Stereotypes In The Film Menace II Society

Stereotypes in media have been around since the earliest cartoons were drawn. The media gives supposedly identifying traits with images of the stingy Jewish man, the single Hispanic woman cleaning homes to raise her three children, and the “butch” lesbian falling for the beautiful blonde who just happens to glance at her every day in the hallway. These portrayals make up general knowledge about minorities for a lot of people, but their accuracy is questionable at best. While production companies have been making strides towards the better, insufficient representation in the media tends to portray minorities as their negative stereotypes rather than as people.

The LGBTQ community is one that faces an ongoing storm of stereotyping and stigmas and the media is no relief from it. One major factor in this is the common trope of the violent and aggressive transgender woman, which is often shown through

The movie Menace II Society exploits a common stereotype of the violent, aggressive poverty-stricken, drugged black society. The main characters Caine, O-Dog, and Tat, all black men, continuously are shown to curse in nearly every sentence without remorse. That may not seem quite as severe, but in the beginning of the film, there is an opening cutscene based around a Watts, Los Angeles riot in 1965. This scene is a meaningless attempt to instill a sense of relevance to the audience in order to distract from the stereotypical and even racist portrayal of the black neighborhood. Not only that, but the plot of the movie seems eerily as though there is a constant need to “escape” this notably predominantly black society and its drug deals, criminality, and “ghetto” look. Although the movie does seem to want to get a point across about racism being relevant even in mainly black neighborhoods, it mostly furthers society’s institutionalized racist thoughts towards the black