Media Stereotypes

After I watched the video above, I can conclude how bad Arabian stereotype in American eyes. Even it has been happen since a long time ago. Too bad, people have been manipulated by the media into believing what they see in films in Arab. They accepted the information from media directly without the filter first, whether this is true or not.

One thing that I worried is American children also conclude that Arabian is bad person as they can see from Disney’s Arabian Nights Fantasy Film Aladdin. The film‘s light-skinned lead characters, Aladdin and Jasmine, have Anglicized features and Anglo-American accents. This is in contract to the other characters who are dark-skinned, swarthy and villainous-cruel palace guards or greedy merchants with Arabic accents and grotesque facial features.

The film‘s opening song sets the tone;

“Oh, I come from a land, From a faraway place, Where the caravan camels roam, Where they cut off your ear If they don‘t like your face, It‘s Barbaric, but hey, it‘s home.”

Sounds creepy to your child, right?

According to our lecture, Stereotype is generalization about a group of people whereby we attribute a defined set of characteristics to this group. These classifications can be positive or negative, such as when various nationalities are stereotyped as friendly or unfriendly.

It is easier to create stereotypes when there is a clearly visible and consistent attribute that can easily be recognized. This is why people of colour, police and women are so easily stereotyped. People from stereotyped groups can find this very disturbing as they experience an apprehension (stereotype threat) of being treated unfairly. Stereotyping can be subconscious, where it subtly biases our decisions and actions, even in people who consciously do not want to be biased. Stereotyping often happens not so much because of aggressive or unkind thoughts. It is more often a simplification to speed conversation on what is not considered to be an important topic.

From the Reel Bad Arabs video, there has been an Arab stereotype in the West about how they think Arabs are. To a majority of Westerners, an Arabian..

• Lives in a tent in the middle of a vast desert filled with sandstorms.
• Have ten wives each of which wear a burqa and have ten children.
• Wears a red keffiyeh and has an uncombed beard from one ear to the next.
• Goes around his daily life with a suicide vest strapped to his chest.
• Rides on a decorated but smelly camel from one village to the next.
• Have wives that go around the tent holding large pots of water on their heads.
• Lives on nothing but falafel for his breakfast, lunch and supper.
• Carries a sword on his back or on his waist and uses it to behead people.
• Have extremist views on killing the entire West and burning their bodies.
• Earns a living by robbing nearby villages late at night.
• Writes in hieroglyphics and worships large statues of ancient pharaohs.
• Has a name of "abu" followed by either "abdul", "mohammad", or "mustafa".
• Come to the west with the only intention of blowing up a crammed bus.
• Have big obsession with American sexy lady.

I think stereotype has positive purpose. It will make people understand easily what media showing. But the negative side is sometimes media deliver the stereotype with the bad way, media often use race, gender, and appearance. For the example, the way women are portrayed in games and film, and how it affected to the teenagers especially for girls. Woman in film looks so perfect, with nice body, beautiful face, and nice skin colour. So if an actress has good body and show her body in the film, she will make girl built an insecure and envy feeling to themselves. Actually this bring many bad effects, because it will makes women try anything just to get a perfect body, even they want to do anything that actually endanger themselves. That’s why a lot of teenagers in Japan did the suicide, and also many of teenagers in Korea did the plastic surgery. They did that just for one reason “want to be perfect”.

So the conclusion is accepting the information wisely. Don’t just take and believe it directly. You can discuss about the information that you just received with your parents or friends. Because sometimes, what you see is not always right. Media just want entertain you. Sometimes, media is cliché, not reality.


Source: http://changingminds.org/explanations/theories/stereotypes.htm