What we want to know is how prejudice is society against African-Americans. More specifically, does racism play a part in advertising? Wilkes and Valencia (1990) conducted a study on Hispanics and Blacks in television commercials. They looked at the incidence and importance of these groups in commercials. Wilkes and Valencia found that both groups were underrepresented with respect to their proportion of the population.

They also found that the number of Hispanics and Blacks in commercials is increasing. Dominick & Greenberg (1968) reported blacks in only 5 percent of advertisements. Gerbner, et al (1981) reported that blacks were in 20 percent of commercials. But Sterns, et al (1987) reported that 11 percent of ads contained blacks. So in comparison to Sterns, et al, Wilkes and Valencia's findings are correct with respect to the percentage of

Why do advertisers use the people they do? Do advertisers use white people because someone thinks that that is the norm? Do advertisers use African-Americans because they feel that if they don't they are being racist? Or do advertisers use who they do because the advertiser thinks that that person represents what they want the ad to represent regardless of race? For these answers further research is needed. But what we can deduce from our results is that there are less African-Americans in ads today then there was in 1989. Even though they seem to be pretty well represented in accordance with their percentage of the population.

We found 20% of all the characters in ads were African-Americans. The number of African-Americans in major roles compared to all non-African-Americans in major roles was 17%. African-Americans represented 23% of all minor roles. We found 68% of all characters were in major roles and 32% of all characters were in minor roles.

We also compared the distribution of African-Americans and others into major and minor roles. We found that our data was statistically insignificant, X^2(1)=1.47, p*. 30. This computation rejects my hypothesis that African-Americans are not delegated to minor roles. But if you look at the data (see table 3) you will see that there was almost an equal amount of African-Americans delegated to major and minor roles.

ads with blacks. Wilkes and Valencia report just under 17 percent of ads contain blacks.

As for coding the advertisements we had 3 rules: 1) more than half of the person must be in the ad to count, just faces count, and limbs don't count, 2) cartoons don't count, 3) stadium crowds, or an overwhelming number of people in the background don't count.

There is reason to believe that our research had some flaws, which affected our outcome. Perhaps there were more African-Americans on television, which is what Wilkes & Valencia used, than in magazines, which is what we used. It is possible that one of our magazines had a disproportionately large number of African-Americans, which helped push the numbers up,

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