In the beginning of last weeks 30 Rock I saw something that was hilarious, bold, and truthful. Tracy Jordan, played by Tracy Morgan, the spontaneous and hard to please star of the fake show TGS, began to act out, saying that "old school racism is back". He said that because Obama is president no one feels bad for black people anymore. He supports his theory saying that he saw black robber on a home security system commercial and a white judge on Law and Order. Although at first sight these examples may appear to be no more than humorous jokes, I think that there is a serious point underlying them. It does seem that in about half of the commercials set in affluent areas the featured family is a racial minority. The truth is that 75% of Americans are white and the percentage of white people in the upper class (I'm talking top 10%) is not proportional to the racial percentages of the population (nearly the entire upper class is white). I think that the people making commercials know that upper class white people love seeing successful minorities in commercials so they can think, "Oh, that's just a typical upper class family like us". The joke about seeing a black robber in a home security system commercial really got me thinking. The last time I saw a commercial like that both the robber and robbeeees were white. But what if the robber had been black. Would America consider the commercial racist? The joke about the judge on Law and Order left me pondering a similar question. If the show only featured white judges would there be any protest? What do ya'll think?
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Andy, I'm sure you're right: Bolos stole everything from this post!
ReplyDeleteYou're on to some important points here. It'd be nice to ground your ideas in concrete example and to cite your sources for those class stats. Still, overall, this is good work -- and you have made some nice progress blogging this semester.