California State University Northridge The Blind Side Video Discussion

For this assignment, you must first post a thoughtful response to the prompt posted below. Then, you must also respond to the post of one of your classmates. Each response should be at least one paragraph in length (five clearly written, thoughtful sentences).

The goal with this discussion question is to try and understand how (mis)representation affects the content of media messages. You will watch two different video clips. I want you to address how the stories told in each clip differ and how that is connected to who is telling the story. How does this help us understand why it is so important to have media messages that are produced by members of non-dominant groups, allowing non-dominant groups to speak for and represent themselves and in the same way members of dominant groups can?

1) Video clip 1: This is a clip from the film The Blind Side, which was released in 2009 and is based on a true story about NFL offensive tackler, Michael Oher. The film was written and directed by John Lee Hancock, Jr. (a white middle-aged man born in Texas) and though the film received a lot of praise from Hollywood (Sandra Bullock won an Oscar for her role in the film), many others criticized the film because of its racist undertones. Most notably, the emphasis on the “White Savior” trope and the depiction of Oher as dumb and incompetent and the fact that he doesn’t speak more than 2 lines of dialogue in the film (many of the aspects of the film have been disputed by Oher himself, in particular, the film’s false claim that his white adoptive mother had to teach him how to play football).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=76nhIfp9gr0 (Links to an external site.)

2) Video clip 2: This is a clip from the TV show black-ish, which premiered in 2014 on ABC and was created by Kenya Barris, a middle-aged African-American man from Inglewood, Ca. The show is about an upper middle class African-American family, and looks at the expectation and experience of cultural assimilation in a primarily white, affluent neighborhood. The show has received a lot of critical acclaim because it tackles racial and sociopolitical issues head on.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VvykfyGTnbQ