Pop Culture & Cultural Diversity Today

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Pop culture has changed overtime, in the same way as the demographics represented in movies. The first top rated movie to incorporate characters of multiple  races was not until the early 1920’s. Why is that? Whites were the dominant race to earn top paying movie roles. Another contributing factor was the historical time period. When movies were first starting to become a popular source of entertainment this occurred before or during the American Civil Rights movement in the 1960’s.

 

The Film Industry: In the early 1900’s until the late 90’s leading characters in popular movies were all predominantly white. Since then movies have advanced from having caucasian leads to main characters of various ethnicity. However, this change in multi race leads has lead to negative controversy. For example when the movie black punter was released there were many negative statements on how the movie was limiting towards one race, which made others feel uncomfortable. Overall the racial breakdown of movies has greatly improved, the current break down is 7.1% Asian, 4.9% hispanic, 13.2% black and 71.2% white racial representation in the film industry.

 

The Music Industry: The music industry is changing constantly. From the rock ages to modern pop and hip hop styles. Along with types of music changing so are the races represented in the top 100 charts. In 2010 out of the top 100 songs 45 of the artist were caucasian, 36 artist identified as black, 16 identified as mixed or as other and 2 songs identified as hispanics, while 1 artist identified as Asian. So what does this mean? Yes from the early 1900’s where almost all top performing artist were white to the late 2000’s where other races were represented in the top 100. Whites were still the highest percentage and the second highest were black. So yes, as a society we have become more culturally diverse however aside from whites and black are the other ethnicities represented equally?

 

The Television industry: The television industry was born in the mid 1950’s when it became a common thing to have a tv in the average american house. Shows would have predominately white male leads with supporting female leads to follow. It has been until recently where shows are starting to incorporate diverse cast. In the past decade from 2002 the to 2010 the black representation in prime tv increased by over 6.3%. Society is becoming more accepting over other races being represented in television. As for African Americans in the United states pop culture they have increased representation in the film, music, and tv industry. A question to leave your self with is  Do you think society is going to start to incorporate other races to become equally represented in pop culture compared to the Caucasian race, and how soon?

 

All Facts sourced from: http://web.a.ebscohost.com/ehost/detail/detail?vid=3&sid=ea5848ff-0859-4dd6-b299-6bf121578620%40sessionmgr4007&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZSZzY29wZT1zaXRl#db=a9h&AN=131123668