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“You should get to turn on the TV and see your tribe.”
--Shonda Rhimes, TV producer, March 17, 2015
TV representations of racial and ethnic groups for decades have exerted a broad influence on how those groups are viewed, a new study finds. The study, one of several in the latest issue of the Journal of Social Issues focusing on media representations of race and ethnicity, analyzed the content of the 345 most viewed U.S. television shows during 12 TV seasons from 1987 to 2009, and compared how minorities are depicted to national surveys of racial attitudes. It found that in years when black and Latino characters were represented as hyper-sexualized, whites expressed more negative attitudes towards blacks. Conversely, as more blacks and Latinos occupied high social and professional status, white Americans tended to hold more favorable views of them.
The study also found that Latinos and Asians remain severely underrepresented on popular TV shows, even as their share of the US population continues to skyrocket. Native Americans, meanwhile, are all-but invisible on the airwaves, with only three of some 2,575 prime-time characters depicted as Native American. As volume co-editor Dana Mastro states, “Although diversity in casting finally seems to be on the radar for the broadcast networks this year, the idea that this marks the start of an enduring shift in the quantity and quality of portrayals for all racial and ethnic groups is probably still a bit optimistic.” Her content analysis of the 2013-2014 primetime season found that only 2.9% of the primetime TV population was Latino.
Mastro said that how groups are represented in the media plays a critical role in matters “ranging from the construction and maintenance of racial/ethnic cognitions to policy decision making.” The importance of media comes from the intersection of two trends, Mastro noted: On the one hand, the continuing self-segregation of our schools, neighborhoods and lifestyles and, on the other, our deep immersion in media, particularly though not entirely in television. The result, she said, is that “much of our interaction with other groups comes vicariously, substituting for the lack of direct experience.”
That vicarious experience can not only affect how we see the world, but subtly shape our policy preferences. Ryan Hurley and colleagues show the impact of a recurring and well-documented problem: the disproportionate portrayal of black Americans as criminals on local TV news. Portraying the majority of suspects as black leads people to believe that criminals are unredeemable—undeserving of eventual parole—even as it diminishes black support for the police.
Peter A Leavitt and colleagues show how the virtual absence of Native Americans in the media undermines their self-understanding by homogenizing Native American identity, creating narrow and limited “identity prototypes.” On the rare occasions they are depicted, Native Americans tend to be placed in an historical context—think Pocahontas—or shown as poor, uneducated and prone to addictions. With few positive images to counteract these stereotypes, Native Americans may come to identify with the negative images “simply because one representation is better than no representation.”
Michelle Ortiz and Elizabeth Behm-Morawitz show that watching English-language television tends to increase Latinos’ estimation of the amount of prejudice and discrimination they face. Latinos who primarily watch Spanish-language programming tend to believe there is less discrimination than those who watch English television. There is one caveat: Latinos who believe Anglophone depictions of Latinos are accurate tend not to be as vexed by those depictions as those who do not.
Toni Schmader and her colleagues found that stereotypes not only affect the majority, but induce negative feelings among the targeted minority. In two experiments, they found that stereotypical depictions of Mexican Americans made Mexican Americans feel a mixture of shame, guilt, anger, and general self-consciousness. “If a brief, five-minute exposure to a negative caricature is enough to shape attitudes of Mexican Americans toward their own group, imagine what a lifetime of exposure to such stereotypes can do,” said volume co-editor Mastro.
The entire issue is available here. The Journal of Social Issues is the flagship journal of the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues (SPSSI).
