Film Can Be Purchased from
Cambridge Documentary Films
www.cambridgedocumentaryfilms.org

 . The film looks at the toxic and degrading messages imbedded in the images of girls and women that dominate the media and the risks that these messages pose to both mental and physical health. The film goes beyond merely analyzing the issues and aims at developing in the viewer critical thinking skills, an ability to resist media manipulation, and a commitment to activism. The video presents the ideas of several leading authorities in the fields of psychology of women and girls, eating disorders, anti-racism, violence against women, and media literacy, all of whom focus on potential long term solutions.

Although the film looks primarily through the lens of gender, the issue of race and racism is critical to understanding the role and impact of media images of girls and women. .

 

Section 1— “Looking Through the Lens of Race” by Valerie Batts, Ph.D.

In order to more effectively analyze the implicit messages of contemporary media, Dr. Batts (who is featured in the film) highlights some of the differences between the overt racism of the first half of the 20th century and the “modern racism” of today. This section also

 

 

Section 1

Looking Through The Lens of Race
by Valerie Batts, Ph.D.

Why is it important to explicitly name race in a discussion of the impact of the media? Clearly, media images have become the central form of communication for most young people in the United States. Our country is based on the assumption that “White is Right and West is Best.” The media has been a primary carrier of this message. The video, Beyond Killing Us Softly: The Strength to Resist begins to challenge this assumption, and this discussion of race and racism is an attempt to deepen that challenge.

Talking about race and racism is often difficult for teachers. Many white teachers fear saying or doing “the wrong thing.” Others practice “color blindness” and claim to treat everyone the same — usually the same as other white middle class children — thus ignoring the impact of racism on many of their students’ lives.

Many teachers of color believe racism will always be a factor and that talking about it won’t make any difference. Each of these positions, though understandable, actually keep us from using our power as teachers to get young people to think critically about their world so that they may become advocates for real and lasting social and economic change.

We need a common language to find our voices and empower our students and ourselves. Educators need to understand what talking about these issues brings up for them, personally, before they begin group discussions with other teachers or with students. To assist in this self-understanding, personal reflection questions have been interspersed in italics and blue throughout this article.

Developing a Common Language

Racism is “a system of advantage based on race.” It is created and sustained on 4 levels:
- Personal (individual thoughts and feelings)
-Interpersonal (individual behavior in relation to others)
-Cultural (values, definitions of beauty, preferred modes of thought and communication — what’s “good, right, beautiful and normal”)
- Institutional (rules, practices, laws, histories, power structures of society and its institutions) NOTE: The difference between personal and interpersonal racism is the “acting out” of biases. The difference between cultural and institutional racism is that the prevailing values and culture of the privileged are legitimized and institutionalized. It becomes an institutional “acting out” of held beliefs. this article.

 

Racism Defined Many people associate racism with people holding prejudiced ideas or acting toward another person in a prejudiced way. We all have individual biases and prejudices, but racism in the United States goes further than individual acts of bias or meanness. When we talk about racism, we are talking about a system of advantage based on race. It is sometimes defined as “prejudice plus power.” It is the ability of one group — white people — to define what is the “right” way of doing things, what is “normal”, what is “beautiful” or “good” coupled with the power of institutions, organizations, and government to put in place policies, procedures, and practices that give advantage to whites.

 

Questions for teachers: How have you defined racism up until now? Which levels of racism (personal, interpersonal, cultural or institutional) do you feel most able to identify? Which are more difficult? What feelings do you notice as you discuss these aspects of racism?

 

“Old-fashioned” Racism

“Old-fashioned” racism refers to overt acts of racism at the personal, interpersonal, cultural and institutional levels:

Personal racism (Example: believing that blacks and other people of color are inferior)
Interpersonal racism (calling people racist names)
Cultural racism (seeing black culture as “less than” or impoverished)
Institutional racism (Jim Crow laws)

 

Such types of racism were the “law of the land” in many parts of the United States throughout our history and remained in the Southern region until the passage of the l964 Civil Rights Act. Institutional racism results in the targeting of certain groups to receive fewer of society’s resources. This means that the chances for their success are less, and the chances of success for the privileged group are better.

In advertising, examples of old-fashioned racism include symbols of black women such as Aunt Jemima or the lack of black women in ads altogether. Aunt Jemima was a television commercial and advertisement character that represented a stereotypical image of black women who served as domestic workers for whites. She was a typically loved character who was not supposed to be smart, beautiful or powerful, but sweet, lacking in sensuality and loving at all times. Women of color from Asian, Latina and Native American communities were virtually non-existent in advertising but, when included, were uniformly stereotypical.

As an African American woman growing up in the South in the l950’s, I experienced old-fashioned racism in its interpersonal, cultural and institutional dimensions. By the time I was in graduate school in l975 at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, the social psychology literature was suggesting that racism had all but disappeared in this country. What was disappearing was old-fashioned racism (although studies show that 25% of people still hold oldfashioned racist views), and something new and harder to pin down was taking its place.

Questions for teachers: What feelings and images does the word “racist” conjure up for you first? As you reflect on this question and the section above, do you tend to think first about racism in terms of its “old-fashioned” form?

 

“Modern Racism”

“Modern racism”, by contrast, uses non-race related reasons for denying equal access to opportunity. “It’s not the blacks, it’s the busing I object to,” is one common refrain. “It’s not that we don’t want to hire people of color, but we need qualified applicants,“ is another.

When my daughter and I were exploring how decisions are made about which models are used in commercials, she was told by advertising agency representatives that the cornrows she was wearing might be seen as “too ethnic.” The underlying assumptions of this opinion are all examples of modern racism.

 

 

      1. It assumes that white consumers will not find beauty in a particular black woman’s style. It does not provide them an opportunity to stretch their perspectives about what is “right and beautiful.”
      2. It assumes that consumers from all backgrounds share this bias. For too long women and men of color have been trained to disregard the standards of beauty traditional to our group or cultural heritage and to feel a need to strive for white images.
      3. It defines what is beautiful in European “ethnic” terms. This is as damaging to people of color as is the stereotypical image of the “mammy” and to whites as is the stereotypical image of the “china doll”.
      4. And finally, it begins to create an image of what is beautiful that is so narrow that very few can see themselves, unless they strive to be white-looking Asians, Blacks, Latinas or Native Americans.

 

 

 

 

 

As Gail Dines points out in the video, the media is controlled by a few U.S. corporations who make profits globally from the marketing of this narrow perspective of beauty. All of us become victims of this media imaging and, over time, lose touch with the fact that very few people of any racial or cultural group look like what is on the television or movie screen. This distortion of reality for economic gain is cultural and institutional racism at its most extreme...and it is happening all over the world.

Question for teachers: If you are European- American in heritage, have you ever thought of yourself as looking “ethnic”? How does this alter your perspective? If you are a person of color, what are images of beauty in your culture?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Internalized Oppression As people of color, we struggle to hold diverse images of ourselves in a country that still communicates through its media that “white is right” and white images are what sell. Against this barrage of white images, we have to remind ourselves to value the normal and natural ways that we look, dress, talk and walk when we are not attempting to assimilate into white culture. This pressure to assimilate and the racism we face when we do not sometimes causes us to devalue these and other expressions of our natural selves — a reaction described as “internalized oppression.” In its modern form, internalized oppression is when people of color, as “targets” of oppression, engage in behaviors and beliefs that undermine ourselves and our community. It is when we seem to collude in our own oppression and it often happens on a level that is quite unconscious. When we choose a white doctor over a doctor from our own cultural group because we think the white doctor is probably more qualified — that is internalized oppression at work. When we lighten our skin or get cosmetic surgery because we believe that our skin or features are not beautiful as they are — again, that is internalized oppression.

Internalized oppression is inevitable, given the intensity of racism, and is first and foremost a “survival strategy”. In the slavery and Jim Crow days, smiling, agreeing with the white man, and acting “simple” meant that you could live another day, both literally and figuratively. It was a functional response to racism. It was self-preservation. It is still difficult to avoid these “traps” of behaving in ways that used to be effective as survival mechanisms, but have now outlived their usefulness. We can bring these behaviors into our awareness and then seek support from others in our community to practice “letting go” of internalized oppression behaviors and find new strategies for getting our needs met in the world.

 

 

Questions for teachers of color: What are some examples of the misinformation we have been taught about ourselves as people of color? What are some of our behaviors that limit our success that we need to address? What are some personal reflections on the concept of internalized oppression?

 

 

Questions for white teachers: Think about an area where you may be a “target” of oppression — due to gender (female), class (working class or poor), language (English as a second language), age (youth or elderly), physical ability (disabled), sexual orientation (gay/ lesbian) etc. What are some behaviors or beliefs that limit your success that might relate to internalized oppression?

 

 

So what can we do about racism in the media? So what can we do? We educate ourselves. We engage in the dialogue. We come to recognize our biases as well as our buying practices. This includes recognizing the ways in which we have come to accept current media images of beauty as ideal. We need to develop a strategy for confronting racist and “Westernist” images in our personal lives as well as in our families and communities.
We can choose not to purchase materials or products that add to personally unhealthy and economically debilitating outcomes. We can write media executives, advertisers, and government officials to make our positions clear. We can organize to support programs that promote media literacy, both locally and globally. We can object to gender and racial stereotyping wherever it occurs.

And, as we view Beyond Killing Us Softly, we can use the following questions both with our peers and with our students to explore the impact of race on our experience with the media, on our image of ourselves, and on our perceptions of what is “right, good and beautiful” in our culture.

 

QUESTIONS to use with video audiences:

I. Getting started

  1. What do you know now that you didn’t know before...or what did you know before that you now understand in a different way?
  2. What questions about racism does the video raise for you?
  3. What did you think was missing?
  4. Give one example of how each of the following was discussed in the video: Personal prejudice, Interpersonal racism, Cultural racism/bias, and Institutional racism

 

II. Reflections of the Culture
Let’s look at this film through the lens of race:

  1. Who were the experts about the subject matter? Who were the experts about their experience?
  2. How many minutes had passed before the topic of racism was introduced? Does this make a difference? What does positioning imply about the importance of a topic?
  3. Describe two examples of racism being identified or confronted in the video?
  4. If you were going to remake this video, what might you add? What might you change?

III. Racism in the media industry

  1. Notice your evening newscasts. Who are chosen as the “content experts” and who are chosen as representatives of the “experiences” of their group.The pattern of choosing whites as the former and people of color as the latter is common in media portrayals of serious issues. If the white group continues to “use” people of color in this way, they are practicing a form of modern racism. If the person of color continues to participate in events in this way, she or he needs to look at whether the behavior is currently functional for the cause of community building, or whether it has become a kind of internalized oppression and needs to be confronted.
  2. When you think historically of women of color in advertising, what images come to mind? To whom were these images/ads directed? Why? Do these images reflect “old-fashioned racism”? (If possible, bring in magazines from the 1940’s through the 1960’s so that students can see the older ads. You might also consider showing something like the video “Ethnic Notions” to give students some background.)
  3. When you think of current images of women of color in advertising, what images comes to mind? To whom are these images/ads directed? Why? How might some of these images reflect “modern racism”? (In addition to some magazines such as “Cosmopolitan” or “Seventeen” or “Life”, you might bring in some magazines targeted at various racial/ethnic groups within your audience’s age group, or progressive magazines that show a diversity of images.)
  4. Have you seen examples of people of color promoting or participating in advertising in a way that reinforces stereotypes? Why do you think this happens? Can you relate this to internalized oppression or survival behaviors?
  5. What are 3 steps we as individuals can take to challenge racism in the media? u An excellent essay by Dr. Teresa Mok on Asian-Americans in the media is included on the Cambridge Documentary Films website. She comments, “Asian American women are forced to struggle with the consequences of both racism and sexism, although we live in a culture that often views racial differences through a monochromatic black-and-white lens. This can often lead to confusing feeling of being “invisible” racially and culturally in this country. Yet, at the same time, Asian Americans are often seen as foreign, exotic, or “different” — suggesting that, indeed, race and culture do matter and are noticed.” Have students read Mok’s essay. How is the portrayal of Asian Americans, Latinas/os, and Native Americans in the media similar to and different from the portrayal of African Americans? What are the stereotypical images/ representations used?

IV. Bringing it closer to home

  1. What magazines aimed at cultural groups other than white European-American exist in your school or community library? Do these magazines focus on issues of interest to that group? How are the magazines different than similar magazines focused primarily on white audiences?
  2. Are there programs or classes in your school or community that teach media literacy? Is the issue of racism being addressed?
  3. Notice the local billboards, advertisements, store promotions, newspaper stories, etc. Who is included? Are their people of color? How are they portrayed? What are the similarities and differences in the representation?