Racial prejudice and institutional racism remain significant problems in the US today. Whatever advances have been made over the years with respect to racial politics, the US remains a nation deeply divided along racial faultlines, and race continues to matter tremendously when it comes to the distribution of education, jobs, housing, healthcare, justice, political power, and then some. One of the most significant arenas where racial politics manifest themselves in US culture is the mass media. We will spend much of the semester studying the ways that this thing we call "race" both shapes and is shaped by a variety of media practices and policies.
In particular, we will examine:
• the social construction of race and racial identity
• the nature of racial identity formation and selfawareness
• the public discourses around racial/ethnic assimilation and integration
• the politics of media representation and invisibility
• the history of interracial cultural borrowing and theft
• the interplay between media and government institutions with respect to maintaining racial hierarchies
• the vexed question of racial ambiguity and hybridity, and
• the variability of racial formations across different geopolitical contexts.
Bear in mind that few (if any) of the questions we'll address this semester have easy answers. If simple solutions were truly effective in eliminating racism, it would have disappeared decades (if not centuries) ago, and there would be no need for courses such as this one. As such, soundbite approaches to these issues (e.g., "can't we all just get along?" or "let's just pretend race doesn't exist") will not serve you well, and a crucial part of your task this semester will be to think critically and complexly about the role of race and media in contemporary society.