Social Frameworks

The Ted Talk by Kimberlé Crenshaw discusses the idea of intersectionality.   Intersectionality represents the intersection of society, race, language, class, and gender, as it pertains to discrimination or disadvantage.  Crenshaw focuses on the idea of intersectionality in the media.  The news has the power to control society’s ideological frameworks, and typically create stories that include the same type of victims.  For example, police brutality is experienced by both men and women black and white, however only black males are typically discussed in the media.  This framework has conditioned society to associate black men and police brutality, so that is what the news tends to report.  This leaves out so many different affected segments of society left out and forgotten.  It is hard for people to incorporate new facts into a pre-established framework, which allows so many peoples’ hardships to slip through the cracks of society’s social awareness.

I chose this image to depict the different races, genders, and social classes.  I liked that they were all different colors so that the central focus was not a white vs black mentality, rather we are all part of the same society regardless of our ethnicity.  It also made me think of LGBTQ awareness with the rainbow effect that the colors give.  Finally it has both female and male socially constructed colors but you cannot tell what gender the arms actually are which fights to break these constructs.  Finally I picked this quote to illustrate how media shapes the way society thinks about different races, genders, sexual orientations, and class.  I think this text becomes more powerful when laid over this image.