Misconceptions of cultural life occurs every day in the U.S. to a higher level than most would imagine and is more current than the occasional problems between different ethnicities that is portrayed and displayed by television and society.
I completely agree with this thesis, seeing as how the media likes to display good images of bad things and the bad images of any good thing. For example, you almost never see the wealthy parts of Africa and almost never see the horrific sides to the current war in Iraq. The media will portray and display images and news that will appear to the viewer as a more positive situation than the modern reality of things really are. You will always see people of different cultural backgrounds living amongst each other in perfect harmony when, in fact, there are still many racial, cultural, and even homosexual/lesbian violence that is very prevalent to this day. The media will rarely display anything focusing on black and white violence because they want viewers to think that it’s just a thing of the past and to think nothing of it when one group comes in contact with the other group, which, even though I believe everyone should be informed on what can and does happen, I somewhat agree with.
The media will portray one group as being superior to the many other groups believed to be inferior in most cases, giving people the self image that they are of an almost greater humanity. One group will honestly believe that when they walk into a room filled with inferior groups, they will be looked up upon, as Oliver Goldsmith extends in National Prejudice, when he encounters and Englishman who assumed that he carried such an air of importance as if he possessed all the merit of the English nation in his own person.
Goldsmith goes on to talk of the Englishman looking down upon the Dutch, the French, the Germans, and the Spaniards, categorizing all as if each had no importance to the world what-so-ever. He speaks about getting into an...