Last Minute Links Before the New Year
This isn’t “The Sopranos,” where a screenwriter and a director sat down and decided they wanted to portray Italian-Americans as marauding morons who pray to the holy trinity of spaghetti, strippers and silencers.
In fact, by focusing all their ire on MTV, the show’s detractors are actually insulting their Italian-American brethren – by suggesting that they’re having fun pretending to be stereotypes. Let’s get this straight: Snooki can barely work a landline phone, and Pauly D thinks you light charcoal in a gas grill, but producers have persuaded them to “act” like boobs?
We Italian-Americans ought to be thanking the network for shining a spotlight on a small but real subset of the culture. One that we should recoil from – and raise our kids to be nothing like.
We’ve heard variations of this argument before: if people stopped acting like stereotypes, we wouldn’t be subject to them. If only that were the case…
Finally, Time magazine published the findings of a study that measured how racial bias is upheld through images on television:
In a series of intricately designed experiments, psychologists at Tufts University demonstrate that subtle racial biases are often expressed by characters on popular television shows, and that viewers not only pick up these attitudes but allow them to shape their own outlooks on race. The most insidious part of this cultural traffic, the researchers found, is that the transmission of race bias appears to occur subconsciously, unbeknownst to the viewer. [...]
The psychologists wondered how such biases could persist in a society in which racism is socially unacceptable and indeed publicly denounced.
So the group decided to examine the medium of television, which connects the vast majority of Americans, and through which many people predominantly receive their social and cultural cues. The study looked at 11 popular prime-time TV shows, such as Heroes, Scrubs, House, CSI: Miami and Grey’s Anatomy, whose casts include both white and black recurring characters of equal status.
In the first of a series of four studies, researchers showed participants TV clips in which a white character and black character interact — but the segments were stripped of sound and the black character was digitally deleted. The idea was to ensure that neither race nor dialogue would color viewers’ analysis. The exercise was repeated with the white character deleted. Researchers then asked the viewers, white college students, to evaluate in each circumstance, whether the unseen character appeared to be treated positively or negatively by the seen character, and how well liked he or she appeared to be. In the end, across the majority of TV shows, viewers consistently said that the white characters had received more positive treatment and were better liked than their black counterparts.
What fascinated Weisbuch was that the viewers’ judgment of the characters was based purely on nonverbal cues, from facial expressions to body language. In fact, when participants were given transcripts of the verbal content of the clips, they saw no difference in the way black or white target characters were treated by speaking characters. These expressions may have been scripted into the show by writers, or by productions editors or the director, but nevertheless, researchers say they demonstrate unfavorably biased attitudes toward black characters. [...]
The findings suggest that despite the progress that has been made in addressing racism in the America, we may still be perpetuating prejudice in subtle ways — and, if Weisbuch’s findings are validated, in ways that we may not even realize. “Human beings are thinking, cognizant, conscious beings who can be strategic and intentional,” says John Dovidio, a professor of psychology at Yale University who wrote an editorial accompanying Weisbuch’s study, published Thursday in Science. “But we are also kind of emotional and we do a lot of things without full conscious awareness. What this research suggests is that although our minds are in the right places, and we may truly believe we are not prejudiced, our hearts aren’t quite there yet.”
Catch you in 2010.
(Image credit: BlackIris.com)
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