Cultural Diversity

Discuss an example from your life or from your observations that illustrates one or more of the concepts or theories you learned about in this week’s readings or audiovisual resources.

Make sure you are clear in describing the course concept or theory that best applies to your experiences or observations. Regardless of which prompt you choose, you are encouraged to use one of the assigned readings or audiovisual resources to support your points. Respond to your classmates’ posts, sharing any commonalities or differences between your classmates’ perspectives and experiences and your own.

Last week you studied the concept of prejudice in relation to discrimination and other sociological aspects of diversity. One element of prejudice is stereotyping, which refers to a process in which people make generalizations about a group of people. Given the media’s pervasiveness in American culture, how the media portrays members of social groups can influence the perceptions of the audience and contribute to or refute common stereotypes.

To learn more about the way in which media represent members of social groups, and the consequences of those representations, read the following resources:

• Colburn, A., & Melander, L. A. (2018). Beyond black and white: An analysis of newspaper representations of alleged criminal offenders based on race and ethnicity. Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice, 34(4), 383–398.
• Frederickson, A. (2017). Sugar and spice and everything nice: Gender representation in media. Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, 56(10), S108.

Watch Racial Stereotypes [Video], which traces the history of stereotyping and discusses a key theory of media influence, called the theory of cultivation. When you click on the video link, the window opens to the player screen, with the film broken into segments for viewing. Total running time for all segments is about 38:00.