Blog #1: Segregation in Mass Media

Taylor Foerster

Blog Post

Blog #1: Segregation in Mass Media

Hello! I’m Taylor Foerster, and welcome to my first post on my blog. The sentence I’ve chosen that has stuck with me was “Keeping whiteness an invisible and unscrutinized presence reproduces unequal power lines rather than disrupting them”. This was taken from “Between Speech and Silence: Reflections on Accountability”, by Ann Russo. This is a rather powerful idea, and worth blogging about for my first post. Russo managed an impressively complex essay, in which she discussed feminism, privilege, color, and much more. She eventually continues on the differences white people and minorities face. The passage I’ve chosen makes me think of two things: Caucasian being an invisible trait, and how it’s “not discussed”.

Growing up, my self-identity solely revolved around me being a person (for the most part). This was a very subconsciously liberating identity to have. An important topic Russo brings up, is that many minorities will grow up not thinking of themselves as a person, but as a black person, or latinx person, etc. I’m white, but I’ve never identified as such. To a certain extent, many minorities aren’t given the privilege of identifying as a person, before a ‘black person’.

This happens for a lot of reasons, however I think a large component that perpetuates this attitude is mass media, especially children’s media. Growing up, there were many TV shows I watched that subtly segregated white people and minorities. Though subtle (like most  modern racism is), my sister and I grew up with little to no exposure to anything non-caucasian. Of Disney Channel’s most successful and watched shows, Hannah Montana has to be one of the most credited. This is a good example of subtle segregation for many reasons. The show took place in California, which contains the most minorities out of most U.S. states. Despite this, most characters in the show were white. If there were black characters, it was rare, or they were in the background.

Disney Channel still had shows with minorities, but most of the time they were for minorities only. Meaning Disney marketed white shows separately from black or latinx shows. It was rare to see a show where black and white characters were distributed equally.

I’m really only scratching the surface. There’s still prominent themes of subtle segregation in modern mass media, which is a conversation often left undiscussed.