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Notes -
A second-hand anecdote, for what it's worth:
Shortly after I graduated high school, but while both my younger brothers were still attending the same institution (a little over 20 years ago now), our mother began volunteering in our school's (small, poorly-maintained) library. And after Middle Brother graduated, Mom undertook to fix up and update the library's rather terrible collection of college prep/research/application materials, having then helped two kids through the process.
As a result of this, she also ended up with students asking for help searching the materials for schools of particular interest. And in one memorable incident, one girl (for context, an upper class white girl), after looking through the materials from various schools with an eye to their ethnic make-up, asked my mother for help in finding a school that wasn't "too white," since the best she could find was "only" a quarter black. How, my Mom asked, was that "too white"? Well, you see, this high school senior didn't want to attend a university that was "boring" and "racist," and so wanted one whose school body reflected the American population — you know, about one third black.
So my mom attempted, with the help of handy reference books containing government-sourced figures, to inform this young women as to the country's actual demographics. She didn't want to hear it, insisting that those figures had to be wrong, because she could clearly see for herself that America has a lot more black people than that any time she watches TV.
(So my mom just dug out the brochure they had for a historically black college, handed it off, and moved on.)
Yes, one teenager a couple decades ago does not alone a pattern make, but media representation does indeed influence people's views, for better or worse.
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