I was reminded of the marginalization of racial minorities in the media while Logan and I were watching a commercial for Virgin Mobile the other day. When the commercial was over, he asked me, "Did you notice that everyone in that commercial was white?" We watched it again, noting the possibility of a black man's hand at 0:19 as well as one very white-looking Asian woman and one very white-looking, possibly Hispanic woman. We then discussed how, while not every commercial needs to fulfill some sort of race quota, it is particularly odd that a commercial that is essentially a montage with (I counted) fifteen different actors and actresses (those who are at least visible enough to discern their race) cannot include at least one racial minority. The very few who are not discernibly Caucasian, the Asian woman in particular, appear white-washed; it looked like her hair had blonde highlights. Then we discussed the implications of our discovery--everyone is throwing their phones off balconies or dropping them in drinks or leaving them in taxis. Their phones are disposable; they are eager to go out and buy this new one from Virgin mobile. There is obviously the implication of wealth here, and it just so happens that everyone doing this is white. Interesting.

I'll admit that CDA, while interesting and enlightening and pro-social justice, all of which I can get behind, makes me feel a bit like I'm simply playing devil's advocate. I felt like this even more as I was reading  Larson's intro about The Apprentice. I've never seen the show, but I was a little skeptical about the way she wrote with such confidence that Kwame plays the role of the white man's sidekick while Omarosa plays the angry black woman. It's not that I don't agree that those stereotypes exist, but something about the way she wrote made me feel like she was simply plugging the show into a pre-existing formula for a racist television show--it just all seemed too convenient. I think what I couldn't get past was the fact that none of these typecasting scenarios are deliberate, which she later cleared up in Chapter One: "The politics of representation does not result from a conspiracy between producers/writers and politicians. There is no meeting in which these people plan how they are going to tell system-supportive stories in films in order to safe-guard their power and wealth" (14). (Which, as I found out the hard way, is why it's so hard to perform a CDA on a film that is consciously addresses issues of racial or some other social injustice; you need one that, like The Apprentice, is oblivious to its racism because it is simply following the narrative that society has already written.) "Instead, the producers and writers are telling stories that make sense to them from the position they occupy in society" (14). If someone is upper-class and white and has been taught, however consciously or unconsciously, that ethnic minorities are below them in some way, then their stories will reflect that. This cycle will continue because no one knows any other way to tell stories. I am reminded of working in Hollister where we would be especially suspicious of young black shoppers because the majority of our caught shoplifters were black--that's just how it was, we told ourselves in some attempt to make ourselves feel like we weren't being racist. We never stopped to ask ourselves why the majority of our shoplifters were black though--what about the racial narrative our society has written has put black youngsters in that position?

So this got all rambly and there was a point I was supposed to be making in regards to the reading. Going back to the Virgin Mobile commercial, Logan and I discussed how the producers of the commercial probably did not not sit down and decide the commercial would not feature any ethnic minorities because ethnic minorities don't have the money to throw their phone in the trash--they probably just cast people they knew who all happened to be white, just like them. When a person's individual life is filled with other white people, that becomes the norm for them. Unfortunately some of these people are involved in the media and so their very white lives are reflected in what we see on television, resulting in the marginalization of ethnic minorities. In Miss Representation (I know, I can't go a blog post without referencing that movie), they refer to this concept as "symbolic annihilation," which is basically when society's representation of a group is so minimally to non-existent that that group's relevance to society is questionable. When we don't include minorities in the media, it looks as though they are not valued or considered to be important, and they might ask themselves what role they even play in society if they are not important enough to be represented. Watching the Virgin Mobile commercial reminded me of being at the apartment of two of our friends, a married couple from Nigeria. They had the TV on and I was once again reminded of how very white the media is in our country, from the shampoo commercials to the soap operas. It made me wonder how they feel watching TV here, or how I would feel watching TV if not a single person on it looked like me. It would probably make me feel very foreign.