5

“They Got Rid of the Naps, That’s All They Did”

Women of Color Critiques of Respectability Politics, Strategic Ambiguity, and Race Hazing

Throughout this book, I’ve assessed the gamut of stereotypes that media aim at Black women and posited that Black women celebrities performatively resist such stereotyping through the postracial resistance of strategic ambiguity. At our very first gathering before watching the first episode of the show, the women who signed up for our viewing party were already anticipating heavy use of, as Robin Means Coleman deems stereotypes, “unvarying” and “negative” portrayals. Means Coleman explains that “a stereotype is a conventional, formulaic, oversimplified conception, opinion or belief. It promotes an unvarying pattern of a group that has come to be associated with negative portrayals.”1 Valentina predicted, “I think they’re gonna paint, you know, certain characters in like a certain light, that kind of thing, based on their ethnic background. I think a lot of it’s gonna be based on … their ethnicity.”

These young women were sophisticated consumers of media, of the type media scholar Racquel Gates describes as “ever more savvy about how reality shows are produced to convey ‘reality,’ … [and] well aware that the portrayals they see are manipulated in various ways by the process of production.”2 Such manipulation, the women in my group pointed out, was racialized and gendered, and applicable to their real lives as well as the lives they analyzed on screen. This chapter, building on the last chapter’s focus on the anti-strategic ambiguity practice of community-building through hate-watching, presents the idea that a resistance to stereotyping defies strategic ambiguity through rejecting respectability politics. Although not naming it as such, they saw the behaviors I designate in this book as postracial resistance through strategic ambiguity as not just impacting the individual attempting such a posture, but negatively infecting the rest of a woman of color community; they saw strategic ambiguity, at times, as no less than a form of race hazing. Respectability politics, as a concept, sits over the whole book, and came to the fore most explicitly in chapter 3 on Shonda Rhimes’ press coverage. In this chapter, I push further on what the flouting of stereotypes and respectability politics looked like when it was enacted by a group of young women of color media consumers who rejected postrace.

“It’s Like Fancy Porn So You Don’t Call It Porn”

The stereotypes the participants were immediately attuned to were misogynistic images of Black women. Jen, not mincing words, provided one theory: “I think some of the modeling shows are, are like porn. But it’s like fancy porn so you don’t call it porn … Yeah, like you’re taking nude photos. And it’s great that it’s like artistic and you put like a pearl screen over them, you know, but it’s still—if this other stuff is pornographic so is that.” Jen posited that “this other stuff”—images labelled as pornographic—create the same dynamics as a commercial network reality television show. Jen was neither moralistically condemning nor dismissing pornography, but rather casting a wider net over what constitutes pornography. In this statement, Jen was implying that, if what we categorize as pornography is exploitative and dehumanizing, then so is the showcasing of women in reality television shows like ANTM.

Camille agreed that reality television functioned as another form of pornography, and she provided an example from one of their favorite shows:

CAMILLE: “Did you see, what’s-her-face on [For the Love of] Ray J when she made herself into a banana split?”

MCCALL: Yes, that was disgusting.

MICKI [to me]: Did you see that? She turned herself into a human banana split [groans].

CAMILLE: She was in the splits, she had whipped cream on her, and she had a banana [puts up to her face, brief thrusting motion] like she was [extended pause] … And that was the first show! Wow!

The women identified against the positioning of Black women as mere objects of consumption, or as the symbolic embodiment of fellatio in this particular example. They balked at the misogyny to which such an image spoke, the lack of agency conferred to the woman in the show, and the way in which the woman on screen became an entirely acted-upon object and not a subject in the scene. Not only were they horrified by what they were watching on TV (perhaps more so because they were discussing it in front of me), but they were dismayed that they, and other women of color who did not make the choice to appear on a reality television show, would be identified with such representations. In assessing the sexualized positioning of Black women on television, the women were concerned about the power of stereotyping influencing other viewers’ ideas about Black women or, in the words of Vanessa, what “makes Black people look so bad.” The viewing women weren’t able to, as theorist Jennifer Nash puts it, read “for ecstasy rather than injury,” as they experienced “the preoccupation with how singular black female bodies are asked to speak for all black female bodies in the visual field, and how particular icons come to stand for black women generally.”3

This interaction, like so many of the interactions I observed between the women, was performative and pivoted on questions of respectability politics. They spoke back to the screen, as media studies scholar Helen Wood documented in her study of women talking to their televisions, as much as they did to each other.4 The women enjoyed the experience of naming a stereotype only to strip it of its power, of one-upping each other, and of making each other laugh. As they were refuting the stereotypes of White classmates, they were defining their own Blackness as one that pushed back against the “unvarying” and “negative” images that Means Coleman defines as at the heart of a stereotype. What such resistance meant was that there wasn’t room in many interactions to reclaim and reframe a stereotype. While theorist Mirelle Miller-Young explains that “stereotypes usually have dual valences: they may also be taken up by the oppressed and refashioned to mean something quite different,”5 the women in my group flatly condemned stereotypes. For example, in this particular interaction, none of the women could claim sex-positive notions; the only space available was one of condemnation. In their fierce refutations of stereotypes, identifying with anything remotely “stereotypical” was impossible. In another session, McCall described her own so-called inauthentic Blackness in this manner: “I guess I’ll lose Black points, but my mom doesn’t make sweet potato pies for holidays, like, I don’t know, [she makes] pumpkin pie.” Even humorously, the notion of having to preserve “Black points” or accomplish Black authenticity buttressed the respectability politics the women performed in this moment. The women equally distanced themselves from hypersexualized images or controlling notions of Blackness.

As I discussed in the previous chapter, the women frequently analyzed the racialized and gendered questions their White female classmates would ask them. Being asked about the dance that was then called “booty popping” (now, twerking) made its way into their discussions numerous times. At one such moment, after laughing about the absurdly stereotypical questions White women asked them about themselves, Jen became very serious as she launched a critique of the power dynamics inherent in White women’s stereotyping of women of color:

JEN: It’s funny ‘cause, like, we’re kidding [about the ridiculous, stereotypical questions posed to her] but, like, I’ve had almost all of these questions asked to me—

MICKI: Someone asked if you could booty pop?—

JEN: They asked me that, and I didn’t know what it was, they used a different word, but they were explaining what the women do in some of the videos, when they like lean on the car. And I was like, I don’t even know what you’re asking me, and it was like, “no I can’t!” And then, the next question was, “well do Black guys like that?” And it was—after I just told you, I don’t know how to do it so I wouldn’t know—

MICKI: Well, like, I’m not a Black guy—

VANESSA: You’re the expert in Black women and Black dudes—

Jen, a dance major, did not object to questions as to if she could do a specific dance, but rather the implication that as a Black woman she had greater access to her sexuality than White women.

Furthermore, the move to White women questioning Black women about Black masculinity illuminated the desire of White women to enhance their own sexual desirability by courting and catering to an imagined Black hypermasculinity. The conversation continued:

JEN: And then, you know, another girl came up to me one time and she put her arm around me and she goes, I’m really glad you’re not one of those ghetto Black girls, like it was a—

MICKI: I’ve gotten that—

JEN:—like it was a compliment. And it’s kind of, you don’t know—

VANESSA: What to say—

JEN: What to say right away, like, you don’t know how to kind of—

MICKI: [voice thick with sarcasm] Thanks … for complimenting me … while insulting me, my race, and my people? Thank you.

JEN: It’s kind of, yeah … [trails off; general agreement from the group] and it’s not a leap to think that people, like, watch this stuff and start thinking those things.

Here Jen, Micki, and Vanessa took on a matrix of class/race/sexuality assumptions perpetrated by White women. They exposed the racism and classism in the White women’s celebration of them as non-“ghetto Black girls.” The group processed this rejection of tokenization slowly and thoughtfully. Microaggression theory tells us that minoritized people spend so much time questioning whether they are correct that a comment actually qualifies as a microaggression; if they are allowed to respond to a microaggression; and if they are allowed to identify a microaggression as such. The women’s community enabled them to say yes to all three modes of internal questioning. Their collective responses were incredibly validating to each other.

“People Always Think That I’m Intimidating”: Negotiating White Women’s Fear of Black Women’s Anger

The anger the young women expressed in the viewing sessions was not simply in response to feeling read as a stereotype. They were angry that even while being insulted they had to measure and weigh their responses in order to appear nonthreatening, keep themselves safe, and avoid and handle racism, the hallmarks of strategic ambiguity. In other words, they had to serve the needs of Whiteness and negotiate through what Robin DiAngelo calls “White fragility” even while they were the victims of White racism.6 This is one of the key predicaments to which strategic ambiguity is a solution or response. One of the stereotypes that had particular resonance with my viewing group was the stereotype of the Angry Black Woman, whose frame, as I illustrate in chapter 2, even the mighty Oprah Winfrey couldn’t escape. Camille described the deployment of the Angry Black Woman stereotype on America’s Next Top Model: “whenever there are arguments, it is always the Black girl that’s the first one to kind of make the first move into the other girls’ territory, or her space.” In other words, the Black woman on screen is positioned as the first one who escalates disagreements and makes them physical. The women related this televisual framing to their own experiences of racialized framing. Vanessa explained the effect of the Angry Black Woman stereotype growing up: “Middle school was just, like, you better know how to fight [Camille laughed] ‘cause you’re Black. Uh, ok [Laughter. Vanessa responds by putting her dukes up, eliciting more laughter].” Vanessa’s story resonated with Jen who turned to Camille and explained:

Like, you know how I am. I’m not going to fight anyone. People would always say that kind of stuff to me. Like, they didn’t want to make me angry because they thought I would get into a fight with them [Vanessa nodded, agreeing], and I was like, I’m really calm, like, I don’t like to yell at [laughs] people. I’m certainly not going to get into a fight with anyone. And I would have that said to me repeatedly [mmm hmmm]. “I don’t want to piss her off.” Like, I’ve given you no reason to think I would just [Vanessa: Be violent], like, flex on you [Laughs. Camille punches the air in front of her and makes a punching sound].

Camille agreed and responded, addressing her comments initially to Micki: “People always think that I’m intimidating. It’s really annoying … Like, in my, like, [one class] [mmm hmm] they would always be, like, well, you’re so intimidating. It’s like, is it because I’m Black? Or is it ‘cause, like I’m talking about racism and how you participate in it? Like, they’d just be like, Ooooh—and [one other student of color] was in that class, too, and, like—And presto, and they were just like, well, we just don’t feel comfortable because there’s like really intimidating people. But really, it was just brown people in the class [mmm hmmm]. It was just like, wow!” Here Camille argued against the codes of postracial racism, by articulating a racialized resistance.

The women expressed frustration that White people did not seem to understand the overwhelming power and the deep impact of stereotypes on women of color. Jen stated that the invisibility of Black women, particularly in discussions of gender and beauty, was just as harmful as the iteration of stereotypes. As in Camille’s story above, the women reported that many such interactions happened in classes at their predominant White university. Jen explained:

I sat in classes where we talked about beauty standards and people would be like, White students would be like, oh, but, that doesn’t matter for like, you, they’re talking to me as like a Black person because you’re Black, so, you don’t, this doesn’t apply to you. Well it’s like, that’s even, it feels even worse ‘cause you’re not gonna get it. [Lupe: right] Like, so you can’t even kind of almost, like, lie to yourself a little bit about it, be like, oh, you know, it’s like, no. Like, Black is not a part of—like, what they want. So I think it affects [us]—and in a sense it makes sense that people who we think look different are still wanting to be on the show and care about modeling and fashion and all that stuff.

The women’s frustration crested not just with the application of stereotypes to them through microassaults, but with their symbolic annihilation, the inability to be seen as women of color.7 Communication scholar George Gerbner coined the term “symbolic annihilation” to denote representational absence;8 many of the women’s comments are about symbolic annihilation as much as stereotypes as they discussed their classmates’ inability to see beautiful women of color outside of the confines of stereotypes. Lupe stated that “they make it seem like, these are such beautiful minority women as if there’s not very many out there. Does that make sense? Like, the way that they talk about it or say things, it’s like, oh she’s really pretty, Latin women, but like, you make it sound in a way as if there’s not that many out there but, you don’t say, oh my gosh, she’s a beautiful White woman [Micki: Exactly]. Because it’s just everywhere.” The beautiful women of color were singular additions, or tokens. Jen agreed: “But I felt like, uh, like, there’s beauty and then people have these other kinds … Like, people have these quote-unquote “Black beauty” [mmm hmmm] and it’s always, like, exceptional. So, like, they talk about the other girls being beautiful, and then the Black girls, like, they separate them out [right]. It’s never, well, not that the playing field is level anyway, but I feel like shows like this … you see it, [girls of color] get separated out [agreement].” The women’s objections here were that a part of stereotyping was never even being seen. In their critiques, the women questioned: was it worse to be stereotyped, or simply to be so absent from the picture that you were never considered? Or, if considered, only as an exception, registering while the rest of your people remained invisible or trapped in a stereotype?

These women struggled with representations because of how representations made their way into their daily lives. Means Coleman notes that the African American viewers of Black sitcoms whom she studied were “worried and angered” that “society would accept only the comedic depictions as an accurate portrayal of African Americans.” Further, Means Coleman reports that her participants “pondered how those Whites, who know little about Blacks, learn to dislike and fear the racial group based on the shows. More than one participant observed that Black situation comedies do not create bigotry, but are an extension of a prevalent racism already in place in America.”9 My participants echoed Means Coleman’s observations. Not only did the women in my group see the images on screen as flat and inadequate, but they felt the burden of having to negate such stereotyping. But, unlike those in Means Coleman’s study, the women in Camille’s living room were not concerned with regulating, producing, or intervening in “positive” or “negative” representations. They didn’t want to counter stereotypes with strategic ambiguity. Instead, their critique amounted to a celebration of self through a multifaceted refusal of respectability politics. Their identities could not be encapsulated by the representations of their identities on screen, where, as Jonathan Gray writes, “[c]ultural identity is always in such flux, characterized by variation and difference, that any attempt to depict a group of people will at the least prove inadequate, and at the worst do great damage to an understanding of the diversity of identity.”10 Their hate-watching viewing sessions provided them with the means to exercise their anger and in doing so resist and reshape their images absent of strategic ambiguity and respectability politics.

“They Just Got Rid of the Naps, That’s All They Did”: Flouting Respectability Politics

The women’s conversations illustrated that stereotyping, tokenization, and respectability politics went hand-in-hand. When you were “the only” and when you were keenly aware of the power of stereotypes to demean and belittle not just you, but people minoritized like you, you bore the weight of representing your entire community. What you did with that burden was one of the running questions of our sessions together. The story of Black respectability politics is one of community members questioning if representations of African Americans are noble, articulate, polished, and intelligent enough. In other words, do representations make “us” look bad in front of “them”? But such policing has had unintended consequences for groups of young women such as these television-watchers. Indeed, media historian Jane Rhodes explains that on the one hand, “the politics of respectability were a response to the racist representations of and routine attacks on black female sexuality, character, and intellect.” However, Rhodes continues, these very same repressive respectability politics, “enabled black women to enact subversive strategies of resistance.”11

Historian Kevin K. Gaines describes the urge towards respectability politics as a “self-help ideology of racial uplift.” Gaines writes that “a broader vision of uplift signifying collective social aspiration, advancement, and struggle had been the legacy of the emancipation era.”12 In media, representations of the marginalized hold a special burden: instead of being singular images of individuals they bear the weight of depicting whole communities, cultures, and races. Ostensibly, representations of minoritized people are subject to respectability litmus tests from the community that aim to limit the reproduction of historic stereotypes and tropes. And yet such litmus tests are far from universally applied or accepted by community members. Respectability politics both challenges and undermines potential forms of resistance and progress in race and gender representation in popular media.13 People play with respectability, as Beretta Smith-Shomade writes in her descriptions of the “playful piety” that often surfaces in representations of even assumed-to-be sacred spaces such as the Black church.14

Even though questions of respectability politics have been around for over a century, the burden of African American respectability politics loomed large in our discussions. One aspect of respectability politics the women discussed negotiating was class and its representation in deportment, clothing, and speech. Gaines argues that historically, “black elites made uplift the basis for a racialized elite identity claiming Negro improvement through class stratification as race progress.”15 These young women found themselves in a liminal class position. While they mostly (but not all) came from working-class backgrounds, as successful college students they found themselves pondering what it meant to be on their way up and out of the working class. This same question of class stratification undergirds performances of postracial resistance through strategic ambiguity. Strategic ambiguity is a performance that only those with some form of class privilege, those who are already invited to the table, can enact. Resisting postracial ideologies through performing strategic ambiguity means using the protective costumes of respectability to pass as unthreatening. This is a level of non-resistance, ambiguity, risk, and class analysis that came out in the young women’s critiques.

The safe space of Camille’s living room enabled the women to analyze and abandon respectability politics. Although many of the women in our viewing group enacted one form of respectability politics at times, for example, expressing dismay that “they” (White people) were going to understand “us” (women of color) along the lines of racialized stereotypes, most of them also enacted a critique and resistance. For example, some of the women critically assessed those they identified as the standard-bearers in their lives for racialized gender—their mothers—for their own respectability politics. A number of the women keenly felt the generational divide when their Black mothers celebrated Tyra Banks; they balked at such celebration. Without exception, at every session all of the women present spent time critiquing the manner in which Tyra Banks performed her classed, racialized, and gendered identity on America’s Next Top Model. Their mothers disdained other reality show representations they consumed, like The Flavor of Love, but venerated Tyra Banks.

In Vanessa’s words, her mother loved Banks and America’s Next Top Model because she was simply “so happy to see some Black faces.” But as her comments throughout the sessions made abundantly clear, mere representation wasn’t enough for Vanessa. Micki asserted that her mother approved of Banks because she proffered a form of acceptable Black representation: “As long as you’re not showing your stuff or like [unidentified woman: you know!] being hella sexual or loose or whatever, they don’t care.” McCall explained further: “My mom talked about Tyra today. She’s like … yeah, I just love Tyra, she’s such a wonderful young Black woman [Jen agrees; she’s heard the same remarks from her mother]. It’s like a lot of people take that for face value. Oh she’s Black, she’s doing something wonderful. No one looks at that she’s crazy.” The “crazy” that McCall referenced was the way in which Banks enacted her respectability politics: by punishing the contestants who were not able to code switch, or transgress racialized boundaries in the same way as Banks.16

Unlike their mothers, the women joyfully spurned respectability politics by consuming many forms of Black representation while still critiquing them. For example, they gleefully shook their heads at 1980s rapper Flavor Flav’s antics on his dating reality show The Flavor of Love, and delighted in the ever-multiplying numbers of Black-oriented reality television programs. They were also sensitive to racialized double standards in their favorite shows. At our viewing sessions, the participants regularly dissected the complexities of respectability politics and the unfair burden placed upon Black televisual representations. The women troubled the idea that some forms of reality television featuring White people was seen as “higher-class” than similar shows featuring African Americans. Micki explained,

See, I thought The Bachelor was going to be quote-unquote “classy” cause it’s ABC and it’s White, but then, I just lost respect for The Bachelor last night too [chatter amongst the others—general agreement—“I don’t watch that”]. He picked the girl, and then like six weeks into it, after picking her and becoming engaged to her, he dropped her like a bad habit and took the other girl back [Oooooooh]. And then, on national TV like she didn’t even know that he was having issues until they [mentioned it] on TV. So yeah, I think The Bachelor is now like on my Ray-J [in the dating reality show For the Love of Ray J] status.

As Micki indicated, different television networks signify different levels of prestige and respectability. Networks, like individuals, are also racialized, gendered, and classed. In 2009 when our viewing session occurred, the cable network VHI was responsible for churning out a number of reality television shows featuring African Americans, including For the Love of Ray J and Flavor of Love, but one of the big three networks, ABC, had yet (and to date, has yet) to star an African American bachelor on their landmark reality dating show and after fifteen years featured its first Black bachelorette in 2017.

And Micki wasn’t alone in comparing The Bachelor to The Bachelor-inspired Black dating shows. Media scholars Rachel Dubrofsky and Antoine Hardy read The Bachelor and Flavor of Love against each other, noting “Flavor of Love has a Black star and predominantly Black cast but self-consciously acknowledges its appropriation of The Bachelor, a series with a White star and predominantly White cast.”17 Dubrofsky and Hardy also point out that Flavor of Love is parodic where The Bachelor is earnest. As a result, Flavor of Love as opposed to The Bachelor, “opens up possibilities for claiming a variety of identities at once; for foregrounding performativity and the constructedness of identities in the space of surveillance; and for complicating the requirement for authenticity in the space of White-centered RTV shows.”18 Sophisticated reality television viewers like the women in my viewing party read through the so-called respectability of The Bachelor to call it out as equally—if not more—misogynistic—than the predominantly Black-cast dating shows. Micki did not buy into the myth of a “classy” Bachelor show perhaps because of the way in which it erased Blackness so entirely that questions of racialized difference did not even enter the frame.

In addition to rejecting the notion that similar genre shows with White and Black leads were not framed as similarly respectable, the women critiqued the persistent logic that “Black shows” (i.e., Black-cast shows) should not necessarily be assessed as disrespectable to begin with and that all Black shows in a similar genre were necessarily alike. Micki went on to explain that not all Black dating shows are the same in her eyes: “[For the Love of Ray J] is actually better [than Flavor of Love] because he’s a little bit more respectful … Like he doesn’t talk to them crazy. Like, Flav, used to talk to them crazy like, [with her Flavor Flav impression, sing-song] “I’m Favor Flav” [group laughter] like he used to talk to them [Camille: [also with her impression] I’m Flavor Flav!]. But Ray J’ll be like, “No, this isn’t going to work out. Like, I’m going to need you to leave. He’s a little bit more respectful, so [yeah]—it’s better in that respect.” Micki pushed back against the respectability politics used to flatten out all Black representation as, in this case, equally misogynistic.

“On the Acceptable End of Black”: Skin Color Matters

Colorism, the privileging of light-skinned people of color in terms of beauty and overall prestige, is another form of racialized hazing that the young women critiqued. The women discussed this form of prejudice throughout our time together when they described how the media showcased light-skinned Black women to stand in for all Black women. Tyra Banks herself was most often the object of criticism both for failing to acknowledge her own privilege as a light-skinned woman, and for castigating darker-skinned contestants for their inability to sell themselves as racially flexible, which functioned as code for lighter-skinned Black women including Banks herself. A number of times the participants asked why Banks’ default was stereotyping and respectability politics through the mode of colorism.

For example, the women took exception to one episode of ANTM in which Tyra upbraided an African American contestant for failing to apply sunscreen after turning a few shades darker. Micki commented with some irritation evident in her voice, “They were all out in the sun at the same time. Why would you say [you need to wear sunscreen] to one of the darkest people there who has the most protection from the sun?” McCall agreed, “Yeah, why would you pick her out?” Continuing, Micki responded, raising her voice slightly with more frustration, “Why would you bring that up at that point in time ‘cause everyone’s complimenting her on how beautiful her skin looked? [[Jen: trying to cut her down]] And then like, ‘Well … I wouldn’t be out in the sun.’ It makes you sound ignorant.” Jen jumped in the conversation, saying, “Well in the modeling world, yeah, dark skin doesn’t fly. Unless they’ve got you [on a photo shoot] up in a jungle somewhere. Or in a favela where you look like you’re from there [laughter]. Then maybe they’ll give you a [photo] shoot.” Even though Banks did not explicitly state, “dark skin is bad” or even, “dark skin is limiting in modeling,” the women understood Banks’ denigration of the dark-skinned model to be a form of strategically ambiguous, postracial racism borne out through colorism.

The women also talked extensively about colorism when they discussed the recently aired CNN Black in America series.19 Although our viewing sessions centered on ANTM the women often discussed other representations of people of color. The women expressed their eager anticipation for the show and their ultimate disappointment with it. Camille dubbed Black in America “horrible” and, Vanessa, in response, covered her face and sighed, “Oh my God, I was so disappointed.” McCall interjected, “that was bad,” as Vanessa continued, “It was like, bad thing after another, bad, bad, bad, bad.… Everything she talked about was negative, negative, negative, negative, negative, negative. Nothing positive.” While McCall’s designation of the show as “bad” was an unspecified blanket statement about any number of aspects of the program, Vanessa riffed off McCall’s “bad” to specify its negative representations. They did not object to negative portrayals altogether: the women agreed throughout our sessions that representations of African Americans should reveal nuance and diversity. In the case of Black in America, as in ANTM, the women were not hoping for whitewashed portrayals of success playing to respectability politics. But they were also not hoping to see solely portraits of Black poverty, crime, and violence. Instead they were hoping for Black representations that showcased a variety of forms of Blackness, including all of the multifaceted ways in which they lived their Blackness as college students.

Black in America was not just disappointing to the young women because of the content—which showed what they read as excessive images of Black poverty—but because of the show’s host Soledad O’Brien, a light-skinned, racially ambiguous, and mixed-race African American woman. Jen commented, “Whenever they have to talk about Black anger, [O’Brien] is like the only one they say [Yeah!] and they never talk about the fact that like, yeah, she identifies as Black but she’s also like [[Micki: Everything]], really light [[Yeah] and [unidentified person from group: it’s really annoying]].” Micki continued, “I had to go on the Internet and look up whether she was Black. Therefore [slight laugh], that doesn’t really help when a person’s flipping through trying to see themselves on TV and they’re like– … I definitely googled it. I was like [positions hands in front of her as if on a keyboard], “Soledad O’Brien. Ethnicity, race, Black” [laughter] I was like every—[[Vanessa: nationality, color]] catchword.” The women balked at O’Brien standing in for all Black women, or even all Black people, by virtue of hosting Black in America because, as Camille noted, “There’s a certain aesthetic that’s supposed to be like “beautiful” and it’s generally, more lighter-complected women.” Camille felt that the message for darker-skinned women about contingent success was clear: “So when people come up that are darker-skinned it’s kind of just like, well … she might make it.” While Camille’s comments began with a critique of televisual images, they quickly moved to a commentary on her real-life experiences.

Indeed, our discussions frequently knitted together critiques of media and personal reflections. The discussion of Black in America prompted a discussion of the ways in which intraracial issues of colorism intersect with White privilege and anti-Black racism. Jen addressed what she believed to be White women having an unfair amount of power and control over Black women’s self-identity around their own perceptions of skin color. Jen explained, initially addressing Vanessa, and then the rest of the group,

The thing you said, you know, you didn’t think any of those [negative] things that other people thought about until you got there [[yeah]], growing up, and I had always—I—I didn’t think [my perception of my skin color] was a bad thing, which I’m surprised that I didn’t, but I always thought I was very dark-skinned. [Vanessa nods]. And I had no idea that I wasn’t. For like, until [[Camille: Until I told you?]], pretty much until [[Camille: light-skinned!]], pretty much until college. ‘Cause everyone was White [Vanessa: right]. So for them it was like, if you weren’t white you were dark [Vanessa: dark]. I was, I was kinda like, oh, there’s, there are my folks, you know? [Vanessa: right, Camille laughs]. And like, someone had to be like, no [laughter] you’re not. And, and like I had no idea, and it’s funny like how [beat], like how, I’m right here, I can look in the mirror and see myself, but because everyone else saw me the other way, that’s how I saw myself too. There was no separation.

In this interaction Jen revealed all of the ways in which racial identity, particularly around skin color, is situational and relational. Because of the way in which Whiteness worked to skew her image of herself, especially her view of her own skin color, she could literally not see herself as other African Americans like Camille saw her. Thus, Camille had to “teach” Jen she was light-skinned compared to other African Americans. Prior to Camille’s intervention, Jen could only envision herself through Whites’ eyes, with no nuance about skin color. The women’s conversation illustrated that the power to see ourselves comes about through comparison, including skin color comparison.

Jen’s story resonated with Vanessa, who interpreted it as the power White people have to construct Black worth and identity. Commiserating and extending Jen’s story to a greater critique of racialized power in beauty, Vanessa said,

Like the weirdest thing about that too, like, White people mess your mind up, so—they always just mess your mind up, ‘cause it’s like we—they want Black people to be lighter and dark is bad blah blah blah, but they tan, and they rub that orange shit on their face … And I was just like, why? And, and it’s like, you’re trying to be like my people, but you want me to hate my people [yeah]. You’re paying all this money to look like my ancestors, but you want me to hate that. Like that don’t make no goddamn sense.

Vanessa related Jen’s reflection about her own self-identity to the peculiarities of anti-Black racism in which White women empirically devalued Blackness and yet symbolically desired it through the process of cultural appropriation. Their appropriation of Blackness worked alongside anti-Black racism. As they spoke back to television together, the women viewers were attuned to what they read as Banks’ intraracial discrimination, with the featuring of O’Brien feeding into such discrimination, and they were also alert to links between intraracial and interracial discrimination.

As the women oriented themselves (in a very un-strategically ambiguous manner) towards their community and not simply to themselves as individuals, they worried about messages regarding skin color affecting younger African American girls. Vanessa commented, “But like, I know people, like, the little kids at the Boys and Girls Club who just feel like we’re saying light skin is better than dark skin [because] I hear someone on TV who’s not like [me]—but then again, simultaneously, that’s kind of how she got famous [being so light], so … [trailing off].” In saying “we” Vanessa took responsibility for the impact of colorist Black representations on young Black girls. She framed herself as someone with agency, someone who could perhaps not only bear the burden of negative imagery but also actually do something to change that imagery (or the perception of that imagery by younger girls).

Vanessa’s sentiment resonated with McCall who agreed, “There’s going to be some little Black girl who watches and thinks, oh, I can’t go out [in the sun]. I shouldn’t go out in the sun because I won’t get like Tyra Banks and everyone knows Tyra Banks is the shit.” Camille, responding defiantly to such notions exclaimed, “I stay in the sun. I do not care.” Here Camille modelled how to speak back to colorism. Micki offered another response. Shaking her head, taking on the position of being a contestant on ANTM having to face Tyra Banks after getting darker in the sun, she said: “I was wearing sunscreen, and sunscreen is gonna protect me but it’s not gonna stop my skin from getting darker [right].” Micki here pointed out two things: the impossibility of Banks’ request as dark-skinned women will naturally tan more deeply even when wearing sunscreen, and the importance of illuminating the racism inherent in scolding darker-skinned contestants for their natural skin color.

In a later conversation, the women again discussed how featuring light-skinned women helped maintain hegemonic beauty standards. Camille noted, “Yeah, [ANTM is] just reproducing the same types of images. Same types of girls [louder]—It’s not like anything is like so dramatically different in the women that they choose, and that I think, when Eva [Pigford, the first African American contestant to win a cycle of ANTM] was picked, it was like, Oh! Okay. But then again, Eva was very light-skinned.” Jen responded, “She was on the acceptable end of Black,” to which Camille added, “Is like Tyra regurgitating all these things that happened to her, placed upon these new models [Vanessa: that’s so true]?” Camille raised the issue again of racialized hazing, the notion that I’m going to inflict the same harm on (vulnerable) others that was done to me.

The women noted that another mode of colorism happened when Banks, in a strategically ambiguous manner, muzzled race talk, and silenced a discussion of the role of skin color in opening or closing doors for models. The women were attendant to such silencing. For example, after breaking down all of the coded, postracial, strategically ambiguous ways that Tyra Banks engaged questions of race and colorism, Camille wanted to know if Banks had ever discussed these topics in a forthright manner. She asked, “has there ever been like Tyra talking about race or about her Blackness?” Jen responded that she remembered such a moment:

[Banks] had like people telling her—walking into an agency office and having them be like, you might as well stop trying to model, no one’s ever going to hire you [[mmm]]. Your color and stuff, and … like, if I made it, like, I opened doors, but she never [speaks about race directly]. So it’s like she talks about being Black I feel, but she doesn’t talk about it.

In other words, in Jen’s assessment Banks defaulted to strategic ambiguity by dealing with race and gender in code. This was one of the dangers of strategic ambiguity: because of the coded ways in which she named—but, as Jen points out, doesn’t name race, Banks ended up enacting racialized and gendered discrimination, in the women’s eyes, despite her stated desire to break down barriers for women of color.

Race scholars Kate Russell-Cole, Midge Wilson, and Ronald E. Hall document the history and contemporary circulation of colorism, an often intraracially-discussed but both inter- and intra-racially perpetuated prejudice, which they describe as getting worse between the initial publication of their highly successful book in 1992 and a new edition in 2013. In their updated preface in the 2013 edition, Russell-Cole, Wilson, and Hall write that today, “colorism is the more legitimate form of prejudice to empirically investigate since skin tone is at least a visible and measurable attribute, whereas race is largely a social construct.”20 This is one of the many forms of racialized violence re-upped in the Obama era. In addition, critical race scholar Angela Harris names colorism an “economy of color,” as a hierarchical system that is linked, but not identical to, racism. She notes that an economy of color provides important distinction to the two “most popular and scholarly discussions of racism”: that of “prejudice” and that of “white supremacy.” The “prejudice” approach saw racism as “interpersonal, and explores how processes of cognition, reasoning, and emotion function to make racial differences real and to make demeaning treatment of the racial ‘other’ seem natural, normal, and necessary,” while the “white supremacy” approach “treats racism as institutional” and an effect of “political, economic, and social power.”21 The women’s read of colorism drew from both the prejudice and white supremacy critiques. In hate-watching Banks spewing colorist statements, the women girded themselves against such negativity in their own lives, just as they girded themselves against another aspect of strategic ambiguity and respectability politics: Banks’ code-switching.

“Elite Moments” and “Snapping Her Neck”: Rejecting Code-Switching

The participants explicitly rejected Tyra Banks’ code-switching, a fundamental performance element of strategic ambiguity and what linguist Carol Myers-Scotton describes as a tool used to signify membership in a particular group.22 Code-switching is a central component of postracial resistance through strategic ambiguity; rejecting code-switching is tantamount to rejecting strategic ambiguity. The phrase “code switch,” while popular not only as an academic term but a vernacular one for decades, has come into the mainstream lexicon by its use in popular culture—one example being on the National Public Radio (NPR) show and podcast “Code Switch,” where journalists of color “remix race and identity” as they dive into discussions of how race “play[s] out in our lives and communities, and how all of this is shifting.”23

Code switching is one reason the young women in my viewing group asserted that they did not identify with Tyra Banks. Vanessa put it this way, “It seems like every week she’ll do her regular script, you know, blah blah blah, elite moment, and then during deliberation she has to have at least one moment where she’s snapping her neck [Jen: where she reminds people she’s really Black].” Turning her address to Banks herself, Vanessa asked incredulously, “What? What are you talking about? Who says that?” Vanessa noted that Banks’ “regular script,” or what feels like her genuine way of speaking, is “elite,” which in this case means respectable while not exactly “White” (as the women never wanted to conflate so-called “proper speech” with Whiteness), an over-enunciated parroting of broadcast-friendly linguistic patterns.

Banks’ “elite” or “regular script” fits media scholar Kristen J. Warner’s assertion that “shows that attempt to cast African Americans as leads must ensure that their characters will not ‘act’ Black or perform in a manner that will offend mainstream viewers’ sensibilities.” At the same time, Warner goes on to explain that such performances are tricky to negotiate as, “these series continue to distance Black audiences because they ‘feel’ disingenuous,”24 especially to insider audiences. Perhaps to deal with this divide, Banks clumsily (at least to these women) switches codes, “snapping her neck” to ingratiate herself to imagined Black audiences and/or appear authentically Black to White ones. However, Vanessa and Jen also noted that “elite” speech did not signify as authentically Black in a televisual space that was courting women of color audiences. In Vanessa’s read, Banks made the choice to “snap her neck,” or parrot a certain mode of Black female performance, in what felt like a false moment. Vanessa read Banks’ code switching as an inversion of what is more regularly thought of as code switching: a lower-prestige group altering speech, dress, and mannerisms in order to gain entry to a higher prestige group. In this case the higher-powered Banks temporary abandons her “elite” or “regular” speech, to quote Vanessa, in lieu of a performance of so-called authentic Blackness. The women read such a performance as patently inauthentic.

Micki interpreted Banks’ code-switching this way: “I really feel like Tyra is so like removed from the field, she has to like forge this connection [[yeah]] because she’s like, ‘Oh, I’m from Compton, and I’m …’ [trailing off] but she left, what, when she was like 14? Or something like that? She’s been all over the world, she has like a vastly different lifestyle than anybody else, and she’ll try to be homegirl next door. It’s like, let it go.” Over the weeks the women expressed disdain for her inauthentic performance of Blackness that amounted, in their eyes, to a stereotype of Black womanhood. The participants pointed out that Banks’ brand of code-switching was particularly dangerous because Banks narrated it as the sole path to success for women of color models. The women at the viewing sessions pointed out that such identity posturing also came from the contestants, who quickly learned how to perform a variety of racialized, classed, and gendered identities from their mentor Banks. Lupe remarked that Banks’ code-switching is similar to “how [one ANTM contestant] acts like she’s from the hood when she’s not.”

But if the women looked down on Banks’ identity negotiations and rejected her attempts at performing so-called authentic Black representation as flat, they had incredible empathy for the contestants and their mandated identity play. The women paused the recording at one moment to remark about how while Banks ostensibly wanted the contestants to act respectably and not, for example, fight, she also essentially goaded a Black woman contestant into fighting by mocking her speech. Camille noted, “Tyra mimics [one of the contestants], [saying] ‘yo, yo, whatsup.” Camille explained that Banks’ words caused an incident later in the show where the contestant spoke loudly “about what she’ll do when disrespected.” The character’s anger and her quickness to fight was understandable to the women as she had just been mocked by Banks for failing to appropriately leave behind what Banks read as Black working class speech and transform to more acceptable standard English and accent. Critic Amy Adele Hasinoff describes ANTM’s urge to makeover unacceptable African American Vernacular English (AAVE) as part of the show’s “neoliberal principles of the structural irrelevance of race, the importance of individual responsibility, the necessity for workers to become flexible to the demands of the market, and the need to continually undertake projects of individual self-improvement to attempt to succeed within the constraints of the system.”25 Such “self-improvement” on ANTM is often racialized and, as the women pointed out, part of the mandate to code switch, or present oneself as strategically ambiguous.

As savvy viewers, the women asserted that Banks postured in racialized ways to forge multiple identifications with the audience, a classic strategy of strategic ambiguity. While her “elite moment,” in Vanessa’s words, might have made her acceptable to their mothers, for example, her “snapping her neck” moment was designed for those who desired stereotypes of Black womanhood. However, neither of these performances rang true for these young women. Micki noted that the latter moment was animated by a desire of Banks to ensure that “she doesn’t want people to forget … it’s ok ‘cause she’s one of us too.” The “it’s” here is Banks’ abuse of the contestants and particularly the women of color contestants. In other words, in Micki’s critique, Banks’ racialized and gendered hazing of the contestants was positioned by the show as understandable and forgivable because she shared race/gender identities with those who bore the brunt of her attack. The women didn’t give any benefit of the doubt to the women as performing in certain ways because of the coaching of producers. In other words, they did not express any sympathy towards the structures in place which might have dictated some of Banks’ behavior. The women of color viewers thus rejected a key component of strategic ambiguity and respectability politics by rejecting code-switching.

“She Is Already Different. They’ll Cut Her”: Managing Difference

Disingenuous racialized and gendered behavior was precisely what the women were attuned to in their discussions of the ways in which ANTM promoted colorism and code-switching, and managed difference writ large. The students pointed out regularly that Banks was trying to churn out models in her same mode, or, in Dez’s words, “I know she gets upset when people are not like her.” Dez’s comments on scripting reality television personae echoed those of media scholar Laurie Ouelette who writes, “One of the things that ANTM teaches is that self-enterprise is similar to being female,” which she deems “an entrepreneurial relationship to the self.”26 This entrepreneurialism of, in Oluette’s words, “self-invention,” amounts to hiding, showcasing, or altering often racialized aspects of themselves in tandem with other identity categories in order to progress in the competition. What Dez illustrated is that this “self-invention” was always along the lines of Banks’ own persona. The young women’s commentary demonstrated that they understood that the show was structured around fetishizing multiple differences, not just race.

One difference they noted was the management of physical difference, where, in one case, the contestants included a burn victim. While rooting for the contestant the group collectively burst into laughter in response to what felt like a scripted, false moment: Banks remarked that it was wonderful to have a burn survivor competing on the show. Jen noted that while this contestant was included on ANTM to highlight her difference, an explicitly stated desire of the show, she would not go far in the contest because of the show’s urge for uniformity. In Jen’s words, “she is already different. They’ll cut her.” In response Valentina defended the inclusion of this contestant, saying, “I think the, the whole point of picking a burn victim, though, is to like, be like something, not to be stigmatized about.” Not satisfied with this answer, Jen interjected, “But that’s like the whole point of America’s Next Top Model. ‘If I win,’ but they’re not going to win.” Jen read through the stated script of the show of diversity to uncover its hidden message of homogeneity. Lupe came around to Jen’s argument and expressed a common sentiment within the group: “It’s so fake.”

The women’s reads on the management of physical difference in the show illustrated their careful attention to the show’s emotional manipulation of the audience around difference. If we define difference as “deviation from the norm,” such showcasing to create a reality show spectacle perhaps made sense.27 And the women noted that the spectacle of difference wasn’t just about physicality on the show. Jen discussed another moment she described from a previous cycle: “I saw one time, one of the girl’s mom had been in a plane crash, her mom died on top of her, and they asked her to tell the story, you know, on that first interview things, and then they had the nerve to be like, ‘Now that’s the kind of thing that gives you strength to be in the modeling industry’ [laughter]. I swear.” Camille added, “That’s why I think it’s so harmful in some way is that you set yourself up to be critiqued in a certain way … I mean, we see the same type of girls being picked [yeah] to be on Top Model so—and in the end you know what type of girl they’re looking for, yet these women still come up there and bare their all [because they hoped to get picked], and then they’re hurt and wondering, well, ‘why didn’t they pick me?’ [slight laughter, yeah].” Camille’s response to the question she posed was one of difference. The show’s message posits equivalency between, in her words summarizing Banks in judging the girls: “Well, I mean, you’re a little dark, so—or your hair’s not this way or your eyes are a little bit together.” Difference in race, body, or even traumatic past was flattened out into simply another attribute—not a marker of power, privilege, or lack thereof—in order to temporarily showcase and then dismiss such complexities.

While many of the conversations pivoted around comparisons to Whiteness, others were Black or women of color specific, like the conversations on hair. Respectability politics often centers on women’s hair, and no session would be complete without some mention of it. Sessions often started with women’s comments on hair products, hairdressers, and all aspects of each other’s hair, especially if a woman’s hair was freshly done or worn in a new style. The hair discussions extended from the living room to the screen as the women invoked their own experiences of hair and racialization. For example, Jen said that the judging panel the end of each episode of America’s Next Top Model,

reminds me of like going up through junior high and high school and whenever it is, and like, if you did, if you did different dance teams or whatever it was and, they would require your hair to be a certain way, and the only way that you could meet that requirement would be if you straightened your hair, most likely if you permed it, ‘cause it’s a constant thing. And it was like—and I never did drill. I couldn’t stand stuff like that but it was just, it was mandatory [yeah] like to have your hair be a certain way.

Dance major Jen rejected the expectations of respectability and conformity in her grade school dance groups. Jen continued, hair as a synecdoche for whole person, summed up her critique of hair-straightening: “It’s just kinda like—and you look really, they look really flat to me now, there’s nothing that pops anymore. And not that you can’t straighten your hair sometimes, but the fact that’s not a choice of like, a style, it’s just your like base all the time.” Switching from personal and real-life observations to observations of ANTM’s makeovers on Black women contestants, Jen continued, “And they just they don’t even do anything to their hair, it’s not like they give them these awesome haircuts like the other girls; they just put weaves and straighten it … They just got rid of the naps, that’s all they did.” Ayana D. Byrd and Lori L. Tharps note that “more than one hundred years after the terms ‘good’ and ‘bad’ hair became part of the Black American lexicon, the concepts endure.”28 Furthermore, communication scholars Regina E. Spellers and Kimberly R. Moffit explain that “if it is true that the physical body represents a community of the self, then it must also be true that the degree to which the body is read as political statement creates interesting ideas about how the self is defined and (mis)understood.”29 In other words, attempted regulation of hair and body stifle far more than just those physical aspects of self.

Jen asserted that the hegemony of respectability politics was so intense that the contestants are essentially hazed, in the manner of Jen’s drill team, in order to get them to perform as respectable subjects. Racialized hazing happened both on screen and off in a reciprocal manner. Again, Jen commented:

I don’t know when people are, like, Tyra Banks, blazing trails and stuff, it’s like, no she’s not. She’s just, she’s just doing [pause] … what was done to her. ‘Cause she talked about that, I watched in her interviews talk about like, oh it’s so hard being Black and or, or being the size that I was, I overcame this and that, but none of that is reflected in the people she chooses; in the end, whoever ends up winning really … [trails off]. I don’t feel like this show, it’s just like you guys said, it just reproduces, it’s not changing anything.

Jen pointed out that Banks’ respectability politics did not align with the ostensible mission of the show: to open up the modeling profession to more women of color and other so-called non-standard beauties. Instead, the show strictly regulated perceived difference. Through the logic of hazing, such regulation reproduced what was “done to her.” The women’s resistant commentary identified the cycle of hazing on screen, and hence ensured that it would not happen with them. They constructed their racialized critique in opposition to the images on screen.

The structure of ANTM made all differences equivalent by providing no discussion of social inequality. In their classic study on The Cosby Show, Sut Jhally and Justin Lewis explain a similar phenomenon, writing that “the series throws a veil of confusion over black people who are trying to comprehend the inequities of modern racism. It derails dissatisfaction with the system and converts it, almost miraculously, into acceptance of its values.” Jhally and Lewis explain that the impact of such veiling is that, “in a culture where white people now refuse to acknowledge the existence of unequal opportunities, the political consequences of this acceptance are, for black people, disastrous.”30 ANTM also flattened structural difference to serve the myth of meritocracy, hard work, and the American dream. Instead of acknowledging that race, gender, or other identity categories held real weight as structures that enable or prevent success, as the women pointed out repeatedly, the show reframed difference. Jen put it this way: “she said you’re quirky, your quirkiness, yours is your age, your height, for you it’s your color.”

Another physical difference that was racialized on ANTM, and that the women viewing the episodes often returned to, was weight and body image. In the women’s estimation, managing size, or limiting the number of “plus size” models or how far they went in the competition, was another way of managing difference and creating an ultimate desire for uniformity and Whiteness, as in the women’s discussions about skin color. Vanessa compared ANTM’s rejection of larger women to her own experiences with White women’s relationship to her body and their bodies. Vanessa said that her self-image shifted because of her White female classmates. One aspect of her shifting self-image had to do with race and class: “I never, I never thought that I was, like, ghetto, or Black this, or Black that till I went to an all-White school … Like, I never … cause, like, I don’t think I am! Like when I was in [a racially diverse] school from K-10, it was like, I’m the White girl, I talk White, I’m bougie, I’m this, I’m that.”

Vanessa explained that, in settings with other African Americans, her own upper middle class upbringing (even as it was demeaned as “White”) was visible to her classmates, but that, when she went to a predominantly White school, Blackness could only be seen as “ghetto.” Similarly, when in a diverse school, she felt like, “I’m too skinny, I need to eat a backyard burger,” a comment that prompted uproarious laughter from all of the women including Vanessa herself. Vanessa continued, “but then [laughter] when I [laughter continues; McCall asks what’s a backyard burger; Jen asks if it has to do with booty]. Yeah, booty [more laughter]. But then when I go to, like, the White girls’ schools, I’m the fat girl, like, I’m not. ‘Oh, you’re so fat,’ [unidentified woman: “they say that?”] no, they don’t say that. But it was, like, those girls were so daggone skinny … [yeah]. Like, I always thought I was small, but I don’t know if they just don’t feed White girls [laughter] where I was growing up, or, like, if it’s just celery and asparagus.” Camille interjected, “I think their body image is a lot different,” to which Vanessa replied, “it must be, because, when I’m fat, so weird, 16 years old and you’re that small.”

As a college student, Vanessa could identify how her high school racialized and gendered sense of self was warped by her White female classmates’ regulation of her body. Vanessa’s critique of ANTM enabled her to name and critique the systems that affected her own self-worth. The conversation drifted back to skewed body image through representation on the show, allowing Micki to have the final word and remind everyone: “We’re not talking about normal people [Dez laughed]. Fashion people [beat]. They think a size zero could be fat.” Ending on a note of humor bolstered their spirits, re-centered their critiques as valid, and further built their collective, consciously racialized anti-strategically ambiguous, anti-respectability politics resistance.

Finally, the women also noted the ways in which ANTM managed difference by whitewashing history. The young women critiqued one episode shot with the theme of immigrants arriving voluntarily to Ellis Island. Jen commented: “having the Black people at Ellis Island like, they came of their own free will?” In one episode, the contestants completed a photoshoot in a Brazilian favela, an extremely poor neighborhood, something at which three of the students who had studied abroad in Brazil particularly recoiled. On that note, and furthering Jen’s critique, Camille exclaimed: “Yeah, it was just kind of absurd to kind of just look at this huge photoshoot going on in the middle of a favela.” Micki stated: “I wonder if they talk to the people, you know, we’re going to be here, what’s going on.” In response to Micki, Camille remarked: “They’re not really trying to explore Brazil, but they’re in Brazil to understand that it’s a fashion capital of the globe. And, like, everyone that they went and saw, all the designers, are White Brazilians. So it’s kind of, like, this is a continuance of the American fashion industry, it’s the same thing as everywhere else you go.” Communication scholar Manoucheka Celeste notes that reality television shows that feature non-U.S. locations present “cultural and racial differences … primarily through signifiers (‘tropical’ music, fruit, and language) and the symbolic presence of those local populations (in stores, in streets, and on the beaches).”31 In a similar vein, in his analysis of the reality television show The Amazing Race, Jonathan Gray writes: “This reduction of ‘the Other’ to backdrop, though, has been a key component of the simplistic rendering of foreign cultures for centuries.”32 Whether critiquing colorism, code-switching, size-ism, or physical appearance, the women rejected the abuses of power that characterized ANTM’s management of difference.

“What Was the Point of That in Relation to the Prize?”: Reading Through Postrace

At one of our viewing sessions, we watched Tyra Banks recite a statistic that one-fifth of all teenagers wanted to be teen mothers, thus “you, as a model, have a responsibility.” The group responded with collective groans and incredulous laughter. Micki complained: “What was the point of that in relation to the prize?” ANTM deployed statistics about teenage motherhood, which were particularly racialized as a coded, postracial racism. But not all audiences were enculturated, as these women demonstrate. The women’s critiques of respectability politics and strategic ambiguity made it clear that, while they consumed a variety of Black representations, they were not consuming them blindly in search of role models, and they were not trying to mimic performances of respectability politics (which they took as facile), or center excessively thin White or light-skinned women or color (which they found problematic).

This chapter provided a look into what happened when women of color created a safe space for each other to abandon strategic ambiguity. What emerged was uncompromising critique. These young women provided a snapshot into a slice of strategic-ambiguity-free life. They knew what they didn’t want to be: strategically ambiguous figures such as Tyra Banks. As they 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 created racialized resistance, an anti-postracial, anti-strategically ambiguous response to respectability politics. In the next chapter, I will examine if the stories of television executives wield similar critiques, or if their identity negotiations look more like the celebrities I examine in part one of this book.