**Project 365 Edition: Freshman Year in College. Starting 8/20/2011**

This blog was originally a blog devoted to a great high school class of mine, but I've decided to transform it into a Project 365 blog (a photo blog where you post a picture everyday for a year). I fell in love with the layout of crayons and cuteness (and wasn't savvy enough to redo it) that I'm just staying here! My teachers may very well still get notifications when I post, but whatever. If so, hi Bolos and O'Connor! :P Feel free to un-link yourself if you get bored/annoyed of me...

I'm not sure how keeping up with the daily posts will work for me (especially seeing my track record of weekly posts in that class) but I thought it would be a neat idea to at least get a feeling of the first year of college, of freshman year. Making new friends, new habits, and living a new life. Also apparently being corny as hell. Maybe this new life can include actually posting each day. Probably not. Let's cross our fingers for me?


Tuesday, February 9, 2010

Discrimination Commercial

I just finished watching LOST, and as a little experiment I decided to count how many African American people showed up in the commercials. In class we talked about commercials a little while back, how they've changed, and how they are constructed to get people to want the product. Our big discussion on kids and toys.

As I watched I counted 40 commercials, give or take a few. The amount of people in the commercials? Way too many to count. The percent of the people who appeared African American? Very little. There were maybe 22 appearances, 10 of which were part of another show being advertised and the others were put in places normally associated with the lower class. There were gangsters, a barber shop owner, and a factory worker. I've always been aware of an unbalance but watching more intently I really realized the impact it has. People design commercials to relate to the average person, so they can reach and convince the most people possible. Watching the smiling, thoughtful, decidedly average people with their "white" skin color I realized that even watching TV African American people are discriminated against and given bad symbols for who they are supposed to be. Under that notion, should we ban commercials? Of course that can't happen, but it makes me wonder why people don't see the problem in this type of discrimination.
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1 comment:

  1. Sophie MFebruary 10, 2010 at 4:43 PM

    I think this is a big factor to the invisible racism in our society. On TV, "average" African American people are- like you said- portrayed as lower class citizens. By generalizing the entire population to this standard, they are therefore seen that way by society. I agree with you and I by no means think this type of discrimination (or ANY discrimination) is acceptable. But I think the problem is that not all people are aware that the problem you identified is discrimination. That being said, the solution would begin with awareness.. America may not be explicitly racist like it used to be, but are we ourselves being racist by not raising awareness or shining light on the invisible racism that still exists?

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