ABSTRACT
This chapter takes a closer look at the history of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color musicians in music video since the premiere of MTV in the early 1980s. This representation changes for a number of ethnic groups after MTV gives way to a number of different cable channels playing specialty programming to targeted demographics. “Immigrants” presents the opportunity to understand how race and ethnicity are depicted in music video. Most obviously, this and other music videos present visible minorities, people who present as non-white, non-European, or Indigenous. However, the current scholarship in genetics, evolution, and sociology all critique the idea that there ever was such thing as a “pure” 100% race of any kind, and instead consider race to be a social construction: a concept that bears little objective reality and is instead driven by the human preconceptions.
