Race, Gender and Media Reflections

 This week for class, the topics we were given was over Arab and Asian perceptions in the media. One discussion topic was to breakdown the different Asian communities that we see either at our college, UNT, and in our hometown, and then discussing the media coverage of these groups. Seeing as I have an Asian roommate and had many friends back in high school, I feel well suited to talk about this topic. In my community at UNT, there are a wide variety of Asian groups. My roommate, Andrew, is Vietnamese, and he participates in the Asian Student Association as the Athletic Director. Aside from just having an Asian Student Association, UNT also has student associations for Filipino, Taiwanese, Vietnamese, and Japanese students, as well as a multitude of other organizations. To be honest, I didn't even know that ethnic groups had all of these different sub-sects of organizations specifically devoted down to people from one country all the way up to Asian people as a collective. I think ...

Our topic for class this week was violence against women in music videos and images of women in the media. The main goal was to decipher how women are portrayed in media and the stereotypes that they are portrayed to have. I particularly liked this week because we were able to break down two songs that I am familiar with in Eminem's "Love the Way you lie" featuring Rihanna as well as how Nicki Minaj portrays herself in her music. As mentioned in Lind's book, music like Eminem's song only empowers the feelings about women that society can have: that men and women are equally responsible for perpetuating violence in relationships, that women asked to be abused, and violence is a means to ignite sexual arousal. In that section, Lind goes on to say that "although females can be violent toward male partners, the opposite (men attacking women) is the norm. Representations negating this reality rigorously reduce perceptions of male accountability." While this i...

This week, our class took our midterm exam, which required us to write 10 short essay questions over various topics that we've been looking over throughout the semester. As I was taking the exam, I was refreshed on some of the content that we had to write about, and was reminded of how interesting they could be. One question asked us to use examples from the film "The Black Press: Soldiers Without Swords" and analyze what they did for the Black community at time when prejudice was high. I went and skimmed a transcript of the documentary and found the bit of information that said how the Black Press propped up its community, which was essentially through humanizing them. All of this to say, I felt inspired being reminded of what a community who is facing hardships can do for each other in order to keep spirits high. Another question I enjoyed answering was on how corporate ownership of news organizations affects media output. One thing that I haven't looked over much i...