For years, diversity in literature has been a major topic. With the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement and increasing political tensions around the whole globe, diversity in literature has become more controversial. According to Guardian’s news coverage, more representation is being emphasized by authors and readers affected by this diversity, both in publishing and literature (Wheeler, 2020). The course has helped me understand how literature diversity is generally associated with racial representation and how it embraces race, ethnicity, and other facets of identity.
Key Concepts and How They Complement Each Other
Stereotype, bias, discrimination, and racism are crucial terms that refer to broad assumptions about groups of individuals founded on color, ethnicity, age, sex, or any other factor. The opinions, thoughts, emotions, and attitudes of a person toward a group are referred to as prejudice. A prejudice is a prejudgment that comes from somewhere other than experience and is not based on it. Discrimination is described as actions performed against a group of individuals, whereas prejudice is described as biased thinking. Age, faith, health, and other variables can all influence discrimination; anti-discrimination laws based on race try to address this wide range of societal issues.
Prejudice, stereotyping, and discrimination are complementary, giving light to race, diversity, and culture. Because prejudice in children can develop at a young age, psychologists and educators have expanded their efforts to study its development and mitigation. The shortage of people of color representation in books has long been an issue. When kids of color are not represented in the literature they read, it signals that they are unimportant. The use of racists’ stereotypes in books with depraved characters facilitates the children’s prejudice that certain ethnic groups have the so depicted characters (Sotirovska & Vaughn, 2021). Persons tend to rely on stereotypes and prejudices to establish beliefs about people beyond their race whenever there is a lack of interaction between racial groupings.
The Problem and how it Relates to Race
The course has enhanced my comprehension of how failure to include a group or some individuals in films, books, and other mediated forms contributes to racism. For instance, the publication had a diversity problem, and consequently, Barnes and Noble, an American bookselling company, sought to upgrade their books. The bookselling firms can determine which narratives are magnified, and hence they can easily alter people’s beliefs. Barnes and Noble seemed sincere in their desire to make great literature. This firm has a reputation for being unduly centered on white narratives, which could be more relevant to children who would grow up reading these stories.
The knowledge from the course has enhanced the understanding that being more diverse and multicultural entails putting forth the effort to seek out and welcome contributions from underserved groups. In Barnes and Noble’s books black people are not the focus, they feel irrelevant. If there were any Black characters, they were consigned by the authors to the story’s periphery. The majority of the authors of Barnes and Noble books were American (Sanders, 2019). As a result, sales of these versions could neither assist nor aid in promoting Black authors’ outstanding and original works. This debacle displays insensitivity and a lack of understanding of how important it is for young readers to see themselves represented on the page (Wheeler, 2020). Barnes and Noble are among the most successful companies in a severely depleted bookstore business. When a corporation does something like this, it demonstrates that the infamously white publishing sector has learned nothing. Publishers and booksellers continue to be tone-deaf inexcusably.
Opinion on the Problem in Light of Race, Media, and Culture
The Guardian’s news coverage has helped me understand how introducing diverse editions can help fight racism and make all readers of the books feel included. The author’s identity does not have to be the sole focus of creative development. However, when venturing beyond the familiar, writers must commit to researching to avoid perpetuating prejudices. The desire for more stories of people of color, particularly the modern difficulties they face, is part of the demand for representation. Authors can help fight racism by writing books that gracefully explore the adventures of marginalized groups. A writer can also achieve this by involving different characters in stories that do not fixate on discrimination or adversity for underrepresented groups. Genres like comedy, eroticism, and fantasy can accommodate a wide range of characters without delving too deeply into cultural politics and history.
The guardian coverage looks at race as a social issue manifested in popular media, particularly the Barnes and Noble booksellers. Negative public impressions have long harmed the lives of black people in the United States and around the world (Russell, 2018). Negative media depictions of black men are substantially associated with lowering life aspirations. These representations, which are regularly perpetuated in print media, television, the web, fiction performances, print advertising, and video games, affect public perceptions and attitudes about men of color. They contribute to the establishment of barriers to advancement in society, making these stances appear normal and unavoidable.
Many examples of literature work and films portray African Americans as savages, stupid, thieves, interlopers, and potential rapists. Even cinematic misrepresentations, such as white individuals painting themselves dark to impersonate African Americans, transmitted potent figurative signals. These symbolic signals inferred that Black people could not portray themselves and lacked the aptitude to play a personality position that only Whites could fill. White individuals’ assumption of these jobs gave a hidden note to the public that the White ethnicity was the favored and only skilled population to take part in mainstream media.
Social-Cultural Consequences of Race
The course enhanced my understanding of how the media’s bias for impairing ethnic stereotypes could contribute to widely held support for punitive drawbacks to individuals of color. The media has a vast effect on people’s day-to-day lives, infiltrating individuals’ insights and understanding with recurrent information forming people’s underlying cultural structures. It is important to think through whether the media influences racial issues in the culture. Race is a social construct used to classify people and give them meaning in sociocultural settings. Racism secures an uneven distribution of status, resources, and influence for the benefit of the leading ethnic group at the overhead of everybody else. Barnes and Noble aimed at eliminating prejudice, stereotyping, discrimination, and other distinct characteristics of bias towards social groups by introducing diverse editions.
If readers did not address race, the negative portrayal of African-Americans could become a problem, leading to a separated society. Authentic and varied representation in novels has a major impact on readers, particularly because it influences how young people come to understand themselves and the environment around them. Kids’ perceptions of themselves can be negatively skewed when they read books that exclusively feature one form of a leading role. Due to the poor representation, children could place an inferior worth on their culture, thus overlooking their personalities. Native American teenagers’ and young adults’ self-worth and emotions could be affected by representations of Native American characters in the media. Racial depictions offered for entertaining can affect how all audiences comprehend and classify people, irrespective of their particular results on definite sets of viewers (Albarracín et al., 2017). Popular media can influence Whites’ impressions of persons of color, and racial caricatures in films and literary works can heighten pre-existing racist anxieties.
References
Albarracín, D., Kumkale, G. T., & Vento, P. P. D. (2017). How people can become persuaded by weak messages presented by credible communicators: Not all sleeper effects are created equal.Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 68, 171-180.
Russell, J. G. (2018). Trading races: Albescence, staining, Xenoface, and other race-switching practices in American popular culture. The Journal of American Culture, 41(3), 267-278.
Sanders, C. (2019). Let us get you into college: Community college librarians, Barnes and Noble, and Oer.OLA Quarterly, 24(3).
Sotirovska, V., & Vaughn, M. (2021). The portrayal of characters with dyslexia in children’s picture books. Early Childhood Education Journal.
Wheeler, A. (2020).‘Fake diversity’: Barnes & Noble cancels race-swapped classic covers. The Guardian.