Before reading this article, I had never taken the time to notice the appearance or context in which Indian Americans appear in advertising. Edward Said's research on Orientalism revealed the tactics behind the portrayal of different races and cultures, "because the chief function of Orientalism was 'to control, manipulate, even incorporate what is manifestly a different world.'" Western world advertising uses the absence of indians in order to incorporate this idea of "exotica". This also emphasizes a groups position in the power structure, which indicates where they are in the social structure. Absence also clarifies who is who in the spectrum which declares who has the most power and what can be done with that power. This power allows our media to place cultural identities on certain groups, molding them into what popular culture expects and wants. This is very unfortunate and unfair because the population of Asian Indians is growing immensely in the US, and is the most educated ethnic group in the country. I would like to say this isn't true, but it is. I have even been affected by this stereotype put on certain minority groups. It blurs peoples visions of who these people really are, and where they truly come from.
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