The Bible Tells Me So: Depictions of Race, Gender, and Authority in Children's Videos

Abstract

The study of what children learn from media has more recently included measures of diversity in children's programming. This article looks to what Veggie Tales, a popular children's video series, presents in terms of race, gender, and authority. The study finds that nonracialized, normative, predominantly male characters occupy positions of authority and are presented as those from which one can learn key lessons. The series also presents the main characters, those with which the child is intended to identify, as lacking in racially based signifiers, thus permitting them to occupy the position of norm. Using not only theories of children's social learning and prior research of representation in children's media, but also theory of how whiteness is defined through the identification of other and neo-Marxist deviance theory, the study connects these issues to problematize the subtle lesson that difference is suspect.