African-Americans and Their Role in Advertising
Racism is a powerful word with a powerful meaning. Who's to say what's racist and what's not. In a way it's subjective. Everyone is entitled to his or her own opinion. Sometimes people see or believe the same things and sometimes they don't. What's really important though is how people react to these things in which they deem racist. But that's not our focus here. What we want to know is how prejudice is society against African-Americans. More specifically, does racism play a part in advertising? Wilkes and Valencia (1990) conducted a study on Hispanics and Blacks in television commercials. They looked at the incidence and importance of these groups in commercials. Wilkes and Valencia found that both groups were underrepresented with respect to their proportion of the population. They also found that the number of Hispanics and Blacks in commercials is increasing. Dominick & Greenberg (1968) reported blacks in only 5 percent of advertisements. Gerbner, et al (1981) reported that blacks were in 20 percent of commercials. But Sterns, et al (1987) reported that 11 percent of ads contained blacks. So in comparison to Sterns, et al, Wilkes and Valencia's findings are correct with respect to the percentage of
We found 68% of all characters were in major roles and 32% of all characters were in minor roles. Each of these magazines, we think, represents a certain/different aspect of society. Our agreement rate concerning the number of ads with African-Americans was 98. In our comparison to the proportion of African-Americans in the advertisements and their representation of the population, we found that African-Americans were over represented in the magazine advertisements. We discussed it and in the end we decided to count these types of advertisements. There is reason to believe that our research had some flaws, which affected our outcome. We chose People because we thought that it represents society as a whole compared to other magazines. Entertainment magazine represents the entertainment industry. These finding do not only support my hypothesis of a fair representation but in fact shows that African-Americans are over represented in advertisements (see table 2). If there is a claim made that society is not as racist as it once was then why are African-Americans under represented in ads? If society isn't racist then there should be more African-Americans in ads. We also compared the distribution of African-Americans and others into major and minor roles. That would have given all magazines out there a fair chance of being selected instead of us just picking magazines in which we thought represent society well. There was almost equal numbers representing both major and minor roles.
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Acceptance Essays
