a hard time figuring this out... As well as other difficult things in the world. Do I want to teach you and enlighten you? No, I dont... Which is why im ending this.

[ExileDragon]

@fargonbastedge In short, it is impossible to argue with someone when they hold no consistent beliefs. If they are like you, and spew out whatever rhetoric that might even remotely support your presuppositions, then obviously no amount of talking will be of any use. You will simply make up statistics and change your argument when it is convenient. If you feel like challenging your belief system some day, feel free to read the book; obviously you are not ready at this point. Ciao.

[ExileDragon]

@fargonbastedge Evidently you are not able to quote a source for your statement, so I am going to do the responsible thing an assume you made it up.

Also: you have switched your definitions. Above you say that the CONTINENT is the determining factor, but here you say it is RACE. These are two completely different questions and require completely different approaches (the Diamond book answers the first question only).

[fargonbastedge]

@ExileDragon Your really don't have to go digging for it. Just read anything on IQ. Or google it. Race and IQ? Whats interesting about IQ. Is it's your PROBLEM SOLVING ability. How the mind can solves problems. Which is everyday life. So what school you went to, to memorize knowledge doesn't apply here.

Its strange how countries, tribes, neighborhoods, etc. with high IQ's make more money, commit less crime, higher standard of living, larger middle class, etc. and vise versa...

[ExileDragon]

@fargonbastedge

Unfortunately, award winning academic books rarely rely on such simple minded conclusions. They also tend to use realdata; mind telling me where you obtained the information that Africans have an mean IQ of 55? I would also be interested in how you think that IQ determines a continents ability to feed itself (re: starvation). Surely access to good soil and optimal weather patterns are more important to this kind of work than being able to solve a rubrics cube

[fargonbastedge]

@ExileDragon Well whats the books conclusion for Africa? My conclusion is that they have the lowest IQ (55) which is why they starve, war, low economy, bad womens rights, etc.

[ExileDragon]

@ExileDragon

seriously, give it a read. :) It will answer your question.

[ExileDragon]

@fargonbastedge

The full title of the book is "Guns, Germs and Steel: A short history of everybody for the last 13,000 years". In fact, one of the common criticisms of the text is that it incorporates almost no information about the last 500 years of history (ie colonialism).