Race And Social Class In America

1192 words - 5 pages

The American culture is revolved around our image. It seems like we are all very egocentric and don’t try to add other cultures or different races views into our society. In other words, we are an ethnocentric society that focuses on the dominant white race and people with money. According to the textbook, “Ethnocentrism is the tendency to judge other cultures using one’s own standards” (Newman 113). I have viewed and analyzed four different magazines: Cosmopolitan, Allure, Muscles and Fitness, and College Basketball. Two of these magazines were for women and two of the magazines where for males and I have concluded that we as Americans only care about ourselves and about money.
While comparing women and male magazines I noticed some differences in race and social class. “Social class is a group of people who share a similar economic position in a society, based on their wealth and income” (Newman 321). The majority of the women’s magazine advertisements conveyed white females that were upper class; this could because as women we want to be seen as glamorous, superior, and attractive. The common theme of the advertisements where about make-up and clothes; advertisements about how to make one’s self beautiful. In other words; these advertisements were egocentric. I can tell because not one advertisement was about the poor and how to help these individuals; then again these magazines weren’t about how to help our world. But wouldn’t you think these magazines could have added at least one advertisement about how to help the hungry? It’s not like these magazines didn’t have enough advertisements about lip gloss. All these advertisements had glamorous white skinny women that had expensive designer brand clothes on therefore I conclude the magazines were trying to convey the “healthy” upper class status. Interestingly enough, according to Newman, the upper class consists of only “the highest 5% of the U.S. population” (page 329). This makes me wonder if the majority of us aren’t in the upper class than why is our society so obsessed with advertising things that seem to be upper class. It could be because our culture sees money as having power. An example, of how obsessed our culture advertising for the upper class is: One of the Cosmopolitan advertisements was about the “fragrance” Estee Lauder with a white female. This woman was elegantly dressed and the way the advertisers used the strategies of language and image. The language use was “fragrance” instead of perfume, which makes this advertisement seem more high class. The women magazines were prominently white and out of the 60 advertisements I looked out for the women magazines 57 of them had white glamorous women in them. The majority of advertisers used images, language, and certain sophisticated fonts to make the advertisements more appealing to the reader. Like I mentioned above the advertisers would use the word fragrance instead of perfume, or sleek instead of shiny, or the word sophisticated...

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