African-American Representation In The Media Essays - Black, Color

African-American Representation In The Media In Jacqueline Bobo's article, The Color Purple : Black Women as Cultural Readers, she discusses the way in which black women create meaning out of the mainstream text of the film The Color Purple. In Leslie B. Innis and Joe R. Feagin's article, The Cosby Show : The View From the Black Middle Class, they are examining black middle-class responses to the portrayal of black family life on The Cosby Show. In their respective articles, Bobo, and Innis and Feagin are investigating the representation of race, particularly African American race, in the mass media. The chief concerns of their investigations lie in how African Americans deal with the way these representations portray them individually and their social group as a whole. In this paper I will compare the issues in each study, analyze the larger sociopolitical implications of the media representations and apply a similar framework of concerns to my own reception analysis project. In Bobo's article, the chief concerns of the author are the savage and brutal depiction of black men in the film, black family instability, and the way that black women embrace the film and use their own reconstructed meaning of it to empower themselves and their social group, (90,92). Film as a medium starts out with many potential limitations and problems when it comes to representing a whole race of people. No two people are exactly alike no matter what race they come from so there is no way one film can represent all peoples. Unfortunately, many people believe that a certain depiction of black people characterizes all black people, which is certainly not the case. This is very dangerous because this perpetuates stereotyping and discrimination. The viewing public pays for movies and therefore movie directors have to tailor their product so that the majority of viewers will enjoy, and agree with the ideas behind the film. The majority almost always means white America so even Afric an American based movies are made for white audiences. Because of this, the representations of blacks in the medium of film are almost always white ideas of who black people are, not who they really are. The film The Color Purple has been the center of controversy since it was made in 1985. Many people feel the film is a terrible portrayal of black family life and that it is stereotypical in its depiction of black men as evil and brutal tyrants who imprison and mentally and verbally abuse woman. Consequently, most men despise the film and can not believe that so many women love it. The main purpose of Bobo's article was to find out why black women loved it so much and what they saw as good about the film. What Bobo found out was that though many women loved it, they also saw that there were things inherently wrong with the way black males were portrayed. However, because black females were mostly portrayed in a positive light, the black female respondents felt that the film was good in that respect. According to Bobo, Black women have demonstrated that they found something useful and positive in the film, (101). The women enjoyed seeing a woman rise up against abuse and take control of her life. They identified with the search for power and their own identity. The Color Purple presented a new type of feminism to black women who were used to seeing black female characters depicted as slaves, maids or mammies. Bobo found that though black women were aware of the oppression and harm that comes from a negative media history . . .[they] are also aware that their specific experience, as black people, as women in a rigid class/caste state, has never been adequately dealt with in mainstream media, (102). This was the main reason why the women liked the film so much. They were able to take their own past experiences and use those as a basis for their interpretation of the text. In this way, the black women didn't see the film as all bad, they saw it as a little bit of truth wrapped in a blanket of a few stereotypes and as a touching story that needed to be told. The larger

Free Essays on Belly Of The Beast

In The Belly Of The Beast by Jack Henry Abbott and Newjack by Ted Conover Jack Henry Abbott's book, In The Belly Of The Beast is as autobiographical account of the author’s lifelong experiences in penal institutions while serving time for numerous petty crimes as a child to murder in later years. He offers a wide array of attacks on various American institutions in society while trying to defend his position as â€Å"victim† of society’s pitfalls. The self-educated author encapsulates the reader by presenting stories, through letters, of the horrific reality of prison life. Although considered psychopathic, his rendition lends an enormous amount of insight and allows us to feel a need to reform a prison system that may not deserve the name of â€Å"correctional facility.† The book offers everything from tormenting accounts of his time in the Hole to foundations of political philosophies of Kant and Marx. In a time when crime literature was surging, it is s omewhat difficult to determine the author’s initial intent to engage his readers in somewhat of a â€Å"public awareness† notice. After all, his life of crime began while a teen and his adult rendition of a perfect knife stabbing does not lend acceptance to being seen as an American outlaw saint. Originally a protà ©gà © of Norman Mailer, Abbott’s letters were seen as being written by the elite of the prison population with an intellectual vision of a diseased society. He gives the reader an analysis how prison is designed to gut and corrupt the timid, and break or brutalized the weak. Abbott makes claim that his loss of constitutional rights in a society unjust led him to surrender to an unspoken prison constitution for the rest of his life. While Jack Henry Abbott can submit to being an authority on the reality of incarceration, we have a desire to review an opposition account on what it is like to be on the other side of the totem pole. Life as a correction officer, as told to us... Free Essays on Belly Of The Beast Free Essays on Belly Of The Beast In The Belly Of The Beast by Jack Henry Abbott and Newjack by Ted Conover Jack Henry Abbott's book, In The Belly Of The Beast is as autobiographical account of the author’s lifelong experiences in penal institutions while serving time for numerous petty crimes as a child to murder in later years. He offers a wide array of attacks on various American institutions in society while trying to defend his position as â€Å"victim† of society’s pitfalls. The self-educated author encapsulates the reader by presenting stories, through letters, of the horrific reality of prison life. Although considered psychopathic, his rendition lends an enormous amount of insight and allows us to feel a need to reform a prison system that may not deserve the name of â€Å"correctional facility.† The book offers everything from tormenting accounts of his time in the Hole to foundations of political philosophies of Kant and Marx. In a time when crime literature was surging, it is s omewhat difficult to determine the author’s initial intent to engage his readers in somewhat of a â€Å"public awareness† notice. After all, his life of crime began while a teen and his adult rendition of a perfect knife stabbing does not lend acceptance to being seen as an American outlaw saint. Originally a protà ©gà © of Norman Mailer, Abbott’s letters were seen as being written by the elite of the prison population with an intellectual vision of a diseased society. He gives the reader an analysis how prison is designed to gut and corrupt the timid, and break or brutalized the weak. Abbott makes claim that his loss of constitutional rights in a society unjust led him to surrender to an unspoken prison constitution for the rest of his life. While Jack Henry Abbott can submit to being an authority on the reality of incarceration, we have a desire to review an opposition account on what it is like to be on the other side of the totem pole. Life as a correction officer, as told to us...

Comparative Economic Systems Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Comparative Economic Systems - Essay Example The traditional perspective as oppressed class which was ever so pervasive during the 1960s is no longer emphatic. The roadmap of economic development of the two South Asian countries, India and China, has paved the way for radical social transformations that have been unprecedented in the history of these countries. This has been reflected in recent years when several incidents in various Indian states have expressed the agitation against industry’s attempt to acquire agricultural land (Chatterjee, 2008, p.54). The economic development in South Korea since the 1960s has been unparalleled in the country’s history. During the previous decade the country was suffering from extreme poverty as destructive result of the Korean War in the early part of the decade. The GDP in 1954 was just about $1.5 billion and per capita only $70 (Heo et al., 2008, p.2). The phenomenal growth is proved by the fact that in 2012 per capita GDP was $31,822 with the country now falling within the bracket of high income countries. In 1998, GDP dropped to 6.9 percent after which South Korea took various economic initiatives like encouraging more FDIs and imports. Although the country was affected by the 2008 global economic crisis, it recovered to a large extent in subsequent years (The World Factbook). Canada is an industrially developed country, and like the US it has market-oriented economy with high level of production. Since the WWII, rapid growth of â€Å"manufacturing, mining and service sectors† (The World Factbook) have resulted in the country becoming an urban economy from earlier rural economy. Trade agreements with the US have a great positive impact on Canada’s trade and economy. Almost 75 percent of its exports go to US resulting in considerable trade surplus. The 2008 global economic crisis badly affect the country’s economy in the