Comic Forms of Racial Justice

Considering the gains and losses of translating racial and political critique into minor forms, this chapter examines the form and aesthetics of online comics to locate ways racial justice can be visually designed and communicated in digital environments. The circulation of activist media within visual economies creates different possibilities and limitations for radical politics across modes of legibility. In attempts to shift politics through shifting culture, what happens when racial justice becomes converted into a commodity object that circulates as visual capital? By focusing on minor forms of racial critique, this chapter examines the processes by which racialized affect and social justice become rendered into objects for consumption and circulation within affective visual economies.

Redesigning a Pocket Monument

In 2016, the Treasury Department announced that its planned redesign of the twenty-dollar bill would feature Harriet Tubman, sparking jubilation from activists who had campaigned for female representation on paper currency. But the redesign also brought sharp rebukes from white conservatives, including Republican presidential candidates, who accused the Treasury of capitulating to “political correctness” at the expense of the honor and memory of President Andrew Jackson. This chapter draws from a previous content analysis of news and editorial coverage of the redesign to incite a Black feminist reparative reading to elevate Tubman’s radical legacy over narratives that affirmed her as a postracial icon.

The “Labor” of Racialized Media

In this chapter, the authors, first, outline the need to understand race and media (and their intersection); second, advocate for both media and racial “literacy”; and third, justify this book’s use of—and inspiration from—the pioneering work of the Birmingham Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies in general and the specific contributions toward understanding race and media from the sociologist and media studies scholar Stuart Hall. The authors then conclude with an overview of the book’s content and a summation on why scholarship on race and media continues to matter in our contemporary moment.

Go ’Head Girl, Way to Represent!

Negative cultural images of Black people, shaped by predominantly white male television content creators, have prompted calls for more racial inclusion behind the scenes. Even though representation is the topic of scholarly conversations, little is known about what representation in television content leadership looks like or how people from diverse backgrounds influence the ways Black characters are portrayed on-screen. This chapter fills this gap by examining a prime-time television show created, written, and executive produced by a Black woman, Shonda Rhimes. Using qualitative content analysis, this chapter analyzes Shonda Rhimes’s Grey’s Anatomy to explore how intergroup interactions and depictions of race and gender on a prime-time television show may reflect the social location of its creator. The findings presented in this chapter suggest that the way Rhimes redefines culturally negative stereotypes of Black women reflects her “outsider within” social location, one she used to push back against external definitions of Black womanhood.

Journalistic Whiteout

This chapter explores the persistent racialization of professional journalism, explaining the overwhelming whiteness of US news as emanating from cultural practices of professional journalism and institutional forces shaping the journalistic field rather than simply the demographic characteristics of the newsroom workforce. The authors focus on the role of objectivity in defining professional journalism as a supposedly “unraced” space in a way that renders invisible its foundational whiteness. In situating professional journalism as white media, they provide a conceptual framework that distinguishes among white privilege, white nationalism, and white supremacy. These concepts help to analyze the newly resurgent white-nationalist media as a case that highlights the structural limitations of professional journalism and its dissemination to the public. Ultimately, the authors seek to understand the racial dynamics of the journalistic field, highlighting the emergent white racial subjectivity within white-nationalist media as both critique of and an alternative to the objectivity of professional journalism.

Reframing Adoptee Narratives

Very public transnational, transracial adoptions by celebrities and the inclusion of transnational, transracial adoption in prime-time television sitcoms make this form of family making increasingly visible. Yet the majority of representations privilege the adoptive parent’s point of view. Drawing on two recent Korean-adoptee-created media, the Netflix documentary Twinsters (2015) and NBC Asian America’s docuseries akaSEOUL (2016), this chapter examines how adoptee-centered media converge with and diverge from traditional renderings of transnational adoption. In doing so, these media provide not only new portrayals of transnational, transracial adoptees but also new conceptions of Asian and Korean American racial, ethnic, and familial identities.

Moral Framing Networks

In this chapter, the authors utilize contemporary sociological theory and examples found on the internet to explain how and why moral entrepreneurs deliver and spread erroneous information through mass media to create moral panics. The authors examine what is referred to as the “Latino cyber-moral panic” in the United States, in which immigrants are criminalized in cyberspace and targeted as the “folk devils.” The authors find that moral entrepreneurs use vertical and horizontal mass communication networks to recruit and maintain the membership of moral framing networks. Moral framing networks are particular sectors of the public sphere that share the same moral values as the moral entrepreneur. The moral entrepreneurs utilize the manipulation and the distortion of information, which is distributed in the form of simple messages and/or circular reporting via cyberspace. Moral framing networks can be generalizable, as they can take different forms and functions. Moral entrepreneurs create, increase, or lose power through the manipulation of a moral framing network.

The News Media and the Racialization of American Poverty

Poverty in America today is widely viewed through a racial lens. But that was not always the case. Throughout most of the nation’s history, public discussion of poverty ignored African Americans. In this chapter, the authors examine the racialization of poverty in the US news media. Building on previous research, they focus on the 1960s as the critical time in which the American media began to focus on Black poverty. Based on a collection of over twelve thousand news stories on poverty from four major daily newspapers, they find that both coverage of poverty and attention to Black poverty in local news largely paralleled the trends revealed in earlier studies of national newsmagazines. Specifically, they find that attention to poverty (irrespective of race) increased dramatically in the mid-1960s (a time when actual poverty rates were in decline); that poverty coverage became racialized during this same period, with a substantial increase in references to African Americans between the mid- and late 1960s; and that, for the most part, the racialization of poverty coverage followed similar patterns in newspapers with lower and higher proportions of African Americans in their metropolitan areas.

Conclusion

Stuart Hall’s influence on studies of the media continue to have ripple effects through a variety of disciplines. The history of media studies ranges from the “hypodermic needle” model assuming direct effects on consumers to choice in shaping one’s own media consumption to the use of media as education and more. Because of the preponderance of media in various facets of our lives, studies of the media have long been interdisciplinary. This conclusion considers how a range of disciplines have examined issues such as racial bias in media, media advocates who attempt to persuade decision-makers in the media world, and how identity and positionality shape various media effects. The relevance of tackling such issues are particularly salient in today’s climate of “fake news” and rampant distrust of media gatekeeping and media content.

#BlackLivesMatter and Twitter

Scholars agree that the Untied States is experiencing a new Black civil and human rights movement called #BlackLivesMatter and that the internet is pivotal to that movement. Protests in Ferguson, Missouri, and in Baltimore, Maryland, dominated national attention for months through 2014 and 2015. Protesters have successfully gained the attention of elite power brokers, which collective action scholars have identified as a necessary step in the social movement process. #BlackLivesMatter still has many insights to provide about mobilization, if researchers are willing to take Black American discursive power and intellectual production more seriously as subjects of analysis. This chapter argues that a dramaturgy framework helps reveal the structure and meaning making that occurs on the periphery of a social movement. In this periphery, or “margin,” the analysis in the chapter shows that Black social media publics are harbingers of racial progress. Additionally, introducing the concept of a Greek chorus to the dramaturgy framework better clarifies how outside observers negotiate their own meaning-making surrounding the movement’s claims and strategies. This analysis provides a clearer understanding of the importance of digital media in the contemporary Black civil rights movement.