Most of us try to avoid thinking about commercials. We reach for our remote to mute them, wander out of the room during them, talk to our roommates, do some homework on our laptops. And because we try to ignore commercials much of the time, we believe that their influence on us is minimized: We're not really paying attention so we do not think that they are affecting us. But the average American is exposed to thousands of ads and commercials every year, and even if we are only giving part of our attention to each one of these ads, the cumulative effect can be dramatic. One of the arenas in which advertising can have a substantial influence is in our perception of gender and race. This paper examines the ways in which African-American women are depicted in commercials.
I had assumed before I began looking at commercials that the African-American women that I saw would be depicted in stereotypical ways. I found this to be true to some extent - but to a lesser degree than I had expected. And I found that black women tend to be stereotyped as women rather than as women of color; that is, black women are not depicted fundamentally differently from white women except in the fact that more commercials have white women in the "lead" role than have minority women in such a position.
I did notice - for example, in a commercial for tooth-whitening strips, in which an African-American woman, an Asian-American woman and a white woman discuss the importance of whiter teeth - that the black women who appear in commercials tend to be lighter skinned African-Americans rather than dark-skinned ones, which is suggestive of a racist cast to commercials (Kern-Foxworth 41). However, I also noticed that most white women who appear are blondes. Thus one can argue that there is a bias toward the kinds of beauty that are more rarely seen in each race rather than a racist bias towards lighter-skinned black women.
In general, African-American women are d...