Ashley Miranda Post 2

One of the things that has become very prevalent to me, especially since beginning this class, is the portrayal of race and ethnicity in the media. In "Recitatif" Toni Morrison doesn't come out and tell the reader which character is which race. Today's readers, a generation living in a modern society and are affected by this media more often than not, see portrayals of the descriptions Morrison gives us on T.V. and in other media and automatically assume racial roles to each of the characters without even actually knowing. "The Venus Hottentot" shows an actual portrayal of a stereotype made public. The story of a real woman was revealed to the world in the form of a circus sideshow because of people's beliefs that all women of the Khoi people have different physical features than their own. Because Sarah Baartman didn't fit into Europe's perfect picture of a woman she was put on display, written about in newspapers and even had pictures painted of her to make an example of her. I feel this is an example of the dehumanization of a woman, in this case women of Khoi, through stereotyping them as only sexual beings. The only parts of Sarah that anyone was interested in was her sexual features. They didn't care about her culture or her intelligence, just the artificial physicalities that were put on display for typical white Europeans to ridicule and report about in their newspapers. I believe that the media is the basis for people's beliefs that every single person they encounter must be categorized. I'm not sure if this is because we are trained to feel this way or if it makes us feel more comfortable with out relationships with these people, but in one way or another we all do it.