Mixed Race Studies

Obama’s race still has bearing on media coverage

The Louisiana Weekly
2012-09-04

Nadra Kareem Nittle, Contributing Writer

(Special to the Trice Edney News Wire from the Maynard Institute) – Long before a little-known Illinois politician ran for president, the mainstream media focused on his race. When he flourished as a presidential candidate four years ago, everyone in America knew that Barack Obama was Black.
 
Have his blackness and extensive coverage of that fact boosted his political career or made it more difficult for him to win re-election? Perhaps surprisingly, some of the nation’s best political minds are divided on this question.
 
Obama’s race dominated media coverage about him before he became president. In 2004, he made headlines for becoming only the third African-American elected to the U.S. Senate since Reconstruction. In the 2008 presidential campaign, news stories questioned whether he could connect with African-American voters because he was born to a white Kansan mother and a Black Kenyan father, neither connected to Blacks in America.
 
When Obama became the first Black president, mainstream media portrayed his historic accomplishment as a symbol of a post-racial, colorblind America. That framing is contrary to the experience of millions of African-Americans and other people of color beset by conscious and unconscious bias daily in this country.
 
As Obama’s first term nears its end, the impact of his race in mainstream media coverage remains unclear…

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Passing Strange: Shakespeare, Race, and Contemporary America

Oxford University Press
April 2011
240 pages
Hardback ISBN13: 9780195385854; ISBN10: 0195385853

Ayanna Thompson, Professor of English
Arizona State University

Notions, constructions, and performances of race continue to define the contemporary American experience, including America’s relationship to Shakespeare. In Passing Strange, Ayanna Thompson explores the myriad ways U.S. culture draws on the works and the mythology of the Bard to redefine the boundaries of the color line.

Drawing on an extensive—frequently unconventional—range of examples, Thompson examines the contact zones between constructions of Shakespeare and constructions of race. Among the questions she addresses are: Do Shakespeare’s plays need to be edited, appropriated, updated, or rewritten to affirm racial equality and retain relevance? Can discussions of Shakespeare’s universalism tell us anything beneficial about race? What advantages, if any, can a knowledge of Shakespeare provide to disadvantaged people of color, including those in prison? Do the answers to these questions impact our understandings of authorship, authority, and authenticity? In investigating this under-explored territory, Passing Strange examines a wide variety of contemporary texts, including films, novels, theatrical productions, YouTube videos, performances, and arts education programs.

Scholars, teachers, and performers will find a wealth of insights into the staging and performance of familiar plays, but they will also encounter new ways of viewing Shakespeare and American racial identity, enriching their understanding of each.

Features

• Productively engages a topic of perennial debate: race and Shakespeare
• Offers first sustained examination of the relationship between contemporary American constructions of Shakespeare and race
• Explores the seldom considered ways Shakespeare has infiltrated American popular culture, from films like the screwball comedy Bringing Down the House to DIY performances on YouTube

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• 1. Introduction: The Passing Strangeness of Shakespeare in America
• 2. Universalism: Two Films that Brush with the Bard, Suture and Bringing Down the House
• 3. Essentialism: Meditations Inspired by Farrukh Dondy’s novel Black Swan
• 4. Multiculturalism: The Classics, Casting, and Confusion
• 5. Original(ity): Othello and Blackface
• 6. Reform: Redefining Authenticity in Shakespeare Reform Programs
• 7. Archives: Classroom-Inspired Performance Videos on YouTube
• 8. Conclusion: Passing Race and Passing Shakespeare in Peter Sellars’s Othello
• Works Cited
• Index

Barack Obama as the Great Man: Communicative Constructions of Racial Transcendence in White-Male Elite Discourses

Communication Monographs
Volume 78, Issue 4 (2011)
pages 535-556
DOI: 10.1080/03637751.2011.618140

Christopher B. Brown, Assistant Professor of Communications
Minnesota State University, Mankato

This study examined responses on the potential impact of Barack Obama’s presidency from 16 semi-structured interviews with White males in leadership positions in various organizations across the United States. While numerous studies examine the circulating racial discourses on Obama, few studies explore how he is represented in first-hand accounts from those in the public, specifically from White-male elites. This study examined interview discourses from White-male elites to reveal how they imagine race through Obama. In positioning Obama among the pantheon of great-man leaders, this study showed how dominant racial ideologies get legitimatized and reworked when members of the dominant group desire to construct racial meanings onto a popular Black leader.

I will never forget the morning after it was announced that Barack Obama would become the first African-American President of the United States. That morning, I got onto the bus and sat near a few people who were discussing the election results. As usual, I was the only African American on the bus; after all, the city of Albuquerque has a minuscule Black population. As I sat down, a Caucasian man, who was engaged in the conversation with two other passengers, immediately turned to me and congratulated me on the election. I looked at him quizzically, but replied, “I appreciate it.” At that point another man, apparently Latino, turned to me and said, “See brother, you don’t have much to worry about anymore.” I replied ambivalently, “I guess everything is all good now!” He ardently insisted, “Yeah brother, there are going to be a few changes; don’t you think so?” I shrugged and sheepishly replied, “I guess it looks that way.” The night of the announcement, I too felt proud, but I doubted that Obama’s election would extract the systematic and oppressive circumstances of a racist, sexist, classist, and heterosexist society. Sensing that I was not sharing their enthusiasm, the passengers turned away from me and continued with their discussion.

During this time, I was conducting interviews with White males in leadership positions in their organizations to understand how they characterize leadership and heroism. In talking about leaders in US history, they all extolled the valor and foresight of the forefathers in creating a vision for what would eventually become the basic virtues of the US democracy. Some even praised the heroic acts of Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and Robert Kennedy for galvanizing movements in circumstances where their viewpoints were considered unpopular in the mainstream. While my initial interest was to understand how these men construct leadership, I was quite surprised to hear how candidly they spoke to the leadership potential of Barack Obama. Like the passengers on the bus, these men embraced Obama as someone with the potential to alter the course of history, because he represented a healthy vision of future race relations in the United States. It is at this point that I began to ponder how the intersection of my racial and gender identity with that of the bus riders and these leaders gave rise to reflections verifying that racism has little to do with the politics of race in the United States.

The present study examines how and why race enters into the discussion of masculinized leadership when discourses of racial transcendence are appropriated by White-male elites in a cross-race interview context. Specifically, I analyze the rhetorical tactics (see Nakayama & Krizek, 1995) that these White-male elites employ when positioning Obama among the pantheon of great men in history. In this essay, I defined White-male elites as those who self-identified as White; who work in high profile positions such as chief executive officer, president, or partner in law firm; and who are US citizens. Unlike most people of color and White women, White-male elites fit the description of people who occupy spaces in which they can reside in various privileged locations: White, male, nominally heterosexual, affluent relative to economic status, and privileged relative to educational status. Scholarship rarely documents White-male elites’ constructions of race (though see Feagin & O’Brien, 2003). In fact, scholarly research on race and communication provides considerably more attention to the views of ordinary White people like college students (Bonilla-Silva & Forman, 2000; Jackson & Crawley, 2003; Jackson & Heckman, 2002; Martin, Krizek, Nakayama, & Bradford, 1996; Moon, 1999). In that regard, I contend that communication scholars must pay close attention to White-male elite expressions on race and ethnicity, given the relative power and privilege that comes with their linguistic and rhetorical styles, and given that institutional spaces are organized around their cultural repertories.

In commenting on studies of race and communication, Allen (2007) asserted that communication theorists often “neglect to delve into race in critical, substantive ways” (p. 259). I heed Allen’s concern and show how ideological discourses of race manifest in White-male elites’ constructions of Obama. This requires considering the implications for valorizing discourses of great-man leadership through discursive constructions of Obama. As Jennings (1960) and Wrightsman (1977) have noted in their critique of the great-man theory, a sudden act by a great man could alter the fate of the nation as great men maintain the appropriate traits for a particular point in history. It is my contention that these White-male elites embrace Obama as a great man leader to suggest haphazardly that it is better to speak of racism in the past tense. As we will see, critical work on race not only examines racial discourse and its manifestations, but also investigates its imaginative (or ideological) dimensions (Leonardo, 2005) how these White-male elites imagine race through Obama to suit their own ideological purposes…

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Caribbean Fashion Week: Remodeling Beauty in “Out of Many One” Jamaica

Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture
Volume 14, Number 3, September 2010
pages 387-404
DOI: 10.2752/175174110X12712411520377

Carolyn Cooper, Professor of Literary and Cultural Studies
University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica

The elitist Jamaican motto, “Out of Many, One People,“ privileges racial hybridity as the quintessential marker of national identity. Conversely, populist constructions of Jamaican identity acknowledge the primacy of the African majority. The “mixed-race“ ideal inscribed in the national motto becomes the aesthetic standard for judging “beauty“ and “ugliness.“ Beauty contests, for example, become sites of contestation in which competing representations of the face of the nation jostle for recognition. Identifying with marginalized African-Jamaican aspirants who often fail to win these competitions, discontented patrons routinely claim the right to assert alternative models of beauty that challenge the authority of the “out of many one“ aesthetic. The emergence of a modeling industry in Jamaica that valorizes idiosyncratic style has opened up a space in which black images of beauty take center stage. Caribbean Fashion Week is the major platform for displaying internationally acclaimed Jamaican models. Showcasing a high percentage of decidedly black male and female models wearing spectacular designer clothes, Caribbean Fashion Week enables multiple readings of the body as cultural text. The permissive modeling aesthetic engenders capricious images of beauty that contest the very conception of the “model“ as a mold into which a singular figure of beauty is impressed.

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Picturing the Mix: Visual and Linguistic Representations in Kip Fulbeck’s Part Asian, 100% Hapa

Critical Studies in Media Communication
Volume 29, Issue 5 (2012)
pages 387-402
DOI: 10.1080/15295036.2012.691610

Nicole Miyoshi Rabin
University of Hawaii, Manoa

In response to perceived invisibility within a black/white racial paradigm governed by hypodescent, various multiracial people have begun to speak out against a lack of recognition of their multiplicitous identities. Along with state recognition (i.e., the 2000 census), many of these multiracial identity activists desire a sense of community built around racial multiplicity. In an attempt to develop a community, various methods have been employed, and this article focuses on one such implementation of community building. Using a semiotic approach combined with the literary method of close reading, this article will explore and analyze the photographic book project, Part Asian, 100% Hapa, by Kip Fulbeck. The article will examine how an “imagined community” of Hapas is created through the project and photographs themselves, but also how the photos work to homogenize the very multiplicity they seek to represent. I will look at the use of photographs as a means of subverting the common usage of the body as a racial signifier and thereby show the limitations of racial language. Finally, I will explore the linguistic elements of representation: how do the Hapa subjects’ self-descriptions work against or with the photograph and the project as a whole? Thinking about how those photographed in the book respond to the book’s central focus of a stabilized Hapa identity is a critical approach that has the benefit of disrupting the limitations of our racial language, our need for stabilized racial identities, and any homogenization that occurs through the aesthetic project itself. I hope to question the photographic project so that multiracial people can avoid becoming complicit in a new form of racial domination and/or racialization, while also respecting the work that this project has done for Hapas’ visibility.

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Barack Obama’s Address to the 2004 Democratic National Convention: Trauma, Compromise, Consilience, and the (Im)possibility of Racial Reconciliation

Rhetoric & Public Affairs
Volume 8, Number 4, Winter 2005
pages 571-593
DOI: 10.1353/rap.2006.0006

David A. Frank, Professor of Rhetoric
Robert D. Clark Honors College
University of Oregon

Mark Lawrence McPhail, Dean of The College of Arts & Communication
University of Wisconsin, Whitewater

The two authors of this article offer alternative readings of Barack Obama’s July 27, 2004, address to the 2004 Democratic National Convention (DNC) as an experiment in interracial collaborative rhetorical criticism, one in which they “write together separately.” David A. Frank judges Obama’s speech a prophetic effort advancing the cause of racial healing. Mark Lawrence McPhail finds Obama’s speech, particularly when it is compared to Reverend Al Sharpton’s DNC speech of July 28, 2004, an old vision of racelessness. Despite their different readings of Obama’s address, both authors conclude that rhetorical scholars have an important role to play in cultivating a climate of racial reconciliation.

…Using an approach similar to that of Forde-Mazrui, Obama’s speech drew from his multiracial background to craft a speech designed to bridge the divides between and among ethnic groups. He writes in his moving autobiography, Dreams from My Father, “I learned to slip back and forth between my black and white worlds, understanding that each possessed its own language and customs and structures of meaning, convinced that with a bit of translation on my part the two worlds would eventually cohere.” Coherence, Obama writes, is a function of translation and the capacity to move between and among worlds. He was repulsed by whites who used racist language, and could not use the phrase “white folks” as a synonym for bigot as it was undercut by the memories of the love and nonracist impulses of his white mother and grandfather. His speech at the convention reflects, as McPhail notes, an ability to integrate competing visions of reality. Obama did so by using a rhetorical strategy of consiliencey where understanding results through translation, mediation, and an embrace of different languages, values, and traditions. This embrace was intended to inspire a “jumping together” to common principles…

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From deracialization to racial distinction: interpreting Obama’s successful racial narrative

Social Semiotics
Volume 23, Issue 1 (2013)
pages 119-145
DOI: 10.1080/10350330.2012.707039

Charlton McIlwain, Associate Professor of Media, Culture and Communication
New York University

While many scholars attribute Barack Obama’s success in the 2008 presidential election to his so-called deracialized campaign strategy, I argue that Obama constructed a persuasive message strategy that was fundamentally based on race. I argue that in pursuing what I call a racial distinction strategy, Obama mobilized race differently than previous Black candidates running in White-voter electoral majorities. Specifically, Obama’s racial distinction strategy constructed a seamless racial narrative – deployed through constellations of subtle racial language and imagery – incorporating Obama’s own personal biography within a broader narrative of the nation, specifically a narrative of American progress. The fact that Obama employed a racial distinction strategy, and the fact that he succeeded in doing so, sheds new light on, and leads us to reconsider the veracity of popular political theories such as post-Blackness, post-racialism and deracialization, along with the general ideology of colorblindness.

Barack Obama’s election as the 44th President of the United States was historic, not only because he achieved something no other Black American had accomplished, but because he attained the political heights many believed no Black American could. Few Black American candidates have been elected to federal office, especially when elections require support from White voters (Lublin 1997). Black candidates’ fear of White voters mobilizing racial prejudice against them has historically prevented Black candidates from even attempting to run in campaign contests where Blacks and other minorities do not comprise the majority of voters. However, Obama not only believed he could win, despite the historical racial odds, but also demonstrated that America was indeed ready and willing to elect a Black president.

Many explanations of Obama’s success focus on his ability to sidestep a variety of racial attacks throughout the primary and general election. Carly Fraser, for instance, writes “As a post-black candidate. Obama did not once make reference to the historic fact that he would be the first African American to have a real chance of winning the democratic nomination.” Fraser continues, saying that race was .. repeatedly acknowledged by the media, his [Obama’s] opponents, his surrogates, and eventually by the candidate himself” (Fraser 2009, 17). Similarly, Manning Marable writes, “Obama minimized the issue of race, presenting a race-neutral politics that reached out to White Republicans and independents. Yet despite his..

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Rosario Dawson and the Ambiguous Blackness of Latinidad

antenna
2012-08-05

Keara Goin

As has become abundantly clear to me over the course of my research, in the context of contemporary popular U.S. racial discourse, one is either Latina/o or Black, not both. Moreover, we see this phenomenon replicated in U.S. cinema, where characters played by Afro-Latina/o actors are racialized as Hispanic or African American and, usually, nothing in between. Actors like Christina Milian (who is of Afro-Cuban descent) and Zoë Saldana (who is of Dominican heritage) have dark enough skin that casting them as African American seems appropriate, if not the only option. While Michelle Rodriguez (who is of mixed Latino and Dominican descent), who can better embody a generic Latina look (Clara Rodriguez 1997), can easily play a Chicana from Los Angeles primarily based on her lighter (read: whiter) skin tone. Relying on dominant conceptions of racialization to construct a racial understanding of racially mixed and ambiguous actors, casting agents are often motivated by racialized casting practices (Kristen Warner 2010)…

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Black-Yellow Fences: Multicultural Boundaries and Whiteness in the Rush Hour Franchise

Critical Studies in Media Communication
Published Online: 2012-07-06
DOI: 10.1080/15295036.2012.697634

David C. Oh, Visiting Professor of Communications
Villanova University

The Rush Hour films disrupt the interracial buddy cop formula largely by erasing whites from the films. Despite the unconventional casting, the franchise has achieved “mainstream” popularity, which I argue is at least partly because the films construct Carter and Lee in an oppositional binary as a multiracial “odd couple,” converting Carter and Lee, the two lead detectives played by Chris Tucker and Jackie Chan, into physical embodiments of blackness and yellowness, fencing in the perimeters of whiteness. Thus, whiteness is able to remain protected and undetected in the normative center. Like a physical fence, however, the boundaries are semi-permeable, creating narrative openings to challenge whiteness. Therefore, the Rush Hour franchise protects white normality but leaves it somewhat vulnerable at the margins.

Nearly 15 years have passed since the release of the film Rush Hour, and, to date, there have been no major Hollywood blockbusters outside the franchise with African American and Asian American leads in a buddy film or in any other genre. This is despite the fact that Rush Hour was an enormous box office success the film series has been one of the most successful franchises in the action-buddy cop genre (Box office mojo, n.d.). Although the box office is only one key indicator of impact, it is, nevertheless, noteworthy because the films financial success points at least in part to its broad cultural appeal. But, why is the film appealing? Is it that the racially progressive casting is indicative of racial progressiveness? If so, what makes its replicability so elusive in a media system that historically gobbles up commodifiable bodies? I argue that the film’s appeal may have something to do with its semblance of progressive casting that referentially constructs whiteness between the binary poles of blackness and yellowness. Through the metaphor of racial fences, I will point to the…

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Articulate While Black: Barack Obama, Language, and Race in the U.S.

Oxford University Press
September 2012
224 pages
Hardback ISBN13: 9780199812967; ISBN10: 0199812969
Paperback ISBN13: 9780199812981; ISBN10: 0199812985

H. Samy Alim, Associate Professor of Education and (by courtesy) Anthropology and Linguistics
Stanford University

Geneva Smitherman, University Distinguished Professor Emerita of English and African American and African Studies
Michigan State University

Forward by:

Michael Eric Dyson, Professor of Sociology
Georgetown University, Washington, D.C.

Barack Obama is widely considered one of the most powerful and charismatic speakers of our age. Without missing a beat, he often moves between Washington insider talk and culturally Black ways of speaking—as shown in a famous YouTube clip, where Obama declined the change offered to him by a Black cashier in a Washington, D.C. restaurant with the phrase, “Nah, we straight.”

In Articulate While Black, two renowned scholars of Black Language address language and racial politics in the U.S. through an insightful examination of President Barack Obama’s language use—and America’s response to it. In this eloquently written and powerfully argued book, H. Samy Alim and Geneva Smitherman provide new insights about President Obama and the relationship between language and race in contemporary society. Throughout, they analyze several racially loaded, cultural-linguistic controversies involving the President—from his use of Black Language and his “articulateness” to his “Race Speech,” the so-called “fist-bump,” and his relationship to Hip Hop Culture.

Using their analysis of Barack Obama as a point of departure, Alim and Smitherman reveal how major debates about language, race, and educational inequality erupt into moments of racial crisis in America. In challenging American ideas about language, race, education, and power, they help take the national dialogue on race to the next level. In much the same way that Cornel West revealed nearly two decades ago that “race matters,” Alim and Smitherman in this groundbreaking book show how deeply “language matters” to the national conversation on race—and in our daily lives.

Features

• The first book-length analysis of Barack Obama’s rhetoric in relation to race
• Uses a sociolinguistic analysis of Barack Obama’s language and speeches to both reveal and challenge American ideas about language, race, education, and power
• A lively and engaging read from two renowned scholars of language, race, and education

Table of Contents

• Foreword
• Showin Love
• 1. “Nah, We Straight”: Black Language and America’s First Black President
• 2. A.W.B. (Articulate While Black): Language and Racial Politics in the U.S.
• 3. Makin A Way Outta No Way: The Race Speech and Obama’s Rhetorical Remix
• 4. “The Fist Bump Heard ’round the World”: How Black Communication Becomes Controversial
• 5. “My President’s Black, My Lambo’s Blue”: Hip Hop, Race, and the Culture Wars
• 6. Change the Game: Language, Education, and the Cruel Fallout of Racism
• Index