Race Tokens

It's currently 9:30 on a Wednesday night, so be honest, how many of you are curled up on your couch watching your favorite Network TV drama air in prime time. I know I would be if I wasn't sitting here typing this blog post. But while you are watching, consider this, is there a minority character in your TV show, and if so are what is their role in the show and how are they portrayed?

My new favorite obsession is a show that ended a just a year ago called 90210 and it is set in an almost all white neighborhood with its plot centered around the Beverly Hills High School. The main character is the girl pictured in the brown ruffled shirt in the center. She is a high school student named Annie and her brother Dixen is the African American boy pictured at her right. He was actually adopted into their family when he was eight years old because of his troubled family life.

I did not realize this until we discussed "TV tokenism" or the rare gesture of offering equal opportunities to the minorities as to the majorities, but these "token" minorities are often added into shows as a way for Networks to prove to their buyers, the advertisement companies, that they can appeal to viewers in minorities and will not seem racist. 

In class we talked about how these "token minorities" often find themselves being deliberately cast in the prestigious "buddy" role that is to always keep the main character in line. This is because the networks are afraid of being criticized for playing the minority in anything less than a prestigious and well respected character because of the fact that in the past the minorities have only received roles as thugs or gang members. This "buddy" character does not usually have that much of a complex background story or different problems in his life. This is exactly how Dixen's role in 90210 plays out. He is always helping Annie out when she goes off the deep end and does something rash. Also, for the first season and a half we do not learn anything about Dixen's life before Beverly Hills, all we are told is that he was adopted.
You can even see this "token minority role" displayed in the cast photo above because Dixen is pictured above Annie's right shoulder, which is where you normally would see the good angel on someone's shoulder guiding them to do the right thing. 

Dixen is Annie's good conscience.

I think the minority character is too often stuck in this role of the token, and that is the role that no actor wants to be cast as. The sad thing too is that no one in society notices it, and I think to myself that I wouldn't have noticed it either if I had not been told. We need to open our eyes and be more critical as a society in America today of our media and the affect it has on certain minority groups and everyone watching as well because that is the first step to change: awareness.

Correctional or Destructional

In America today we make up 5% of the worlds population yet we hold 25% of the world's prisoners. Am I the only one horrified by those numbers?

Bruce Western, a Harvard student, is conducting a study of our country's correctional system and how it affects those who emerge from it. Western interviewed an ex-inmate named Jerry and Jerry admitted to having trouble sleeping because he was so used to the prison quarters. Jerry confessed in the interview, "“It’s like my body left the prison, but my mind is still in there." According to Western, "subjects have said they simply can’t cope on the outside—that going back to prison seems comforting and familiar"

I find it incredible that a prison cell could be referred to as "comforting and familiar," meaning reassuring and intimate or personal. These are words that are frequently saved for describing your own home so it is shocking to me that someone could ever feel at home in a prison. However these inmates are forced to because since they are spending so much time there they slowly lose their connections to the outside world. Western explains that, "Prison time strains relationships with partners and children, and the men often live separately after their release." Some even end up homeless because of financial problems stemming from unemployment.

To top it all off, the people who end up in prisons are most likely troubled in ways that don't stem from a need to kill or murder or rape, they stem from something that is above their control. The nonprofit Human Rights Watch found that 56 percent of U.S. inmates are mentally ill.
at least two-thirds are thought to have substance-abuse problems.

The 2.2 million inmates living in America today require actual help maybe with a substance problem or a mental illness so we shouldn't just stick them behind bars and let them waste their life away as we forget about them, we should put them in a place where they will actually get help. They need rehab or a facility that can take care of their illnesses and problems so that all the fathers out there can be reunited with sons, and mothers to daughters and relationships and precious lives can be salvaged.

The New Feminist

A few weeks ago Kelly Clarkson was asked during an interview with time magazine if she was a feminist yet she quickly batted it down, saying, "No, I wouldn’t say feminist — that’s too strong. I think when people hear feminist, it’s like, “Get out of my way, I don’t need anyone." 

She was afraid to admit to being a feminist because it was too strong of a word, an extreme that she didn't want to be associated with. She even gave a very negative connotation to the word by saying that it was associated with people who "don't need anyone," or aren't connected to other human society. Also, by saying it means "get out of my way," she acts like a feminist is someone who thinks they are better than other people. 

Clarkson even added something at the end of her answer for her reason why she was not a feminist, saying,"I love that I’m being taken care of, and I have a man that’s a leader." Personally, I think that is sickening. If this popular icon in the media believes that she should have a man who is a leader, or someone who takes charge and controls the situation, that implies that she is the follower and does not have any power and is simply ordered around. Celebrities are people who many people look up to, or at least take a strong interest in, and this is a bad message to send to woman everywhere. 

Other prominent female celebrities of today, such as Lady Gaga and Beyonce, have expressed similar views. Rachel Hills from the Daily Life wrote in an article 2 weeks ago, "if you ask a female celebrity if she is a feminist, she will politely demure, insisting that she “loves men,” “doesn’t like labels,” and that if she had to pick a label, she’d prefer “humanist."

Hills has a valid point because this description seems to match Kelly Clarkson's comment perfectly. Clarkson denied being a feminist because the label was just "too strong," as well as mentioning the fact that she loved men, or that men take care of her.

Hills says that these celebs would rather be "humanists" or people who are very interested in human welfare, versus a "feminist," or someone who a person who advocates rights of woman equal to those of men. This means that they are willing to accept the fact that humanity as a whole should treat each other equally, but does this mean that these strong women do not believe that within humanity women deserve the same rights as men?  These extremely popular female celebrities are setting an example for so many other people worldwide. It makes me question whether they don't recognize the fact that women are not entirely equal to men in our society today and like Clarkson are accepting being the "follower," or if they recognize this and are just unwilling to fight for change.

I don't know which is worse.

Stop and Frisk Profile- Darker skin required

Just a month ago in a court ruling the NYPD Stop and Frisk program that had been going on for 10 years was officially unconstitutional and violated the 4th amendment. That amendment states:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons... against unreasonable searches, shall not be violated... but upon probable cause.

This clearly states that the police can only search with a probable cause, which means the NYPD must have a reason or grounds to justify the search because they suspect they will find something. 

Apparently the legal system did not find that being a race of black or hispanic proved probable cause enough to justify the stopping of a pedestrian to search for weapons or other contraband. 

There has been a lot of controversy over the profile of a person who is stopped for these random searches. I would put money on the fact that you won't see a 5 year old girl with a lollipop the size of her head being stopped and searched for weapons. An astounding 87% of those stopped were black or hispanic, where only 10% of these stops result in an arrest and it is extremely rare that they will find a weapon. 

This means that 90% of the time these searches are simply for no reason, and we can never be sure if the police officer did suspect something because we don't know what he is thinking but I would hope that his gut isn't that bad at guessing. US district judge Shira Sheindlin said on this subject, "The city and its highest officials believe that blacks and Hispanics should be stopped at the same rate as their proportion of the local criminal suspect population," however then she commented, "But this reasoning is flawed because the stopped population is overwhelmingly innocent - not criminal." 

Sheindlin is saying that the these New York officials justify their support of the the stop and frisk of blacks and hispanics over other races is because in those areas the crime rates of those races are higher. This means that these officials are just acting on stereotypes. It is not fair to more heavily police one area just because some of those people happen to get into some trouble. We cannot just assume that all the people in that area are therefore going to be criminals then. Also, obviously if you stop and frisk 10 hispanics for every white person you stop and frisk, the odds say that you will find more weapons and such with the hispanic, simply because you have rolled the dice 10 more times. This could lead the public to believe that hispanics are more criminal because they were caught with more weapons when in reality they were just singled out on a stereotype. 

I'm grateful that this unconstitutional practice has ended for the time being, and hopefully it will stay that way. Do you the practice of "stop and frisk"generally kept the public safer or just discriminated against minorities?