Minority Women Vs White Women Essay

The author’s hypothesis that white female offenders are portrayed more favorably in the media than minority female offenders is supported. According to Brennan and Vandenberg (2009), “Figure 1 indicates that stories about white women were nearly three times more likely to have an overall favorable tone than were stories about minority women (47.8 percent versus 16.7 percent, respectively). We reached the opposite conclusion when we examined how race/ethnicity was related to stories that were overwhelmingly unfavorable. Specifically, while two-thirds of the stories about minority women were predominantly negative, only about one-quarter of the stories about white women had a similar tone” (p. 156). These results show that stories of white women were often more favorable, while stories of minority women were often more negative. Another example supports this stating “Figure 1 indicates that responsibility was denied in 56.5 percent of stories about white women, but in less than 21 percent of stories about minority women” (Brennan and Vandenberg, 2009, p. 156). This particular result shows that white women were more often denied the responsibility in a crime story compared to minority woman. These results support the author's hypothesis.

The overall implications of white women and minority women being portrayed more positively or negatively in the media are that there is still some racism that occurs. Since white women are viewed more positively and the blame is placed somewhere else while minority women are viewed more negatively and the blame is placed on them, it shows that people seem to favor white women overall. This means that racism is still a problem. The media is usually to blame in perpetuating this idea because they make the stories and report why the offender did the crime. This means that the media may be racist or they may be spreading this idea to get more