Guest speakers highlight importance of minority representation in the media

People of color are often underrepresented, misrepresented or not represented at all in mass media. Some activists have fought to change this internally, while others have combatted this disparity by creating their own media.

On Tuesday night, Queer People of Color, La Vida magazine and Sigma Lambda Upsilon/Señoritas Latinas Unidas Sorority, Inc. held an event entitled “Minorities in the Media” to address that very problem. Guest speakers Alicia Maule and Suhaly Bautista-Carolina led an open discussion in the ARCH building about the issues that minorities, especially afro-latinas, face in the world of media.

Maule is a Brown University alumna who has worked for President Barack Obama and MSNBC. She is now working for the Innocence Project, a nonprofit which uses DNA evidence to exonerate wrongfully incarcerated people.

“I wanted to manage and do my own thing, and you don’t get that in a lot of corporations,” Maule said.

Bautista-Carolina works on promoting social justice from a different angle. She works for Creative Time, a company that commissions public art projects. Aside from her job, she hopes to publish a photography book that highlights afro-latina women.

“Why is there a narrative that black and Latino people don’t camp or don’t like nature?” Bautista-Carolina said. She hopes that her work will differentiate the ways that people envision people of color.

Both women emphasized the importance of getting minority peoples’ ideas out there. “Representation matters,” Bautista-Carolina said. ”That reigns supreme over everything.”

One of the difficulties of limited representation is that it is hard to do justice to an entire race or culture with only a few characters that are widely known. Different people within the same ethnic group can have very different experiences.

“I’m going to get a whole different story about what it’s like to be afro-latino in New York City than in Puerto Rico,” Bautista-Carolina said.

The mediator of the discussion, College junior Abby Cacho, asked the guest speakers how much accountability to give to celebrities when it comes to their status as minority figures in the media.

“I can’t defend Kanye [West] anymore but I can enjoy his music,” Maule said, “Let’s not put so much accountability on [Kanye and Beyonce] because it’s a waste of our energy.”

Maule feels that we cannot depend on others to represent us. Individuals should do what they can in their life to create representation, otherwise, “we’ll always be disappointed,” she said.

“We need to be represented everywhere,” Maule said. You do not have to be an activist to make an impact, she added.

The speakers added that another way that everyone can make an impact is through consumer choice. “Every time you consume, that’s a vote,” Bautista-Carolina said.

When it comes to making a change, you have to take action where you can and when you can. “They don’t want us to have the keys,” Bautista-Caroline said, “so we take the hinges off the door.”

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