Representation of the Black people

The topic about the representation of the black people.
The story about Sara Baartman was quite shocking to me.

Her "abnormal" bodily features fascinate the European viewers. Her difference does not meet their cultural classificatory system so she was excluded from their culture, society. She was treated as other even though she lived there and might think she could be one of their society; she was a "taboo", "forbidden" so she was attractive and interesting to European viewers . Even after her death at the age of 25 years old, she remained an object of the entertainment for the Europeans. She was not even treated as a human in Europe throughout her life and even after her death.

I can not believe one human being was treated like an animal, beast for some people's enjoyment.


Hall says, the difference is important because we can think about the meaning depending on the difference between opposites.
Black/White, for example; the "white" is so invisible that we can think about the meaning compared to the opposite black.
But he also says that here, the meaning is oversimplified. We tend to think about each meaning in the reductionist way, and the one of the opposites often has a negative reduced meanings, negative stereotypical features because there is a gap between the power of the opposites such as the white dominant over black.


Many people tend to think that the representations or stereotypes of the black people are modified. But the black people's stereotypical images subordinate to the white people still continue today.



In advertisements especially, even though some advertisements seem to express the diversity of race, the white people are mainly shown to send good images of the brand like high ending, luxurious, leading the edge etc, whereas black people, especially woman (but including men), are portrayed as wild savage and fetishized. There are still on-going image of white people = good, modernized, superior etc while black = bad, evil, wild, primitive, dangerous and so on. Still, how people see black people is sort of similar to how Europeans looked at Sara Baartman. When could black people feel they are part of "Americaness" or "Britishness", when would they be able not to double consciousness as black and American; when could people start not to mark "black" such as "black president"and "black actress"?

The dangerous thing that today's stereotyping of minorities have is how subtle and widespread is. We do not usually see the negative images of the black people that those ads connote if we do not see them critically. People are raised with these stereotypes so they do not question it. But it is not easy to get rid of all these stereotypical images. Probably, what this problem can be done might be that people first acknowledge the problem and moderate the negative with more positive images.