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."