Stereotyping on Television Throughout the history of this country, all Americans and even immigrants have endured stereotypes. Whether it be race, gender, sexual preference, social class, or even our regional background, someone has decided that we do not belong and should not have the same rights because we are different. Are these behaviors innate to human nature, or are they taught to us through the world around us? From an early age we have many different ways of learning things. We learn how to socially interact with people through our family members, peers, teachers, and media. These avenues of learning are certainly the building blocks that make us the people we grow up to become. Have we been able to grow beyond these feelings, break these stereotypes, and learn to embrace our diversity? Looking into the mainstream media of television, do we have a long way to go before reaching that goal or are we close to attaining it? Since the first settlements of what was known as the new world in the 16th and 17th century, many groups of people have tended to fall within a certain stereotypical classification. Most of these stereotypes were brought on by the social elite. Whether it be the color of your skin, ethnic background, social status, religious beliefs, or gender; one group has stereotyped another. Many of these stereotypes go back further prior to the settlement of North America by Europeans. Most of our culture today is based on ideas that were created or observed by our American and European ancestors in order to justify another group’s actions. In early colonial times Africans were seen as dumb, lazy, poor, smelly, and uncivilized. This was the means that British colonists used to justify their slavery and treating these people like animals and property. In prior centuries, women were not allowed to vote or own property. During the early to mid 19th century western expansion had started and Native Americans or “Indians” were seen as obstacles, and they were stereotyped as being savages. Even though this great race of people welcomed and helped early settlers, they were still labeled in a negative way to justify their displacement. After the Civil War, the Reconstruction, and the Industrial Revolution, white Americans even turned on each other and expanded into Asian groups. Italians were seen as violent and criminal, such as mobsters. Irish were seen as drunkards and fighters and referred to as the fighting Irish. Poor whites of the south were termed crackers and hillbillies if they were from Appalachia or the Ozarks. Asians were seen as exotic and sinister. It seems that people were categorized derogatively by the social elite. Media has been seen as a way to attempt to break these stereotypes. Printed media has been used as a powerful tool to persuade people for a particular cause. During the abolitionist movement that started the Civil War, books like Uncle Tom's Cabin and Twelve Years a Slave were written to appeal to the social elite and cause them to see the people that they saw negatively were human like them. These books did have a profound effect as they helped lay the groundwork to start the Civil War along with John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859. However, media has also become a way to reinforce these negative stereotypes. Newspapers, public protests, and even the rising film and radio genres at the early 20th century assisted with this. When the film industry started, these stereotypes were incorporated into the films of the times. These films depicted members of ethnic groups of people as all the same. This may have had the effect of causing people who identified themselves as this group to start acting in these stereotypical ways. The children probably saw this and started emulating these behaviors because they believed these were the social norms of their particular ethnic group. The children that were outside of these groups also learned that these were