ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thank you to all of the many people who sit at my scholarly, activist, and community tables, where I have had the luxury to resist and abandon strategic ambiguity. I thank all of the staff, students, and community members who make up my second home, the Center for Communication, Difference, and Equity (CCDE). In what can feel like an isolating line of work, where people lament the silos of their work-lives, I am blessed with a community of scholars with whom I can develop, share, and grow my ideas. I workshopped various portions of this book with my WIRED (Women Investigating Race, Ethnicity, and Difference) writing group members Habiba Ibrahim, LeiLani Nishime, and Sonnet Retman; my Communication Humanities writing group members Leah Ceccarelli, Christine Harold, and LeiLani Nishime; UW’s Simpson Center for the Humanities Society of Scholars (with a big thanks to Kathy Woodward); and my WIRED Mediating Difference writing group members Michelle Habell-Pallán, Habiba Ibrahim, LeiLani Nishime, Sonnet Retman, Ileana Rodriguez-Silva, Stephanie Smallwood, and Sasha Su-Ling Welland. Thank you to Judy Howard for looking out for me when I couldn’t be at the table, and to Jerry Baldasty for somehow knowing I was a Communication scholar before I did.

So many Comm/Race/Media warriors welcomed me to the Communication table with open arms including (but not limited to!) Mary Beltran, Robin Means Coleman, Herman Gray, Ron Jackson, Josh Kun, Lori Kido Lopez, Isabel Molina-Guzmán, Roopali Mukherjee, Beretta Smith-Shomade, Catherine Squires, Myra Washington, and Anghy Valdivia. For the past nearly twenty years, I have been, and continue to be, indebted to my mentors Jane Rhodes and Daphne Brooks, whose intellect, grace, and necessary irreverence provide me with my models for how I want (and need) to be in order to make a difference and stay sane in this career.

Thank you to the friends and colleagues who invited me to share this work at the Annenberg School at USC, the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, the University of Michigan, Gonzaga University, Black Perspectives, and FLOW. Every comment and question helped shape the book. I thank Laura Helper-Ferris for our now five-year-long conversation about my writing. Thank you to all of the undergraduate and graduate students (past and present) who have worked on various portions of the book (even when you didn’t know you were workshopping it! “Let me ask you guys a question …”), especially the Communication and Difference Research Group members (even before we had a fancy name or a fancy center).

I am grateful to all I continue to learn from my advisees Manoucheka Celeste, Elizabeth Cortez, Marcus Johnson, Monique Lacoste, Mia Lawrie, Azeb Madebo, Jennifer McClearen, Madhavi Murty, Meshell Sturgis, Riley Taitingfong, Victoria Thomas, and Anjali Vats. Thank you to the NYUP team, especially Lisha Nadkarni, Dolma Ombadykow, Aswin Punathambekar, and Eric Zinner. Thank you to all of the women in my audience group—Dezi, McCall, Vanessa, Micki, Jennifer, Yumi, Valentina, and Lupe—and most especially Camille for hosting us. Thank you to the Hollywood women who graciously endured my questioning. Thank you to Gina Aaftaab for being my Radar at the Center; your incredible ability to read my messy mind and to always generate brilliant plans has allowed the CCDE to grow and thrive while I finished this book. Thank you to the CCDE faculty, especially Carmen Gonzalez, LeiLani Nishime, and Andrea Otanez, and to all of the now 60+ WIRED women for adding so many leaves to our table that we need a new furniture set.

Thank you to my ride-or-die wing-women, my “no panel,” my sisters in crime, Janine Jones, Wadiya Udell, and Joy Williamson-Lott, for enlivening my life, making me snort with laughter, and modeling three amazing and amazingly different modes of how to be the professor/mother/scholar that I strive to be. Thank you to Cherise Smith for being your brilliant, fierce self, and for introducing me to the extraordinary artist Deborah Roberts, whose incomparable piece “Untitled (Black Gloves, Big Eye, Yellow Collar)” graces the cover of this book. Thank you to my lifelong friends-from-Providence, Praveen Fernandes, Heather Reid (and Ava Hall!), and the dearly departed Jeffery Charles Mingo. Jeff, I miss your inane (and yet so on point) questions that always managed to crack open the heart of what I didn’t even know I wanted to argue, while simultaneously managing to crack me up.

Thank you to my Oakland family Allison Briscoe-Smith, Mike Smith, and my godbabies Alonzo, Ava Marie, and Aria. Thank you to my Bon Secour family Jesse Meeks and Diane Sims for being the two brightest blue points in the reddest state. Thank you to my Fremont family, Diana and Ed White, for your unshakable, constant, quiet investment in me. Thank you especially to my parents, Richard and Irene Landwehr, for all of the love, support, and sacrifices that you made so that I could have the choices that you did not have the luxury of making; your sacrifices have allowed me to claim my seat at the table.

Last but always most, I dedicate this book to my James, TJ, and Naima Joseph. You are my live-in sounding boards, my first readers (and listeners), my editors, my thought-partners, and my go-to research assistants (paid only with gushing love). All is possible because of your crushing hugs, your nightly roses, thorns, and buds, and your good-natured, eye-glinting, gleeful teasing. And, yes, you’re right. It’s time to put the computer away. Mama owes you a vacation.