THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, June 9, 1996 TAG: 9606070080
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E8 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY ANN G. SJOERDSMA
LENGTH: 78 lines
TWO TELEVISION commercials:
A confident young boy in a business suit extols the merits of a cookie as he surveys the factory where it was baked. A young girl, dressed in a chef's white uniform, joins him briefly, to smile and silently acknowledge her cookie-making skill.
Both are blond and fair-skinned.
Two girls, about 8, sporting grass skirts and leis, stroke a shapely blonde Barbie doll, their ticket to a Hawaiian Punch vacation, and begin to sway their nonexistent hips to a hula.
Both ooh and aah over Barbie. Both are white.
These scenarios were among a number shown last week in a developmental psychology class at Old Dominion University that I'm auditing, for discussion of television's effects on children. A roomful of undergraduates, male and female, black and white, watched with rapt attention. This is their medium, after all.
What messages, if any, asked the white female professor, baby boomer vintage, do these TV spots send?
Uhhhhhh . . . Well . . . Hmmmmmm . . . Let's see . . .
Lord, were they a disappointment. Especially the men (all white), who were mystified by any complaints - raised mostly by the prof and me - of stereotyping.
I dare not generalize from 25 undergrads at one university to a generation. But, oh for the students of the 1970s, my politicized peers, who may have seen sexism and racism around every corner, but at least were looking where they were going!
What the heck happened? Youth is supposed to be about rebellion, challenging the status quo. And this is the post-'60s age of enlightenment.
The professor showed a Tom and Jerry cartoon from the 1950s featuring a black ``Mammy,'' who speaks in exaggerated and ungrammatical dialect and foolishly falls for Tom's (he's a cat, you know) deception. Guess who had to point out the racist caricature?
Sex-role typing? Race exclusion? Come on. This is the way TV ads and cartoons are. What's the beef?
The beef is a familiar one, unfortunately. One I conceptualize in terms of a ``box,'' that damnable lack of awareness of the way other people experience life. A lack of awareness that leads to a lack of empathy and concern for people outside one's own orbit and ``culture.'' To alienation. And eventually ``otherness.''
Male-female.
Black-white.
Some people live in tight, cramped boxes. Others can stretch, walk about, invite friends in. The cramped ones have never heard of ``diversity.'' The ones with lots of room find it a self-evident state of life.
The U.S. Navy ``culture,'' much in the news lately, is a box, a box that holds white male heterosexuals who know when and why boys will be boys and when girls aren't allowed.
But not all sailors are cramped. And some, like the late chief of Navy operations Adm. Jeremy Boorda, sincerely, if not always effectively, try to expand the space in the box.
Then there are the male Mitsubishi Motor employees. They recently protested the sexual harassment allegations leveled by hundreds of their female co-workers at the Normal, Ill., auto assembly plant. They believe they are the victims.
Talk about a tight box. Without even knowing the facts, they refuse to believe that women were sexually abused.
Hey, it's not their problem.
But it is ours.
I spoke to the psych professor after class about the students' response to the TV clips.
``They're an unusually bright class,'' she told me. But their response was typical. The women often lie low. And the men, she said, ``don't see it.'' They don't see the sex- and race-role typing.
Black men, too? I asked.
``Can't tell. There are too few of them, and they're usually quiet.''
What messages does television send?
The one I heard loudly last week is an old one, one that parents should heed: There is none so blind as he or she who will not see.
Still. MEMO: Ann G. Sjoerdsma is a lawyer and book editor of The
Virginian-Pilot. by CNB