chs 1-3 SGL

In the first few chapters of Stephanie Greco Larson's book, Media and Minorities, she talks about exclusion and selective exclusion of African Americans in media. Exclusion is there being no minorities on television. Selective exclusion is there few minorities in media, and those who are there are in smaller less important roles. They have no cultural identity or they are stereotyped. This is a problem because minorities aren't represented, and when they are only further marginalized.

I think television has done a poor job trying to fix the problems of selective exclusion. On main network stations there are few leading minority characters. One thing that happens in the mean time is that these representations are satirized. The Office does a great job with this.

The video above is of the show main character, Michael Scott, and the warehouse manager, Darryl. Michael constantly takes their relationship to be as stereotypical as possible. He doesn't know any black people so he takes his cues from stereotypes. Darryl sees this, and he uses it to make a fool out of Michael. Michael is Darryl's superior, but only in his job title. Michael is always made to look dumber than Darryl. This is different from the relations like this on previous shows. In other shows Darryl would be the fool. This satire of previous shows adds to the comedy of the situation. There is still selective exclusion happening. Darryl is one of two continuous black characters amongst a large ensemble cast. His character makes no strives in character development like the other characters, but to a degree his character is still pointing out the problems with previous representations which have been small and stereotypical.