Firstly in our lesson of ethnicity we made a list of all the different races around the world from African American to Hispanic and Latino’s and after naming just about all of them we discovered there are three broad terms in ethnicity which are White (although its often forgotten we are our own ethnicity), Black and Asian.
After introducing ourselves to different ethnicities we looked at what it was that made up stereotypes and why they were so commonly used in terms of race. Typical representations of people is what’s known as a stereotype, so in other words it’s the generalisation of a group of people judged by a minority of them. An example of this could be how people believe the majority of Chinese people to be short and dark haired but it’s clear that with such a large population within China not every single one of them is going to be short and have dark hair as everyone’s different. Another example is the Asian (Korean) guy in the walking dead who follows the stereotype of Asians tending to be very clever and thoughtful which is exactly how he’s shown in the TV series. It’s just due to how different ethnic groups are portrayed in society as generations come through because it’s obvious that the generalisation of people gets passed down through different generations. Stereotyping is basically having one person to represent the general public for that ethnicity which in hind sight is a very inaccurate thing to do as common sense should overrule any kind of stereotype there is.
Stereotypes are used as a short cut to meaning as many people tend to understand the very basic stereotype of different ethnicities so it’s the general meaning from it is understood. It’s very common for non-white characters in TV programme’s to be stereotyped although an exception we discussed in class was Luther as the main character is black but it’s not used as a problem with his ethnicity at all, he’s just seen as a basic actor in a drama TV show.
It’s often seen that stereotypes are used in a very negative sense, for example racism and sexism and they are quite oftenly fround upon which isn’t surprising as they could be seen as quite offensive if you was on the recieving end of someone stereotyping your ethnicity.
Elliott Horne 