Race, Gender, And The Media Essay

Have you ever had a job interview? Been on a blind date? Posted a picture on social media? If so, you 've probably fallen victim to lookism. Lookism is defined by the Merriam-Webster Dictionary as “prejudice or discrimination based on physical appearance believed to fall short of societal notions of beauty”. With social trends of being fit and having more prominent physical features on the rise, as well as race in general, women, as well as men, are becoming more and more cautious of how they present themselves. Race, gender, and the media all play critical roles in the way lookism affects men and women in today’s society. Race has become a significant topic in the world lately. In recent years, it has been immensely difficult for newly graduated black students to get jobs. According to a study conducted in 2013 by the Center for Economic and Policy Research, the unemployment rate of black students who had recently graduated college was double that of the rest of recent college graduates (Berman, 2014). The United States, a country that is sixty-two years past the Brown v. Board of Education decision that terminated the “separate but equal” rule, is far from racial equality in, not only the workplace, but everyday society as well. A study organized by the University of Southern California in 2014 found that out of 30,000 characters in the 700 most popular films from 2007 to 2014 only thirteen percent were black and seventy-five percent were white (Santhanam and Crigger,…