Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: The January issue of PS, the APSA Standing Committee on the Status of Blacks in the Profession published its report entitled “Survey of African American Portrayal in Introductory Textbooks in American Government/Politics.” They used index citations, illustrations/visuals, and written text of the chapters as the measurement indicators. However, their analysis of visual presentations is sadly unsatisfactory as there was less than a paragraph devoted to the discussion of pictures/illustrations and the impact of such visual messages on students. Furthermore, their analysis did not go further than the conventional “racism/lack of effort by publishers” to identify a new culprit.
This proposed content analysis of 3,162 photographs in twenty introductory American government textbooks go further than the conventional claim to explore what lies beyond such “lack of effort/racism” argument. Focusing solely on photographs, this new study argues that visual underrepresentation of minorities reflects their political underrepresentation at the national stage, and that the underrepresentation in the textbooks is actually a sadly accurate portrayal of minorities in the public sphere.
This new finding was deduced from the fact that as between racial majorities and minorities, there are substantial differences in the total number of public/political figures and their visuals in the textbooks. Traditional content analyses do not count the number of public/political figures in pictures or identify them to determine whether there is a potential link between the underrepresentation of minorities in the sphere of higher learning and that of the public. This study hopes to serve as a supplement to existing studies.

Publication Type: Proceeding