Blog topic 1

I believe that stereotyping for the most part affects our society as a whole negatively.  For each of the four different cultures covered in the first four chapters each stereotype had a negative impact on each culture by making each culture over simplified. 

For the African Americans it was negative because in the minstrel plays they were portraying slaves as being happy to serve their masters, and made it seem like slavery was fun.  For these plays Caucasian people were painting their faces black and portraying African Americans.  For the reversal minstrels plays, African American  people were painting their faces white and making fun of the minstrel plays by exaggerating the stereotypes of blacks even more.  In the video for “Day of Absence” you could hear people laughing at how extreme the stereotypes were of the white-faced actors talking to the black actor that was portraying a slave.

For the Latino and Mexican stereotyping it was definitely a negative impact, even though it portrayed some of the people as very hard workers, they were trying to sell them like cars in “Los Venditos”.  The clip also portrayed them as being able to live anywhere, even in the worst neighborhoods in the most dilapidated buildings.  It was also very offensive to me that the college students were dressing up as Mexican janitors and wearing names like Pedro and Sanchez in the representations of the media clip.  This does not make our colleges look very accepting of other nations and is just ignorant to me.

For Native American stereotypes, they were almost always portrayed as villains in the older movies, that’s why it was nice to see a movie like “Dances with Wolves” when it came out.  It finally was a movie that showed that white people may have been the ones that were the villains.  After watching the clips of the “White Shamans and Plastic Medicine Men” I felt bad for the Natives and Indians because they are right it is wrong to try to profit from pretending to be healers, especially when true healers don’t charge for their “services”.

For the Asian-American stereotypes, they seemed to have the most positive ones but, this still is a way of making everyone seem the same.  When some people might be good at math while others aren’t and excel at some other subject, just like any other race or nationality.  The idea of the obedient woman with Asian culture made it seem like Asian women and Indian women were like robots and would just do what their husband said.  Which, no matter where this idea came from it is not fair to say this about anyone, it kind of makes them sound like they don’t have a say in what they do.

The media just spreads these stereotypes faster and is not helping us to break the stereotypes any time soon.  Certain movies don’t help either like “A day without a Mexican” that was a prime example of stereotyping with all of the low end jobs being empty since all of the Mexicans were gone.