Minority groups matter too!

[...] It can be overwhelming and discouraging to find out my whole self image has been formed mostly by others or underneath my worries about what I look like are years (17 of them) of being exposed to TV images of girls and their set roles given to them by TV and the media. It's painful to deal with. The idea is scary. So why dissect the dreams? Why not stay ignorant about them and happy? The reasons for me is that those dreams are not unrelated to my every day life. They influence how I behave, I think, react to things.... My dreams keep me from dealing with an unpleasant reality.

This was a quote presented by Linda Christensen in Unlearning the Myths That Bind Us. These were the words written by one of her students named Justine when asked to respond to a piece by Ariel Dorfman. The reason why I picked this quote was because when I read it, this is exactly what happened:

 The fact that this person was studying social justice and still managed to say this is beyond me. I mean, I can see where they're coming in wishing to remain ignorant about this -- they are obviously afraid of being told that they have been victims to some really screwed up ideology and that everything they have been taught is complete and utter bullshit and formulated by people who wanted to remain on top. And that this--

perpetuates an insane amount of stereotypes, misogyny and racist views; and it is these same views that are drilled into our heads and well, we normalize the concept and we accept it as truth. Sigh, Justine needs to get her life straight and look at her life and choices. 

I start by showing students old cartoons because the stereotypes are so blatant. We look at the roles of women, men, people of color, and poor people play in the cartoons. I ask students to watch for who plays the lead. Who plays the buffoon? Who plays the servant? I encourage them to look at the race, station in life, body type of each character. What motivates the character? What do they want out of life? What is their mission? If they are people of color in the cartoon, what do they look like? How are they portrayed? What would children learn about this particular group from this cartoon? [...] What about women other than the main character? What jobs do you see them doing? What do they talk about? What are their main concerns?

This quote spoke to me in more ways than one. Every time I speak about media representation (wether that would be the representation of people of color, women, queer people, or any minority group), I start by asking myself whether X from Y minority group has an "important role" in a certain medium. Sometimes, over the course of my teenage years as I watch tv, read books, etc, is that a lot of the time people will tell you that "THERE ARE BLACK/GAY/HISPANIC PEOPLE AND WOMEN IN THIS SHOW/BOOK/ETC!" Okay buddy, there might be some kind of representation in the media about one of these, but that doesn't mean it's accurate. I am so sick and tired of gay people in television shows and movies being given a storyline based on the fact that they are gay; or a black character having a storyline based on their blackness; or a woman being given a role that falls under stereotypical and misogynistic tendencies  While the white person gets the STORY. They get the SPOTLIGHT and the RELATABILITY. Fuck that, we (queers, people of color, women, etc) are more than just entertainment for people who want to pity us. We are people too and we deserve to be treated as these "exotic" or "other" or "abnormal" beings in the media. Lets give the black man the CEO position with the cheating wife and the son who's gay. Or let's give the woman the leader position after the plane crashes, forcing her into the tough role based on her expertise on various fields. LET'S JUST GIVE STORIES TO THESE "OTHERS" BECAUSE WE MATTER TOO.

Both of the Cinderellas compete for their men against their sisters and the rest of the single women in their cities. They "win" because of their beauty and their fashionable attire. Both of these tales leave young women with two myths: Happiness means getting a man, and transformation from wretched conditions can be achieved through consumption--in their case, through new clothes and new hairstyle.

Although the messages are still not messages that should be shown to children, the point of this quote is the fact that the same story could be shared without having to make the main character a white, straight person in every single medium out there. This one kind of ties in to my previous quote about giving storylines to people of color. Recently, Girl's (on HBO) creator and writer Lena Dunham adressed the remarks concerning the lack of people of color in her television show, WHICH IS SET IN NEW YORK. Even though she attempted to acknowledge the fact that the experiences of white girls and girls of color might not be "drastically different", she still made the core of the character be race-related. I guarantee that if one of those four girls was, in fact, a person of color and given the same story that the white girls currently have, it would not have made much of a difference in her character. I don't buy Lena Dunham's bull and I'm sick and tired of her trying to defend her covert racism and people buying into her.