In Why are all the Black kids sitting together in the cafeteria?, Beverly Daniel Tatum discusses the costs of racism, and how we can fight against it. One section in this book called “It’s That Stuff Again: Developing a Critical Conscience” discusses the importance of teaching children to recognize signs of racism, sexism and classism in popular culture. She emphasizes that children are “are better able to resist the negative impact of oppressive messages when [they] see them coming than when they are invisible to [them].”
I’ve recently come across an interesting method of looking at how well popular culture represents females in minorities in the Bechdel test. The Bechdel Test, originally created by Allison Bechdel to show the underrepresentation of women in movies, has three simple rules: 1. There must be two or more female characters, 2. Who talk to each other, 3. About something other than a man. Most people don’t really notice how much pop culture really ignores women until you apply this test to popular films. Looking at lists that show how many movies are actually able to pass this test, women’s representation is pretty low. http://bechdeltest.com/
But, when you change the rules to apply to POC, you can see that it’s even worse. http://theangryblackwoman.com/2009/09/01/the-bechdel-test-and-race-in-popular-fiction/ In this post, Johnson points out how difficult it is for most movies and TV shows to pass the first rule, let alone the other two. How many movies have you seen recently that feature more than two characters who aren’t white? While this test doesn’t give us an idea of the quality of the movie, or even whether it has racist undertones, it does shed light on a problem in pop culture. Because minorities are underrepresented in pop culture, it sends out the message that their thoughts and ideas aren’t important, that only interaction between white males are important enough to be represented. It perpetuates the idea that minorities are lesser than whites, an idea that may be given less power if people in Hollywood realized what they were doing.
I’ve recently come across an interesting method of looking at how well popular culture represents females in minorities in the Bechdel test. The Bechdel Test, originally created by Allison Bechdel to show the underrepresentation of women in movies, has three simple rules: 1. There must be two or more female characters, 2. Who talk to each other, 3. About something other than a man. Most people don’t really notice how much pop culture really ignores women until you apply this test to popular films. Looking at lists that show how many movies are actually able to pass this test, women’s representation is pretty low. http://bechdeltest.com/
But, when you change the rules to apply to POC, you can see that it’s even worse. http://theangryblackwoman.com/2009/09/01/the-bechdel-test-and-race-in-popular-fiction/ In this post, Johnson points out how difficult it is for most movies and TV shows to pass the first rule, let alone the other two. How many movies have you seen recently that feature more than two characters who aren’t white? While this test doesn’t give us an idea of the quality of the movie, or even whether it has racist undertones, it does shed light on a problem in pop culture. Because minorities are underrepresented in pop culture, it sends out the message that their thoughts and ideas aren’t important, that only interaction between white males are important enough to be represented. It perpetuates the idea that minorities are lesser than whites, an idea that may be given less power if people in Hollywood realized what they were doing.
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