The Issues Arising From The Media Representation Of Race

This essay will highlight the key issues arising from the media representation of race. In the essay the concepts of stereotyping, othering and appropriation will be discussed with the hope of showing that there are many issues in regards race. Race is not easily defined, however simply put the Concise Oxford Dictionary describes race as â€Å"A group of people or things with a common feature.† To think of race is to think of racism as John storey says The first thing to insist on in discussion of ‘race’ is that there is just one ‘race’, the human race. Human biology does not divide people into different ‘races’; it is racism (and sometimes its counter arguments) that insists on this division. This essay will seek to elaborate on how the†¦show more content†¦Race is about differences and as times change so do differences â€Å"We are always different, negotiating different kinds of differences.† In Establishing differences between ethnicities the idea of the black slave gets regurgitated frequently, by likening minorities with ‘blackness’, which trivializes them in order to make them subservient. For example, during colonial times the English sought to establish the Irish as an inferior minority therefore, propaganda was produced which animalised the Irish, making them ape-like to represent them as moving towards ‘Blackness’. Likening them to ‘blackness’ made them seem less ‘white’ and therefore less ‘human’. Charles Kingsley said But I am haunted by the human chimpanzees I saw along that hundred miles of horrible country. [†¦] But to see white chimpanzees is dreadful; if they were black, one would not feel it so much, but their skins, except where tanned by exposure, are as white as ours. Ethnic minorities, also fall victim to stereotyping, whereby the actions of a small selection of the ethnic group are seen to represent the entire group. â€Å"The roles in which ethnic minorities have been developed in media texts have tended to be stereotypical, constructing a narrow and generalised version of the lives and identities of such populations.† For