Portrayal Of Race Research Articles

Disney in Black and White: An Analysis of Race Representation Within Disney Animated Films From 1937 to 2021

This study examined Disney studios’ portrayals of race as it relates to the physical, mental, and social characteristics of major characters ( N = 319) within Disney animated films released from 1937 to 2021 ( N = 59). Findings revealed most of the characters featured were portrayed as White (68.3%) whereas BIPOC characters made up 31.7% of the total. Results suggest that BIPOC characters were significantly more likely to be featured in supporting character roles, with White characters featured in both the protagonist and antagonist roles. We further observed a limited integration of characters of varying races in a singular film.

Portrayal of Race and Gender in the Selected Novels of Toni Morrison: A Critical Reading

With deep insight into the racial problems that have been confronted by Blacks since their existence, Toni Morrison has boldly projected the prejudices and racism faced by African American Women and explicitly exposes the long struggle that Blacks have had against the exploitative tendencies of the Whites. In my paper, I will analyze the selected novels of Toni Morrison, namely, The Bluest Eye, Sula, and Beloved. My thrust area in these novels of Toni Morrison will be on the theme of race and gender, which is persistent and is rendered as an entirely different perspective in each of her novels.

Laughing about race in “colorblind” France: Racial stereotypes in French television comedy

This article examines the portrayal of race in two iconic French television series, H and Platane, exploring how they negotiate racial stereotypes within the context of France's purportedly colorblind society. Through a comparative analysis, we analyze the comedic strategies employed by these shows, drawing on humor theory to elucidate the dynamics of superiority and relief in laughter. While H often reinforces racial stereotypes under the guise of criticizing racist speech, Platane adopts a more nuanced approach, inviting viewers to engage with the complexities of racial discourse. By contextualizing these representations within France's sociopolitical landscape, we demonstrate the evolving nature of race talk in French television and its implications for broader societal attitudes. This study underscores the significance of television comedy as a space for both reflecting and potentially challenging cultural norms surrounding race and identity.

“Hip Hop and the Televisual Global South: Atlanta and Sintonia”

In recent years, audiences in the United States and around the globe have witnessed an explosion of television and streaming content focused on hip hop. Such content contemplates, historicizes, promotes, and represents the art form, artists, industry, and regional genres that have together emerged as a central feature of contemporary popular culture. This article explores the spatial and thematic links to the theoretical Global South in Atlanta and Sintonia. Analyzing the series’ respective portrayals of race and inequality from the margins, I examine how hip-hop/ funk and the Global South function as narrative tools and symbolic spaces through which notions of a shared precarity stemming from global flows of capital are constructed, consumed, and challenged. By considering the series’ connections to the Global South, this article contributes to a growing body of work that aims to move beyond research that centers the west and the nation-state.

Unveiling the Narrative Horrors in Heart of Darkness

Narrative in fiction is a powerful tool for authors, influencing tone, intent, and reader perception. Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is celebrated for its intricate narrative style, yet it harbors a troubling bias, particularly evident in the narration of the central character, Marlow. Marlow’s narrative channels the author’s prejudices, dehumanizing African people and offering a limited perspective that obscures the broader context and diverse viewpoints. This paper emphasizes the importance of approaching Heart of Darkness with a critical understanding of its historical context and its portrayal of race and colonialism. It encourages readers to discern and challenge inherent biases in storytelling and historical accounts, aiming to comprehensively analyze the narrative’s perpetuation of racial prejudices and colonial pretense.

A call for curricular reform: Recognising the importance of race-based medical education.

The social uprising of 2020 led to the redoubling of efforts to recognise and eradicate racist practices in all aspects of the US social system, including the health care complex. The medical school system is no exception. Traditionally, medical school curricula have focused on the treatment of medical ailments with little emphasis on the considerable influence social factors—particularly race and ethnicity—have on treatment outcomes. In fact, a 2016 study reported that both medical students and residents held false beliefs about biological differences between Black and White individuals (e.g. Black people have thicker skin and feel less pain than White people).1 We recognised that for medical students to become physicians committed to mitigating the negative effects of racism, radical reform of our curriculum's portrayal of race and racism with strategic ingraining of anti-racism teaching is vital. Three second-year medical students developed a landmark educational intervention—Race-Based Medical Misinformation: History's Impact on Today's Medical Practices. We aimed to increase knowledge about racial disparities and provide tools to mitigate implicit biases that underscore discrimination in patient care. Using a teaching module, we explored the relationship between the historical origins of racialised medical mistruths and present-day health disparities. To encourage engagement and discourse, the lecture was paired with a case-based exercise that highlighted various clinical consequences of specific medical mistruths. The impact of the educational programme was assessed using a pre-survey and post-survey completed at the beginning and end of the intervention. By explicitly addressing the sordid history of race, racism and medicine and recognising the connection between past deeds and present-day health care disparities, we believe that medical students will gain essential knowledge and an anti-racist perspective that will benefit future patients. This educational intervention—now a formal course within the M1 curriculum—proved effective in increasing knowledge regarding medical mistruths. Still, students' expressed comfort levels discussing race, and their attitudes towards race-related constructs remained unchanged, perhaps because established beliefs more often shift when people are exposed to different environments, cultures and ideologies. In a feedback survey, numerous students regarded the intervention as eye-opening and were shocked at the poverty of education on this topic throughout the curriculum. However, there were students who found the material to be too extreme, too far-fetched and too focused on the impact of racism on the health outcomes of Black patients. These comments highlight that changing ingrained beliefs requires ongoing interventions. For substantive change, institution-driven escalation of these efforts is necessary. Medical schools must create environments that normalise exploring and discussing the impact of internalised, interpersonal and institutional racism in medicine. Nevertheless, our experience has shown us that, when given the opportunity and the resources, medical students are responsive to curricular reform and are, in fact, eager to learn more about the topic of race and racism in medicine.

The Philip Roth We Don't Know: Sex, Race, and Autobiography by Jacques Berlinerblau

Reviewed by: The Philip Roth We Don't Know: Sex, Race, and Autobiography by Jacques Berlinerblau Hana Wirth-Nesher (bio) The Philip Roth We Don't Know: Sex, Race, and Autobiography. By Jacques Berlinerblau. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2021. 230 pp. Philip Roth's fate hangs in the balance as a celebrated and lauded American author whose work is increasingly interrogated for both misogyny and racism. Jacques Berlinerblau's book is exactly what we need right now. The Philip Roth We Don't Know: Sex, Race, and Autobiography is neither an apologia nor a denunciation. It is a serious attempt to read Roth in light of #MeToo and #Black Lives Matter, as well as in light of his mercurial brilliance. Berlinerblau begins by framing his book within the contemporary tendency of "bringing the artist back in," so that literary works and other art forms are no longer processed as creations severed from the author's life (5). Immoral conduct by an author, therefore, is inevitably intertwined with aesthetics. Philip Roth's work is particularly compelling in the current moment, according to Berlinerblau, because his aesthetic signature of tearing down the wall between author and character actually parallels the core belief of # MeToo, but without the latter's "ethical investments" (12). Drawing a sharp line between the biographer's task and the literary critic's role, Berlinerblau describes his project as a "reverse biography" in which he peruses Roth's fiction for what he calls his "obsessional themes," which he reads back into his life (15–16). This is justified, he argues, because Roth himself repeatedly explored the interplay of autobiography and fiction. The book is divided into two parts, the first half examining sex, race, and autobiography in Roth's writing. In contrast to what he describes as a misguided perception that Roth depicted African Americans sympathetically, Berlinerblau demonstrates that both his non-Jewish and [End Page 307] Jewish characters repeatedly express bigoted views of blacks, that his nostalgic view of Newark is racist, and that his fictional Jews regard themselves as unambiguously white, in contrast to the more complex portrayals of race in the works of contemporaries like Grace Paley or Bernard Malamud. To draw conclusions about whether Roth's fiction is misogynist, Berlinerblau distinguishes among three Philip Roths: the "Real Roth" whose attitude toward women can be determined only by a biographer; the "Nexus Roth," who "loops his life into his fiction" and whose obsessive, vengeful depictions of his first wife dramatize his misogyny; and the "Page Roth," the "8500 fictional pages he composed" whose complexity makes it hard to pinpoint misogyny (65). Drawing on this structural model of the reading process reminiscent of Wayne Booth's New Critical separation of author from implied author and text, Berlinerblau chooses to focus on the text, on those extraordinary 8500 pages. After submitting ample evidence for the racism and misogyny in Roth's art in Part I, Berlinerblau devotes the second part of his book, "Roth Unsexed," to a compelling argument for preserving Roth's work from the threat of cancel culture. Roth's artistry, he argues, focuses primarily on the mutability of the self, both as theme and aesthetic strategy, in Roth's words "on the mystery of being alive and in flux" (80, from The Human Stain). Drawing on the sociologist Erving Goffman's dramaturgical approach to social interaction, Berlinerblau maps Roth's diverse dramatizations of self-reinvention, among them "The Looking Glass Self" (94), "the Impersonating Self" (96), "the Kinetic Self" (100), and the "Sloganizing Self" (104). For Roth, imagining selves in fiction who in turn imagine and perform counter selves provides the best route to self-knowledge. While praising the ingenuity of Roth's attempts to portray fiction as generating truth, Berlinerblau is skeptical about the results. "The author did not prove that reality is accessed through make-believe, but he did frame the problem with dash and daring," Berlinerblau writes (120). By conceding that Roth's fiction is at times complicit in the misogyny and racism of his time, Berlinerblau sets out to validate our engagement with Roth's ingenious, sophisticated and subtle treatment of post-modernist identity. On one hand, Berlinerblau's separation...

Democratic candidates in the 2020 US presidential primary: The portrayal of race, gender, and age in editorial cartoons

AbstractEditorial cartoons provide an incisive view on political candidates and often include more provocative or emotional material than textual editorials. A content analysis of editorial cartoons was conducted to examine the portrayals of candidates for the Democratic nomination for the US presidential election of 2020. Themes related to gender, race, and age were a particular focus. Gender stereotypes were more frequent in cartoons about candidates of color; however, this was largely driven by the high number of gender stereotypes in cartoons about Kamala Harris, a biracial Black woman. Race stereotypes were most common in cartoons about Harris and Elizabeth Warren (due to controversy about her claimed Native American ancestry). Age was a central theme only for the candidates who were younger or older than is typical for a presidential nominee. Women were not shown with their spouse more often than men; the only candidate with more than one cartoon including a spouse was Pete Buttigieg. These representations of his husband were likely a coded way to draw attention to his sexuality. As in prior research, women were more likely to be portrayed as violent. Findings support the continued relevance of age, gender, and race in media coverage of political campaigns.

Portrayals of Race and Gender: Sentiment in 100 Years of Children’s Literature

Portrayals of Race and Gender: Sentiment in 100 Years of Children’s Literature

Cultivation theory: The impact of crime media's portrayal of race on the desire to become a U.S. police officer

The death of George Floyd on 25 May 2020 again left people asking why U.S. police officers so commonly resort to the use of deadly force when interacting with Black individuals. The current article proposes that media, combined with cultivation theory and social cognition concepts may create implicit biases that are potential contributors to this problem. Police officers have a greater vulnerability to these biases because intake of crime-related media positively predicts their interest in selecting law enforcement as a career. Other predictors of an interest in working in law enforcement, and implications of these findings, are discussed.

Students' perceptions on race in medical education and healthcare.

Major racial disparities continue to exist in our healthcare education, from the underrepresentation of ethnic minorities when teaching about clinical signs to health management in primary and secondary care. A multi-centre group of students discuss what needs to change in medical education to cultivate physicians who are better prepared to care for patients of all backgrounds. We argue that the accurate portrayal of race in medical education is a vital step towards educating medical students to consider alternative explanations to biology when considering health inequities.

Visualizing a Critical Mixed-Race Theory

In this paper, questions regarding the cultural understanding of mixed race are explored, which have the ability to complicate the accepted portrayal of race in society as a black/white binary system. Thus, the acknowledgement of something other than this binary system offers new ways of theorizing about race, particularly concerning the sociopolitical implications of mixed-race designation. This paper argues that the visually mixed-race person has a certain direct ability to challenge the binary and its racist logic. Furthermore, this paper goes on to offer a unique interpretation of where power for working against a racially oppressive system lies within critical mixed-race theory.

The Portrayal of Gender and Race in Cars Trilogy

As the most commercially successful animated film, Cars trilogy, produced by Pixar Animation Studios, are opted to be analysed due to its impact on formulating perception of gender and race. Considering that intolerance and gender-based injustice still happens within our society, any discussion about gender and race portrayal, particularly through films, becomes urgent. The study aims at investigating how gender and race are portrayed in Cars trilogy. Gender portrayal is analysed through Beauvoir’s concept of immanence and transcendence and Finklea’s themes about masculinities. The portrayal of race is investigated using McLaren’s critical multiculturalism. The study uses the descriptive analytical interpretative method. The data analyzed are the characters, dialogue, and plot. The result shows that men and women are portrayed as equal but the stereotypes are still visible. Men are portrayed not only brave but also confident. Males’ romantic interest is manifested in heterosexual desire and male bosses are driven by profit. Women can be successful in racing if she dares to intervene the bureaucracy or is given opportunity by men. Different accent of English is seen as less capable and white characters are not always portrayed unproblematic.

Numbers are Just Not Enough: A Critical Analysis of Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Elementary and Middle School Health Textbooks

Textbooks are a multimillion dollar publishing business in the United States. Even as 21st-century classrooms become more multimodal, digital and hardcopy textbooks remain a key feature of American education. Consequently, classroom textbooks have been shown to control knowledge dissemination across the content areas. In particular, health texts have been uniquely shown to communicate values that validate or marginalize students and encourage healthy or harmful activity. Thus, what textbook makers choose to include as worthy of study, and how they portray various groups of people with regard to race, gender, and sexuality has societal implications. Employing quantitative and qualitative content analysis methods, we analyzed 1,468 images across elementary and middle school health textbooks to examine the portrayal of race, gender, and sexuality. We found that, although gender and racial diversity are well-represented in texts, women and people of color were frequently portrayed in stereotypical roles. For example, girls were depicted daydreaming about heterosexual marriage. Furthermore, this analysis revealed limited representations of sexuality. Findings suggest that focusing on the numerical representation of marginalized groups is not enough to address issues of equity and power in classroom curricula. Instead, we argue, educators must consider the ways in which people are positioned in curricular materials, and ask if portrayals perpetuate or challenge traditional stereotypes.

“Who Gets to Tell the Story?”: Adaptation and Juxtaposition in Two Dance Versions of Othello

This essay explores the juxtaposition of three texts: Shakespeare’s Othello , Jose Limon’s The Moor’s Pavane (1949) and Doug Elkins’ Mo(or)town/Redux (2012). Limon’s piece, now considered a modern dance classic, reimagines Othello as a taut, twenty-minute formal dance set to the music of Henry Purcell, for Othello, Desdemona, Iago, and Emilia. Elkins’ piece responds to Limon’s by retaining the four-character format and some of the key movement motifs, but uses a postmodern aesthetic drawn from hip-hop and various other styles, and a Motown soundtrack. I argue that although these dance adaptations are derived from Othello, they are not derivative; they do not achieve meaning only in relation to Shakespeare’s play. Rather, they reveal that Othello is more of a process than a product: a text that, as Margaret Jane Kidnie suggests, “evolves over time in response to the needs and sensibilities of its users.” Yet Limon and Elkins adapt Shakespeare in diverse ways, particularly in their portrayals of race on the dance stage. Limon, a Mexican-American, created the role of Othello in The Moor’s Pavane and presented a striking physical contrast with Lucas Hoving, the Dutch-born dancer who created the role of Iago. Yet Limon attempted to efface a racially-inflected reading of the piece, claiming that it presented “the tragedy of Everyman.” Elkins, by contrast, insists on the visibility of racial issues within Mo(or)town/Redux , through the history of Motown music, through his uses of hip-hop and breaking, and through “color-sighted” casting practices.

Manufacturing white criminals: Depictions of criminality and violence on Law & Order

AbstractThis study examines exposure to the police drama television genre and its impact on perceptions of crime and racial criminality. Content analyses of three seasons of Law & Order were examined to evaluate the show’s portrayal of race and crime compared to actual crime statistics for New York City during the same periods. A survey was also conducted to examine perceptions of personal safety and the influence of television’s depiction of race and crime. Results suggest whites are disproportionately portrayed as criminals five to eight times more often on police dramas compared to actual crime statistics for the city of New York, exposure to police dramas increases beliefs of threats to personal safety, and exposure to police dramas leads to elevated perceptions of white criminality among non-whites. Results provide additional support for cultivation theory and “Mean World Syndrome,” and implications for delimitation and racial distrust.

A critical discourse analysis of race and gender in advertisements in the South African in-flight magazine Indwe

In a critical discourse analysis of two in-flight magazines, Qantas and Air New Zealand, Small et al. (2008, p. 33) found that the advertising texts in these magazines are designed to appeal to an elite minority of air travellers who have the wealth to pursue a life of leisure and luxury. As a consequence, consumers who have the means to pursue this lifestyle are constructed as legitimate air travellers – a status that others must aspire to. A further implication is that the manner in which consumers are depicted in these advertisements may reveal advertisers' assumptions about which demographic is most likely to fall in this elite category. Small et al. (2008, p. 31) found that the majority of the advertisements in their sample depicted white consumers. On the basis of this argument, the current article aims to conduct a critical discourse analysis of a South African in-flight magazine, Indwe, in order to investigate depictions of race and gender in the advertising images in this magazine. The results suggest that Indwe is only marginally more balanced in its portrayal of race, while depictions of gender differ significantly from Small et al.'s (2008) analysis.

Doctor Who and Race: Reflections on the Change of Britain’s Status in the International System

This article discusses how the issue of race is treated in the British television science fiction programme Doctor Who (DW) by looking at changes in the international system and the decline of Britain’s role as a global player within it, as well as significant internal changes within Britain that made the portrayal of race, and for that matter gender, more palatable to British audiences and television executives. Thus, as Britain’s role in the international system declined, and as the country became more comfortable with a multicultural society (which traditional ideas of empire and great power status worked against), it became possible to include different racial characters on DW.

Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights. RobinBernstein. New York: New York University Press, 2011.

Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights. Robin Bernstein. New York: New York University Press, 2011.In discussions about controversial social and political issues - ranging from public entitlement programs to gay adoption to abortion - the potential impact on frequently comes up. Why are children invoked in such discourse, and what is the historical and cultural significance of this tendency? In Racial Innocence, Robin Bernstein sheds light on these questions by examining how the notion of childhood innocence has shaped - and been shaped by - conceptions of race. Trans-disciplinary in subject and transhistorical in scope, this fascinating book engages an impressive array of evidence, including graphic arts, ephemera, oral history, and material artifacts. Historiographically, it constitutes an important contribution to the scholarship on childhood (by Patricia Crain, Karen Sanchez-Eppler, and others) and the portrayal of race in literary, visual, and theatrical culture (by Daphne Brooks, Jo- Ann Morgan, and Harvey Young, for example). Theoretically and methodologically, Bernstein provides a new paradigm for understanding objects. Although the social significance of things has long been a topic of interest for Americanists working in material culture studies (e.g., David Jaffee, Jules David Prown, and Laurel Ulrich), Bernstein offers a new perspective by exploring not only what artifacts reveal but also what they demand. In other words, she contends that objects are fundamentally performative: they incite - or script - us to use them in highly specific ways.In the first chapter, Bernstein investigates formulations of childhood in American popular culture during the second half of the 1800s. She shows how representations of innocent white children, particularly Little Eva in Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), came to symbolize innocence itself; how insensate black children, especially Topsy (another figure in Stowe's novel), stood in stark contrast to such images; and how activists and cultural producers mobilized these stock characters to deny and affirm the basic humanity of African Americans. Depictions of white children highlighted their vulnerability and goodness, whereas black children were imagined as comically impervious to pain. Bernstein follows this chapter with a development of her theory of scriptive things, arguing that objects generate practices in everyday life by inviting people to perform, in both the theatrical and functional sense. The scripts associated with dolls, such as the half-white/half-black topsy-turvy doll, are of special interest to her. …

World of Race War

Stereotypical portrayals of race are common in many modern video games. However, research on games and game environments has often overlooked race as an important consideration when evaluating games for their educational potential. This is particularly true of the educational literature on online games, which has tended to emphasize virtual game spaces as intrinsically exemplary learning environments while deemphasizing the narrative content of the games themselves. This article addresses this oversight. Through a close reading of game communications and fan-created content, the authors examined how developer-produced racial narratives influence players’ experience of the game world. The authors find that players and player communities reproduce and reinforce narrow developer-produced interpretations of race during in-game interactions as well as in player forums and virtual communities beyond the confines of the game world. Because the game environment is not conducive to players’ critical examination of race, the authors conclude that the game does not intrinsically provide a means for players to engage critically with game content. They further conclude that as educational environments these games must be situated and contextualized within the ideologies and discourses of the physical world.