Minority Representation in Visual Media

The representation (or lack thereof) of women and ethnic and cultural minorities in media is a broad topic encompassing many different things. Any subsection could be taken and be written about at length, and to think that I would be able to adequately cover this topic in a brief blog post is not realistic. Instead of coming at the topic directly, I decided to do a little searching for what we actually mean when we talk about the "representation" of a group in media.

I found an article on the subject written by Maryann Erigha, Professor of Sociology and African-American Studies at the University of Georgia. There is a free link to the article HERE if you would like to read it in its entirety. Erigha lays out three different types of representation of a group in media, and describes how they interact and what they would look like if they were all done well.

     

1. Numerical Representation
• How many people of a particular group are there? Does that proportion fall in line with that of the rest of the country?
• A report by the Screen Actor's Guild (2013) showed that white actors made up nearly 75% of all speaking roles, African American actors made up 14%, Latino actors 5%, and Asian Americans less than 4%. 
• While not every movie is required to have an equal distribution of people from different ethnic groups, the fact that the overall average leans so far in favor of one group is still definitely a problem.
2. Quality of Representation
• Another aspect of representation involves the quality. While different numbers of people can be met and all of the diversity boxes 'checked off', the way that a group is represented can still cause harm and strengthen stereotypes.
• For example......
• Was an African American actor/actress chosen because they play a role well, or were they chosen because the film needed an 'urban' character.
• Was a character made to be of Asian descent because they were involved in martial arts?
• Not all representation is good representation.
3. Centrality of Representation 
• Centrality of representation deals with how important (central) a group is to the industry.
• For example......
• 93 percent of Hollywood studio directors from the 6 largest film companies were white and male (Cieply 2009).
• A statistic like this shows the value (or lack of) that many companies/studios assign to people of different backgrounds. When there are so few people of varying groups in institutional positions, another barrier is created for people from those groups to become a part of them.

This blog post was a short overview of what representation in media is, and some of the issues people are facing. I highly recommend you read the article linked above, and do a little research on your own time. I'm confident that everyone can find something they'd like to know more about in a subject that deals with so many different things.