Is it possible to consider minority groups in an equal way?

So far, I’m really enjoying Larson’s book.  I think her words, “entertainment does serious ideological work by avoiding or hiding social issues and problems” sums up what the book is going to entail.  I really liked that she used specific instances of her discussion about the treatment of minorities in entertainment when she discussed The Apprentice and liked that included multiple examples in each of the sections, mentioning multiple movies that represented what she was discussing.  

“By including minorities but treating them as undifferentiated members of a unified group (such as Americans or women), the entertainment media deny both racial discrimination and diversity” (7).   

While I do agree, that they should be not treated as undifferentiated members of a unified group, I think the use of “women” as a unified group is a little off base.  I don’t think that people should only be classified in terms of gender, but I also think that gender does play a role in exclusion as well as experience, and shouldn’t be tossed off to the side.   However, I do think it is important to consider race, and go beyond gender because feminism is not the same for white women as it is for women of color.  

While I also enjoyed the fact she covered a lot of different minority groups, including Asian Americans and Native Americans, two groups that we have covered very little overall, I do think that while trying to be inclusive, this practice in many ways was also exclusive.  There were many groups of people that she left out of her discussion including Arab or Middle Eastern Americans, Indian Americans, as well as many other groups.  Maybe it is because many of these groups see little air time in entertainment media, or at least less time than some of the other groups talked about.  But I think that discussing the stereotyping of Arab Americans would have been something worth looking at, especially in the context of American news media post-9/11 and the negative framing surrounding the stories of Arab Americans as well as anyone they suspect could be of Arab or Middle Eastern descent.  All of the minorities who do not fall under her categorization are sort of just, lumped in.