4

“No, But I’m Still Black”

Women of Color Community, Hate-Watching, and Racialized Resistance

Thus far this book has examined postracial resistance through strategic ambiguity as a way to facilitate a successful image makeover and PR tool (Michelle Obama), an unsuccessful anti-racist tool (Oprah Winfrey), and an effective entrepreneurial mechanism (Shonda Rhimes). In the second half of the book, I take the theory of postracial resistance through strategic ambiguity from an analysis of the women we see on our screens to discussions with the real, live women in front of and behind our screens. I want to see how non-celebrity Black women and, in particular, Black women privileged by career and/or education responded to racism and sexism in the Michelle Obama era. Would their resistance look like Michelle Obama’s image makeover strategy? Would it be more akin to calling on history as Oprah did? Would it be about speaking in coded language, à la Shonda Rhimes, and then, when pushed, speaking truth to power? Or perhaps something entirely different?

In these next two chapters, I investigate how a group of women completely rejected the postracial ideology of strategic ambiguity in a safe, women of color space, where the women acted as a collective and not simply as individuals. The young women saw—and critiqued—the celebrities’ performances of strategic ambiguity, which signified, for them, as mere articulations of tokenism and stereotyping. This chapter examines the question of—not whether postracial resistance is a successful tool, but rather—what type of community can form when women reject strategic ambiguity as a primary response to twenty-first century postracial racism; the next chapter delineates their anti-postracial resistance and strategic ambiguity critiques. In these two chapters, I turn from the first half of the book’s attention to celebrities’ management of their images, to the people who make meaning of such images in multifaceted, diverse, and unexpected ways: audiences. Media sociologist Darnell Hunt notes that “how we make sense of our day-to-day experience is continuously shaped by the stories we consume. We live vicariously through the pleasures and pains of characters and their predicaments, trying these adventures on for size as we reflect on who we are, who we are not, and who we hope to be.”1 I also turn from textual analyses to audience studies. In doing so I strive to, in media studies scholar Jonathan Gray’s encapsulation of classic communication studies models, “complete the communication loop from sender to receiver.”2

Two of the receivers in this chapter are Camille and Micki,3 students from my Black Cultural Studies undergraduate seminar, and their friends. These two women often sought me out before and after class to talk about representations of Black women on television; in the winter of 2009, they were the first people I told that I wanted to do a small audience study. They loved the idea of getting together to watch a television show, which we all agreed would have to be their then most obsessed-about program, the reality show for aspiring models, America’s Next Top Model (ANTM). With my paltry promise of weekly pizza and soda, the two set off on a mission to recruit their friends and classmates to join our viewing party. These two young women were—and, indeed, still are—a force: smart, fearless, and, most importantly for this study, avid consumers of television programming featuring African American women. They quickly recruited an additional seven friends and friends-of-friends, all of whom were women of color in their late teens and early 20s, and none of whom I had met prior to our first viewing party.

After Camille, Micki, and I decided that our audience study would focus on Black women on television through the lens of ANTM, they eagerly jumped at the opportunity to take on all of the recruitment efforts. Before our first session met, I assumed that these two young Black women would choose other Black women to join them. However, I was surprised (but did not let on as much) when they recruited a multiracial group of women of color from their network of friends and classmates from a study abroad program to Brazil, an undergraduate Black women’s student group, and the dorms. Six of the participants, Camille, Micki, Vanessa, Jen, Dezi, and McCall, identify as Black or African American, with Micki also identifying as Jamaican American and Dezi, as also Black and Filipina. Two, Lupe and Valentina, identify as Latina, and one, Yumi, as Asian American. The diversity of the group, I believe, speaks to racialization practices on the West Coast and, more specifically, in a predominantly White city at a predominantly White university in the predominantly White Pacific Northwest, all three of which have small African American populations. The Black women in the group enjoyed women of color linkages that expanded beyond their connections with other African American women.

These next two chapters draw upon this ethnographic audience study to provide a look into how young women of color talked to each other about the types of mediated representations that I analyze in this book, and what critique looked like when it refused strategic ambiguity. This refusal took the form of the antithesis of strategic ambiguity, what I consider a reaction to the coding, double-speak, and softening in postracial resistance. Instead they preferred what I think of as not a postracial but a racialized resistance: a form of forthright pragmatism, an unambiguous, woman of color feminist critique that purposefully upheld the group over the individual, and in doing so consciously fostered community-building.

For the group of minoritized women in the study, who were very cognizant of the fact that they were still underrepresented on television, one way to arrive at such forthright pragmatism was through the act of tuning in to watch a show about which one has strong but conflicting feelings: to “hate-watch.” In the popular press, the verb “hate-watch” has overtaken a related, older phrase “guilty pleasure.”4 To indulge in a guilty pleasure is to enjoy a seemingly low-quality cultural text while also flagellating oneself for doing so; one suffers remorse over consuming all-too-tasty cultural junk food. “Guilty pleasure” denotes a moment of slothful, unproductive, and passive viewing, while “hate-watching” denotes an interactive, resistant, and productive shouting-at-the-screen (and sometimes to, with, or at other viewers). Hate-watching takes on a particular force when women of color audiences watch television shows featuring women of color, whose numbers are growing in number and yet continue to feature images that, for many viewers, are frustratingly one-dimensional.

But as I set out on my journey with these young women, the idea of hate-watching and eschewing strategic ambiguity for racialized resistance was in the future. Instead I wondered how they would talk with each other about mediated images and if they would enact any form of strategic ambiguity in our setting. I wondered what they would celebrate and what they would critique as they consumed representations of Black women. What did they want of their media? Could unguarded conversations about race, gender, and representation happen with me—an adult over a decade their senior and a professor at their university—present? I had seen some of my students carefully couch their words in class when a classmate said something that struck them as racist or sexist, or just plain wrong, and then speak up more boldly if I validated their comments. I would be present at these viewing parties, but not facilitating or even participating in the discussion unless they directly invited me (and, even then, I would gently demur). But would our viewing sessions simply run like an extended version of one of my classes on race, gender, and sexuality in the media? Would they be looking to me to validate their answers? Since these next two chapters draw on a different archive and constitute a different approach than the earlier chapters, first I describe my particular form of ethnographic work and situate my project in the literature that informed this feminist, women of color, collaborative endeavor. Then I introduce the women, enter into their viewing practices, and listen to how they speak back to strategic ambiguity.

Creating a Women of Color, Feminist Audience Study

I aimed to construct the study as a community collaboration, to create a dialogic women of color feminist space. I called upon anthropologist Leith Mullings’s idea that “incorporating community collaboration into research … allows us to uncover the cultures of resistance that stand in opposition to the dominant representations of African American women.”5 In conducting the research for and writing this chapter, I’ve thought a lot about how to center the audience and de-center myself. I also pondered the “truth” that emerged during our viewing sessions together. Indeed, television scholar Amanda Lotz’s cautionary statement for feminist television studies ethnographers—“we must recognize the possibility that our understandings of situations are false or only partially true”6—felt particularly resonant for me in this study. But my goal in including the voices of audiences (or, in chapter six, television executives) in this book is not to capture some transcendental truth. My desire is to articulate how one group of young women formed community by negotiating and resisting controlling images of their racialized, gendered, and classed identities vis-à-vis televisual images and each other.

Because of this desire, I was always conscious of how my presence as both insider, as a fellow woman of color, and my status as outsider and professor gave me access to their community but also kept me apart. To combat my intrusion into their space, I tried to minimize the “me in the room” as much as possible: I was not teaching any of the women in the quarter I organized our viewing session, and I had only previously taught two of them. I tried to create a physical atmosphere where I could recede into the background. Before each session, and before any of the other women outside of Camille was present, I would set up my camera in a corner and a microphone on the coffee table. I sat with the women, but while they sat on the sofas, I grabbed a seat on the floor. In the beginning of this first session, they talked to me directly and sought out my opinion; this was the only time that I introduced prepared questions (such as “tell me about your favorite television shows” and “how much television do you watch per week?”). In subsequent sessions, I asked no questions and the women took their own conversations to a variety of locations. I also worked hard to not look at a speaker when she was speaking (something totally against my nature, culture, and upbringing); I found that I only occasionally had to gently remind them to talk to each other and not me. I also acknowledge that the measures I put in place to de-center myself as a professor could never completely erase my presence or my power in the room.7

Since my study was small and ethnographic, I use the terms “viewing party” and “audience study” instead of “reception analysis.” I was not watching the women behind two-way glass or running the camera and leaving the room; I was always present, and my terms illustrate that presence. Furthermore, I do not claim that this group constituted a representative sample (which I’m not particularly interested in creating), but I also do not think that their opinions and interactions with each other through television were anomalous. They exemplified resistance to controlling images of Black women in media, the type of responses that happens across living rooms, dorm couches, group texts, Facebook feeds, Snapchat stories, Instagram images, and Twitter streams across the world. Like so many of these other conversations, the women’s TV discussions did not linger on simply ANTM. They meandered through larger questions of the politics of representation; they talked about their own philosophies and lived experiences of race, gender, sexuality, and class; they questioned their university’s policies and decried how unhospitable they were to women of color. To honor their conversation streams, I engaged in what communication scholar Aisha S. Durham dubs “interpretive interactionism,” which “aims to illuminate the crisis of representation between the so-called real and the symbolic world. It explores lived experience and assumes that epiphanic moments—those moments of heightened awareness of the situated self—emerge from interactions that render crises of identity and/or representation.”8

The conversation circled back a number of times to the women’s need for real life role models at our university. Many of the sessions prompted them to share their experiences of racism and sexism in classes, and from there the conversation would inevitably move to their observations about the small numbers of faculty of color. Twice in the sessions, the women together listed out every tenure-track woman of color faculty member they knew of on campus. The act of naming everyone together felt ritualistic, as if saying these professors’ names in and of themselves created a protective bubble around them, and helped show them a potential next stage, a successful future to imagine in the midst of their struggles. These were the moments when the women turned directly to me, and I tried to honor their desire to “talk shop,” but not commandeer the conversation.

As the sessions progressed, the women registered my presence and the presence of my camera less and less, and, in fact, sometimes exclaimed, “I forgot you were here!” They spoke to each other far more boldly and more bawdily than in class, and even cursed in my presence, sometimes sheepishly glancing over at me for my reaction and only sometimes saying “sorry!,” when one of their friends reminded them I was in the room. They are, to a one, young women of color who expressed clear respect for me in a way that I identified as cultural and not generational or geographic—their deferential attitude was indeed quite dissimilar to the attitudes I encountered from most White students of a similar age and from a similar geographic region. For example, while some of their White classmates nonchalantly call me by my first name without invitation, these students refused to do so in class and largely refused to do so outside of class (even with invitation); indeed, now in their late 20s, many still call me “Professor Joseph” or “Dr. Ralina.”

Strategic ambiguity is a performative action, and so the performativity of the women’s racialized and gendered identities in our sessions were, in a sense, the most important element of our time together. They reveled in the opportunity to perform their racialized gender in an uncompromising, unapologetic manner. In addition, although I shine a light on the performative nature of their interactions (dramatically one-upping each other to get a laugh, for example), I believe such performativity would already have characterized the young women’s gatherings, perhaps even around this very show, if I were absent. In fact, some of the women said that in previous “cycles” (the show’s preferred word for “seasons”), they watched ANTM in groups of two to five women, and I can imagine that similar conversations peppered their watching experiences. Indeed, from the very first meeting, I was relieved to discover that the tone and content of the women’s commentary was far different from what I experienced in class with Micki and Camille. They were real—funny, occasionally crass, and relaxed.

While they hate-watched, this group of women gleefully flouted the preferred codes of ANTM and other reality shows featuring women of color. In other words, they identified against not with the host; they rooted for the characters framed as villains instead of the ones framed as heroes. As Stuart Hall’s encoding/decoding model notes, audience members will not always interpret or decode the media creator’s encoded or preferred meaning in either desired or unilateral ways.9 Hall proposed that some audiences might believe the favored meanings encoded in the text, but others will believe only certain elements while rejecting other features in a negotiated manner, and still other audiences will embrace instead an entirely oppositional view. Critics such as film scholar Jacqueline Bobo employ the encoding/decoding model “for understanding how a cultural product can evoke such different viewer reactions.”10 The “different viewer reactions” these women articulate embodied what bell hooks calls the “oppositional gaze of Black female spectators.”11 For example, a couple of the women discussed whether or not a plus-sized, brown-skinned contestant from a previous cycle, Toccara Jones, had won her season’s grand prize. Jones, in fact, did not win her cycle, but she did go on to have a fairly successful post-ANTM life on television. Camille said: “in my mind she won, so …!,” to which Micki agreed that “she won in life [general laughter].” As oppositional readers, they decoded the moment of victory in the season—what the producers script as the season crescendo—as “wrong.” As oppositional viewers, the young women remembered Jones as bold, spirited victor, not sad, defeated loser from an episode that aired five episodes before the finale and five booted contestants before the winner.

As I took a feminist, critical ethnographic approach to this audience study, I viewed every woman as an active participant in the process of knowledge production, and in the process of decoding. Decoding is not a straightforward process; rather, viewers who decode—and thus the scholars who write about both texts and viewers—must see texts as polysemic. Considering texts to be open is particularly necessary when assessing the constantly changing landscape of popular culture, which, as media scholar John Fiske asserts, “always is part of power relations; it always bears traces of the constant struggle between domination and subordination, between power and various forms of resistance to it or evasions of it.”12 The women in my audience study categorically resisted the forces of dominance on their screens. Like cultural studies scholar Janice Radway, who centers the voices of her audience members in her classic study, Reading the Romance, I draw upon theorist Stanley Fish’s notion of audiences as “interpretive communities”13 and cultural studies scholar Angela McRobbie’s idea that “representations are interpretations.”14

I give voice to, in McRobbie’s words, “the patterns or regularities … viewers and readers bring to texts in large part because they acquire specific cultural competencies as a consequence of their particular social location.”15 As young women of color going to school, working, and living in very White contexts, they had similar “reading strategies and interpretive codes,” as McRobbie puts it. In this book, moving at this point from textual analysis to audience study allows for me to make sense of the complexities of young women of color’s varied strategies and codes. An audience study also presents a balanced approach to media studies, where, as Amanda Lotz states, “studying reception exposes perspectives unobtainable through textual analysis,”16 and, as Henry Jenkins notes, scholars should “read the text from the specific perspective of particular audiences, creating our analysis in dialogue with those reception communities and in furtherance of our common interests.”17

The “reception community,” to quote Jenkins, with which I engaged was a minoritized audience who read ideologies encoded in televisual texts in a negotiated or oppositional manner. Media scholars Vicki Mayer, Miranda J. Banks, and John Thornton Caldwell note that “one place [where] academic strands weave together more complex tales about media is in the study of consumers and audiences as interpretive communities. Treating television viewers … as ‘producers’ of meaning, audience studies have mined the way that people talk about their consumer practices as formative of their identities as well as how identities shape ways of consuming and talking about consumption.”18 In their identity talk, my viewers exhibited what Jacqueline Bobo writes of as a healthy skepticism: “Black women are aware, along with others, of the oppression and harm that comes from a negative media history. But Black women are also aware that their specific experience, as Black people, as women, in a rigid class/caste system, has never been adequately dealt with in mainstream media.”19 Further, whereas, as Timothy Havens writes, “scholars have treated television as an ambivalent site for African American portrayals, at once closely linked to traditional racist stereotypes in the service of white political and economic interests,” I believe resistant potential lies in the audience’s interaction with the text.20

While textual analysis can certainly illuminate a scholar’s skepticism, as exemplified by my own skeptical reads in chapters 1 through 3 of this book, centering audiences’ words can provide more credence and complexity to such critique. Building on Bobo, Beretta Smith-Shomade asserts that, while “objectification of Black women exists,” such objectification “can be undercut by showing moments of subjectivity achieved within television texts and within the audience’s own subjectivity and identification with the character.” Although my audience tended to identify against rather than with the characters on television we discussed, such moments of audience-articulated subjectivity allow for, again in Smith-Shomade’s words, “moments of agency conferred upon and taken up by Black women within their circumscribed role as and within the audiences’ readings of the text.” Agency thus becomes “the mode of visual and content awareness of women’s authority, voice, and vision.”21 I attempted to confer agency to the women by sharing drafts of chapters 4 and 5, and inviting the women to comment on and change anything that felt inaccurate, inappropriate, or simply uncomfortable to them.22

My desire to create agency for the young women also informed the location of the study: I conducted the viewing sessions in Camille’s home. Home viewings, Amanda Lotz writes, center active audiences.23 We watched on Camille’s large television, which was positioned, like in most homes, at the center of the living space, as “television is (and always has been) more than just furniture,” Ethan Thompson and Jason Mittell note. Although the women sometimes pivoted their heads and their bodies to physically address one of the other women in the room, as our gathering was predicated upon watching television, most of the women’s remarks were addressed in the direction of the TV, even when the television program was paused. Thus, even when the conversation strayed far from the topic of television, the television itself structured our talk. My choice to include the voices of audiences in this book flouts the desires of what Joshua Gamson calls “the world of celebrity production” where “direct sales information (what are they buying? what are they watching?)” rules and yet “little information is sought about them.”24 Like Gamson, I seek to understand more about the texts and contexts by considering the voices of audiences.

Getting to Know the Women

Camille hosted the group at the loft apartment she shared with her fiancé Daniel in the more affordable city just north of their university. I usually arrived first at the springtime, early-evening, weeknight gathering. I unloaded the pizza, set up my equipment, and chatted with our hosts. As soon as the second woman arrived, Daniel would retreat to the bedroom to play videogames; the space became instantly and entirely female. I saw each woman heave a relaxed sigh when crossing the threshold into Camille’s place, with its comfy sofas, big TV, and plenty of room for all of us to watch. We watched ANTM in a relaxed timeframe as we had chosen not to watch it live. Since Camille didn’t have a DVR (still fairly uncommon in 2009, and certainly uncommon for college students), each week I recorded the previous week’s airing of the show. We usually watched one week after the original airing dates, and the women promised each other to not watch ahead (a promise that they mostly—but not always—honored). Camille ran the remote and would generally fast-forward through commercials, although she occasionally would rewind to watch a commercial that she or one of the other women wanted to watch and discuss. At every session, I began running the camera as soon as the first two women sat on the sofas, and continued recording throughout the viewing and the postmortem of the show. Our sessions ran approximately two hours in length, although sometimes we had to double up on episodes after a missed week, or conversation kept flowing and no one was making a move to leave.

All of the women were from the West Coast, mostly from the Seattle area, but also from other places in Washington state as well as Oregon and California. They identified as lower-middle-class, “low income,” situationally lower-middle-class (what one young woman called “broke college student”), and upper-middle-class. One student saw her class identity as immigrant/first generation, which, for her, meant working-class. All but one of the women identified as straight, with one identifying as queer (her word). They were social science and humanities majors, dancers and scientists, campus activists and critical observers, with many expressing hope to eventually attend graduate school. These young women were active participants in creating change in their worlds. For example, when Camille took a course on “The Other,” which, in her description, was supposed to be about “origin, identity, culture, and authenticity,” she balked at the absence of authors of color on the syllabus. Instead of dropping the class, like a fellow student of color did, Camille and another classmate “began to prod and poke through the professor’s curriculum, required texts, and legitimacy of the course itself. We asked to edit the required reading list, to incorporate authors of color, and more women theorists.”25 When the White, male professor refused to address her concerns, Camille and her classmates created a student of color collective to address the curriculum and held a public forum with invited faculty, students, and staff from the office of minority affairs. This action resulted in that particular department’s revamping their entire curriculum.

These students’ connections with other young women, and particularly young women of color, constituted a lifeline of support. For example, after her father suddenly passed away, hometown student McCall transferred from the out-of-state university that she had first attended straight out of high school to our university. Her own parents, both Black alums from the university, were her link back to the school or, as she put it, “I technically wouldn’t be alive without the black student rallies and blossoming trees of the quad in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s!” After walking on to the basketball team but not receiving much playing time, McCall worked as its manager, and she credits the three years doing so with “help[ing] my spirit and my career. After losing my biggest fan, I was able to get back to the game of basketball and made bonds with teammates and coaches that are still strong to this day.”26

As the students bonded through shared stories like these, they co-constructed their identities in dialogue with each other. Cultural identity, as Stuart Hall famously proclaimed, is always in process and never complete.27 In our group, the Black women’s identification as such was always formed in relation to their fellow women of color, and for the purpose of community-building. However, not everyone participated equally in the processes of community-building. Even though a diversity of women of color were invited, the non-Black women did not attend the sessions as frequently as the other women and, when the non-Black women attended, they tended to speak less. A core group of five of the African American participants, McCall, Vanessa, Micki, Camille, and Jen, attended all or all-but-one of the twelve viewing sessions, over which time we watched sixteen hour-long episodes of America’s Next Top Model, while the other four women came to the majority of the sessions, and watched the show on their own during the weeks they missed. The African American women tended to be more vocal during our sessions, and my quoting of each woman’s words in this and the next chapter reflects her level of participation.

To set the scene for our viewing sessions: during the spring of 2009, this group of young women were abuzz about pop star Rihanna’s brutal beating by her boyfriend and fellow musician Chris Brown, and the media’s will-she-or-won’t-she-go-back-to-him debate. They exclaimed, as Vanessa did, that “there is nothing that she could have done except killed his mama to deserve to get her ass beat like that,” as well as puzzled over her decision, like Valentina: “But I’m saying, what are you doing going back to him?” Like the rest of the country, they scrutinized the media coverage of football player Michael Vick’s dog fighting, and called out the racialized double standards of outrage at the killing of dogs but not the murders of African Americans. McCall noted that “the media completely turned on Vick,” and Micki agreed, adding that “I know dog fighting’s bad, like, totally, I get it—but they treated him like he had, like, serial murdered somebody.” They commiserated about their hunger for and the paucity of images of women of color in media, and shared their experiences of having their excitement about Beyoncé gracing the cover of Vogue turn to frustration when, as Camille put it: “And so I’m like, ok, I’m, I’m literally buying this magazine just because Beyoncé’s on the cover … [But] when I flipped through the magazine there were no other people of color, and they were just like stick figure White, blonde women.”

All of the women were constantly on the hunt for images of women of color, and all of the women maintained a powerful critique of racialized patriarchy. Both of these desires found their home in discussions of their favorite television show, America’s Next Top Model. While the show itself drew them in week after week, the show’s host, supermodel Tyra Banks, roused their unmitigated disgust. They found her to be fake, a misogynist, racially biased, and unapologetically and disproportionately cruel to women of color. They did not see Banks as a woman of color role model they aspired to be like, but rather as a villainous figure against whom they identified. Most interesting to me, they didn’t see her as a strategically ambiguous agent for change. They saw her as a sellout.

Throughout our sessions, the women often spoke in an easy, relaxed, and familiar manner, characteristic of what sociolinguist Maya Angela Smith describes as “a racialized narrative, in which they cut each other off, speak over each other, and repeat each other.”28 In developing their group membership, the students also exhibited another feature Smith notes, “speak[ing] in absolutes,” which served to “further accentuate the us/them schism by taking isolated instances and attributing a generalization to them.”29 The “us” were young women of color and the “they”—the group against which they were performing their identities—was sometimes ANTM, sometimes Tyra Banks, but often, as we see in the next sections and the next chapter, young White women who functioned, interestingly, as ideological stand-ins for ANTM and Banks. Their sense of what it meant to be a woman of color meant not performing, among other things, postracial resistance through strategic ambiguity; instead, being a woman of color meant being unapologetic and outspoken in responses to racialized sexism.

“Yeah, That Show’s Ridiculous … I Still Watch It, Though”: Identity against Television

The women formed community through their oppositional reading of television. Throughout our sessions, they connected with each other through the prisms of their racialized and gendered identity. Their status as women of color was the connective tissue for their friendships. These connections were not happenstance but intentional, forged out of centering women of color sisterhood. They expressed their need to find each other in order to navigate their Predominantly White Institution (PWI) where a Black student walking across campus might only rarely see another familiar face. As Vanessa put it, she found Camille on Facebook after she “searched for all of the Black girls [at their university] on it freshman year.” Here the media—both in connecting students and in providing alternative representations to the real life around them—was vital. This sentiment emerged often during the viewing sessions, where race and gender, alongside connections to class and sexuality, surfaced often in jokes, stories, and analysis. They bonded over discrimination as well as women of color resilience and critique. Furthermore, while they certainly lamented experiences of minoritization, they didn’t do so to simply commiserate: they were working to forge a community that fought back and changed their university, city, state, country, and world.

In their community-building, these young women bonded over the constant presence in their lives: television. Indeed, in their own estimation, excessive TV consumption united all but one member of the group. Vanessa said:

I watch so much TV just because, like, I—like, that’s, like, my life. I do my homework, I hang out with my boyfriend, and then I’m online watching TV. I don’t sit and, oh, show’s coming on at 8, like, whatever’s on online I watch it. I watch, like, 15 shows at one time. I—it’s terrible [Camille laughs knowingly]. And it’s really bad, ‘cause, like, growing up I never had cable or nothing, never use to watch TV, and then when I got to college—it’s horrible.

For Vanessa, just as coming to college meant having access to a community of other young women of color, so did it mean having unbridled access to an unlimited amount of television. Her experience of watching multiple shows at a time was a common one within the group. Many of the students talked about not necessarily consciously consuming programs, but having the television on constantly. Micki described television as the general background soundtrack to her life so that, in her words:

I feel lonely if it’s not on. I can’t stand the silence. Like, this right now [talking before the screening without the TV on] is kind of driving me crazy. Like, I would rather have the TV on. But, like, when I was little, I used to do my homework with the TV. I used to always—and, at first, my Grandma was, like, that’s bad, but then she saw that I really did get more work done with the TV on, so then she was like, well, if it works for her.

Similarly, Desiree, who, at twenty-one, was positioned as the little sister of the group, shared: “I can’t say I watch too much TV but I like to have it on, but I don’t necessarily watch it.” McCall agreed: “I can’t start my evening without watching TV,” prompting Micki to one-up her, inserting: “I can’t walk into my house without turning on the TV.” Television was a companion to these young women: the distraction, the comfort, the constant in their lives. It also connected them as throughout their days their conversations often entailed discussions about their favorite shows and characters. Camille told me that, even now, years after graduating and geographically scattering across the country, when she and her girls get together, their conversations still center on Black women and television. Only the shows have changed: now their discussions focus on Scandal and The Real Housewives of Atlanta rather than ANTM.30

The one dissenting voice in their conversation about TV consumption came from Jen, who, at twenty-four, was the oldest member of the group; she often expressed a counter-view to many of the members. Jen balked at the idea of the TV as background noise, saying, “That’s one of my pet peeves, like ambient noise of just TV in the background.” Micki responded, “You don’t like that?” to which Jen retorted, “I can’t stand it [[Micki: Really?]]. Jen rejoined: “Well because you just wanna sit and chill and talk and they’re like, ‘Oh let me turn on the TV real quick.’ Like c’mooooonnn.” Jen’s reaction spurred the rest of the women to murmur in general agreement: “Yeah, I do that.” The TV-always-on group’s sheepish reactions indicated a lighthearted performance of guilt or perhaps the acknowledgement of the background television noise as a guilty pleasure in itself. The women remained in uncharacteristic silence for a couple of seconds after Jen’s comment. To break the silence, McCall, the comedienne of the group, countered: “When I’m there with my roommate, I have to have the TV on, ‘cause she breathes way too loud.” The room erupted in laughter.

These young women were like so many Americans in that television was a constant fixture in their lives. For the women, more TV time was a result of not just freedom of parent-free dorm rooms and apartments, but also the change in technology from traditional box to multiple devices capturing television content online. Thompson and Mittell explain that “now in our era of convergence among different technologies and cultural forms, there is more TV than ever. New or emergent forms of television work alongside the residual or ‘old’.”31 “Having the TV on” did not necessarily mean running a traditional television set, but instead playing one or more TV programs in the background on various devices, a far less common practice in 2009 than at this writing in 2017. While some of the students did own traditional televisions, Vanessa, self-described as an avid consumer of television, stated, “I think TV online is more addictive [General agreement, “yeah”] because you could watch it whenever you’re ready [laughter]. ‘Cause, like, I don’t have a TV.” And yet, Vanessa would say that she “watched TV” constantly. Jen again provided an alternate viewpoint to increasing numbers of television hours: “I found that now that [I’ve] been kind of off [TV] in the past sixth months, I’ve been—I watch a lot less TV.” Nonetheless, even though Jen didn’t “watch TV,” she knew all about the characters her friends discussed. Without actually watching television, Jen was conversant in details about past seasons of ANTM and other reality shows that her friends consumed.

In addition, the women’s non-traditional viewing practices affirm research that television consumption has risen with its availability across multiple devices. Television studies scholar Toby Miller notes that “people who watch TV on different devices and via different services are watching more, not less, television.”32 TV watching is also racialized; Beretta Smith-Shomade documents that “Black folks watch more on the go than any other group as well—six hours per month on mobile phones and other handheld media devices.”33 Smith-Shomade’s research illustrates another TV habit confirmed by my group of viewers: “Young African Americans in general … watch more ad-supported cable and less network affiliate programming compared to women and older demographics.” Black audiences’ disproportionate ad-supported cable television watching might point to a search for alternative images that, at least in 2009, were largely not available on network television, but were on channels such as BET, VH1, and the network that then aired ANTM, the CW.

While some of the students said that they would watch anything that happened to be on live television while watching a traditional box, they did watch thoughtfully and pragmatically: they all discussed deliberately consuming images of young Black people. And yet they experienced an ambiguous and conflicted relationship to representations of African Americans on reality television, in particular. They wanted to see women of color but despised the representations they saw. This ambiguity, at the heart of their hate-watching, stemmed from what they saw as the representations’ stereotypical qualities. For example, the women constantly discussed the short-lived VH1 reality dating show, For the Love of Ray J (2009–2010) starring a minor child star and brother to pop singer and actress Brandy. McCall confessed, “Yeah, that show’s ridiculous … I still watch it, though,” and Micki agreed, “Me too!” Vanessa added, “It’s addictive, it’s like one of these, it’s one of these [puts her hands over her face like she can’t watch].” She continued, “[I watch] all bad stuff like [reality shows] Rock of Love, I Love Money … I watch like 15 hours. [dramatic pause and intentional glance around] A week. [another pause and glance around]. Way too much.”

The students also discussed how the enticement of their favorite programs was almost enough to make them consider paying more for particular channels. McCall stated: “I was getting ready to invest in paying for that one channel because I thought Taneisha [a reality star from The Bad Girls Club] was coming back.” A single character on a single show was enough of a draw for a college student to consider “investing” in a cable package with the desired channel. However, while McCall didn’t end up ponying up money, the women invested time in watching reality TV representations of African Americans; they were gauging controlling images in the popular sphere and creating a community around critiques of the representations they watched, including critiques of strategic ambiguity.

Community, a presence and ideal divorced from the individual-focused nature of postracial resistance through strategic ambiguity, structured their watching in a variety of ways. While watching was sometimes a solitary action, it was more often than not a communal activity. Some of them watched with small groups of friends in their dorm rooms or apartments, while others attended larger gatherings for special viewing events. For example, Micki watched The L Word at a theater on Sundays, the same place where McCall watched the home team WNBA games when they played out of town. Interactive and community gathering around a screening was a commonplace event for these young women. If they didn’t see the shows together, they talked about them. Their viewing patterns confirm what television studies scholar Toby Miller notes: television “viewing remains a collective act as well as an individual one.”34 Furthermore, the act of television viewing was intimately connected to the way in which the women negotiated their racialized and gendered identities, and provided them with endless fodder for hate-watching critique.

The women’s critical views on the world, and a particular racialized and gendered critique, also linked them. Vanessa, one of the more outspoken women in the group, articulated their collective need to keep up such a critique: “we’re so sexist deep down inside, women don’t even realize it.” This notion of internalized sexism reverberated with the group. In watching they were constantly breaking up the pleasure of the watching act with conscious critique; or, rather, they received another form of pleasure in creating critiques. Their women of color feminist oppositional gaze did not let them simply relax into the hegemonic images. They maintained a running thread throughout the discussions about double standards between men and women. In one example, Micki related a commercial that she asked Camille to rewind and replay where the men were fully dressed and the women scantily clad to a recent visit to the club:

That reminds me when we were at the uhhhhh … Fusion! And the bar, they have bartenders and there’s the guy bartender wearing a t-shirt and jeans, and the female bartenders are wearing lingerie [[Desiree: oh yeah!]]. And I was like, am I seeing this? Like she was, they were both wearing bustiers [[Desiree: I remember that!]], like fishnets, garters, and, like, high heels, and he was wearing a freakin’ Mickey Mouse t-shirt [[yeah!]] [[Lupe: was that the theme of the night?]]. No, like, it was no reason. And she looked hella tired, she was like [pantomimes exhaustion], she was, I was like, that makes no sense.

While the conversation in this instance emerged from Micki’s critique of a commercial, the women immediately related what they saw on the screen to their real lives.

Without a doubt, the women did not see themselves in, want to see themselves in, or live vicariously through the reality television shows they eagerly watched. Nor were they unthinking dupes mindlessly consuming the images. As media studies scholar Racquel Gates writes, we must not presume “ that audiences straightforwardly accept the dominant version of ‘reality’ that the programs carefully assemble and present to them.”35 While most of the women consumed sizable amounts of television, their consumption—often fueled by hate-watching—stoked their critiques of intersectional inequalities. Their television consumption also provided them with the new material to understand their own racialized and gendered pasts and presents, including many of the women’s experiences of being “the only” growing up. As we see in the next section, their fierce critiques of power inequities in real life and in media informed the way in which they discussed—and dismissed—postracial resistance and strategic ambiguity.

“I Was the Black Senior”: Tokenism and the Burden of Being “the Only”

If the participants’ race and gender initially drew them to each other on their college campus, their similarly progressive and activist sensibilities bonded them further. These students were woke before the hashtag. However, even though the young women had no problem discussing their identities in their everyday lives, they hadn’t necessarily spoken about their formative racialized and gendered experiences in the depth that our viewing sessions encouraged and indeed even enabled. Although some of the women had been friends for years, prior to our viewing sessions, they didn’t know about one important commonality: their similar experiences of being “the only,” or, although they didn’t use the word themselves, feeling like tokens.

Lamenting that her White high school classmates assumed that she shared similarities with stereotypical Black women characters on television whom she despised (and yet hate-watched), Vanessa shared her own experience of being “the only”:

VANESSA: they [White high school students] have one Black kid at their school—

MCCALL: yeah!

VANESSA:—who’s probably McCall or me—

MICKI: No me!—

CAMILLE: [patting her chest]—Or me! I was the only Black girl in my senior class—

MICKI: All of you guys are, like, the only, very little populations of Black people at your high schools?—

CAMILLE: Yeah, I was the Black senior—

JEN: By the time I got to high school there was, like, maybe like five girls. I went to junior high with no Black girls and elementary with no Black girls.

While some of the young women knew about the demographics of each other’s primary and secondary schools, most of them were finding out this information for the first time. And, yet, these women were, by their description, good friends. They were so excited by this discovery that they cut each other off and spoke over one another animatedly in this discussion. Thus, through their discussions of Black representation, they discovered and connected a central component of their experience. Our viewing sessions—especially in the midst of the most spirited hate-watching critique—opened up another space of racialized and gendered connectivity and critique.

Their bonding around hating the experience of being “the only” flew in the face of postracial posturing, which can be effective by celebrating “the only” to the exclusion of her minoritized sisters. But these women identified the power inequities propagated by one aspect of postraciality: tokenization. Such connectivity and critique showed their resistance to tokenism. Social psychologists Stephen C. Wright and Donald M. Taylor define tokenism as “an intergroup context in which very few members of a disadvantaged group are accepted into positions.” These positions are positioned as special, Wright and Taylor argue, because they are the ones “usually systematically denied for the vast majority of qualified disadvantaged group members.”36

Communication scholar Subrina Robinson cites tokenism as a major concern to Black women in university settings. Because of tokenism and other forms of racial and gender bias, Robinson states that “Black women feel that they must constantly prove themselves by working harder than their White counterparts and combating negative stereotypes.”37 Robinson describes how, while tokenism might be seen as an opportunity for advancement, such advancement is contingent upon “stay[ing] within the parameters of appearing safe and unassuming to the dominant racial group even while challenging the status quo.”38 Robinson contends that, on the one hand, tokenism is a privileged position accessible to a chosen few, but, on the other hand, tokenism works to silence Black women. In other words, tokenism illuminates both the promises (being chosen) and perils (being alone) of postracial resistance and strategic ambiguity.

The women also posited that feelings of tokenism were not easy to cast off. Indeed, one is often tokenized, and resisting this process—having the agency to speak back to the force of tokenization—can feel impossible. Our gathering, like other women of color gatherings, was a respite from feeling the oppressive force of being tokenized, of being the “chosen ones” having to hold the burden of representing their communities on their shoulders. The women roundly dismissed their experiences of being tokenized as neither exclusively harmful nor the way to gain a seat at the table. Being the only for these young women was an undesirable result of gaining access to elite spaces (although a number of them reported attending exclusive private schools prior to attending their regionally prestigious flagship state university). Furthermore, being the only meant that, to the White people around them, they became the standard-bearers of information about Black womanhood. From their own perspectives, acting as standard-bearers also meant that they were the target of stereotypes.

In this vein, the students lamented how a White woman exhibiting hypersexual behavior on a show was not going to bear the responsibility for all White women being stereotyped as hypersexual, while a Black woman felt the impetus to “lift as she climbed.” Vanessa explained:

Well, it’s like when teenage white kids, like suburbia, are like, what do they talk about with their friends at, like, school and they watch [reality television star] Ray J. They don’t talk about the little White girl. They’re going to talk about the little Black girl. Like it totally makes Black people look terrible … They’re comparing us to her. They know Lil’ Hood [a White character from For the Love of Ray J] doesn’t act like [White girl] Alison from next door. You know, they’re going to think about how, when we’re not at school, we probably act like the Black girl.

This comment resonated deeply with the other participants, as Micki agreed that their White classmates must think that “we probably do splits and do booty pop [the term that predated “twerk”].” Micki’s comment animated Vanessa. She verbally positioned herself as Micki responding to an imaginary white classmate, choosing a first-person address: “I’m like, No, but I’m still Black. Booty? Like what’s booty pop? Like can you define booty pop?”

Here Vanessa took on one of the strategies one can use to interrupt a microaggression: she feigned ignorance to the controlling image and asked for elaboration.39 Psychologist Derald Wing Sue identifies one form of microaggressions as microassaults, “conscious, deliberate, and either subtle or explicit racial, gender, or sexual-orientation biased attitudes, beliefs, or behaviors that are communicated to marginalized groups through environmental cues, verbalizations, or behaviors. They are meant to attack the group identity of the person or to hurt/harm the intended victim through name-calling, avoidant behavior, or purposeful discriminatory actions.”40 Vanessa’s strategy forced an individual who perpetrated a microassault—applying a racialized and gendered stereotype seen in popular media, in this case, a conjured image of a Black woman doing a stripper dance, to a real-life woman—to awkwardly define and explain use of the stereotype.

In the resistant space of their viewing session, the women validated their own experience of microassaults by cataloguing all of the stereotypical questions they had been asked. In addition to queries about dancing, Vanessa exclaimed that popular ones she got were: “Can you cook? Can you braid hair?” More of the women jumped in to reveal the ways in which they refuted the stereotypes conjured by their White classmates. Sometimes they addressed an imaginary White classmate, sometimes each other. Jen remarked, “I can’t braid hair” and Micki echoed, “I can’t braid my own hair … like what are you talking about?” Vanessa added, “Yeah, I can’t help you there, pal. Can’t cook fried chicken, can’t do shit.” Camille echoed Vanessa saying, “Everybody’s like, you can’t make fried chicken? I’m like nooooo.” The women amped up the discussion, refuting more stereotypes. McCall said, “I don’t even like the smell of watermelon!” and Vanessa added, “I don’t like cornbread.” The repetition of “I don’t” and “I can’t” added up to refusal to participate in pretending that racism—even coded, postracial racism of microaggressions—didn’t exist. Such straightforward pushing back is anathema to the coded postracial resistance of strategic ambiguity.

The women had to deal with the problem of their small numbers on campus, as well as the fact that their small numbers meant that their White classmates identified them through television stereotypes. Forging connectivity fought the very notion of tokenism. Tokenism, at its core, is an experience of isolation, of loneliness. Being a good token means not allowing others in—it means fighting for scraps in a racialized and gendered economy of privilege. However, being able to name such positioning was a form of strength. By identifying each other as having similarly isolating experiences and similar critiques of media, they bonded as a community and ensured that they have somewhere to turn when being tokenized and stereotyped—what they described as a daily occurrence in their predominantly White university. The difference between their high school experiences of being “the only,” without similarly positioned friends with whom to commiserate, and their experiences as college students as one of few, but with a posse of powerful women of color who also fought similar battles, was that they did not simply understand the situational nature of their “only” status, but they also understood that others were similarly positioned. They understood the ways in which White privilege functioned to minoritize and tokenize women of color across their institution, and they fostered their community of women of color precisely because of such positioning.

The women also illustrated that their experience of being “the only” shaped what they wanted from representation, but in diametrically opposed ways. Some of the women bristled when media too closely replicated their real-life experiences. Camille told the group, “No I can’t get into this [season of the MTV reality show The] Real World. It’s really boring to me. There’s no Black people on it.” For Camille, being surrounded by all-White folks on campus or in her hometown was one thing; she couldn’t control the situation. She wasn’t, however, going to invite them into her home via her television. But some of the women discussed the comfort of consuming all-White images because of their familiarity. McCall described, in her words, the “White shows” she liked, including the reality shows set in Orange County, The Hills and Laguna Beach, and a fictionalized version of these shows, the teen drama The OC: “That’s because I, I went to a White high school, and so, the OC kind of reminds me of what my high school kinda was.” For McCall, who moved to Southern California soon after graduation, there was something comforting about these images and perhaps the fantasy space they represented. But that didn’t mean that she was longing for such minoritization (in fact, she expressed just the opposite). Her love of watching White people on television did not translate to her desire to insert herself into all-White spaces. Whether rejecting homogenous representations because of their alienating quality or embracing them because of their familiarity, the women were carefully thinking through the impact of representations and constructing their community.

Racialized Resistance and the Woman of Color TV Watcher

The young women of color in my viewing session wanted a lot from their media, and their critique of “bad” representation bonded their community in a manner that seemed a world apart from the forms of strategic ambiguity I elucidate in the first half of this book. They accessed their critiques, their connections, their very understanding of Black womanhood just as much through their co-constitutive processes of hate-watching representations of Black women on television as their engagement with each other. There was no careful couching of their words, no switching of codes, no softening for others’ comfort. All of the viewers’ ire emerged in the space of hate-watching. It was no accident that their bald and bold responses occurred in a private, domestic space. And it was no accident that the young women spoke back freely to one of the most taboo topics in mixed company of the Michelle Obama era, racism against women of color, when surrounded by other young women of color. Hate-watching together provided the women with a tool to, quite simply, be neither strategic nor ambiguous, but racially critical and resistant.

This chapter shows one small group of progressive women of color college students at a large northwestern U.S. public university lovingly and fiercely engaging, resisting, and hate-watching mediated images of women of color while stoking their woman of color community and their critiques. The women constantly tacked between “real life” and representation, before, during, and after our viewings of ANTM. These young women provided a snapshot into a slice of strategic-ambiguity free life. Perhaps it was the sanctity of Camille’s apartment; perhaps it was the freedom of youth. Regardless, they knew what they didn’t want to be: tokenized and stereotyped. Throughout the sessions, the women combatted postrace in a particularly collective, collaborative, and gendered manner. They bonded and saw each other more fully when they engaged with representation.

In many ways, these women illustrate that their community functioned as the antidote to the individual-focused, clenched-teeth survival strategy of postracial resistance through strategic ambiguity, which flourishes alone and never in community. I further develop this idea in the next chapter as I suss out the dynamics of the women’s racialized, resistant critique, and how they turned their viewing sessions into productive spaces, where they, in a sense, enacted anti-racism, anti-sexism workshops. As the young women critiqued televisual instantiations of code-switching, respectability politics, colorism, stereotyping, and the management of difference, they made sense of their own racialized and gendered lives, and turned hate-watching into a space of pleasure and productivity. In turn, the women in my viewing study inadvertently fashioned productive and pleasurable hate-watching counterscripts to strategic ambiguity.