Communicating Gender, Race, and Class: 2020

Although the first clip is more than a decade old, it offers historical background of media representations of the working class. This next clip is from 2018, helping us update the conversation. Meanwhile, this site provides an interactive map on redlining .

For today's discussion of hegemonic masculinity we will watch and discuss this video featuring Justin Baldoni from Jane the Virgin . Please use the comments section to ask any questions you have about concepts from the readings that we don't have time for in class. Meanwhile, this story provides more data for Gans' analysis of class mobility for African-Americans.

In class Friday we discussed Chs. 9 & 10 related to communicating about ethnicity. For Ch. 9, I shared this Washington Post article about a U.S. policy to classify the Jewish community as a racial category. For Ch. 10,  I ran out of time to stream this video clip about pop culture stereotypes of Indian and South Asian populations. Here is the link to the news article about The Simpsons I mentioned.

Chapter 7. “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack,” Peggy McIntosh Peggy McIntosh explores the invisibility of racial privilege. She argues that Whites tend to be unaware of the privilege they have as members of the dominant group. To illustrate this point she compares her own experiences with denied male privilege to her own limited perception of the privilege she enjoys because she is White. In an effort to challenge this lack of awareness, she lists 26 examples of the invisible privilege she experiences in her everyday life that people of Color do not. She points out that these daily benefits of being White make her life easier. For example, the ability to shop without being followed, to count on her skin color not causing suspicion of her financial reliability, or even the ability to find blemish cover to match her skin tone reflects her White privilege. She argues that for Whites these occurrences are largely taken for granted. They are expected, assumed to be th...

An opinion piece by Kaitlyn Greenidge published in the Sunday New York Times offers an example of taking an intersectional lens on a popular narrative, Little Women. If you peruse the article , I hope you'll notice connections to ideas we discussed in class Friday, particularly the importance of context and representation in our narratives and how we talk about race and racial critiques.