While doing research on the internet for a paper I am writing about advertisements and how they target and affect children, I came across this photo. It didn't have much to do with what I was looking for in regards to my paper so I moved on without thinking twice about it. After reading the assignment for this weeks blog post assignment, I immediately thought back to this photo that I had found.
This is a photo from a Barney children's reading book. As a child growing up I myself read Barney a lot and I was a huge fan. It surprised me to see this photo because it portrays an awful stereotype that people of African-American decent are suppose to sit at the back of bus as if they are not superior enough to sit in the front with white people. Segregation has been a problem in the United States for an extremely long time and finally in 1964 the Civil Rights Act was passed ending all segregation...or so we thought.
Barney was a big character when I was a child and I was born in 1992. Approximately 30 years after segregation was supposedly ended, we still encounter racist images as shown above; in a children's book of all things. This image is installing in the brains of our youth that thinking that black people belong at the back of the bus is still socially accepted. This image is persuading us to believe that black people are less important than white people and therefore belong at the back of the bus. African-Americans have fought a long and hard battle to get where they are today and it's sickening to think that a character created at the end of the 20th century/beginning of 21st century is still portraying racist images to children. Seeing this makes me a little ashamed that I was such a fan of Barney, knowing now that I was being subjected to racism before I even knew what racism meant.
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