Jackie is a character in the hit show called That 70’s Show. In the show, she has a father who has a very successful buisness and is wealthy. Throughout the show, Jackie is displayed as ignorant, privileged and very self centered. In the 2002 That 70’s Show episode “Class Picture”, it is no different. The character of Jackie wrongfully shows how rich white girls only care about themselves, and are downright rude.
To start off, while Jackie and the gang were reminiscing about their past, Jackie was upset that she wasn’t in any of the stories. The gang was trying to remember what they they did in the past so they could come up with a yearbook quote. While only going one story through, Jackie was upset they haven’t told a story about her yet. She told the group how they are loosing focus and “it has to be about me”. During this scene, we see the character of Jackie enforce the norm of the self centered rich kid. She wasn’t interested her other friends past stories and only cared about hearing about herself.
In the next scene, It showed how they first met Jackie and how she was really inconsiderate. While first meeting Donna at gym, she told her “We haven’t met before. I guess because I’m richer than you.”. In retaliation because of this rude comment, Donna threw a Dodgeball at her. After getting hit, Jackie said “That hurt you lumberjack”. Here, we see younger Jackie shows off how she is richer than them. If she hasn’t been rude enough, she even called Donna a lumberjack. Jackie enforces the norm that young rich girls are really rude and are jerks. Younger Jackie wasn’t afraid to she off how privileged she is and completely oblivious to how wrong that is.
Lastly, When the gang finally decided on a yearbook quote, she was upset that she wasn’t in the quote and forced her boyfriend to change his. When the group comes up with the quote of What a long strange trip it’s been in Foreman’s basement, Jackie was displeased. She tells the group that she hated the quote. Kelso, her boyfriend, offered to change the end of the quote to pleases her but to Jackie it wasn’t good enough. She ended up changing Kelso’s quote to I love Jackie Burkhart. This scene tells us how Jackie only cared about if she was in the quote. This Further shows how Jackie is self centered and only cares about herself. Even when everyone all decided on this quote and was happy about it, she wasn’t because she wanted to be the center of attention. She wouldn’t have cared about the end product unless her name was in the quote. This scene continues to enforce the norm by showing the how selfish rich girls can be.
In the End, even though the show is trying to joke around, it presents a bad image to the upper class. The show Presents Jackie as a selfish brat who only cares about herself and could care less about her friends. These negative traits are what some people think about upper class families. This episode can show how the upper class can be just like Jackie and can be greedy, self centered, and a jerk to others. This isn’t a good thought to have about a group of people. Even though some people in the upper class can be like this, the vast majority aren’t.
