omic figures, while beginning for black viewers a long line of unflattering role models that included easily frightened train porters, sexless mammies, and ridiculously incompetent maids.
Black actors since the establishment of the civil rights movement have made remarkable progress, to the extent that Denzel Washington, Whoopi Goldberg, Will Smith, and many others are able to create fully-dimensional characters that are not identified primarily by their race and are equally appealing to audiences of all ethnicities. Yet, as James Robert Parish (1995) notes, "The process is far from complete. It can only occur when the color of actors' skin and/or the shape of their facial features are not deciding factors in whether they are or are not employed" (p. 19).
Stereotypes are an ever-present presence in every society. James L. Hilton and William von Hippel (1996) speculate on why this is true:
We believe stereotypic thinking serves multiple purposes that reflect a variety of cognitive and motivational processes. Sometimes, for example, stereotyping emerged as a way of simplifying the demands on the perceiver . . . [making] information processing easier by allowing the perceiver to rely on previously stored knowledge in place of incoming information. Stereotypes also emerge in response to environmental factors, such as different social roles, group conflicts, and differences in power. Other times stereotypes emerge as a way of justifying the status quo or in response to a need for social identity (p. 237).
They define stereotypes as "beliefs about the characteristics, attributes, and behaviors of members of certain groups" (Hilton, 1996, p. 239).
Stereotypes can be positive or negative; they become prejudicial and racist when they are used negatively by members of the dominant in-group to restrict the opportunities of out-group members. As Lee Sigelman and Steven A. Tuch (1997, Spring) note, "They are often motivat...