Germany: Study by the University of Rostock on colored people on television provokes outrage

Rostock - A study by the Institute for Media Research at the University of Rostock on migrants on German television caused outrage. Since the creators arranged people in a table according to ethnic characteristics, they earned accusations of racism. "The categorization of a person on the basis of questionable external characteristics in an equally questionable typology is, from a scientific point of view, complete nonsense. You cannot assign someone to a region or an ethnic group based on the color of their skin, hair or eyes," said the ethnologist Susanne Schröter to Bild.

Something like that does not happen in the ascription from outside either. The whole thing is highly constructed, devoid of any empirically verifiable basis and politically nothing other than a paternalistic new racism.

The historian Jörg Baberowski called the methodology of the study "discriminatory and racist". That reminds him of "the darkest epoch of the 20th century".

Rostock study complains that the proportion of women is too low
The college justified the practice of the investigation. "With our method we have met the demands of anti-discrimination activists to make their marginalization visible. Because the discrimination that Black & PoC (People of Color) experience in real life is precisely based on the attribution of external appearances."

The study comes to the conclusion that people with a migration background and people of color are underrepresented in TV programs. According to the survey, eleven percent of the main characters have a migration background, with 26 percent of the total population. Colored people, who made up ten percent of the population, only made up five percent of the protagonists.

In October 2020, a study by the University of Rostock criticized the fact that images of women in streaming series were not very diverse. Female characters in the productions of Netflix, Amazon Prime and Sky are therefore mostly young, slim and lightly dressed. In addition, they would have worked more in jobs such as salespeople, teachers or nurses instead of working as politicians or scientists.

Source: Junge Freiheit