Ethnic Stereotypes in American Films & Its Psychological Impact

672). Fetchit's character was a shuffling, lazy, geni ally stupid depiction that came to personify mainstream American cinema's view of the inglorious man. He allowed purity viewers to see pitch-black manpower as inoffensive, laughable comic figures, while beginning for black viewers a long line of unflattering sh atomic number 18 models that included easily frightened train porters, sexless mammies, and laughably incompetent maids.

Black actors since the establishment of the civil rights movement corroborate made remarkable progress, to the extent that Denzel Washington, Whoopi Goldberg, Will Smith, and many others are able to create fully-dimensional characters that are non identified in general by their race and are equally appealing to audiences of all ethnicities. Yet, as James Robert Parish (1995) notes, "The process is far from complete. It can only if occur when the color of actors' skin and/or the shape of their nervus facialis features are not deciding factors in whether they are or are not employed" (p. 19).

Stereotypes are an ever-present heading in every society. James L. Hilton and William von Hippel (1996) speculate on why this is true:

We believe stereotypic thinking serves multiple purposes that resound a variety of cognitive and motivational processes.

The same scenario fires Steven Spielberg's Amistad, the story of the uprising and takeover of a slave ship during the 19th century. The Africans, who are portrayed as noble innocents (and not fully humanized, since they speak only in subtitles), are rescued by an almost entirely white team of champions, led by Anthony Hopkins (again adding to his savior-of-the-noble-savage on-screen persona) as John Quincy Adams. only Morgan Freeman stands as the one fully-realized black member of the defence team.

As the mainstream media have come to be more certain of stereotypic images, efforts to counteract them have resulted in the establishment of opposite stereotypes, rather than the elimination of stock images of any kind.

In The kelvin Mile, for instance, a very large black man, convicted of the hideous assassinate of two very small, very white girls, is shown to be innocent. He is so innocent, in fact, that he must sacrifice his life, despite the vigorous support of a very white round of guards. His beatific innocence makes him no more of a comprehensive human being than did the bumbling incompetence of the Stepin Fetchits and the menacing unholy of the black villains and drug dealers that preceded him on the screen.

Jones, A. (1998, November 20). Stereotyping and double standards in "Hollywood Islam." National Catholic Reporter, pp. 17-20.

Bettelheim, B. (1985, October 28). TV stereotypes "devastating" to young minds. U. S. intelligence information and World Report, p. 55.

Our society talks out loud nigh justice, equality, and egalitarianism, and most Americans accept these values as their own. At the same time, such equality exists only as an ideal, and that fact is not lost on our unconscious. Images of women as sex objects, footage of African-American criminals on the six o'clock new - "this is knowledge we cannot escape," explains [Yale psychology professor Mahzarin] Banaji. "We didn't take in to know it, but it still affects our behavior" (p. 55).

They define st
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