Ethnicity

Stereotypes -


Mexicans: Pool cleaners, maids, immigrants, taco's


British: Tea, scones, the queen, posh, bulldog


Black people: Weed, chicken, dreadlocks, Bob Marley, crime


White people: Bad dancing, can't jump


Asian people: Yin yang, noodles, nuclear bombs, maths, karate

As Pieterse forcefully put it in 1992; “The legacy of several hundred years of western expansion and hegemony, manifested in racism and exoticism, continues to be recycled in western culture in the stereotypical images of non-western cultures.”


Theorist Sarita Malik points out the obvious in her essay ‘The Construction of Black and Asian Ethnicities in British media (1998); “The word ‘race’ in the cultural and political terrain has almost universally been aligned with Black and Asian people, as though they are the only racial groups that ‘own’ an ethnicity… Whiteness has been naturalized, as though it is an invisible ‘norm.’ When it is of course an ethnic group like any other.


Malik argues: “Many feel that Black and Asian audiences are still not sufficiently catered for and that insensitivity towards issues of race and ethnicity still exist. The reality of a lived multiculturalism is not represented in the British media."

Regional Identity

Andrew Higson (1998) - "Identity is generally understood to be the shared identity of naturalised inhabitants of a particular political-geographic space - this can be a particular nation or region."


Higson goes on to say that "Stereotyping is a form of shorthand, a way establishing character by adopting recognisable and well established conventions of representation. The stereotype reduces characters to the most basic form so that the stereotype becomes comic." - "No wonder then that a particular characterisation may be criticised for being stereotypical meaning it lacks a realistic dimension, it fails to match up to the reality of identity."



Benedict Anderson (1983) maintains that the media play a vital role in constructing a national/regional identity as in reality the nation is too big for everyone to know each other, yet they often have shared values; "The unification of people in the modern world is achieved not by military but by cultural means."


Regional stereotypes

Cornwall - Farmers, pasties, "wasson"

Devon -

Yorkshire - Fields, cows, tea

London - Crime, chavs, police

Wales - Rugby, sheep, beer, baked cheese, Tom Jones

Birmingham - Drag on words, Yam yams, Chavvy

Northern - Chavs, dumb, working-class

Manchester - Chavs, benefits, terraced houses, tracksuits

Liverpool - Football, Chavs, well known accent, swearing, Hollyoaks

Scotland - Kilts, no underwear, bagpipes, red hair, ghost white

Essex  - Chavvy accent, girls are blond and tanned, alcohol and parties