NOTES
PREFACE
1 Sue, xvi.
2 Collins, Black Feminist Thought, 221-238.
INTRODUCTION
1 I use the terms “Black” (capitalized) and “African American” largely interchangeably throughout this book. When, in the second half of the book, I utilize interview data I follow the wording preferences of my interview subjects.
2 “Transcended race” quoted in Peck, “Oprah Winfrey” 83. See also Peck, The Age of Oprah, and Pomerantz.
3 See L’Oréal Paris and Beyoncé for video links.
4 Celeste, Race, Gender, and Citizenship 14.
5 See National Institutes of Health.
6 See U.S. Breast Cancer Statistics.
7 See Arons and Collins, 2132–2138.
8 Guerra, 2.
9 Guerra, 2.
10 Dozier, 1833–57.
11 In 2012 the median income for Black women writers was $98,155, as opposed to all female writers at $117,008, and all male writers at $127,537. Personal correspondence with Darnell Hunt.
12 See Brinkhurst-Cuff.
13 Crenshaw, “#SayHerName”.
14 Crenshaw, “#SayHerName,” 1.
15 See Garza.
16 Gilroy, Against race 53.
17 “post-”, from Latin post ‘after, behind’, quoted (?) in Oxford Dictionary website, 22 April, 2016: www
18 While numerous race critics gesture towards this phrase while writing about the paradox of race bearing social weight and yet being constructed, Richard Jenkins uses the phrase “imagined but not imaginary.”. See Jenkins, “Imagined but not Imaginary” 114–128.
19 Gilroy, Against race 12.
20 In his essay “Is the Post- in Postmodernism the Post- in Postcolonial,” Kwame Anthony Appiah writes: “the task of chasing the word postmodernism through the pages of Jean-François Lyotard and Fredric Jameson and Jürgen Habermas, in and out of the Village Voice and the TLS and even the New York Times Book Review is certainly exhausting.” Appiah ultimately chases philosophers and cultural representation to find his definitions, and I follow Appiah’s lead in my search for postracial resistance. See Appiah, 341.
21 Featherstone, 3.
22 See McRobbie, The Aftermath of Feminism. I have chosen in this book to center my analysis and critique around “postrace” and not “postfeminism” because I believe postfeminism to be an unproductive analytical category for studies of women of color. This is a clear revision of some of my earlier work in the articles “Tyra Banks is Fat” and “First Lady Reframed.”
23 Fleetwood, On Racial Icons 14.
24 Dyson, 32.
25 Dyson, 12.
26 Dyson, 20.
27 Dyson, 11.
28 Stuart Hall (“Minimal Selves”) quoted in Bhabha, 45–46.
29 Crenshaw, “Foreword.”
30 Gotanda, 59.
31 Nilsen and Turner, 3.
32 Pollock, 3.
33 Jackson, 78.
34 Vats, 113.
35 Smith, Enacting Others.
36 See Frankenberg; Morrison; Lipsitz.
37 Squires, The post-racial mystique 25.
38 Brooks, “All That You Can’t Leave Behind 183.
39 Toby Miller notes that such tripartite methodologies of political economy, ethnography, and textual analysis derive “from Roger Chartier’s tripartite historicization of books … This grid turns away from reflexionism, which argues that a text’s key meaning lies in its overt or covert capacity to capture the Zeitgeist. It also rejects formalism’s claim that close readings of sound and image can secure definitive meanings, because texts accrete and attenuate meanings on their travels as they rub up against, trope, and are troped by other fictional and social texts and interpreted by viewers” (147). See Kellner 1995.
40 Coleman, African American Viewers 12.
41 Sonnet, 258.
42 See Burke. Burke writes that while the best texts to analyze the ways in which an individual structures his or her rationale for a particular speech or action, in his words, a grammar of motives, are “theological, metaphysical, and juridical doctrines,” other overarching themes and their connected archives are important to consider, including the Symbolic with its analysis of “the forms and methods of art” and Rhetoric with its focus on “observations on parliamentary and diplomatic devices, editorial bias, sales methods and incidents of social sparring.” At the same moment that Burke articulates his particular focus on Grammar, he also states that his goal is not “to evolve terms free of ambiguity and inconsistency” (xviii) but instead to make space for “something essentially enigmatic about the problem of motives,” which means “inevitable ambiguities and inconsistencies among the terms for motives.” Burke asserts that crafting an argument around the very notion of ambiguity—and a strategic one at that—brings a reader to the most crucial points of an argument. While Burke’s idea has been picked up in business and the military, I haven’t seen it used to a more critical end, or indeed in discussions of minoritized subjectivity and representation.
43 Conventional U.S. policy dictates that smaller powers should be prevented from utilizing strategic ambiguity, by, for example, not being allowed to refuse arms inspections, because the smaller power’s weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) will continue to multiply unchecked without U.S. surveillance. However, Sandeep Baliga and Tomas Sjöström point out that strategic ambiguity, also known in military policy as “deterrence by doubt,” can also decrease arms proliferation for both bigger and smaller countries even without ultimatums from the larger power (Baliga, 1023–1057).
44 See Eisenberg, 3. Eisenberg adopted Burke’s phrase to denote “the human capacity to use the resources of language to communicate in ways that are both inclusive and preserve important differences” (x). Eisenberg’s research is on “how people in organizations use ambiguity strategically to accomplish their goals” (5) as strategic ambiguity creates a type of “unified diversity” allowing for “multiple viewpoints in organizations … Strategic ambiguity is essential to organizing because it allows for multiple interpretations to exist among people who contend that they are attending to the same message … It is a political necessity to engage in strategic ambiguity so that different constituent groups may apply different interpretations to the symbol” (8–9). Eisenberg writes: “At the interpersonal level, strategic ambiguity can facilitate relational development. This occurs when organizational members are purposefully ambiguous and those attending to the message ‘fill in’ what they believe to be the appropriate context and meaning. The more ambiguous the message, the greater the room for projection. When an individual projects, he or she fills in the meaning of a message in a way which is consistent with his or her own beliefs” (11–12). Eisenberg claims that, “particularly in turbulent environments, ambiguous communication is not a kind of fudging, but rather a rational method used by communicators to orient toward multiple goals” (18).
45 Bernheim, 902–932.
46 Heller, 77–96.
47 Ceccarelli, 404. To put Ceccarelli’s work on strategic ambiguity into context: In “Polysemy: Multiple Meanings in Rhetorical Criticism,” Ceccarelli explicates the idea that the term polysemy, the recognition of a text’s multiple meanings, is, itself, polysemous. Ceccarelli centers not just the text but the audience in her analysis as she considers both “the agent who activates a polysemous reading (audience, rhetoric, or critic)” alongside “the social action it inspires” and “the power dynamics it puts into play” (397). Ceccarelli distinguishes the two often-confused ideas of polysemy, or varying interpretations, and polyvalence, or varying judgements, before describing three types of polysemy: resistive readings, or ones that are “audience inspired” and “undergird rebellion against a dominant authorial interpretation” (408); hermeneutic depth, where a critic “offers a new expanded way that audiences should read a text” (408); and strategic ambiguity. Ceccarelli’s arguments are thus about method as much as theory. The critic’s read isn’t sufficient to make sense of a text: we also need to take reception into account (407).
48 Ceccarelli, 404.
49 Ceccarelli, 405.
50 Ceccarelli, 407.
51 Hall, “Encoding/Decoding” 128–38.
52 Gates, “Keepin’ It Reality Television” 143.
53 Spivak, 214.
54 Wall, 456–458.
55 Hall, Representation 1.
56 See Kellner, Media Culture.
57 See Gaines.
58 Mitchell, 393.
59 Noble, 19.
60 Gerbner, “Living with Television” 175.
61 In “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation)” (1972), Louis Althusser defines interpellation as the process by which people become subjects—or are hailed into being—through embracing ideology. In “The Culture Industry” (1979), Horkheimer and Adorno apply Althusser’s ideas of interpellation and ideology to media, and seeing subjects as passive receptacles of media. Other scholars, including Stuart Hall in “Encoding, Decoding” (1973), resist such unidirectional interpretations of ideology while acknowledging the incredible power of media to interpellate subjects.
62 Mercer, 234.
63 Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment.
64 See Parker.
65 Butler, Bodies 219.
66 Muñoz, 31.
67 Lotz, 2.
68 Lotz, 35.
69 Hall, “The Whites of Their Eyes” 30.
70 Hall, “The Whites of Their Eyes” 31.
71 DeAngelis, 5.
72 White, 76–77.
73 Camp, 2.
74 Hine, 4.
75 Hine, 29.
76 Hine, 90.
77 Collins, 97.
78 Thompson, Beyond the Black Lady 3.
79 Higginbotham, “African-American women’s history” 270.
80 White and Dobris, 176.
81 Hine, “Rape and the inner lives” 915.
82 See Fordham, 10. Psychologists Tracy Robinson and Janie Victoria Ward write of the difference between African American female adolescents’ “resistance for survival” and “resistance for liberation.” While the former “may well serve the (short-term) interest of individual survival in a hostile and oppressive environment, the latter is a “resistance in which black girls and women are encouraged to acknowledge the problems of, and to demand change in, an environment that oppresses them.” (Robinson and Ward, 89.
83 Fleetwood, On Racial Icons 145.
84 Black women’s representation in “dominant visual culture,” as Fleetwood puts it, is a small but growing area of study. Postracial Resistance is grounded in Jacqueline Bobo’s groundbreaking book Black Women as Cultural Readers and Beretta Smith-Shomade’s incisive Shaded Lives: African-American Women and Television. In her 2002 book Shaded Lives, Smith-Shomade writes: “In the last twenty years many scholars have devoted themselves to interrogations of, by, or about African-Americans, especially Black men … Yet this same period offered fewer (and then typically derisive) works focused on Black women, although they have endured similar types of disrespect within American institutions” (1). This book owes much to scholarship on African American representation writ large, including Herman Gray’s Watching Race: Television and the Struggle for Blackness and Cultural Moves: Culture, Identity, and the Politics of Representation, Robin Means-Coleman’s African American Viewers and the Black Situation Comedy: Situating Racial Humor, and edited collections by Coleman (Say it Loud!: African American Audiences, Media and Identity) and Smith-Shomade (Watching While Black: Centering the Television of Black Audiences). This book joins a new renaissance of literature on Black women and representation, including Manoucheka Celeste’s Race, Gender, and Citizenship in the African Diaspora, Kristen Warner’s The Cultural Politics of Colorblind TV Casting, and scholarship on Black women and pornography including Mireille Miller-Young’s A Taste for Brown Sugar, Jennifer C. Nash’s The Black Body in Ecstasy, and Ariane Cruz’s The Color of Kink.
85 Mask, 4.
86 Mendelberg, 109.
87 Gray, “Subject(ed) to Recognition” 771–798.
88 Smith-Shomade, Shaded lives.
CHAPTER 1. “OF COURSE I’M PROUD OF MY COUNTRY!”
1 Cooper, “A’n’t I a Lady?” 41.
2 Gordon-Chipembere, 166.
3 “Presidential Ratings—The First Lady.” Viewed September 21, 2016. www
4 For full disclosure, I have to admit that I am not merely an unbiased observer of our First Lady. I am a fan and so I have worked harder to substantiate my intuition about Obama’s linguistic choices. However, I don’t believe that my fandom makes my reading more flawed. Indeed, as Ann duCille (569) writes: “Readings are never neutral. All criticisms are local, situational. My own critical interpretations … are always-already colored by my race and my gender.” In this chapter, I try to articulate what I imagine to be Michelle Obama’s particular struggle. This is not just to help me think through the positionality of our First Lady but also to think through my own positionality. She becomes a signpost for how other women of color understand and imagine ourselves. For women of color professors ensconced in White, patriarchal departments and universities, and for scholars grounded in “biased” and “unscientific” knowledge produced through ethnic studies and feminism, when and how are we allowed to speak?
5 While this book focuses on postrace, similar cultural phenomena have occurred in the realm of gender, or in postfeminism. Scholarship in postfeminism, primarily conducted in feminist media studies, correspondingly exposes the smokescreen effect of the post (see Brunsdon, 110–116; Douglas; McRobbie, Displacement Feminism and “Post Feminism and Popular Culture” 255–264; Tasker; and Vavrus. In the words of communication scholar Mary D Vavrus, postfeminism, in its denials of institutionalized sexism and misogyny, “displaces critical attention from actual sources of patriarchal power and on to feminism” (223).
6 The article from which this chapter grew considered postrace and postfeminism as fairly equal and parallel intersectional identity categories; as such I discussed them in tandem through the word “post-identity,” in the years that have passed since the publication of that article, I have been increasingly convinced that race is and still remains the most significant identity category, and my reliance upon racial terminology reflects that thinking. See Joseph, “‘Hope is Finally Making a Comeback’” 56–77.
7 Squires, “Running through the Trenches” 213.
8 See Bonilla-Silva; Forman 175–202; Gilroy, Against Race; Watts, 214–222.
9 Nayak, 427.
10 St. Louis, 671.
11 See Beltran, 63–88; Springer, “Third Wave Black Feminism?” 1059–1082 and “Divas” 249–276.
12 Kellner, “Media spectacle” 707–716.
13 Rodman, 117.
14 Collins, Black Sexual Politics 4.
15 Kahl, 319.
16 Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora” 222.
17 Obama’s use of race and gender codes in lieu of speaking explicitly of race and gender discrimination illustrates her deployment of, in the words of communication scholars Lee and Morin (376–391, 387), “prior textual history” of a misogynistic, racist culture.
18 See Habell-Pallán.
19 See Smith, Not just Race, not just Gender xix, xv. Smith also describes how “social transformation will become possible only as we understand how these dynamics and relations [of dominance] are inscribed and produced” (xvi). We have to read “overlapping, discontinuous, and multiply interpretable discursive sites” (xviii).
20 See Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins” 357–383.
21 Race/gender theorist Chela Sandoval gives us another way to speak back to the delimiting of women of color through her analysis of what she calls the “posttraditional era,” a time she explains has also been called “‘postindustrial,’ ‘consumer,’ ‘high-tech,’ ‘multinational,’ ‘transnational,’ ‘postcolonial,’ ‘postmodern,’ and/or ‘global.’” Although Sandoval does not use the specific term “postrace,” she describes a similar rationale and function: “a new cultural dominant has overtaken the rationality of the old.” In the case of postrace, the “new” cultural dominant of colorblindness presides, supposedly killing off the “old” cultural dominant of racialized sexism, and even racialized and gendered identity (9).
22 See Lyotard.
23 See Derrida.
24 Weber, 137.
25 See Trebay.
26 Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins” 357–383.
27 See Swarns.
28 Millner, 541.
29 See Bhabha; Butler, Gender Trouble and Bodies That Matter; Chow, Ethics after Idealism; Gilroy, The Black Atlantic; Muñoz; and Sedgwick. Judith Roof (2003) also uses the phrase “exhaustion of identity politics” to describe why the journal Post-Identity was created in the late 1990s.
30 Griffin, 484.
31 See Omi.
32 See Collins, Black Feminist Thought.
33 James, 2.
34 See hooks, Feminist Theory 24.
35 Smith, Not Just Race 21.
36 Ceccarelli, 398.
37 Coleman, “The Gentrification of ‘Black’” 88.
38 See Davis.
39 Obama’s second set of remarks differed from her first because in her second she added the word “really” (“for the first time in my adult lifetime, I’m really proud of my country”).
40 For a link to the speech itself see www
41 See Habell-Pallán.
42 Davies, “Con-di-fi-cation” 76.
43 Madison, 321.
44 Kelly, 35.
45 Cloud, 458.
46 See Hovell.
47 Springer, “Third Wave Black Feminism?” 1059–1082 and “Divas” 249–276.
48 Lorde, 117.
49 See Brooks, “All that You Can’t Leave Behind” 181.
50 See Piazza.
51 Spillers, 308.
52 In 2014 infant mortality rates for infants born to White women were 4.89%, and for Black women were 10.93% (T.J. Mathews, M.S., and Anne K. Driscoll, Ph.D. “Trends in Infant Mortality in the United States, 2005–2014,” NCHS Data Brief No. 279, March 2017); the 2015–16 real median income of White households was $65,041, versus $39,490 for Black households (The U.S. Census Bureau, “Income, Poverty and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2016,” Newsroom, https://
Release Number CB17–156, 2017 Race and Hispanic Origin, viewed 10 October 2017).
53 See Lugones.
54 See Steyn.
55 See Hare.
56 See Thompson.
57 See Samuels, quoting Michelle Obama.
58 Sandoval, 63.
59 Schiappa, 253–272.
60 Gordon-Chipembere, 165–80.
61 Brown, 248.
62 Williams, “The First (black) Lady” 833.
CHAPTER 2. “BECAUSE OFTEN IT’S BOTH”
1 Smith-Shomade, Shaded Lives 148.
2 Lofton, 6.
3 See Gabbard.
4 Ibrahim, xvii.
5 Havens, 125.
6 See Peck, The Age of Oprah.
7 As Alexander Weheliye writes, why are “formations of the oppressed deemed liberatory only if they resist hegemony and/or exhibit the full agency of the oppressed? What deformations of freedom become possible in the absence of resistance and agency?” (2).
8 See Chestang.
9 Jackson, 3.
10 Sue, Race Talk 7.
11 Morris III, 228–244.
12 Davies, Black Women 21.
13 See Randhawa.
14 Winfrey references the incident on Twitter in the following manner: “Turns out that store clerk did me a favor. Just found out that bag was $38K!!! She was right I was NOT going to buy it.” A couple of hours later that same day, Oprah tweets: “other than the handbag diss. I had a GREAT time in Zurich. Best spa ever @doldergrand. Would love to experience again.” Viewed January 28, 2014.
15 See Rothman.
16 See Reuters.
17 This sentiment was expressed in either inferential ways in newspapers or more explicitly in blogs. For example, the Mr. Conservative blog titles its story on the topic: “Oprah Says ‘Sorry’ for Crying Racism After Receiving Ba-16Customer Service at Boutique” (August22, 2013), http://
18 See Aesop.
19 Brüggemann, 51–58.
20 For example, see: “Oprah sorry for blown up racism row.”
See also: Smith-Spark, “Oprah Winfrey: I’m sorry Switzerland racism incident got blown up”).
21 See “Oprah Winfrey apologises for Swiss handbag-gate.”
22 For example, see Evatt, “Oprah Winfrey expresses regret over media storm surrounding Swiss flap.”
23 For example, see Hall, “Now Oprah says sorry.” See also Evatt, “Oprah says sorry for Switzerland racism brouhaha.”
24 See: “Oprah regrets Swiss racism incident.”
25 See: “Oprah says ‘sorry’ for media storm linked to Swiss shopping story.”
26 See Evatt, “Oprah says sorry for Switzerland racism brouhaha.”
27 See Legge.
28 See: “Oprah regrets Swiss frenzy.”
29 For example, see Evatt, “Oprah Winfrey expresses regret over media storm surrounding Swiss flap,”
30 See: “Winfrey regrets storm stirred by racism story.”
31 See: “Oprah says sorry over Swiss racism flap.”
32 See: “Oprah sorry over uproar over racism scandal.”
33 See: “Oprah says ‘sorry’ for crying racism after receiving bad customer service at boutique.”
34 Kim, 55–79.
35 See: “Winfrey sorry for ‘racism’ furore; Panorama around the world in 10 stories Switzerland,”
36 See: “Oprah ‘racism’ just lost in translation.”
37 See: “She’s sorry for racism flap.”
38 See TMZ.
39 Fleetwood, Troubling Vision 3.
40 Fleetwood, Troubling Vision 7.
41 See Heilpern, “Oprah’s Encounter with Racism Results in Apology from Swiss Tourism Office.”
42 Bonilla-Silva, 1.
43 Rita Repulsa, who “was a female humanoid sorceress bent on intergalactic domination,” was initially played by Japanese actress Machiko Soga and later by Asian American actress Carla Perez. Viewed October 19, 2015. http://
44 See: “Could it be Oprah’s just a picky shopper?”
45 See: “Storm in a handbag: Oprah Winfrey accuses Zurich boutique of racism.”
46 See: “A bagful of racism for Oprah in Zurich.”
47 See Power.
48 See: “Swiss sorry after Oprah snubbed in shop ‘racism’ row.”
49 See Methven.
50 See: “Oprah in bag shop race row: Outrage over ‘cheap’ insult.”
51 See Li.
52 See: “Cheesed off Oprah bags the ‘racist’ Swiss.”
53 See Heilpern, “Swiss apologize for encounter Oprah calls racist.”
54 See Dawn.
55 See: “Apology to Oprah over bags of money,”
56 See Pomerantz.
57 Erigha,441. Erigha and Charles also note that the term uppity “references historical relationships and power dynamics of subordination and domination between Blacks and Whites characterized by Jim Crow segregation and the ideology of White supremacy following the U.S. Civil War” (441). A more vernacular source, Urban Dictionary, defines uppity as “taking liberties or assuming airs beyond one’s place in a social hierarchy. Assuming equality with someone higher up on the social ladder.” Accessed January 7, 2014. www
58 See Staples.
59 Smith-Shomade, Shaded Lives 157.
60 Andrea O’Reilly’s essay “‘I come from a long line of Uppity Irate Black Women’: African-American Feminist Thought on Motherhood, the Motherline and the Mother-Daughter Relationship” in Mothers and Daughters: Connection, Empowerment, and Transformation (143–59) takes its title from a Kate Rusin poem, “Family Tree,” that begins: “I come from/a long line of/ Uppity Irate Black Women” and continues “I cultivate/Being Uppity/it’s something/ my Gramon taught me” (quoted in O’Reilley, 144).
61 See: “Oprah accuses Swiss shop of racism.”
62 See McKinley.
63 See: “Swiss racism upsets Oprah.”
64 See: “Shop assistant’s big mistake earns ire of Oprah.”
65 See Battersby.
66 Morgan,485–502.
67 Springer, “Divas” 258. See also: Walley-Jean 68–86.; and Griffin, 138–157.
68 White, 6.
69 See Hall, “Oprah Winfrey racism claim disputed.”
70 See: “Oprah handbag claim not true.”
71 See Charter.
72 See Jefferies.
73 See Brain.
74 See Hicks.
75 See Williams, The Alchemy of Race and Rights 44–45.
76 Williams, The Alchemy of Race and Rights 47. Note that Williams writes that the line I quote here was cut out of the analysis she wrote for a law review symposium.
77 Williams, The Alchemy of Race and Rights 49.
78 Peck, “Oprah Winfrey” 83. See also: Peck, The Age of Oprah.
79 See NewsOne Staff.
CHAPTER 3. “I JUST WANTED A WORLD THAT LOOKED LIKE THE ONE I KNOW”
1 See: “Oprah Talks to Shonda Rhimes.” The Oprah Magazine, December 2006.
2 I want to underscore the fact that I am in no way attempting to read Rhimes’ intent; instead, I am reading her performance, her self-fashioning (see Staiger, 89–106).
3 Higginbotham, “African-American Women’s History” 251–74, and Righteous Discontent.
4 See Horne.
5 See White and Dobris.
6 Horne, 4.
7 See Thompson.
8 See Cosby.
9 See Lewis.
10 Gray, “Introduction” 193.
11 One exception is a very special Scandal episode, “The Lawn Chair,” that took on police brutality of Black men and the issues of Black protest and Black armed resistance; see Verica.
12 Gray, Watching Race.
13 See, for example: Brooks, “All That You Can’t Leave Behind” 183, and Noble.
14 See Williams’ 2016 BET Awards speech at https://
15 See Smith, “Boycott ABC.” The petition had 27,692 supporters as of October 4, 2016.
16 See Bennett.
17 Caldwell, 205.
18 Caldwell, 206.
19 See McNamee.
20 See Carey.
21 See Johnson.
22 See all of the popular press articles discussed in this piece.
23 See Levine.
24 Collier, 204–208; Johnson; “Oprah talks to Shonda Rhimes.”
25 “Oprah talks to Shonda Rhimes,” 321.
26 See Peck, Age of Oprah; and Lofton.
27 See Catanese.
28 Catanese,17.
29 Warner, “A Black Cast” 49–62.
30 Long, 1067–84.
31 Havens, Black Television Travels.
32 Horne, 63.
33 See Collier.
34 Another celebrated show featured a cast of color that rarely addressed racial difference, The Cosby Show, and Sut Jhally and Justin Lewis similarly suggest that it not only did not open up racial understanding, it created greater racial animus. Here White audiences never saw Black people fighting racism, implying that it doesn’t exist.
35 The #BlackLivesMatter movement was founded by three queer Black women activists who, in the words of one of them, created “a call to action for Black people after 17-year-old Trayvon Martin was post-humously [sic] placed on trial for his own murder and the killer, George Zimmerman, was not held accountable for the crime he committed.” See Garza.
36 See Everett.
37 See Yu.
38 See Myers.
39 Retman, 98.
40 See Paskin.
41 See Samuels.
42 See Stanley.
43 See Brown, “The New York Times, Shonda Rhimes & How to Get Away With Being Racist.”
44 See Goldberg.
45 See Sullivan.
46 See Maerz.
47 See Maerz, 8.
48 See Holmes.
49 Mercer, 234.
50 Mercer, 240.
51 Long, 1068.
52 Warner, “The Racial Logic of Grey’s Anatomy” 633.
53 Warner, “The Racial Logic of Grey’s Anatomy” 633 and 635.
54 Warner, “The Racial Logic of Grey’s Anatomy” 638.
55 Everett, 34.
56 Everett, 37.
57 See Wolfe.
CHAPTER 4. “NO, BUT I’M STILL BLACK”
1 Hunt, “Hollywood Story” 163.
2 Gray, 66.
3 At the first session, as the women discussed and signed their human subjects forms, each participant chose her moniker for the study, and those names are what you see here.
4 Amongst communities of television fans, the buzzword “hate-watch,” or to tune in to a television show simply to deride it, gained cultural cache in 2012. See Nussbaum; Franish; Davies, “‘Hate watching’ is mostly just being embarrassed by your own tastes.”
5 Mullings, 21.
6 Lotz, “Assessing Qualitative Television” 456.
7 After I left the sessions, I typed up and expanded my scrawled comments, and developed my sparse notes into more thorough documentation of each session, as I did not want to be scribbling all during our viewing sessions. A graduate student research assistant transcribed the sessions for me within three months. While at first my RA attempted to transcribe every word spoken during the entire time the camera ran—even those spoken when the television show was on—after laboriously transcribing the first and second sessions, we agreed that she should only transcribe the moments when the TV wasn’t running (before and after the show, and during the commercial breaks), and time-mark places where interesting conversation went on when the television was playing. I combed through the transcripts, watching the tapes again, making edits, and adding details with my field notes. When I incorporate the women’s words in this chapter, square brackets [] denote something unspoken including a dropped word or phrase, as well as an interjection by another speaker. A dash or double square brackets [[]] denote the second speaker not just interjecting but cutting the first off, or speaking simultaneously with the first speaker. Inside of the square or double square brackets, italics denote tone, description, and nonverbal communication. Ellipses denote a pause, although—if there is a long pause—I write pause in italics and, if there’s a pause for effect, I write beat in italics. I adapted this style from Maya Angela Smith’s dissertation Multilingual Practices of Senegalese Immigrants in Paris and Rome.
8 Durham, 13.
9 Hall, “’Encoding/Decoding’” 128–36.
10 Bobo, “The Color Purple” 238.
11 hooks, “The Oppositional Gaze” 115–131.
12 Fiske, 19.
13 See Fish.
14 McRobbie, “The Politics of Feminist Research” 51.
15 As Janice Radway notes in her discussion of the romance readers in her audience study, “there are remarkable similarities to the way all the women who contributed to these studies use traditionally female form to resist their situation as women by enabling them to cope with the features of the situation that oppress them” (12).
16 Lotz “Assessing Qualitative Television” 449.
17 Jenkins, “‘Out of the Closet and Into the Universe’” 239.
18 Mayer 3.
19 Bobo, Black Women as Culture Readers 102.
20 Havens, Black Television Travels 11.
21 Smith-Shomade, Shaded Lives 23.
22 Notably, none of the women sent me any requests to make changes. What did happen, however, was that I reconnected with the young women.
23 Lotz, “Assessing Qualitative Television” 449.
24 Gamson, 124.
25 Email correspondence with Camille, March 18, 2016.
26 Email correspondence with McCall, April 13, 2016.
27 Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora.”
28 Smith, “Multilingual Practices” 132.
29 Smith, “Multilingual Practices” 132.
30 Personal conversation with Camille, February 14, 2016.
31 Thompson and Mittell, 5.
32 Miller, 143.
33 Smith-Shomade, “Introduction: I See Black People” 4.
34 Miller, 115.
35 Gates, 143.
36 Wright, 648.
37 Robinson, 159. In this article, Robinson cites numerous studies “suggest[ing] that Black women experience gendered racism, and as a result, they face significant obstacles in the academy.” Robinson coins the term “spoketokenism to denote the significance of [Black women’s] voice, physical presence, and perceptions about themselves and others” (178). Robinson also notes: “‘being the only one’ can be an opportunity for some Black women to prove their intellect and embody an active leadership role. Conversely, if there is a lack of representation, participants felt they needed ‘to bring to the table’ one’s race, gender, and identity politics. The accepted status of tokenism affords some Black women the verbal leniency to strategically institute change by virtue of their insider out status” (178).
38 Robinson, 178.
39 See Kenney.
40 Sue, Microaggressions 28.
CHAPTER 5. “THEY GOT RID OF THE NAPS, THAT’S ALL THEY DID”
1 Coleman, African American Viewers 73.
2 Gates, 144.
3 Nash, 2.
4 See Wood.
5 Young, 5.
6 DiAngelo, 54–70.
7 Sue, Microaggressions.
8 Gerbner, “Violence in Television Drama” 44.
9 Coleman, African American Viewers 222.
10 Gray, “The Amazing Race: Global Othering” 96.
11 Rhodes, 202.
12 Gaines, xv.
13 Much of my thinking on Black respectability politics emerged from a panel that Khadijah White and I put together for the 2014 Seattle conference of the Society of Cinema and Media Studies, and developed through the special issue for Souls that Jane Rhodes and I co-edited. In addition to Dr. White and myself, other SCMS panelists included Jane Rhodes and Robin Means-Coleman.
14 Smith-Shomade, “‘Don’t Play with God!’” 321.
15 Gaines, 5.
16 I discuss how Banks prods her Black models to “transcend Blackness” in my chapter “Recursive Racial Transformation: Selling the Exceptional Multiracial on America’s Next Top Model” in Joseph, Transcending Blackness.
17 Dubrofsky, 376.
18 Dubrofsky, 385.
19 Black in America premiered on CNN in July of 2008: http://
20 Russell-Cole, xv.
21 Harris, 1.
22 See Myers-Scotton.
23 See “Code Switch.”
24 Warner, “A Black Cast” 60.
25 Hasinoff, 326.
26 Ouelette, 173.
27 Joseph, “What’s the Difference with ‘Difference’?”.
28 Byrd, 182.
29 Spellers and Moffitt, 5.
30 Jhally, 129.
31 Celeste, “Entertaining Mobility” 2.
32 Gray, 98.
CHAPTER 6. “DO NOT RUN AWAY FROM YOUR BLACKNESS”
1 Jennifer Holt and Alisa Perren note that the circuit of culture that was “developed by the Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) at the University of Birmingham in the 1960s and 1970s prove[s] particularly useful for an emergent media industry studies” (8).
2 Caldwell, 1.
3 Kellner, “Media Industries” 100.
4 I promised the women anonymity. As a result, I have chosen first-name-only pseudonyms for them. I’m describing them by broad titles such as “television executive,” and I am not naming the show(s) and network(s) for which they work.
5 Caldwell, 2.
6 Lotz, “Assembling a Toolkit” 49.
7 Hesmondalgh, 110.
8 Mayer, 2.
9 Banks, 87.
10 See Caldwell, quoting Felicia D. Henderson.
11 Caldwell, 227.
12 Hunt et al., 25–26.
13 Hunt et al., 25–26.
14 Hunt, “Turning Missed Opportunities into Realized Ones.”
15 Hunt, “Turning Missed Opportunities into Realized Ones” 36.
16 Personal correspondence with Darnell Hunt, March 24, 2015.
17 Havens and Lotz, Understanding Media Industries 15.
18 See Andreeva.
19 Hunt, “Hollywood Story” 165.
20 Henderson, 187.
21 Hunt, “Hollywood Story” 167.
22 See Durkheim.
23 See Watkins.
24 Zook, 5.
25 Zook, 5.
26 Banks, 89.
27 See About Program.
28 See Creative Talent Development & Inclusion.
29 See NBC Universal.
30 See CBS Corporation.
31 Hunt, “Hollywood Story” 167.
32 See Smith, “Black Faculty Coping.”
33 Rivero, 171.
34 Zook, 70.
35 One thing we didn’t discuss was the women’s positioning as executives and “creatives” and not “technical” workers. Their relative privilege in position, despite the lack of privileges conferred through their race and gender, were not a part of our conversation, nor were, in the words of Matt Stahl, the title distinctions that “do not reflect observable, noncontroversial differences in creativity, but that they actually serve to produce and/or sustain particular (im)balances of power” (65).
36 Kellner, “Media Industries” 105.
37 Havens and Lotz, Understanding Media Industries 13.
CODA. “HAVE A SEAT AT MY TABLE”
1 See Knowles.
2 See Mayard.
3 See Brooks, “Solange interview.”