Running Head: Race stereotypes on TV and Films.

Community Problem Report: Race Stereotypes on TV and Films.

Juan Manuel Gama Trevio

The University of Texas at El Paso.

November 7,2017
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Abstract

Since I was a kid, I always have been fascinated with the American TV, how even the open

channel has good series, with good stories and video quality, not like Mexico that the only

thing that the open TV channels offer are soup operas and bad copies of American reality TV

like the voice, but at the time I was growing I started to notice something really strange in

American TV, it has a really bad representation on how America looks now, did you know

that in the 2016 census, the government count only 61.3% of American Population are white,

and that are more Latinos than African American people. Well even though these facts are

true, the TV and films dont show this at all, almost all of the main characters in TV and

Films are typical white people, and maybe they have a multi-diverse group of actors, but this

non-white actors often have to act as a living stereotypes of the race they are trying to

represent, as the case on the CW series Riverdale, where we can see a character named

Veronica and her family being a Latino family in the town of Riverdale, but the only

Latino thing about them is when they say stuff like mija, and giving her the stereotype of

being the cool rebel girl with spice as they said once in the series. I'm going to use personal

experience, books and articles, to try to approve my thesis: "A lot of the TV writers don't

know about the cultures they try to represent and make a poor effort to get to know them".
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Background

America has always been a multicultural country, since the 1840s when hundreds of

thousands Irish migrants came to America, but also since then as Nyman says (2016), the

white Anglo-Saxon protestants reacted with a lot of discrimination against them. This

misunderstanding about Irish and even make them part of the TV culture as a big Mafia that

was in the streets just because of the socio-economic status of this Irish in the U.S. Also

movies like The Godfather created an equal myth about the Italians and the Mafia that they

had in the US society. Thats why now we can see that the collective mindset of the Irish

people was reduce to priests, gangsters and corrupted law enforcers such as politicians and

police officers.

Another ethnicity that has a really bad representation on TV is the Hispanic people. For

example, (Nittle, 2017), back in the 1930s to 1950s black housekeepers played roles in

television sitcoms, but in the 1980s, Latinos started to replace blacks in Hollywoods

domestics. When according to the BLS (Bureau of Labor Statistics) not even the 50 percent

of the Latino people is in the cleaning and maintenance business (see chart 1). Also another

really hurtful stereotype is the thug life/immigrant Latino, that movies live West Side Story

(1961) have, it portraits Latinos as thugs, drug dealers and gangbangers, that the only thing

that make them get to the country is by breaking the law and doing blurry businesses, when

the reality is that all of us know a person who is Latino or Latina, and are good people.

As Nittle says in her 2017 article for thoughtco.com: The gangster stereotype aimed at

Latinos is particularly harmful, as it gives the public the idea that Hispanics arent law-

abiding citizens but cholos. Accordingly, they should be feared, shunned and certainly not

treated as equals. While some Latinos, just as some whites, find themselves entangled in the

criminal justice system, the majority of Hispanics arent criminals.

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Stereotypes today

Nowadays we are more informed than ever, thats why a lot of this stereotypes are

being erased little by little, but even now we have to fight with this hurtful stereotypes that

now are more hidden than ever, for example the Grammy award series The Big Bang Theory

has the character Ramayan Koothrappali played by Kunal Nayyar an English man who has

indian roots, he is forced to speak with an Indian accent, when in real life he doesn have this

marked accent just for comedy purposes. Now TV insists in add this multicultural characters

and make them act as if they are different from their white counterparts, when in real life a lot

of this Americans who are from different ethnicities just want to fit in society, and its not

that they are ashamed of its cultural heritage, but is that TV makes it a big deal out of it, this

new generations of kids just want to have the best of both worlds, they are Americans just

with different backstories, they are not a completely different culture as TV portraits. For

example, another stereotype that is often shown about Native Americans, is that they are from

the wilderness and that they have a completely different culture away from the cities, but in

fact according to the article of Nittle 5 common Native American Stereotypes the

Washington University in St. Louis found out that 60% of the Native Americans lives in the

city.

And is not even what the viewer want as you can see in the video StereoTypes-Racial

Identity by the channel iamOTHER, people doesnt see themselves as just one race, they see

themselves as biracial or multiracial there is no such thing as just white, or just black, we are

a big mix of all the races, nationalities and ethnicities so if we dont act or thing l like that,

why the TV really wants us to classify the people in just one box, when we can have more

than one culture.

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Conclusion

As I pointed out all of this report, the stereotypes are bad, but now is time to say why

they are bad for our society. America is now more diverse than ever, but even with that there

is a lot of ignorance out there, people that doesnt have a good education or moral values tend

to despise what they cannot understand, which only creates more hate and fear about people

different than the standard. And now that this hatred is supported by the current President of

the United States is more important to create more awareness than ever, so that all of us are

treated as equals, that we are just human beings as everyone, and that the color of your skin

or your cultural heritage defines you entirely, as the people in the video mentioned earlier, we

are a mix race, we can be multiple cultures in one, and I think its better that way, it makes us

unique. So I want to take a stand for all my fellow people, no matter who they are, that we

can be the new generation, a better generation, one in which everyone would be included and

all of the ideas would be listen, maybe when we star getting jobs in the media, we would

create conscience, and make characters in TV and movies based in their personalities, desires

and loves, not just only in his heritage.

Basu, P. B. (2014, July 23). The Big Bang Theory Best of Raj Koothrappali. Retrieved November 19, 2017,

from https://thefundoowriter.wordpress.com/2014/06/18/the-big-bang-theory-best-of-raj-koothrappali.

We can see a quote from the TV show that makes reference to his accent
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Images page

Chart 1.
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Reference Page

Nittle, N. K. (2017, March 02). Five Common Latino Stereotypes in Television and

Film. Retrieved November 05, 2017, from https://www.thoughtco.com/latino-stereotypes-in-

television-and-film-2834654.

Nittle, N. K. (2016, June 11). Common Racial Stereotypes in Movies and Television.

Retrieved November 05, 2017, from https://www.thoughtco.com/common-racial-stereotypes-

in-movies-television-2834718

Nittle, N. K. (2017, March 2). 5 Common Native American Stereotypes in Film and

Television. Retrieved November 05, 2017, from https://www.thoughtco.com/native-

american-stereotypes-in-film-television-2834655.

(2013, November 12). Retrieved November 05, 2017, from

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_z6yKGiDMdo

Taylor, D. H. (2005). I'm looking for myself on television. Windspeaker, 23(3), 17-

18.

Arapoglou, E., Kalogeras, Y., & Nyman, J. (Eds.). (2016). Racial and ethnic identities

in the media. Retrieved from https://0-ebookcentral-proquest-com.lib.utep.edu.

Bresnahan, M. J., & Lee, C. (2011). Activating Racial Stereotypes on Survivor: Cook

Islands. Howard Journal Of Communications, 22(1), 64-82.

doi:10.1080/10646175.2011.546746.