Media That Reflects Old or New Ideals?

By Ryan Dettmann

In some of the readings this semester’s readings there has been mostly separation between the races and them rarely conversing. One example is Gone With The Wind, in which Mammy rarely is basically the only main black character in the movie and the rest are white, which reflects old ideas of the South. The subject we should investigate or look at is the media today and see if you can find certain shows or current media that portrays old southern ideals or values, or shows a counterexamples to presumed old southern values and/or instead injects breadth of different ones.

There are several modes of entertainment in which today are still in a sense like this, in which generally the characters are of one ethnicity except for one or two characters. Granted sometimes this is for humor in a way, it is seen in movies or shows such as This Christmas or Family Guy. In the first one the all the main characters are black except one who is at first considered an outcast based on her skin and then accepted to the family through her struggle and marriage to one of the men in the family. In Family Guy Most of the characters that appear are white except Cleveland, who they occasionally poke fun at him and actually made a spin off show on him and his new family.

Other shows have happened to have this similar trend such as Tyler Perry’s House of Pain, in which all the reoccurring characters are black except one of the firemen, who is kinda slow. But the show also addresses many stereotypes and situations that can be racist or have racial tensions that happened in the South and how they can affect many ethnicities. These and other shows address issues of old southern ideals or satirically portrays.