American Cultural Oppression

American Popular Culture as an Instrument of Racial Oppression The cultural images produced by the media serve to further oppress racialized groups in America and form national psyches which allow America’s institutionalized racism to prosper. Images proposed by the media and popular culture have made claims about all different racialized groups in America. The media has been instrumental in perpetuating ideas about the black male perp, the black male buffoon, all black Americans since the days of slavery as “darkies,” who are content with playing in the mud, Americans of European descent as harmless, safe, and normal, Asian Americans as dangerous, inassimilable aliens, who pose a threat to Americans, the American Indian culture as a joke,
In Werner Sollors’s “How Americans Became White: Three Examples” he discusses the early appearance of racism in American. He quotes Friedrich Alexander von Humboldt who states, “‘In a country dominated by whites those families of whom it is assumed that they are least intermingled with Negro or Mulatto blood are the ones most highly honored,’” (Sollors, 3). This is a testament to the ways in which popular images have served to subjugate people who defy the white-American ideals. Furthermore, Sollors seeks to show that, from the beginning, whiteness was equated with power, and it enabled those people to make up the aristocracy. Since the colonization of the Americas, white people have been given privileges. Robert Jensen’s “White Privilege Shapes the U.S.” is written about that privilege, which has been so manifest in any examination of American history, yet the privileged people, the whites, often have no acknowledgement of it. Jensen states that people are put into their places in society, and “we are the product of both what we will ourselves to be and what the society in which we live lets us be,” (Jensen, 117). For white Americans, this means that they will almost never be feared by others, and will usually be viewed as safe or harmless. Jensen writes, “…when I seek
However, Foley argues that their assimilation comes at the cost of their heritages. In Foley’s “Multiculturalism and the Media” he criticizes a comic strip that appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle in 1990. It depicted an Italian owner of Montoni’s Pizza, who receives an order, via telephone, for Donatello, Raphael and Michelangelo, and it is made clear to the viewer that Montoni is unaware of the Italian artists. Beyond being portrayed as stupid, he is seen as an Italian, living in America, who has lost his Italian heritage. Foley writes, “Montoni is an Italian American, a deracinated man, someone no longer in touch with the greatness of the Italian tradition. This, says the strip, is what it’s like to be Italian here,” (Foley, 367). He may have assimilated and been accepted as American, but he lost his heritage, despite the Italian heritage having such glory in its past, and tremendous influences on America. Furthermore, Montoni is a character in a comic strip; he is entertainment for Americans, and is supposed to make us laugh. He is part of the American legacy of racism, which has used cultural differences as comedic entertainment since the nineteenth-century. Foley inquires, “Why do we laugh at Chico Marx, who spent his entire career playing a moronic Italian immigrant? Why do we not regard him