[May 31st 2010] Read the full post here by Jamie Keiles;
In May of 2010 , Jamie Keiles created a blog
based on the Magazine ‘Seventeen’, the whole point of the blog was for
Jamie to live her life for a month according to the gospel of Seventeen
Magazine, during this period she decided to do a post particularly on
race. Although the author of this post claims she is from a town which
is 95.1% white and has not had much exposure to racial discussion, I
feel she wrote the post incredibly well, with no hint of any sort of
biased opinions. The point of the article was for her to compare the
breakdown of racial content featured in Seventeen Magazine with what was
the latest census at the time of race demographics in the United
States.
Comparing the two pie charts the writer
created and with the information she provided on how she conducted the
study, I concluded that the researcher counted 332 faces and then
researched the ethnicities of the models she could identify. Models
whose races she could not determine with reasonable certainty she did
not include in the study and therefore ended up using 319 faces as part
of her data. From the charts I can see that there were 19% non-white
faces in the June/July Issue of Seventeen Magazine and 81% white
(non-Hispanic) faces in the same [June/July/ Issue of Seventeen
Magazine.
In the United States 72% of the population are white (non-Hispanic), 12% are Black, 5% are Asian/Pacific Islander/Native American, 9% are Hispanic white and 2%
are Two or more races. In that particular issue of Seventeen Magazine,
the racial breakdown is actual pretty close in comparison to the
statistics of the races in The United States, with the exception of the
1% represented in the magazine compared to the 9% population.
‘Personally,
I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect an entirely equal distribution
of race in every issue, but it does seem reasonable (and logical) to
expect that a modern magazine would have a race breakdown that is
similar to the race breakdown of the country in which it publishes, in
this case, the United States.’ I also, personally
agree with this statement that the writer makes, I was incredibly
surprised when I discovered these results. Although it would be
fantastic if all magazines represented all races equally, it is also
highly unlikely, because all magazines have a target audience to cater
for and these audiences sometimes have a specific idea of what they want
to see on the pages and what they think beauty is. Seventeen magazines,
although they seemingly want to encourage diversity within their pages,
still have a duty to cater for mainstream American teenage girls (their
target audience) and the majority of that audience is white. I
personally don’t believe it’s a race thing by not showing all races
equally within the pages, I simply think that each magazine has it’s
target audience and they are the ones widely represented in their
magazines. For example ‘Ebony’ Magazine is predominantly aimed at
African American’s and those are the ones who dominate the pages of
their issues, that doesn’t mean that they only feature black people
however they know that a member of their target audience is more likely
to pick up the issue and buy it if there is a successful black woman/man
on the cover.
All in all, I believe that this post by Jamie
Keiles is one of the most interesting I have come across whilst
researching for this topic, it has opened my eyes to the fact that
although major fashion magazines may not follow this diverse trend that
others are recognizing beauty within all races. In addition, after
reading this article, I myself started to notice how teen magazines seem
to represent race a lot more equally within them than the older, high
fashion magazines do. This makes me wonder whether this represents the
gap between the old and young generation within society, and are we, as
the younger generation a lot more open and accepting to seeing beauty
represented through all different ethnicities.
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