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Comments
I'm not sure I entirely agree with this. After all, said racist policeman might be racist because media representations have reinforced in him the notion that a black man is more suspicious.
INUH - Emphasis on reinforced. The media are unlikely to have made him think that black people are inferior in the first place. That comes from family, school and just the general racism of society. And the latter is the reason why there's racism in media representations anyway.
I actually have to differ, Brass. Media shapes the way most people see the world when they're kids and even when they are teenagers. Sure, experience in social environments such as school is equally important, even, but when your kid is watching a show with racist undertones and doesn't understand what discrimination is or how harmful it can be, what do you think he'll do?
Granted, it's not an ultimately big issue in comparison to those things you say, but they help towards its perpetuation.
Juan - Oh, I don't disagree that it shapes people's outlooks, but I don't think it's the original source of all these attitudes. You don't get people who are fundamentally not racist just sitting down and reading The Turner Diaries or Mein Kampf and promptly turning into racists.
And in any case, it's a chicken and egg situation, and therefore difficult to prove either way. Are we racist/sexist because of our racist/sexist media or is our media racist/sexist because we are?
It's a self perpetuating thing. If you take one thing out of the equation, though, the other stops gaining momentum. So, then, it becomes a matter of which one is easier to remove: racist and sexism in media, or racist and sexism in our society. This is not to say that we should just completely focus on the easier one, but simply that it's easier to focus on the easier one when you've got no political power outside of protests.
You'd have to find some fundamentally not racist people to check that.
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion are infamous for causing an almost universal antisemitic sentiment, first among Russians, and later the rest of Europe and America. It served as the inspiration for the Jewish pogroms in Russia, and long served as a handbook for antisemites, racists and Nazis worldwide. We cannot say that media influence on collective and individual consciousness is entirely nonexistent.
Aw jeez
I'm reminded of how in Bruce Campbell's autobiography where he says that actors and writers always want to inspire people but they're also the first to go 'It's just a movie.'
I think fictional portrayals are a catalyst for what is there more than anything else. I think what needs to happen is, of course, emphasis of the difference between fantasy and reality. I mean, it's not definitely not the writers' of Avatar's fault that the shippers threaten each other with bodily harm.
I do wonder sometimes, if artists really have to be responsible for the effects of their work, and if people have been convinced not to commit suicide by hearing songs like "How to Save a Life," does that mean it's morally irresponsible to make something like this?
On the subject of racism and sexism, the latter seems more obviously entrenched than the former, though that might just because books that have offensively written female characters often have no characters at all who aren't white. On the flipside, I've read more books with realistic female leads than with realistic nonwhite leads.
You guys are thinking too black-and white. Reading Mein Kampf won't cause you to start building a gas chamber in your bathroom. It may, however, result in you thinking 'huh... that makes sense' a few times, bringing you slightly closer to Hitler's way of thought. The influence of a single text is tiny, but media exposes you to thousands, even millions of texts, and if enough of them have the same sort of narrative... well, you can see where I'm going with this.
It's kind of like evolution. No-one believes that living in arctic conditions will cause you to spontaneously manifest a fur coat and blubber, but your environment, over a sufficient period of time, can shape the gradual adaptation of your species. Only since society changes a lot faster than biology, it can happen over decades rather than millions of years. You see what I mean here?
An article on the phenomenon.
Probably a generation or two. So lets say anywhere from 15-45 years.
Presuming other more pressing issues are attended to.
Also, now I'd like to know what sort of problems people had before the mass media existed.
The thing about mass media is that it's in your face.
When it wasn't around, people could discount all kinds of things like black people not being lazy, or Chinese people not really having yellow skin or women being capable at things not related to childbirth because they couldn't see it. People could believe what they wanted because of selection bias. By varying that selection into so many things, it makes it difficult for people to pronounce their opinions.
Sure, there's a big problem with stereotypes and generalizations, but they're generalizations almost everyone shares, and there will always be generalizations. Slowly, bit-by-bit, things will change, and there shall be inertia.
Every possible vision, every possible idea, every possible viewpoint, all right in front of you, making you face it all.
Iaculus,
Thanks for linking to that blog post, I thought it was a pretty worthwhile read.
I feel like "huh... that makes sense" phenomenon you brought up raises a good point too. I think I remember reading something about the whole "Truther" conspiracy community that said something similar.
In that case, someone who basically has the job of debunking conspiracy theories went on a TV show to talk about the Truther view. He was somewhat alarmed afterwards when he asked a seemingly clear-thinking person about the show and she replied that there might be something to what the Truthers were saying. I think part of what he concluded from that experience was that the presentation of Truther advocates on the show made them seem legitimate rather than crazy and shrill.
Applying that to the racism and sexism discussed in this thread, it seems to me that like conspiracy theories, those views only have weight to the degree that they are perceived to be and presented as legitimate. As Iaculus and Kraken mentioned, that probably means that their prevalence is largely dependent on how society as a whole sees them.