Symbolic Interactionist Media Paper
Renee Abreu
SOC/100
March 12, 2012
University of Phoenix

Symbolic Interactionist Media Paper

Family Guy, an American animated sitcom created in 1999, is a fictional television show that centers around a dysfunctional family called the Griffins and their talking dog. The show takes place in a fictional city known as the city of Quahog and illustrates much of its humor from jokes on American culture. The show has an animated cast of predominantly white characters with two African-American characters, which we see consistently throughout the program. Although the show exhibits many different forms of social inequality the most frequent of which that I have seen has been racism between whites and blacks. Many of the jokes centered around this theme play on a vast majority of stereotypes between the two races, which is essentially how viewers seem to relate to the show.
Scenes of racism between whites and blacks on family guy are shown from a non-black perspective touching on historical events such as slavery, welfare, and police brutality to name a few. Overall the scenes that I saw implied a sort of white supremacy over black characters. One of the scenes in the show is set at a track meet with white and black runners. The man who starts the race lets the white men start first and a few seconds later allows the black runners follow who sprint past the white runners with ease. Upon being passed by the black men the white runners seemed startled and began to slow down. At the end of the race the white runners were seemingly shaken up essentially afraid.
The most historically significant scene has to do with slavery and is centered on a white woman’s affair with a black slave, which then fast forwards to a few years later where they have three children. The woman is feeding the black slave and their children one