Me, 1. describe the main characters of one television program that you watch. do you think the characters reflect the composition of society in terms of class, race, and gender? why or why not? 2. sociologists argue that sports often reflect gender, racial, and class inequality. do you agree or disagree with this? why? 3. do you think that gatekeeping is increasing or decreasing in society (in other words, are alternative messages more or less likely to be heard in today’s media)? why or why not?

1. One television show I like to watch is called Riverdale (a re-creation of the comic book series "Archie). This show definitely reflects some societies standards. The popular guy is a redhead, muscular, jock, white male who attracts sexualized females who come from wealthy homes. The minorities of the show are very few and overlooked. All the wealthy people, in fact, are WHITE individuals who have large old companies dating back years. ( think of Rockefeller, etc). 

2. Sports definitely do reflect gender, race, and class inequality in some aspects. For one, until very recently, many aggressive sports that were televised and popular were limited to white men. Slowly over the years, we learned of tiger woods, OJ Simpson, Michael Jordan but even then we lacked women in sports. Some people who were poor could not pursue their dreams of being in sports because they were busy trying to help support their families. And class, due to our history, always related to race. 

3. Gatekeeping is decreasing. Now we see a lot of encouragement for women to engage in science, tech, and engineering fields. Movies depict very successful women who contribute to our history with scientific discoveries. Girls do not have to play with dolls, they can do what boys do. This is all largely in part to dedicated women fighting to change society's values and finally make men and women equal in the eyes of all. Racial issues are slightly improving but as we see with our current political climate and police brutality, it can also be said that there is much more progress to be made in the sense minorities need to be depicted for what they are more often. Hard-working, contributing members of society rather than illegal criminals.