Denise Pelayo

Daehwan Lee

AAS 201

May 10, 2017

Reflection: Minority Spotting Paper

The main focus of doing this minority spotting paper was so we could analysis how

minorities are portrayed throughout media. To complete this essay, it was required to

watch two random hours of television shows or movies and commercials. While doing

so we had to make inferences when minorities were displayed and what was noticed.

During the process of writing this paper I learned varies issues that had to do with

minorities. In doing so I realized that minorities such as Latinos, Asians, and African

Americans are underrepresented. This was by watching two shows, the first called

Modern Family and the other Baby Daddy. Both shows had Caucasians as the main

characters. Each show had their own issues on how they missed represented

minorities. For example, one of the issues that takes places in Modern Family was that

there is a white male named Jake that is wealthy and is married to a single Latina

mother. Throughout this show Gloria and her son Manny, Jakes wife, were the only

characters that were minorities. Gloria is a minority that is portrayed as the definition of

what every White-American believes that a Latina would speak and look like; she has a

high-pitched voice with an ascent and is sexually appealing. She is also portrayed as

being uneducated and always seeking for help from her family that are all Caucasian.

In the show Baby Daddy, the main character is a Caucasian. Bens family, the other

characters that also have main roles, are all Caucasian as well. The only minority that is
in this show is an African American guy named Tucker, he lives with Ben and his brother

Danny. Tucker is given a main role in the show, but seems to always be inferior of all the

actors. Other minority groups also are present in the show, but are usually bystanders.

This show did have more minorities than Modern Family and less stereotypes.

Another required was to pay attention to the commercials shown during the breaks of

these shows. While watching the commercials, I concluded that the media portrays

minorities wrongfully, such as placing them into stereotypes. For example, commercials

that had to do with education contained minorities such as Asians and Indians, which

are often stereotyped as being the nerds of society. Another commercial that caught

my attention were the commercials for Walmart. In these commercials, the people that

play the main role are always Hispanics or Latinos. In society Hispanics and Latinos are

stereotyped as being uneducated, lazy, a burden to society, etc. and by these

commercials showing just this race in their commercials just adds on to this belief.

An in all, looking back at this assignment I realized that I have never paid attention to

how the media discriminated against minorities. I believe that the media plays a big role

in how racist our society is because they keep minorities in stereotypes. The media

contains white-supremacy by keeping whites on top and minorities on the bottom.