The Post-Racial Mystique

Critical Cultural Communication

General Editors: Sarah Banet-Weiser and Kent A. Ono

Dangerous Curves: Latina Bodies in the Media Authentic™: The Politics of

Isabel Molina-Guzmán Ambivalence in a Brand Culture
Sarah Banet-Weiser
The Net Effect: Romanticism,
Capitalism, and the Internet Technomobility in China: Young
Thomas Streeter Migrant Women and Mobile Phones
Cara Wallis
Our Biometric Future: Facial Recognition
Technology and the Culture of Surveillance Love and Money: Queers, Class,
Kelly A. Gates and Cultural Production
Lisa Henderson
Critical Rhetorics of Race
Edited by Michael G. Lacy and Kent A. Ono Cached: Decoding the Internet
in Global Popular Culture
Circuits of Visibility: Gender and
Stephanie Ricker Schulte
Transnational Media Cultures
Edited by Radha S. Hegde Black Television Travels: African
American Media around the Globe
Commodity Activism: Cultural
Timothy Havens
Resistance in Neoliberal Times
Edited by Roopali Mukherjee Citizenship Excess: Latino/
and Sarah Banet-Weiser as, Media, and the Nation
Hector Amaya
Arabs and Muslims in the Media:
Race and Representation after 9/11 Feeling Mediated: A History of
Evelyn Alsultany Communication Technology
and Emotion in America
Visualizing Atrocity: Arendt, Evil,
Brenton J. Malin
and the Optics of Thoughtlessness
Valerie Hartouni The Post-Racial Mystique: Media and
Race in the Twenty-First Century
The Makeover: Reality Television
Catherine R. Squires
and Reflexive Audiences
Katherine Sender
The Post-Racial Mystique

Media and Race in the Twenty-First Century

Catherine R. Squires

a
NEW YORK UNIVERSIT Y PRESS
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Squires, Catherine R., 1972–
The postracial mystique : media and race in the 21st century / Catherine R. Squires.
pages cm. — (Critical cultural communication)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8147-6289-9 (hardback)
ISBN 978-0-8147-7060-3 (paper)
1. Mass media and race relations—United States 2. Cultural pluralism in mass media—
United States. 3. Post-racialism—United States 4. Race and media. I. Title.
P94.65.U6S77 2014
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2013043409

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Contents

Acknowledgments vii
Introduction: Welcome to Post-Racial America 1
1. Post-Racial News: Covering the “Joshua Generation” 17
2. Brothers from Another Mother: Rescripting Religious 65
Ties to Overcome the Racial Past
3. The Post-Racial Family: Parenthood and the Politics 97
of Interracial Relationships on TV
4. Post-Racial Audiences: Discussions of Parenthood’s 133
Interracial Couple
5. Not “Post-Racial,” Race-Aware: Blogging Race in the 165
Twenty-First Century
Conclusion: Back to the Post-Racial Future 187
Notes 207
Index 233
About the Author 235

>> v
This page intentionally left blank
Acknowledgments

I often complain to colleagues, family, and friends that I have a bad

habit of picking research topics that stress me out; nonetheless, I am
quite fortunate to have people and institutions supporting me as I do
the research and writing. I owe a lot of my productivity to the FOCI
Writers’ Group at the University of Minnesota. I am so glad we pulled
it together, and that we’re still going strong two years later. When I get
writers’ block, it’s good to know folks are counting on me to set up our
writing space so we can all get motivated. Many thanks and hugs to
Mary Vavrus for reading early drafts of the Parenthood chapters, and for
well-timed family dinners and venting sessions. I owe you, sister, and
can’t wait for your next book to drop!
I received valuable feedback on the news chapter when I visited the
Rhetorical Studies Group at the University of Illinois. Conversations
with Kent Ono, Cara Finnegan, and their colleagues and students were
right on time for my revision cycle. Likewise, Daniel Brouwer and his
colleagues at Arizona State University gave me a warm welcome and
feedback that helped me work out ideas for the conclusion of the book.
And although my mother, Helen, and sisters, Theresa and Leah, are
excellent editors and sounding boards, any and all errors are my own.
Thanks again for all the phone calls and tweeted encouragement—in
addition to everything else over the years. Most of this research would
not have been accomplished had I not received generous funding at two
universities. Much of the work on Justice Sunday III was supported by a
grant from the Howard R. Marsh Center at the University of Michigan.
The other chapters were researched and written using funds from the
Cowles Chair for Journalism, Diversity, and Equality at the University

>> vii
viii << Acknowledgments

of Minnesota. Without these sources of support, I would never have

been able to hire such excellent research assistants: Sarah J. Jackson
(now Professor Jackson!), Meagan Manning, Anna Popkova, and the
amazing Ruth De Foster.
As always, I am extremely grateful for the continuous supply of affec-
tion and strength I get from my better mathematical half, Bryan, and
our twins, Will and Helena. I am happy to now have more time to thank
them for their support.
Introduction

Welcome to Post-Racial America

As my son and I walked down the street, taking our usual route with
our dog, we crossed paths with a man I’d never seen in our neighbor-
hood before. He appeared to be white and seemed to be looking for
something specific, as if he needed directions. He smiled at us as we
approached, looked at the dog, and asked from a few yards away, “What
breed is that?” I told him she was a mix: “Australian Shepherd and Bea-
gle, or so we were told by the dog rescue society.” He petted her, smiled,
and then looked me right in the face to ask his next question:
“What kind of mix are you?”
Just another day in post-racial America, I thought.

* * *

How is it that in what’s termed “post-racial America,” people seem to

keep finding ways to keep talking about race? Race is a common topic
of conversation and a predictable source of moments of confusion and
comedy, as well as of desolation and violence. We are regularly told that
things have changed—we are now “post-race”—but exactly how and why
those changes have come about and what the changes mean are matters
of continuing debate. In mundane and formal settings, citizens confront

>> 1
2 << Introduction

race in subtle and obvious ways every day. From celebrations of the inau-
guration of the first black president to news of a neo-Nazi attack in Nor-
way, race and racism remain salient features of our world. In the wake
of social movements for justice, generational change, cultural exchange,
immigration, and other phenomena that reshape our racial realities, a
new question has erupted in the last decade: Are we post-racial?
The Post-Racial Mystique explores how a variety of media outlets—
the news, network television, and online independent media—define,
deploy, and debate the term “post-racial” in their representations of
American politics and society. Media discourses and imagery help us to
map the contours of change in society’s understanding of race. The book
draws upon a variety of disciplines—communication studies, sociology,
political science, cultural studies—in order to understand emergent
strategies for framing discussions of post-racial America. Each chapter
presents a case study of these strategies and explores how and whether
each contends with (or ignores) remaining racial inequalities and social
tensions, as well as what (if any) future for race is imagined. The diverse
case studies illuminate the ways in which media texts and appeals cast
U.S. history, reimagine interpersonal relationships, employ statistics,
and inventively redeploy other identity categories in a quest to formu-
late different ways of responding to race.
The cases in this book were selected in order to sample (although
not systematically) different genres and media outlets. Because the
public engages in a mix of specialty and mass media consumption, it
is important to survey how both broad-based and niche media wrestle
with questions of race in the twenty-first century. Moving from media
targeted to general audiences (mainstream news and prime-time tele-
vision series) to messages targeted to particular well-defined groups
(specialty Christian digital media and progressive blogs) and to audi-
ence interactions (Facebook discussion groups and focus groups), the
case studies shed light on some of the emerging modes of contempo-
rary post-racial discourse, revealing recurrent themes and problematic
tensions around race, gender, family, and political allegiances. Across
these varied expressions of the post-racial, I explore how communica-
tors work to (re)create and/or re-envision a sense of community, inspire
(or reject) new vehicles for multicultural inclusion, and confront the
facts of persistent racial inequalities in the United States.
 Introduction >> 3

The Emergence of “Post-Racial”

While the term “post-racial” was not commonly used in the 1980s and
1990s, discussions of the meaning of race—particularly the meaning of
black identity—were widespread. In the explosion of black media and
celebrity culture of the 1980s and the culture wars, commentators from
a wide variety of media, political, and scholarly venues pondered the
meaning of blackness in the so-called “post–civil rights era.” Nelson
George, bell hooks, Toni Morrison, and Cornel West wrote about the
pop culture and political spectacles of blackness from Michael Jackson’s
dominance of the pop charts to Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill’s hear-
ing, hip hop, OJ’s ride, and Lisa Leslie’s WNBA dunk.1 Debates over the
meaning of black identity and the continued existence of racism swirled
around Spike Lee’s films, novels such as The Women of Brewster Place
and The Color Purple, and the TV juggernauts of the Cosby Show and
Oprah. Vernon Reid’s band, Living Color, NBC’s A Different World,
painter Jean Michel Basquiat, the quilters of Gee’s Bend, and curator
Thelma Golden introduced multiple audiences to a wide variety of black
subjectivities, artistic expression, and intra-group differences.2 In this
mix were considerations of law (the war on drugs, abortion, police bru-
tality), immigration (do Caribbean-born blacks have a superior culture
of middle-class success?), religion (why are church pews still so segre-
gated?), education (should affirmative action remedies continue in col-
leges?), and politics (why don’t more black people vote Republican?).3
Although most of these high-profile media discourses about race
centered on blackness, Latinas/os, Asian Americans, and whites were
also implicated and specifically mentioned as well. Often this was done
via comparison. For example, commentators wondered if “immigrant”
populations were more culturally attuned to educational and workplace
success than African Americans. Others posited that Asian Americans
didn’t really need affirmative action or equal cultural representation
since they were “model minorities.” The advent of Whiteness Studies
occasioned some hand-wringing as well, with discussions of whether
academia had gone too far in analyzing the dominant racial group. In
the wake of the violent unrest after the Los Angeles police officers were
acquitted of beating Rodney King, news media seemed surprised to
find inter-group tensions between black and Asian American groups in
4 << Introduction

Figure I.1. Barack Obama and Joe Biden at the 2008 Democratic National Convention.
Courtesy of the Carol M. Highsmith Archive, Library of Congress, Prints and Photo-
graphs Division.

California. And when the Human Genome Project began presenting its
results and the mixed-race movement showed muscle in the 2000 Cen-
sus hearings, Time magazine and others speculated on how the seem-
ingly inevitable “merger” of human races would produce a new, unified
beige human race. Still, it was not until the mid-2000s that “post-racial”
became the go-to term for these kinds of changes in the American
racial landscape.
Post-racial rhetoric surged during the historic 2008 election. Across
the nation, pundits and politicians, bloggers and celebrities made ten-
tative and dismissive statements about the (finally?) declining signifi-
cance of race. But as the last few years have demonstrated (again), rac-
ism and racial inequalities persist and in some areas, such as wealth and
health, have deepened. The gap between the aspirational post-racial
discourse and the brutal realities of poverty, police profiling, anti-
immigration vitriol, and mind-boggling incarceration rates for blacks
and Latinos/as is wide. Yet the media continue to churn out films and
shows that feature scores of people of color living discrimination-free
 Introduction >> 5

lives. Advertisements showcase knowledgeable professionals of all col-

ors happily giving advice or buying products for their middle-class
homes—right next door to their white friends. When someone reports
a racist incident on the news, sources scramble over each other to deny
any racist intent or impact of the event in question. They point to mil-
lionaire black athletes, Asian American collegians, and, of course, our
biracial president as proof of that America is post-racial. This book
explores the post-racial mystique conjured by the disjuncture between
the entrenched effects of institutional racism and the media texts that
deny—or purport to resolve—racial inequalities.

Post-Racial Media

The use of the term “post-racial” is both widespread and ecumeni-

cal in media—commentators and partisans from the Right, Left, and
center have embraced, questioned, and mocked the term over the past
decade, with increasing intensity during the 2008 election. The prolif-
eration of this word suggests hopes and fears about race, democratic
progress, and multiculturalism—fears that stem from the decades’ long
“culture wars,” struggles over the meaning and extent of the impact of
civil rights era reforms, and the role of the state in mediating identity
politics and redistributive justice. It emerged in popular discourse at a
time when the human genome project “proved” that there aren’t “dif-
ferent races;” that we humans are more alike than different; that race is
a social construct, not a constituent element of humanity. However, as
Eric K. Watts summarizes,

Treating “race” as merely a social construction misses a crucial facet of

its nature; the power of tropes of race . . . [that are] coded into the insti-
tutions we inhabit and the social relations regulated by them. . . . Say-
ing that “race” is a “fiction” does very little to disable its vigorous
affects. . . . The trope of the “postracial” enunciates the “demise” of “race”;
meanwhile . . . strategists capture and redeploy the haunting and raven-
ous affects of “race.”4

The way this trope operates, however, varies across media and depends in
part on who’s defining—or disputing—what “post-racial” is and means.
6 << Introduction

Post-Racial Discourses: Embracing Diversity through Neoliberal Logics

Hosts of media scholars have investigated how post-racial representa-

tions and discourses operate in the contemporary United States. Main-
stream media suggest our society requires no further political or social
activism to achieve equal opportunity for people of all races.5 This post-
racial vision of an already-achieved multicultural nation draws upon
neoliberal ideologies of market individualism, whereby race/ethnicity
presents us with specific choices to navigate: whether to or not to join
groups founded by people of our race; whether to consume cultural
products that reflect the customs or tastes of racial Others.6 Post-racial
discourses obfuscate institutional racism and blame continuing racial
inequalities on individuals who make poor choices for themselves or
their families. Post-racial discourses resonate with neoliberal dis-
courses because of their shared investment in individual-level analysis
and concern with individual freedoms. Remedies that draw upon group
solidarity or require state or other kinds of intervention in the mar-
ketplace—a realm imagined to be neutral, organized by self-interested
individual choices—are deemed suspect and anathema to values such
as merit and hard work.
For example, scholars have analyzed how neoliberal post-racial log-
ics of the reality TV show America’s Next Top Model compel contestants
of color to “embrace the particular aspects of their non-white racializa-
tion that the market deems attractive” and hide the rest.7 Contestants
with ambiguous skin tones celebrate how they can provide the model-
ing industry with an array of “looks” that are saleable in a time of mul-
tiracial chic. As one model gushed, “I could bring a lot of diversity, a
lot of versatility, because I can pass for Latina . . . Asian . . . black.”8 This
show and others reinforce the notion that racial identities are malleable,
yet differently valued in the marketplace. However, nowhere is there
recognition of the racist aspects of that valuation system that continues
to value whiteness or near-whiteness over other “looks.” When darker
skinned contestants lose points, their failures are framed in terms of
not making the right moves with their difference. The judges’ under-
valuation of their racial performances is understood as “objective” and
just the way the business works, not a product of prejudice or deeply
rooted white dominance of the fashion industry. The show fosters
 Introduction >> 7

the post-racial idea that everyone has the same degrees of freedom to
choose their preferred level of ethnic/racial identification, while ignor-
ing continued stereotyping and the privileges of whiteness.
Likewise, in news reports about the subprime loan crisis, the banks
were deemed “too big to fail,” while the disproportionate number of
people of color with mortgage woes seemed preternaturally doomed to
failure by many commentators. When the massive numbers of foreclo-
sures in black and Latina/o neighborhoods made headlines, many edi-
torialists framed the issue in terms of the failure of black and Latina/o
homebuyers to educate themselves on how to negotiate a sound mort-
gage. Copious evidence of fraudulent loan practices was swept aside in
favor of a neoliberal, post-racial view of a marketplace that faltered due
to naïve or greedy individuals.9 Similarly, on “Judge” shows such as Joe
Brown and others, the legal problems of the mostly African American,
Latina/o, and poor litigants are contrasted with the bootstrapping life
story of Judge Brown. 6 Brown and other TV judges consistently use
racist and sexist stereotypes to lambast the lifestyles and decision-mak-
ing of participants in the trials. Unemployment, single parenthood, lack
of access to education—all are chalked up to lack of willpower.
A related way of conveying post-racial illusions in the media
is through a “celebration” of differences. As with the models who
“worked” their ambiguous ethnicity for the industry, here post-racial
logic responds to demographic changes and globalization of media to
maximize market share. As Jonathan Rutherford writes, “Paradoxi-
cally, capitalism has fallen in love with difference: advertising thrives
on selling us things that will enhance our uniqueness and individual-
ity. . . . From World Music to . . . ethnic TV dinners to Peruvian hats,
cultural difference sells.”10 Advertisers fill magazine spots with care-
fully blended groups of attractive people of different races, inviting
us to consume the mix without having to think about what social and
political practices would be necessary to make our neighborhood or
workplace as diverse as the ads.11 Multiracial people in particular help
facilitate a sense of safe diversity, satisfying the need to bring color into
the frame without conflict. For example, media scholar Jon Kraszewski
demonstrates how MTV’s push to retool its liberal image to be more
friendly to conservatives led it to increase multiracial cast members on
The Real World after 2000. MTV feared that white conservatives had
8 << Introduction

been offended by past seasons’ representations of white rural contes-

tants who expressed racist views—views criticized by urban black and
liberal white cast members.12 Casting and editing shaped multiracial
people into “bridges” between black and white who could inspire toler-
ance in contrast to the show’s prior dependence on interracial conflict
for drama. This strategy echoes 1990s and 2000s news discourses that
positioned multiracial people as conduits to a post-racial society.13
Another post-racial approach offers this solution to the race problem:
Substitute more “legitimate” social identities for racial identities. While
many on the Left have argued for decades that class, not race, should be
the main identification for progressive struggles, the Right has recently
amplified its use of this post-racial strategy in terms of religion and
nation, arguing these categories provide more stability and possibilities
for social cohesion than race. Moreover, in the wake of 9/11, attacks on
multiculturalism were launched in part on the idea that “tolerance” of
differences had gone too far. Therefore, a return to a national identity
grounded in Judeo-Christian principles was necessary to squelch the
alleged excesses of multicultural relativism. The September 11 attacks
amplified concerns about “Other” enemies within, providing proponents
of assimilation with a dramatic, violent example of what they saw as the
endgame for multicultural tolerance: endless fragmentation amongst
groups and internecine battles for ideological purity. After the attacks,
many commentators insisted that the impetus was on people of color
and non-Christian religions to prove their American-ness, to attend
more to similarities with other Americans than to differences. In analyz-
ing these discourses, Tariq Modood discusses how they presented mul-
ticulturalism either as a failed experiment or as a fait accompli requiring
no further state or social intervention.14 For her part, Susan Searls Giroux
illustrates how the attacks were used to justify neoconservative revival of
the culture wars, wherein the Right framed any attempt to discuss racial
inequalities, the unjust profiling of Muslim Americans, and hate crimes
against those who “looked Arab” as divisive and anti-American.15
But promoting national identity does not work equally for all racial-
ized Others. For example, Evelyn Alsultany analyzed how non-profit
and government agencies utilized advertising campaigns in an attempt
to disrupt the association between American Muslims and terrorism
and assert their patriotism. She concludes that the public service spots
 Introduction >> 9

reinforced existing racist and Orientalist representations of Arab and

Islamic peoples by highlighting the exceptionally patriotic attributes
of individual Muslim Americans and families in images and texts that
reinforced an Us-Them binary. The implied comparison group—Other
Muslims who are essentially anti-Western—required Muslim citizens to
“prove their loyalty to the nation for a chance at being imagined as part
of the diverse national community.”16 Political rhetoric and press reports
suggested strongly that only so much difference—and specific perfor-
mances of difference—were tolerable post-9/11.17 Here, being post-racial
required people of color—in this case, people of Arab descent and/or
Muslim faith—to silently accept racial profiling as a sacrifice for the
nation and to tacitly agree to refrain from exercising their First Amend-
ment rights to satisfy a barely tolerant majority.
Substitutions of more “legitimate” identity categories also have prob-
lematic implications for policy. Supporters of class-based affirmative
action, for example, argue that if race is removed from the table, pro-
grams based on income disparities alone will solve the problem of the
race gap in education. This thinking is flawed, however, as has been
borne out in states such as Texas, where the lauded “Ten Percent Plan”
has not increased the number of black and Latino/a students at flagship
state universities as promised; indeed, some analyses found decreases
in enrollment.18 The class-not-race approach fails to recognize the inter-
sections of race and class; thus, class-only policies will not remedy the
subtle and not-so-subtle effects of racial discrimination and segregation
that operate in K–12 educational institutions or in other facets of col-
lege admissions criteria. Although many liberals hope that class-based
policies will resonate with white voters who switched party allegiances
in the Reagan era, there is little proof that strategies of “New Demo-
crats” for using class to get at race have dampened racial resentment.19
This approach also fails to confront the issue of social responsibility for
racial discrimination.

Post-Racial Representations: Comedy and

Casting—But Hold the Conflict

Another variant on post-racialism is what some have taken to calling

“hipster racism” or “equal-opportunity offending” in comedy. Sitcom
10 << Introduction

writers, stand-up comics, and others “ironically” spew racial epithets and
stereotypes as part of their jokes, all the while winking at the audience that
they’re not really racist—they’re making fun of racists, right? In the post-
racial entertainment world, anything goes because we “all” know it’s inap-
propriate to be racist—so the racist jokes are a hip way of pushing bound-
aries. Anyone who protests is uptight and humorless. As writer Liddy
West puts it, hipster racism is expressed in the attitudes of “educated,
middle-class white people (like me—to be clear, I am one of those) who
believe that not wanting to be racist makes it okay for them to be totally
racist.”20 Shows like South Park, Tosh.O, and countless stand-up routines,
Twitter hashtags, and YouTube videos exhibit this hipster, shock-value
post-racial humor. Moreover, the same kind of humor is often unleashed
to refute criticism of the continued dominance of white actors, writers,
and producers in mainstream media. Recently, critics of the all-white hit
HBO show Girls were treated to lynching jokes and snarky comments
about the movie Precious by the show’s defenders and head writer.21
One web article on the Girls controversy linked to a 1979 piece by
music journalist Lester Bang, in which he recounted how he decided
to stop the habit of using “nigger” to prove he was “edgy” after he was
confronted by the pain he caused an African American friend.

Ivan Julian told me that whenever he hears the word “nigger,” no mat-
ter who says it, black or white, he wants to kill. Once when I was drunk
I [said] that the only reason hippies ever existed in the first place was
because of niggers, and when I mentioned it to Ivan while doing this
article I said, “You probably don’t even remember—” “Oh yeah, I
remember,” he cut me off. And that was two years ago, one ostensibly
harmless little slip. You take a lifetime of that, and you’ve got grounds for
trying in any way possible, even if it’s only by convincing one individual
at a time, to remove those words from the face of the earth. . . . Another
reason for getting rid of all those little verbal barbs is that no matter how
you intend them, you can’t say them without risking misinterpretation
by some other bigoted asshole; your irony just might be his cup of hate.22

When hipsters are criticized, their reactions usually dismiss or ignore

the pain people of color and other people who are objects of hipster
bigot jokes. The freedoms and pleasures of whites are privileged over
 Introduction >> 11

the desires of people of color to decrease their exposure to racist

speech. As West wrote in her blog posting about why hipster racism
is still racist, “It’s all tied up with the deliberately obtuse people who
conflate ‘freedom of speech’ with ‘immunity from criticism.’ . . . [Racist
jokes] hurt people. Why do you want to hurt people?”23 Likewise, Chan-
ning Kennedy of Colorlines wrote that defenders of hipster racism argue
that “only bad people are susceptible to racism, so therefore it’s okay
for us good people to pretend to be racist for comedy’s sake. Anyone
who doesn’t like it is the real racist.”24 The ironic/humorous post-racial
stance misunderstands the meaning of the social construction of race.
It translates social construction to mean that race isn’t real and is mal-
leable and that each individual can therefore make of it what s/he will.
This misreading of social construction leaves out scholars’ and activists’
attention to how the changing construction of racial identity manifests
within institutional and social processes that reinforce inequalities born
in earlier eras. The power of race—even if it is not a proper biological or
fixed category—is a measurable phenomenon.25
This is not to say, of course, that humor can’t be anti-racist. Indeed,
scholars such as Bambi Haggins and Mel Watkins have chronicled how
African American comedians have used their routines and sketches to
resist and undermine racism. But post-racial humorists aren’t always
clearly anti-racist, as humor need not indicate responsibility or directly
indict people in power. For example, Haggins discusses how breakout
comedy star Dave Chappelle appeals to white audiences in part because
many of his racial sketches are often vague about issues of whiteness
and power.26 In contrast, Jonathan Rossing offers Stephen Colbert as a
satirist who endeavors to make clear the privileges of whiteness in his
post-racial spoofing of neoconservative pundits and politicians. He
describes how one of Colbert’s mock editorials disrupts “familiar dis-
courses of colorblindness and offers a counter-hegemonic critique of
naturalized ideologies of whiteness.”27 This leads to the next form of
post-racialism: post-racism.

Post-Racialism as Anti-Racism

The proliferation of post-racial discourse is partly inspired by scholars

of critical race theory and cultural studies who call for us to embrace
12 << Introduction

notions of hybridity and intersectionality, constructs that should gener-

ate more and better ways to combat racism without using terms tied to
essentialist understandings of identity. The broad circulation of post-
racial discourse suggests a yearning for our communities to be healed
of racism, not just to “get beyond race.” This, however, is the least fre-
quent connotation of post-racial in the media examined in this book.
Now that institutionalized racist regimes have been partly dismantled,
how do we deal with difference? This is the question that the post-racial
begs: When we get “beyond race”—and, more importantly, the racism
that structured our society for so long—how does race work? Certainly
the physical characteristics we’ve identified as “racial” do not disappear
from our field of vision or biological code. Do we create mechanisms
to reform the partial assimilation strategies of the past that allowed
for various European immigrants to “melt” into the American pot
such that “visible” racial minorities also have equal access to becom-
ing recognized as legitimate American citizens? Or is there a way for
difference to matter in a more transformative way? How do we reshape
society when we have few models for pluralism that don’t rest on hier-
archies based on racial and gender and sexual orientation differences?
Post-racial media touch on these questions in varying ways.
Not all post-racial media are “bad.” We should be happy, for exam-
ple, that we live in a time when networks feel pressure to integrate tele-
vision show casts. Moreover, we are now able to confront people who
express hurtful racial beliefs, even as we acknowledge their freedom of
expression. And, following Edward Schiappa’s caution that it is impos-
sible to create representations that will elicit from all audiences the
“right” responses in terms of attitudes or stereotyping behavior,28 I rec-
ognize that we cannot hold any particular media text to some standard
of representational perfection to satisfy all peoples of all racial back-
grounds. That being said, however, surveying the types of narratives
that are widely available to audiences about what “post-racial” means
show that there is a surplus of individualistic approaches and ahistori-
cal frameworks, at the same time that there remains a deficit of rep-
resentations of a post-racial society authored by people of color—the
very people who would benefit most from the end of racism and racist
assumptions. The most widely available approaches to the post-racial
are troubling because they inherit a lot of the same elements of past
 Introduction >> 13

articulations of how to solve the color line in ways that are seemingly
oblivious to the critiques and contributions of people of color and their
allies to rethinking race and racism. This book explores some of these
post-racial media phenomena.

The Plan of the Book

The first chapter, “Post-Racial News: Covering the ‘Joshua Generation,’”

explores how the term “post-racial” became widespread in dominant
news discussions of politics and culture. Drawing on an exhaustive
analysis of news items collected in the Lexis-Nexis news database, this
chapter illustrates how the term went from obscurity in the 1990s to a
widely used framing device in the mid-2000s. Although “post-racial”
is now a commonplace adjective used by journalists and pundits, what
the term means remains controversial and in flux. After delineating its
different uses, the chapter argues that while the debate over the term
is healthy and necessary, the effect of applying “post-racial” can be to
close down many productive avenues for public discussion.
Chapter 2 explores the strategy of replacing race with an ostensibly
more legitimate collective identity, religion. “Brothers from Another
Mother: Rescripting Religious Ties to Overcome the Racial Past” exam-
ines specialty conservative Christian media created to reach out to Afri-
can Americans. These media appeals to black voters often attempt to
rewrite black Civil Rights movements as primarily spiritual and Chris-
tian-oriented, thereby suggesting an impetus for Christian fellowship
with whites in the present. Displacing the political and racial elements
of these movements is suspect, however, and requires significant forget-
ting and forgiveness on the part of African Americans, who are encour-
aged to overlook the racially divisive strategies employed in the recent
past by the same organizations and individuals authoring these media
appeals. After analyzing one such appeal, the 2006 broadcast program
Justice Sunday III, the chapter shifts to a study of African American
Christians who watched segments of the program. Participants in the
focus groups were generally skeptical of the motives of white speakers
featured in the program—particularly those identified with the Repub-
lican Party. However, many of the participants also said they appreci-
ated and enjoyed the speeches given by African Americans.
14 << Introduction

Chapter 3, “The Post-Racial Family: Parenthood and the Politics of

Interracial Relationships on Network TV,” features an analysis of NBC’s
prime-time drama Parenthood, a remake of the popular movie of the
late 1980s. From its casting and inclusion of more people of African
descent, Parenthood is clearly a different text racially than its movie
ancestor. However, the portrayal of those African American characters
is not necessarily an unambiguous step forward. While well-meaning
in its attempt to engage with social issues and portray the multicultural
realities of California, the intergenerational drama continues to draw
upon some of the oldest tropes of black/white romantic relationships
and sexual interaction.
Chapter 4, “Post-Racial Audiences: Discussions of Parenthood’s
Interracial Couple” provides an analysis of fan responses to the show
on its official Facebook site. Fans have constructed specific discussion
topics and threads about the romantic pairings of black and white char-
acters, and often remark upon what they see as fair or unfair charac-
terizations of the couple, their behaviors, and their problems. These
conversations—which often get heated—demonstrate not only that the
show is problematic in its portrayals of the interracial family, but also
that viewers of different racial and ethnic backgrounds are invested in
talking through their different interpretations. They see the show as an
important potential site for learning—or unlearning—old-style repre-
sentations of interracial couples and children.
Chapter 5, “Not ‘Post-Racial,’ Race-Aware: Blogging Race in the
Twenty-First Century,” examines a handful of blogs and websites that
have gained circulation within traditional media as well as the Internet.
Three websites in particular—Racialicious, the Black Snob, and Color-
Lines—exemplify a diverse, complex set of concerns and approaches to
rethinking race in the twenty-first century. These sites provide readers
with information and perspectives that were rare in the news media
analyzed in chapter 1. Moving fluidly between identity groups, pop
culture, and politics, these sites suggest that post-racialism requires
us to be actively anti-racist in our everyday lives, and remind us that
any post-racial era will be the product of much more discussion and
reform.
In conclusion, the book presents a meditation on race, media, and
memory and suggests that a vigorous re-examination of how we tell the
 Introduction >> 15

stories of our racial past is necessary both to demystify post-racialism

and to learn strategies for promoting racial justice.
I deliberately chose the title The Post-Racial Mystique not only for its
resonance with Betty Friedan’s classic text, but also because I believe
there are parallels between my subject and Friedan’s insights about
the unnamed malaise felt by women of a certain age and class in the
1950s and 1960s even as the media and countless experts told them that
married mothers were living the dream. While desires to think about
activities outside managing a household were dismissed as folly, or even
regarded as a road to psychological and familial ruin, magazines, televi-
sion shows, and advertisements portrayed the American housewife as
“freed by science and labor-saving appliances from . . . the drudgery [of
housework]. . . . She was free to choose automobiles, clothes, appliances,
supermarkets; she had everything that women ever dreamed of.”29 Like-
wise, members of Generation Millennial—also known as Gen M, the
most multiracial generation in American history—are described as free
to interact with a smorgasbord of cultures, races, ethnicities, and reli-
gions without any further need for political activism.30 They can alleg-
edly pick and choose how racial identity matters to them, as well as take
their pick of colleges, workplaces, neighborhoods, and consumer goods
in ways their forebears who fought for racial equality only dreamed.
But as with the dream concocted by the feminine mystique, the post-
racial mystique is faulty in its reduction of social and political aspira-
tions to consumer and individual choice. It narrowly interprets prior
generations’ struggle as one for market-oriented freedoms rather than
a transformation of the society and common understandings of our
humanity, our relations with each other, our responsibilities to each
other, regardless of race, color, or creed. Hence, though the voices that
declare or represent a post-racial utopia in America are loud and hope-
ful, when we are reminded by ugly incidents in the news or unkind
interactions on the job that race still matters, we feel unease, and won-
der what’s wrong with us. The gap between many of our daily experi-
ences of race and the shiny, happy multiracial faces that smile at us from
billboards and TV screens reveals that the road to post-racial America
remains very long. This book doesn’t provide a single definition of
“post-racial” or a solution to “the race problem.” What it endeavors to
do is help describe how post-racial media have further complicated,
16 << Introduction

and in some ways frustrated, national conversations about race and

democratic progress.

* * *

Returning to my walk with my son: When I was asked about my “mix”

on the heels of giving information about my dog’s breeding, it was clear
to me that the man had identified me not as a canine, but as a so-called
“mixed-race” human. This was confirmed when (after taking a moment
to choose between a snappy comeback and a calm, honest response) I
decided to provide a brief account of my parents’ identities: “My mother
is German American, my father is African American.” He smiled again,
pointing at us as he replied, “I thought so—I can see that North African
in you and him. I’m a mix too—Irish, German, Lithuanian, and Jew.
Most of us white folks got Jew in us, but most are afraid to admit it.” He
went on to say he was looking for a car he was repossessing and had to
“get on with that business.” After we exchanged a wave, he went up the
hill toward a deserted Jeep, which he proceeded to drive away.
My new acquaintance’s mode of conceptualizing identity, which
mixed categories of race, ethnicity, geography, and religion, is indicative
of the fluid, shifting ways most people naturalize and articulate racial
identities today. It also reveals how supposedly old frameworks for
race—such as the idea that “Jew” is deemed by some as “separate” from
and inferior to “white” and that race is “in you” (is “North African” a
race or a region?) via blood—continue to have purchase in the twenty-
first century. This strange amalgamation of acknowledging racial “mix-
ing” with ease, while still depending on biological constructions of race
and culture, is also indicative of the problem with the use of “post”
with “racial.” As Thomas Holt notes, “post signals its ambiguity: differ-
ent from what preceded it, but not yet fully formed or knowable.”31 The
problem with post-racial media is that acknowledgements that we are
still grafting our “new” racial understandings onto those of the past are
rare. We pretend to our peril that racism is safely in our past. We must
recognize that we haven’t fully grappled with the legacy of de jure let
alone de facto racism, and cannot allow post-racial optimism to blind
us to the corrosive, continuing effects of race in the contemporary
world.
1

Post-Racial News

Covering the “Joshua Generation”

The earliest reference to “post-racial” I could find in the news appeared

in a 1976 Newsweek article about then-presidential candidate Jimmy
Carter. The reporter described the Georgia Democrat as one of a small
handful of white politicians who were willing to “gamble his future on a
new post-racial Southern politics” in the years prior to the major legal
victories of the civil rights movement.1 In this context, post-racial poli-
tics meant a politics that would emerge when the institutional apparatus
of white supremacy was dismantled. The article compared Carter to the
character of Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird: clear in expressing
his disdain for racism, but also clear-eyed about the limits of his ability
to help black people in his community. After this profile of Carter, the
term vanished from the news. Perhaps it didn’t catch on then because
violent white resistance to segregation was still fresh in the minds of
journalists. In 1976, school busing and affirmative action fights were
raging in the courts and in neighborhoods throughout the country. It
was hard to imagine the South or any other portion of the nation being
“post-” anything having to do with race. Indeed, the term didn’t cap-
ture journalists’ interest until the nation was on the cusp of electing the
first president of African descent. Why and how the term went from a
one-time use in a story about a southern white Democratic candidate

>> 17
18 << Post-Racial News

in 1976 to becoming a regular feature of election year news discourse

in 2008 sheds light on the factors that continue to stymie the media’s
“national conversations” on race—conversations that usually leave par-
ticipants and observers frustrated and wanting something more.
As I discussed in the introduction, the emergence of “post-racial”
as a buzzword in the media was a result of multiple factors. This chap-
ter focuses on the ways in which news discourses of race in American
politics and society adopted the term “post-racial” to describe shifts
in demographics and culture which seemed to require a different set
of terms than “diversity” or “multicultural” or “colorblind.” When
news producers seized upon “post-racial” en masse in the 2000s, it
was as if they’d discovered the word they’d been searching for to tem-
per—or end—the contentious debates of the culture wars, when talk
about race, pursued in distrustful fits and starts, seemed doomed to
fail. This chapter presents a content analysis of post-racial news dis-
courses. First, I tracked the usage of the term from 1990 to 2010 to
discern which uses of “post-racial” dominated discussions of race and
racially inflected events. While finding that the term was used only
minimally in the 1990s, compared to the 2000s, the analysis shows
that similar themes accumulated around the term throughout both
decades.
The second part of the chapter examines significant surges in use
that occurred in the early 2000s, most often in stories about particular
individuals and issues linked to African American identities and poli-
tics. Specifically, close readings of the articles show that the usage of
“post-racial” accumulated around the continued debate over affirma-
tive action, the significance of the civil rights movement in contempo-
rary life, the style and appeal of black politicians as well as multiracial
celebrities of African descent, and the fascination with rapidly shifting
racial/ethnic demographic data. The term also accompanied discus-
sions of whether pop culture consumption and racial intermarriage are
clear markers of an imminent post-racial era, as commentators debated
whether “Generation Millennial” would achieve “Dr. King’s Dream” of
a society where skin color is of no consequence. The final sections of
the chapter draw from a mix of close reading and quantitative analy-
sis of the exponential increase in appearances of “post-racial,” finding
that Barack Obama’s candidacy and early presidency drove most of the
 Post-Racial News >> 19

post-racial talk, usually drawing from the same repertoire of issues and
frames as in the earlier periods.

The Rise of “Post-Racial”: The Numbers

The term “post-racial” is multifaceted and reflects hopes and fears,

political calculations and demographic changes. Given the lack of prog-
ress in mediated public discourses of race in the 1990s, the appearance
and popularity of “post-racial” in the mid- to late 2000s suggests that
journalists and their sources found the term an intriguing and useful
tool for reframing racial discussions in the twenty-first century. Why
did this occur, and why so quickly? First, I conducted a basic content
analysis to find out whether use of the term really had increased sig-
nificantly over the past two decades.2 I was intrigued—and a bit sur-
prised—at how sharp the increase in usage actually was after the 1990s.
As Table 1.1 demonstrates, “post-racial” was barely mentioned on televi-
sion, radio, or in print in the 1990s. By 2008, each of these media—as
well as online news—contained hundreds of uses of the term.
Importantly, usage of “post-racial” increased in frequency not just in
sound bites from interviewees. Rather, as Table 1.2 illustrates, journalists
and editors themselves increased their use of the term in headlines and
lead paragraphs of stories in a way that suggests that by 2008, writers
and editorial staff were fairly confident that audiences would recognize
or be intrigued by the term “post-racial.” The numbers in Table 1.2 tell a
clear, if incomplete, story: “Post-racial” became a highly salient term for
journalists and commentators across a host of news media outlets by
the end of the 2000s. But the larger question remains: How was it being
used throughout the period, and why the sharp jump in 2008?

The 1990s: Post-Racial People and Politics—

In the Not-So-Near Future

“Post-racial” wasn’t a major buzzword in the 1990s news media; only

thirteen pieces used the word, and none in a headline. My close read-
ings of these news items found that all of them employed the term to
describe a time in the distant future when racial discrimination will
truly be a thing of the past. As journalists looked far ahead to the
20 << Post-Racial News

Table 1.1. News Items with “Post-Racial” in Text or Transcript

News Source/Medium 1990–2000 2001–2004 2005–2007 2008 2009 2010
Newspapers 11 55 72 767 821 575
TV/Radio transcripts 1 4 8 215 205 147
Magazines 1 9 23 130 84 75
Blogs & Web publications* N/A N/A 13 363 562 457
Total 13 68 116 1475 1642 1254

* Lexis/Nexis did not begin cataloging blogs, stand-alone web news sites like Politico, or
web-only articles until 2005.

Table 1.2. “Post-Racial” in Headline and/or Lead-In of News Items

1990–2000 2001–2004 2005–2007 2008 2009 2010

Headline and leading 0 4 8 226 371 257
paragraph
Headline only 0 0 0 64 105 91

post-racial dawn, they consistently invoked two interrelated factors that

would encourage the development of a post-racial America. First, they
proposed that the demographic changes brought about by multiracial
people, cultural mixing, and immigration provided a preview of a post-
racial society. Second, they posited that at some point, a post-racial pol-
itics would displace race-based alliances or strategies.

Post-Racial People: Tiger Woods and Multiracial Families

As golfer Tiger Woods began his meteoric rise in the sports world,
many writers argued that his success was proof that golf had overcome
its racist, classist country-club history to become colorblind—or post-
racial. Others surmised that his success was proof that the United States
as a whole had overcome race.3 But Cox News Service columnist Tom
Teepen chastised pundits for proclaiming that Woods’s expression of
multiracial identity and historic win at the Masters’ tournament sig-
naled that the 1990s were already post-racial. Teepen cited continued
 Post-Racial News >> 21

racial antagonisms and individuals with less-than-sterling racial records

to counter the hype:

Color isn’t the liability it once was, but jeopardies still attach, despite the
remarkable number if lifelong racial-justice laggards who are now insist-
ing we’re post-racial. Decry if you will chip-on-the-shoulder multicul-
turalism, but ethnic jockeying for place is hardly surprising in a nation
founded in racial inequality, only a generation past legal segregation, and
now trying to fend off Hispanic and Asian immigrants. We’re a ways yet
from just enjoying our diversity.4

Other articles pointed to the greater visibility of multiracial individuals

and families as a source of post-racial hope. In these pieces, though, multi-
racial people were portrayed as annoyed and/or oppressed by institutional
requirements to articulate to the state their racial identity. The practice of
recording and keeping track of racial identity, then, was portrayed as an
impediment to a post-racial society, and reinforced colorblind discourse.
One columnist remarked on the increase of multiracial and white college
applicants who declined to indicate their racial identity. He reported that
one college official believed that “the surge in Declined-to-state-ians may
be because the race category on the new, post-racial preferences univer-
sity application form is harder to find and fill out.” Then he joked, “Wait
a minute. Is she saying Declined-to-state-ians are lazy and stupid?”5 The
attempt at humor gestures toward racial stereotypes of black and Latina/o
students that can get into college only via affirmative action—that is, race-
conscious policy—not on “colorblind” merit alone. Thus, “racial” think-
ing was implied to be an outgrowth of keeping official records of racial
identity, a practice considered suspect by the writer. These pieces framed
the validation of group racial identities or political organizing around the
shared identities as anathema to a post-racial future. This theme also sur-
faced in reports on the possible emergence of a post-racial politics.

Post-Racial Politics

As writers toyed with the idea of a post-racial politics, they did not pro-
vide many examples of political practices or policies that would encour-
age further progress toward a post-racist America. Rather, “post-racial”
22 << Post-Racial News

politics meant black candidates would be able to count on white vot-

ers to support them at the ballot box. For example, in a discussion of a
1999 Supreme Court ruling that struck down a race-conscious congres-
sional districting policy, an interviewee on National Public Radio cited
data that showed white Democrats were still likely to cross party lines
to avoid voting for black candidates. The guest, political scientist Ron
Walters, concluded, “We’re not living in some post-racial age in the bal-
lot box yet.”6 He and other guests noted that the (misnamed) “Bradley
Effect”—that actual white voting rates for black candidates are lower
than pre-election polls suggest—was still a considerable hurdle. But
fickle white voters weren’t the only impediment to post-racial politics
in 1990s news: The motives and strategies of black politicians were also
roadblocks.
A feature on city council candidates in Dallas described the work-
ings of an old-guard black political machine, led by council representa-
tives like Roy Williams, who was described by reporter Dan Schutze as
someone who can “intone some of the time-honored maxims of racial
politics as though he were playing a cathedral pipe organ.” Then, he
contrasted Williams’s style with up-and-coming candidates who hailed
from a variety of racial/ethnic backgrounds.7 As the reporter followed
the challengers and the incumbents to public appearances, he framed
the voters’ choices as follows: between black politicians who fought a
good fight against (now insignificant) white discrimination, but now
merely rest on their laurels and black voter support, on the one hand,
and new politicians who garner support based on their willingness to
solve substantial urban issues and not just talk about race, on the other.

People here this evening pay respect to [Roy] Williams. . . . But it’s his-
tory. Everybody has seen African American council members on TV
giving white folks hell down there for decades. But how about some new
curbs? How about something we can see, something for which there are
no excuses? Welcome to the era of post-racial city council politics.8

This description of dysfunctional black urban politics neatly illustrates

what became a dominant theme in the 2000s: “Racial politics” are prac-
ticed by (mostly black) corrupt leaders who play on white racial guilt
 Post-Racial News >> 23

and stir up racial anger to keep people of color loyal. Indeed, this racial
strategy is so effective, the argument goes, that voters look the other
way when elected officials fail to deliver better outcomes. Thus, “racial
politics” are a destructive game, pitting insiders versus outsiders in a
game that benefits only the politicians. In this and other articles, lit-
tle is said about instances of interracial cooperation, let alone decades
of white racial political practices that deprived black people of voting
rights. Thus, “race” is attached to the political practices of people of
color, and white racial politics are absent.
Although the reports I’ve described so far refer to Democratic politi-
cians, Republicans also began to craft their own version of “post-racial”
politics. Two issues framed conservatives’ approach. First was the need
to change the GOP’s image as a mean-spirited, anti-diversity party. This
image was heightened during the conventions of 1992 and 1996, where,
despite the presence of Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell, the last-
ing afterimage was that of speakers such as Pat Buchanan, who called
for the end of affirmative action, exclusion of gays, draconian treatment
of undocumented immigrants, and so forth. After losing yet another
presidential election to Bill Clinton in 1996, Republicans were advised
by conservative writer Noamie Emery to reframe their policy propos-
als and tone down their rhetoric to better appeal to conservative black
and Hispanic voters. In a special issue of the New Republic devoted to
strategizing how to gain conservative majorities again in the United
States and the United Kingdom, she suggested that Colin Powell was
the perfect symbol to attract a center-Right group of non-white voters.
She also optimistically predicted that the GOP could both narrow the
gender gap and grab “20–40 percent of the blacks.” But to do so, she
said,

conservatives should learn to reframe their issues. . . . They should take

the lead in the country to a trans- and post-racial future, now that the
liberals have formally endorsed the ideas of identity, grievance, and vic-
timhood that have made the West Bank, Bosnia, and Northern Ireland
such wonderful places to live. . . . They should urge that the country drop
all racial classifications from the national Census, a sign that the country
relates to its people as citizens, not interchangeable members of blocs.9
24 << Post-Racial News

Here, Emery outlines how the Republicans should use post-racial peo-
ple (Powell) and policy prescriptions (end collection of racial data) to
persuade black and Latino voters to choose GOP candidates. She con-
strues race consciousness as a direct route to civic division.
Unsurprisingly, her instruction to eliminate racial categorization
on the Census echoes one of the dominant frames in news coverage of
multiracial identity in the 1990s: The state is “forcing” bi- and multira-
cial people to “choose one race”—that is, forcing people into making a
choice that allegedly devalues their individuality and judges them by
the color of their skin and not the content of their character.10 In the
process, Emery sketches out the second component of the strategy to
reframe the party as post-racial: present policy measures aimed to dis-
mantle civil rights legislation as means to promote individual equality.
She draws upon the same logic used by anti-affirmative action activ-
ist Ward Connerly and his allies: Using racial classifications to identify
anyone for any reason is actually racist—and anti-individualistic. Thus,
whereas in the past, conservative attacks that counseled colorblindness
often depicted people of color as deficient, the newer strategy involves
depicting race-aware policies as debilitating and divisive.
Bradley Jones and Roopali Mukherjee have traced the ways neo-
conservative anti–affirmative action rhetoric moved from blaming
and demonizing minorities to blaming big government for incapaci-
tating individuals’ ability to make their own choices.11 Conservatives
amplified this rhetoric and leavened it with inflammatory phrases.
Thus, politicians and pundits accused the NAACP, the Democrats,
and activists like Jesse Jackson, Jr., of wanting to “keep black people
on the plantation” of government dependency rather than liberate
them. Insisting that the Republicans will deliver real freedom to peo-
ple of color in the marketplace, these spokespeople encouraged voters
to support neoliberal policies that take government out of education,
social welfare, labor rights, and other arenas.12 In the 1990s, then, dis-
cussions of “post-racial” were most often framed within two areas of
civic life: demographic change and electoral politics. As the next sec-
tion demonstrates, after 2000, journalists and commentators contin-
ued to employ the term “post-racial” within these issue domains, as
well as increasing their use of the term to describe people and politics
in the next decade.
 Post-Racial News >> 25

The Rise of “Post-Racial”: Demographic Change and

a New Generation of Black Politicians, 2002–2007

In the first two years of the new century, there was no marked increase in
the use of “post-racial.” But in 2002, the press and political elites identified
a “new generation” capable of changing the racial terrain, and the promi-
nence of members of this generation provided more impetus for post-
racial talk. The cohort included: Tennessee Congressman Harold Ford,
Jr.; Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick; Philadelphia Mayor Michael
Nutter; and then-Senatorial candidate, Barack Obama. Cory Booker’s
2002 run for mayor of Newark, New Jersey, jump-started the press with
a story that articulated the narratives of generational and demographic
change with political transformation of identities and policies.
These young African Americans—whom Barack Obama later dubbed
the “Joshua Generation” (meaning they were taking over from the prior
“Moses Generation” of black politicians whose careers were forged in
the civil rights movement)—were suitable for the post-racial bill for
several reasons.13 First, their biographies fit neatly into a ready-made
American narrative of inevitable forward progress and generational
renewal. The majority of them were Ivy-League educated sons who
benefitted from the civil rights struggles of their parents’ generation.
As such, they were heralded as proof of racial progress since the 1960s.
Second, their rise to prominence resonated with the “Great Leader”
narrative that has structured dominant media narratives of civil rights
movements as well as foundational myths of American innovation. As
many historians and memory studies scholars have cautioned, however,
the emphasis on black male leadership not only under-represents the
contributions of women and scores of unnamed people who fought and
died for racial equality, but also suggests that once the right leader is
chosen, victories will accrue.14 This obfuscates the need for long-term
planning, diligent hard work, and fortitude through times of backlash.
Furthermore, another danger of the “Great Leader” framework is that it
suggests we must first find a leader to define an agenda, and sets up the
leader for a fall should he fail—this narrative nearly always presents a
“he”—to deliver the goods.
Third, the demographic data attached to these emerging politi-
cal figures—Generation Millennial, white-voter friendly, and, in some
26 << Post-Racial News

cases, of multiracial parentage—hit on the nascent post-racial themes

that first showed up in the 1990s. The fresh-faced, light-skinned, Ivy
League–educated black men formed a kind of post-racial “talented
tenth” whose profiles were fit to a frame for “getting beyond race.” And,
importantly, the ways that these men talked about race to multiple con-
stituencies facilitated post-racial labeling. Whereas a candidate like Al
Sharpton ran a (brief) issue-focused presidential primary campaign to
put issues of racial injustice on the table, post-racial candidates would
not make such topics central to their message of change. This opened
up more space for pundits to insist that the practices, issues, and fig-
ures of the civil rights era—the Moses Generation—had worn out their
welcome.

Joshua versus Moses: Booker versus Sharpe and Beyond

My close readings of the news items from 2002 found that Cory Book-
er’s run for mayor in Newark, New Jersey, provided the first full test of
the post-racial politician frame. The contest generated more than twice
as many uses of “post-racial” in news media than had occurred in the
previous year. In the thirteen articles that used the term in 2002, six
were about Booker and the meaning of his candidacy.
In these news items, journalists and sources continued to suggest
that most black politics could be characterized as appeals to a mis-
guided sense of shared identity or racial loyalty rather than as a product
of struggles, strategies, and shared experiences among people of color.
This caricature of the “Moses” generation infused the articles written
about Booker’s mayoral campaign against the four-term black incum-
bent, Sharpe James. News writers and pundits solidified their defini-
tion of “post-racial” politicians: They were “beneficiaries of the civil
rights movement,” but not beholden to its political strategies or the
alleged racial chauvinism of figures like the Reverend Al Sharpton or
Jesse Jackson, Jr.15 The crucial difference between the old guard and the
young turks was that the latter were described as attractive to white vot-
ers: This became a linchpin of post-racial politics that augured an end
to uncomfortable tensions within the Democratic Party over whether
issues that disproportionately affect people of color—redlining, public
 Post-Racial News >> 27

Table 1.3. Comparison of News Items with References to “Post-Racial”

and Cory Booker
2001 2002
News items with “post-racial” used anywhere 5 13
News items with Booker and “post-racial” 0 6

education, poverty, police harassment, the death penalty—should be

front and center in the party’s agenda.
For reporters and editorial commentators, the Newark mayoral
race quickly became a symbol of an imminent change in black politics.
With headlines such as “In Newark Race, Black Political Visions Col-
lide”16 and multiple descriptions of Booker as a “vegetarian post-racial,
postpartisan” candidate,17 reporters quickly decided this election was a
harbinger of a post-racial era. 18 One front page headline declared the
mayoral contest was a sign of a “New Game in Urban Politics,” and con-
trasted the candidates as follows: “Mayor James—a stalwart of the civil
rights movement and part of the first generation of black municipal
leaders—is pitted against an equally fervent but young Ivy League—
educated reformer.”19 In another piece, this contrast was drawn in
greater detail:

[James] has been mayor for 16 years, and he was a city councilman before
that, elected in the wake of riots that rocked Newark and then one major
city after another in the late 1960s. Everyone elected with him in the
city’s black ascendancy has since retired, died or been indicted. . . . His
main opponent, Cory Booker, is a black freshman city councilman half
his age who moved here six years ago with degrees from Yale, Stanford
and Oxford to organize poor tenants against slumlords. He has attracted
glowing media coverage and a record $3 million in campaign contribu-
tions, much of it from wealthy, white donors outside Newark.20

Many other articles dedicated significant space to listing the vari-

ous and sundry race-baiting rumors James’s supporters spread, such as
Booker wasn’t really black, or that he was a pawn of white Jewish Wall
28 << Post-Racial News

Street executives. Newsweek’s Ellis Cose depicted the intergenerational

struggle and its identity politics as follows:

Booker makes it abundantly clear that he considers himself a differ-

ent breed—a post-racial man for an increasingly diverse Newark who
believes in multiracial, multiethnic coalitions and non-doctrinaire
thought. A child of privilege raised by corporate executives, Booker
could not have existed before the civil-rights revolution. . . . James
understandably views Booker’s challenge as something akin to betrayal.
So he has denounced the younger man, in terms not only extreme but
bizarre, suggesting, among other things, that Booker is not black—obliv-
ious, apparently, to the irony in defining blackness in terms of the very
lack of privilege that James himself struggled so valiantly against.21

Only one article contained the suggestion that this narrative of a gen-
erational divide and/or of the corruption of the older generation might
not be the most accurate depiction of black politics. Thus, towards the
end of his lengthy New Yorker feature on the Newark race, Jonathan
Tepperman included this passage about Booker’s relationship to black
political tradition:

[H]e bristles when I suggest he is running a race-less campaign. “Look,”

Booker says frowning, “I am a black man who takes a lot of pride in my
heritage and my people. I’m out there talking about race. . . . I haven’t
divorced myself from the tradition of African American politics, which
has always involved innovation and using new tactics for new situations.”
He pauses. “But I don’t want to be a great black politician. I want to be a
great politician.”22

Unfortunately, Tepperman failed to pursue or elaborate on Booker’s

statement about the innovations of black politics. Rather, he immedi-
ately provided another sound-bite condemnation of Sharpe James from
an African American professor, Orlando Patterson, who characterized
the mayor’s tactics as playing “the black chauvinist card.” Apparently,
Tepperman was either uninterested in querying Dr. Patterson about
other black political traditions, or felt no need to include any remarks
the professor (or Booker) may have provided on the subject.
 Post-Racial News >> 29

Figure 1.1. Harold Washington for Mayor campaign button.

Personal collection of the author.

In the end, readers could find nothing here or in the other news
items on the Newark race to back Booker’s claim about the richness and
vitality of black political traditions. Surprisingly, no one mentioned a
trailblazer like Chicago’s first black mayor, Harold Washington, who
won despite an incredibly racist campaign run against him by fellow
Democrats and Republicans. Against these racially skewed odds, a
coalition of liberal whites, Latinas/os, and African Americans elected
Washington in 1983. But unless a reader has knowledge of Washington
or other black coalition-builders, there is little evidence that anyone
of James’s generation has the capacity or desire to do so. Readers are
left with the hope that Booker and his generation will forge interracial
coalitions once the old guard has faded.
30 << Post-Racial News

The characterization of James and other older politicians of color

as racially suspect anachronisms continued to gain traction. Although
associations between post-racialism and Booker were numerous—
fifty-five stories between 2000 and 2007 linked him to the term “post-
racial”—Booker’s candidacy was by no means the only one that sparked
discussions of a post-racial turn in local and national politics. This
theme appeared in reports on other electoral battles, such as a 2006 race
for a congressional seat in New York, where a white Jewish candidate,
David Yansky, ran against three black candidates. The writer juxtaposed
images of “old-school,” aging black politicians with the professionalism
of the opposition in an article titled “Brooklyn Bantustan.” After noting
how the outgoing black congressman called Yansky a “colonizer,” the
writer depicted the black candidates as members of a fading, perhaps
dying, breed:

Even though the contest has been cast as black versus white, when
Owens, Vann, and the others stand . . . onstage and invoke icons of the
sixties civil rights movement, another color is blatantly apparent: gray,
the dominant hair color. . . What power this group of black leaders had
is quickly ebbing.23

In this and other articles, the main theme was that people of color were
about to shift away from voting based mostly on racial identifications to
considering the actual qualifications of candidates.

Wherefore Black Leadership? The Implications of Joshua versus Moses

The articles discussed above suggest that race still matters, but we don’t
know really what that means other than that the candidates who avoid
talk of racism or ways in which the racial past informs our present may
be more successful now than those who allegedly stir the racial pot. The
expectations for post-racial politicians set them up for the difficult chal-
lenge of attempting to relieve racial tensions without actually identify-
ing or addressing the roots of those tensions. The problem is that post-
racial news frames don’t provide a full picture of the scope of political
organizations and practices that blacks and other people of color engage
in across a host of institutions, cities, and regions. If the ascendance of
 Post-Racial News >> 31

the Joshua Generation is the key to post-racial political change, is it also

necessary that post-racial discourse simultaneously discount the older
generation or demonize any form of race-conscious politics?
Few observers would argue that people should vote based on racial
identity alone or that a politician shouldn’t to reach out to all groups in
his or her city. However, when the post-racial ideal is contrasted with
a caricature of a monolithic black politics—symbolized by a mayor
caught in scandals—the deck is unfairly stacked against the so-called
“civil rights generation.” The distortion of black politics and politicians
that emerges from these articles also fits into what Houston Baker, Jr.,
calls the “conservative nostalgia” narrative of the rise and demise of the
civil rights era.24 This narrative—exemplified in conservative misap-
propriation of Martin Luther King’s “Dream” speech25—posits that in
the early days of the civil rights movement, a harmonious relationship
among non-violent black protesters, benevolent, patient black leaders,
and exceptional white individuals drove positive change. What stopped
the tide of change? The rise of black power politics, often depicted as
a violent, radical politics of self-segregation practiced by the likes of
Malcolm X and the Black Panthers. This caused a rift in the movement
and pushed away well-meaning white allies, thus ending the promise
of King’s “Dream.” This story is incorporated in many popular—and
scholarly—narratives.26
A disturbing corollary to the depiction of black power as the down-
fall of civil rights progress is the idea that black leaders are primar-
ily responsible for getting things back on track towards a post-racial
America. If they broke it, they must fix it. This not only ignores the role
of white-dominated state and cultural backlash against racial justice
movements, but also extends and sustains the inaccurate, and prob-
lematic, “Great Black Male Leader” narrative. This retelling of civil
rights activism not only subsumes the presence and contributions of
women to anti-racist politics; it also reinforces the notion that black
people—black male leaders in particular—are responsible for solving
the “race problem.” Thus, in the sphere of electoral politics, in which
the race problem of the Democratic Party has been framed, for good
or ill, as “losing the white South” and white “Reagan Democrats” in the
North after President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act
of 1965,27 this “Great Black Leader” narrative lets Republican operatives
32 << Post-Racial News

and white citizens who respond to race-baiting politics off the hook:
The onus is on black and brown people to mute their concerns so as to
not scare away the white “moderates” and “independents” who left the
Democratic coalition in the 1970s and 1980s. In this scenario, black and
brown people need to stop “following” the lead of “divisive figures” like
Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, or Louis Farrakhan (or gangsta rappers or
__________: fill in the blank) and find the right kind of leader (Colin
Powell? Herman Cain?) who would move them in a better direction.
Accordingly, this narrative bifurcates black politics into two camps:
the “good” leaders like MLK and post-racial figures like Booker and
the “bad” leaders like Huey P. Newton and modern-day race-men like
Sharpton. On the Right, commentators tried to argue that the alleged
lapse in black and liberal leadership should convince black voters to try
the post-racial GOP.

Conservative Post-Racialism

Post-racial discourses on the Right emerged as Republicans tried to dis-

tance themselves from their race-baiting reputation, hoping to reintro-
duce themselves as “post-racial” to Latina/o and African American vot-
ers. One pitfall of this practice is that the racially suspect strategies of
past—and present—GOP strategists and policy positions are the salient
“pre-” that is contrasted with the “post-” moment. The racist past that
the post- has supposedly overcome remains the foil to the alleged
contemporary post-racial Republican Party. Moreover, the continued
prominence of certain present-day Republican officials whose rheto-
ric and policy preferences are hard to classify as “post-racial” makes
it difficult for the GOP to repair its image with voters of color.28 It is
no surprise, then, that the accompanying strategy of painting the Left
and Democrats as the true players of the race card is central to conser-
vative post-racial discourse: It is easier to paint liberals as reverse rac-
ists than to explain away decades of race-baiting politics. Thus, in the
early 2000s, Republican usage of “post-racial” crystallized around two
main ideas: first, that liberal Democrats and prominent black political
figures use race to manipulate voters; second, that the GOP is the post-
racial vanguard in politics due to its rejection of race-aware policies and
appreciation of individuals of color based on merit. At the same time,
 Post-Racial News >> 33

though, most writers had to acknowledge that some wings of the party
weren’t yet riding the post-racial wave.

Republican Post-Racial Reform: Recuperating

the Party’s Image, 2000–2007

Proximity to post-racial politics was demonstrated by George W. Bush’s

“compassionate conservatism” and appointment of blacks and Latinos to
his cabinet. Andrew Sullivan praised President Bush for appointing Con-
doleeza Rice as Secretary of State in the face of Democrats’ opposition.
He declared that reactions to Rice revealed “much of the Left’s diversity
mania is about upholding a certain political ideology, rather than eth-
nic or gender variety itself.”29 Bush’s “management style is clearly post-
racial,” Sullivan decided. Though President Bush was credited with tak-
ing a “post-racial approach” to assembling his cabinet, writers were still
split on whether the Republican Party as a whole was capable of post-
racial politics. This uncertainty was evident in reactions to Georgia Gov-
ernor Zell Miller’s confrontational keynote speech at the 2004 Repub-
lican National Convention. The New York Sun’s Luiza Savage opined
that Miller’s keynote gave viewers “the scowl of a white Southern sep-
tuagenarian . . . perhaps not the most desirable face for the Republicans
to project” in contrast to the optimistic, “post-racial” Democratic key-
note speaker, Barack Obama.30 Jonah Goldberg of the National Review
agreed: There was a stark contrast between “Obama—’a post-racial, smil-
ing, expansive young American’—[and] Zell Miller, his face rigid with
anger. . . . Remember who [Miller] is: once a proud supporter of racial
segregation.”31 Commentators cringed at the visibility of the GOP’s con-
tinued ties to icons of Southern racism and argued that the party was
missing out on the post-racial future. In their criticisms, the “racial” that
is attached to “post-” is associated with old-school, racist southern poli-
tics, a politics that has been soundly discredited and, allegedly, has no
impact on the seemingly post-racial present—except to scare off pro-
spective voters. The question therefore becomes whether the GOP will
reform its style and put out to pasture those politicians who refuse to get
up to post-racial speed to compete with the likes of Obama.32
There was also significant disappointment from conservative writers
who felt that the GOP’s initial response to Obama’s 2004 senate race
34 << Post-Racial News

fell short of the new post-racial expectations. When the party chose
Alan Keyes, a well-known black conservative, to replace the disgraced
white candidate, Jack Ryan, many felt their party was mimicking the
worst type of identity politics. An editorial in the Economist declared
that Keyes’s candidacy “smacks of tokenism. . . . [W]hat other than
racial discrimination can explain the Illinois Republican Party’s deci-
sion to shortlist two blacks for the Illinois seat—and eventually choose
Mr. Keyes? He brings no powerful backers . . . and was thrashed in two
runs for the Senate in Maryland.”33 The editors went on to say that the
GOP had neither listened to Obama’s speech nor realized that he “is a
post-racial candidate. . . . He appeals just as strongly to white subur-
ban voters as he does to blacks,” whereas Mr. Keyes was telling voters
Obama wasn’t a real African American because of his biracial, Kenyan
heritage.34 So the Right’s caricature of identity politics on the Left was
ironically playing out with the Republican black candidate, who ques-
tioned the authenticity of Obama’s blackness.
Conservative commentators had a slightly easier time framing Ken
Blackwell, a Republican conservative, as a post-racial candidate in 2006.
One columnist dubbed Blackwell “Reagan’s unlikely heir” for his stead-
fastness against gay marriage and abortion.35 Blackwell briefly became
yet another black male political star linked to the term “post-racial”
when he announced his intention to run for governor of Ohio. But the
post-racial case was still harder to make for Blackwell than for Obama’s
cohort in the Democratic Party. Young black Democrats, such as Booker
and Obama, were (correctly) described as “beneficiaries of the civil
rights movement”—but not beholden to the leaders of that movement.
Blackwell, however, was never described as “a beneficiary” of civil rights.
That clashed too much with his Republican bona fides, which required
him to deny having accrued any benefits from black Americans’ col-
lective actions. Older than Booker and Obama, Blackwell was in fact
involved with black student movements on his college campus in the
1960s.36 While his supporters described him as “post-racial, post-civil
rights,” they did not emphasize that he was a civil rights activist in col-
lege. Instead, conservative commentators (as well as Blackwell himself)
distanced him from the movement by calling him “Jesse Jackson’s great-
est nightmare.”37 Like the Joshua Generation Democrats, then, Blackwell
was distinguished from the civil rights generation.
 Post-Racial News >> 35

Conservative celebration of Blackwell’s “post-racial” candidacy res-

onated with the argument crafted by Noemie Emery a decade earlier
and deployed (as chapter 2 illustrates) in Justice Sunday III: Republi-
cans should acknowledge that their divisive strategies were scaring off
scores of potential conservative voters of color. In theory, any candidate
should be able to leave the “old” Republican racial tactics behind and
court voters of color based on shared conservative beliefs. But Black-
well’s campaign in particular was seen as a test run for those post-racial
political aspirations: Writers assumed that he could (finally) deliver
those black conservative voters. National Review columnist Kathryn
Jean Lopez opined that although GOP National Committee Chair-
man Ken Mehlman was correct to reach out to black conservatives, he
“doesn’t have the power that Ken Blackwell does to pull it off. In one
electoral triumph, Blackwell could achieve what no task force, outreach
program, or powerful speech ever will—making it ‘safe’ for blacks to
routinely vote Republican instead of being looked at as anomalies.”38
Lopez’s assertion is problematic. First, she assumed that most black
voters fear being harshly judged by other black people when they exit
the ballot box. There’s no recognition that voting Democratic might be
a rational, self-interested choice based on the party’s support for civil
rights policies or progressive tax policies. The idea that liberals have
bamboozled generations of black voters rests on the disturbing stereo-
type that black people lack the political sophistication to understand
their true interests—which, according to Republicans is to reject race-
conscious policies. Second, Lopez states that a white Republican will
not get the same reception from black listeners because they don’t
share his racial identity. Paradoxically, then, she wants black voters to
do what conservative writers usually condemn: listen to and vote for a
candidate because he is black. Thus, the GOP post-racial strategy, when
it involves black candidates, assumes that people of color will be more
likely to warm to Republican ideas if conservatives of color deliver the
message.39 In other words, their “post-racial” strategy is still dependent
upon color-conscious configurations of candidates and public repre-
sentatives. Republican operatives understand the value in leveraging
shared racial identity and essentialist notions of intraracial trust in an
ostensibly post-racial era of politics, if only to overcome a sorry civil
rights record.
36 << Post-Racial News

Post-Racial Policy: Colorblindness Remixed

At the same time that Republicans and allies tried to find candidates
of color to carry their banner into black and Latina/o communities,
they continued to try to reframe colorblind policy as post-racial. A
column by George F. Will, a writer for Newsweek and the Washington
Post, encapsulates this approach. Will’s column appeared in the wake
of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to uphold affirmative action in
college admissions. Famously, the majority decision included a section
authored by Sandra Day O’Connor predicting that within twenty-five
years, affirmative action would no longer be necessary.40 Still, Will was
outraged by the decision and stated that “The Supreme Court made
no sense here. It has given us black-and-white law in a post-race U.S.”
According to him, a key element for implementing affirmative action—
namely, the state’s ability to identify people by race to assess any racial
harms—was itself racist. The emergence of mixed-race people, new
immigrant groups, and scientific declarations that “race and ethnicity
are . . . dubious scientific categories,” 41 Will argued, meant that any race-
conscious policies or lawsuits are irrelevant and suspect. In other words,
if racial categories themselves are not stable or scientifically valid, then
no solutions based on racial or ethnic difference can be legal. He con-
cluded: “Demographics, not constitutional litigation, are determin-
ing the destiny of a post-racial America.” Thus, once racial categories
become “fluid,” multiply, or complicate the black-white divide, we have
become post-racial, and need no race-conscious remedies to address
lingering inequalities. This approach—which echoes Ward Connerly’s
ballot initiative drives—offers a concrete policy objective (eliminate
racial categorization protocols) and resonates with well-known, easily
accessed arguments about race, merit, and individualism.

Refuting Conservative Post-Racialism

Although there was an increase in discussions of an emergent post-

racial politics or a “Generation Mixed,” a handful of commentators still
emphasized that getting past race would take time and effort. These dis-
cussions of post-racialism, like their predecessors in the 1990s, com-
bined data illustrating racial inequalities and dismay at the premature
 Post-Racial News >> 37

diagnosis of a post-racial society. For example, in contrast to the George

Will column just discussed, Colbert King’s op-ed about the Supreme
Court’s decision to uphold affirmative action presents a very different
view of race in America. King’s column was inspired by Justice Ruth
Ginsberg’s reaction to the companion case against the University of
Michigan’s undergraduate admissions policy, which the court struck
down. Quoting from Ginsberg’s dissent, King agrees with the Justice
that racism is not in the past, even though “affirmative action foes
would deny . . . that we’re not in a post-racial America in which bigotry
is a thing of the past.”42 After sharing passages of the dissent, wherein
Ginsberg cites continued segregation, economic disparities, and evi-
dence of ongoing “‘[i]rrational prejudice . . . encountered in real estate
markets and consumer transactions,’” King lauds her for documenting
this proof in “lengthy footnotes.” Unlike Will, who did not even take
a moment to consider the evidence of racial inequalities in education,
wealth, health, and other domains, King counseled readers to continue
to recognize and fight against such disparities, thereby also implying
that the post-racial era will not emerge without such efforts to eliminate
the remnants of bigotry.
These two Washington Post columnists, Will and King, present
their audiences (King’s smaller than Will’s, since King’s column was
not reprinted elsewhere) with two very different visions of what post-
racialism means. For Will, it is an end of an era of government interfer-
ence in racial categorization and policy; for King, it is a time when big-
otry and residues of racial hierarchy no longer influence the life chances
of Americans of any color. Will sees a post-racial era emerging from
changing demographics and dismissal of race as a biological category;
King sees post-racial America coming into being only after defeating
racism and racial inequality via legal and other means. Unfortunately,
King’s take on post-racialism was almost drowned out in the deluge of
post-racial excitement that accompanied Barack Obama’s candidacy.

The Obama Effect: Exponential Growth of

Post-Racial Expectations, 2008–2009

As Table 1.4 illustrates, the popularity of the term “post-racial” grew

exponentially with Obama’s presidential campaign. This growth, in
38 << Post-Racial News

Table 1.4. Change in Use of “Post-Racial” in News Items (All Source

Types), 2005–2010

2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010

“Post-racial” mentioned 11 20 75 1475 1642 1254
“Post-racial” in headline 0 0 0 64 105 91

turn, required a different methodological approach for analysis of post-

racial discourse in news media. Whereas in previous years, the number
of stories using the term “post-racial” was small enough that perform-
ing a close reading of all items was reasonable, between 2008 and 2010,
when the number of stories increased to the thousands, I turned to a
mixture of quantitative coding and close reading to make the analysis
manageable.
As Susan Herbst notes, even with a seemingly infinite stream of news
and opinion available through digital media, “we can still dip into the
news systematically, keeping in mind that news outlets cannot be repre-
sented as neatly as they were twenty years ago.”43 My research assistants
and I gathered all the news items that included the term “post-racial”
and then created a random sample of 205 stories (after eliminating
repeats and errors). These stories were then coded for the types of peo-
ple, arguments, and definitions of “post-racial” used.44 Data analysis
from this sample is represented in Tables 1.5 and 1.6. In addition to cre-
ating the random sample, we also separated out from the entire set of
stories all of those in which “post-racial” appeared in the headline (260
stories), and coded each headline in terms of whether it seemed to have
an optimistic or pessimistic take on post-racial politics or society (Table
1.7). In addition, I also closely read all the stories in the random sample,
as well as half of the stories that used “post-racial” in the headline, some
of which overlapped with the sample. Overall, I read over 300 stories,
taking careful notes of the questions, themes, and issues in each one.
What I hope emerges from the combination of qualitative and quantita-
tive analysis is a broad, yet textured, picture of post-racial discourse in
the news.
As the previous chapter illustrated, reporters had already con-
structed frames for post-racial politics before the election. But once
 Post-Racial News >> 39

Obama began having success in the presidential contest, there was a

sharp increase in use of the term. In 2008, “post-racial” appeared in
over 1,400 news items, compared to only 116 between 2005 and 2007.
From his biracial heritage (post-racial to some people) to white voter
enthusiasm (for a post-racial black politician) to his own rhetoric that,
as Stephanie Li describes, “signifies without specifying” about race,45
news media framed Obama as the perfect (or suspect) post-racial fig-
ure. In other words, the elements of Obama’s persona and the historic
import of his candidacy generated the perfect post-racial storm.
Other researchers who have examined news and specialty media
coverage of the 2008 presidential election have concluded, as I do, that
despite the diversity of candidates in this historic election and its even-
tual winner, mainstream media did not push beyond the usual limited
frames for race and race relations, let alone include the influence of
class, gender, or sexuality.46 As Enid Logan summarized, election cover-
age of Obama adhered to a “triumphal narrative . . . that the ‘old’ politics
of race, focusing on black grievance, victimhood, and protest, were van-
quished” and that “newer, more effective” politics would replace the old
due to Obama’s victory.47 Even when journalists and editors had space
for longer-form explorations of the meaning of the campaign—such as
in the multiple commemorative books and DVDs produced and sold in
the wake of Obama’s 2009 inauguration—mainstream media turned to
familiar frames, placing “Obama’s ‘historic moment’ within a grander
discourse of immigration and freedom [and] suggest[ing] little change”
in how reporters respond to racial issues or events.48 Moreover, even
as many of these commemorative narratives and news reports declared
the election proof of post-racial society, they continued to emphasize
black/white relations and failed to take a more nuanced look at demo-
graphic change and political realities.
While this section reaffirms the previous analyses of election-year
news coverage and imagery, it also focuses on the ways in which ques-
tions about and hopes for a post-racial society built upon and solidified
the themes that emerged earlier in the decade. First, multiracial people
and families continued to be cited as “proof ” of an emerging post-racial
society. Second, optimism about Barack Obama’s candidacy was framed
within the boundaries of black politics drawn in previous discussions
of Cory Booker. These frames strongly suggested that a presidential
40 << Post-Racial News

Figure 1.2. President Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama at Inaugural Parade, 2009.
Courtesy of the Carol M. Highsmith Archive, Library of Congress, Prints and Photo-
graphs Division.

victory for a black man would in itself signal the beginning of a post-
racial era for the nation, without paying much attention to how a single
electoral contest would facilitate such radical change.

Generation M: Multiracial “Millenials” and the Post-Racial Future

Discussions of a post-racial America were driven largely by Barack

Obama’s presence in the campaign. Running second were articles
mentioning multiracial families and persons, as well as demographic
changes happening within the nation. The idea that demography
and the election were pushing post-racial change in 2008 lent a posi-
tive vibe to the majority of articles. Whether journalists described the
 Post-Racial News >> 41

Table 1.5. Types of Post-Racial People or Political Actors Mentioned,

2008–2010

Post-racial people 2008 (N=56) 2009 (N=90) 2010 (N= 59)

Barack Obama 76.80% (43) 66% (60) 66% (39)
Celebrities, multi-racial families, “new” demographics 49.90% (28) 49.6% (45) 26% (16)
Black politicians/civil rights generation 26.80% (15) 13.30% (12) 18% (11)

multicolored mix of people that had transformed the streets of their

hometowns, reflected on the increase in biracial children, or opined
about the popularity of celebrity people of color, the idea that a post-
racial society would emerge out of a new “mixed” generation appeared
in almost half of the sample of news items.
Many commentators who described Barack Obama as a post-racial
person felt he cemented that title in the wake of his famous speech
on race in Philadelphia during the campaign. Although Obama had
largely avoided references to racism in the early campaign, release of
an edited video of his pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, exclaim-
ing, “God Damn America!” for its racism and imperialism, pushed the
candidate to make a statement about race relations. After Obama gave
this March 2008 speech, National Public Radio’s Daniel Schorr opined
that the candidate’s “post-racial” response to the furor over the Rev-
erend Wright was promising, and surmised that “Young voters born
since the excesses of the last century have generally embraced the
Obama thesis” that it was past time to stir up old racial wounds.49 Sim-
ilarly, a USA Today columnist hoped that the next generation would
move us steadily towards a post-racial future and recounted an inci-
dent in which his son replied to the query of whether he supported
Obama because of his heritage by saying: “‘Dad, you need to wake up
to the new thinking about race in America. . . . It is not about being
racial; it is not about being biracial; it is about being post-racial.’”50
And, though scholar Richard Rodriguez was frustrated with main-
stream media’s continued focus on black/white, he nonetheless wrote
in Newsweek that the United States had already experienced a signifi-
cant demographic and cultural shift that foretold post-racial changes,
exemplified by Obama’s heritage:
42 << Post-Racial News

Sure, there are separate cafeteria tables. But there is also flirting and
unlikely friendships being formed. A young woman from Kansas falls
in love with a visiting student from Kenya. In any American family
I can name, there are cousins and in-laws of several races. There are
grandchildren who do not look exactly like any of their grandparents.
And many families have adopted a child from China or Guatemala. Or
Bangladesh.

In this world, the political necessity is for someone who might help us
imagine lives larger than racial designations. A politician might win the
day, if he or she were able to speak of the ways our lives are mixed.51

In a related vein, historian John McWhorter told a reporter that in the

next few decades, the United States “will be so hybrid a nation that any
idea of black-white relations as a major problem in need of address
will seem archaic.”52 Thus, through interracial mixing and generational
change, society would inevitably follow Obama’s post-racial lead.
Moreover, the younger generation was poised to make a histori-
cal break with the racist past by electing its first president of African
descent. Indeed, in a story about the demographic breakdown of voters,
journalist James Bacon wrote:

A CNN election exit poll showed a strong correlation between the age of
the voter and his or her likelihood to vote for Obama. The GenY (mil-
lennial) generation voted lopsidedly for Obama, by 66 percent to 32 per-
cent, while GenX favored him by a solid margin (52 percent to 46 per-
cent). Baby boomers split their votes evenly between Obama and John
McCain (50 percent to 49 percent), while only the Silent Generation
[born in the Depression Era] tilted toward McCain (53 percent McCain,
45 percent Obama).53

But Bacon tempered the usual progress narrative of multiracial genera-

tional change with the following fact: “If we narrow the focus to white
voters over 30, the generational shift disappears. A consistent per-
centage of that group—between 56 percent and 58 percent—selected
McCain across the age spectrum.”54 The fact that significant white
majorities across key voting age groups did not go post-racial at the
 Post-Racial News >> 43

ballot box went largely unremarked once the media decided this elec-
tion was an historic marker of post-racial transition.

History and Hope

Excitement about the historical importance of an Obama win over-

whelmed discussion of the practical and necessary measures to remedy
racial inequality, let alone change the hearts and minds of people who
still practice racism. An Associated Press story exemplifies the way the
history-making element may have inflated hopes for post-racial trans-
formation. In a report about how the University of Mississippi would
host one of the presidential debates, the writer gushed about the way
“Ole Miss” had changed from the time that the campus and state vio-
lently resisted integration. After noting that “bullets flew and tear gas
canisters exploded” as whites tried to keep James Meredith off campus,
“Now, Ole Miss is a diverse university where racial conflict is a topic for
history classes.”55 Incredibly, there is not a single quotation from any
student that suggests Ole Miss or the state itself has any vestiges of rac-
ism, any scars. Racism is over, it seems, and a state that was a citadel of
white racist resistance and segregation is now ready for Obama.
In the same vein, Michael Crowley, a writer for the New Republic,
declared in the first paragraph of a feature titled “Post-Racial” that
“Even white supremacists don’t hate Obama.” Crowley surveyed white
supremacy websites, like the Conservative Citizens’ Council (CCC)
page, that still “promote the view of white superiority over blacks.”
Indeed, the CCC alleged an Obama victory would “embolden blacks to
be more aggressive toward whites.” But he noted that he didn’t see any
specific racial stereotypes applied to Obama as an individual. The writer
interpreted this as a sign of how post-racial Obama had “confused” the
supremacists because he didn’t match their stereotypes of blackness.
With his biracial background and Ivy League “mild tone,” Obama was
“hilariously confounding the world view of white supremacists” because
he “lacks certain cultural signifiers . . . that would viscerally threaten
racist whites obsessed with maintaining ‘white rights,’ ending affirma-
tive action, and cutting off nearly all non-European immigration.”56
Somehow, he (and many others) overlooked the fact that Obama and
his family were under Secret Service protection earlier than any other
44 << Post-Racial News

candidate in history due to death threats from white supremacists, and

that his offices had been vandalized with racist graffiti. Moreover, the
comments seem to contradict evidence in his own piece: How is it that
the Conservative Citizens’ Council was not “viscerally” threatened by
Obama when they linked his victory to emboldening “black aggres-
sion” towards whites? This writer seems to have wholly embraced the
idea that Obama and the Joshua Generation are so different from other
black politicians that they cannot be linked to the “scary” kinds of black-
ness, whether it take the form of fantasies of black revenge on whites
or caricatures of black leaders who demand racial justice. Presenting
Obama as an exception to the rule for white supremacists, on the one
hand, and as exceptional, on the other, employs the same stereotypes
of racial identity and politics that delegitimize calls for direct action on
racial disparities. This approach recalls Dana Cloud’s discussion of how
even “positive” stereotypes of racialized Others operate through a binary
logic that requires the presence of negative referents in order to work.57
In the West, stereotypes are constructed within understandings of race
and nation that position people on either side of a negative/positive
binary (e.g. black/white, Oriental/Occidental). As such, even the “posi-
tive” representation of a “post-racial black” candidate is dependent upon
understanding the other side of the binary—the angry Black politician
who plays “the race card” and ultimately wants to punish whites.
As summarized earlier, coverage of election night and the inaugu-
ration was overwhelmingly congratulatory of the nation for “overcom-
ing” the “last barrier” of racial politics and electing a black president.
Numerous journalists and commentators sighed over the coincidence
that the inauguration would take place on the Martin Luther King holi-
day weekend, and that King’s “Dream” had been fulfilled, or was on the
verge of fulfillment, in our exceptional, ever-progressing nation. Take,
for example, this editorial:

Obama campaigned to be president of all Americans, not one faction,

and on that basis he won. Nothing else explains the long lines of voters of
all races and backgrounds. . . . But Obama’s election sends an especially
powerful message to African Americans. They have suffered most, and
on Tuesday, they gained the most. This country became their country as
never before.
 Post-Racial News >> 45

When Obama says, as he often does, that “in no other country on

Earth” was his story “even possible,” African Americans know what story
he’s talking about—their story—even if his mother was white and his
father was African. His victory was the culmination of two centuries of
hardship and struggle.58

This and other editorials suggested that the struggles were either over,
or were on the verge of completion now that Obama was president. If
the latter were the case, how were citizens to make it into the home
stretch? Beyond celebrating the first black First Family in the White
House, there was no agenda for any final policy tasks or new social
practices that would get us over the finish line. The ebullience fostered
the unrealistic expectations that enough people were (1) invested in that
symbolism; and (2) knew how to act accordingly afterwards to finish
what was started by thousands of civil rights workers in the 1950s. As
the 2008 news narratives articulated the “Dream” with Obama’s victory,
journalists and pundits made the move of assuming symbolic politics
of representation were sufficient for a politics of racial justice to take
hold. Only a few news items about Obama’s victory hinted that it might
not be so easy to achieve the post-racial dream state. One rare piece
contained a cautionary quotation: Kevin Alexander Gray, a civil rights
organizer who had worked on Jesse Jackson’s 1988 campaign, said,
“People are so focused on celebrating the history of [the election], they
haven’t figured out how to move beyond that, and that kind of worries
me a bit. He’s in; it’s historic; now it’s time to press him.”59 But press him
on what? On the Right, it was clear: press Obama to disavow liberals
and particular black leaders and to end affirmative action to prove that
he is “truly” post-racial.
Barack Obama became “the” post-racial leader for the press because
he seemed to emerge at the nexus of overlapping narratives of race,
progress, politics, and generational change. He was literally dubbed
the heir apparent to John F. Kennedy by the Kennedy clan, thereby fur-
ther strengthening the notion that liberals and Democrats had gone
astray when they lost the Great Liberal Leaders of the 1960s: JFK, MLK,
and RFK.60 The bright star of a new generation of black male leaders,
Obama gained not only the blessing of the Kennedys,61 but then also
the support of the black males of the “civil rights generation,” who, it
46 << Post-Racial News

was imagined, were finally ready to “step aside” now that the inheri-
tor of King’s “Dream” had arrived. This narrative of regeneration and
renewal simplifies what happened in the intervening four decades. It
is as if Obama would pick up right where the “good guys” had left off,
returning us to a (mythical) national, bipartisan consensus on race and
civil rights issues.
A huge problem with the Great Leader scenario—regardless of
race—is that once the “right” leader emerges, people can sit back and
let him (not her, of course) do the work. Elect Cory Booker, and he
will transform Newark to attract corporations, white suburbanites, and
hipsters back into the city they abandoned en masse decades before,
decimating the tax base and school system along the way.62 Elect Barack
Obama, and he will somehow make it easier to talk about race and to
figure out what to do about the entrenched inequalities and injustices
in our education, judicial, and economic systems. Obama’s “natural”
affinities with multiple imagined publics—black, Asian, white, Chris-
tian, Muslim—will somehow release the right kind of energy to bring
balance to Washington, D.C., and end the culture wars as well as the
wars in the Middle East. Parallel narratives from the Right that ques-
tioned whether Obama was a post-racial savior were less visible, but
regular.

The Right and the “Real” Obama: Stealth Race-Man

From the beginning of the 2008 electoral cycle, Right-leaning blogs,

articles, and broadcasts questioned how far Obama’s politics were from
the tactics of Jackson and Sharpton. The kerfuffle over Rev. Wright pro-
vided the best opening for these attacks. To explain why he suspected
Obama’s motives, a blogger on California Yankee borrowed an English
theorist’s dual characterization of black leaders as being either like Mar-
cus Garvey, who wielded “power by making whites feel guilty about
[slavery] and only allowing the guilt to be relieved in return for conces-
sions,” or like Martin Luther King Jr., Oprah, and Bill Cosby, who are
“bargainers,” who tell whites “‘I will not use America’s horrible story of
racism against my you if you will promise not to use my race against
me.’” He then surmised that, once in office, Obama would exploit the
racial guilt card, just like Garvey.63
 Post-Racial News >> 47

In traditional news outlets, such as the Chicago Daily Herald, the

scandal over Rev. Wright provided an opportunity for letter writers to
suggest Obama was a black radical in more genteel terms.

It took 20 years and a media spotlight on Rev. Wright for Sen. Obama
to acknowledge that sermons Rev. Wright gave were “rough.” What
Sen. Obama lacked was moral courage to confront Rev. Wright about
his sermons at any time. My guess is either Obama saw nothing wrong
with Rev. Wright’s sermons or was afraid that his views would make him
unpopular in Rev. Wright’s church and hence lose local voter support
among parishioners.64

Why couldn’t more of America see through the post-racial veil cov-
ering the rabid race-man beneath? Atlas Shrugs blogger Pamela Gel-
lar reasoned that it was because the liberal media had decided to “tar
and feather anyone pro-McCain as a racist. . . . The ugly secret is the
real racism our state-run media refuses to cover. It is a violent racism
Obama encourages and incited.” She then alleged that black Obama
supporters had been assaulting white McCain supporters.65 This dis-
torted picture of violence-inciting, guilt-inducing black leaders not
only misrepresents the variety and complexities of African American
political struggles; it also assumes the total innocence of white people
in contemporary racial disputes and inequities. Accordingly, these cari-
catures made the further case that Obama was not really different from
all the other black political leaders.
These conspiracy theories and the expectations of imminent post-
racial change were bound for a collision. Thus, it is not surprising that
after he was inaugurated, Obama’s first few comments and actions
related to race, power, and injustice lit off a powder keg of public reac-
tions. When Obama criticized the arrest of Professor Henry Louis
Gates, Jr., which seemed to be a case of racial profiling and abuse of
authority, and when once he nominated the first Latina to the United
States Supreme Court to shape binding decisions on civil rights law, the
“Dream” of post-racial politics began to crumble. Obama’s victory was
achieved, in part, by avoiding talk about race as much as possible—a
tactic that the press and pundits praised as savvy, post-racial politics.
So when race talk flared early in his administration, the backlash was
48 << Post-Racial News

vicious, and the White House had few, if any, strategies for responding.
This reality hit home swiftly and brutally in the first year of Obama’s
administration, when a handful of ugly feeding frenzies involving race
erupted, and the country witnessed the level of contempt and rac-
ist invective aimed at the President and his family rising precipitously
after the inauguration. The incivility and racism expressed at rallies
for the McCain-Palin ticket continued amongst the ranks of the Tea
Party—including its GOP-affiliates in the House and Senate. Racist
images and accusations circulated widely on the Internet, and showed
up in startling statistics about rising participation in white supremacist
organizations.66
Once the dream of the great post-racial leader “completing” King’s
“Dream” was dashed, the lack of historical and political complexity in
the media’s understanding of race in America became painfully clear.
Columnists engaged in hand-wringing, teeth-gnashing, and finger-
pointing, trying to figure out how the seemingly widespread optimism
of 2008 transformed so quickly into the ugly conspiracy theories and
angry shouts heard during Obama’s first year in office. On the Right, an
“I-told-you-so” narrative patted Republican voters and officials on the
back for not trusting Obama to be post-racial, and further energized
calls to halt all race-based initiatives. On the Left, frustration, despera-
tion, and resignation characterized explanations of Obama’s fall from
grace.

The Post-Racial Dream in Decline: Racial

Realities and Media Spectacles, 2009–2010

Although “post-racial” appeared in the news more often in 2009 than

in 2008, the term was associated more often with pessimistic ideas
about politics and society after Obama’s inauguration. Table 1.6 displays
data from the sample of news items we coded for post-racial themes.
Whereas in 2008 nearly half of the stories argued that post-racial poli-
tics were in effect or imminent, only a fifth of stories in 2009 and 2010
exhibited that optimism, while pessimism about post-racial politics
doubled.
As early as January 26, 2009, Philadelphia Inquirer columnist
Annette John-Hall warned her readers with the headline: “Race Still
 Post-Racial News >> 49

Table 1.6. Dominant Themes Expressed in Post-Racial News, 2008–2010

Post-racial themes 2008 2009 2010

Conservatives are post- 19.60% (11) 28.88% (26) 10% (6)
racial
Post-racial politics won’t 28.60% (16) 55.55% (50) 57% (34)
emerge soon
Post-racial U.S. will emerge 23.20% (13) 23.33% (21) 38% (23)
in an egalitarian future
Post-racial politics are 46.40% (26) 23.33% (21) 22% (13)
imminent

Matters in Obama’s Post-Racial America.”67 She criticized actor Will

Smith—himself often lauded as a symbol of Hollywood’s “post-racial”
change of heart—for saying that Obama’s inauguration meant that “‘all
of our excuses have been removed. . . . There’s no white man keeping
you down, because if he really were trying to keep you down he would
have done everything to keep Obama down.’” She countered Smith’s
assertion with a sobering description of institutional racism:

Fact is, before we skip into post-racial wonderland together, we still have
some institutional dismantling to do. Disproportionate red-lining, lack
of equality in pay and lending. Inferior education. One black senator
in Congress, a dearth of professionals of color in every segment, from
boardrooms to newsrooms.68

John-Hall’s words of wisdom were affirmed in other cautionary col-

umns, such as one in USA Today titled: “Post-Racial Era? Go Tell
Victims of Police Shootings.”69 In opinion pieces like these, writers
and interviewees listed examples of systemic racism in education, law
enforcement, death sentencing, employment, and housing. They tried
to temper the excitement over the symbolism of Obama’s rise with clear-
eyed assessments of how much would have to change for our nation
to merit the adjective “post-racial.” In the Albany Times-Union, writer
Ryan McAuliff Straus stated that the election didn’t “prove that racism
is finally dead.” He then urged readers to stop thinking about racism
as built on “the explicit, in-your-face violence of yesteryear . . . but on
50 << Post-Racial News

segregated, underfunded schools. It is built on different access to health

care and different life expectancies.”70
But these assessments were not matched with many ideas for how
to undo the damage of racism other than restarting the “national con-
versation” on race. On the eve of the anniversary of the inauguration,
when NPR’s Talk of the Nation aired a segment titled “The Post-Racial
Conversation, One Year In,” scholar Mark Anthony Neal observed that
many people hoped that Obama’s “post-racial” triumph would mean
“that conversations about race would disappear.” But, he argued, the
conversation was not even progressing; it was also shallow due in part
to citizens’ lack of a “sense of historical memory.”71 Predictably, discus-
sion in the press didn’t follow his advice to consider history, and instead
focused on damage control and spin when the Sotomayor nomination
and arrest of Gates sparked talk of race.

Obama the Race Card Shark

Even before the Supreme Court nomination, conservative commenta-

tors were priming the pump to accuse Obama of reverse racism and
playing the race card—a very un-post-racial kind of politics. One
important theme was that Republicans should expect to be accused of
racism anytime they disagreed with the president. For example, Pete
Riehm predicted in Alabama’s Mobile Register in February of 2009,
that even though everyone wants to “strive to solidify the post-racial
society of Dr. Martin Luther King’s dream,” anyone who challenged the
president would be “summarily dismissed as a petty partisan, if not a
downright racist.” Although the president didn’t actually call any of his
opponents racist, somehow conservatives assumed he and his surro-
gates would use this as a weapon.
This theme of liberals’ cynical use of race ramped up once Sotomayor
was nominated in May 2009 and her “wise Latina” comments were
taken out of context and widely circulated in a media frenzy. Andrew
Breitbart opined that the Sotomayor nomination was the final nail in
the coffin for post-racial politics on the Democratic side. “With Barack
Obama, many Americans had hoped to get a post-racial president . . . it
looks less and less like they got one.” He and others accused Obama of
hypocrisy for not being angry about Sotomayor’s “wise Latina” remark.
 Post-Racial News >> 51

“It is the onerous double standard that ensures the Left wins every argu-
ment about race. And that is far too useful a weapon for the president
and his Democratic Party to give up.”72
Before the dust could settle on the Sotomayor soundbite, Harvard
Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., was arrested in July. A white police
officer charged him with disorderly conduct after he had trouble open-
ing his door and a neighbor called police, even though Gates pro-
vided proof of his ownership of the home. When Obama was asked
about the incident in a press conference, he remarked that he “didn’t
know . . . what role race played in that, but I think it’s fair to say, num-
ber one, any of us would be pretty angry; number two, that the Cam-
bridge police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was
already proof that they were in their own home.” Despite the fact that
the charges were dropped—and were suspect at best, since disorderly
conduct in Massachusetts is a violation that occurs in the public arena
not inside one’s own home—and despite the reams of data and docu-
mented experiences of racial profiling, Obama was quickly tagged as a
reverse racist by pundits on the Right.73 Here is one choice quotations
from a 2009 post from the “Weapons of Mass Discussion” blog:

Did you see the race baiting, anti-police garbage spewed by the Thug
in Chief? Yes, he called police officers stupid. I thought this @$$clown
was supposed to be the post-racial President? More like MOST RACIST
President.74

Former Bush administration Justice Department official, John Yoo,

used more polite language to insinuate that the president wasn’t really
post-racial. After applauding a recent court decision “against the use
of racial quotas” in hiring, he wrote in the Wall Street Journal that the
decision would challenge “the nation’s first minority president . . . to
help lead us to a post-racial America.”75 Yoo implied that Obama could
not actually be able to be post-racial because of his support for affirma-
tive action. Again, for conservatives, any use of race is “racial” or even
racist, and thus one cannot get past race if it is used in any way, even to
remedy inequalities caused by structural racism.
In their commentaries about the president’s failure to follow their
prescriptions for being post-racial these conservatives personalized
52 << Post-Racial News

race and racism, focusing on Obama’s alleged persona, political motiva-

tions, and “true” nature. Personalization works well with the overarch-
ing endorsement of colorblind individualism on the Right, as well as
the more foul white supremacist invectives and conspiracy theories that
Obama and other people of color are subversive, dangerous individuals
who must be stopped lest they defile the “real” America. These news
items suggest that Obama’s “real” racial nature was unleashed after
the election, after he had hoodwinked enough (white) Americans into
believing he was post-racial.

The Silver Lining in the Post-Racial Cloud: Time

to Talk about Institutional Racism

On the Left, commentators chided Obama for how he stepped into

the racial fray, even when they endorsed his decisions and agreed that
post-racialism was a pipe dream. They argued that people shouldn’t
have been surprised at the reaction to Obama’s nomination of Soto-
mayor, or his statement about Gates’s arrest. In his column on Politico.
com, Roger Simon shrugged, “So much for post-racial America.” He
then asked the rhetorical question, how “did things turn around so
fast?” The answer:

They didn’t. They may never have turned in the first place. Largely over-
looked in the understandably good feelings generated by the election of
our first black president was the simple fact that . . . most white Ameri-
cans voted for John McCain. In fact, Barack Obama lost the white vote
in 2008 by a landslide. While Obama won the overall vote by 53 percent
to 46 percent, he lost among white voters by 55 percent to 43 percent.76

Here, Simon and a few others went back to the data that was barely
mentioned in the wake of the election: A majority of white voters did
NOT vote for Obama. At the same time, other commentators used the
feeding frenzy over Gates as an opportunity to discuss institutional rac-
ism. Professor Glenn Loury wrote in The New York Times, “I seriously
doubt that calling the police stupid is something the president’s poll-
sters encourage.” For him, it was
 Post-Racial News >> 53

Figure 1.3. Madison, Wisconsin, Tea Party Rally.

Photo by Jesse Russell. Used with permission. CC BY-ND.

depressing in the extreme that the president, when it came time for him
to expend political capital on the issue of race and the police, did so on
behalf of his “friend” rather than stressing policy reforms that might
keep the poorly educated, infrequently employed, troubled but still
human young black men in America out of prison. . . . [I]f Mr. Obama
were going to lose some working-class white votes to the charge of “elit-
ism,” I’d much rather it have been on countering the proliferation of
“three strikes” laws, . . . or inveighing against the racial disproportion in
the administration of the death penalty.77

In a television discussion that went beyond the he-said/she-said

recounting of the arrest and White House damage control efforts (like
the “beer summit”), scholars and journalists interviewed by CNN’s
Soledad O’Brien urged audience members to go beyond the tip of
the iceberg of racial profiling. Unlike some in the media who saw the
54 << Post-Racial News

meeting as a significant step forward in resolving the issue of racial pro-

filing and the underlying prejudice, many on the panel thought it was a
mostly empty gesture. “It is a significant brouhaha [but] I’m not sure it
gets to what ‘ales’ (ails) us,” commented panelist and Georgetown Uni-
versity professor Michael Eric Dyson. “The real problem is still on the
streets where disproportionate numbers of Black and Latino men and
women are subjected to arbitrary forms of police power.”78
Thus, one promising development of rejecting the notion that “post-
racial” was an accurate descriptor of politics is that critics had more
space to discuss continuing racial disparities and injustices in the United
States. In the process, they drew on both personal stories and empirical
data. On NPR, a guest commentator ended a segment on racial pro-
filing and police brutality by recounting how policemen accosted him
and a friend without cause, and then beat him when he asked for their
badge numbers. This commentator reminded listeners that his story
was not unique, though it was rarely heard: “If there’s any silver lin-
ing to the arrest of [Professor] Gates, it’s that public awareness of this
problem had increased, and the country gets closer to realizing . . . ain’t
nothing post-racial about the United States of America.”79 While crit-
ics on both sides agreed that the Gates and Sotomayor episodes proved
that U.S. politics aren’t “post-racial,” only some used these cases to refo-
cus attention on the realities of institutional racism. Moreover, even as
the dream of post-racial politics was fading, post-racial people and cul-
tural artifacts—multiracial families, celebrities, and movies with inter-
racial casts—remained popular in the news as symbols of progress.

Post-Racial People Redux: Cross-Racial Consumption and Courtship

Some commentators continued to insist a post-racial cultural change

had been generated by the Millennials, even if political change had not
occurred. In her piece for the Sunday Oregonian, for example, Lillian
Mongeau wrote, “While our society is certainly not yet successfully
‘post-racial’ my generation’s concept of race, especially when it comes
to black and white, really has changed.” She cited growing up with a
black family, “the Huxtables” of the Cosby Show on TV, and stated that
Michelle Obama, “resembling nobody more than Clair Huxtable, rep-
resents the new reality we are living in.”80 Writer Lenox Magee agreed
 Post-Racial News >> 55

that youth were leading the way with their multiracial tastes: “Just
as . . . Will Smith changed stereotypes about the ideal Hollywood lead-
ing man, the youth market is following the same pattern. . . . There’s no
doubt that mainstream America is being redefined.”81 Writers continued
to make links between celebrities of color and post-racial change, none
more emphatically than New York Newsday columnist Glenn Gamboa
in his response to the death of Michael Jackson. Gamboa declared that
the King of Pop had “moonwalked his way through mammoth racial
barriers in the ‘‘80s by barely discussing it . . . which many say paved
the way for the age of Obama, Oprah, of what many call ‘post-racial
America.’”82 Others also argued that Jackson’s unprecedented cross-
over success with white audiences made him a “post-race superstar.”83
Here, music and movie choices, facilitated by stars’ willingness to avoid
talking about race, made way for post-racial culture. No mention was
made of the disjuncture between the immense popularity of Jackson
or Smith and the plight of other black men who are racially profiled
by employers or police, for example, or of the racial undertones of the
tabloid obsessions with Jackson’s life. This silence is indicative of the
post-racial mystique in that race is noteworthy in the realm of personal
choices (media consumption, individual performances of racial iden-
tity) but deemed toxic in discussions of social and political inequality.
Though post-racial people and cultural consumption still provided a
ray of hope for some in the news, political commentators sounded the
final bell for post-racial politics in 2010.

2010: The Dream Is Over

The change from optimism during the election year to pessimism in

Obama’s first years as president was also reflected in a shift in the tenor
of headlines that used the term “post-racial.” We coded each head-
line as follows: pessimistic about the state of racial politics; optimis-
tic that post-racial society was immanent; gestures toward policies or
approaches to make society post-racial; or ambiguous.
Headlines published in 2008, such as “A New Post-Racial Political
Era in America”84 were replaced and outnumbered by 2010 headlines
that declared, “The President Is No Redeemer, Post-Racial or Other-
wise.”85 As Table 1.7 illustrates, pessimistic headlines nearly doubled
56 << Post-Racial News

Table 1.7. Tone of Post-Racial Headlines, 2008 and 2010

2008 (64 headlines) 2010 (91 headlines)
Optimistic 30% (19) 4.3% (4)
Pessimistic 36% (23) 67% (62)
Policy 6% (4) 4.3% (4)
Ambiguous 28% (18) 30% (21)

between 2008 and 2010. When we coded for the prevailing opinions
expressed in the body of the sampled articles, we found a similar distri-
bution. In 2008, only 14 percent of stories were dominated by the opin-
ion that it was premature to use “post-racial” to describe U.S. society or
politics; in 2010, 48 percent of stories delivered that verdict. There was
also a drop in optimism: In 2008, 15 percent of items were optimistic
that society was becoming post-racial; in 2010, the number decreased
to 9 percent.
The decrease in optimism was often expressed through bitter humor
and irony. A blogger posted a January 2010 entry with the title, “Ring
in the Post-Racial New Year: Obama Effigy in Plains, GA.”86 Shortly
thereafter, the AP Wire sent one story under the headline “Hope for
Post-Racial U.S. Fades after Remarks.” By July 2010, the Chattanooga
Times declared the “Post-Racial Presidency Over,” and in September,
New York Times columnist Bob Hebert’ scoffed, “Post-Racial America?
No Way.” While a handful of headlines asked for patience (“A Little
Less ‘Post-Racial,’ a Little More Listening”)87 and counseled cautious
optimism for the impact of generational change (“A Child Will Lead
Us: Post-Racial Attitudes”),88 the overwhelming majority of 2010 head-
lines concluded that the election of the first black president had not
ushered in a post-racial political era. At the same time, the pessimism
was still expressed through many of the themes that dominated the
optimistic news items in 2008. Thus, in stories that focused on Presi-
dent Obama’s role in racial controversies, voices on the Right domi-
nated, reasserting that the Republicans and Tea Party activists were the
true vanguard of post-racial politics in the United States. In their view,
Obama had proven he was a creature of leftist identity politics run
amok. But as in 2009, the overall disappointment about post-racial
 Post-Racial News >> 57

politics did generate a little space for arguments about institutional

racism, arguments that been shoved to the wayside during the eupho-
ria of 2008.

The Blame Game: The Right and the “Real” Barack Obama, 2010

Attacks on Obama were relentless and brutal in the blogosphere and

the traditional press. Writers accused the president of either deliber-
ately stirring up racial tensions or making tactical racial blunders in
response to others’ provocations. Many of these attacks were laced with
bitter humor and incivility toward the president, his allies, and people
of color. For example, in a 2010 post on Wonkette, a blogger joked that
she was reporting to readers “live from Thugtown USA, i.e. Obama’s
backyard or Chicagotown, where there are no races or post-racial rela-
tions at the polls to watch today.”89 Di Hall argued in a letter to the
Fresno Bee that in saying in a speech that the Republican Party wanted
to “turn the clock back,” Obama was playing the race card for black sup-
porters: “Could it really be that this post-racial president is saying to
the black community that if they do not rally and keep Democrats in
office, to the back of the bus you go? Yes! That is exactly what he is say-
ing. Shame on President Obama! He has done more to set race relations
back in America than anyone in recent history.”90 This hyperbole was
not unique to Ms. Hall; it was clear from other writers that the inordi-
nately high hopes set for Obama and fanned by media enthusiasm for
the post-racial meme had crashed right at his feet. Another writer pre-
sented a litany of hopes deliberately dashed:

[Obama] ran on being post-racial. . . . He ran loftily challenging us to

leave a better world for our children. He ran on hope. The plain fact is:
He has not governed as he ran. Americans, including many who did not
vote for him, had hoped he could help harness the inner angels of we the
people. Instead, he has unleashed the outer demons of his circle of hand-
maidens and henchmen . . . 91

Likewise, in the aftermath of Andrew Breitbart’s smear of Department

of Agriculture official Shirley Sherrod, media outlets gave the conser-
vative blogger plenty of space to allege a White House, liberal media
58 << Post-Racial News

conspiracy to use racial division as a tool. Breitbart released a heav-

ily edited video that had made it seem that Sherrod advocated dis-
criminating against white farmers. He told the media this was proof of
Obama’s real racial agenda.

“It is my belief that President Obama promised, tacitly, to be a post-racial

candidate, and it is sad to say that he hasn’t,” Andrew Breitbart said at a
news conference before his appearance at a “Uni-Tea: United Tea Party
For All Communities.”
Breitbart accused the president of engaging in a “proxy warfare plan”
using the media, Hollywood and lawmakers. . . . Breitbart accused [all of
them] of [making] false charges of racism during the health care debate
as well as the NAACP’s recent call on tea party groups to disavow “racist
elements.”92

One would expect Breitbart to defend himself against a seemingly large

conspiracy of race-card-playing liberals. But other commentators lever-
aged similar arguments about Democrats and allied groups. For exam-
ple, many journalists and editorials equated Breitbart’s premeditated
attack on Sherrod—framing her and her NAACP listeners as advocates
of racial revenge on whites—with the NAACP’s request for the Tea
Party to denounce racist propaganda materials visible at their rallies. A
Los Angeles Times editorial (reprinted in the Monterey County Herald),
alleged that the Sherrod incident wouldn’t have happened had it not
been for the NAACP’s action:

The whole sorry spectacle was set in motion last week at the annual con-
vention of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored
People, which approved a resolution accusing the “tea party” movement
of harboring racists. Breitbart, a conservative Internet entrepreneur who
has built a career out of taking umbrage, responded Monday by post-
ing a short, edited video on his BigGovernment.com website that he
presented as evidence of racism in the NAACP. It showed Sherrod, an
official with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, making a speech at
an NAACP meeting in which she confessed to giving less than “the full
force of what I could do” for a white farmer who came to her for help 24
years previously.93
 Post-Racial News >> 59

The editorial then explained how Breitbart deliberately left out the sec-
tion where Sherrod explained how she changed her mind and became a
friend and ally of the white farmer. However, despite this acknowledg-
ment of deceitful editing, the editorial insisted that “the blame doesn’t
lie solely with conservatives. Attacks by the NAACP on the tea party
movement serve only to fuel white resentment. To collectively tar one’s
opponents as ‘racist‘ is the lowest form of political attack.”
This is a disturbing example of how easily and quickly accusations
of white racism are discredited in the news, and how little work is done
even to gauge whether the accusation holds any validity. None of the
pieces that condemned the NAACP’s vote bothered to mention why the
members might have believed there were racist subgroups within the
Tea Party. Instead, they assumed that both Breitbart and the NAACP
were acting on bad faith and misrepresenting the facts. Although the
Tea Party has many factions, there is plenty of documentary evidence
of use of blatantly racist symbols at Tea Party events.94 Some factions
of the Tea Party were amongst the loudest supporters of the “birther”
conspiracy theories that Obama is not a U.S. citizen but a secret African
Muslim bent on bringing Islamic law to the United States.
So, with this in mind, we might ask, why is it the “lowest form of
political attack” to say that it is racist to hold up a sign at a rally depict-
ing the first black president as a Sambo or a pimp or alleging he is a
“Kenyan-Muslim” or a “Lyin’ African?”95 Why is it “low” to ask a politi-
cal organization to denounce racism within its ranks? When a critique
of the use of such clearly visible, visceral, and ugly racial symbols in
public spaces is equated with the mendacious, unethical manipulation
of a public speech to defame a black government official, the press is
engaging in the worst sort of “balance” by insisting that people of color
always be equally to blame for racial incidents as whites.
Other commentators didn’t use false equivalencies to make their
case that Obama would not usher in the post-racial nirvana foretold
in 2008. Rather, they blamed media frenzies, partisan politics-as-usual,
and moneyed interests for stalling progress on race relations and racial
inequality. Here, writers critiqued the notion of post-racial politics by
emphasizing how naïve it was to assume one election could change the
deep cultural currents of race in America, and argued for a renewed
commitment to fighting racism. This set of observers offered lessons
60 << Post-Racial News

from the past and specific examples of how to work through the murky
and uncomfortable intersections of personal and social phenomena
that reinforce racism and racial inequalities. Indeed, after 2008, writers
and interviewees contributed evidence and experiences that rejected
the post-racial premise in greater numbers, which rose above 50 per-
cent in both 2009 and 2010. Those who debunked post-racial mythol-
ogy in order to broaden the conversation did so in two main ways. First,
they looked at the uproar around Shirley Sherrod and other frenzies
as more evidence that the conversation on race was not improving; it
had perhaps become more frustrating due to the use of “post-racial” to
reframe race. Second, they discussed the reasons why U.S. society isn’t
post-racial, weaving in arguments and evidence about structural racial
inequality as well as heinous acts of bigoted violence.
Critics of the term “post-racial” found in the Sherrod incident per-
fect proof of the lack of sophistication and fairness in debates over
racial controversy. Here, they argued that reactions to the now-dis-
credited Breitbart video were not only unfounded, but unacceptable
given the background of the “reporter” and his history of racial animus.
Mary Sanchez of the Modesto Bee declared, “Whoever came up with
the insipid term ‘post-racial’ ought to be forced to sit down and read
aloud the vile commentary that pours into any newsroom after it pub-
lishes or airs a story on race.” She then noted how fearful the USDA, the
White House, and the NAACP had been over the reverse racist accu-
sations brought against Sherrod, and she wondered why no one had
“suspended judgment until they had done a little research. They would
have discovered that Sherrod was actually telling a much longer tale,
one of redemption. She had helped the white farmer save his farm, real-
izing that poor black and poor white have more, not less in common.”96
Finally, Sanchez underscored that the topsy-turvy world of conserva-
tive racial “gotchas” had directed people’s attention away from the real
racism in agricultural policy:

There is another racially charged dimension to this drama, one that most
commentators and reporters don’t mention: The Department of Agricul-
ture is still trying to settle lawsuits with black farmers who for decades
were systematically denied loans, causing financial ruin for many in lost
crops and land. . . .
 Post-Racial News >> 61

The Obama administration is backing legislation enabling a $1.25 bil-

lion grant to settle the outstanding claims, a plan that conservatives have
attacked vigorously. That legislation was supposed to be voted on the
very week Breitbart chose to release his edited video. Coincidence?97

Using the racial debacle to get back to a fact-based discussion of race

and USDA policy, Sanchez reveals what is at stake when a supposedly
post-racial administration doesn’t stand up to race-baiting games.
In a similar vein, Politico.com writer David Dante Troutt lamented
that the Sherrod case showed society and the media’s “lack of racial bear-
ings.”98 How, he asked, could a “career civil servant with solid creden-
tials” be unjustly railroaded by “deeply motivated bloggers with a track
record for racial antipathy?” Troutt suggested that post-racialism means
“nobody has to honor a principle except [out of] the fear of immediate
public backlash against any hint of racial consciousness.” This, he argued,
was the fruit of allowing conservatives to spin Martin Luther King’s “I
Have A Dream” speech to mean that we must “shut down further talk of
race, racial identity, and racism.” Moreover, while conservatives accuse
Obama of favoring black people, “the administration’s tacit acceptance
of post-racialism has disfavored blacks,” as seen in the rush to judgment
in the Sherrod incident. These writers and others illustrate that the true
cost of post-racial discourse is not just a lack of clarity on race and rac-
ism, but also the possibility that progressive people and solutions can be
too easily undermined by partisan post-racial tactics.

Interpersonal Animus and Structural

Racism: Connecting the Racial Dots

Many commentators who declared the notion of the post-racial a sham

lined up multiple examples of where and how society still exhibited
racist ideologies and practices. Importantly, some of these examples
made links between the personal and the political aspects of racism,
undermining the notion that racism lives in the hearts and minds of
misguided individuals, not within social, economic, and political insti-
tutions. For example, on the blog Pam’s House Blend, Pam mused about
the validity of libertarian reasoning with respect to how desegregation
can come about with only “market forces” in play:
62 << Post-Racial News

If access and membership to a private club is one of the ways people “do
business” with the movers and shakers in the community, the ability to
bar people for spurious reasons of their choice means by default, those
without access cannot rub shoulders and make deals that affect the very
“market forces” that determine the out-group’s economic destiny. Is this
ok in communities where there is no alternative? The libertarian view
doesn’t provide for a lack of equivalent competition to force change.
How does change occur in this world view? 99

Those who argue the government can’t “legislate hearts and minds” are
thus saying that people of color need to be content to “remain on the
short end of the stick until there are enough benevolent patrons ready
to let you in the door.”100 She then pivoted to the recent cases finding
that Alabama prosecutors improperly barred blacks from juries. The
spurious personal judgments—“The district attorney, Robert Brous-
sard, said one had seemed ‘arrogant’ and ‘pretty vocal.’ In another
woman, he said he ‘detected hostility’”—lead to very real life-and-death
decisions made by all-white juries in capital cases, as well as others. If
the Justice Department and other entities don’t check the “hearts and
minds” of these individuals, the inaction reinforces the structural ineq-
uities in the economy and the criminal justice system.
Elsewhere, spates of campus hate speech incidents and hate crimes
were aggregated as proof that America was not post-racial. More-
over, writer Tim Barker of the Salt Lake Tribune challenged the ideal-
ized image of universities as bias-free intellectual zones inhabited by
Millennials:

It’s tempting to think of college campuses as islands of enlightenment,

places where students embrace new ideas, people and cultures without
the specter of hate hanging overhead.
Tempting. But it’s not always the case, as demonstrated by events on
campuses across the nation in recent months. . . .
There have been racial slurs and a threat of lynching at Saint Louis
University. There was a swastika scrawled on a bathroom wall near
a Jewish studies center at the University of Miami. There were death
threats against black students left on a bathroom wall at Hocking College
 Post-Racial News >> 63

in Nelsonville, Ohio. And a white fraternity sparked an uproar at the

University of California San Diego when it sponsored a ghetto-themed
“Compton Cookout” to mock Black History Month.
To be sure, such events have always been part of the American land-
scape. But campus and diversity experts say they’ve seen a surge in the
past year, poking yet another hole in what increasingly appears to be the
myth of a post-racial America.101

Listing these incidents together, Barker pushed back against the usual
characterization of hate speech as isolated acts of “bad apples.” There
are so many bad apples spread across so many of our higher educational
institutions that it is hard to argue that the problem will disappear once
the culprits are rooted out. He then included Justice Department data
that estimates “12 percent of hate crimes occur on either college or
school campuses.” The statistic nationalizes the issue, and illuminates
how educational institutions are broadly implicated in racism.
Another article illustrated the faults of post-racialism by declaring in
its headline, “We Need a Post-Racial and Post-Poverty America.” Writer
Brian Gilmore opened his piece, which reflected on the Martin Luther
King, Jr., holiday, with historical references to lynching woven together
with present-day racist violence:

[F]or part of his first year in office, Obama was receiving 30 death threats
a day, a 400 percent increase over the number of threats President
George W. Bush was receiving. The Secret Service has attributed some of
this to the fact that Obama is our first black president. [It] harkens back
to the country’s ugly past where thousands of black people were lynched
all across the country.102

Gilmore then reminded the audience to remember King’s words about

poverty and race:

“Like life,” King wrote in “Where Do We Go From Here,” “racial under-

standing is not something we find but something we must create.” But
racial understanding is not the only issue the nation faces that could
benefit from King’s vision.
64 << Post-Racial News

“Poverty is one of the most urgent items on the agenda of modern

life,” King said in his Nobel Peace Prize address in 1964. It’s more urgent
than ever right now, since poverty has worsened in the last 10 years.103

Unlike the post-racial appropriations on the Right that reframe King’s

life and work as an appeal for race-blind, Christian-oriented public pol-
icy, Gilmore’s meditation reaffirms the multiple facets of the fight for
equality, asserting that racism and economic injustices are problems
that require us to create solutions, not wait for the market or hearts and
minds to gradually rectify centuries of oppression.
However important these counters to conservative post-racial dis-
course are, they still leave audiences with few ideas for how to rem-
edy the continued racial inequalities and injustices listed. Conserva-
tives offer a short, easy to understand explanation: Racial inequalities
are best addressed not by government, but by individuals who take it
upon themselves to improve their lives and/or charitably intervene in
the lives of others. The real problem is that the government and liberals
continue to use race in any capacity in public life. Others who count on
interracial marriage or the next generation’s diversity to naturally solve
the problem leave little hope for those who won’t live to see the Millen-
nials mature into post-racial citizens. While it is necessary to provide
evidence of institutional racism, it is not sufficient. In the fifth chapter,
I examine how some alternative online news media provide discussions
that go beyond debunking the post-racial mystique to articulating pos-
sibilities for anti-racist action. Before looking at alternative online news
and commentary, the next chapter takes a detour from the news and
editorials to examine how many of the themes found in the news reso-
nate in media produced for spiritual edification and entertainment.
2

Brothers from Another Mother

Rescripting Religious Ties to Overcome the Racial Past

One type of post-racial discourse suggests that other sources of com-

munal identities—nation, gender, or class—are more legitimate means
for classifying groups and organizing political action. Race, in these dis-
cussions, is often characterized as a distraction from these more valid
or “real” identities. On the Left, this is expressed most often by a con-
cern that commitments to multiculturalism have derailed activists’ and
scholars’ class-based analysis and action.1 On the Right, post-racial dis-
course elevates the role of the individual, but also charges that empha-
sis on racial identities erodes our sense of national unity and amplifies
difference at the expense of similarities. And, in particular, the Right
argues that multiculturalism promotes a kind of relativism that will dis-
able sound judgment when citizens consider Western ideological values
alongside other “non-Western” systems of thought, particularly Islam.
What these discourses have in common is an anxiety about the abil-
ity of the nation’s citizens to find common ground upon which to base
deliberations and political actions. Whereas critics on the Left are not
always specific about the types of identity that should form the glue that
holds us together (although class often rises to the top), the Right has
been clear that Enlightenment and/or “Judeo Christian” values should
remain hegemonic to facilitate democracy. 2 Our national identity,

>> 65
66 << Brothers from Another Mother

based in these traditions, should take precedence over all other affini-
ties to race or gender. In addition to suggesting national identity should
overcome racial differences, another collective identity figured as more
legitimate than race (and thus, post-racially correct) is religious iden-
tity. Arguing that the alleged excesses of multiculturalism have allowed
too many groups to create enclaves for themselves and refuse to assimi-
late “American” values or that Judeo-Christian tradition forms the true
foundation of the Constitution, conservative pundits and scholars sug-
gest assimilation is key to overcoming remaining racial divisions and
tensions.3 In this chapter, I look at a nationally broadcast and webcast
event, Justice Sunday III (JSIII), as an example of a post-racial media
event that encourages African Americans to reimagine civil rights
struggles and political affinities in primarily religious terms.
As the title suggests, this event was the third in a Justice Sunday (JS)
series sponsored by the Family Research Council (FRC), a well-known
and powerful conservative organization with many ties to Republican
lawmakers, lobbyists, think tanks, and Christian faith groups. FRC’s
motto, proudly displayed on its website, is “Defending family, faith,
and freedom.” The JS series—which was co-sponsored by other major
religious Right groups—was organized by the FRC to garner public
support for then-President Bush’s Supreme Court nominees as well as
for pet policies of conservative Republicans and the Christian Right.
In particular, the series underscored the media reach of the Christian
Right. A huge network of Christian television and radio broadcasters,
bloggers, and podcasters disseminated the event via live simulcast and
retransmitted it on TV, radio, and the Internet for weeks afterwards.
DVDs of any of the three Justice Sundays were for sale for at least a year
after the original events. The organizers boasted on the FRC website
that, with their media partners, the event could potentially reach 80
million households in all fifty states. But for the JSIII event, the goal was
to continue rescripting the Right as a post-racial, welcoming political
space for black people who share Christian Conservative values.
JSIII was held on January 8, 2006. The event was staged in a major-
ity black church, providing an opportunity for white Republicans and
Christian Right leaders to advance their argument that race is less
salient and valid than religion. By performing their outreach within
a black institution, the JSIII organizers signaled that they understood
 Brothers from Another Mother >> 67

black people may still hold suspicions about the legacy of racism in the
Christian Right and contemporary GOP.
In the next sections of this chapter, I place JSIII in the context of
increasing media appeals from the GOP and its Christian allies to con-
servative black voters. Then, I analyze the JSIII broadcast, with par-
ticular attention to the presence and performances of featured white
and black speakers, as well as a video that suggested a different way for
defining liberty and the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. The final sec-
tion of the chapter presents results of a focus group study done with
African Americans who viewed a portion of the JSIII webcast. This
study provides an interesting glimpse of the ways black viewers inter-
pret appeals like these, as well as suggesting whether the articulation
of religion over race as an identity for political organization has the
desired effect: garnering trust and votes.

Religion, Race, and Media

Melissa Harris-Lacewell urges scholars to examine “the spaces of

everyday black life where African Americans cull meaning from daily
interactions.”4 Church services and media consumption are important
parts of everyday life. Indeed, some black political scientists suggest
that given its historical and contemporary importance as a social and
political institution, the black church has had more impact on African
American political beliefs than other sources of ideological influence. If
black churches are spaces where many African Americans “come into
contact with ideas that shape the direction of their political thinking,”5
then we should take a close look when white-dominated Christian
organizations provide media products for black congregants.
The rise of the Christian Right and debates over the nature of the
September 11 attacks have led scholars and political activists to revisit
how religious organizations and individuals use media resources.
While earlier observers of religion and media assumed that religion
would decline as a social force in the late twentieth century, religion
thrives at present and is, perhaps, increasingly relevant to everyday
life.6 Christian Right organizations, often loud critics of contemporary
“liberal media” content, have long used mass media resources from
church magazines to radio broadcasts of sermons to expand the reach
68 << Brothers from Another Mother

of the pulpit. By the turn of the twentieth-first century, their outreach

became even more sophisticated with new media tools at their disposal.
Religious organizations publicize “their message through sounds and
image, and instigate alternative politics of belonging, often in competi-
tion with the modern nation-state”7 and, perhaps, in competition with
racial and ethnic group identities as well. With this in mind, we can
view recent conservative, white-dominated Christian media appeals to
black conservative Christians as an attempt to persuade black people
that, in concert with a post-racial era, politics based on religious iden-
tities are more authentic, moral, or politically fruitful than a politics
based on racial identity.
These appeals were highly visible in the 2004 election, when black
clergymen and congregations were invited to support George W. Bush
as a “man of faith” who believed in heterosexual marriage and govern-
ment funding for churches. But interracial religious outreach campaigns
are neither new nor newly controversial. Indeed, blacks who converted
to Catholicism or who worked with the Catholic Interracial Councils
(CIC) were sometimes singled out for criticism,8 just as today black
evangelicals who break bread with Ralph Reed have been accused of
selling out black interests to the Republicans. In both cases, critics point
to past and present practices of racial discrimination within white-
dominated churches and by their Republican Party allies, question-
ing the sincerity and motives of white Christian outreach. While these
suspicions have roots in valid concerns—given the poor track record
of many denominations in civil rights—they also subtly reinscribe an
essentialist view of the relationship between racial identity and politi-
cal interests. That is, critics who accuse black conservative Christians
of acting against their true(r) interests operate on the assumption that
racial identity is (or should be) more central, or politically meaning-
ful, than religious identity. Conversely, when the Christian Right argues
that race no longer matters such that shared religious beliefs can bridge
divides, they assume that religion is more essential to community
than racial groups’ history, shared experiences, and modes of cultural
expression. Neither recognizes that race and religion are intersecting
identities that cannot be so easily separated and ranked.
Recent scholarship, however, emphasizes how religion is interwoven
into both racial and national identities in the Americas, and how each
 Brothers from Another Mother >> 69

inflects discourses produced about the other.9 Thus, ’white evangeli-

cal appeals for post-racial cooperation may not succeed if they try to
erase the racial past or gloss over other matters related to racial iden-
tity. Yet such appeals are made, and so we need to ask, how do those
appeals for “post-racial” cooperation in politics based on religious val-
ues rework or reframe assumptions about party identification as well as
racial and national identity? And, importantly, how (if at all) do white
Christian media texts try to explain their own histories of racial exclu-
sion and racist practices to black audiences? Examining the Christian
Right’s interest in using mass media resources as a tool to negotiate and
repair relationships with black Christian publics, we can also see how
they reframe histories of racist exclusion and/or domination of those
publics.
In so doing, we can conceptualize white Christian media appeals
to Black publics as “racial projects.” Racial projects “connect what
race means in a particular discursive practice and the ways in which
both social structures and everyday experiences are racially organized,
based upon that meaning.”10 Such racial projects are not unique to the
turn of the century; at least as far back as white Christian abolitionist
William Lloyd Garrison’s insistence that his paper, the Liberator, was
a black newspaper,11 some white Christians have created media mes-
sages seeking spiritual and political union with African Americans. I
argue that, while they weave their messages in a post-racial manner, the
white Christian institutions and Republican allies that courted African
Americans via JSIII were engaged in a racial project that sought to de-
emphasize the role of racial dynamics in contemporary politics through
an elevation of religious identity. Through discourses that combine
politics, race, and religion, JSIII attempted to reinterpret contempo-
rary black political interests and histories of black collective struggles
through the lens of religion. The program hailed blacks as brothers and
sisters in Christ, all joined in a continuing struggle for a more righteous
and just nation.
Republicans and their Christian Right allies continue to showcase
the support of a few outspoken conservative black clergy in elections
and policy debates. Particularly at the local level—in anti-gay ballot ini-
tiatives, for example—appeals to religious belonging rather than racial
identity have been rampant, and are successful with some, but not all,
70 << Brothers from Another Mother

black Christian voters. Since the 2008 passage of California’s Proposi-

tion 8 (which outlawed gay marriage), there have been many reports
and discussions of homophobic attitudes in African Americans com-
munities. In particular, many point to “the black church”—a monolithic
grouping that already problematically belies the diversity of black reli-
gious experiences—as a major source of anti-gay sentiment in black
communities.
The seeming mismatch between an institution often viewed as a civil
rights stalwart and the anti-gay proclamations of camera-ready black
pastors has been raked over in the press and on the Internet many
times. But African American GLBT activists, scholars, and artists were
challenging homophobia in black denominations well before these con-
troversies. Moreover, as historians such as Charles Payne have docu-
mented, leaders in certain Baptist churches were less supportive of 1950s
civil rights activism than pastors of other denominations.12 Despite the
diversity of thought and theology in black churches, though, many still
tend to refer to “the black Church” as a singular entity with conservative
leanings. Even so, resistance to the narrative of a monolithic, homo-
phobic black church has emerged in some quarters. Specifically in the
wake of President Obama’s endorsement of same-sex marriage, activ-
ists point to polls and statements by leaders and celebrities that demon-
strate black communities aren’t “more” homophobic than whites, and
that support for gay and lesbian African Americans is more widespread
than once assumed.13
As progressive black clergy and organizations with strong ties to
black churches—such as the NAACP—formally endorse gay mar-
riage and full civil rights for LGBT people, the notion that Republicans
will splinter the black vote by playing on conservative religious beliefs
seems unrealistic. Moreover, Republican candidates who take a hard
party line on conservative social policy to court black voters based on
religious and moral similarity haven’t gotten very far in terms of elec-
toral success. Black and white Republican candidates, including reli-
gious conservative favorites like JSIII speaker (and then-Pennsylvania
Senator) Rick Santorum, did not do well with black voters. Likewise,
appeals to conservative Christian Blacks by surrogates of the McCain
campaign did not detract from Obama’s commanding lead. Regard-
less of its impact on voting, however, this strain of post-racial rhetoric
 Brothers from Another Mother >> 71

has emerged over the past two decades as a strategic part of the Right’s
media program.

Re-Engaging the “Party of Lincoln”: The GOP,

the Christian Right, and Black Voters

Since the mid-1990s, conservative appeals to black Christians have

become bolder. These appeals present Christian values and common-
alities as more legitimate means than race for binding communities,
forming political beliefs and informing voting choices. In a brilliant,
clever, inspired, or cynical move (depending on your viewpoint),
Christian Right groups who form a large portion of the Republican
Party’s support base have appropriated the rhetoric of black freedom
movements (which, of course, do have affinities with religious dis-
courses stretching back to the anti-slavery movement) to try to bring
black voters back into the fold. For example, Christian Right organiza-
tions have sponsored anti-abortion billboards that specifically charge
abortion providers with black genocide, appropriating charges from
black organizations that the U.S. health system has historically abused
Black populations through forced sterilization and other violations.14
In other advertisements and speeches, the appropriation and mis-
representation of narrow portions of Martin Luther King’s writings
remain widespread. What these communications have in common is
they ignore the role of white supremacy as well as tenets of black self-
determination that informed original criticisms and protests against
injustices inflicted on black people.15
Some stalwart Republican-allied religious and conservative organiza-
tions have sporadically employed targeted messages to black radio sta-
tions to drum up support for Republican candidates and anti-gay mar-
riage amendments. These attempts have not gone unnoticed. In 2006,
multiple news outlets reported on the controversy over radio commer-
cials that featured (ostensibly) black women discussing politics. During
the ad, one woman tells her friend, “Dr. King was a real man. You know
he was a Republican,” before launching into a critique of Democrats’
support of same-sex marriage and abortion.16 The ads were targeted to
voters in Ohio and Maryland, where prominent black Republicans were
running for governor or U.S. Senate seats.
72 << Brothers from Another Mother

Certainly, Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, and other

prominent blacks were Republicans—until a majority of black orga-
nizations, newspapers, and an overwhelming number of voters voted
for Franklin Delano Roosevelt to support his efforts to end the Great
Depression and defeat Nazism. The shift was further cemented during
the civil rights movement when black citizens overwhelmingly voted
for Kennedy, Johnson, and every Democratic presidential candidate
since. As Congressman John Lewis said to a reporter, “I knew Martin
Luther King Jr. . . . and I know he voted for John F. Kennedy . . . and if
he had lived, he would have voted for Hubert Humphrey in 1968 and
not the Republican candidate Richard Nixon.”17 Others chimed in that
these ads were disingenuous, distorting not only King’s political affini-
ties, but also the Republicans’ contemporary record of voting against
policies that would alleviate poverty, discrimination, and other residual
ills of the era of legal racial segregation which were anathema to King’s
life and work.
At the same time that they have strategically appropriated black civil
rights rhetoric and leaders, Christian Right organizations have made
some attempts to allay the suspicions many blacks harbor towards
modern-day Republicans, whose electoral strategies and policy plat-
forms have, not infrequently, used racist cues and racist logic to gain
white votes.18 For example, in one press conference, then-Christian
Coalition leader Ralph Reed admitted that “For too long, our move-
ment has been a predominantly—frankly, almost exclusively—white,
evangelical Republican movement with a political center of gravity
centered in the safety of the suburbs.”19 In his 1996 book, Active Faith,
Reed wrote, “The white evangelical church carries a shameful legacy
of racism and the historical baggage of indifference to the most cen-
tral struggle for social justice in this country, a legacy that is only now
being wiped clean by the sanctifying work of repentance and racial
reconciliation.”20
While many critics lambasted Reed’s and others’ “reconciliation”
initiatives as cynical smoke screens meant to split the black vote, the
urge to confront and atone for past racism has taken on different
guises in different white-dominated churches, with legacies including
the slave trade, colonialism, and imperialism. Thus, for example, best-
selling author and celebrity pastor Rick Warren has gained notoriety
 Brothers from Another Mother >> 73

for pushing evangelicals to contribute to the cause of fighting AIDS/

HIV in Africa and to see African debt as a moral issue.21 Some minis-
tries within the Baptist church have sponsored meetings between black
and white congregations whose churches are within a few miles—if not
blocks—from each other, recognizing the legacy of racism and segrega-
tion in the founding of duplicate churches. Others have merged, bring-
ing black and white worshippers under the same roof for the first time
ever.22 Thus, there are many responses to multiple calls to deal with race
in the church.23
As explained in chapter 1, Republican strategists have been arguing
within the party about how (if at all) to attract black voters. The “com-
passionate conservatism” framework for Republican outreach during
the Bush administration is one way this has been articulated. Simultane-
ously with Karl Rove’s race-baiting tactics in South Carolina, Bush and
his advisers continued outreach to black evangelicals and Catholics,24 in
ways meant to signal a departure from the party’s race-baiting reputa-
tion and anti–civil rights policy positions, which included using racial
cues, opposing affirmative action, weakening the Voting Rights Act,
and attacking other state- and court-organized efforts to level the racial
playing field. Moreover, speeches at recent GOP conventions expressed
a harsh anti-immigration line and a pervasive use of code language
about “special rights” and the like. Intended to counter these prevailing
trends, compassionate conservatism proposed market- and faith-based
programs to craft policies to improve educational and job opportunities
for people of color. Support for policies such as school vouchers, which
use market-based theories of competition to displace government-led
initiatives, is one hallmark of compassionate conservatives’ attempts to
make kinder, gentler neoconservative appeals to people of color. As Ste-
ven Teles summarized, since the Nixon era, Republican strategists have
used issues like welfare, states’ rights, and school integration via busing
to paint Democrats as elitists who sold out working class whites.25 But,
in the late 1990s,

compassionate conservatism encouraged Republicans to present them-

selves as allies of the poor and minorities, and to insist that “liberal
elites” in the Democratic party were the defenders of ineffective bureau-
cracies and a morally debased culture. Instead of embracing [white]
74 << Brothers from Another Mother

racial resentment . . . Republicans should rebrand themselves as the

party of racial solidarity—the allies of the moralizing agents of the inner
cities.26

Bush’s compassionate conservative policies were pitched to black

clergy—the “moralizing agents” identified in black communities.
This approach was encouraged in part by moderates in the party,
who cringed at the excesses of some of the far right wing of the GOP.
It was also a prudent strategy in the face of demographic change: As
the white majority began shrinking, any savvy political party hoping
for a future would need to recruit more voters of color. In the early
1990s, some Republican strategists theorized that with 20 percent of the
black vote, they could gain a nearly air-tight governing majority.27 The
Clinton years derailed that plan temporarily, but when George W. Bush
planned his move into the White House, he and his strategists made
it clear that they were bidding for black voters, and they viewed evan-
gelical churches as a perfect vehicle to spread the word that Republi-
cans were ready to be more welcoming and diverse. The press picked up
on Bush’s attempts, as mentioned in the previous chapter, and featured
comments from black voters who saw some promise in his compassion-
ate conservative stance. But most remained wary of replacing all gov-
ernment efforts with private sector interventions. As journalist Tracy
Van Slyke observed,

Many blacks agree that it would be good for the federal government to
help churches and other community institutions play a bigger role in
tackling unemployment, child pregnancy, gang violence and other social
ills. But opinion polls suggest that most think such community activism
should come on top of, not instead of, existing and expanded govern-
ment programs.28

In 2001, J. C. Watts—at the time the lone black Republican congress-

man—was enlisted to spearhead a strategy for minority outreach. The
money available from the faith-based initiative was also predicted to
be a way to open the doors of Black churches to Republicans. Again,
the press was intrigued, and captured the opinions of some black clergy
who had accepted Bush’s outreach on the basis of shared faith and
 Brothers from Another Mother >> 75

moral judgments. A New York Times piece described the motivations of

a few of these pastors in a 2004 feature article.

William Turner, an African-American pastor from Pasadena who

voted for Mr. Gore in 2000 . . . is now volunteering for the Bush cam-
paign. . . . Others said Mr. Bush’s faith, and in particular his opposition
to same-sex marriage, had at least made their decision about the elec-
tion a closer call. . . . Republicans strategists say they are also planting
seeds that they hope will yield greater results in future elections, even if
it does not make much difference this year. And both sides acknowledge
that the endorsement of African-American clergy has a symbolic value
among nonblack voters, in part because their status in the broader cul-
ture as the legacy of the civil rights movement.29

Bush’s faith-based policies provided a perfect home for compassionate

conservative outreach, and more blacks voted for him in 2004 than in
2000.30 Moreover, as the quotation indicates, the value of visible sup-
port from black pastors lies not only in shaving off a few black voters
from the Democrats’ side, but also in assuring white voters that the
GOP is no longer as racially hostile as it was in the 1990s. Justice Sunday
III, then, is but one of many recent attempts to reshape the reputation of
the Republican Party amongst black voters. In contrast to twenty-sec-
ond radio ads or billboards, the broadcast provided an extended rein-
troduction of the GOP and its conservative Christian allies.

Justice Sunday III

In the context of the ideology of the Justice Sunday series, the word
“justice” refers to the oft-made charge that “liberal activist” judges
have used their power to deliver warped interpretations of the Consti-
tution—such as the Roe v. Wade decision—to serve “special interests”
and a “liberal elite” that are abhorrent to Christian beliefs. According
to speakers at JSI and JSII, damage done to the U.S. moral fiber by lib-
eral “judicial activism” requires people of faith (led by then-President
Bush and a Republican-dominated Congress) to curtail the power of
the third branch of government. The Justice Sunday series thus served
as a clarion call, as well as a dare to Democrats to question or block
76 << Brothers from Another Mother

President Bush’s controversial conservative nominees to the Supreme

Court. Judge Samuel Alito was the specific nominee under scrutiny at
the time of Justice Sunday III, and the producers sought to garner sup-
port for him amongst African Americans as well as white evangelicals.
High-ranking Republicans, including former Senate Majority Leader
Bill Frist and former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, spoke live or
via video at each of the first two JS events. They were joined by well-
known conservative preachers and activists, like the late Jerry Falwell,
Phyllis Schafly, and Rev. Ted Haggard—who later lost his leadership
position in the movement after a scandal involving a gay male prosti-
tute. Held at majority White churches in the mid-South, the bedrock
of Christian Right and Republican support, the first two events were
attended by few people of color. Only one Black speaker, Bishop Harry
Jackson, addressed the crowd during JSII. In contrast, JSIII was held in
a black majority church in the midst of an urban Democratic strong-
hold: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
The Reverend Herbert H. Lusk II, described in the New York Times
as a “maverick black minister” for his entrepreneurial drive and close
connections to the Bush White House, hosted Justice Sunday III at his
Greater Exodus Baptist Church in Philadelphia.31 Rev. Lusk had spoken
at the 2004 Republican National Convention and considered himself
a good friend of George W. Bush. Many Black politicians and clergy
criticized Lusk as an opportunistic sell-out, and pointed to the fact
that Lusk’s church was one of a very small number of black churches to
receive any money from Bush’s Faith Based Initiatives office. That the
sum was rather large: Lusk’s church received over $1million by some
estimates.32 For his part, though, Lusk told reporters that he decided
to host the event because “this is what Jesus would have me to do as
a pastor. I’m not following the dictates of Bush, Falwell, or Tony (Per-
kins). . . . I’m following the dictates of my Lord.”33 He justified his asso-
ciation the event by explaining that he believed the Bible spoke directly
to issues of “same-sex marriage, abortion, you can go down the line,”
and that as a pastor, he had an obligation to address these issues.34
Again, the press was intrigued by the latest Republican outreach to
black churches, and covered other black clergymen’s responses to the con-
troversial event. Thus, for example, Rev. Robert P. Shine, Sr., told reporters
that he feared that viewers of JSIII would come away believing that black
 Brothers from Another Mother >> 77

Figure 2.1. Photo of President George W. Bush and Rev. Herbert Lusk.
© TIM SHAFFER/Reuters/Corbis. Courtesy of Corbis Images.

clergy in general were backing Judge Alito’s nomination, even though

“nothing could be further from the truth.”35 Rather, Shine said, Lusk was
only “hosting this Justice Sunday by virtues of a personal relationship
with the president and some financial support of his organization by the
administration under the guise of faith-based initiatives.”36 As this quota-
tion and many others from secular and religious black leaders indicate,
many feared that Republican strategists were using Lusk’s church to con-
fuse and divide black voters.
78 << Brothers from Another Mother

Like the first two Justice Sundays, the third showcased well-known
white leaders of the Christian Right and Republican Party, including
some with dubious records in terms of race and civil rights. Amongst
the featured speakers were the late Jerry Falwell (who once preached
against desegregation in his ministry); Edwin Meese (who led the
charge against affirmative action as Attorney General during the Rea-
gan Administration); and FRC President Tony Perkins (who bought
white supremacist David Duke’s phone list of supporters for a U.S. Sen-
ate campaign). However, unlike the other two mega-church events,
JSIII featured three black speakers: Dr. Alveda King, niece of Martin
Luther King, Jr., and an ardent supporter of anti-abortion ministries;
the Reverend Lusk; and Bishop Wellington Boone, a scion of the Prom-
ise Keepers (a men’s ministry that urges its followers to reassert patri-
archal leadership in the home) and the man who famously wrote, “I
believe that slavery, and the understanding of it when you see it God’s
way, was redemptive” for African Americans.37

Religion over Race: Post-Racial Repositioning

of Valid Politicized Identity

The Reverend Herbert Lusk welcomed JSIII television viewers and

radio listeners of all colors into his church on January 8, 2006, as the
Bush administration fueled up for a fight over Supreme Court nomi-
nee Samuel Alito. At the beginning of the broadcast, the camera swept
over the crowd at his church, revealing that most seats were occu-
pied by African Americans, along with a sprinkling of white people.
Then, Tony Perkins of the FRC took the microphone to address the
media audience, noting that Christian broadcasters and Internet sites
such as Sky Angel and the Christian Television Network were bring-
ing the program to people across the country. The list of media outlets
suggested that hundreds of thousands were listening on the radio or
watching via cable or satellite.
Lusk’s welcome to the media crowd indicated that not only had
media vastly multiplied the congregants in attendance, but also that this
was a rare interracial gathering of Christian conservatives. Lusk explic-
itly thematized race as he welcomed the audiences within and outside
of the church:
 Brothers from Another Mother >> 79

Welcome to you all . . . those of you who are watching from far and dis-
tant places, those of you down South, the Midlands, all over the world. I
want you to know, I am your brother. [Applause from audience] . . .
Some of you, perhaps this is the first time you’ve had a chance to
enter into an African American congregation. I want you to know we
have many things in common. We love Jesus. We love the Lord. We love
life! We love liberty! I am your brother—I’m just from another mother.
[More applause and some laughter]38

In effect, Lusk both emphasized the perceived racial differences

between the in-church audience (black), the usual audiences courted
by the groups who organized the Justice Sunday series (white), and the
media audience (multiracial), and asserted Christianity facilitates a
bond (even if one is “from another mother”) that can supervene over
racial difference and the racial past. Noting that shared religious and
moral values make these different audiences fundamentally the same
(We love life! We love Jesus!). Lusk performed their post-racial broth-
erhood in Christ by physically embracing each of the white speakers
he introduced as they stepped up to the podium. Thus, he assured the
audience that they, too, would be able to embrace each together to pro-
tect their shared Christian values from liberal excesses. Lusk’s invitation
to the audience to enter a black-majority church suggests that the moral
imperatives of Christian teaching allow us to transcend and aban-
don racial politics and racial identity. This idea was further reinforced
through another portion of the broadcast, a videotaped meditation on
the Liberty Bell that rewrote black freedom movements as being pri-
marily concerned with religious liberty rather than with civil rights.
In the rhetoric favored by many politically active right-wing evan-
gelicals, including then-President Bush, democracy is the most perfect
form of liberty, and thus God wants us to all be living in democracies—
so long as they are democracies guided by Christian theology.39 Tony
Perkins’s narration encouraged viewers to reinterpret the symbol as
follows:

Behind me is a building that houses the Liberty Bell. . . . It has become an

important symbol of our freedom. In the 1840s, the Liberty Bell became
a symbol of the anti-slavery movement [because of the inscription from]
80 << Brothers from Another Mother

Leviticus 25:10. Today, to quote scripture is not politically correct but it

is historically correct. Atheist groups have made great progress in their
efforts to eradicate all public displays of our religious history.

Perkins’s framing of the biblical inscription on the Liberty Bell and its
link to the anti-slavery movement asserts that our nation is based pri-
marily on Christian principles, and that black freedom fighters, such
as Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King—both of whom were
pictured in the video as Perkins spoke—were really working towards
making our union more perfect in religious or spiritual terms, not in
terms of racial justice. Like the commercials and billboards discussed
earlier, these appeals to religion make a spurious connection between
the philosophies and practices of anti-racist activists like Douglass and
King and the contemporary conservative Christian movement. Their
appropriation of the history and symbolism of black civil rights lead-
ers is based on a retelling of history full of gaping holes and omissions.
Not only is the Republican embrace of segregationist Democrats who
switched parties (the “Southern Strategy”) completely omitted, so too
are the words and deeds of Reagan-era officials, such as former Attor-
ney General Edwin Meese (a Justice Sunday I participant), whose goals
were to end affirmative action and eviscerate the Voting Rights Act.
The ugly race-baiting political ads, defenses of police brutality, promo-
tion of unequal sentencing laws and racial profiling, as well as a regular
spate of racial gaffes—all were left out of this glowing story of steadfast
Christian fellowship with African Americans.
This post-racial selective memory was embodied in the presence and
words of the next African American speaker who came to the podium,
Alveda King. The announcer reminded the audience that she is a niece
of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Her family ties to the nation’s most
famous civil rights icon and her down-home preachy rhetorical style
made her a perfect fit for JSIII’s attempt to articulate black religious cul-
ture with conservative politics. She began her time by singing what she
referred to as “an old Negro spiritual” about freedom. Afterwards, she
told the congregation:

Today in our nation we enjoy the expression of religious freedom. We

also celebrate the 50th anniversary of Mrs. Rosa parks and the civil rights
 Brothers from Another Mother >> 81

exodus. Liberty is a precious light we must preserve. When truth cannot

be absolutely proclaimed, the lives of all people including the lives of the
unborn are caught up in the battle of religious freedom before us . . .

She then invited the gathering “to share in the faith of my uncle, Dr.
Martin Luther King, Jr.” This faith, she said, convinced him that

“If we are to go forward, we must go back and rediscover these pre-

cious values that all reality hinges on moral foundations.” That’s Dr. Mar-
tin Luther King’s words, but we can affirm those words here in America
right now. I want to close with one of the prayers of my father. He prayed
this prayer during his lifetime. Almighty God, who is the light, the truth,
the way, we come at this hour. . . . Have mercy we pray and bless our lives
and this nation in which we live. Bless our rulers tonight. Make them
mindful of the responsibility they have this night. Bless our nation, Lord,
in Jesus’ name we pray, amen!

In her speech, Ms. King excerpted selectively from her uncle’s words to
argue that Martin Luther King would have agreed that Christian val-
ues are under siege by the liberal judiciary (and liberal media) in the
twenty-first century. Her words garnered thunderous applause from
the crowd as she accused liberals of pushing God—and by extension,
trying to push all good Christians—out of the public sphere. As Bill
Donohue of the Catholic League told a nearly all-white, Southern Bap-
tist audience a few months earlier at Justice Sunday II, “Now we’re in
the back of the bus.”40 The idea that contemporary evangelical Chris-
tians face a level of oppression similar to that of African Americans
in the 1950s was further reinforced when Alveda King led the congre-
gation in singing “We Shall Overcome.” As she encouraged the other
featured speakers to join her, the camera showed the white and black
men stand up, awkwardly holding hands as they mouthed the words to
the song.
When Reverend Lusk returned to the stage, he again took the oppor-
tunity make explicit references to racial differences; but here he lashed
out the African Americans who had criticized him for hosting the
event, further asserting Christian identity as a more legitimate founda-
tion for political ideology and action.
82 << Brothers from Another Mother

I’ve been called a sellout. I’ve been called an Uncle Tom, and the New
York Times called me a maverick to the black church. Well my friends, I
just want the Times to note that, if a maverick can be defined as one who
is pro-life, then I’m a maverick. [Applause] . . .
Fifty-five of the original signers of our Constitution were all men
of God. But the foundation is being tampered with. . . . From the time
in 1963 until 1999, over 18 million African American babies alone have
been aborted. They say I don’t speak for black people. Well, I may not
speak for all black people, but there are some black folk that I speak for!
[Applause] . . . We are against the redefinition of marriage, we are against
partial abortion and we are against Christian bashing! . . . There is dis-
crimination against the people of God . . .

In this rousing speech, Lusk used recognizable cadences of black spiritu-

als. He also conveyed the main talking points in the conservative play-
book: Liberal whites and Democratic-affiliated blacks have become rigid,
politically correct arbiters of racial loyalty and demand lock-step agree-
ment with the party line. By insisting on the separation of church and
state, he argues, liberals are not following the Founding Fathers’ prescrip-
tion for religious freedom. And, of course, by supporting a woman’s right
to choose, they are not protecting women. Rather, liberals are oppressing
all Christians—including black Christians. Indeed, with his references to
abortions, he implies what is made explicit in anti-choice billboards plas-
tered in inner cities today: Pro-choice advocates are enacting genocide
on black people. As anti-abortion activists cast themselves as saviors of
the black nation, they also take a page out of the playbook of conserva-
tive black nationalists who argue that white feminists are racists who seek
to neuter black men and convert black women into traitors.41 Later, Rev.
Boone followed suit, racializing women’s reproductive rights to describe
why black Christians should reject liberals and Democrats:

You can’t tell me that abortion and this matter is a white man’s issue. It is
an issue of black people aborting at a rate like nobody else. Black people
have to stand up and pray. . . .
Judge Alito will turn back the hand of civil rights 100 years? Don’t spit
in my face and call it rain! That’s the same old stuff they’ve been saying
for years.
 Brothers from Another Mother >> 83

Like Lusk and Alveda King, Boon, spoke in the oft-imitated cadences of
black preachers. He also alluded to intraracial debates over Republican
policies and judicial appointments, and decried Democrats’ opposition
to Alito as insulting nonsense. However, none of these black speakers,
let alone the white speakers, mentioned any major civil rights accom-
plishments or efforts. Other than references to anti-slavery movements,
none of the speakers spoke to the substance of the rights Alveda King’s
uncle fought and died for in the 1960s. Nor did any of the speakers
address issues that are central to contemporary black politics: voting
rights, equal opportunity employment, equal education, freedom to live
in any neighborhood, freedom to avoid police harassment. Rather, the
only freedom described is the freedom to impose conservative Chris-
tian morality on the rest of the public.
In various ways, some of these “freedoms” do, of course, impinge
on—or deny—the freedoms of others. Thus, for example, while gay
marriage was a consistent talking point for Justice Sunday and was pre-
sented as an attack on Christianity, as many progressive activists have
pointed out, restricting marital rights to heterosexuals on the basis of
religious principles is discrimination, and sets up unequal status for gay
and lesbian couples. Rather than defending liberty, then, many of the
freedoms speakers articulated can just as easily be described as intoler-
ance and bigotry.

Viewer Responses to Justice Sunday III

Whether JSIII or other attempts to synchronize black Christian tradi-

tions and conservative policy imperatives is successful with black audi-
ences is a key question. Black Christians harbor a diverse set of political
and theological views, and many are well aware and wary of the fact
that many white churches endorsed slavery and Jim Crow segregation
and that they continue to shun congregants of color.42 Hence, it is logi-
cal to assume that many blacks would be skeptical of media overtures
emanating from white Christian institutions that have historically
excluded them not only from houses of worship, but also from defi-
nitions of humanity. Simultaneously, however, we must recognize that
past and present black congregations share significant areas of belief
with white congregations; even if they are met initially with wariness,
84 << Brothers from Another Mother

the media appeals created by whites for black Christians may resonate
with some subset of shared theology and worship practices.
This section of this chapter presents a focus-group study of reli-
gious African Americans who watched portions of the JSIII program.
I assembled three focus groups in the late fall and early winter of 2006
at a large Midwestern university. Participants were recruited in three
ways: (1) through an undergraduate research participant pool; (2) email
invitations sent to African American–interest listservs, available to the
public on campus; and (3) referrals from participants. Students who
participated in the first group were asked to refer their African Amer-
ican friends to the study. Focus group size ranged from three to five
participants. In all, eleven of the participants were women, four were
men. Participants met in a conference room, and were provided with
a light meal before and during the viewing of JSIII. Before the inter-
view process began, I asked them to fill out and sign consent forms and
to complete a voluntary demographic questionnaire. All participants
gave consent to be audio recorded, and all of them agreed to fill out the
demographic forms.
Participants ranged in age from eighteen to twenty-four. Most par-
ticipants were undergraduates aged nineteen, and only three graduate
students were part of the groups. Family income estimates for the par-
ticipants ranged from below $29,000 and up to $99,000. Two of the
graduate students reported being financially independent of their fam-
ily, but the majority of participants reported family incomes of either
$30,000–49,000 or $70,000–79,000. All of the participants identified
as either black or African American. The majority of the participants
practiced or came from a Christian faith household. Half (seven) of
the participants identified as either Baptist or Pentecostal; one par-
ticipant was Catholic; and two referred to themselves as “Christian”
with no denominational specification. Three others considered them-
selves “non-denominational Christians,” and one participant identified
as Muslim. One student identified as atheist, and one as agnostic, but
both wrote on the information forms that they had grown up attend-
ing Christian churches with their families, and still attended services
when they returned home for family affairs. Both of these students also
characterized themselves as “spiritual” people who were not interested
in “organized religion.”
 Brothers from Another Mother >> 85

After eating a meal and filling out the forms, the groups watched a
thirty-minute segment of Justice Sunday III, which included speeches by
Rev. Lusk, Tony Perkins, Senator Rick Santorum, and Dr. Alveda King.
To conduct the focus groups, I aimed for a flexible style of moderation
to allow for changes in the protocol of questions. I began the interview
with “ice-breaker” questions (getting everyone’s name, favorite food or
television show) and then proceeded to ask the participants whether
they had heard of, seen, or listened to JSIII previously, and then asked
their opinions of each of the four speakers featured at the pulpit. As the
discussion continued, I asked questions about whether the participants
thought it was a good idea for politicians to talk about religion or if
they thought most Americans agreed with the principle of separation of
church and state. Each of the questions in the protocol was open-ended,
and I was able to get through all the questions in each session. In a the
first session, the participants’ answers prompted questions that had not
been included in the protocol, and in subsequent sessions I added those
questions in to the conversation.
Once I finished asking all of my questions, I turned off the audio
recording equipment, thanked the participants, and invited them to ask
any questions they might have about the study. Participants were also
reminded that they could contact the Institutional Review Board if they
had any concerns. I listened to the tapes immediately after the sessions,
making notes. I then sent the tapes to be transcribed, and reread the
transcripts for errors while listening to the original tapes. I edited the
transcripts, substituting pseudonyms for the participants as I corrected
transcriber errors.

Responses from the Audience: Mixed Feelings about

White Republican Speakers’ Sincerity

The focus group participants had very different reactions to the black
and white speakers. Nearly all of the participants expressed some
skepticism about the presence, motives, and rhetoric of the two white
speakers, Senator Santorum and Tony Perkins. Most also remarked that
each used speaking styles that did not resonate with traditional black
church audiences or addressed topics that didn’t belong in a church.
Santorum especially was singled out as a wooden speaker who wasn’t
86 << Brothers from Another Mother

really talking about religion at all, but rather pushing a particular politi-
cal agenda regarding the Supreme Court. Perkins, on the other hand,
was viewed as trying to make a connection with black congregants, but
was still suspect due to his political affiliations.

Rodney: And in regards to the other speakers, I felt the senator, he spoke
well, but that’s kind of expected considering he’s a senator and he has
to speak all the time. His, I don’t think he connected to the audience
as much on a personal level, like Tony Perkins and the other two.

Another participant was much more blunt in her disapproval of

Santorum:

Beatrice: My initial reaction to the movie was, to be quite frank, disgust.

And particularly when I saw that Rick Santorum was the speaker and
it was associated with justice and freedom and liberty, I just find that
to be completely, like complete hypocrisy, to associate him with any
of that. I think that he is a very hateful person, and, especially when
it comes to homosexuality and things like that, and I just thought
that all these people were contradictory . . . to like, seeing them, as
far as the 1st two speakers go, I didn’t really have an opinion, I mean
I didn’t expect anything really enlightening from what they had to
say. I wasn’t surprised as far as anything they had to say, as far as the
religious thing goes.

Other speakers weren’t as affronted by his politics, but agreed that San-
torum seemed out of touch.

Allison: Yes, the way he was speaking just seemed . . . he wasn’t really
fluid with his speech, and he looked down every time he went to say
something. And his hand gestures seemed kind of robotic. Those
were my 1st impressions.

At the start of our conversations, some of the participants were con-

fused by the event’s organization and premise. They weren’t sure why
this particular combination of religious and political messages was the
focus of attention.
 Brothers from Another Mother >> 87

Katrina: I thought it was very unclear when [Lusk] was speaking—it

took him a very long time to make me understand what he was
talking about. I felt on the edge like what? Towards the end when he
introduced the next speaker, then you finally realize the connection
between the name of the DVD and what he was talking about.
Interviewer: So what made it clear? What was, in terms of when he
introduced, I guess you were saying when he introduced Tony Per-
kins, what made it clear to you? What was kind of the crystallizing
statement?
Katrina: Just when he began talking about how we’re getting away from God
and things like that, but before I didn’t know what he was talking about.
It didn’t sound related to religion or liberty or anything, it was just,
seemed like a really long introduction of “we’re brothers and sisters.”

Participants again singled out Santorum as misplaced in this context

because of the overt political agenda he laid out in his speech.

Michael: Yeah, [Santorum] seemed like the one person that didn’t really
fit in with the rest of them because he was a senator, and because the
stuff he was talking about, like the other people were talking about
religion and he was more talking about senator—Judge—Alito, Judge
Alito, or he would become judge later, but he was more talking about
him than how, somehow, than all the values that we’d lost over time,
back to America.
Christopher: I would agree. He kind of lost me at some point, and it
more so seemed like he was lobbying for the judge—
Allison: Seemed like that was his purpose, and that it was really rehearsed,
like I know he had his speech prepared, but it wasn’t as though he was
there for the actual cause, it was definitely rehearsed, his speech.

The participants were not pleased in general at what they perceived

as politicians just going through the motions at churches for political
gain. They didn’t see the white speakers as sincere in their attempt to
connect with black congregants.

Christopher: [Satorum] didn’t sound really sincere about what he was

talking about.
88 << Brothers from Another Mother

Janice: Right it was rehearsed.

Christopher: It was just like ok I’m going to prepare this speech and talk
about this because this is what the event is for. But that’s it.
Allison: I’m not surprised either. But I think it goes along the lines of you
know, candidates and kissing babies. [Laughter from group] . . . I just
think that it’s more for his agenda than for others.
Interviewer: When you say “more for his agenda than for others,” how
do you characterize his agenda?
Andrew: Other agendas would be people who are not . . . white . . . Repub-
lican . . . and basically fit among his demographics. So those are the
other agendas, but if you have issues that are within his agenda, that
coincide with those others, then, you know, things like this would
happen, and you have white people and black people who are cel-
ebrating Christianity, and you know, they’ll go ahead and get those
issues dealt with.

While participants could imagine white politicians and black wor-

shippers having overlapping interests, there was disagreement amongst
the participants as to whether any politician should use a church as
a ground for campaigning. Some felt that public displays of religious
belief by politicians were always part of a ploy to gain votes.

Interviewer: So, Janice, you said you were sort of skeptical about the
whole thing, so would you want your elected U.S. congressmen to
show up at Justice Sunday IV?
Janice: If that congressman or woman was there representing him or
herself and not speaking from his or her position, then fine. But I
don’t think that politics should be involved with church. Separation
of church and state.
Michael: And I think that if it is, I don’t think that they should come out
here to get more votes or to get more support behind something
they’re doing, but you know, if they’re heavily involved in a religious
organization before they come to that position, then . . . [drifts off,
shrugs]
Interviewer: So because prior to being elected they were heavily
involved, if they keep showing up at that church or that particular
venue then that would be ok?
 Brothers from Another Mother >> 89

Christopher: I wouldn’t, I guess, have negative thoughts about it. But if

just out of the blue they just show up, then . . . I don’t know.

One participant brought up her own experiences with white candi-

dates coming to her church for political support.

Renee: Well, I know that during election time, I have been in churches
where political figures have spoken before, and I didn’t really like it.
I know that they’re just trying to get their vote out to as many peo-
ple as possible, but I think just when you get ready to go to church
on Sunday, it’s not really, you’re going there, it’s something sacred;
it’s not really [that] you’re trying to push the political. . . . I’m not
sure if that was supposed to be like a service or was it an extra
thing? If it was going to a picnic or some sort of luncheon thing
that the church hosted, I can understand, but in my experience,
when I’ve gone, it’s been: you’re going to Sunday service, and up
pops a political figure.
Interview: What about you, Katrina? Would you like to see one of your
congressional representatives show up at this?
Katrina: I think it would depend on the person who is running for a
particular party and how they present themselves, not at just one
moment during the race, but I’ve noticed that there are some political
leaders or people wishing to get in political situations, who automati-
cally come from a certain religious background, and who use those
ethics, and those morals, and those beliefs as part of, they want to
use them as part of their political campaign because that’s essentially
what they believe in, and they’re thinking that’s how they want to
establish that certain political leadership role, and I think it’s different
when you have a person in a certain political position who just, who
doesn’t necessarily establish first-off that that’s the way they’re sup-
porting their views. That’s different from a political person who right
from the beginning states that this is the way I’m approaching things:
I’m using the church, I’m using my beliefs, I’m using my morals as
something that’s going to support me . . .

Another group member questioned whether white politicians were try-

ing to “side-step” race by using religion.
90 << Brothers from Another Mother

Beatrice: I feel like that when it comes to issues, especially when it comes
to religion, in order to get certain measures passed. . . . Okay, I’m not
saying people are racist. I’m just saying whatever personal prejudices
they have, they seem to put them aside when it comes to something
they believe in. I feel like religion especially allows for people to kind
of side-step the whole race issue.

Thus, the white speakers at JSIII might still have issues with race, but
the participants believed they were able to bracket them in order to gar-
ner support for Alito.
Another focus group member agreed, following up with this sum-
mation of Santorum and Perkins’s agenda:

Allison: It’s kind of like a planned out thing to get certain votes, to get
certain people to go along with what you want, but I agree that there
are certain things that people won’t pass. They will go out and break
down barriers of race so that [the task] gets done, but in other set-
tings, it might not be the same.

Christian Identity and Political Values

Two participants were concerned about the assumptions outsiders seem

to have about what it means to be a Christian. They expressed strong
beliefs that stereotypes about the Christian Right are mapped onto any-
one who is a publicly avowed Christian. As Violet argued, there is much
more diversity within the religion, politically and spiritually, than those
stereotypes allow.

Violet: Well just a quick comment. The Christian vote for me is not
necessarily the conservative vote, and that’s a distinction that I’d like
to make, because that’s another stereotype, that the Christian vote is
always the conservative vote. In some states that’s true, but not gener-
ally speaking.

She and another member of this focus group argued that they are not
swayed by mere proclamations of politicians who claim Christian faith.
 Brothers from Another Mother >> 91

Rather, what they want is confirmation that the politicians’ political

decisions will be in line with Christian doctrine as they understand it.
Violet added:

Violet: Secondly, if a politician is in a forum—a religious forum—and

he’s taking a stand on religion, I’d rather know up front those are his
beliefs rather than say 2 or 3 months down the line—a lot of people
say, “I’m a Christian, this or that.” I’d rather know up front what their
intentions are, what they are supporting, and how they’re plan-
ning on going on about doing that. And as far as quoting the Bible
or anything like that, I feel the same way. If you want to quote the
Bible, that’s just another source. If you want to quote Gandhi, quote
Gandhi—I won’t ask you, “Why you reading Gandhi every day?”

Later, Katrina said:

Katrina: A lot of people who claim to be Christians—they don’t even

hold the same beliefs. I could be—one person right here could say
they were Christian, and be totally different from me—because a lot
of people like to pick and choose: “It’s wrong to murder, it’s wrong
to steal, but I want to have this abortion.” You know, and you can’t
do that. You have to just choose wholly. If you say you want to be a
Christian, then you have to believe everything. You can’t just pick
and choose what you think is right, and the rest of the stuff, you
ignore it, so if someone comes against it, you defend it. So I think
that’s the way I think [Christian politicians] lose a lot of votes,
because the audience [of Christians] that they’re capturing, whose
attention they want, will be very, very small.
Interview: Allison, what is your call?
Allison: If I was to hear a politician, quote the Bible, uh . . . I think—I
would hope that that stereotype—of everyone being under the same
umbrella of Christianity—I would hope that they would not be
under that umbrella where everyone is anti-this, or pro-this, anti-
that. . . . If I were to hear that, that’s what I would hope for. Another
thing that I would think, I would think that it’s good that they’re
quoting something that has really good meanings for morality. And
I would hope that they would know about other religions that have
92 << Brothers from Another Mother

good or the same morality. I would assume that they would know
that many other religions have the same mode of thinking about
things, and I would just hope that they would show respect to other
religions.

In their discussion of Christianity, morality, and politics, the partici-

pants varied in their belief that religion should be part of politics. What
they all seemed to hope for, though, was transparency and consistency
from politicians who made public statements about religion. They per-
ceived many politicians—including Rick Santorum—as using religion
as a tool to gain voter support. They were also concerned about the
ways in which the label “Christian” seemed tied to a narrow stereotype
of beliefs and practices. But interestingly, these concerns weren’t part of
the discussion when we talked about the black speakers.

Reactions to Black Speakers: Ambivalence, Suspicion, and Admiration

Compared to their skepticism about Santorum and Perkins, partici-

pants were more ambivalent about the black speakers, Rev. Lusk and
Dr. Alveda King. While many agreed that they found King’s address
passionate and more fitting for a church environment, some were trou-
bled by her use of her family ties to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Like-
wise, some viewed Lusk as welcoming, but others felt that he was “sell-
ing out” his church and trying too hard to embrace white viewers. The
following exchange between Renee and Katrina illustrates the mixed
feelings about these speakers.

Renee: For the woman, Alveda King, it seemed like she based a lot of
her credibility on her father and on her grandfather when she was
speaking. . . .
Katrina: Alveda King . . . , she was political in that she touched on Martin
Luther King and how he addressed [faith] and the words that came
out of his mouth, but I’m not sure. It wasn’t as formal as Tony Perkins
and his address to the crowd. . . .
Renee: I got kind of a negative aspect from the—Herbert Lusk. I felt kind
of, I feel he’s sort of selling this church out to these senators and to
the media. He was kind of manipulating his church where he was
 Brothers from Another Mother >> 93

using it as more of a political aspect rather than you know preaching

the word of God and trying to do that aspect. I felt like he was trying
to work in the political aspect . . . [I think] there should be a separa-
tion between church and state. . . . And Alveda King, I felt like, with
all the singing and the continuous references to Martin Luther King
and her father . . . I felt like she was trying too hard to stress that
these are the people I’m related to. I felt like she wasn’t using her own
credibility and her own voice—more so trying to rely on others and
their accomplishments to prove her point

I asked the participants what they thought of Lusk’s welcome at the

beginning of the program, since it was one of the few moments that
racial identity was explicitly mentioned.

Interviewer: What did you think about the Reverend Herbert Lusk—he
was the person who opened up the program, who said “I am your
brother” and such things. It was his church. What did you think
about him?
Janice: Pretty typical pastor.
Interviewer: “Pretty typical pastor?” Why was he typical?
Janice: I mean not typical of my church that I’m familiar with, but he has
the suit and the voice and the catchy phrases, just things that I hear
people describe about their churches.
Interviewer: About what kind of churches?
Janice: I would say black churches in general.
Interviewer: What did you all think of that “We’re all brothers but
maybe from a different mother” comment? What do you think
[Lusk] meant by that?
Katrina: I don’t think it made sense because normally in a religious
setting, in a church setting, if I hear “we are brothers,” I automati-
cally think about like, Adam and Eve, but if he says “from a differ-
ent mother”—I don’t know, that kind of threw it off. But maybe he
just meant all brothers because they’re all related in the body of the
church, but that’s all I got from it.
Beatrice: I mean, it made a lot of sense to me because before he was talk-
ing about brother from another mother, he was saying well maybe
this is your first time in a black congregation. So I felt like he was just
94 << Brothers from Another Mother

trying to bridge that gap and say even though we’re from a different
ethnicity, we have the same beliefs and common interests, and in that
way we’re brothers and sisters.

Janice and others picked up on the traditional cadences of black church

vocals, and suggested there was something stereotypical about Lusk’s
performance. But others found his style attractive.

Christopher: I guess to me he seemed very welcoming, happy, friendly—

kind of similar, same things that she mentioned as well.
Allison: And excited that, you know, we were . . . people were coming
together for such a good cause.
Christopher: And not only just African Americans, but people from all
different backgrounds, because he mentioned you know I’m your
brother, but we’re just from different mothers [laughter from other
participants], so, showing I guess, that he embraced not only African
Americans, but other races as well.

Since so many of the participants critiqued Santorum’s delivery, I

asked them follow-up questions to make sure I understood what they
meant in terms of the style or styles they would expect in a black major-
ity church.

Interviewer: Now you say that [Senator Santorum] sounded rehearsed,

but everyone who was speaking—except for, I think, Reverend
Lusk—had notes and you saw, I noticed them looking down at their
notes. So what is it about Rick Santorum that seemed more rehearsed
than Dr. Alveda King?
Christopher: She was more passionate about what she was talking about,
like . . . I don’t know, she just seemed more passionate than he did
about what he was saying . . .
Interviewer: So would you all agree with that assessment: he wasn’t
really talking about religion in the way that Dr. Alveda King was?
Christopher: She was more open with expression I guess, her expression
of her spirituality or whatever, because not once did I remember him
saying “hallelujah” or “thank you, Jesus” or anything like that, but she
was more open to expressing that.
 Brothers from Another Mother >> 95

The participants read from the program racial/cultural cues associ-

ated with the black church and its civil rights history. As their responses
suggest, there were some appealing elements within the JSIII program,
particularly the presence and style of Alveda King and portions of Rev.
Lusk’s presentation. Overall, however, they were not impressed by the
overtures of the white speakers.

Inroads in the Black Church, or Post-

Racial Symbolism for White Voters?

Specialty media such as JSIII represent part of a post-racial project that

attempts to shift the locus of identity politics from one of identification
with a broadly defined, phenotypically visible racial group, to a politics
of belonging to a specific religious community. This post-racial strategy
may really be for the benefit of white voters, for it provides them with a
post-racial means of imagining solidarity with black people. The religion-
not-race position provides a means for Republican-leaning white vot-
ers to distance themselves from the racist reputation of the party with-
out having to think about the desires of many African Americans to
address racial inequality, let alone confront questions of white privilege.
As the next chapters demonstrate, the post-racial amnesia that facili-
tates the idea that religious fellowship will provide a shortcut to racial
harmony also encourages the notion that family ties or a single election
cycle could profoundly transform race relations without revisiting the
past.
This page intentionally left blank
3

The Post-Racial Family

Parenthood and the Politics of Interracial Relationships on TV

Network entertainment television has served as one barometer of racial

inclusion and sentiment.1 Although the networks have certainly been
conservative in terms of the pace of racial integration—both in front of
and behind the cameras—television producers’ responses to the chal-
lenges of representing diversity provide us with an interesting gauge of
what influential, creative people in media think Americans want—or
are ready for—in terms of entertainment. For the greater part of this
history, this readiness has been translated according to what television
executives and creative personnel believe advertisers and white audi-
ences will accept.
In the twentieth century, certain racial inclusion landmarks and
landmines became iconic. Nearly all involve African Americans, in a
reflection of how dominant television continues to focus on the black/
white binary to the exclusion of more representations of Asian Ameri-
cans, Native Americans, and Latinas/os. Early on, in 1951, the attempt to
move Amos ’n’ Andy from radio to television signaled that the emerging
civil rights movement had already changed the calculus of black inclu-
sion in mainstream media: Opposition to that show emerged before the
first episode aired.2 This opposition didn’t lead to different approaches
to black inclusion, however; rather, it led to continued exclusion.3 Later,

>> 97
98 << The Post-Racial Family

in 1956, when NBC took a chance on a show featuring one of the most
popular black entertainers of the day, opposition to Nat King Cole’s vari-
ety program by advertisers who feared the show would enrage southern
affiliates was intense. The assumption that white audiences and con-
sumers weren’t “ready” for black representations continued to shape
network decisions into the 1960s and 1970s. But as Herman Gray, Robin
Means Coleman, and others have documented, the changing racial
landscape off-screen finally led to some changes on-screen. Some of
the most memorable actors, shows, and characters of the 1960s, 1970s,
and 1980s were products of attempts to bring black and brown people
on screen: Bill Cosby was suave on I Spy; the Lear sitcoms brought us
Archie Bunker and the Jeffersons; urban dramas like Hill Street Blues
and its imitators wove stories of black and white cops, lawyers, and doc-
tors into the mix; and, last but not least, Bill Cosby’s triumphant return
to TV in the 1980s with The Cosby Show made almost everyone feel that
they knew a middle-class black family.4
Indeed, as some have conjectured, the explosion of black faces on
television in the 1970s and 1980s laid the groundwork for whites to feel
more comfortable with black people in the workplace, in schools, and
in neighborhoods. As Seattle Times columnist Jerry Large wrote after
the 2008 election, “young voters . . . have seen so many black presi-
dents on TV they don’t blink at the idea.”5 Some studies suggest that
this could, indeed, be the case: Positive parasocial interaction with tele-
vision characters can influence perceptions of people in the real world,
under certain conditions.6 Not surprisingly, pundits and observers have
compared the Obamas to the Cosby Show’s Huxtable family and drawn
the conclusion that shows like Cosby and other vicarious contact with
interracial pop culture impacted the youth who voted for the president
in overwhelming numbers.7
However, post-racial change doesn’t simply arise from getting televi-
sion audiences to see a critical mass of black people on television. Orga-
nizations like the NAACP and the advocacy group Children NOW have
tried to move away from counting the people of color on screens to
thinking more deeply about how and in what contexts these represen-
tations occur. Certainly our culture has produced copious representa-
tions of African Americans, from minstrel shows to Hollywood’s plan-
tation fantasies (epitomized by Gone With the Wind). For decades, these
 The Post-Racial Family >> 99

inclusions fell within prescribed roles defined by racial hierarchy, thus

reaffirming rather than challenging segregation and discrimination. If
we are to move toward a post-racial era, we need to examine emerging
methods of inclusion to gauge what kinds of messages about people of
color are being used to signal racial enlightenment. When, for example,
television producers use interracial families as vehicles for racial inclu-
sion, we can’t assume the visibility is unambiguously progressive.
The focus of this chapter is the first two seasons (2010–2011) of NBC’s
prime-time drama Parenthood and its representation of the character
Jasmine Trussell, one of many mothers on the show. Analyzing how
Parenthood “integrated” its main family via a troubled inclusion of a
black woman and her biracial child, I explore how the inclusion of this
black mother to make an interracial family simultaneously amplifies
post-feminist and post-racial sentiments and lays bare confusion and
discomfort around contemporary race and gender roles. This discom-
fort emerges out of the invitation to viewers to compare parents—espe-
cially mothers—who appear on the show, as well as from the scripting
of secrets and lies about sexual relations and parental status in the rep-
resentation of the interracial couple.8
My analysis reaffirms the need to think about sexism and racism as
interlocking systems—systems that are sometimes hard to pin down,
but that do manifest themselves in our culture and politics. Specifi-
cally for this chapter, I attend to the intersections of race, class, and
gender in representations of families on television. Here, I examine
how “post-racial” and “post-feminist” discourses and sensibilities that
have been prominent in the political sphere—see Mitt Romney’s joke
that he’d do better with poor voters if he was “part Mexican,” and the
NRA’s argument that to stop domestic violence, women should choose
to own guns9—have influenced a popular representation of family on
TV. In particular, post-feminist and post-racial framing of the fam-
ily deploys strategic depictions of “choices” made by women who are
mothers.
To begin, I compare two iterations of Parenthood—the original 1989
film and its 2010–2011 TV reincarnation—to illuminate how templates
for racial inclusion formed in the 1980s continue to haunt dramatization
of interracial family contact and composition in the twenty first century.
Then, I discuss the ways in which interracial couples and families have
100 << The Post-Racial Family

been used to symbolize a post-racial America. Following the work of

other critical race and media scholars, I argue that interracial couples and
children are key figures in post-racial aesthetics, serving as shorthand
for social and interpersonal progress and enlightenment about race. But
before delving into the movie, the TV show, and the show’s main charac-
ters, I will briefly revisit definitions of post-feminism and post-racialism.

Post-Feminism and Post-Racialism, Reexamined

Many scholars have taken on the topic and the trouble of post-femi-
nism. For Mary Vavrus, from’ whom I borrow, the most prevalent form
of post-feminism found in mainstream media is a “depoliticizing ide-
ology whose claims include that feminism is unnecessary now that
women have ascended to high-status . . . jobs and are protected from
sex discrimination due to various laws. . . . If women fail to succeed
under these conditions, they have only themselves to blame.”10 Post-
feminism thus frames women’s childbearing and work choices within a
neoliberal “individualizing and privatizing rhetoric about social activi-
ties (like mothering) and neglect of social programs designed to ease
the difficulties of family care.”11 Moreover, this overlapping of neoliberal
and post-feminist discourses reinforces and normalizes traditional gen-
der roles in parenting. Characteristic of dominant post-feminist rhet-
oric is neglect of how institutions, power, race, class, or sexuality still
operate to limit the choices of many women,’ particularly working-class
women and women of color.
Recent revival of the so-called “Mommy Wars” reflects post-fem-
inism’s insistence on scrutinizing individual women’s choices—with a
myopic focus on upper-middle-class women’s lives. Susan Douglas and
Meredith Michaels skewer the wars in The Mommy Myth, where they
illustrate how media continue to render harsh judgment on women
and girls no matter what choices they do or don’t make about sex, par-
enthood, education, and work. Likewise, philosopher Amy Allen dis-
sects the faulty logic of the media’s post-feminist critiques of mother-
ing while framing the struggle as “motherhood versus feminism” rather
than as a conflict over the meanings of feminism and the lack of social
and structural support for all parents.12
 The Post-Racial Family >> 101

As noted in the introduction to this book, the notion of post-racial-

ism can be used by some as a multicultural upgrade for colorblind-
ness and by others to suggest that demographic changes will usher
in racial harmony. Eric Watts’s consideration of the term reveals why
disquiet and disagreement continue to vex our discussions of what
race means now that we (mostly) agree that it is a social construc-
tion. That is, while race is socially constructed, we experience racial
tropes and embody them through “values that are sensually learned
and known.”13 Yet, as Watts notes, “post-” suggests a break with the
past and creates a gap: A break can separate one from home, from
comfort; a break can provide release or relief. In this break one may
feel the euphoria of the new or the horror of the unknown. The break
can be liberating for those who were oppressed in the old days, and a
wound for those who formerly wielded unquestioned power and sta-
tus. The signs at Tea Party rallies declaring “give me my country back”
are expressions of the anxiety in the break of the “post-.” Thus, Watts
concludes, the eruption of ugly “old-style” racism (for example, online
depictions of Michelle and Barack Obama as Dinah and Sambo)
reveals that white supremacy is not dead and gone: It is a zombie
stalking the land.14 Thus, one perspective on the post-racial is that it is
an era of the “living dead”: The racial ideologies and representational
strategies that the “post-“ declares to be dead and gone refuse to stay
buried. They keep cropping up, like zombies, in expected and unex-
pected places, such as network television.
Drawing on Vavrus’s and Watts’s conceptualizations of these oft-
twinned “post-s,” I argue that post-feminist discourses and post-racially
revamped stereotypes of black motherhood stalk and shape the char-
acter of Jasmine Trussell and infuse the storylines that involve her
and her white paramour, Crosby Braverman, as they negotiate their
romantic relationship and parenting responsibilities. From this per-
spective, we can discern how post-feminist understandings of women’s
choices merge with stereotypes of black unwed mothers that, like zom-
bies, refuse to die and thereby foreclose other possibilities in the story,
despite the show’s attempt to portray a post-racial family via one of the
concept’s most popular representational forms: interracial couples and
children.
102 << The Post-Racial Family

Interracial Couples and Post-Racial Aesthetics

As discussed by many critical race and media scholars, pop culture’s

recent fascination with and employment of interracial figures and fami-
lies has a long and varied history. Here, it is important to revisit and
emphasize the contributions of scholars such as Mary Beltran, Camille
Fojas, and Ralina Joseph to delineate how interracial couplings, and
women of color in these pairings, function as post-racial signifiers.15
Since the 1990s—and most famously in Time magazine’s “Eve” cover—
mainstream media have recirculated and promoted the idea that bio-
logical mixing will produce a future America where everyone is blended
to some degree, and all exhibit some skin shade of light brown.16 This
intermixture, proponents of this theory claim, will eliminate racial dif-
ference by making us all mixed—and therefore all racially the same. By
extension, this racial mixing will destroy racial hierarchy as well.
As I and others have argued elsewhere, this is magical thinking at
best, for it relocates the responsibility and causality of political and eco-
nomic inequality in the bodies—in the skin—of individuals rather than
in the institutional and cultural practices that define and support the
racial hierarchy in the first place.17 Thus, this approach to “solving the
race problem” centers on individual choices and emotions, relying on
people’s gradual willingness to intermingle, while suggesting that politi-
cal and social policy has no place in the solution. One need only look to
Brazil and other nations that celebrate “mixed” racial populations to see
that even centuries of sanctioned multiracial identities can easily result
in modes of racial stratification of a different kind.18 Despite the obvi-
ous flaws in the fantasy of racial equality via inter-mating, Hollywood,
mainstream news, and Madison Avenue have embraced the multiracial
family as a symbol of post-racial progress. In films and TV shows, in
ads and feature stores, we see multiracial individuals and families por-
trayed as proof that we’re getting to a post-racial society. In car com-
mercials, movies, and sitcoms, interracial couples and children have
become vehicles for expressing to the audience that we have arrived,
that the text or product in question is hip—still, perhaps, a bit edgy or
exotic, but not threatening.
Yet, as Michele Elam elegantly demonstrates, pop culture representa-
tions of multiracial identity need not fall into these categories in her
 The Post-Racial Family >> 103

book The Souls of Mixed Folk.19 Elam’s investigation of recent novels,

comics, and comedy routines that “critique the narrowing of mixed
race discourses” to individualistic narratives of self-discovery or apo-
litical celebrations of the “millennial generation’s” ability to blur bound-
aries shows that there are other choices when media producers aestheti-
cize black-white relationships and biracial children.20 Likewise, Bambi
Haggins also explores some of the possibilities and pitfalls of post-racial
entertainment in her analysis of Dave Chappelle’s rapid rise on Comedy
Central, with routines such as “The Racial Draft” satirizing the ways
whites value and undervalue celebrities of color, and questioning the
validity of essentialist ties between celebrities of color and their race-
matched communities.21 And, along comparable lines, Jonathan Ross-
ing examines how Stephen Colbert’s conservative alter-ego on the
Colbert Report exposes and critiques the privileges of whiteness, devel-
oping a post-racial satirical style that confronts the audience by speak-
ing the tacit understandings about racial politeness and expectations
for multicultural tolerance.22
Many other television producers, it seems, aren’t looking for more
critical inclusions of multiracial folk. But they continue these inclusions
for economic as well as aesthetic reasons. The world of niche and global
marketing requires mainstream media to reconfigure previously all-
white casting aesthetics to serve and court multicultural consumers.23
Within this context, interracial families and individuals provide cost-
effective, inoffensive means of representing difference. The increas-
ingly successful careers of multiracial and mestizo/a actresses and
actors, such as Rashida Jones, Jennifer Lopez, Halle Berry, Vin Diesel,
and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, are further proof that producers see
benefits in marketing racially ambiguous stars to “ethnic” and “main-
stream” markets simultaneously. Moreover, with the entertainers also
often portraying love interests or protectors of whites, their stories rep-
licate and update some of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century narra-
tives of interracial contact and conquest.
Jon Kraszewski demonstrates how MTV’s desire to rebrand itself
as friendly to conservatives and liberals alike led it to an increase in
multiracial cast members after 2000. The show’s producers saw these
individuals as a means to secure white conservative viewers’ loyalty
to the channel. Fearing the 2000 elections and rising backlash against
104 << The Post-Racial Family

“liberal media” would scare conservatives from the show, producers

shifted their emphasis from encouraging conflicts between conserva-
tive, rural, white cast members and black urban participants to bring-
ing in biracial cast members to serve as “bridges” between the races and
defuse conflicts.24 This scripting borrows heavily from 1990s neocon-
servative framing of interracial families as a vehicle to racial harmony
via a colorblindness engendered through the end of racial categoriza-
tion. For instance, in the science fiction TV drama, Battlestar Galactica
(2004–2009), Leilani Nishime analyzes how the interracial family—in
this case, comprised of a white man, an Asian (and alien) woman, and
a biracial child—serves the purpose of bridging cultures, but with a
specific twist derived from stereotypes of Asian women.25 Using alien-
human conflict as an allegory for racial/national differences, the show
portrays the Asian woman, Athena, as a Cylon (alien) who must prove
her loyalty to the humans/whites after falling in love with Helo (a white
human soldier) and bearing his hybrid child, Hera. In her analysis of
the show, Nishime illustrates how Athena is treated much like Asian
women in other dramas—she is understood primarily through her abil-
ity to seduce non-Asian men, to reproduce, and to perform punishing
labor with no hope of reward. She is continually under suspicion and
repeatedly abused, but in a model minority performance, she takes her
punishment as a means to prove her loyalty and sever ties with her race,
the Cylons.
Post-racial aesthetics are not limited to the inclusion of multiracial
cast members or interracial families. Rather, it is also clear that demands
for multicultural/racial inclusion have altered the casting expectations
for secondary and background actors. One need only look at the roster
of guest actors, extras, and recurring characters in NBC’s long-running
Law & Order franchise, ABC’s hit Grey’s Anatomy (2005–present), or
its recently retired Desperate Housewives (2004–2012) to see that, in
addition to a sprinkling of regular characters of color, people of color
are in establishment shots, walking through the background, and so
on. So while the main cast of shows like CBS’s How I Met Your Mother
(2005–present) or Two and a Half Men (2003–present) may be all white,
when the cast ventures out into public spaces, people of color are nearly
always in the frame, anchoring our sense of a post-racial world where
we’re all mixing it up.
 The Post-Racial Family >> 105

Post-Racism + Post-Feminism = Parenthood 2010

Parenthood’s televisual frame incorporates many elements mentioned

in the research discussed above. Located in one of the ultimate lib-
eral and multiracial cities—Berkeley, California—the show serves up
a white male/black female pairing, replicating what prime time has
served up for decades: Uhuru and Kirk had their space-age kiss in the
1960s on Star Trek; the Jeffersons lived in the same building as the Willis
family in the 1970s and 1980s; Dynasty revealed a secret biracial sister
born to a white corporate head and his black maid in the 1980s, while a
Black male lawyer hid his romance with a white female attorney on LA
Law; and Girlfriends and Sex and the City explored interracial dating
in the 2000s. Heterosexual interracial couples have thus been a conve-
nient device for integrating a cast and/or bringing racial controversy
and difference to the small screen. In the post-racial imaginary, the
interracial couple (with whom no one has a problem) serves to bridge
the gap between the racial past (which forbade such unions) and the
future (when this won’t be an issue).
The problem is, we’re not past it. There is still a significant minor-
ity willing to say in opinion polls that they disapprove of interracial
marriage and would be upset if a family member married “outside the
race.”26 News reports of the Louisiana judge who refused to marry an
interracial couple because he feared for the fate of their future chil-
dren were met with shock in 2009, but any glance at white supremacy
websites (and some fraternity prankster pages) shows that women of
color are constantly depicted as unsuitable, abominable partners and
that desires for white purity persist. We have, obviously, broken with
the past, in that the numbers of post-Loving interracial families grows
larger, and (most) advertisers are not afraid to put interracial couples in
their commercials. But as we try to imagine the post-racial future, zom-
bie stereotypes and attitudes from the racial past continue to stalk and
shape our cultural output, populating our imaginations with contradic-
tory elements of representation and narration. In other words, post-
racial aesthetics of network television often reveal the struggle in the
attempt to make something new, to forge what it means to get past our
racial past. In this gap between present and post-, Parenthood emerges
as an illustration of the uncertainty of the “post-,” with its dramatic
106 << The Post-Racial Family

devices leaving many gaps for old stereotypes to flow into the narrative
and its characters constantly bumping into the glass walls and ceilings
of post-racial, post-feminist America.

Parenthood 1.0: 1980s Hollywood and Integration via Racial Surprise

The TV series Parenthood was created by the star director/producer

team of Ron Howard and Brian Grazer. The show, which airs on NBC,
is an update of the movie Howard directed 1989, wherein Steve Martin
led an all-white (save for one) cast. The movie chronicled the hopes and
dreams of the Buckmans, a large family living in an affluent suburb of
St. Louis. As the Buckman siblings and their spouses (all white, all het-
erosexual) navigated their dilemmas—how to balance work and family,
how to discipline toddlers and teens—one adult son returned with a
heretofore unknown child: Cool Buckman. The kicker? Cool was black.
In the movie, then, racial difference was injected through a surprise
plot turn: A prodigal son returns with a biracial black son in tow, with-
out his black mother (who is never on screen and is described only as a
“Las Vegas dancer”). This son eventually abandons Cool to be raised by
his father (Cool’s grandfather), a crotchety old white guy who embraces
his biracial grandson as an opportunity to become the kind of loving,
attentive parent he never was to his own sons.
The movie’s plot mimics the characteristics of other popular texts of
the 1980s that created “integrated” television through the unexpected
insertion of African American characters. TV family sitcoms which
employed the bodies of young black children deposited into otherwise
all-white families to integrate the small screen included NBC’s Diff ’rent
Strokes (1978–1986) and ABC’s Webster (1983–1989), both of which were
ratings successes. How do we account for the need for black children
to be in all-white milieu? By way of the black parent(s) or potential
black guardians being either dead or unfit, and certainly unseen and
unneeded.27
In the arena of prime-time drama, miscegenation narratives of the
early twentieth centuries had more of an obvious influence. Dynasty,
the hit ABC soap (1981–1989), brought color on screen through the
backdoor: Patriarch and oil baron Blake Carrington discovers that
Dominique Devereux (played by Diahann Carroll) is his half-sister,
 The Post-Racial Family >> 107

born to the family’s black maid and his father. Dominique also has a
secret: She had a daughter with a white man, a daughter whose exis-
tence she kept secret from the man for twenty years. In this way, Dynas-
ty’s narrative updates early twentieth-century tragic mulatta narratives,
wrenching angst and violent upheaval from the exposure of forbidden
interracial sex. But unlike the protagonists in most tragic mulatto nar-
ratives—tragic because the mixed race individual must die to restore
order for white society—Dynasty’s biracial diva mixes it up in high
society, entering the Carrington mansion on equal financial footing
with an axe to grind with her half-brother. She and her daughter stick
around for the long haul, albeit in less-than-central plotlines after the
initial shock of their appearance on the family tree. Both the 1989 film
and 2010 television versions of Parenthood contain elements of these
troubling attempts to integrate representations of interracial families
for mass audiences.

Parenthood 2.0: Post-Racial Twenty-First Century Berkeley

In their twenty-first century update of Parenthood for network TV, the

writers and producers clearly chose to “break” with the original movie.28
The show, steered by executive producer/showrunner Jason Katims,
is also centered on a large family, the Bravermans. But the Braverman
siblings are thirty- and forty-somethings (GenXers), and their parents,
Zeek and Camille, are aging Boomers. All of them are white, and have
white partners and children. Eldest son, Adam, is married to Kristina,
a stay-at-home mom who is toying with re-entering the workplace, and
they have a teen daughter and a younger son, Max, who has Asperger’s
Syndrome. Sarah, the eldest daughter, is divorced with two teens and
moves back in with her parents. Youngest daughter, Julia, is a high-
powered lawyer whose husband, Joel, stays at home with their young
daughter. The youngest son, Crosby, is not married, but has a long-
term girlfriend who is pushing him to marry her and begin a family.
As these descriptions suggest, each sibling’s family situation is “differ-
ent” in terms of work, children, and spousal relationships. The show’s
storylines milk a lot of drama and plot points from these differences in
family situations and the tensions they create between parents and kids,
brothers and sisters, husbands and wives.
108 << The Post-Racial Family

Rather than living in white-flight suburban St. Louis, Missouri,

like the movie family, the TV Bravermans live in multicultural, liberal
northern California: Berkeley is their hometown. In their workplaces,
in the background, and in establishing shots, we see evidence of the
racial and ethnic diversity of California as people of color fill in as extras
and tertiary characters like teachers, baristas, and coworkers. Within
the family, racial difference comes in the door through two characters
linked to the youngest Braverman adult, Crosby. The only sibling who
has never married, Crosby finds out in the pilot episode that an old
flame, Jasmine, who is African American, gave birth to his son, Jabbar,
five years earlier. In the movie, the family finds out immediately about
the surprise biracial child when his father, the prodigal son, returns to
the family home. In the TV version, Crosby learns of his biracial off-
spring while isolated from his family and keeps his son’s identity secret
for a few episodes. This secretiveness builds dramatic tension around
the question of how he will tell his family—and his white girlfriend.
This is the first interracial secret used to drive the plot.
Clearly, the TV show is different, and, perhaps, better in many ways.
By moving the show to twenty-first century Berkeley, California, and
making a black woman a visible and involved mother to a white man’s
child, the show breaks with the casting and scripting of family dra-
mas and sitcoms of the not-so-distant past. The location of Berkeley is
meant to signal to the audience that we’re in a different racial place, a
liberal, multicultural city. And, unlike the movie, the TV version actu-
ally shows the black parent of the secret biracial son on screen. But the
placement and treatment of this black woman and the biracial child
are not as different as they seem at first glance. This is due in part to
the writers’ decision to make Jasmine and her son’s presence dramatic
and unexpected rather than an already-included element of the Braver-
man family’s composition. Of course, one can defend this revision by
saying it actually had the effect of creating continuity with the movie’s
original premises. However, why was it necessary to racially match the
unknown son? Beyond that, why make this secret relationship the only
biracial family tie? California is home to more interracial marriages and
couples than most other states—in 2008, a Pew Center study found the
state was third in the nation for interracial marriages. So why didn’t the
writers make one of the already married couples interracial? Rather
 The Post-Racial Family >> 109

than rendering the interracial family distinct—and surprising—why

not signal that white-black (or, especially for California, white-Asian
or Anglo-Latino) marriages were already all in the family? As the
show develops the storylines around the Bravermans and their part-
ners, the contrast between Jasmine and Crosby and the white parental
pairs reveals how the decision to replicate the 1989 racial surprise plot
encourages additional troubling choices for developing this interracial
couple in a TV family.

Meet (and Compare) the Bravermans:

Racial and Parenting Differences

Each episode of Parenthood moves the viewer from parent to parent,

household to household, allowing us to compare the parenting styles,
foibles, and lifestyles of each pair. Their coping styles, jobs, home décor,
etc., is on display (and under discussion) for us to compare as we move
from scene to scene.
Many things make Crosby and Jasmine stand out from the sibling
crowd. Crosby is the only Braverman who has never been married. He
is like many other thirty-something white male characters in popular
media today: living as if he’s in perpetual adolescence, with a girlfriend
tapping her foot and watching the biological clock tick while he decides
if he’s ready for adulthood (which here = marriage and parenthood).29
Crosby is hip and cute—he’s a music producer who lives on a house-
boat. When we first meet him, his girlfriend, Katie, who is white, gives
him an ultimatum: begin a family life with her or she will use frozen
donor sperm to strike out on her own to have a baby.
In the first episode, Crosby complains to his siblings about his “baby-
crazy” girlfriend. He’s uncertain about their relationship’s prospects and
whether he is ready for marriage and parenthood. Then, Crosby unex-
pectedly gets a call from an old flame named Jasmine. He describes her
to his brother, Adam, as a potential “booty call,” saying that Jasmine is
“a dancer” who is “really flexible,” and implying with his tone, gestures,
and expression that their sexual activities were all the more exciting
because of her ability to contort her body. However, when Crosby meets
up with Jasmine, she has a small boy with her named Jabbar—and she
introduces Crosby to Jabbar as his father. Crosby is visibly surprised,
110 << The Post-Racial Family

and the scene ends with the camera focused on his shocked face. Later,
Jasmine explains that she had tried and tried to tell him, calling him
on the phone again and again, but that he had never called back. This
experience led her to believe that he was not interested in her anymore,
and consequently, she figured he wouldn’t be a responsible dad. So now
he knows, and the audience knows—but no one else in the Braverman
family knows for a while. After this initial meeting, Crosby is even more
wary of parenting prospects, but is forced to reckon with fatherhood.
Thus, in the show’s debut episode, the audience is introduced to all
of the mothers in different contexts: as they ready their children for
school; as they prepare for work inside or outside of their clearly upper-
middle class homes; as they engage in conflict with reluctant kids who
don’t want to go to a new school, and so on. We see Crosby in con-
flict with Katie about whether they should marry and have a child. In
the show’s constant movement across couples and children, homes
and workplaces, Jasmine and her “choices” stand out compared to the
other mothers. She is the only mother who is not white; she is the only
mother who has not raised her child with a known bio-father in the pic-
ture; she is the only mother who did not tell the father about his child
for five years; she is the only mother who does not have a clearly defined
home or set of responsibilities. She’s the only one who has to confront
the father of her child about his lack of interest in her after a night or
two of sexual passion, five years earlier.

Revealing the Secret: A Secret Son with an

Unmentioned Racial Identity

Crosby first confesses about Jabbar only to Adam, and then debates
whether or not to tell Katie. Indeed, he continues to keep knowledge of
his son and Jasmine from everyone but his brother for two episodes—a
situation that allows the writers to create a mix of comic and dramatic
moments for each impending “reveal” to different members of his fam-
ily, and to Katie. After Crosby tells his girlfriend the truth, she breaks
up with him. After he tells his sister Julia, the lawyer, she advises him
to get a paternity test to confirm whether he can be held responsible for
Jabbar. When Crosby asks Jasmine to give him a sample of Jabbar’s hair,
she reacts with anger and hurt: How could he believe she would lie?
 The Post-Racial Family >> 111

He then tells her he won’t go forward, yet he akes Jabbar’s toothbrush

to have it tested for a DNA match, ostensibly without agreement from
Jasmine. We are supposed to forgive this action, however, because in
the subsequent episode, Crosby is so clearly happy that the test results
confirm that Jabbar is his biological child. The fact that Jasmine is in
the dark, and that no one seems to find his deception problematic, is
the first sign of the latent “father’s rights” discourse that rears its head
sporadically throughout the show.
While Crosby goes through his journey of confirming and disclos-
ing his fatherhood, viewers can learn a lot about his personality, his
emerging relationship with Jabbar, and his communication style, but
viewers rarely see Jabbar’s mother, Jasmine. Indeed, in the first part
of Season one, she is included mainly when she is dropping Jabbar by
Crosby’s home for father-son bonding or retrieving him from Crosby.
When she speaks, she is often criticizing Crosby or expressing skepti-
cism about his sincerity. She does have some reason to be distrustful:
Crosby’s judgment is questionable, and the writers show his foibles.
For example, he takes Jabbar to a parent-child yoga class, but is hard
pressed to follow the teacher’s instructions because he is so distracted
by the derriere of a woman in front of him. Flirting with this woman,
he secures a play-date for Jabbar with her son, and then, while at her
home, they steal away while the boys play in the pool, watched over by
a private lifeguard. As Crosby and the woman begin foreplay, he has
second thoughts about leaving Jabbar alone in the pool with strangers,
and stops the encounter.
When Jasmine hears about the “pool party” from Jabbar, she is
incensed and tells Crosby that she won’t be leaving him alone with Jab-
bar for some time, since he left their child alone in a pool. The camera
reveals that Crobsy is crushed by focusing on his expression and pro-
tests as Jasmine angrily cancels his next outing with Jabbar. In the first
half of the season, this is what the audience can see of Jasmine—that she
is warily observing Crosby, giving him the conditions for seeing Jabbar,
setting the pace. The scripts don’t provide scenes of her being a mother
to Jabbar in the ways we see Kristina or Sarah parenting their children
in multiple contexts. In contrast, there are tender scenes of Crosby tell-
ing jokes to Jabbar, explaining his houseboat, fishing, tossing the ball
around, and generally being adorable.
112 << The Post-Racial Family

In addition to not providing opportunities to see Jasmine as a parent,

the show doesn’t locate her spatially outside of Crosby’s orbit. Although
Jasmine has an apartment, the show doesn’t visit its interior until after
she and Crosby resume a sexual relationship. Although she has family
in Oakland (a space that is coded blacker and poorer than Berkeley), we
don’t see members of that family until a moment of interracial confronta-
tion late in the season. Thus, the show is set up so that viewers see Jasmine
through Crosby’s eyes, and she is very isolated from the rest of the char-
acters, even from her own son—the only other person of color with any
significant presence on the show—since he is mainly seen with Crosby.
Thus, while the audience learns a lot about Crosby’s siblings, white in-
laws, nieces, and nephews, they learn little about Jasmine. She does not
have conversations with other characters about her worries, her con-
cerns, her hopes or dreams for her child. She doesn’t have an anchored
presence. Rather, she appears and disappears until her relationship with
Crosby becomes romantic. This rekindled romance is initially a secret,
providing an additional dramatic device to drive plot points.

Guess Who . . .

When Crosby finally tells more of his siblings about Jabbar and Jasmine,
he declines to mention race. Within the logic of post-racial television
casting, there is no need to mention that either Jabbar or his mother
is a person of color—the audience saw it, right? So why talk about it?
Race need not be thematized through dialogue, because we’re “over it,”
and only if something very racist happens does racial difference need
to be explicitly remarked upon. The first time their racial identity is
signaled as different, and perhaps as a possible point of contention, is
when Crosby finally tells his parents—in the fifth episode of the sea-
son. His father, Zeek, reacts to Jabbar’s name with a question: “What
kind of a name is that?” Later, when he meets his new grandson, his
eyebrows noticeably lift as he sees the boy’s skin for the first time. The
second time racial difference is explicitly named occurs when Crosby
and Jasmine go to a laundromat, and she suggests he needs to separate
his white and colored clothes. Crosby responds by joking that it’s clear
he does not separate whites and coloreds, and jokingly accuses her of
advocating segregation as he draws her into a kiss.
 The Post-Racial Family >> 113

It is important to note that only white male characters ever explicitly

bring racial difference into the narrative via behavior or speech. Zeek,
the elder, has a more ambiguous, but perhaps expected response to
having a biracial grandson. When the camera zooms in on Zeek tak-
ing in Jabbar’s racial difference, perhaps audience members are meant
to experience some relief that he doesn’t make an issue of it—as other
members of his generation might. That is, as a Baby Boomer who grew
up through Jim Crow, Zeek could be more likely to have an issue with
Jabbar’s biracial identity. Crosby, on the other hand, enacts the role of
the multicultural-friendly GenXer, who uses humor, musical taste, and
dating choices to express his racial enlightenment. He is post-racial: He
“gets it”; he makes jokes about race at the Laundromat; he dances to
hip hop; he finds women of color attractive. So, he couldn’t have had
any racial reasons for blowing Jasmine off five years ago: He did it only
because he was young and irresponsible. But all of this alleged comfort
with race begs a few questions. If the Berkeley-bred Bravermans are so
down with people of color, why did the writers deem it necessary to
replicate the secret biracial child storyline of the movie and of previous
TV shows? Again—why not have one (or more) of the already married
pairs be an interracial pair? Why not have a white long-lost son and
paramour, or an Asian American, or a Latina/o, either of which would
fit the predominant race/class demographics of northern California, as
well as the statistics on interracial coupling: White male/Asian female is
the most likely interracial pairing in the United States.
More importantly, why wring out so many dramatic moments from
disclosure of the secret? One answer is this: While interracial couples
are more prevalent today, there is still tension around the issue of inter-
racial marriage, and more importantly, around black-white socio-polit-
ical relations. As exhibited in the 2008 election, our society continues to
rediscover the ways in which many blacks and whites live and experi-
ence separate social and ideological realities, separate spaces, separate
cultural touchstones. Another answer is that the show is set up from
the vantage point of the white family members. Thus, the experience
of racial difference is unidirectional: The story sticks to exploring how
white people (the Bravermans) react to family situations, including how
they are affected by Jasmine and Jabbar’s arrival and potential inclusion
into the white family.
114 << The Post-Racial Family

Balancing the Blame: Jasmine’s Choices and Shaming

So, if race wasn’t an issue, and if Crosby is so obviously a good guy who
just needed a push in the right direction to be a good dad, why didn’t
Jasmine try even harder to reunite with him five years ago? The writers
and actors do a great job of making Crosby look like the ultimate hip
dad. So, we need to have a reason for Jasmine’s “choice” to keep Jabbar
away from this guy. In the post-racial era, it can’t be that she was wor-
ried that Crosby’s neglect of her after they had sex was racially moti-
vated. In the post-feminist era, it can’t be his fault that he signaled he
had no use for her after sex by not returning her calls. Rather, post-
racial and post-feminist logics set us up for a reckoning from Jasmine.
Her choices must be centered as the problem, the generator of the dis-
tance between father and son.
As discussed earlier, one of the major elements of post-racial politi-
cal discourse positions people of color and misguided liberal whites as
the real race-card sharks. Black people, especially, are apt to try to make
innocent whites feel guilty about race. Likewise, post-feminism posits
that women’s choices and the feminist movement are to blame for any
inequalities or unhappiness women may experience. Thus, while Crosby
is at fault for being a jerk to Jasmine, post-racial logic often requires an
assertion of white innocence, just as post-feminism displaces patriarchy
and centers on (middle-class) women’s alleged misuse of their freedoms
to “have it all.” Add it all up, and a dramatic showdown over the cause
of Jabbar’s fatherless first five years makes sense, in a post-racial, post-
feminist way. Crosby can’t be alone to blame for Jabbar’s fatherlessness.
And any surrogate father or father figures cannot be sufficient, because
in post-feminist logic nuclear families are the best choice to make, and
post-racial narratives continue to denigrate black extended families and
single mothers. So Jasmine needs to share the blame. What rises from
the (shallow) grave to make this all make sense is the old, multipurpose
zombie of black matriarchy, the emasculating, family-killing power of
the independent black mother.
Midway through the season, the writers script a racial confronta-
tion when Crosby’s white family finally meets Jasmine’s black family.
It is a first meeting for the audience as well: As mentioned earlier, up
to this point Jasmine is never depicted with any other black relatives
 The Post-Racial Family >> 115

or community, only Jabbar. And, in this episode, the writers throw in

a doozy of a plotline: On the eve of Jabbar’s birthday, Jasmine reveals
to Crosby that she lied to her family about him. She told her fam-
ily that he knew about her pregnancy and refused to be part of Jab-
bar’s life. Thus, she warns Crosby that her family will probably be cold
to him, and she is worried that Jabbar’s birthday party will be tense.
Crosby is aghast, but understanding (he is such a great guy!). None-
theless, he extracts a promise from Jasmine to come clean with her
family after the party.
The party is filmed with Crosby—not Jabbar—at the center of the
camera’s attention. Even though Jasmine’s extended family is ostensi-
bly gathered to celebrate Jabbar’s birthday, there is no sense of excite-
ment or care for the boy. Everyone is sitting around, eating snacks with
sullen looks on their faces, throwing cold glances at Crosby as he tries
in vain to hand out refreshments and start conversations with his son’s
black relatives. The camera veers from one corner of the house (owned
by Jasmine’s mother, Renee) to the next, uncovering stony looks and
unresponsive black bodies. The house is not well-lit, and it is clearly
smaller and less stylish than any of the Braverman abodes, which are
all light-filled and well-appointed with chic colors, art, and furniture.
When Jasmine introduces Crosby to her mother, Renee only gives him
a quick, tight smile and terse greeting before turning her back on him
to take a favored black relative to the kitchen. The tension is palpable,
and Crosby is visibly relieved when his family arrives.
When the Bravermans enter the house, the camera turns to Crosby
who says, sotto voce, “Where’d all these white people come from?” This
is the fourth moment when a white male cast member acknowledges a
racial difference between Jabbar, Jasmine, and the Bravermans. It is fol-
lowed by a set of shot of the Braverman clan members trying to engage,
unsuccessfully, with Jasmine’s relatives. The discomfort seems to have a
potential end when the camera catches Crosby’s mother, Camille, chat
with Renee and her son, Sekou.

Camille: Sekou. That’s a beautiful name.

Sekou: Thank you.
Camille (to Renee): You must have named him after Sekou Turunga,30
the African independence leader, I assume.
116 << The Post-Racial Family

Renee: Now, how did you know that?

Camille: Berkeley in the ’60s, babe.
Renee (smiling, eyebrows lifted): Well I hear that!

This détente is born of the good will (and liberal bona fides) of a white
woman who reaches out and demonstrates she’s not a racist—she’s cul-
turally aware of African independence movements thanks to her col-
lege-era activism and continued Bay Area residency. But Sekou doesn’t
let the moment last. He cuts in, turning to confront Crosby:

Sekou: You know what? I’m sorry. This is weird. I know you’re tryin’ and
all that stuff, but where have you been?
Crosby: I wish I had been here.
Sekou: Yeah, yeah, that’s your loss.
Crosby: No one knows that more than me. No, I’m just glad I get to be in
[Jabbar’s] life now and hopefully be a role model—
Sekou: He has a role model, Crosby. I’ve been here since the day he was
born.
Jasmine: Sekou!—
Sekou: No, I’m just tellin’ him how it was. I drove them to the hospital. I
stood at the christening. Huh?! Look, I moved apartments just to be
closer to him.
Renee: I’m going to get the cake. Sekou, could you help me?
Sekou: No, I’m tellin’ him how it was—
Zeek: I would like to say something if I may. [All the Bravermans are
caught by the camera looking nervous about what their father is
going to say.]
Zeek: You seem to have a wonderful family. I’ve met you and I like you
all. But why are you treating my son like he’s a pariah? Uh, the only
reason I can think of is ’cause he’s white.

After Zeek makes his statement, his kids scramble to make excuses
for him, looking embarrassed and saying, “He didn’t mean it like it
sounded” and “He has Tourette’s.” Thus, the fifth time race is made
explicit on the show, a white man asserts reverse racism to be at work.
Renee responds to Zeek’s outburst with the observation, “Maybe it’s that
he’s irresponsible.” Zeek replies, “Renee, that is not my understanding.”‘
 The Post-Racial Family >> 117

This exchange finally prompts Jasmine to step in, literally, in between

the factions. She announces to the families that she lied about Crosby’s
absence. She follows her confession with an indictment of her choice to
be a single mom:

Jasmine: Look, I was the one who chose to have this baby and not let his
father know. It was me. But if you’re going to be mad at anyone, be
mad at me; don’t be mad at him.

Renee and Sekou look shocked. Renee asks why Jasmine would do
such a thing, and Jasmine explains that she thought it would be easier if
everyone thought Crosby had left her, just as her father left Renee and
her children. Renee chastises her with the question, “Easier for who?”
Sekou is left speechless. Jabbar then runs back into the room and asks,
“Is it time for cake?!” His query breaks the tension, everyone laughs,
and Crosby is heard over the happy sounds saying, “Boy buddy, is it
ever!” Renee asks “Grandpa Zeek” to help her cut the cake, and every-
one relaxes and enjoys the scene as Jabbar blows out the candles. After
the party, when Jasmine and Crosby are back at her place, she offers to
show him the video of Jabbar’s birth. Crosby takes her up on it, and the
show ends with a close-up shot of Crosby, tears in his eyes, watching his
son’s birth in awe. The camera witnesses his joy and pain, and viewers
are encouraged to empathize with his emotional response.

The Post-Racial, Post-Feminist Shaming of

Jasmine (and Her Black Family)

The Braverman’s white liberal identities and Crosby’s father’s rights are
secured in this dramatic crescendo pitting black family against white
family. Jasmine’s shame is Crosby’s redemption. Jasmine’s “choice” to be
a single mom without Crosby’s knowledge is the source of the racial
tension at the party. Her lack of honesty has undermined Crosby’s abil-
ity to be a good father who does the right thing (although one wonders
why he didn’t return Jasmine’s calls five years ago if he’s such a good
guy). Moreover, the black people at the party are portrayed as unfeel-
ing, not able to put aside a grudge even to make a little boy’s birthday
party festive. The audience also now knows that Jasmine is part of the
118 << The Post-Racial Family

stereotypical cycle of single black moms begetting single moms, a cycle

that undergirds so much of the discourse of black pathology.31 Black
fathers leave black mothers, and black mothers get all bitter and matri-
archal. Jasmine has daddy issues; her brother (like so many black men
we see on TV!) is sullen and confrontational. Thus, what could have
been framed as an empowered, albeit hard choice to give up on a guy
who seemed uninterested in her after sex is now scripted as Jasmine’s
choice to exclude and impugn a white man by withholding the truth
about his son and lying to her family about him. Not only is Jasmine
placed in the lineage of perpetual single black mothers; she has also
been so adversely affected by the experience of absent black fatherhood
that she tells lies to her family about her son’s father.
Here is the return of a set of zombie black stereotypes: The broken
black family and suspect single black mother are set up in comparison
to the intact upper-middle-class white family. Thus, the post-racial and
the post-feminist steamroll over Jasmine, leaving the Bravermans’ lib-
eral white bona fides and nuclear families in their elevated position. In
this comparison of families, the gap of the “post-” opens up, allowing
some of the most retrograde ideas about black women and families to
flow in through the plot devices and camera angles that the showrun-
ner, writers, and director used to make the birthday party scene dra-
matic. When race breaks out at the party, it is clearly black people’s fault.
Sekou’s anger, the guests’ sullenness, and Jasmine’s deception lead to the
arguments that precipitate her confession. The showdown between the
families is drama that leverages stereotypes instead of offering a more
nuanced discussion about why someone would choose to be a single
mother, or why there could be tensions when families of different races
meet for the first time.
Jasmine, Jabbar, and the other black family members bring race and
gender trouble into the script. They are placed in the story to bring in
drama, suspense, tension. There is visible tension and discomfort when
the “white people” come into the party, and Crosby is the one allowed
to mark it with his aside. This discomfort is broken only by whites—by
Camille’s acknowledgment of Sekou’s name and by Zeek’s ham-handed
diagnosis of the tension in the room, a tension he brings to a head and,
ultimately, resolves, since it pushes Jasmine to confess. Once that is
done, everyone can be happy and together, eating cake. To paraphrase
 The Post-Racial Family >> 119

an early black feminist text, the post-racial post-feminist bridge here is

Jasmine’s back.32 The sacrifice of her dignity and the culpability assigned
to her individual choices create the space for the white and black fam-
ily to be together, if momentarily, and for the white family to shine as a
liberal, accepting whole.
But the unity is short lived. Other than in this episode, Jasmine’s fam-
ily is not seen again until the very last episode. Their purpose has been
served: to bring drama, tension, and resolution for the white father.
And an opportunity is lost. Once Jasmine and Jabbar’s black family
members disappear, we don’t get to see how the white and black fami-
lies interact other than through drama and trauma. The scriptwriters
don’t show us how they might come to know each other as grandpar-
ents, uncles, aunts, and cousins—as family rather than as antagonists.
Sekou and Renee aren’t invited to Zeek’s dinner table where he holds
court with the extended family. Thus, the “integration” of the family
via black mother/biracial child is incomplete, troubling, a gap still not
crossed. Crosby and his siblings never cross Renee or Sekou’s thresh-
olds again in Season One. There is never another moment when black
people outnumber whites, or are even equal in terms of family repre-
sentation and interaction.
This aftermath of the party and remaining episodes of Season One
suggest that Jasmine’s family, her Black/Oakland world and ties, are
unnecessary to the composition of extended family support networks.
In order to create this interracial union, the only family whose support
and love needs to be visible is the white family’s. Despite Sekou’s tes-
timony about devotion to his sister and nephew since the day Jabbar
was born, the writers don’t depict this uncle acting like a role model:
He is only seen confronting a white father, a confrontation that would
have been avoided, perhaps, had his sister told the truth. Audiences
do get to see Zeek and Joel and Adam being nurturing towards Jab-
bar when he interacts with their family, but the only Black male in his
life is dismissed from view after he has played his stereotypical role of
instigator, aggressor. Sekou’s experience is only represented in the con-
text of racially-inflected confrontation and unveiled lies about family.
Likewise, Jasmine’s mother never gets to act like a grandma after she
helps bring in the cake; she, too, is left out, having been exposed as yet
another black single mother.
120 << The Post-Racial Family

After the Fall: Jasmine amd Jabbar’s

Integration into the Braverman Clan

Once the ugly confrontation at the birthday party is over, Jasmine and
Crosby’s relationship develops in the light of day, so to speak, and in
full view of the Braverman family. After Jasmine’s reckoning, then, she
is less isolated from his family, and the couple decide that they are “not
just fooling around” anymore. The seriousness of their growing rela-
tionship is suggested in the ways Jasmine and Jabbar become more inti-
mately linked to Braverman cousins, aunts, uncles, and grandparents—
but there is no such intimacy between Crosby and the Trussells. So, in
the episodes immediately following the birthday party, Jasmine and
Crosby have a date while Jabbar has a sleepover with his cousin Syd-
ney. Later, Julia recognizes Jabbar’s athleticism and recruits him onto
Sydney’s soccer squad, transforming the team into a juggernaut as the
camera follows Jabbar’s dominant moves on the pee wee soccer field
and Jasmine and Crosby cheer him on with the rest of the Braverman
clan. Notably, neither Renee nor Sekou are part of the sideline scene—
apparently the black uncle and grandmother weren’t able to make it to
the soccer game to cheer on their beloved relative; perhaps they weren’t
invited. Whatever the case, viewers are left without a sense of how Jas-
mine’s black family members might relate to the Bravermans in the
absence of conflict. The show, in this way, sets up separate worlds for
these families, despite the moments of warmth exhibited at the party
after Jasmine’s confession. The imbalance in the contributions and pres-
ence of the black and white family members is disturbing. In an inter-
view with Vulture.com, Katims was praised for portraying a family so
realistically. He responded:

One of the things I find myself saying in the writers’ room a lot is, “What
would really happen?” A lot of times as writers you want to come up with
the best possible story and you bend it according to what you want to hap-
pen. I think one of the things that I always try to think about is what would
really happen in a situation, what feels real. . . . Everybody has flaws, every-
body has demons, everybody has ghosts, but I think you watch people and
you see everybody trying to do their best. To me, that’s compelling and it
sort of reflects what I typically see that happens in the world too.33
 The Post-Racial Family >> 121

Apparently, what “really happens” when interracial family is created is

that women of color isolate themselves from their family and commu-
nity of color.

Exit Jasmine, Enter Renee: The Black

Matriarch Gets Her Comeuppance

As the season moves on, Jasmine auditions for the Alvin Ailey Dance
Company, and Crosby and Jabbar take her to the audition and cheer her
on before she begins. This is the first time we actually see evidence of
Jasmine’s career as a dancer. For viewers who are aware of the prestige
and history of the Ailey Company, it is clear that her dancing is part of
an artistic, high-brow professional world, not the “Vegas dancer” career
of the (unseen) Black mother in the original movie. Indeed, it would
not be surprising if, before this moment, some viewers assumed that
Jasmine was a pole dancer or stripper, since almost all the references
to her dancing are conveyed through Crosby’s sexual desires. In fact, in
one episode we hear that Jasmine injured her back during recent love-
making because Crosby asked her to contort herself into a titillating
position.
The scripts provide audiences with no idea if she was working or
looking for work while Crosby and Jabbar have father-son time—the
audition scene is the first time we see her in her professional element.
This is another thing that makes Jasmine atypical: Other Braverman
mothers and fathers, siblings and in-laws are filmed in their workplaces,
schools, or wrestling with their career vs. home choices.34 Jasmine alone
has no visible vocation or hopes and dreams until the Ailey opportunity
pops up, which soon becomes another plot device to generate tension
between her family and Crosby.
Season One ends with a cliffhanger: Jasmine is preparing to move
to New York, having landed a spot in the Ailey traveling company. She
and Crosby have tense discussions about what will happen to Jabbar.
Jasmine has assumed that her mother, Renee, will take care of him at
her home in Oakland. Crosby is hurt; he wants Jabbar to live with him
on his houseboat. Jasmine is not keen on the idea, since the boat doesn’t
even have a room or a real bed for their son. When Zeek hears that
not only is Jasmine taking the job, but also that Jabbar will live with
122 << The Post-Racial Family

her mother, he balks. During an alcohol-soaked night on the boat, Zeek

tells Crosby he needs to “man up” and tell Jasmine that he’s the father,
and that he will decide what’s happening with his son. Crosby gets
angry, and declares his father’s advice is not wanted. But it is clear from
his facial expressions that he is not satisfied with the situation. Crosby
later tells Jasmine that “he has rights” and that she can’t make decisions
about Jabbar without him. Crosby’s outburst in this scene returns us to
the theme of father’s rights that began with the paternity test, reinforced
by Zeek’s not-so-subtle suggestions to his son that he needs to take the
lead or “wear the pants” in the relationship since he is the man.
In the season finale, Crosby makes up with Jasmine. We later see her
at the airport gate, hugging Renee, Crosby, and Jabbar as she prepares
to go. The scene ends with the black grandmother, white father, and
biracial son waving goodbye, standing together as a unit. But this show
of unity is short-lived. When the show returns in Season Two, the initial
reintroduction to Renee is via conflict over Jabbar’s schedule. In the first
few episodes, she and Crosby clash over bedtimes, watching TV, and
whether to go to a baseball game or to church. Renee snaps at Crosby,
rushes in and out impatiently with Jabbar, and is otherwise portrayed as
an impediment to Crosby’s relationship with his son. Crosby also com-
plains about this to his own family, including Zeek, who encourages
him, yet again, to man up and tell Renee to back off. After getting feed-
back from Zeek, Crosby does take a stand against Renee. He confronts
her about taking Jabbar to church rather than allowing him to go to a
baseball game. Then he declares that he will make more decisions about
Jabbar’s activities because he is his father, and because he wants his son
to take part in his family traditions:

Crosby: I want my son, Jabbar, to have the same experience with all the
other people and the camaraderie [at a baseball game]. So I disagree.
And another thing, it’s not fair of you to hold some grudge against
me for some crap your husband did years ago. I’m here for my son,
okay!? And I’m not going anywhere. You’re gonna have to deal with
that!

Renee is clearly shocked by this speech, and the camera catches her
face, eyes wide with surprise and hurt. Between Zeek’s advice, Crosby’s
 The Post-Racial Family >> 123

outburst, and our lack of information about Renee’s motives (beyond

the stereotype that she is a controlling black mother with man issues)
for maintaining her grandson’s normal routines, we again are faced
with a white father versus black mother situation. As in Season One,
where Jasmine berated Crosby for his lack of parenting sense (leaving a
child alone at a pool with strangers), Renee also clearly disapproves of
his parental choices (baseball instead of church). More importantly, the
father’s rights theme is amplified here as Crosby asserts his place and
power in Jabbar’s life against grandma Renee.
The next scene that brings Crosby and Renee together finds them in
her living room, sitting on the couch with Jabbar between them, pre-
paring to watch a baseball game. Apparently, Renee has backed down,
allowing Jabbar to take in a game rather than go to church or adhere to
a regular bedtime. Moreover, she is now being tutored by Crosby in the
rules of baseball—she asks a question about the game, listening intently
as Crosby describes the players’ movements and motivations. As in the
birthday party scene of Season One, black mothers are to blame for
family tension, and most importantly, are controlling and emasculat-
ing. (White) men like Zeek and Crosby need to stand up to them and
“find their balls” in order to overcome this negative force that could, of
course, distort the childhood of yet another (biracial) black male: Jab-
bar. Crosby, then, interrupts the pattern of black matriarchal control.
As he wrests parental control from Renee, he makes her “see the light”
of allowing Jabbar to follow in his family’s footsteps—and gains her
respect in the process.
The latter is reinforced in the next episode, when Renee calls Crosby
to ask him to pick Jabbar up from an after-school program. Unfortu-
nately, when he answers his phone, Crosby is in the middle of a party
for a band, and he is clearly drunk. But, not wanting to give Renee a
reason to re-evaluate her decision to trust him, he declares he will pick
up his son. Crosby’s solution to avoid driving while intoxicated is to
call Gaby, his nephew Max’s special education aide, and ask her for a
ride. Gaby warns him it is probably not a good idea, but Crosby uses his
charm to get her to go along with the plan.
Once they reach the school, they are surprised to see Sekou there,
approaching the building ahead of them. Crosby rushes out of the
car and confronts Sekou, insisting he leave and let him take care of it.
124 << The Post-Racial Family

Sekou observes he is drunk, and that Renee asked him to get Jabbar
instead. Crosby tries to push Sekou, who resists, and Crosby topples
onto the lawn in disgrace. Sekou turns away, and Gaby gets Crosby back
in her car to leave. After this altercation, Crosby assumes that Renee
and Sekou will “tell on him” to Jasmine, thereby poisoning their rela-
tionship and his reputation as an improving father/adult. When he goes
to see Renee and Jabbar, Renee surprises him by saying that neither she
nor Sekou will tell Jasmine. She then goes into a speech about how she
doesn’t need to be in their business, BUT—she hopes Crosby and Jas-
mine will soon decide what to do with their relationship. She does so
through a critique of her daughter’s work choices.

Renee: I know she is doing the best she can. But the truth is, she’s been
dragging that poor boy all over creation. Summer in New York,
then she moves him back here and she goes to Europe. It’s not
good! . . . So you need to figure it out . . . I mean the both of you
together. Children need stability. I know it’s modern and fashionable
to live your separate lives and split time with your kids, but I think
that’s a bunch of bull. That boy needs his mom AND his daddy. So
either you-know-what or get off the pot.

Crosby is happily surprised by her words, and we are now left with
the impression that Renee is “on his side,” that side being wanting Jas-
mine and Jabbar to make a permanent, nuclear family connection with
Crosby. Of course, one way of doing this would be for Crosby to move
to New York with Jabbar, and start a life there where Jasmine can con-
tinue her career. This is never an option, of course, for the show is set
up to be centered in Berkeley and the Braverman family abodes. So,
the dramatic device of removing Jasmine from the geographic area
reinforces the false choice presented by post-feminism: women need
to decide whether to have a career OR a family; there is no “having
it all”—that was a false promise of second-wave feminism, which set
women and their families up for failure.35 Magically, during her next
visit to California, Jasmine announces that she is leaving the Ailey
dance company and will stay in Berkeley. This change of heart comes
with little discussion and no exposition other than that she missed
Crosby and Jabbar.
 The Post-Racial Family >> 125

This sets up the next phase in the relationship: Crosby proposes mar-
riage, and they move into an apartment together. The Braverman family
rejoices that he has finally made the right decision to marry his son’s
mother. Jasmine and Jabbar then join the family at Thanksgiving, where
she wows the clan with her athleticism during the traditional turkey-
day touch football game. While Renee is also invited to the Thanks-
giving feast, Sekou is not. Renee’s main function for the Thanksgiving
episode is to create tension over whether she can be prevented from
trying to take over Camille’s kitchen or disrupt other Braverman holi-
day traditions. Jasmine and Crosby have discussions alone about how
to keep Renee from taking over, and when she arrives at the Braver-
man compound, she tries to join the cooking rituals, but is blocked by
Camille and her granddaughter, Amber. Again, the inclusion of this
black mother does not create intimacy, but tension between the fami-
lies. Rather than allowing for an open exchange of traditions, the epi-
sode frames her desire to contribute to the dinner as a barely tolerated
interruption of Braverman family ritual.
In a subsequent episode, Crosby returns home to find Renee and
Jasmine looking over catering catalogues and other wedding parapher-
nalia. To his surprise, they announce that the wedding date has been
changed to accommodate Trussell relatives who have to travel from out
of state. Crosby looks bewildered, and becomes more so when he hears
the women continue the discussion about various wedding details—
details that are apparently new to him and not in line with his vision
of the wedding. He leaves the kitchen, chagrined. The wedding—where
the Trussells and Bravermans will be together again—is prefaced by
interpersonal conflict in which Renee and Jasmine are pitted against
Crosby and echoes the discomfort surrounding Jabbar’s living arrange-
ments when Jasmine went to New York.
For the remainder of the season, Crosby and Jasmine continue to
disagree over their vision for the wedding and their life together. They
meet with a reverend, who is black, who will marry them (in Renee’s
church). As part of a premarital counseling exercise, the reverend asks
each of them to draw a picture of their future life, and Crosby has a
hard time thinking of that picture, while we see Jasmine eagerly draw-
ing a detailed vision. She presents her picture first, which imagines a
house, more children, and her running a dance studio so she can work
126 << The Post-Racial Family

from home. Crosby looks surprised when he sees what his fiancée has
drawn. Crosby’s picture, which he is now shy about revealing, consists
of stick figures of the three of them, looking happy. The gap between
their visions becomes the next bump in the road.
Later on, while doing dishes, Crosby tries to rearrange plates and
bowls. Jasmine overrules him that the dishwasher won’t get them clean
in that configuration. Crosby blows up and declares: “I can’t marry
someone who will not let me make any decisions! Ok?! I’m starting to
realize that you are VERY controlling.” Jasmine is quiet, and hurt, and
listens as he continues to rant about how she doesn’t let him do any-
thing his way. He refers to her drawing, and she replies it was just an
exercise. Then she asks him if he wants his ring back, and the argument
escalates. She points out that he is often unwilling to make decisions,
and that their parental responsibilities require that she step in to make
a plan. Crosby then asks if she was going to “drop those kids on my lap
like you did Jabbar?!” She is shocked, and yells at him to get out. He
then says she is ungrateful for the way he has become part of her life.
When they next see each other, she says calmly that they need to spend
some time apart to decide what they really want. Crosby begins living
on his houseboat again, alone.
Their trial separation sets up a one-night-stand between Gaby—
Max’s therapist for Asperger’s—and Crosby. Promos for the show began
to hint at this affair as soon as Jasmine and Crosby had the fight. Jas-
mine disappears, and Crosby has multiple interactions with Gaby. At
Adam’s house, he witnesses her have a hard time consoling Max, and
takes her for a drink afterwards, where he leans in to kiss her, but they
both pull away in time. In the next episode, Crosby helps Gaby set up
for Max’s birthday party—a party that Jasmine and Jabbar would have
attended. However, at the last minute Jasmine calls to tell Crosby that
her aunt in Phoenix, Arizona, is ill, and that she wants to visit her to
give some help. Their absence provides an opening for Crosby to flirt
with Gaby during the party, which leads to sex—and regret.

Gaby and Crosby and Jasmine

In hindsight, viewers of Parenthood could have easily guessed that Cros-

by’s attraction to Gaby would lead to trouble eventually. Her character
 The Post-Racial Family >> 127

was introduced in Season One as the in-home aide for Max, who has
Asperger’s. The actress who plays Gaby, Minka Kelly, is a well-known
actress who has appeared on other programs, including Friday Night
Lights, another NBC show that producer/showrunner Jason Katims
helmed for the network. When Crosby first meets her in Season One
during a trip to Adam’s house, he comments to Adam that he finds her
attractive. Although Gaby is a recurring character, she does not appear
often in Season Two. She is mainly there to assist Max and update his
parents on his progress. She is an empathetic, caring, and attractive per-
son. By the time her night of passion with Crosby occurs, the writers
have provided plenty of evidence of her allure and the logic of Crosby’s
temptation.
After Crosby’s lapse into infidelity, the next episode begins with
Crosby leaving Gaby’s bedroom, while she lies asleep, with a regretful
look on his face. When he next sees Jasmine, he is drunk and alone on
his boat. She wants to end their separation and continue planning the
wedding. Crosby is clearly torn as he listens to his fiancée: Should he
tell her the truth, or allow this moment to continue into a happier part-
nership? But he tells her, and she explodes as he tries to apologize. She
leaves the boat, yelling that she will never forgive him for what he did to
their family.
Having interjected this new level of drama for the interracial couple,
the rest of the story is now organized around the question: Can they
be reunited? However, instead of devoting time to how Jabbar’s par-
ents will repair their relationship—perhaps through counseling? fam-
ily mediators?—the writers first focus on Crosby and Gaby’s side of
the love triangle The first episode after Crosby’s confession focuses on
Gaby’s guilt and her relationship with Adam’s family, not Jasmine’s feel-
ings. We see Gaby tearfully quit her job, and Kristina frantically trying
to figure out what she did wrong and what to do without the therapy
Max was getting. The episode centers on Kristina’s quest to get Gaby to
tell her what went wrong, which finally results in the confession that she
slept with Crosby. The audience later witnesses the women repair their
relationship in a subsequent episode via their shared concern for Max.
Gaby, then, is framed not as the typical “home wrecker,” but rather as a
good person who made a single, costly mistake, which can ultimately
be forgiven.
128 << The Post-Racial Family

The show details Crosby’s range of emotions and tensions with his
family in the aftermath of the affair—but not Jasmine’s. When Adam
finds out Crosby’s infidelity caused his son’s aide to resign, he is furious
and bans his brother from the house. Thus, Crosby and Gaby’s affair
is mostly used to generate scenes of conflict and angst for Adam and
Kristina—not Jasmine, the betrayed party. The episodes revolve around
whether Adam will forgive his brother; whether Max can handle know-
ing he has Asperger’s; and whether Kristina can make do without Gaby’s
help. Jasmine herself is rarely on screen, and when she does appear,
she is usually telling Crosby to leave her alone. Only two scenes give
viewers a glimpse that Jasmine is experiencing any emotion other than
anger. In one, Jasmine has committed to hosting Sydney for a sleepover
with Jabbar so Julia and Joel can go out for their anniversary. The cam-
era reveals that Jasmine has been crying: A close-up shot reveals puffy
eyes, little makeup, and fatigue. She tries to be upbeat, but dissolves into
tears, and Julia hugs her.
The second scene that reveals a more tender side of Jasmine features
Crosby and Jasmine together with Jabbar at his school. Jabbar gets to
introduce his family to his class, and the kids ask his parents how they
met. Crosby jumps in and tells a fairy-tale version of their meeting in
New York, ending the tale not with the truth—that he never contacted
Jasmine again after having sex with her—but with the statement that
as soon as he met her he knew he wanted to spend the rest of his life
with her. Jasmine smiles wistfully as she listens to his tale, and doesn’t
contradict him. Later, Jasmine visits Crosby’s houseboat, and tells him
she enjoyed the story, but fears it was only a story, and it’s time to move
on. Crosby is devastated as she leaves the houseboat, but later vows to
his siblings that he is going to “get my family back.” His plan is to buy a
house for Jasmine to prove his commitment.
For the remainder of the season, the camera follows Crosby as he
pursues the classic patriarchal proof of providing care: homeownership.
He buys the house, fixes it up with Joel, his brother-in-law, and repairs
his relationship with Adam in the process. In the last episode of Season
Two, Crosby tries to convince Jasmine to see the house. The show ends
with Jasmine dropping by with Joel, and the camera follows Crosby tour-
ing her around the house. The audience can’t hear what they are saying,
because the soundtrack takes over, but they are clearly not arguing, and
 The Post-Racial Family >> 129

they exchange tender glances as Crosby points out the repairs he and
Joel have accomplished. Their future looks brighter, but is still uncertain.
In some ways, Crosby and Jasmine are back where they began:
unclear about the nature of their relationship beyond their attachment
to Jabbar. And the audience is, in some ways, back where television
began with interracial couples. Viewers have been shown an interra-
cial relationship that is unstable and fraught with sexual interactions
that are frowned upon by the mainstream: single motherhood brought
on by premarital sex, and infidelity on the eve of marital union. Like
the mulatto narratives of old and the awkward inclusions of 1980s tele-
vision, the story of this interracial family is hampered by secrets and
lies, and is not equipped to include black family members in ways that
enrich our understanding of the interpersonal dynamics of interracial
families. Like Dominique Devereaux and her daughter on Dynasty,
Jasmine and Jabbar are not “with the family” from the beginning as
intimate, expected equals. They are introduced via secrets and lies sur-
rounding the sexual relations and knowledge of a black woman and a
white man, a white man whose family knows nothing of his interracial
sexual dalliance or child. Dominque’s mother was a black servant, one
who came in through the back door. Though Jasmine and Jabbar didn’t
come through the back door, they didn’t really enter through the front
door either. Rather, post-racial and post-feminist logic opened up a side
door, created by uncomfortable maneuvers in the script that replicated
some old racial stereotypes even as the location and spirit of the show
tried to leave them behind. In many ways, then, the show illustrates that
TV has not come as far as some have thought in depictions of race and
family. The promises of the “post-” to bring women of all colors into the
frame ring hollow; in the gaps between past and present, present and
future, too many old habits of racial representation continue to stalk
this show, zombies refusing to die.

Afterword: Spoiler Alerts, Final Comments

As of this writing, Parenthood has finished up its fourth season, with

respectable ratings and critical acclaim.36 The show has also won awards
for realistic portrayals of people with special needs, diversity, and other
social issues.37 Crosby and Jasmine are now married and expecting a
130 << The Post-Racial Family

new child. But the show continues to include race explicitly as a prob-
lem to be solved. For instance, when visiting his dad’s music studio,
Jabbar hears a black rap artist use the word “nigga.” Crosby agonizes
over how to explain it to his biracial son, but then is offended when his
black wife, Jasmine, lets him know she can handle it. Unfortunately, the
audience doesn’t get the full story on how she explains the history and
meaning of racial epithets to a grade-schooler—a lesson many parents
of different backgrounds may want to hear. Her discussion with Jabbar
is overlaid with soothing music, and the camera focuses on Crosby’s
face as he admires her words—words the audience cannot hear. Rather
than privilege the black mother’s wisdom and experiences with racism,
the show makes the white father’s awe the focus. So it goes. Black peo-
ple on Parenthood interject race in problematic ways. Despite the fact
that this episode aired within weeks of Bay Area unrest over police bru-
tality, in the wake of the shooting of Trayvon Martin, and in the midst
of an election campaign where anti-Obama displays of nooses were in
the news, the “problem” of racist terminology was situated in rap music.
Parenthood is one of a handful of primetime network shows that fea-
ture interracial pairs. ABC’s Modern Family, for instance, has a white
man/Latina pairing as well as gay male parents; Grey’s Anatomy has at least
two interracial love stories at this writing; and the aforementioned Battle-
star Galactica featured a white man/Asian woman pair. All of these shows
mobilize interracial families in ways that connect to different aspects of
the post-racial mystique. Where Battlestar deploys interracial family as
a bridge between races, Modern Family uses broad humor to comment
on racial difference in the manner of the Lear sitcoms of the 1970s, serv-
ing up and sometimes skewering stereotypes. Perhaps the jokes about a
Latina’s “fieryness” or her accent provoke conversation about interracial
coupling as a part of “modern” American family life, or perhaps they rein-
force forever-foreigner stereotypes about Latinas/os. These programs also
continue to position the dual-parent, middle-class family as the correct
means of comparison as they continue to employ stereotypes of women
of color and “domesticate” GLBT parents.38 Moreover, the women of color
prove their loyalty/acceptability by taking punishment (for Gloria, jokes
at her expense; for Athena, actual torture; for Jasmine, public and private
humiliation) and distancing themselves from their other family members
of color and/or the entire Othered racial group.
 The Post-Racial Family >> 131

Finally, it is notable that these families all “integrate” via the bod-
ies of women of color. Men of color, it seems, are too threatening to
become part of the extended family. On Modern Family, Gloria’s Latino
ex-husband, Javier, continually lets down their son. The show pushes
Javier out of the family, framing him as an untrustworthy presence.
On Parenthood, Jasmine’s brother Sekou is not included in the sporty
outings of the Braverman males, and does not attend Jabbar’s school
events or soccer games. Her mother Renee is framed as a scold who
lives in a run-down part of the Bay Area. The gendered bias for women
of color in these post-racial shows reveals yet another zombie stereo-
type: predatory and untrustworthy men of color who are unable to be
domesticated enough to eliminate their threatening sexuality and/or
physicality.
These problematic inclusions of interracial couples are examples of
the continued discomfort about what race means in what is supposed
to be a post-racial era. Clearly, in the first two seasons, the show hesi-
tated to portray racism at work in the lives of the Bravermans’ potential
new family members, but the show does recognize on some level that
it doesn’t make sense to cast black people as romantic partners without
some gestures that race still matters somehow, if only in misperceptions
of motives. Indeed, at the end of Season Two, the eldest daughter of
Adam Braverman, Haddie, announces her desire to go on date an older
Black teen, Alex, to her parents’ initial dismay. She thinks their disap-
proval may be partly motivated by race, but ultimately, the season ends
with Alex telling Haddie he’s not ready to date her yet.
The tepid approaches to race in the first two seasons of Parenthood
leave too much unresolved. Although the show aspires to depict a
world where adding a biracial child and his black mother to a white
family is not an issue for white people anymore, the absence of dialogue
or additional scenes of meaningful contact between the families makes
it far too easy for old stereotypes of black motherhood to fill in the gaps.
By not committing to doing something more, something different than
just bringing in black people to generate drama or affirm the feelings
of white characters, Parenthood, like the post-, fails to articulate spe-
cifically what race does or should mean within this family. It disavows
much of the racial past, but continues to depend on some of the racial
shorthand of that past when bringing people of color into the frame.
This page intentionally left blank
4

Post-Racial Audiences

Discussions of Parenthood’s Interracial Couple

I side with Crosby and I don’t really care for Jasmine at

all and I especially can’t stand her mother. I think Crosby
should get some legally established visitation rights—end of
story.
—T. F., “Crosby needs to dump Jasmine,” Facebook
discussion thread

As T. F.’s remark demonstrates, fictional television shows can inspire

strong feelings. Viewers connect with storylines and characters, con-
sciously and unconsciously judging the motives of the characters, as
well as evaluating how skillfully the writers develop storylines. It is thus
particularly important for studies of post-racial media to examine how
audiences react when producers inject racial difference into programs
broadcast in an era when race ostensibly matters “less” than it did
before, while advertisers attempt to reach ever-more-diverse consum-
ers/audiences. This chapter takes a look at how some viewers discussed
the post-racial network television drama Parenthood. These Facebook
conversations exhibit many of the elements of post-racial discourses
discussed in the previous chapters. Specifically, many audience mem-
bers felt free to take note of racial difference without seeing any link-
age between difference, on the one hand, and racial stereotyping and
racism, on the other. As they naturalized physical racial markers and
individualized the choices made by characters, their comments reso-
nated with post-racial discourses about interracial families. These post-
racial interpretations were countered by race-conscious understandings
of the show, its characters, and the history of racial representations in
network television.

>> 133
134 << Post-Racial Audiences

As I argued in the previous chapter, Parenthood is a post-racial

update of its movie predecessor. While I ultimately read Parenthood
as a failed attempt to “integrate” the family, given its recycling of black
female stereotypes and inability to provide sufficient depth for black
characters, I am clearly not the only one watching the show. Although
my reading illuminates where, when, and how black stereotypes, gen-
der stereotypes, and twentieth-century melodramas of interracial rela-
tions inform the presentation of Jasmine, Jabbar, and their black rela-
tives, not everyone will share experiences that make these influences
salient. Thus, in addition to reading the show’s “integration” of its black
characters as a cultural critic, I was committed to assessing how others
saw these figures as they interacted with the Braverman clan. To gain
access to other reactions to the show, I went to Facebook, and read all
of the viewer comments in discussion threads that indicated Jasmine,
Crosby, and/or Jabbar were the focus of audience talk.

Audiences and Race on TV

Standpoint theory and reception theory remind us how, amongst viewers

of a popular television show like Parenthood, there will be members of
multiple, sometimes overlapping, interpretive communities responding
to the program and negotiating its portrayal of parenting from various
standpoints. Readings of media are not completely unique or singular:
Given our shared cultural heritage, linguistic expectations, understand-
ing of genre conventions, and so on, audiences agree on many facets of
meaning, from plot development to which characters are supposed to be
good or evil. Beyond this, however, social identities such as age, gender,
race, class, sexuality, and their intersections impact how we respond to or
evaluate a text; we form “interpretive communities” linked to our social
identities. As Stanley Fish wrote, an interpretive community is not merely
an aggregation of individuals who share points of view; rather, the inter-
pretive community structures “a way of organizing experience . . . [shared
by] individuals in the sense that its assumed distinctions, categories of
understanding, and stipulations of relevance and irrelevance [are] the
content of the consciousness of community members.”1
Take myself, for example. My son has Asperger’s, and when I watch
Parenthood, I am particularly interested in comparing my experiences
 Post-Racial Audiences >> 135

with my son, his doctors and specialists, and others with the Braver-
man family’s experiences with Max. My membership in an interpretive
community of parents of special-needs children, then, means I may see
the show very differently than people outside of that community. Like-
wise, I am an African American, biracial woman married to a white
American man; my readings of race and gender representations have
been shaped by close familial relationships, my scholarship, and per-
sonal experiences of racism and sexism. Thus, when I watch the show,
I bring my experiences of all-white family gatherings, among others,
when I assess scenes between Jasmine and the Bravermans.
To take an historical example of interpretive communities—white
audiences generally loved Birth of A Nation (1915); black audiences pro-
tested the film.2 All of them agreed on its content: The film portrayed
the South after the Civil War and the rise of the Ku Klux Klan. But these
audiences disagreed widely over what the film’s impact would be on race
relations. The NAACP campaigned to have the film edited or banned
for fear that its sympathetic portrayal of the Klan would increase anti-
black violence and give further validation to Jim Crow laws. In con-
trast, President Woodrow Wilson called it a masterpiece of history on
film; many white film critics lauded director D. W. Griffith’s cinematic
talents.3
Birth provides a stark example of interracial differences in media
interpretation, but there are also intraracial disagreements. That is,
while interpretive communities do share common frameworks and
approaches for understanding media, they don’t necessarily share the
same opinions about the meaning and impact of particular genres or
characterizations. When broadcast on radio, Amos ‘n Andy garnered
both praise and condemnation from black newspapers and individual
listeners.4 More recently, black illustrator Aaron McGruder’s comic
strip (and now television show) the Boondocks has sparked controversy
among black audiences. One study of how black readers of the comic
discussed its racial content on the Boondocks webpage found that com-
ments fell into three categories: (1) debates over whether the strip rein-
forced or refuted black stereotypes; (2) praise for the strip’s relevance to
black readers; and (3) questioning whether MacGruder or other black
artists have a responsibility to black communities to represent the race
positively.5 Other scholars have likewise found conflicting opinions in
136 << Post-Racial Audiences

black audiences’ responses to media that feature racial themes or Afri-

can American characters.6
Discerning differences across and within racial groups can illumi-
nate how a TV drama can spark debates about racial identity, politics,
and other issues that impact individuals and groups. Television provides
lenses through which we might see other racial/ethnic groups and own
identity groupings differently. As Robin Means Coleman summarized, it
is imperative for scholars to continue to research audiences because of the
“role of media in our domestic settings and daily lives. . . . [E]ntering into
a dialogue with audience yields deepened insights into the tastes, . . . inter-
pretations, and political/identity understandings around an important cul-
tural institution.”7
Popular television can inspire moments for confronting race and
racism and, hopefully, lead to transformations of attitudes and actions.
Many people credit the miniseries Roots (1977), for example, for (tem-
porarily) opening up discussions about the legacy of slavery in the
United States8 How audiences interact with television, then, is impor-
tant to investigate in terms of the post-racial mystique because therein
lies a space where individual, cultural, and institutional levels of rac-
ism converge. Although many in critical race theory are concerned that
dominant discourses of race reify individual acts and thoughts, Malinda
Smith cautions us that we must continue interrogating social and indi-
vidual practices “that are normalized and part of our everyday thinking
and acting.”9 Post-racial media texts are often constructed in ways that
encourage audiences not to notice racism, and instead to see represen-
tations of racial difference as mattering only in terms of descriptiveness
or novelty, not in terms of power or hierarchy. Post-racial narratives
work to “deny, to discount and even to minimize experiences of rac-
ism and, thereby, to excuse” audiences from responsibility—moral or
political—to act against racism.10 Smith analyzed official reactions to
incidents of on-campus racist spectacles, such as blackface parties that
were excused by participants as “just a joke” but not racist. She refers to
such excuses as the product of “motivated ignorance,” which Cheshire
Calhoun describes as self-interested wrong-doing that is supported by
social practices that impede individual and group awareness of harm
done to others.11 The post-racial practice of displaying racial differ-
ence while denying racial discrimination encourages audiences to “not
 Post-Racial Audiences >> 137

see” racism in everyday cultural texts—whether on network television

shows or in Facebook discussions. Here, I analyze audience discussions
to see whether the show’s post-racial combination of increased inter-
racial visibility and invisibility of racism sparks counter-discourses.
Social media constitute an everyday media context where we can
interrogate audience reactions to post-racial television. Many viewers
use social media like Twitter or Facebook in tandem with traditional
media. We often hear reports or see spoofs of how audience mem-
bers tweet, post, or chat before, during, and after they watch television
shows or movies. It has become commonplace for the TV networks to
create official social media portals for fan interaction, attempting to
corral viewers into new media spaces that are closely connected to their
show and their network’s brand. And, of course, these official spaces are
more easily tracked than the limitless fan sites viewers can participate
in at their leisure. Like communication scholars Patricia Cornwell and
Mark Orbe, I am interested in how Parenthood viewers use the Inter-
net (in this case, a Facebook page created by NBC) to talk about the
show with other audience members. The dialogues of people who may
or may not know each other in this online space provide an opportu-
nity to see how they negotiate the racial representations of the show as
well as one another’s assumptions about race, gender, class, family, and
heterosexual courtship.
Looking at the myriad responses of audience members who are
motivated enough to post online, we can gain insight into ways that
viewers evaluate a character that is still rare on network television: a
black woman in a relationship with a white man. Although they are
judging fictional figures, it is important to note that our evaluations
of entertainment figures may influence our views of people in the real
world. Edward Schiappa explains how virtual contact with media char-
acters can impact people’s opinions about members of social groups
represented by those characters.12 So, for example, a heterosexual man
with no gay acquaintances who watches a show like NBC’s hit show fea-
turing gay characters, Will & Grace (1998–2005), may feel he is learning
what gay people are like from the show, and make assumptions about
gay people in the real world accordingly. The question then is, what
is he learning? Many critics of the show asserted that the effeminate,
over-the-top behaviors of an out gay character, Jack, reinforced anti-gay
138 << Post-Racial Audiences

stereotypes.13 Implicitly and explicitly, many of these writers assumed

audiences for Will & Grace would absorb negative beliefs about gay
men. However, experiments by Schiappa and colleagues showed
that people with little real-world contact with gays and lesbians who
watched Will & Grace reacted in the opposite fashion: Their anti-gay
prejudices were reduced after watching the show.14 Why would this be
the case? Social cognition research suggests some answers.
Psychological and communication researchers have conducted stud-
ies that suggest that we describe and evaluate celebrities and television
characters in the same ways we describe and evaluate our neighbors
and coworkers—even though we don’t know them personally, the stars
and/or their characters seem “real” to us.15 Many of us (or our children)
cried when Professor Dumbledore died in the sixth installment of Harry
Potter, or have friends who were incensed that Brad Pitt dumped Jenni-
fer Aniston for Angelina Jolie and angrily condemned those who sided
against their favorite actress. Thus, we engage in what social psycholo-
gists call “parasocial interactions” with media figures. Our experiences
will not be uniform, however: Social identity, level of fan knowledge,
and other factors will vary our feelings of closeness to media figures
and our judgment of their character. Based on this research on paraso-
cial interaction, Schiappa and colleagues suggest that parasocial con-
tact has the possibility of undermining stereotypes and negative beliefs
about a group when the following is true:

1. viewers find the character likable and/or attractive

2. viewers think the character is realistic
3. viewers find the character similar in some way.16

Thus, because many study participants found the cast of Will & Grace
likable, real, and similar somehow, positive evaluations of the charac-
ters seemed to mitigate anti-gay stereotypes.
But what about when a character isn’t seen as realistic, attractive, or
similar? Many researchers and critics assert that the continued employ-
ment of unattractive black stereotypes, along with sparse counter-ste-
reotypical characterizations of African Americans, reinforces anti-black
beliefs and stereotypes. The theory suggests that anti-black stereotypes
are “chronically accessible,” and thus unconsciously or consciously
 Post-Racial Audiences >> 139

affect audience perceptions of black people.17 While a large majority of

whites, for example, report in polls that they do not believe black peo-
ple are less attractive or smart than whites, studies of implicit attitudes
find that the majority of whites do hold anti-black biases.18 These biases
can be primed or activated by media representations, even for people
who don’t consciously endorse black stereotypes. For example, research
on news and political advertisements that use racial imagery or racially
coded language prime anti-black stereotypes (e.g., “welfare queen” or
“inner city”).19 Less work has been done on reactions to televised enter-
tainment. Such studies as have been undertaken have generally found
differences between black and white viewers’ interpretations of race,
family roles, and gender politics, as well differences between male and
female viewers of both races.20 In some cases, black audiences continue
to express worries that black stereotypes in television will have a nega-
tive impact on race relations, whereas white audiences don’t always
share the same concerns.
Although the methods and theories employed by social psycholo-
gists and critical race and media scholars are often quite different,
they converge in their concerns about the longevity of stereotypes and
evidence of continuing racist discrimination in society and media.21
Observing affinities between critical race theory’s interest in narrative
and symbols and social psychological examinations of stereotypes, atti-
tudes, and behavior, legal scholar Jerry Kang summarizes, “the scientific
consensus is that racial schemas are not of minor significance. Instead,
racial schemas are ‘chronically accessible’ and can be triggered by the
target’s mere appearance, since we as observers are especially sensitive
to visual and physical cues.”22 This means that we are likely to access,
and perhaps apply, race or gender stereotypes when we see people of
color in the media. And, though much of the bias that results may be
unintended or even unconscious, Kang emphasizes that lack of intent
“does not magically erase the harm.” Studies strongly suggest that this
harm takes many forms, including employers prejudging applicants
with “black-sounding names” as deficient; police and everyday citizens
prejudging black and Latino men as threatening; and strong, agentic
women being judged negatively while strong, agentic men are evalu-
ated positively.23 These judgments occur with people in the everyday
“real” world as well as in media contexts. With these studies in mind,
140 << Post-Racial Audiences

I examine how audience members on Facebook describe and evaluate

the interracial family on Parenthood.

Facebook and Parenthood

I analyzed viewer-created discussion threads on the Parenthood Face-

book page from the first two seasons of the show. While there are liter-
ally hundreds of discussion threads on the show, eight were specifically
titled with references to Crosby, Jasmine, Jabbar, and/or racial identity.
I gathered all of the discussion threads that focused on those characters
and race, and then closely read each for themes, contradictions, and
commonalities. I also kept track of the racial and gender identities of
discussion participants, using cues such as photographs, explicit identi-
fications of self, and implied identity statements to categorize each par-
ticipant. In the examples from the discussion threads that follow, I also
reproduce participant comments verbatim. My process follows Corn-
well and Orbe’s study of audience comments on the Boondocks website,
in which the researchers sorted messages posted to the site by race by
using the comments of participants to discern their identity, comments
that included comparisons to characters, explicit statements, and the
like. In the case of Facebook, some users have photos attached to their
screen names. Although those photos, like other visual “evidence” of
race, don’t guarantee identification, the images do suggest racial iden-
tity to other users.
Another point to highlight about my collection of Parenthood dis-
cussions on Facebook is that I have access only to the responses/debates
started by people with access to the Internet and who were motivated
to comment in a semi-public forum. Facebook discussions amongst
“friends” on other pages that are limited to a network of friends are not
part of this study. However, given that race and interracial relationships
continue to be touchy subjects for many people, the fact that so many
fans were interested in commenting on Jasmine and Crosby’s relation-
ship on the public Facebook page that NBC created for the show is in
itself notable. Moreover, given its semi-anonymity—one can create
a pseudonym, create a fake account, or refuse to post personal iden-
tifiers that would suggest race or gender—Facebook is a place where
people can be candid (or provocative) without fear of much face-to-face
 Post-Racial Audiences >> 141

reprisal, although being insulted or hazed online by fellow chatters does

occur and can be painful.24 For this reason, Facebook and NBC’s staff
could edit or remove postings deemed offensive.
Finally, given the continued segregation of neighborhoods and
schools in many parts of the United States, Facebook discussion threads
provide a spontaneous space for potential interracial interactions—
mediated, but interactions nonetheless. And, given the ability to hide or
manufacture an online identity, it is interesting that many of the discus-
sants seemed willing to post personal photos and/or offered descrip-
tions that conveyed their racial identity as they talked about an inter-
racial couple on a major network show.
Parenthood’s official Facebook page, which invites its viewers to
engage in conversations with each other about the show’s plot, char-
acters, and the social issues and dilemmas tackled in various episodes,
also demonstrates how social media sites have become integral parts of
contemporary television, as the networks look for ways to keep viewers
interested as they navigate their multiplying options for screen-based
entertainment. Moreover, social media spaces offer opportunities for
additional advertising and surveillance of the audience; as people write
about the show on the Facebook discussion boards, recommend the
page to other Facebook friends, “like” the show, and participate in other
ways on the site, Facebook and NBC garner more information about
their audience’s demographics, tastes, and other data.
Beyond the possible data mining going on, though, the site is con-
structed to attract audience members, champion the show, and to
engage people in discussion about the show’s titular topic: parenthood.
The most prominent issue for the show and on the Facebook page is
autism. The page contains large banner announcements and displays
showing parents links to experts, organizations, and personal narratives
about autism. Indeed, the show’s producers partnered with the orga-
nization Autism Speaks to consult on scripts and provide web-based
resources to families.
Although the fact that Crosby and Jasmine are an interracial couple
was not explicitly thematized by NBC as a social issue on the Facebook
page, race was part of the fans’ conversation. That is, while the Parent-
hood Facebook page did not invite viewers to see this couple through
the lens of race in the way it asked fans to see Max through the lens of
142 << Post-Racial Audiences

Autism Spectrum Disorder, many discussion threads did comment on

how race operated in their relationship and in the production of the
show.

Discussing the Interracial Couple and Child

Facebook users’ discussions of Jasmine and Crosby’s relationship

reveal some of the ways in which audience members negotiate post-
racial media. I suggest that the comment threads analyzed here reveal
moments of “motivated ignorance,” as well as moments of intervention
wherein other audience members attempt to show their fellow fans how
they are “not seeing” racism even as the dominant reading of the show
encourages a post-racial sensibility. By reading against the grain of the
text, some members of the audience attempt to reframe a black woman/
white man relationship as an example of the strength, resilience, and
complexity of modern family life. When they contest the arguments of
white viewers who see Jasmine as a controlling, unpleasant, and unnec-
essary character, they invoke their own readings of the show, auxiliary
entertainment news, and media history to argue for a more holistic
evaluation of this black mother. Moreover, they are “troubling” ste-
reotypes of black motherhood and skin color that some white viewers
employ or imply in their critiques of Jasmine and Crosby’s relationship.
These interventions make it harder for fans to “comfortably coexist with
racism even among friends”25 or at least other fans of the show. As they
question the choices of show writers to truncate viewer access to her
inner life and minimize her positive attributes, these viewers resist and
directly challenge some of their fellow discussants’ understandings of
racial identification, gender, and single motherhood. In these ways,
they subtly and unsubtly call out their fellow viewers for continuing to
“not see” racism or sexism.
The eight discussion threads focused on Crosby and Jasmine were
often blunt in their expression of support or liking of the characters.
From the thread titled “Crosby needs to dump Jasmine” to the one
named “Crosby and Jasmine belong together,” discussions of these char-
acters were not neutral in their approach to what the couple meant to
each other and to the viewers. Four main themes emerged. First, many
white participants (people whose photos or self-identifiers marked
 Post-Racial Audiences >> 143

them as white) characterized Jasmine (and sometimes her mother) as

a controlling, manipulative, and unattractive woman who deserved
neither Crosby’s affection nor his (or viewers’) trust. This first theme
resonates with my critical reading of the text: that the show frames Jas-
mine using common stereotypes of black women. Second, and often in
response to the first theme, some white participants wondered whether
or not Jabbar was truly Crosby’s son, using the actors’ skin colors to
consider whether it was realistic for them to be represented as father
and son. As with the first theme, those who doubted Jabbar’s parentage
seemed influenced by preconceived notions about skin color and racial
“biology,” as well as negative depictions of single black mothers, both
of which influenced their reading of how Jasmine “surprised” Crosby
with a biracial son. In these discussions, white participants’ declarations
about Jasmine and Jabbar echoed post-racial discourses that simul-
taneously mark racial difference but deny racism. Participants “saw”
the differences in skin tone and more, but “didn’t see” that their own
interpretations of those differences may have been influenced by racist
stereotypes.
Third, and often in direct response to the previous themes, partici-
pants argued that Jasmine was an attractive, independent, praise-wor-
thy mother who had flaws, but not fatal ones. In this line of discussion,
many contributors suggested that negative reactions to Jasmine were
exacerbated by how the writing team neglected her character: Jasmine’s
fans pointed to her shallow back story and meager screen time as a rea-
son why other viewers had such a limited perspective on her motiva-
tions and personality. Some implied that black stereotypes contributed
to the distrust and disdain felt by white viewers.
Finally, some discussants were concerned that the show’s writers—
and network TV in general—were incapable of creating and sustain-
ing a complex, caring, and long-lasting interracial relationship. Veering
between congratulating the writers for trying at all and second-guessing
them as plot twists suggested Jasmine’s demise, these participants con-
textualized their wariness in terms of television history and entrenched
stereotypes of black women. In these exchanges, participants invited
others to “see” Jasmine through feminist and anti-racist lenses, and sug-
gested that the writers’ and some viewers’ vision were clouded by rac-
ism and sexism.
144 << Post-Racial Audiences

While one of these themes (Jabbar’s parentage) was mainly limited to

one discussion thread, the other three were found across the different
titles. Indeed, many participants posted remarks on different boards,
arguing their points and cross-referencing comments made on differ-
ent parts of the discussion threads as well as on other fan sites. In these
exchanges, participants often brought in new information from indus-
try gossip, teasers for the show, or interviews with the showrunner,
Jason Katims. Thus, the discussions wove together a host of media texts,
as well as participants’ own experiences with race and relationships.
In these ways, the Facebook page for Parenthood supported a lively, if
sometimes contentious, set of intertwined and intertextual discussions
of interracial couples on television, limitations on viewers’ abilities to
identify with black characters, and the sometimes limited imaginations
of television producers when it comes to race and family matters.

Theme One: Jasmine Is Controlling

and Can’t Be Trusted
Participants who attacked Jasmine’s character were ample, and cues
such as photos and comments about racial identity suggested that these
commentators were all white.26 Indeed, their intense negative reactions
to Jasmine suggests that my reading of Parenthood’s representation of
black womanhood was on target: The writers’ choices regarding what
to import from the original movie (the surprise biracial son) and how
to “balance” Crosby’s irresponsibility with women against Jasmine’s lie
about Crosby framed her in ways that resonate with easily accessible
and well-worn stereotypes about black women and families headed by
single mothers.
Three discussion threads—all started by a woman, L., who looks
white in her screen picture—were generated specifically to argue that
Jasmine was neither worthy of Crosby’s affections nor trustworthy over-
all. L. created the threads “Crosby needs to dump Jasmine,” “Jasmine,”
and “Why are Jasmine and Crosby hiding their relationship?” In each of
her starting posts, L. asserted her dislike of Jasmine. For example, in her
initial post for “Why are Jasmine and Crosby hiding their relationship?”
L. wrote, “There’s something about Jasmine I don’t like and I really don’t
like her with Crosby.” Other participants in these threads agreed, and
began building the case that Jasmine was up to something. Either she
 Post-Racial Audiences >> 145

was lying about Jabbar’s paternity or she was a controlling woman who
was too focused on her career to truly care about or deserve a relation-
ship with Crosby—or both. In the discussion “Crosby needs to dump
Jasmine,” L. and two other white women, E. and T. F., argued that Jas-
mine was untrustworthy to the point that Crosby would need to assert
his father’s rights through legal action to maintain access to his son.

L.: She uprooted Jabbar without any thought for a career that came out
of the blue. I can’t be objective about Jasmine because I don’t trust
her. Every time something ticks her off she uses Jabbar as a bargain-
ing chip. Waiting five years to tell Crosby he had a son was selfish &
cowardly.
E.: Personally . . . I think Jasmine is lying . . . [about Jabbar] . . . Although i
like every character in the show and appreciate their perspective Jas-
mine is hardly a saint. She is beautiful and talented and an opportun-
ist. She wants a bigger life and Crosby isn’t it . . .
: She is like many women (yes they exist) who . . . drop their kids
with their Mom’s to pursue themselves, their career goals and even
drug habits. No, I am not saying she (jasmine) has a drug habit. So
back to the fact that it looks like Jasmine is “away” saint or not (not)
the relationship that we will probably be following is the Grand-
mother and Crosby’s which should ultimately end up in a court room
I imagine. . . . Looks like a case of Parental Alienation. And, I think
Julia [Crosby’s sister, a lawyer] should get to work. . . .
T. F.: I side with Crosby and I don’t really care for Jasmine at all and I espe-
cially can’t stand her mother. I think Crosby should get some legally
established visitation rights—end of story.

These comments suggest a post-feminist, post-racial tale of an “oppor-

tunist” (or gold-digger) black single mother who is looking to “have it
all” by shirking her mothering duties.
While many of these participants point to Jasmine’s alleged “habit”
of dropping Jabbar off and picking him up on a whim as proof of her
controlling behavior, when asked by other discussants to explain why
she isn’t trustworthy, none was able to articulate any links with the
show’s scripts or plot points apart from her decision to stop trying to
contact Crosby when she was pregnant. This decision—concocted by
146 << Post-Racial Audiences

the writers to replicate the original movie’s “surprise” of the biracial

son—makes her irredeemable in the eyes of many white viewers across
all of the discussion threads. On the board “Is Jabbar Crosby’s Son?” N.
(a woman) snarked on the thread “Jasmine,” “Perhaps he would have
returned her call if he knew she was having his baby . . . that was a huge
part of the message she left out . . .”
Some viewers went so far as to blame Jasmine entirely for the preg-
nancy, as well as for not telling Crosby. In the thread “Crosby and Jas-
mine Belong Together,” H. (a white woman) told Jasmine’s support-
ers that “Someone not being ready for parenthood is no excuse to not
tell him for 5 years. If Jasmine was stupid enough to have unprotected
sex with an irresponsible man, she should have dealt with the conse-
quences. No excuse will ever be good enough for what she did.” This
comment employs the double-bind often used in post-feminist dis-
course to demean single mothers. On the one hand, Jasmine must take
full responsibility for the pregnancy and alleged lack of contraception.
On the other hand, she is pilloried for being too self-sufficient and not
trying hard enough to get the father involved. Is there a statute of limi-
tations for telling the biological father about a child? Does a woman
have a “duty” to do so, even if she has no legal or other solid tie to the
father—and he expresses no interest in a relationship beyond sex?
Many discussants stated the obvious: They “identified with Crosby”
because he was, as P. (a white male) said, more like themselves. On
“Crosby should dump Jasmine,” he wrote, “There is something about
Jasmine I don’t trust. I can’t put a finger on it, but I don’t see it lasting.
Mabey because I have more in common w/ Crosby than anyone else on
the show? Time will only tell.” White women who said they identified
with Crosby did not assert likeness per se, but said that Jasmine was so
distasteful, that they had to take Crosby’s side, and that the show meant
for them to identify with Crosby rather than with Jasmine. In the dis-
cussion “Crosby should dump Jasmine,” T. F. and M. (a woman) chal-
lenged each other about what identifying with a character means.

T. F.: I gotta wonder why you are so pro-jasmine?!?!?!?! It seems to me the

writers want us to identify more w/Crosby.
M.: . . . and i gotta wonder why you are so anti-Jasmine?! In fact i am
totally identifying with Crosby, hence the reason why i support him
 Post-Racial Audiences >> 147

forgiving Jasmine, supporting her career, and loving her. That’s the
way it’s being written and i am supporting it. This season Crosby
appears to be more in love with Jasmine than ever . . . that’s what i’m
supporting. If jas is who he loves, i am totally identifying with him,
it’s just what the writers want me to do. How exactly are you identify-
ing with Crosby again?

Here, M. (whose photo suggests she is a woman of color) intervened

in the zero-sum framework set up by many of the discussants: To like
Crosby is to hate Jasmine. M. asserted that the writers were not neces-
sarily pushing viewers to take sides; rather, they were asking viewers
to explore a growing relationship between two imperfect adults who
shared a child but not a lot of experience in being a couple. M. rede-
fined identification with a character as making a connection with his/
her feelings rather than taking sides. Although some other participants
in the discussion appreciated her acknowledgment of the complexity of
the characters, none took her up on the suggestion that identification
wasn’t limited to deciding whose team you’re on when a romantic pair
has difficulties.

Theme Two: Is Jabbar Really Crosby’s Son?

The second theme was at times interwoven with the first, and was
explored mostly in the discussion board (again started by L.) “Is Jabbar
Crosby’s son?”

L.: I don’t think he is. Jasmine never told Crosby she was pregnant & waited
five years to tell him he had a son! And she freaked out when Crosby
asked for a paternity test. If she has nothing to hide she would have
agreed right away. I’m surprised Crosby didn’t ask why Jasmine
waited so long to tell him about Jabbar & didn’t question her at all.

K. (a woman) replied that she feared “[C]rosby will get very attached,
and then he will find out jabar is not his. :(” A. (also a woman) added,
“It is very suspicious that she would wait five years to tell him he has a
son.”
The next commentator, a white man, G., disputed their remarks:
“I honestly think that crosby is the father, and that he will stop seeing
148 << Post-Racial Audiences

his current girlfriend and end up having another baby with jabbars
mother.” To counter, L. shared the following suspicion about Jabbar’s
skin tone:

L.: If jabbar is crosby’s son, wouldn’t he be white or mixed race? He’s very
dark & his mom isn’t that dark. My aunt who is white had two sons
with a jamaican man & they are both dark. I always thought if the
father is white & the mother is dark, the kid usually is white.

L.’s casual expression of racial “knowledge” illustrates the ways post-

racial discussions continue to indulge in pseudo-biological explana-
tions for difference. It also sparked many responses, even though the
next episode of the show cleared up the fatherhood issue—Crosby
received the results of the DNA test and had proof Jabbar was his son.
While a few participants shared their happiness that Crosby wasn’t
set up for disappointment, others returned to L.’s description of what
makes mixed-race people look like their parents. L.’s attempt to use her
experience with her aunt’s children as proof of what most biracial peo-
ple should look like hearkens back to the pseudo-science of race and
the naïve, misguided, but still prevalent understandings of what factors
contribute to skin color variation.
Commentators replied to her posting with with varying degrees of
patience. The first response (from C., a woman of color) gently cor-
rected her assumptions with examples and counter-examples of real-
life biracial families:

C.: @L.—I’m late to the party but biracial children’s coloring can range
from as dark as the dark parent to as light as the lighter parent. The
young man who plays Jabbar is biracial; his mother is white and his
father is black. Shar Jackson & Kevin Federline’s 2 children are very
fair (latino/mediteranian looking). While Robert DeNiro & Grace
Hightower’s son is darker. Genetics is just that funny.
: The only thing I would disagree with is the color of the baby
Jasmine gave birth to in the episode last night. The vast majority of
“full” black children (regardless of their parents coloring) are very,
very light at birth. They darken up later. So I would expect a biracial
child at birth to be even lighter. The baby was the only mistake I
 Post-Racial Audiences >> 149

would say the show made. Crosby & Jasmine might get together so
Parenthood has time to do better research.

Invoking examples from the celebrity world, C. gently informed L. that

her single experience with one biracial family was insufficient to form
solid expectations for what a biracial child should look like. Simultane-
ously, C. questioned the use of a “too black” baby for the birth scene,
asserting her own type of expertise in skin color variation over time/age
and suggesting that the creators of Parenthood need to do more work on
the realism of their racial representations. Although her skin color logic
is also faulty (kids’ skin tones, eye color, hair texture, and so on, can go
through many changes as they age), C. makes an important point: The
racial appearance of one family member is not sufficient evidence on
which to base assertions about how multiracial people’s skin “matches”
or doesn’t match their parents’.
A later response was frank in its disbelief and disdain for L.’s con-
clusions about skin color within interracial families. S., whose picture
shows a black woman standing arm in arm with a lighter-skinned
man, wrote : “@L . . . were you born on Mars? Really? Who are you to
question what someone’s skin color should be? People of color come
in all colors, not just dark, or white. Sheesh!” Refuting the oversimpli-
fied, faux biologies of race in the discussion more forcefully than C., S.
rejected the idea that we can easily map racial identity of parents and
children via comparisons in skin color.
Responding to continued claims that Jasmine tricked Crosby about
Jabbar’s paternity, multiple discussants joined in with textual cues
as well as points of physical similarities between the actors that play
Crosby and Jabbar. After M. (a white user) predicted a medical emer-
gency would show mismatching blood types between father and son,
others argued that the producers made casting and storyline choices so
that their family tie was clear to see:

C. M. (female): haha i knew he was [Crosby’s son] from the beginning!

he had to be. each character had to have more than one story line.
Crosby was with him and katie, and with him and jabbar. and the
shows all about parenting. crosby was the only one that wasn’t a par-
ent, and he was the irrisponsible child. . . .
150 << Post-Racial Audiences

N. (white male): The kid is his! The show says that right after crosby left
jazmyn she all of a sudden got pregnant! Right after crosby left her
and by the way the kid looks like him so theres ur proof the kid is
his!
C.: @M.—I HIGHLY doubt a medical emergency is going to arise to show
Jabar isn’t Crosby’s son. That is good for soap operas (a dying breed)
not dramatic comedies. I have to agree with [N.] on this one. The
kid is his and they casted a child that could pass for Crosby’s child.
Also the parenthood website listed Jabbar as Crosby’s BEFORE the
results. . . . If the kid wasn’t his then Julia who is a lawyer would have
said something. She’s the one that told him about his legal and finan-
cial responsibilities.

This discussion of what makes TV families “look alike” veered between

assumptions about the “real world” of race, genes, and skin color and
the world of casting talent and scripting a primetime drama in a “real-
istic” manner. C., C. M., and N. were quick to reject comments that
questioned Crosby and Jabbar’s father-son relationship by combining
information gleaned from the show, its genre conventions, and compar-
isons between the actors to reinforce the DNA “evidence” provided by
the paternity test episodes. These participants referred both to scenes
from the show and to the ways the opening credits, teasers, and web-
site information designated Jabbar as Crosby’s legitimate son. They also
rejected the idea that the writers of a “quality” show like Parenthood
would concoct “soap opera” plot twists in order to manufacture more
drama.
This work of weaving together multiple media and “real life”
resources to support particular interpretations of the show is even more
evident in the final theme, wherein mostly women of color viewers
devoted significant energy and effort to argue for Jasmine’s complexity
and humanity to her detractors.

Theme Three: Give Jasmine and Crosby a Real Chance

Many women of color fans expressed sadness and frustration at the
amount of hatred others directed towards Jasmine. M. and C. N., for
example, exchanged exasperated back-to-back posts on L.’s “Crosby
should dump Jasmine” thread:
 Post-Racial Audiences >> 151

Figure 4.1. Joy Bryant,

actress who plays Jas-
mine on Parenthood.
© Kristen Noseda
./Retna Ltd./Corbis.
Courtesy of Corbis
Images.

M.: CN, i can’t believe we are all watching the same show. Some viewers are
just making up things about Jasmine that have no basis in reality; Jas-
mine is lying, you can’t trust her, she’ll break Cros’ heart, she’s up to
something. LOL. The same ones who think Crosby is a model father,
are wishing he has an affair with Gaby; the same ones who claim
to love Jabbar, are wishing his mother would die. Makes no sense
to me. . . . The Jasmine bashing is unreasonable, it’s like some feel
personally injured by the fact that Crosby loves Jasmine, despite her
flaws. All the characters on PH are flawed and that’s what i love about
them, that’s what makes them interesting. Katims is doing a great job.

C.N.: Jasmine could be a clone of June Cle[a]ver and some people will have
issues with her. LOL! I’m still trying to figure out this big lie that
152 << Post-Racial Audiences

Jasmine is holding. I know, she’s an alien from out of space. LOL!

This is so funny to me. What is she up to? Trying to steal his money?
No. Crosby doesn’t have a lot of money and neither does his family.
She can’t be trusted? Does she work for Bin Laden? LOL! Jasmine is
flawed like the other characters on the show, which makes them all
the more interesting to me.

Both C. N. and M. (whose picture icons suggest they are women of

color) situate Jasmine as one of many complex, flawed characters on
the show. They argue that the anti-Jasmine viewers are unreasonably
magnifying her flaws in ways they do not for other characters. In later
exchanges, they identify race as an influence in this unreasonable
assessment.
M.’s creation of a new thread, “Crosby and Jasmine belong together,”
can be seen both as a reaction to the anti-Jasmine sentiment on the
other discussions and as a way to create more space to appreciate the
show without having to always confront negative comments about the
only major female character of color on the show. Although M.’s thread
was not as popular in terms of the number of different people who
joined the discussion, its 280 postings—most between herself and four
other women of color—provide an extended commentary by audience
members on their hopes for the portrayal of an interracial couple on
primetime “quality” television. Cross-referenced with other postings on
the other threads, discussions between M. and those who shared her
views show that (1) many of these viewers were disturbed by the lack of
complex representations of women of color and their families; and (2)
many believed that well-written television shows can make an impact
on how people see race—for good or ill.
M., P. (a woman of color), C., and others make it clear that part of
their attraction to the show was the inclusion of Jasmine and Jabbar’s
storyline. And, as their viewing continued over the course of the two
seasons, their investment in this interracial family’s story was palpable
on the “belong together” board.

M.: I am so excited that PH will return this Tuesday, i like the whole show
but i really love the Crosby/Jasmine/ Jabbar [storyline]. I hope that
Cros and Jas have a serious talk about being an IR [interracial]
 Post-Racial Audiences >> 153

couple, especially now that they are engaged to be married. They will
encounter racism at some point and they should at least talk about
how they will deal with it. Yes, IR couples are just like other couples,
but they also have unique challenges, which should not be ignored.

M.’s hopes, though, were met with skepticism from P., who predicted
the show would not maintain Jasmine and Crosby’s relationship once
Crosby’s niece, Haddie, began to consider a relationship with a black
older teen, Alex, in the second season.

P.: So I read the link “getting involved with Gaby.” Have been expecting it.
It will be really hard seeing how much a part of the family she is now.
I don’t know. I’m like A. I don’t know if I’ll be able to watch it if they
split it up. I will tell you, I got really scared with the Haddie/Alex
thing because I felt they were not going to have 2 interracial relation-
ships on the show. So the question is, who gets to stay?

As these viewers mused over Jasmine and Crosby’s future, they wor-
ried about what the writers would do to them—especially given the
negative audience opinions they’d read about Jasmine on Facebook and
elsewhere. The main concern was that her character was given neither
sufficient screen time in her self, nor enough interactions with other
Bravermans to overcome the deficit she inherited from the show’s set
up—namely, not telling Crosby about Jabbar for five years. They feared
Jasmine would continue to be portrayed as the villain in the relation-
ship in order for the writers to foster audience sympathy for Crosby.
Thus, it isn’t surprising that these viewers often jumped to Jas-
mine’s defense in discussion threads within and outside of the “belong
together” thread. These defenses, though, were not knee-jerk assertions
of racial sameness or solidarity like those imagined and derided in con-
servative post-racial discourses. Rather, these Parenthood fans articu-
lated exactly where the text revealed to them nuances or possibilities
for depth in Jasmine’s life story, and reminded their fellow viewers of
relevant events, plot twists, and character traits that could provide fod-
der for different interpretations. On top of these text-oriented interven-
tions, these women also interweaved their own experiences with stereo-
typing, single motherhood, and television history to make their points.
154 << Post-Racial Audiences

For example, when other fans lambasted Jasmine for not doing
more to inform Crosby of her pregnancy or for being too “control-
ling,” many of her supporters acknowledged she could have done
more. But they also asked the critics to consider other elements of the
situation. First, as in this exchange between L. (white) and C. (woman
of color) on “Why are Crosby and Jasmine hiding their relationship?”
the latter argues that people are turning a blind eye to Crosby’s poor
choices.

L.: I don’t like Jasmine’s attitude sometimes, and how she took Jabbar away
from Crosby whenever they had a fight. It was immature and mean.
Calling him about Jabbar wasn’t enough. As soon as she found out
she was pregnant, she should have gone to see him and told him in
person. It seems like she used that as an excuse to justify her actions.
C.: @L. we will have to agree to disagree. . . . Jasmine should have tried
harder at the time of her pregnancy to tell Crosby. But the fact
that he didn’t call her back showed his immaturity. It appears that
Crosby has had commitment issues in the past (ie Katie Pilot epi-
sode). . . . Crosby’s character has grown on me since the show began
but he WAS a flack in the beginning. As far as Jasmine taking Jabbar
away she did it twice and one was justified. When Crosby asked for
the paternity test she should not have reacted that way but she later
apologized. The 2nd time was when Crosby left Jabbar in the pool
with the “lifeguard.” I wouldn’t leave my kid alone with a doctor and
he left their child in a pool with some random dude. Sorry but you
would have to regain my trust on that one. The behavior was irre-
sponsible and I wouldn’t leave my child in your care.

In this exchange, C. redirected the questions of choice and responsi-

bility away from Jasmine’s original decision to have a child without a
father involved to how parenting should be conducted once the child
is out of the womb. Highlighting Crosby’s track record, she argued that
Jasmine’s reactions weren’t spiteful but logical because she was protect-
ing their son.
Second, supporters of Jasmine reminded viewers that her labor as
a single mother for five years was invisible, yet should be taken into
account. For instance, in the “Jasmine” thread, J., a white female viewer,
 Post-Racial Audiences >> 155

thought that Jasmine deserved more credit for her single motherhood
despite her sin of omission.

J.: I like Jasmine—she screwed up in not telling Crosby about Jabbar, but
she also made a good point when he didn’t return her third phone call
she thought maybe she didn’t want him around. Crosby’s character is
already kind of irresponsible, imagine that five years ago. It’s tough being
a single mom, she was probably just trying to protect herself and her kid.

Asking her fellow viewers to consider how hard it would be to parent

a child alone, as Jasmine did for five years, J. also noted that having to
adjust to having a new parent in the picture would be challenging, too.
Discussants underscored how the show privileges the perspectives of
Braverman family members and how Jasmine’s relative lack of screen
time and story development makes it easy for her to look like “the bad
guy” since we see her through Crosby’s eyes.

M.: . . . I take issue with the writing. I can’t help but conclude that the writing
deliberately sacrificed Jasmine’s character to tell Crosby’s story. Some
of the characterisation for Jasmine was just ridiculous, case in point,
changing the date of the wedding. No one does that. It was crazy and
only served to arouse additional resentment for Jasmine. As written it’s
easy to erroneously sympathise with Crosby and blame Jasmine.
P.: M., I think people forget about her giving up her dream with Alvin
Ailey to be with him. I think part of that is a lot of people don’t
realize how prestigious a job that is. Also, this show is not necessar-
ily about HER journey but HIS. We are viewing his struggles with
becoming a parent.

Here, P. and M. reminded Jasmine’s critics of her sacrifices for her son
and Crosby. P. surmised that many viewers probably don’t have knowl-
edge of the Alvin Ailey Dance Company, which tends to be more acces-
sible to connoisseurs of dance and/or African American cultural his-
tory. This comment suggests that the show writers may have done a
disservice to the character by assuming most viewers would recognize
the prestige of this dance company. Because her career was not clearly
outlined, it was easier for audiences to dismiss her choice as an instance
156 << Post-Racial Audiences

of the post-feminist cliché of “career versus family.” From this vantage

point, Jasmine was merely selfish, and could not be credited with giving
up something of significance to return to Berkeley.
Third, once it became clear that Crosby would cheat on Jasmine with
Gaby, the fans who posted on “Crosby and Jasmine Belong Together”
questioned why the Jasmine haters both supported a man who would
cheat and blamed Jasmine for a choice made by Crosby. M. noted how
the double standard for sexual infidelity blames women (fiancée pushed
him into cheating) and ignores the agency of the men.

M.: The more i think of it, the more i am puzzled by the writing re Jas-
mine. I mean why not show Jasmine hurt over the argument, why
imply Jasmine pushed Crosby to cheat? Then other things did not
make sense, like Jasmine asking Crosby what he was doing there,
why would she ask that unless they had agreed to take a break? Then
the whole Jabbar issue, obviously they needed to have Jasmine and
Jabbar away so that Crosby could cheat, but did they really think
the audience would gloss over that and not blame Jasmine AGAIN?
I did not get the impression that Jasmine was punishing Crosby by
keeping Jabbar away, i do think that she had to go and see her SICK
aunt. Coming on the heels of their argument it could look that way
but i did not get that she was being spiteful. IMO [in my opinion] the
writing was exaggerated to skew things in Crosby’s favour . . .

M.’s comment resonates with my reading of Parenthood’s post-racial

approach to inclusion: It presents characters of color to audiences
through the eyes of white characters. Additionally, Jasmine’s supporters
aired frustrations with how the writers set her up to be compared with
Gaby, another under-developed character but one who was clearly sym-
pathetic given her care-taking relationship with Max.
Other fans saw Jasmine as the one to blame and that Gaby as pref-
erable for Crosby. H., a female commenter, told fans on “Crosby and
Jasmine Belong Together” that Jasmine’s attitude pushed Crosby into
sexual betrayal.

H.: I think Crosby wants to have the responsibilities and baggage that
comes along with Jasmine, but she isn’t letting him take his share of
 Post-Racial Audiences >> 157

it. He got no say in the first 5 years of his son’s life, and it appears that
he has no say still. I do get that they might love each other or that
love is growing, but I think the issues and Jasmine not giving an inch
will kill that . . .

More bluntly, M. K. (a man) chimed in on the same thread with the

statement: “It’s Jasmines fault, she waited 5 years to tell him about the
kid. Started off all wrong, women for you.” Later, he posted, “Yeah P.
They had jungle fever. It’s over. Move on, plus Gaby is better. Ha.” In
response to these types of remarks, M. commiserated with P.:

M.: i am just as flabbergasted as you are that people think that Gaby is a better
fit. You know i’m beginning to wonder if Gaby did not play Crosby, he
should have known better than to share details of his private life with
someone of the opposite sex, whom he was just getting to know. He was
practically ill-speaking Jasmine. Gaby just had sex with someone in a
committed relationship, whom she knew was in a vulnerable place, and
she will make a good life-partner? P. folks have made up their minds,
next week they will sympathise with Gaby and Jasmine will be the evil
B#@&! I was surprised when Crosby proposed, and i felt that there was
something in the pipeline that had nothing with them being married, i
felt it was a plot point for something else, and now i know.

Likewise, A. G., a woman, took issue with folks who asserted that Gaby
was more attractive than Jasmine:

A. G.: So you have seen the good girl Gaby. How do you not know that
Jasmine is also loving and sweet? She has done a wonderful job rais-
ing her son. I did not see any one avoid her when she intertwined
with the Bravermans at Halloween, Thanksgiving, her bridal shower.
Just because the writers have her not be social with anyone outside
Crosby, you have put this judgment upon her.

Finally, a few viewers questioned why other fans described Jasmine

as “controlling” and “mean” instead of “strong” or “responsible.” One
white woman, K., asked why the commentators who disapproved of
Jasmine’s choices were so willing to take Crosby’s side:
158 << Post-Racial Audiences

K.: I don’t know why strong women characters are so disliked by audiences
today. Jasmine kept her baby, she followed her dream of becoming
a professional dancer and then decided that her child and Crosby
meant more to her. . . . Crosby’s character is immature, irresponsible,
childish. . . .Why all the love for a loser guy? I don’t get it?

For K., Jasmine’s plight was related to that of female TV characters in

general: They have few opportunities to be well rounded and strong
without drawing fire for being bitches. Pursuing a related idea, C. S.
wondered why fan evaluations of other women on the show, such as
Sarah Braverman, a single mother who started a romance with her
daughter’s English teacher, were not criticized as much as Jasmine.

C. S.: I can’t believe all the things that people are saying. Does anyone
believe in commitment anymore. Would everyone say the things
about Sara or Julia. Both have extremely strong personalities. I think
this is a pick on Jasmine. This woman took care of her son without
asking Crosby for anything. She is a strong woman who made the
mistake of having a child with an immature brat. . . .Wow, this makes
me say Hmmmmm! What is the true story behind the story.

Here, given her other stated concerns about having a successful interra-
cial relationship on the show, C. S. implied that “the true story” behind
the anti-Jasmine comments was racial.
M. also saw Jasmine trapped in a double-bind, and expressed her
exasperation with the hateful remarks she saw on Facebook.

M.: C. S. after a while i decided to take a break, it is beyond comprehension

why folks would say the things they do about Jasmine. I knew i had
to stop when things were being posted about Jasmine/Crosby that
NEVER happened in the show. I’ve read that Crosby only proposed
to jasmine because he did not want her to run off with Jabbar, that
Jasmine accepted because she wanted a father for Jabbar, that Crosby
didn’t really cheat because he and Jasmine broke up; i mean which
show are people watching, some don’t care about the facts. . . If
jasmine left jabbar with Crosby for the day, she was using him as a
babysitter, if she took him somewhere for a day, she was preventing
 Post-Racial Audiences >> 159

Crosby from seeing his son. . . . Jasmine isn’t allowed to be human

like other women, Julia is darn controlling, she belittles her spouse at
times and folks don’t relentlessly attack her for it. Jasmine can’t ever
get upset, she should always say yes to Crosby, actually some folks
don’t want Jasmine to have an opinion.

M.’s comment echoes critiques of media coverage of female politicians

and other representations of powerful women—it is nearly impossible for
a woman of strength to escape punishment of some sort for not conform-
ing to feminine expectations or for supposedly emasculating men.27 But
these sanctions are more likely for black women, who are already assumed
to be less feminine and more emasculating than white or Asian women.28

Theme Four: What’s Up with the Writers?

The main contributors to the “Crosby and Jasmine belong together”
discussion thread were incensed and disappointed when Crosby had
sex with Gaby. While they credited the writers—particularly Katims—
for having the guts to put interracial couples on the show, they were
wary about the show’s ability to manage Crosby and Jasmine’s relation-
ship. They were also concerned that the storyline would veer into ste-
reotypes or repeat other mainstream media depictions of white men/
black women and ultimately end or explaining away the relationships.
Their fears were exacerbated by their knowledge of other fans’ hatred
for Jasmine, which they felt was due in part to the underdevelopment
of her back story and the way she was perceived by some viewers as a
stereotypical “baby mama/angry black woman.”
When she first started the thread, M. had high hopes that the writers
would avoid this route.

M.: A lot of viewers think that Crosby and Jasmine are stereotypical char-
acters, so they keep expecting Crosby to slip up (by maybe sleep-
ing with Gaby) or Jasmine to break his heart (typical baby-mama
goldigger). I don’t think katims is going the stereotypical route with
Crosby and Jasmine (nor his other characters). They are instead defy-
ing those stereotypes and showing that two free-spirited Bohemians
can become committed, responsible and selfless as a couple and as
parents. Well at least I hope so.
160 << Post-Racial Audiences

By the time Crosby had sex with Gaby, her hopes were dashed.

M.: Well the show has created a setup where it’s easy for them to bow out of
reuniting the couple. . . . Also, BW [black women] in IR [interracial]
relationships do not have a good track record in TV, they never get
the guy and never make it to the altar; so forgive me if i’m not hope-
ful this one will.
P.: @C. S.—I felt back in October when he proposed that they would not
let them get married and I felt that I couldn’t watch it anymore if
they broke them up. I’m not as strident as I was then, but it would be
really difficult to watch. They are my favorites. I like everyone else,
but they are my favorite. And I told you, M. when they had Haddie
dating Alex, that I was worried about Cros/jas because I just didn’t
think they would have 2 interracial couples in the same family. . . .
M.: . . . If Jasmine’s character was not invested in when she was with Crosby,
one of the central characters, do you think they will invest in her
when she is not? It will be totally cruel of this show to have Crosby
and Gaby hook up and Jasmine on the sidelines flying her single,
independent woman flag.

P.’s, C. S.’s, and M.’s disappointment was not generated solely by the
infidelity storyline, but also by their experiences with primetime tele-
vision’s lack of investment in black female characters and interracial
romance. Reading reluctance to have two interracial couples in the
plot twist that broke up Jasmine and Crosby and reflecting on how lit-
tle audiences saw Jasmine (even when she was Crosby’s fiancée), they
were pessimistic that the writers could create anything of interest for
her character after the break up. The pro-Jasmine viewers knit together
clues from the show, promos, fan sites, and other media hoping to find
evidence that Parenthood’s writers were not planning to “ruin” Jasmine
and Crosby’s relationship, or push actress Joy Bryant out of the picture
altogether.

M.: Sometimes i can’t see any other purpose for the Gaby thing but destruc-
tion of C&J. But Katims said in a recent interview that he wanted
to bring to life that irresponsible part of Crosby that we heard a lot
about but never saw.
 Post-Racial Audiences >> 161

P.: I feel like he did it cause he loves Minka Kelly [from Friday Night
Lights].

Here, P. and M. traded information from their past acquaintance with

Katims’s other shows along with interviews with the writer and cast
members to try to understand why he would change the relationship
so drastically. Reading across these texts and speculating about behind
the scenes connections amongst actors and writers, they found addi-
tional reasons to explain the probable demise of their favorite Parent-
hood couple.
As they read the tea leaves of entertainment news and fan sites,
these viewers were clearly invested in the show’s representation of the
Crosby/Jasmine interracial relationship and in the inclusion of a black
mother and biracial child in the family unit. They were also pleading, in
a sense, for the show’s writers to resist following the well-worn path to
break-ups for black woman/white man pairings in mainstream media.

C. S.: my two cents, I would love to see Jasmine and Crosby together, but it
appears as if the people who hate Jasmine have won. When they had
Crosby cheat on Jasmine, they doomed the relationship then. If they
break them up for good, that is it for me. I would not stop looking
at the program because they broke this couple up, but because of the
mentality of the writers, directors and producers. They do not see
the value in having a child of color with a 2 parent married family. I
know this just a drama on tv, but it depicts life situations.

P. then suggested the writers’ had made a mistake in deciding which

themes to pursue, and that the history between Minka Kelly (the
actress who plays Gaby) and Katims contributed to the problematic
representations.

P.: I guess I feel they are making [Jasmine] more hard and inflexible. I’m
mad that they took an issue—control—and took it off the table and
put this stupid one [cheating] on it. You can forgive cheating it just
takes time and time is the thing they need. But really, i think Katims
loves Minka and wanted her in the show and then thought she was
so gorgeous, who wouldn’t want to sleep with her. Yeesh! . . . . And
162 << Post-Racial Audiences

I saw you [M] post about the angry black woman—that was good. I
personally think that’s why everyone wants Gaby with him. . . .
M.: @P. i don’t think we are going to get our couple . . . I’ve lost hope, TPTB
[The Powers That Be] will listen to their core audience, i’ve been here
done this already.

C. S., M., and P. figured that “The Powers That Be”—meaning the net-
work and the writers—were not concerned about viewers like them-
selves. They assumed that the “core” viewers were white and likely to
side with the Jasmine-haters.
After the season finale, when Jasmine reconnected with Crosby for a
possible reconciliation, the discussants returned to share their thoughts
of what might happen next. A few were happy that Jasmine seemed to
be willing to let Crosby back into her life and enjoyed a return to scenes
between the actors that were not angry or tense. Others were suspicious
of the show producers and the ambiguity of the ending sequences, won-
dering if they would ‘make some sneaky move’ during the summer hia-
tus to get rid of Jasmine.

P.: I agree. I am glad it ended with them looking at the house and talking.
That’s what they need to do. They need to have a season 3. They have
no other shows and I am sick of two hours of the biggest loser. . . .
M.: C. S. it would also be hard for me to continue viewing. Joy Bryant’s
character attracted me to this show and i have grown to love all the
story lines. But i don’t love the show to the point of seeing my fav
character relegated to baby-mama status only, especially when i
was made to buy into the idea of them getting married. Jasmine the
baby-mama forever just wouldn’t cut it for me because it reinforces
the stereotype that black women aren’t desirable life partners. It also
didn’t help that they overdid the controlling issue . . . and it certainly
didn’t help that she was compared to Gaby, a sympathetic character
from day one. . . . If they break up i will know whose viewership
TPTB really value.

These fans’ distrust of the show’s producers (“The Powers That

Be”) was warranted given the track record of network TV with inter-
racial families and strong female characters. Except in rare occasions,
 Post-Racial Audiences >> 163

primetime dramas give women of color short shrift, relegating them

to auxiliary roles and less screen time. Like the audience members in
prior studies noted at the beginning of this chapter, the Facebook dis-
cussants who rooted for Jasmine and Crosby knew that television his-
tory and, perhaps, white audience opinions were against them. Unfor-
tunately, while many women of color and a few white viewers pointed
out how the scripts were stacked against Jasmine, most of the white fans
who participated in the discussion threads seemed to dismiss any other
interpretations of this character. Their reactions correspond with the
predictions of the parasocial contact hypothesis—that is, if a character
from an out-group (Jasmine) is not perceived to be attractive, likable,
realistic, or similar to the in-group (white fans) then parasocial inter-
action with the character will not challenge stereotypes and may even
reinforce them.

Identifications and Disidentifications with Interracial Intimates

Analysis of these comment threads illustrates how fans’ views of

Jasmine, Crosby, and Gaby clash. As they described and evaluated
Jasmine, the great majority of white viewers judgment that she was
unlikable, their fixation on the adjective “controlling,” and their
descriptions of her “dumping” Jabbar on his father but not allowing
Crosby to “wear the pants” resonate with the controlling stereotypes
of black women delineated by black feminist scholar Patricia Hill Col-
lins. Indeed, some of these viewers even insinuated events and plot
points that did not happen on the show to reinforce their case against
Jasmine’s character.
Other viewers who posted on Facebook—the majority of whom
were women of color—challenged the stereotyping of Jasmine and
articulated ways to view Jasmine so that she was likable, realistic, and
similar to other women characters on the show. They compensated
for the lack of screen time and backstory for her character by reiterat-
ing and weaving together scenes, experiences, and information across
episodes, and challenged discussion participants who brought in false
information. Likewise, many reread her single motherhood as an act of
strength, not manipulation, and acknowledged the labor and sacrifices
of single moms in ways that opposed post-feminist discourses. Some of
164 << Post-Racial Audiences

these commentators also made racism visible. M., in particular, explic-

itly called out the “baby-mama” stereotype and insisted that the qual-
ity of the writers’ work—specifically their goal to make characters who
are flawed, but not stereotypical—showed Jasmine to be more than that.
Finally, Jasmine’s supporters wondered aloud why and how viewers
could take Crosby’s side so easily even when his choices and emotional
characteristics did not suggest a flawless individual without any blame.
Here, the counter-narrative presented by fans rejected the assumption
of innocence for Crosby—a white man—and challenged white viewers
to articulate how they came to be convinced of Jasmine’s guilt.
Although the participants in the Facebook discussion threads staked
claims to particular viewpoints and sympathies with specific charac-
ters, the additional conversations on the site did extend the parasocial
contact of the television series to an online context, providing another
potential vehicle for audience members to (1) interact in virtual space
with people of different racial backgrounds via media; (2) reconsider
their initial judgment of Jasmine and her family; and (3) consider dif-
ferent information and views about interracial relationships and single
motherhood. While the conversations on Facebook I analyzed in this
chapter can’t tell us whether or not anyone who participated or read
these threads changed his or her mind about any of the characters, the
discussion board does illustrate audience investment in and interac-
tion with post-racial characters on television. Importantly, the differ-
ences between most of the white viewers and women of color viewers
suggests that applications of black matriarch stereotypes persist, as do
disturbing misunderstandings about the ways interracial families and
children are supposed to look and behave. It is heartening to see some
viewers challenge such ideas and use their own interpretive lenses and
experiences to articulate their desires for more sophisticated treatments
of interracial relationships and strong black women. At the same time,
further investigation is needed to gauge whether these online discus-
sions can foster reconsiderations of the racial stereotypes and assump-
tions that were on display in the majority of the Facebook postings.
5

Not “Post-Racial,” Race-Aware

Blogging Race in the Twenty-First Century

One troubling omission from the post-racial discourse I have analyzed

thus far is the idea of “anti-racism.” I thought it reasonable to expect
that, in the news, more folks would refer to anti-racism in some way,
shape, or form to argue that we were on the verge of a post-racial soci-
ety. Whether the term appeared in the context of crediting anti-racist
movements or anti-racist education, I thought I would see it more often
than I did. Indeed, I did a search for variations on “anti-racism” as part
of the initial data collection. I used computer searches to see which key
terms appeared most often with “post-racial” between 2000 and 2010.
I found that in over 4,000 news items, variants on “anti-racism” only
appeared in 45; in contrast, “reverse racist” appeared 70 times, “inter-
racial marriage” popped up in 250 items, and “affirmative action”
appeared 400 times. This finding is shocking and troubling. Although
most people would agree that “post-racial” means that racism has been
eliminated, commentators and journalists didn’t see fit to extol the vir-
tues of anti-racism as they discussed post-racial politicians or cultural
consumption. The focus on personal choices’ demographic shifts and
gotcha media strategies of the Right seems to have pushed the civic
actions of organized, anti-racist people to the margins.

>> 165
166 << Not “Post-Racial,” Race-Aware

As post-racial discourses are employed by media to reimagine and

project an idealized multicultural nation, they are also prescribing how
citizens should understand their own and others’ racial identities in the
public sphere, in public policy, and in private life. These discourses imag-
ine how we citizens should “do race”—how we should understand it and
perform it in our own lives, as well as how to communicate our racial
identity to our fellow Americans. These prescriptions, as the first chapter
illustrated, rarely include the term “anti-racism.’ Post-racial news suggests
that citizens and government should do little, if anything, to take action
in the public sphere to ensure that the post-racial future actually dawns.
In effect, they are implicitly endorsing particular models for under-
standing the role of race in our society, which involve treating race as a
slowly dying social category, a nineteenth-century anachronism that will
soon have less influence in our lives than eye color. These dominant dis-
courses largely ignore matters of socioeconomic inequality and evidence
of continued institutional racism. They still perpetuate the myth of sepa-
rate races; the only “positive” difference is the belief they can be joined
through biological hybridity. Multiracial people and interracial marriage
are proposed as solutions to the problem of the color line, accompanied
by calls to get over race, to choose other identities for social organization.
Robert Asen suggests that scholars reorient their “approaches to
civic engagement from asking questions of what [citizens do] to ask-
ing questions of how” they do citizenship.1 He suggests we think of
citizenship as consisting of “mode[s] of public engagement,” which
can help us focus on ways in which citizens engage each other and
institutions, and produce communications. This theory of citizen-
ship also recognizes that citizenship often entails risk, for in engag-
ing other members of the public in what could perhaps be creative or
unapproved modes, rejection or even violence might ensue. In related
fashion, this theory of “doing citizenship” sees engaged actors using
media discourses to draw lines between public and private, for exam-
ple, or among genders, races, and classes. As lines—of identification,
perhaps—are drawn as citizens engage each set of discourses, Asen
argues that “Some participants will be better positioned to draw lines
that better represent their interests.”2
Using Asen’s approach, I suggest that post-racial discourses support
different modalities of racial citizenship, and that with their power to
 Not “Post-Racial,” Race-Aware >> 167

influence and set boundaries for public discourse, media are major
players in drawing lines between identity groups and between accept-
able ways of doing race, doing citizenship. Furthermore, and impor-
tantly, dominant post-racial narratives offer particular modes of doing
race and citizenship that do not necessarily represent the interests of
people of color. If “racial” citizenship before the civil rights reforms of
the 1950s and 1960s meant (fairly) neat divisions between white citizens
having extreme social, economic, and political privilege and people of
color being brutally oppressed and having access to few, if any, privi-
leges of citizenship, then what does post-racial discourse imagine post-
racial citizenship to be? The cases presented in the previous chapters
suggest a few ways of doing post-racial citizenship, with preferences for
the privatization of race overwhelming ideas for reforming or reimag-
ining public-oriented racial practices or performances.
As discussed in the first two chapters, one of the main ways to be a
post-racial citizen is to ask the government to eliminate race as a cat-
egory for recognizing its citizens and/or organizing its policies. This
neo-colorblindness asks citizens to refrain from declarations of dis-
crimination based on race/ethnicity, and to look for race-blind rem-
edies to racial inequalities in education, housing, employment, and so
forth. Similarly, as Justice Sunday III illustrated, post-racial citizens are
encouraged to invest in other, ostensibly more legitimate group identi-
ties to organize civic interests. Where race is framed as a destructive
and divisive mode of identification, other types of identification, such
as religion or nation, are framed as sources of solidarity and healing
the scars of race. This approach not only oversimplifies categories of
identity as singular rather than intersectional, but also requires amne-
sia from people of color as they consider overtures and outreach efforts
based in shared religion or nation. Moreover, while paying lip service to
the social construction of race, this discourse continues to essentialize
racial identities.
At the same time that post-racial discourse frowns on political uses
of race, it directs post-racial citizens to “do” race through market con-
sumption and interpersonal relations. Fashionistas, music lovers, and
movie-goers are congratulated for mixing it up with racial others. In
Parenthood and in news focused on multiracial families, transforma-
tions of family demographics are offered as emblems of post-racial
168 << Not “Post-Racial,” Race-Aware

progress, with no explanation of how these interpersonal affinities will

translate to social equality. This post-racial paradigm implies that peo-
ple of color who “blend” with white lovers and spouses will “choose”
to immerse themselves in the dominant community, becoming a sort
of “bridge” or “model minority” who won’t make race an issue. Thus, a
kind of neo-assimilation results, where we’re all “beige” in the end.
What is largely absent, except in a few outliers in the news, is a sense
of how the newly visible multiracial landscape might transform racial
politics and interracial relationships. If “old” racial politics were built
on essentialism, white supremacy, and extreme legal and physical seg-
regation of different groups, then why not imagine a post-racial politics
built on coalitions of groups, forged through regular multiracial inter-
actions? Why not look for examples of people with shared interests in
dismantling racial hierarchy, reimagining their modes of identification
and goals as they discuss inequality, history, and strategy?
This chapter presents examples of some practical and hopeful race-
aware approaches to post-racial citizenship found on news websites
and blogs that are focused on racial dynamics. These sites provide not
only criticism of the aforementioned ways of understanding and doing
race in post-racial America, they also suggest avenues of discussion and
action for racial justice. In other words, these sites give visitors tools to
critique the post-racial mystique and ideas for practicing anti-racism.
In the process, these blogs and webzines reject the “Great Leader” para-
digm through features on everyday acts and practices of anti-racism.

Post-Racial Online

Of course, it would be folly to try to catalogue, let alone analyze, all ref-
erences to “post-racial” and “anti-racism” on the web. For this chapter,
I looked at a handful of blogs and web news sites that I encountered
as I delved into post-racial references in the news, and sites I knew of
from my prior work on race and online news. These sites were Color-
Lines, Racialicious, and The Black Snob, and, of course, they represent
only a snippet of what might be available online in terms of anti-racist
post-racial discourses. Nonetheless, they do provide an instructive con-
trast to the mainstream news and partisan blogs that made up the bulk
of news items analyzed in earlier chapters of the book. As such, these
 Not “Post-Racial,” Race-Aware >> 169

web-based news and opinion resources provide a clear alternative for

reimagining racial dynamics in the Obama era.
Each of these sites is slightly different, but all are committed to
sustained discussions about race and ethnicity in the United States
(although there are sometimes references to other parts of the world).
ColorLines started as a print magazine, and now maintains a print and
online presence. The Applied Research Center (ARC), a non-profit
research and advocacy group, provides the home of ColorLines. The
webzine features investigative reports, interviews, blogs, and updates
from a mix of regular contributors and editors. The site also has links to
ARC research papers and advocacy projects.
Racialicious is a blog “about the intersection of race and pop culture.”
Owner-Editor Latoya Peterson, Managing Editor Arturo Garcia, and
Associate Editor Andrea Plaid compose and gather a mix of blogs and
guest contributions from around the country.3 Although “pop culture”
is the touchstone for discussions of race, as the examples demonstrate,
writers incorporate political valences of culture in their dissections of
celebrity gaffes. Like Racialicious, The Black Snob is also a blog, but is
authored mainly by one person, Danielle Belton. Belton characterizes
site’s focus as “pop culture-meets-politics,” and reports a following of
two million readers. Many other sites list the Snob and Racialicious and
ColorLines on their blog-rolls or cross-post listings to articles on these
sites. Additionally, many of the writers represented on all three sites
have been interviewed in traditional news media, such as CNN and
NPR.
From these three sites, I gathered all of the blog postings and web
articles that contained the term “post-racial” in the headline or lead-
ing paragraph for the years 2008–2010. After taking out duplicates and
articles that were erroneously included in the searches, the total came
to 119 articles and blog posts, with Black Snob having 15, ColorLines hav-
ing 45, and Racialicious having 59. Taking detailed notes on the themes
and frameworks in which “post-racial” appeared in each article, I was
particularly interested in discovering how writers defined the term, as
well as what their discussions suggested that people who are concerned
with racism do in an era that has been dubbed “post-racial.” Four over-
lapping themes emerged from my close readings of the blog postings
and articles.
170 << Not “Post-Racial,” Race-Aware

Figure 5.1. Danielle Belton, a.k.a The Black Snob, blogs on politics and cultural debates.
Used with permission.

First, contributors to these websites marshaled plenty of evidence

that racist discrimination and violence continue to do harm to signifi-
cant numbers of citizens of color. This finding is similar to that of many
mainstream news commentators, who hedge their bets on post-racial
politics by listing existing inequalities and modes of discrimination.
Second, along with this information, bloggers included more discus-
sions of how post-racial discourse can minimize racial harms and side-
track constructive debates about race and public policy. Many argued
that the ambivalence of post-racial discourse leaves too much room for
those who deny racism to frame the discussion. Writers and bloggers
pointed out that, in particular, Obama and his allies’ adoption of a post-
racial approach (seen as politically expedient) undermined their ability
to effectively counter attacks from the Right, let alone advocate for the
kinds of policies needed to address racism and inequalities.
Third, having deconstructed post-racial discourses that minimize
the significance of race, many of the web contributors focused on pro-
active means for promoting antiracism. To begin this work, they coun-
seled Americans to be better students of history, utilizing nuanced
understandings of the roots and mechanics of civil rights movements,
as well as the development of racial hierarchies. Accurate knowledge of
our racial history, they suggest, supports a more sophisticated analy-
sis of the contemporary situation and a deeper understanding of the
processes and practices that organizations and individuals should adopt
to foster anti-racism. Writers advocated intersectional and coalitional
approaches to anti-racist work. Whether reporting on the simultane-
ous effects of race and class on poverty or incarceration, or featuring
 Not “Post-Racial,” Race-Aware >> 171

successful joint campaigns against bigotry by GLBT and Asian Amer-

ican organizations, the blogs present readers with many more exam-
ples of grass-roots and individual means for political and personal
engagement with anti-racist action. Importantly, these examples go
well beyond the black-white framing that continued to dominate dis-
cussions of the post-racial in the mainstream news, and, as such, they
give readers a sense of the real diversity of political activism around the
intersecting issues of inequality and race.
Finally, when bloggers included stories of personal experiences with
racism, they usually articulated those moments within larger structural
and historical frameworks. They rarely missed a chance to indicate how
their stories or the stories of other individuals were just a few examples of a
larger pattern with roots in the institutional and cultural aspects of oppres-
sion. Adopting the “personal is political” framework, these blog posts and
web articles challenged the individualized sensibility of post-racial dis-
courses found in mainstream media. Rather than put the onus on each
person to make the “right” choices about race, the blogs analyzed here
provide opportunities for readers to rise to the level of the “social imagina-
tion,” locate their struggles within a matrix of social phenomena, and con-
nect their stories with similarly affected individuals engaged in resistance.

Plenty of Evidence We’re Not “Post”:

Let’s Really Talk about Racism

Like some of the left-leaning news items discussed in the earlier chap-
ters, blog posts offered copious evidence from personal experiences,
ongoing investigations, and socioeconomic data to debunk the myth
that Obama’s election engendered a post-racial transformation. For
example, when Racialicious posted a series of blogs on discriminatory
hiring in the adverting industry, guest contributor HighJive wrote a
humorous FAQ for “The Culturally Clueless”:

Question: Doesn’t President Barack Obama prove we don’t have to pursue

this diversity stuff anymore?
Answer: Why do certain individuals view President Barack Obama as
some form of reparations—as if his election pays off the bar tab of
bias Madison Avenue has amassed over the years? . . .
172 << Not “Post-Racial,” Race-Aware

President Obama assembles a staff reflecting the vibrant variety of

brilliance in America. Madison Avenue collects excuses like, “We can’t
find qualified minority candidates.”
President Obama signs his first bill in support of equal pay. Madison
Avenue signs diversity pacts and is exposed for paying Blacks 20 percent
less than Whites.4

On ColorLines, writer Channing Kennedy chided mainstream journal-

ists for losing interest in racial profiling and police brutality cases after the
Gates affair, especially when sources use the word “systemic.” Then Ken-
nedy described a more recent case in which the police unjustifiably Tasered
a pregnant Latina and her father and contextualized it within broader insti-
tutional practices that reinforce police aggression toward people of color.

Now, you and I spat out the post-racial kool-aid already. We know that
“‘racism’” can mean something other than a white hood, and that even
the most diverse police forces can still practice racial profiling or act on
ingrained prejudices. . . . Instead of talking about who is or isn’t racist
this week, we need to talk about how police are trained, why they’re so
quick to reach for the mace, or the Taser, or the gun, and why “‘non-
violent’” and “‘non-lethal’” have become sickeningly interchangeable.
We need to talk about racism, but not in terms of intent—we need to
talk about racism in terms of impacts and outcomes, in which commu-
nities of color are more heavily policed by more heavily armed officers
with less accountability to the people they serve. We need to talk about
. . . why Bushwick kids need to take a class on what to expect during a
stop-and-frisk.5

In this article, the writer not only critiques the lack of institutional fram-
ing in mainstream news about police misconduct, but also provides
readers with examples of police practices and vocabulary to explain
racial profiling and unjustified force as structural phenomena. Kennedy
concludes that discussions of whether an individual was racially moti-
vated is a “red herring” that distracts us from the more important con-
siderations of institutional racism.
Commentators were frustrated—but not surprised—that Obama
and his surrogates hadn’t used the Gates incident to inject more
 Not “Post-Racial,” Race-Aware >> 173

discussion of institutional racism into the public sphere. Similarly with

regard to the nomination of Sotomayor and the rush to blame Shirley
Sherrod, they wondered why the administration failed to dispute right-
wing accusations of reverse racism. In an interview with ColorLines
co-founder Jeff Chang, editor Jamilah King asked about the Obama
administration’s inability to defend itself in racial scandals.

J. K. :It seems like President Obama was much more willing to speak can-
didly about race before he took office. . . . We saw that play out espe-
cially during the whole “beer summit” debacle, when he backed down
from his criticism of Cambridge police officers. How complicit has the
Obama administration been in feeding into the right’s race baiting?
J. C.: It’s easy to say “very complicit.” It’s hard to say what Obama himself
can do about it. The administration, however, treats race the way it
treats “the professional left.” It is sensitive to being perceived as too
left, too pro-people of color. So when Attorney General Eric Holder
began speaking about dealing with race, he was quickly pulled back
to the right. The Shirley Sherrod incident illustrated definitively that
the administration is on a hair-trigger on the public perception of
being cast as a “pro–people of color” administration. There is no
doubt that, behind the scenes, the administration is pushing forward
with needed reforms.6

A Racialicious guest blogger, Andrew Grant Thomas, had harsher criti-

cism for the president’s avoidance tactics. Thomas characterized the
2010 State of the Union speech as a lost opportunity to help the public
understand the intersections of race and class that make it unreason-
able to expect that race-blind policies will ameliorate racial disparities.

As a matter of political calculus, the silence was unremarkable and

unsurprising, coming as it did from a president reluctant to publicly
tread the ground of race except, at times, in the context of his personal
biography. However, with respect to on-the-ground realities and the
opportunity presented for social transformation, a continued failure to
engage race would be devastating. . . .
He pointed out that in the 21st century “one of the best anti-poverty
programs is a world-class education.” However, the president neglected
174 << Not “Post-Racial,” Race-Aware

to mention that young Latino adults earn bachelor’s degrees at one-

third the rate of their white peers, and that African Americans earn
degrees at only half the rates of whites. . . . [I]t would have been cru-
cial that he also offer informed insights into the underlying [structural]
dynamic. . . . The president could have educated the American people
about the many young African Americans and Latinos who live isolated
from decent opportunities in neighborhoods that provide access only to
underfunded, low-performing schools, unsafe streets, a limited number
of unpromising jobs even in “good” times.7

This critique recalls Stephanie Li’s characterization of Obama’s post-

racial rhetoric as “signifying without specifying.” Obama can ges-
ture to race and suggest he “gets it” via his life story, biracial family,
and the symbolism of his phenotype without clarifying how these fac-
tors link to public policy. He rarely delves into the details of how race/
ethnicity/class/gender influence society, not just biography. Thomas
counters this strategy by highlighting all Obama could have said to
explain entrenched, recurrent outcomes of marginalization for people
oppressed by race and class.
This and other blog posts offer examples of important types of ques-
tions to ask and issues to raise when post-racial evasiveness is the dom-
inant mode of operation. A roundtable response to an Atlantic Monthly
article titled “The End of White America?” illustrates the importance of
posing challenging questions that expose the assumptions that support
post-racial discussions in the mainstream media. One of the respon-
dents, Fatemah, commented as follows:

Hsu’s “The End of White America?” (cue scary music) essentially aims
to hash out the following: “Hey, white people are freaked out that people
of color are becoming the majority in the U.S. Why’s that? Don’t worry,
guys. It’s cool.”
. . . Hsu hints at a “white panic” caused by the racial demographic
shift, but doesn’t explore it, question it, or even attempt to assuage it
(except for a few paragraphs in the last section). He quotes Bill Imada,
who states that whites are worried about “losing control,” which is the
reason for all this “white panic” over shifting ethnic demography. But
instead of analyzing this point (“What do they mean by ‘losing control’?
 Not “Post-Racial,” Race-Aware >> 175

What do they think this means for them?”), it serves as a transition at

the end of a section, and is quickly glossed over in a comparison of dif-
ferent “types” of whites (the seemingly conservative and liberal camps)
that still doesn’t tell us what white people are afraid of.
Fear can’t be assuaged or overcome without an assessment of what it
is you’re afraid of, which Hsu hints at in the next section but never actu-
ally plainly states: “The coming white minority does not mean that the
racial hierarchy of American culture will suddenly become inverted. . . .”
As if people of color will suddenly disenfranchise whites, confiscate their
assets, and force them into slavery.8

Fatemah and other roundtable participants pointed out how Hsu’s

article, which is supposed to “go deep” on race, succeeds only in recy-
cling shallow stereotypes and vague assertions about whiteness and
fear. There is no serious attention to power, or sufficient discussion of
whether white fears have any basis in actually existing social, economic,
or political contexts.
In another Racialicious article, a writer reposted an open letter to
University of California San Diego Filipino American students from
Dr. Jody Blanco. Blanco, a professor of Comparative Literature and
Spanish, wrote the letter in response to a “Compton Cookout” hosted
by a majority white fraternity which featured blackface and costumes
mocking African Americans. The event sparked protests, but also pro-
vided conservatives with another opportunity to assert that offended
students and faculty were too sensitive and opposed free speech. Dr.
Blanco’s letter, in contrast, provided a template for countering those
who try to silence protests against racist acts by invoking the First
Amendment:

The scandal isn’t that the right to free speech might even include the
right for individuals to denigrate and stereotype people: I can turn the
TV to Fox News Channel and see the proof of that for myself any given
day. The scandal is that an event like this could only happen in or around
a university or institution that has failed in its commitment to academic
and cultural diversity. The scandal is that many students at UCSD con-
sider black people and communities as a product of their imaginations
and consumer habits: an entertainment commodity we pay to watch on
176 << Not “Post-Racial,” Race-Aware

MTV, or hear on the radio. A stereotype we have the “right” to enjoy

and take pleasure in, because we have paid good money to possess and
consume it in the privacy of our homes and TV screens. The scandal
is that many whites—and even Asian Americans—do not belong to a
community that involved and involves the active participation and vital
humanity of another person or community of color, another historically
underrepresented minority.9

In this letter, readers have a powerful example of someone redirecting

the conversation back to the harm done to those who are mocked. Dr.
Blanco underscores how an appeal to a “universal right”—free speech—
can be used to devalue the speech of marginalized groups when they
speak out against discrimination. The spotlight is on the roots of that
mockery in media systems that continue to exploit racist imagery and
educational institutions that have not yet made good on the promise
of integration. Reminding students of the widespread availability of
speech venues for people who value the speech rights of racists more
than the rights of people of color to defend themselves against hateful
speech acts, Dr. Blanco assembles a clear rebuttal to those who argue
anti-racist protest violates the speech rights of the white fraternity
brothers who exploit racist stereotypes for fun.

Taking the Intersectional View: Activism

and History beyond Black and White

Twin deficiencies of mainstream news items’ post-racial reportage

are the continued focus on black-white relations and the lack of his-
torical context. While black-white dynamics certainly are important to
address, discussions of race restricted to this dualism do not provide
a comprehensive framework for understanding racism in the United
States. Moreover, this focus continues to displace the issues faced by
Latina/o, Asian, and Native American communities, while also fail-
ing to account for coalitions that are often built at the grass roots level
across and within different identity communities. For instance, when
he introduced Dr. Blanco’s letter to Filipino students, blogger Ninoy
Brown noted that the NAACP had spoken out on the “Compton Cook-
out” and that Dr. Blanco’s letter “was important for more folks to read,
 Not “Post-Racial,” Race-Aware >> 177

as well. Dr. Blanco was an inspiration for many of us, student of color
organizers, while attending UCSD.”10 Ninoy creates a sense of an inter-
racial community of student leaders who will be inspired by the letter
even though it was originally sent only to one specific group.
Returning to the letter itself—in it, Blanco provides context for
explaining why it has historically been important for communities of
color to support each other’s struggles against racism:

For those of you who have close friends in the black community, you
may have witnessed . . . students weeping in the halls and on Library
Walk at their helplessness and inability to represent themselves against
the violence of having other people represent them. If you are like me,
you are familiar with this feeling. . . . I’m asking you to become or stay
involved, first and foremost, because as historically underrepresented
minorities we are directly implicated in both acts of racial hate speech
and the university’s responses to it. . . . [W]hen the US conducted a near-
genocidal war against the Philippines at the beginning of the twentieth
century . . . both US soldiers and commanders often referred to Filipinos
as “niggers.” In the 1920s and 30s, . . . [Filipinos] were identified as “nig-
gers,” and they were lynched, beaten, and murdered without any recourse
to the law. To this day, the word retains the same popular meaning as it
did at the turn of the century: to be a “nigger” means to be identified
as an available target for extra-judicial violence and social exile, without
right of appeal to an established or legitimate authority. 11

Drawing a picture that includes personal and historical details, Blanco

calls attention to similar experiences with white supremacy endured by
Filipinos and African Americans. The combination powerfully testifies
to the importance of history to understanding the present and empha-
sizes the need for coalitions. Blanco’s definition of “nigger” also under-
scores the importance of contextualizing speech in terms of the relative
power of speakers and listeners—an aspect often overlooked in facile
discussions of who is “allowed” to use racist, sexist, or homophobic
epithets in the post-racial world. While in popular humor and some
arenas of rap music, the word is tossed around as an artifact of a hip,
post-racial sensibility, Blanco reminds readers of its origins and uses as
tool accompanying violence.
178 << Not “Post-Racial,” Race-Aware

Other writers were likewise committed to making connections

between marginalized groups in ways that refocused attention on power
and privilege, not post-racial visibility and individualism. For exam-
ple, writer Daisy Hernandez emphasized in a piece for ColorLines that
attacks on one group’s civil rights can easily lead to setbacks for other
marginalized groups. In an article on legal arguments supporting Cali-
fornia’s anti-gay marriage law, Proposition 8, she underlined how a win
for conservatives would potentially harm not only GLBT communities:

The legal fight to overturn Prop. 8 took a scary turn yesterday for com-
munities of color. The defenders of hetero marriage argued that gays
and lesbians don’t need the state to protect them from discrimination
because they have political clout. . . .
“Gays and lesbians are able to achieve positive outcomes in the politi-
cal process” and can “attract the attention of lawmakers,” according
to Kenneth Miller, a political science professor who testified as a wit-
ness for the defense of the same-sex marriage ban. . . . What Miller and
the pro-Prop. 8 side really did yesterday in court was to argue that the
United States is post-gay. But you can’t be post-gay without also being
post-racial. If the judge buys Miller’s argument, it would give legal sup-
port to the idea that Blacks, Latinos and other people of color are also
too empowered to deserve the state’s attention and protection.12

Hernandez’s concern about the broader implications of Proposition 8

reflects the advice conveyed in an article about a speech at ARC’s racial
justice conference by scholar Melissa Harris-Lacewell:

Harris-Lacewell told the crowd of racial justice activists . . . that our move-
ment must stop compartmentalizing itself. Harris-Lacewell . . . urged
progressives to see how race, gender, LGBT issues are all intercon-
nected. . . . The Shirley Sherrod incident, and the white farmers who came
to her defense, forced us reexamine how we see our allies—not as “who
looks like us,” but more about “who sees us,” said Harris-Lacewell.13

In a similar vein, HighJive’s first answer to another “Culturally Clueless

FAQ” rejected zero-sum racial logic that supposes a “win” for one group
means a “loss” for or neglect of other oppressed groups.
 Not “Post-Racial,” Race-Aware >> 179

Question: Why do all the diversity discussions focus on Blacks—what

about Latinos, Asians, Native Americans, People With Disabilities,
Gays, Lesbians, Women, Veterans, Older Employees, Pit Bull Lovers,
Mutants and The Rest Of Us?
Answer: Get in line. Unfortunately, the deeper you dig into Madison
Avenue’s corporate closet, the more skeletons you’ll find. Recent
years have seen work and deeds demeaning everyone listed
above. . . . Blacks are in the spotlight for a few reasons. First, the
group has been officially fighting for change since the 1930s. To
understand the details, read Madison Avenue and the Color Line
by Jason Chambers. . . . [A]ttorney Cyrus Mehri is building a
class-action lawsuit focused on the inequities Blacks seemingly
always face in the ad game. However, it’s important to realize the
real battle is not being waged exclusively for any single group. The
Bendick and Egan Economic Consultants, Inc. report stated the
following:
. . . the same issues of employment bias in the advertising
industry simultaneously affect other “outgroups”—race-
ethnic minorities such as Latinos and Asians; women; older
workers; persons with disabilities; and even White males
who do not share the cultural or stylistic characteristics of
the White males who dominate the industry. These other
groups would benefit alongside African Americans from a
reformed, inclusive advertising industry culture.14

HighJive’s long-term, multiracial view of the struggle on Madison

Avenue demonstrates how historical insight and making connections
between groups that struggle against discrimination encourage us to
see the ad industry as a system with a legacy of practices that discrimi-
nate against people of color.
Although many writers illuminated the need to understand history
and look more closely for inter-group affinities, these discussions rec-
ognized that forging coalitions takes time and effort, and often engen-
ders some discomfort. They also didn’t shy away from acknowledging
prejudices within and across marginalized groups. In a roundtable
with lesbian and gay bloggers of color, ColorLines editorial director,
Kai Wright, asked each to comment on the “conventional wisdom” that
180 << Not “Post-Racial,” Race-Aware

Latinas/os and African Americans are more homophobic than other

groups.

Pam: I give an honest answer: yes and no. In black and Latino commu-
nities, the matter is not completely about race, per se, it’s about
whether you’re talking churched or unchurched. Religion is by far
more important than race when it comes to fomenting homophobia,
however, the black and Latino communities at large have not held
publicly accountable the pastors stoking anti-gay sentiment. That’s
going to take time to change.
Miriam: What gets me most about this blame game around homophobia
is the role that white communities—primarily through the history of
colonization—have had in the homophobia that exists in the com-
munities of color. You can see this even more clearly internationally,
but in immigrant communities here as well. In many (if not most)
communities of color, there is a vibrant history of sexual and gender
diversity. Think of two spirit folks in Native American communi-
ties, hijras in India, etc. It was often the colonial powers that came in
(with strong religious agendas) and stamped out much of that culture
of diversity and acceptance. Now white folks are coming back around
to sexual diversity and they’re finger pointing at communities of
color? Oh hell no.15

In their thoughtful responses, Pam and Miriam took time to dis-

cuss other intersectional identities—religion, nation—that come into
play when discussing people of color and attitudes toward sexual-
ity. Whereas Pam suggested that religion is actually the more relevant
influence, Miriam referred to histories of colonization that suppressed
gender diversity in indigenous communities. Their exchange opens the
lens of identity much wider than most mainstream news discussions of,
say, black pastors such as Herbert Lusk who urge fellow worshippers to
vote against gay rights. In so doing, the round-table participants didn’t
excuse the homophobia that comes out of particular black churches or
neighborhoods; rather, they contextualize homophobia as a stance that
emerges from a variety of influences, not just shared racial identity.
A few commentators used electoral politics as a means to suggest
more border-crossing and coalition-building would benefit multiple
 Not “Post-Racial,” Race-Aware >> 181

communities of color. In these postings, most referred to intersections

of race, ethnicity, and class. For example, in an interview with Color-
Lines, David Ochoa, who is Latino and was a delegate to the 2008 Dem-
ocratic National Convention, responded to the idea that Obama’s presi-
dency means the country is on the cusp of a post-racial era by noting
the need for people of color to act in solidarity around class more often
when voting.

That [post-racial idea] is complete b.s. People of color make the least,
pay the most, and suffer the worst. Let’s not kid ourselves, the people
who harvest the crops and clean the bathrooms are people of color. The
problems in this country largely are carried by low income people, and
another commonality is that they most often are people of color. The
anthem of Barack Obama’s presidency is not going to be Kumbayaa.
That’s not pragmatic to think that way. But what I think Barack Obama
has a capacity for [is] bridge-building, and I’m hopeful about that. But
you know, I’m ashamed to say we were late, the Latino community, to
come around to Barack Obama. That’s due to racism. This campaign
offers us a new possibility, and I know that without the Black vote, there
would be no Tony Villaraigosa in LA.16

Here, Mr. Ochoa admitted to tensions and racism between Latinas/

os and black Americans, but then also took a moment to recognize
that the first Latino mayor of Los Angeles, Antonio Villaraigosa, was
elected with black voters’ help. Like HighJive, he presented a case for
people to reject zero-sum thinking about political or economic benefits,
and encouraged a coalition-based approach to solving the race/class
conundrum.

The Personal Is Political—When We Make It So

Personal experiences were often used by bloggers and contributors to

illustrate a larger problem, or just to vent about recent media firestorms
about race or Obama. But unlike post-racial stories in the mainstream
news which isolated individuals from structural factors, the blogs and
articles on these sites almost always made links between personal frus-
trations and institutions, racial history, or widespread public practices.
182 << Not “Post-Racial,” Race-Aware

Thus, for instance, in reflecting on the Cambridge Police Department’s

decision to charge Dr. Gates with disorderly conduct even after he
proved he was in his own home, The Black Snob shared memories from
her family’s brushes with racist law enforcement:

Personally, I think Gates was arrested for having a normal, human reac-
tion as opposed to the reaction my Grandpa was taught to have living in
segregated Arkansas. Meaning, be humble and apologize even when the
police are in the wrong. My grandpa, while in his 60s was once stopped
because he and his brother, also in his 60s, had a bunch of furniture in
the bed of their truck and the officer, young enough to be one of their
grandkids asked, “What are you boys doing with this stuff?” . . .
Black people are not allowed it seems, under any circumstances, to
ever have a human reaction to police error or harassment. Even in Post-
racial America. . . . You are not allowed to get mad. You are not allowed
to voice your opinion. . . . You are supposed to be apologetically black.
Sorry for being an obvious target of racism. How dare you be born this
color and attract this negative attention? I’m so very sorry for being born
black in America. How can I make this up to you, Mr. Officer?17

Recounting two generations of police harassment, The Black Snob under-

mined the post-racial myth that “old-style” racism is gone, and also took
aim at the white innocence narrative that posits people of color are at fault
for making white people uncomfortable with their presence, or when
they notice racism happening. This is one of the “pendejo games” (feign-
ing ignorance about one’s power and impact) that critical race scholar
Aida Hurtado skewers as a move meant to silence people of color and
maintain the fiction of white racial neutrality. The Snob’s breakdown of
the Gates event and her family’s experiences uncovered the faults in the
innocence narrative, and revealed the absurd blame-the-victim assump-
tions that often underlie official responses to police racism.

“The Violence of Revulsion”: Confronting

Everyday Cultural Racism

Many of the blog entries focused on the continued employment of rac-

ist caricatures and stereotypes in entertainment and media. In these
 Not “Post-Racial,” Race-Aware >> 183

posts, bloggers didn’t end their critique with historical accounting

of the origins of old-school representations of black or Asian people;
rather, they pushed further to delineate the real harm done when peo-
ple assume that their personal fascination with or profit from racial ste-
reotypes doesn’t hurt anyone except the “over-sensitive.” After seeing
one too many New Orleans storefronts with racist paraphenalia for sale,
Racialicious blogger Fiqah had to text a friend to make sure she wasn’t
alone thinking that pickanninny dolls and the like were offensive. She
emailed a friend a picture of one doll. The text conversation went as
follows:

Him: WHAT THE FUCK! Where did you find that at?
Me: At a gallery
Him: Was it a Klan gallery? That’s some racist shit.18

When one of the artists told Fiqah that he didn’t realize the dolls could
be seen as racist, and other storeowners told her how popular the post-
cards of grinning Mammies were with tourists, she pondered why these
good-natured folks didn’t seem bothered by the images. The answer was
that they had grown up with them all their lives. The continued popu-
larity of such images in a “post-racial modern society” speaks to “a dia-
bolically sophisticated narrative that combines tenets of ‘colorblindness’
and ‘tolerance’ with post-racialism. The result: a system of rhetorical
gaslighting that permits individuals to indulge in the most blatant kinds
of old-school racism while simultaneously denying its existence.”19
The feeling of having been “gaslighted” by whites who deny any
racial or racist elements to their collectibles was shared by other blog-
gers. For example, in response to white Dutch models being dressed
up with blackface makeup in French Vogue, Min-ha wrote a post for
Racialicious titled “Blackface and the Violence of Revulsion.” There,
Minh-ha described how she came upon the photos in the course of
her daily fashion reading—photos “violently interrupting” her day.
These images, she argued, are a product of “racial arrogance” that does
not stop to consider the visceral responses of people of color who feel
“anger, exasperation, disappointment, and a feeling I can only describe
as racial fatigue.” This is one of the privileges of whiteness: to not think
about the damage inflicted when one “plays” with race.
184 << Not “Post-Racial,” Race-Aware

The bloggers put the pain experienced by people of color front

and center, spotlighting the carelessness of fashion editors and gal-
lery owners who look to the bottom line without much care for the
emotions or cultural heritage of consumers of color. These blogs
echo Malinda Smith’s deconstruction of on-campus racism, in which
white privilege is shown to be “ignorant” of—or unconcerned with—
the pain experienced by people of color when they encounter racist
images, speech, and behaviors on the street, in the classroom, or in
the media.20 Like the Facebook fans who rushed to Jasmine’s defense
on the Parenthood discussion boards, these writers offer criticism of
the seemingly inexhaustible supply and tacit endorsement of racial
caricatures in media.
Other than protesting how and why people profit from racial cari-
cature, what can be done to educate people beyond exposing the pain
caused—pain often dismissed as “over-thinking” or “political cor-
rectness”? When things get personal, how to respond? Many writers
addressed the nexus of the personal and political, musing over recent
racial controversies and interpersonal interactions that left them less
than satisfied with their spouse’s, colleagues,’ or friends’ response to
racism. Some bloggers who were part of interracial couples or fami-
lies acknowledged that when intimates make racial jokes or ignorant
remarks, “the best course of action isn’t actually obvious. Do you go
ahead and try to have an anti-racist ‘teachable’ moment knowing full
well that Americans SUCK at talking about race or let it go?”21 These
pieces testified to the fact that the upswing in interracial marriage
hadn’t made much of a dent in improving racial discussions. As Ope
Bukola wrote for Racialicious, “If we’re really going to be anti-bigotry,
then we need to have the back of those we care about” and take a risk in
confronting racism from in-laws and others, even if we don’t have clear
rules of engagement.
Other columnists provided insight and advice from their own navi-
gation of treacherous racial waters with their families. Terry Keleher,
for example, offered “Four Tips for Interracial Parenting” on Color-
Lines. Step number two is “Learn to understand and challenge institu-
tional racism.” Keleher then explained the need for white individuals to
make it a priority to be anti-racist allies through an understanding that
racism isn’t just personal prejudice, but a systemic phenomenon.
 Not “Post-Racial,” Race-Aware >> 185

It’s not enough to try and change yourself or other individuals. We also
have to change institutions that have biased practices and unfair policies.
Schools are a great place to start challenging institutional racism, since
most families have direct experience with them. . . .
If the advanced placement classes are filled with mostly white stu-
dents, if the curriculum is perpetuating stereotypes, if there aren’t many
teachers of color, you can do something about it. Ask questions, talk
with students about their experiences, request public documents, orga-
nize parents, talk to elected officials, notify the media and take public
action. If you’re white, you don’t have to wait for people of color to com-
plain first. You can be change agents and . . . allies to people of color. 22

These “tips” articulate the intimate act of caring for one’s children with
the politics of race and social change. Dismissing colorblind and post-
racial paradigms that privatize race or compartmentalize racism into
feelings and individual acts, Keleher gives readers clear examples of
why it is imperative to move beyond the personal to affect the struc-
tural to make a better world for children of all races. More importantly,
each of the tips suggests a specific anti-racist intervention that could be
implemented by any parent, anytime, anywhere. Finally, the blog post
presents the idea of whites being agents and allies in facilitating anti-
racist solidarity.
What is inspiring about these websites and blogs is how they offer
a very different orientation toward racial citizenship than mainstream
media. While many writers describe how communities of color have
reasons to be allied with each other, they don’t articulate solidarity in
terms of “we’re more alike than different,” or by suggesting a more “uni-
versal” identity grouping (like class or nation) to use as an organizing
principle. Rather, these bloggers illustrate how people of color, GLBT,
and white allies share similar experiences with and analyses of racial
hierarchy, discrimination, and abuses of power. It is through these
shared experiences, they argue, that shared investments in organized
struggle develop. This doesn’t mean that people become “colorblind” or
forget the uniqueness of their own histories in the United States and
elsewhere in order to facilitate interracial cooperation. Rather, the post-
racial visions advanced in these websites acknowledge the pitfalls any
movement faces if it identifies itself as either colorblind or associated
186 << Not “Post-Racial,” Race-Aware

with a singular identity to the exclusion of other intersecting identities.

While those monolithic movements are vulnerable to the post-racial
mystification practiced in dominant discourses, the blogs give us a
wider variety of ideas of how to move from and between shared histo-
ries and shared struggles to find common ground and relevant tactics
without insisting on common identity.
Conclusion

Back to the Post-Racial Future

On February 27, 2013, two events occurred that together caught the
attention of news commentators’ irony detectors. One was President
Barack Obama’s dedication of a statue of civil rights activist Rosa Parks.
The other was the U.S. Supreme Court’s hearing of arguments against
the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Indeed, many television news outlets moved
from footage of the President’s remark that without movement pioneers
such as Parks, he “would not be here,” to Supreme Court Justice Anto-
nin Scalia’s condemnation of the VRA as “a racial entitlement.” But the
juxtaposition of Obama’s reverence for civil rights history with Scalia’s
disdain was not the only peculiar instance of racial histories remixed in
the early weeks of Obama’s second term.
In the wake of the Sandy Hook school shootings, white neoconser-
vative gun advocates like Ted Nugent argued for their rights to unlim-
ited assault weapons by alluding to Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King,
Jr., lamenting that gun owners weren’t seated “at the front of the bus.”1
Others declared January 19, 2013—the date of the Martin Luther King
holiday—Gun Appreciation Day, and held rallies.2 They argued that if
Dr. King were alive, this pacifist, non-violent leader who was slain by
a gun-wielding racist would have marched with gun owners to assert
their rights. Others proclaimed that if African slaves had had free access

>> 187
188 << Conclusion

to guns, emancipation would have come sooner than 1865.3 As Larry

Ward, the organizer of Gun Appreciation Day, told CNN, had blacks
had “the right to bear and keep arms . . . perhaps slavery would not have
been a chapter in our history.”4
The absurdity of these statements would be almost laughable had so
many right-leaning news sites and talking heads not recirculated and,
in some cases, adopted the claims about slavery and civil rights and
guns. From Fox News to the blogosphere, many who argued against
gun control measures used these spurious comparisons to lay claim to
victim status and assert consonance with civil rights resistance. Some
even turned to the Holocaust, saying that Hitler was able to decimate
the Jewish population because he “took their guns.”5 Worse still, these
fantasies of gun ownership and liberation were put forth both with seri-
ousness and without any regard for the actual history of legal, social,
economic, and physical violence that combined to oppress black slaves
and free blacks, and Jews throughout history as well. As one reader
commented in response to Ward’s comments, “Yes. If Africans brought
to America had been given the rights of free citizens, they wouldn’t
have been slaves. Funny how it didn’t work out like that.”6 Nevertheless,
the idea that somehow black people would be granted free access to
guns during the brutal, racist rule of white citizens—citizens who were
rewarded for turning in escaped slaves, citizens who rioted through
black neighborhoods and left orphanages burning—was actually a sub-
ject of debate for at least a week on television and beyond that on the
Internet.
Research on the most recent presidential and midterm elections have
found disturbing evidence of a resurgence of “old fashioned racism”—
meaning endorsement of explicit anti-black stereotypes, such as beliefs
in black intellectual or moral inferiority—as well as a continuation of
“modern racism” or “racial resentment” amongst white voters. One
such study found that old-fashioned racism was a stronger determinant
of white voter preferences in the 2010 election than in the 2006 elec-
tion.7 Other studies found that racial resentment8 and ethnocentrism9
were strong predictors of white voting preferences in 2008. In addi-
tion, researchers and observers have shown that many Tea Party mem-
bers (who are seen as having had significant influence on Republican
electoral politics during the 2010 and 2012 elections ) are more likely
 Conclusion >> 189

to express racial resentment and old-fashioned racism at rallies and in

their publicity campaigns.10
As discussed in the introduction, GOP strategists were more than
willing to admit that they were going for “the white vote” in the past
two election cycles, and didn’t seem very concerned about how some
of their messages could be viewed as being racially coded, if not out-
right racist. Much ink and many data bytes have been employed to
deride Republicans for “delaying the inevitable” demographic change
where whites will no longer be a majority of voters. Importantly, many
of those strategists who counsel the GOP to makeover the image it has
long had as a white, intolerant party have focused on finding “standard
bearers”—Senator Marco Rubio (a Cuban American) or Governor
Bobby Jindal (an Indian American)—who reflect the “new” multicul-
tural America. Unfortunately, the reduction of people of color’s politi-
cal affiliation to simply matching skin color or ethnicity still seems in
place. The idea that millions of voters of color who stood in agonizingly
long lines in Republican-controlled states would soon forget so many
important parts of history is appalling. Would they remember which
party made it harder for them to vote? Would they forget the antics of
prominent members of the party who want to prohibit gay marriage?
Would they recall which party wants to restrict contraception access, or
which party wants to allow unlimited access to deadly firearms that kill
hundreds of young people of color every month? Would their memo-
ries be so easily wiped out by the affinity neoconservatives imagined
between Rosa Parks and the opponents of gun control?

Remember How Obama Got Here? Wasn’t

It . . . the Civil Rights Movement?

In a 2009 essay for ColorLines, whiteness scholar Tim Wise laid out
some of the repercussions for allowing others to rescript histories of
anti-racist struggle in ways that erase painful conflict and simplify
notions of racial justice.

It’s been a rough year for Martin Luther King, Jr., and for his legacy. . . .
We have turned King into a milquetoast moderate whose agenda
went little beyond the ability to sit next to white people on a bus. We’ve
190 << Conclusion

stripped away from the public remembrance of this man his calls for
income redistribution . . . his proclamation that poverty, racism and
militarism are the “triple evils” that America’s rulers have not the cour-
age to confront. When conservatives can effectively twist King’s singular
line about judging people on the “content of their character” rather than
the color of their skin into a reason to oppose affirmative action, even
though he openly supported such efforts in his writings and interviews
in 1961, 1963, 1965 and again in 1967, it ought not surprise us that folks are
a bit confused about who King was, and about the principles for which
he stood.11

As Wise observes, detaching King’s image from his work is dangerous.

Such a move muddies the waters of collective memory, making it hard
for new generations to understand the full scope and meaning of free-
dom struggles, to learn from the past, or to generate interest in sus-
taining or extending the legacy of activists like King. The post-racial
mystique is dependent, in part, on the kind of racial amnesia—or racial
arrogance—that enables crass stunts like holding a “Gun Apprecia-
tion Day” during the Martin Luther King holiday. As more than a few
commentators infamously said on election night 2008, people of color
can’t “complain” anymore about racism now that the United States has
a black president.12
But many have gone beyond telling people of color they can’t say rac-
ism exists; they have further declared an inversion of racial subjuga-
tion, whereby it is now whites who need a Dr. King to safeguard their
rights and privileges. For instance, after the strong turnout during the
2012 presidential election of black, Asian American, and Latina/o voters
(despite voter suppression tactics) many on the Right began express-
ing fear about the end of the “white establishment.”13 Just a few weeks
before the election, a white student at Towson University sought to cre-
ate a White Student Union in order to fight an alleged “inherent anti-
white bias in academia and mainstream society.” He argued that it was
no different than black or Asian students creating a student union to
represent their interests in the face of discrimination.14
People who so easily reconfigure the meaning of social movements
in ways that facilitate these sorts of delusions of a racial power reversal
operate from a space where they cannot “see” racism in its twenty-first
 Conclusion >> 191

century forms, let alone read the past for wisdom on how to combat
racial injustice. I am particularly intrigued by the kind of amnesia—or
the practices of “not-seeing” race—that made many people so surprised
at the number of racist jokes, gaffes, and defamatory statements made
by President Obama’s opponents almost weekly, if not daily. And to me
the recurrent “surprise” and dismay suggest that we really are behind in
thinking about racial politics and should have listened more closely to
those who were publicly unsure about Obama’s chances to become the
first president who was not white.
In 2007 and early 2008, many astute observers of racial politics pre-
dicted that Barack Obama had no chance of winning the Democratic
nomination, let alone the White House, in the upcoming election.
Many scholars and pundits—black and white—said America wouldn’t
be ready until at least 2012 or even 2016. Obviously, their predictions
regarding the outcome of the 2008 election were wrong, but few have
revisited these forecasts and explored their sources. Doing so here, and
exploring ways in which the “readiness” of the white American public
to vote—or not vote—for a man of African descent was construed, I
will argue that peculiar patterns of memorialization and forgetting cre-
ated grounds for undue optimism about our “readiness,” as well as mis-
understandings of the reasons many black scholars and voters had for
thinking that Obama could not win in 2008. If we fail to understand
these dynamics of public memory, we are in danger of losing opportu-
nities to ready ourselves for pluralist politics.
In reviewing why it was that many observers—particularly African
Americans—felt pessimistic about Barack Hussein Obama’s chances at
getting the nomination (let alone winning) in 2008, we can see their
awareness of certain deep cultural assumptions about race that seem to
anchor some white voting behavior. Pessimists used history as well as
diagnoses of the dominant white culture’s treatment of black politicians
and everyday people of color to frame his chances. So I would like to
suggest not only that their predictions were rational, based on existing
empirical evidence of white political behavior, but also that their diag-
nosis of the depth of the cultural anchor of white supremacy helps us to
see how the Birthers (who believe Obama is not a native-born citizen
of the United States and therefore cannot be president) and others were
not so unexpected after all.
192 << Conclusion

To begin, let’s look at the two most common reasons why many
political observers thought it was too early for Obama to win the presi-
dential election and why 2012 or 2016 were seen as more “realistic,”
especially in allowing time for him to gain more experience in the Sen-
ate and the country to “progress” more in terms of race relations.

Reason #1: Hillary’s Turn

If we go back to 2007, the case against Obama was pretty tight. After all,
he was running against a white woman with at least six advantages over
him: (1) national name recognition; (2) incredible fund-raising and
plentiful personal coffers; (3) a popular former president husband; (4)
more “experience” and powerful allies; (5) a good reputation with black
elected officials—ostensibly the same officials whom Obama should
have been courting;—and, of course (6) whiteness. Yes, she had gen-
der working against her, but if we look at the relative successes of white
female candidates for state-wide offices such as governor—as well as in
the Senate and the House of Representatives—we find that many more
white women have been elected than black men or women. Thus, elec-
toral evidence suggests that white female candidates are not as ham-
pered by gender as black candidates are by race. This is not an argu-
ment about the “oppression Olympics,” but just an observation based in
actual electoral data.

Reason #2: White Voter Behavior

Studies of actual races for state-wide or national offices as well as

experimental studies of white voter preferences show strong evidence
that despite improving statistics in opinion polls that say a majority of
whites are “ready” and willing to vote for “qualified” black candidates,
white voters don’t actually vote for black candidates as often as their
stated beliefs suggest. Analysts and pundits referred to cases where
black candidates polled well with white before the election, only to end
up losing or winning by a very slim margin. These examples included
references to: Harvey Gantt’s U.S. Senate race loss in North Carolina;
the infamous—and ill-named—“Bradley Effect,” where Mayor Tom
Bradley barely won his seat in Los Angeles after polling well ahead of
 Conclusion >> 193

his white opponent; and the recent loss Harold Ford, Jr., suffered after
polling strongly in the 2006 Tennessee senate race, only to have some
last-minute race-baiting ads released on the eve of the election. Studies
of racial cues in political ads find a strong correlation between expo-
sure to racial cues and anti-black sentiment. Together, these stories and
studies suggested that the U.S. white majority did not yet contain the
critical mass of voters who would not be susceptible to race-baiting and
that there still remained an influential subgroup of bigots or racists who
would never vote for a black person. Under these conditions, an Obama
candidacy did not appear realistic.
Moreover, no Democratic candidate for president has won either the
majority of white votes or the South since the Republicans launched
their infamous Southern Strategy (courting the votes of Southern seg-
regationists) in the wake of Lyndon B. Johnson’s support for civil rights
legislation. With these stats, who would expect a black candidate to win
as many white votes as John Kerry, the losing 2004 candidate, had, let
alone former Arkansas governor President Bill Clinton? If we couldn’t
expect white Democratic candidates to win the majority of white votes,
how could we reasonably expect a black one to do it—and especially one
who has a Muslim middle name, Hussein, at a time when a majority of
white Americans said it was okay to racially profile Muslim Americans
at airports and other public places?

Amnesia and Dreams

So these are the reasons why many people thought that Obama should
wait another cycle, or be satisfied with a good showing and drop out of
the primaries as soon as Hillary’s campaign crushed him. These reasons
are based on both measurable phenomena, including black candidates’
recent losses even when it looked good for them in the polls, and the
unavoidable reality that there still exists at least a significant portion of
the white electorate that endorses black inferiority stereotypes. Some
people still have a white supremacist mind set, and others are ready to
exploit racial fears and misgivings about race-based policies to prime
white voters to turn on Democratic candidates of any color. Though
these were solid reasons to question Obama’s chances, obviously pre-
dictions that he would lose were wrong. Many people said, “I told you
194 << Conclusion

so,” and argued that the pessimists themselves were out of touch, overly
consumed by race, and unwilling to believe in the fulfillment of King’s
“Dream.”
While I disagree with those commentators who alleged Obama’s vic-
tory was the culmination of Martin Luther King’s “Dream” (narrowly
interpreted), I think it is ultimately to our benefit that they did make
that connection, because it directed public attention to the uncanny
overlap of multiple racial/national commemorations. In January of
2009 the inauguration of a new president; the King national holiday
and newly built monument; and preparations for the one hundred and
fiftieth anniversary of the Civil War were underway. The intersection of
these events provides us with coordinates for recurrent conflicts over
the meaning of race in America, specifically elements of racial domina-
tion that grew out of slavery. As Kenneth Bindas wrote, all Americans,
at least since the Civil War, have “had to deal with the structural and
generational memory of slavery, Jim Crow, and its corresponding his-
torical paradigm of subordination, which helps to construct a collective
memory.”15
From November of 2008 to January of 2009, the process of memory
construction was in overdrive, with a mass media frenzy of congratu-
latory coverage of the first black president, along with intimations of
the real end of race, the final crushing of the nation’s “original sin” of
slavery, all under the gaze of the angelically characterized martyrs of
the 1960s: MLK, JFK, and RFK, the last of whom said before he died
that there could be a Negro president in forty years. However, this opti-
mistic discourse was shadowed by a soon-to-explode, parallel narrative
of national crisis. In this retelling of American milestones, the crisis
was precipitated by the fraudulent election of a non-citizen, a secret
Muslim, a rabid anti-white double agent of blackness destined to seek
revenge against a now shrinking white population for the sins of slavery
and Jim Crow. The existence and force of this second narrative, and its
roots in deep cultural understandings of race, citizenship, religion, and
nation, are major reasons why many black observers not only feared
Obama would be easily beaten by Hillary Clinton, but also, once he got
the nomination, feared for his life.
That some were surprised at the post-election expressions of white
racism and xenophobic nationalism is indicative of the failure of our
 Conclusion >> 195

society to further interrogate the collective memory of racial subjuga-

tion and to take accountability for the lasting effects of racial apartheid
that structured not only law and policy, but culture and society. In par-
ticular, our increasingly mediated remembrances of the eras of slavery,
segregation, and draconian restrictions on immigration encourage a
sort of selective collective memory and a truncated practice of remem-
brance, crowding out and discouraging the counter-memories of Afri-
can Americans and others brutalized by these systems of dominance.
What is exciting and hopeful about the convergence of the anniver-
saries I listed earlier and the subsequent outpouring of white rage, con-
spiracy theories, and appropriated histories in the public sphere is that
together they blew open a hole in the post-racial argument, a hole wide
enough to fill with counter-memories and discourses that include those
who were excluded. If the fears expressed by those whites who declared
“I want my country back” and the greasy kaleidoscope of racist images
displayed in private emails “between friends” that were made public, in
white power websites, and on Tea Party rally signs and bumper stick-
ers teach us anything, it is that the idea of a man of African descent
in power provides at least enough symbolic juice to reinvigorate and
expose the continued strain of white supremacy that refuses to go away
quietly.
Their fantasies of race war and health care as reparations lay bare
the fact that any “racial reconciliation” that has occurred since the ebb
of the mass movements of the 1960s has been terribly incomplete, and
that our dominant displays of collective memory have been horribly
inadequate to the task of democratic renewal. We need to discuss more
deeply the causes and effects of the long civil rights movement, and the
ways our mediated remembrances do not provide sufficient context for
conversations about and approaches to racial reconciliation. It requires
us to attend seriously to culture and the stories we tell ourselves—or
ignore.
So first, I would like to describe what I mean by the “deep meaning”
and “deep narratives” of culture. Building on the arguments of scholars
in sociology, rhetoric, and memory studies, I illustrate how dominant
white culture and media production have created two enduring—and
often contradictory—deep narratives of slavery, class, Jim Crow, and
the civil rights movement that are evident in representations of the
196 << Conclusion

racial past and contemporary interracial interaction. I contend that

the dominant white-oriented “progress” narrative attends only to tri-
umph and glosses over the pain, struggle, and losses—losses that are
the product of white supremacist domination. This approach to our
history perpetuates the myth that scores of racially “innocent” whites
vastly outnumbered a smaller number of “bad”—and usually poor
Southern—whites in the past. Now that the bad guys are vanquished,
we can all be friends. Rather than listening to and fully incorporating
the counter-memories of people of color, the dominant racial prog-
ress narrative employs a paltry type of multiculturalism in the ser-
vice of national unity, which, however, is exposed to be quite tenuous,
especially in moments of crisis. Second, I sketch out suggestions of
what we might do in the midst of this revival of the “culture wars”—in
some ways an extension of the Civil War—if we can get the excluded
histories back into the frame. In this environment of increasingly
vicious public discourse and cynical deployments of identity, we have
some room to maneuver, to engender dialogues, and to present alter-
native pathways towards a future that learns more lessons from our
collective past.

Culture and Deep Assumptions about Race

Collective memories are part of the “social imaginary.” As Darrel Enck-

Wanzer writes, the social imaginary informs and is “informed by fac-
tual and normative commitments about ‘how things usually go’ and
‘how they ought to go.’”16 Collective memories, then, and commemora-
tions of significant events, comprise part of our understanding of how
things “usually go,” because we know the story, and its lessons suggest
how we should behave in the future. The factual and normative aspects
of commemoration draw “attention to . . . social practices and civic hab-
its . . . political doctrines . . . and circulating symbols.”17 King’s “Dream”
is one such symbol; marching in Washington and voting are civic hab-
its; racial segregation and democracy are political doctrines. Our atten-
tion is drawn to these and more when events call on us to collectively
remember the civil rights struggle.
Thus, collective memory and commemorative practices pro-
vide a field within which we recognize the “deep meanings” that
 Conclusion >> 197

circulate—often without notice—in our culture. Following the work of

Durkheim, Robert Wuthnow notes that commemorations are part of
the periodic renewal of democratic society. At these times, we trans-
mit core values, reinivigorate our associations, and engage in public
advocacy.18 We can view the presidential inauguration, for example, as a
performance of democratic renewal, wherein the peaceful transition of
power between administrations occurs in the public eye after the votes
have been tallied and verified and the figure of the executive unifies the
nation. Obama’s inauguration was an exceptional moment of expecta-
tions and hope for renewal of a nation in economic crisis, at war, and in
the throes of post-racial discourses that suggested this president would
serve as a conduit for our “better angels” to finally make good on the
promises of the Declaration of Independence that all its citizens are cre-
ated equal. This hope hedged against fears that the United States was on
the path to becoming a “society in which the narrow self-interest Toc-
queville warned about has become so rampant that we find it difficult to
work together for the common good.”19 Many voters and commentators
hoped that Obama would inspire people to embrace a form of citizen-
ship that emphasized public spirit rather than private gain. In his rheto-
ric, people heard a call for a return to attention to the public sphere, to
consensus building and civic pride.
But even as folks drew upon a common store of cultural meanings
about democracy, some of the other deeply held meanings served as bar-
riers to social cohesion, even as people yearned for change. Wuthnow
writes that though deeply held cultural assumptions are evident when
“society mobilizes itself to achieve some laudable end,” as the mobiliza-
tion occurs, the same society may find itself puzzled that it is “a long way
from achieving its ideals.”20 For example, even after investing significant
human, legal, and monetary resources to ending segregation, racism and
racial inequalities persist. Wuthnow argues that we should acknowl-
edge that this isn’t just about finding the right legal or policy remedy;
rather, “there is more to the problem than just rolling up our sleeves.”21
To achieve the sort of democratic renewal that would get us past what
Obama once called a “racial stalemate” requires a redefinition of culture
“at the level of deep meaning; for instance, by reinterpreting old narra-
tives or constructing new ones that tell how a person should behave in
order to be regarded as morally responsible” and in whom we can trust.22
198 << Conclusion

Cultural assumptions about behavior inform our sense of trust; but

“trust is rooted in tacit knowledge about such matters as affinity (who
am I like?) and responsibility (who will be there when I need them?).”23
So race, class, religion, nationality—all of these facets of identity factor
into deep meanings about trust and the common good. When it comes
to race, there is little trust to be had. Stark evidence of racial profiling,
unequal and unjust sentencing procedures, redlining in real estate and
lending, draconian anti-immigrant policies and violent acts against
undocumented workers paint an ugly picture of an untrustworthy
society. Moreover, public opinion polls strongly suggest that a majority
of whites see no link between these facts of racial life and racism. Only
32 percent of whites in a recent poll agreed that racism is still a prob-
lem, even though a majority admits inequalities still exist.24 If a large
portion of our society doesn’t even see that racism still operates, that it
contributes to the “racial stalemate,” and that it serves as a deep anchor
keeping us from moving faster away from the murky waters formed in
cultural narratives of race and fear, superiority and Otherness, then we
will continue to find solving the problem of the color line a Sisyphean
task.
One way to start is by excavating and deconstructing the ways in
which dominant collective memories of racial “anniversaries,” so to
speak, are anchored to problematic deep meanings of race, individual-
ism, innocence, government, and responsibility. Paul Shackel suggests
that public memories are established through three types of activity:
(1) forgetting or excluding certain narratives of the past; (2) “creating
and reinforcing patriotism”; and (3), “developing a sense of nostalgia to
legitimize a particular heritage.”25 I follow his argument that dominant
groups often use collective memory in ways that naturalize inequali-
ties—but that collective counter-memories can be deployed as well to
challenge that process. Importantly, he notes that collective memories
are more reflections of “present political and social relations” than
“accurate” representations of the past.26 So we should attend to what
elements of our political present are served by particular renderings of
our collective racial past.
So now I turn to the dominant, competing collective memories that
media have circulated and normalized in two particular versions of the
nation’s racial past. The first is the “lost cause,” wherein the memories of
 Conclusion >> 199

the daughters and sons of the Confederacy hold the South was wrongly
invaded and abused; that slavery actually benefitted black people (as
did subsequent Jim Crow segregation); and that the federal government
regularly oversteps its bounds in state sovereignty.27 This version of his-
tory posits that the racial troubles of today stem from the tyranny of
government and, for some, the inferiority of non-white groups.28 The
most rabid pro-Confederacy supporters imagine that a race war is inev-
itable and that the South will rise again. The more temperate believers
argue that individualism and states’ rights trump any attempts to legis-
late racial equality.
The second is the “white civil rights heroes” and white innocence
narrative, which centers on the experiences and feelings of whites who
contributed to or witnessed moments in the civil rights movement.29
The innocence part of this collective memory posits that good white
people (usually in the North) were either unaware of, unconnected to,
or not implicated in slavery, Jim Crow, or other racial oppressions, and
thus remain untouched by racism in the present and future. For these
groups, the remnants of racial oppression and racial tensions are caused
either by folks who “play the race card” to gin up white guilt to get con-
cessions, or by the remaining “rednecks” who still lurk on the fringes of
society but will soon be gone due to generational change. Through the
perpetual progress brought by education and the limited integration
efforts of the past forty years, eventually we will get to an approxima-
tion of King’s “Dream” of a world where we’re judged not by the color of
our skin, but the content of our character.
Mainstream media have dramatized both of these collective memo-
ries, and their main themes are easily found in a host of Hollywood
productions. From Birth of a Nation (1915) to Gone With the Wind
(1939) and a host of other depictions of a genteel Southern elite, the
“lost cause” narrative has structured depictions of Blacks as savages
tamed only by the firm white hands of Southerners.30 Likewise, Con-
federate monuments lionize the generals and soldiers who died fighting
the North, and replicate the idea that slavery was good for blacks, as
in the South Carolina monument to the “faithful slaves” who allegedly
stood by their masters during the war.31 While not directly connected to
the specifics of Confederate nostalgia, sitcoms like Beulah (1950–1953),
which featured a black maid happily serving a white family, and 1980s
200 << Conclusion

“buddy” movies reinforced the idea that blacks are happiest when in
servitude to or managed by whites.32
Today, images of passive, happy slaves and black sidekicks are not
as prevalent as they once were, and clearly there are voices raised in
protest as well as counter-representations available to audiences. But
simultaneously there are specialty media—DVDs, websites, blogs—
where the “lost cause” lives on, chock full of “old school” white suprem-
acy ready to be discovered or recirculated with the push of a button.
The racist caricatures of Barack and Michelle Obama that sprouted up
are evidence of how accessible and relevant the Sambo, the Mammy,
and the Brute remain.
Public memories of white heroism and innocence are more wide-
spread and available to mass audiences. Kelly Madison, Kristen Hoerl,
and others have described how Hollywood created a slew of civil rights–
themed films that focus on the heroic acts of individual whites, shunt-
ing generations of black activists and everyday participants to the mar-
gins.33 Just as in the “lost cause,” the pain and loss that white supremacy
caused black Americans is muted. And, more importantly, their agency
is dissolved when they are framed as being perpetually dependent upon
the good graces of white people.
When the everyday indignities and violence of racist domination
are erased from the frame, people can deny that it was all that bad, or
that they had anything to do with that racial stuff. As generations wit-
ness “the nationalization of the movement, the street names, television
specials, books and movies,” they are usually introduced to the people
and events in ways that suggest we’re past racism, and that it was inev-
itable that the nation would come together to right all racial wrongs.34
Even those who were alive during the movement seem to have taken
on this notion. For example, historian Kenneth Bindas found in his
oral history projects with aging whites that they were reluctant to
name or describe any of the obvious impacts of segregation in their
lives—even though they came of age in the midst of Jim Crow. Partici-
pants claimed they never even saw any black people, or they rational-
ized that any racial segregation they witnessed was “just how it was,”
as if some invisible force field once separated white from black and
was lifted away “naturally,” not by struggle and painstaking changes in
the law.
 Conclusion >> 201

Figure C.1. Tulsa, Oklahoma, Red Cross workers after race riot.
Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

The idea of racial innocence is reinforced in contemporary media,

which suggest that there really is no more work to be done by the every-
day citizen to reduce inequalities. At the same time Hollywood render-
ings of the Jim Crow era reassure us that good white people were in suf-
ficient supply to ease any suffering felt by blacks (see Mississippi Burning
[1988] and The Help [2011]), advertising and entertainment television
have specialized in creating multiracial vistas that assure us we are so
different from our segregated ancestors. From McDonalds commercials
to Grey’s Anatomy to Glee, race rarely flares up at all. And when race
does rear its head, jokes are made, feelings are not hurt too badly, and
everyone goes back to normal in their multicultural schools and work-
places by the end of the hour.
Likewise, other scholars have demonstrated how anti-affirmative
action activism and news framing helped construct whites as the real
victims of racism, having their opportunities reduced as part of a rem-
edy for Jim Crow.35 At the same time, black politicians who argue for
race-conscious remedies are framed as reverse-racist hucksters who cry
202 << Conclusion

discrimination at the smallest provocation. These narratives of white

innocence/black intransigence allow for the reverence of the white
heroes of the past—who somehow felt a responsibility to contribute to
ending racial segregation without being implicated in racial hierarchy—
and denial of any complicity or accountability for the cumulative effects
of centuries of white supremacy.36 And, they continue to center on the
motives and actions of whites, and ignore the initiative and creativity of
blacks and other people of color who create tactics to fight against and
survive racial domination. The deep meanings of whiteness and civic
responsibility, the hero/innocence dominant collective memories of the
Civil War and civil rights movement enable a kind of forgetting and
passiveness about racism in the present. That is, these narratives sug-
gest we just need to wait for the right leader to emerge, and he (because
it’s always been a he!) will let us know where to march, what slogans to
adopt, and so forth, so that we can find our way out of the stalemate.
The faults of this approach are easy to see when it is confronted by
the resurgence of the “lost cause” collective memory and its visions of
(white) American renewal. Recent calls for a monument to be erected in
Selma, Alabama, to honor Bedford Forrest—the man popularly credited
with founding the Ku Klux Klan—is only one of the most recent inci-
dents of this desire to reclaim the Confederacy without coming to grips
with the reality of white terrorism. In the gaps between these two domi-
nant, white-centered narratives—the passive wait for the next leader
versus the anxious vigil for the redemption of the Confederacy—black
Americans and other people of color are held at arm’s length, in civil
rights limbo. When added to the empirical evidence of racist inequali-
ties and white voter reluctance to cast a ballot for black candidates, the
predictions of Obama’s loss made in 2007 don’t seem so crazy, do they?
And, I can’t help but want to say “I told you so” to the many people who
seem bewildered by the stark displays of racist iconography and vicious
racist humor that have found their way into all corners of the public
sphere. Yes, they are usually met with condemnation, but also with denial
of racial import—as in the case of the Montana judge who apologized
for circulating a racist joke about Obama’s parents via email to “private”
“friends,” while claiming that he isn’t a racist, just “anti-Obama.”37
The harshness of the racist, xenophobic responses to Obama’s presi-
dency was a sharp slap in the face, a surprise to many well-meaning
 Conclusion >> 203

people who were sure that we were on the cusp of a post-racial America.
But one leader cannot bring about deep cultural change overnight. And
the pervasive narratives of civil rights movements being over, being
dependent on the charisma of the right kind of black leader, obfuscates
the long-term activism, mundane actions, and everyday bravery that
must accumulate over time to develop a new sort of civic conscious-
ness. Many historians, activists, artists, and archivists strive to record
and publicize the memories of those who survived segregation, xeno-
phobic policies like Japanese internment, broken treaties and genocidal
violence against Native Americans, and various and sundry means of
terrorizing those who cross the border to the South. In these counter-
narratives of what civil rights movements mean and what fighting for
justice means, the struggle and the pain are clearly visible. The culti-
vation of oppositional consciousness and self-determination is central.
And, always, we hear and read that survival was not guaranteed even
for the fittest and the smartest, and that white allies were not often in
view.
Oral and written histories of people of color who did survive the
atrocities of racism often emphasize “the sacrifices necessary to chal-
lenge” racism,38 and not the feel-good moments afterwards. In these
counter memories, we see how the most mundane acts—riding a bus,
writing a letter, reading a book, speaking in one’s native language, look-
ing someone in the eye on the street—were potential seeds of change,
moments of resistance. Think of what it would do to the dominant
narratives of civil rights if we focus on these counter-public memories
when we commemorate Dr. King, or inaugurate the first biracial presi-
dent. If these memories were more accessible when the pundits were
debating Obama’s chances to win, how many more would have been
skeptical, or more cautious, predicting a post-racial win? More impor-
tantly, what would they say was important to analyze in the electorate?
Which voters would have gotten more attention as they gauged people’s
desire to renew America again through electoral change? I would argue
that if these counter-memories were in the minds of news media mak-
ers, there would have still been concern about what white voters would
or wouldn’t do in the ballot box. But, the focus on “will they or won’t
they” vote for Obama would not have completely crowded out some of
the most heartening and interesting things happening in the electorate.
204 << Conclusion

As political scientist Cathy Cohen reminds us, in 2004 and 2008, young
voters of color increased in numbers that far outstripped the growth of
white voter participation in their age group.39 But the agency and initia-
tive of young voters of color were not consonant with the narrative of
white-led progress in U.S. democracy, not part of the story of progress
wrought not by the masses, but by enlightened black leaders whose elo-
quence moves us all to moral action. Likewise, some poor white voters’
dismay with Mitt Romney and other Republican candidates got little
attention.40 And, some studies—as well as recent incidents of racist
graffiti on college campuses—suggest that middle class, college-edu-
cated whites are sometimes more likely to express racial resentment.41
The narrative of a finite, no-longer-necessary civil rights movement
still resonates in mainstream media and beyond. This collective mem-
ory draws attention to a limited set of social practices and civic hab-
its that focus on the charisma of leaders and the spectacular display of
mass marches. The focus on short timelines and singular leaders creates
a blind spot for the other practices that occur at less lofty heights. Joined
by other narratives that write off certain sectors of the voting public—
i.e., youth of color—and hyperventilate over the motives of others—i.e.,
white college students hip to Obama—these deep narratives make it
harder to imagine other avenues for change in the racial landscape of
America. If we can’t see and value the participation of young Latina/o,
Asian American, and black voters now, when will we ever? If we can’t
remember that the majority of white votes continue to go to Republican
candidates who play on racial fears every election, how can we start a
conversation about making a post-racial America?
But if we center attention on the collective memories of struggle,
then we are drawn to different social and civic practices. If we look at
the increasing involvement of youth of color through the prism of the
memories of struggle, then we need to acknowledge that they voted in
2012 against very high odds—confusing voter ID laws, stop-and-frisk
harassment, cuts in public education, and anti-immigrant fervor. To
understand how they were able to get to the ballot box, we must turn
our attention to the long-term involvement of communities of color
in fostering care and passion for justice. There, we learn something we
can’t from the narrow horse-race focus on the “moderate white voter”
whom the political and press elites say Obama and the Democrats must
 Conclusion >> 205

Figure C.2. Seattle, Washington, Martin Luther King, Jr., Day March.
Courtesy of Seattle Municipal Archives.

lure into his camp. If we stop to consider that a “great leader” and “toler-
ant” white voters are not the most important factors in our democratic
outcomes and improvement of race relations, then we can tell a new
story, craft a different narrative that challenges the conventional wis-
dom and transforms the deep meanings of race in our culture. Listen-
ing to and learning from the experiences of everyday people who sur-
vived Jim Crow and struggled for justice not just on one shining August
day, we have a better chance to value a set of experiences that call for
accountability, that don’t play down the brutality and devastating con-
sequences of racial domination. We also have to remember that the
descendants of the oppressors and the oppressed are often still sizing
each other up with wariness. Attention must be paid; reparation must
be made. How can we hear these stories, see the evidence of the contin-
ued legacy of Jim Crow, and not feel any accountability, any urgency to
make amends?
If we begin to recraft our collective memories, to reconfigure com-
mon assumptions about the meaning of the civil rights movement
and of race in our society, then we can’t just blame Obama for not
206 << Conclusion

being truly “post-racial,” as many have done. We can’t wait for him
or someone else to save us from our history. A community-centered,
multi-racial approach to public memory exposes both the democratic
and undemocratic processes in our past. We can’t let ourselves off the
hook if we recognize that it was people just like us who did or didn’t
act, did or didn’t trust each other. There were people who decided that
their identity didn’t have to rest on being superior to another group of
people. There were people who believed in their ability to work collec-
tively for change. People like us expanded our democracy; and people
like us fought to retain the status quo of inequality. We are their daugh-
ters, grandsons, and great grandchildren. We should start acting like we
know from whence we came.
Notes

Notes to the Introduction

1. So many books and programs from the 1980s and 1990s (and about those eras)
could be in this list, but here are a few notable ones: Nelson George, Post-Soul
Nation (New York: Viking, 2004); Toni Morrison, ed., Race-ing Justice, En-Gen-
dering Equality: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, and the Social Construc-
tion of Reality (New York: Random House, 1992); Cornel West, Race Matters (New
York: Vintage, 1994); bell hooks, Yearning: Race, Gender and Cultural Politics
(Boston: South End Press, 1999); Mark Anthony Neal, Soul Babies: Black Popular
Culture and the Post-Soul Aesthetic (New York: Routledge, 2001); The Black Public
Sphere Collective, eds. The Black Public Sphere (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1995); Marlon Riggs, dir., Black Is, Black Ain’t, DVD (California Newsreel,
1995).
2. Again, while this list will not be all-inclusive, a sampling of work discussing these
emergences includes: Paula Massoud, ed., The Spike Lee Reader (Philadelphia:
Temple University Press, 2008); Paul Taylor, “Post-Black, Old Black,” African
American Review 41 no. 4: 625–40; Jennifer Harris and Elwood Watson, eds., The
Oprah Phenomenon (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2009); Maureen
Mahon, Right To Rock: The Black Rock Coalition and the Cultural Politics of Race
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2004); S. Craig Watkins, Representing: Hip Hop
Culture and the Production of Black Cinema (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1999); Jacqueline Bobo, Black Women as Cultural Readers (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1995); Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: White-
ness and the American Literary Imagination (New York: Vintage, 1993); Michael
Eric Dyson, Reflecting Black: African American Cultural Criticism (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1993).
3. Patricia Williams, The Alchemy of Race and Rights: Diary of A Mad Law Profes-
sor (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992); Shelby Steele, The Content of
Our Character (New York: Harper Perennial, 1991); Ellis Cose, The Rage of A
Privileged Class (New York: Harper Collins, 1993); Michael P. Rogin and Robert
Post, eds. Race and Representation: Affirmative Action (New York: Zone Books,

>> 207
208 << Notes to the Introduction

1998); Melissa Harris-Lacewell, Barbershops, Bibles & BET: Everyday Talk and
Black Political Thought. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006); Jayne
O. Ifekwunigwe, ed., “‘Mixed Race’” Studies: A Reader (New York: Routledge,
2004); Michael O.Emerson and Christian Smith, Divided by Faith: Evangelical
Religion and the Problem of Race in America. (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2001).
4. Eric K. Watts, “The Nearly Apocalyptic Politics of Post-Racial America: Or, ‘This
Is Now the United States of Zombieland,’” Journal of Communication Inquiry 34
(2010): 216–17.
5. See, for example, discussions in the following recent books and articles: Ralina L.
Joseph, Transcending Blackness: From the New Millenial Mulatta to the Exceptional
Multiracial (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012); Roopali Mukherjee,
“‘Bling–Fling‘: Commodity Consumption and the Politics of the ‘ Post-Racial,’” in
Critical Rhetorics of Race, eds. Michael Lacey and Kent A. Ono (New York: New
York University Press, 2011), 178–96; Catherine R. Squires, Dispatches from the
Color Line: The Press and Multiracial America (Albany: SUNY Press, 2007).
6. Squires, Dispatches from the Color Line.
7. Amy A. Hasinoff, “Fashioning Race for the Free Market on America’s Next Top
Model,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 25 no. 3 (2008), 324–43; Joseph,
Transcending Blackness; Mary Thompson, “‘Learn Something from This!’: The
Problem of Optional Ethnicity on America’s Next Top Model,” Feminist Media
Studies 10 no.3 (2010): 335–52.
8. Hasinoff, “Fashioning Race,” 335.
9. Catherine R. Squires, “Coloring in the Bubble: Perspectives from Black-Oriented
Media on the (Latest) Economic Disaster,” American Quarterly 64 no. 3 (2012):
543–70.
10. Jonathan Rutherford, Identity: Community, Culture, Difference. (London: Law-
rence & Wishart, 1990), 11.
11. Henry Giroux, “Consuming social change: The ‘United Colors of Benetton,’”
Cultural Critique 26, (1993): 5–32.
12. Jon Krasewski, “Multiracialism on The Real World and the Reconfiguration of
Politics in MTV’s Brand During the 2000s,” Popular Communication 8 (2010):
132–46.
13. Squires, Dispatches.
14. Nasar Meer and Tariq Modood, “The Multicultural State We’re In: Muslims, ‘Mul-
ticulture’ and the ‘Civic Rebalancing’ of British Multiculturalism,” Political Studies
57, no. 3 (2008): 1–25; Tariq Modood, “Is Multiculturalism Dead?” Public Policy
Research (June–August 2008): 84–88.
15. Susan Searls Giroux, “From the ‘Culture Wars’ to the Conservative Campaign for
Campus Diversity: Or, How Inclusion Became the New Exclusion,” Policy Futures
in Education 3, no. 4 (2005): 314–26.
16. Evelyn Alsultany, “Selling American Diversity and Muslim American Identity
through Nonprofit Advertising Post-9/11,”American Quarterly 59, no. 3 (2007): 28.
 Notes to the Introduction >> 209

17. See discussions in: Alsutany, “Selling”; Barbara Biesecker, “No Time for Mourn-
ing: The Rhetorical Production of the Melancholic Citizen-Subject in the War on
Terror,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 40, no.1 (2007): 147–69; Giroux, “From the ‘Cul-
ture Wars’”; Bruce B. Lawrence, “Conjuring with Islam, II,” Journal of American
History 89, no. 2 (2002): 485–97; Melani McAlister, “A Cultural History of the War
Without End,” Journal of American History 89, no. 2 (2002): 439–55.
18. See studies summarized in Marta Tienda, Sigal Alon, and Sunny Niu, “Affirma-
tive Action and the Texas Top 10 Percent Admission Law: Balancing Equity and
Access to Higher Education,” February 2008, http://theop.princeton.edu/reports/
wp/AffirmativeAction_TopTen.pdf. See also Nicholas Webster, “Analysis of the
Ten Percent Plan,” Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race, 2007, http://kirwanin-
stitute.osu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/Texas-Ten-Percent_style.pdf.
19. David Roediger, “White Workers, New Democrats, and Affirmative Action,” in
The House That Race Built, ed. Wahneema Lubiano (New York: Vintage, 1998)
48–65. See multiple essays on and analysis of economic and social data that sug-
gest that class-not-race approaches have failed to shrink racial gaps in education,
jobs, and wealth in “Revisiting William Julius Wilson’s The Declining Significance
of Race,” Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare 39, no.1 (2012).
20. Liddy West, “A Complete Guide to Hipster Racism,” Jezebel.com, April 26,
2012,http://jezebel.com/5905291/a-complete-guide-to-hipster-racism.
21. Channing Kennedy, “Understanding Hipster Racism: Lester Bang’s 1979 ‘White
Noise Supremacists,’” ColorLines.com, April 27, 2012, http://colorlines.com/
archives/2012/04/hipster_racism_isnt_new_read_1979s_white_noise_suprema-
cists.html.
22. Bangs’s article was reproduced at http://www.mariabuszek.com/kcai/PoMoSemi-
nar/Readings/BangsWhite.pdf.
23. West, “A Complete Guide.”
24. Kennedy, “Understanding Hipster Racism.”
25. There are many discussions and investigations of the impact of race on society
and individual life chances, from research on the racial disparities in public health
(e.g., the Kaiser Foundation provides regular updates on minority health, accessi-
ble at http://www.kff.org/minorityhealth/index.cfm) to racial bias in the criminal
justice system (e.g., Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in
the Age of Colorblindness [New York: New Press, 2012]), the “achievement gap” in
K–12 education (e.g., Jessica Rebell and Michael A. Wolf, NCLB at the Crossroads:
Re-examining the Federal Effort to Close the Achievement Gap [New York: Teach-
ers College Press, 2009]); and employment discrimination (e.g. George Wilson,
ed., Race, Ethnicity, and Inequality in the U.S. Labor Market, Annals of the Ameri-
can Academy of Political and Social Sciences Series, vol. 609 [Thousand Oaks,
CA: Sage, 2007]).
26. Bambi Haggins, Laughing Mad: The Black Comic Persona in the Post-Soul Era.
(New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007). See especially discussion of
Chappelle’s spectrum of conciliatory to confrontational racial humor, 192–99.
210 << Notes to Chapter 1

27. Jonathan P. Rossing, “Critical Intersections and Comic Possibilities: Extending

Racialized Critical Rhetorical Scholarship,” Communication Law Review 10, no.1
(2010): 10–27, 15.
28. Edward Schiappa, Beyond Representational Correctness: Rethinking Criticism to
Popular Media (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2008).
29. Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York: Dell Books, 1963/1983).
30. Squires, Dispatches.
31. Thomas Holt, The Problem of Race in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge: Har-
vard University Press, 2000), 23.

Notes to Chapter 1
1. Peter Goldman, “Sizing up Carter: The Question of Character,” Newsweek, Sep-
tember 13, 1976.
2. My research assistants and I searched for items in the Lexis/Nexis English-Only
News database. The assistants read through the items to eliminate articles that
were repeats, as well as articles that were captured due to idiosyncrasies such as
having the Washington Post moniker situated next to the word “race.” I created
a codebook based on previous research, and then the assistants read through
each item to identify explicit assumptions, themes, and people associated with
“post-racial.” I also read through the items to identify other unexpected themes or
issues associated with the term.
3. See analysis of news reports on Tiger Woods in Squires, Dispatches from the Color
Line, 189–92.
4. Tom Teepen, “We’re Red, White, Blue and Lots More,” South Bend Tribune, April
27, 1997. This piece was syndicated by Cox News Service, and also appeared in five
other newspapers in the West and Midwest.
5. Gordon Dillow, “Their Race? Some Students Just Won’t Say,” Orange County Reg-
ister, March 19, 1998.
6. “Recent Case Argued Before the Supreme Court Regarding Redisctricing,” Talk of
the Nation, NPR, May 18, 1999.
7. Jim Schutze, “Taking It to the Street: Want to Get Elected to City Council in
Southern Dallas? Forget the Race Card and Patch that Pothole,” Dallas Observer,
April 22, 1999.
8. Ibid.
9. Noemie Emery’s essay was part of the special segment of the Weekly Standard
titled, “Is There a Worldwide Conservative Crack-Up? A Symposium,” August 25,
1997/September 1, 1997.
10. Squires, Dispatches, 175–78.
11. Bradley Jones and Roopali Mukherjee, “From California to Michigan: Race,
Rationality and Neoliberal Governmentality,” Communication and Critical/Cul-
tural Studies 7, no. 4: (2010) 401–22.
12. For example, Illinois Representative Joe Walsh (R) was caught on camera at a
2012 town hall meeting telling the crowd that “[t]he Democratic Party promises
 Notes to Chapter 1 >> 211

groups of people everything. They want the Hispanic vote, they want Hispan-
ics to be dependent upon government, just like they got African-Americans
dependent upon government. That’s their game. Jesse Jackson would be out of
work if they weren’t dependent upon government. There’d be no work for him.”
See “Joe Walsh: Democrats Want Hispanics, African Americans ‘‘Dependent On
Government,’” Huffington Post.com, May 30, 2012, http://www.huffingtonpost.
com/2012/05/30/joe-walsh-hispanics-african-americans_n_1557480.html. During
the 2012 primaries, candidates Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum argued that
Obama wanted black people to remain dependent, and falsely claimed his policies
had made more Americans dependent on food stamps than during any other
administration. And, after a speech to the NAACP, front-runner Mitt Romney
implied that black voters who supported Obama just wanted other citizens to give
up precious tax dollars so they could get “free stuff.” Susan Brooks Thistlethwait,
“‘‘Free Stuff?’ The message from Romney’s NAACP Speech,” Washington Post.
com, July 12, 2012, http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/guest-voices/post/free-
stuff-the-message-from-romneys-naacp-speech/2012/07/12/gJQAFNhGgW_blog.
html.
13. The Joshua Generation is a reference to a passage from the Old Testament
which has to do with a younger generation who benefit from the struggles of
their parents. Obama dubbed himself and other young politicians the “Joshua
Generation” who followed the “Moses Generation” of civil rights activists
whose actions created the context for his successes in college and politics.
He used the term in his March 4, 2007, speech in Selma, Alabama, to com-
memorate the 1965 “Bloody Sunday” march for voting rights. “It was left to the
Joshuas to finish the journey Moses had begun, and today we’re called to be the
Joshuas of our time, to be the generation that finds our way across the river.”
Full text of the speech available at http://blogs.suntimes.com/sweet/2007/03/
obamas_selma_speech_text_as_de.html.
14. See, for example, Charles Payne’s enlightening history of civil rights from the
grass roots level, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom, as well as in Nikhil Pal Singh,
Black Is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy. (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 2004). For discussions of the erasure of women’s leader-
ship, see Bernice McNair Barnett, “Invisible Southern Black Women Leaders in
the Civil Rights Movement: The Triple Constraints of Gender, Race, and Class,”
Gender and Society 7, no. 2 (June 1993): 162–82. For analysis and commentary
on the problematic focus on male leadership, see Belinda Robinette, How Long,
How Long? African American Women in the Struggle for Civil Rights (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1997), and bell hooks, Salvation: Black People and Love
(New York: Harper Perennial, 2001). For discussions of the problematic way the
civil rights movement—and Martin Luther King, Jr., in particular—is memorial-
ized, see Renee C. Romano and Leigh Raiford, eds., The Civil Rights Movement in
American Memory (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006); Jacqueline Dowd,
“The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past,” The Journal
212 << Notes to Chapter 1

of American History 91, no.4 (2005): 1233–63; and Ronald Turner, “The Dangers of
Misappropriation: Misusing Martin Luther King Jr.’s Legacy to Prove the Color-
blind Thesis,” Michigan Journal of Race & Law 2, no.1 (1996): 101–30.
15. Matt Bai’s New York Times Magazine cover article, “Is Obama the End of Black
Politics,” gathered together the entire elected body of “Joshua Generation”—i.e.,
post-racial politicians—in one feature published August 10, 2008. Prior to that,
however, each of the men listed in this section were repeatedly associated with
the term “post-racial,” but none more than Booker between 2002 and 2005.
16. Dave Russakoff, “In Newark Race, Black Political Visions Collide,” Washington
Post, May 14, 2002.
17. Alexandra Marks, “New Game in Urban Politics,” Christian Science Monitor, May
10, 2002.
18. This narrative was also reflected in the now-famous documentary made about
the campaign, Street Fight, dir. Marshall Curry (Magnolia Home Entertain-
ment, 2005), reviews of which allowed reporters and commentators to revisit
and reinforce the theme of black generational conflict. The film premiered at the
Tribeca Film Festival and then was aired on PBS’s Point of View on July 5, 2005. It
was nominated for an Academy Award for best documentary, guaranteeing more
coverage by the media.
19. Marks, “New Game in Urban Politics.”
20. Russakoff, “In Newark Race.”
21. Ellis Cose, “What the Revolution Was For,” Newsweek, May 13, 2002.
22. Jonathan Tepperman, “Complicating the Race,” New York Times, April 28, 2002.
23. Chris Smith, “Brooklyn Bantustan,” New York Magazine, July 24, 2006.
24. Houston Baker, Jr., “Critical Memory and the Black Public Sphere,” in The Black
Public Sphere, ed. Black Public Sphere Collective (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1995), 5–38.
25. See Turner, “The Dangers of Misappropriation.” Ron Walters, “Keep King’s Words
in Context,” Baltimore Sun, January 19, 1998.
26. For a bracing, thorough set of discussions on the ways in which popular represen-
tations of black power are limited and limiting, see V. P. Franklin, ed., New Black
Power Studies: National, International and Transnational Perspectives, special issue
of, Journal of African American History 92, no. 4 (2007).
27. See Clare Jean Kim, “Managing the Racial Breach: Clinton, Black-White Polariza-
tion, and the Race Initiative,” Political Science Quarterly 117, no. 1 (2002): 55–79;
and John Brenkman, “Race Publics,” Transition 66 (1995): 4–36.
28. Examples abound of Republican appointees, supporters, and elected officials
who made public statements or pursued policies that clashed with basic ideas
of civil rights or racial equality. See, for example, defenses of the Confederate
flag in many Republican-led states such as South Carolina throughout the early
2000s; Senator Trent Lott’s 2002 speech lauding Strom Thurmond and wishing
he had won the presidency in 1948, when running on the segregationist platform;
the anti-interracial dating policies (not ended until March 2000) at Bob Jones
 Notes to Chapter 1 >> 213

University, a regular stop on the speaking circuit for any Republican presidential
hopeful; and the widespread stereotyping of Muslim and Arab Americans as
terrorists-in-waiting, deserving of extra surveillance and/or harassment, exempli-
fied most recently by Representative Peter King’s much-criticized hearings on
Muslim American “radicalization” in 2011.
29. Andrew Sullivan, “The Left and Condoleeza Rice,” New York Sun, November 19,
2004.
30. Luiza Savage, “Senator Miller’s Angry Keynote Divided Listeners,” New York Sun,
September 3, 2004.
31. Jonah Goldberg, “Only Time will Zell,” National Review, September 2, 2004.
32. See Steven M. Teles’s account of the racial strategies of “compassionate conser-
vatism” in the 1990s and early 2000s in “The Eternal Return of Compassionate
Conservatism,” National Affairs (Fall 2009), 107–27.
33. “The Politics of Tokenism,” Economist, August 12, 2004.
34. Keyes notoriously said in one debate and in ads that Obama wasn’t a “real” black
man (or a real Christian). See commentary on the debate in Richard Thompson
Ford, “Name Games: The Folly in the Attempts to Define African American,”
Slate.com, September 16, 2004, http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/
jurisprudence/2004/09/name_games.html.
35. Steven Malanga, “Reagan’s Unlikely Heir,” City Journal, Winter 2006.
36. Frances Fitzgerald, “Holy Toledo! Ohio’s Gubernatorial Race Tests the Power of
the Christian Right,” New Yorker, July 11, 2006.
37. Kathryn Jean Lopez, “Meet ‘Jesse Jackson’s Worst Nightmare,’” National Review,
February 15, 2006.
38. Ibid.
39. Many academics and political observers have observed the contradictions in the
strategy of using conservatives of color to legitimate racially coded rhetoric and
policy measures. See, for example, Angela Dillard, “How the New Black Elite
Peddles Conservatism,” New Labor Forum 13, no. 1 (2004): 31–38.
40. O’Connor wrote: “The Court takes the Law School at its word that it would like
nothing better than to find a race-neutral admissions formula and will terminate
its use of racial preferences as soon as practicable. The Court expects that 25 years
from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the
interest approved today,” Grutter v. Bollinger, 539 U.S. 306 (2003).
41. George F. Will, “The Supreme Court Made No Sense Here,” Charleston Daily Mail,
June 28, 2003.
42. Colbert I. King, “Truth from Justice Ginsberg,” Washington Post, June 28, 2003.
43. Susan Herbst, Rude Democracy: Civility and Incivility in American Politics (Phila-
delphia: Temple University Press, 2010), 150, n. 14.
44. We double-coded a subsample of 25 percent of the stories for coder agreement.
All results reported here had at least 90 percent inter-coder agreement.
45. Stephanie Li, Signifying Without Specifying: Racial Discourse in the Age of Obama
(New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2012).
214 << Notes to Chapter 1

46. See, for example, Enid Logan, At This Defining Moment: Barack Obama’s Presi-
dential Candidacy and the New Politics of Race (New York: New York University
Press, 2011); various contributions to Heather Harris, Kimberly Moffit, and
Catherine Squires, eds., The Obama Effect: Multidisciplinary Renderings of the
2008 Campaign (Albany: SUNY Press, 2010); Catherine R. Squires and Sarah J.
Jackson, “Reducing Race: News Themes in the 2008 Primaries,” International
Journal of Press/Politics 15, no. 4 (2010): 375–400; Siobahn Stiles and Carolyn
Kitch, “‘‘Redemption for Our Anguished Racial History’: Race and the National
Narrative in Commemorative Journalism about Barack Obama,” Journal of Com-
munication Inquiry 35 (2011): 115–33.
47. Enid Logan, At This Defining Moment, 31.
48. Stiles and Kitch, “‘Redemption,’” 128.
49. Daniel Schorr, “Wright Hurts Obama’s Notion of a Post-Racial World,” All Things
Considered, NPR(Washington, DC, April 29, 2008).
50. Mohammed Ali Salih, “A Son’s Wisdom on a Post-Racial World,” USA Today,
February 22, 2008.
51. Richard Rodriguez, “Black, White, and Shades of Grey,” Newsweek, June 2, 2008
(emphasis mine).
52. Mark Dolliver, “Double-Vision: The Race Issue Revisited,” Adweek.com, July 14,
2008.
53. James A. Bacon, “Put Race Behind Us?” Deseret Morning News, November 11,
2008.
54. Ibid.
55. Emily W. Pettus, “For Ole Miss, Debate Marks School’s Progress,” Associated
Press, September 20, 2008.
56. Michael Crowley, “Post-Racial,” New Republic, March 12, 2008.
57. Dana Cloud, “To Veil the Threat of Terror: Afghan Women and the Clash of Civi-
lizations in the Imagery of the U.S. War on Terrorism,” Quarterly Journal of Speech
90, no. 3 (2004): 285–306.
58. “From Slavery to Obama,” Chicago Sun Times, November 5, 2008.
59. Justin Ewers, “An Enviable Position for Civil Rights Advocates,” US News & World
Report, December 1, 2008.
60. See Robert Spicer, “The Obama Mass: Barack Obama, Image, and Fear of the
Crowd,” in Harris, Moffit, and Squires, eds., The Obama Effect, 190–208.
61. Ibid. Public endorsements from Senator Ted Kennedy and Caroline Kennedy, the
daughter of President John F. Kennedy, came early in the campaign, along with
numerous comparisons between JFK and Obama—both were elected senators at a
young age, both were Harvard educated, etc.
62. There continue to be superhero memes inspired by Booker. Recently, see the Twit-
ter hashtag fest “#corybookerstories” after the mayor rescued someone from a
burning building in April 2012. Twitter users imagined other humorous and not-
so-humorous rescues Booker might be involved with in the future, such as “Cory
Booker caught N. Korea’s missile launch with his bare hands #corybookerstories.”
 Notes to Chapter 1 >> 215

63. Dan Spencer, “Would an Obama Victory Prolong the Racial Divide?” California
Yankee, February 28, 2008.
64. Ron Feldman, “Letter to the Editor: Obama Has Invited Legitimate Criticism,”
Chicago Daily Herald, March 28, 2008.
65. Pamela Gellar, “The Real Racism in Obamanation,” Atlas Shrugs.com, November 17,
2008, http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/atlas_shrugs/2008/11/the-real-racism.html.
66. The Southern Poverty Law Center, as well as the FBI and other organizations,
have charted increases in white power organizations and their activities since
Obama was elected. See SPLC summaries of white hate groups at http://www.
splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-report/browse-all-issues/2012/spring/
the-year-in-hate-and-extremism. See also the Leadership Conference’s discussion
of white power groups and hate crimes at http://www.civilrights.org/publica-
tions/hatecrimes/white-supremacist.html, and Democracy Now! special report on
white supremacist group activities at http://www.democracynow.org/2010/1/11/
white_power_usa_the_rise_of.
67. Annette John-Hall, “Race Still Matters in Obama’s Post-Racial America,” Philadel-
phia Inquirer, January 26, 2009.
68. Ibid.
69. DeWayne Wickham, “Post-Racial Era? Go Tell Victims of Police Shootings,” USA
Today, January 13, 2009.
70. Ryan McAuliffe Straus, “Racism Is Still among Us,” Albany Times-Union, January
21, 2009.
71. “The Post-Racial Conversation, One Year In,” Talk of the Nation, NPR, January 18,
2009.
72. Andrew Breitbart, “No More Apologies from Sotomayor,” Washington Times, June
1, 2009.
73. In 2012, the issue of racial profiling became a hot topic in the news due to high
profile shootings in Oakland, CA, and in Florida. This prompted more discussion
of data and studies that strongly suggest police use racial profiling extensively
and without cause in cities such as New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago. See,
for example, editorials in the New York Times on the “stop and frisk” laws (e.g.
“Injustices of Stop and Frisk,” , New York Times, May 13, 2012, http://www.nytimes.
com/2012/05/14/opinion/injustices-of-stop-and-frisk.html?_r=1); articles and
editorials in TheRoot.com and Colorlines.com on the racial impact of so-called
“stand your ground” laws in states such as Florida (e.g., Jenée Desmond-Harris,
“Florida, Black Victims, and Stand Your Ground,” TheRoot.com, June 5, 2012,
http://www.theroot.com/buzz/florida-black-victims-stand-your-ground; Sean
Thomas-Breitfeld, “Could I Be Both Trayvon Martin AND George Zimmerman?”
ColorLines.com, April 11, 2012, http://colorlines.com/archives/2012/04/could_i_
be_both_trayvon_martin_and_george_zimmerman.html.
74. “President Obama Shows Race Baiting Lessons Learned from Wright, et al.,”
Weapons of Mass Discussion, July 23, 2009, http://massdiscussion.blogspot.
com/2009/07/president-obama-shows-race-baiting.html.
216 << Notes to Chapter 1

75. John Yoo, “Court’s Push Toward Post-Racial America,” Providence Journal-Bulle-
tin (Rhode Island), July 11, 2009.
76. Roger Simon, “What Happened to Post-Racial America?” Politico.com, August 7,
2009, http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0809/25890.html.
77. Glenn C. Loury, “Obama, Gates, and the American Black Man,” New York Times,
July 26, 2009.
78. “Black Intellectuals Decry ‘Beer Summit’: Say Notion of a Post-Racial America is
a Myth,” States News Service, August 6, 2009.
79. “Whose ‘‘Post-Racial’’ America?” Tell Me More, NPR, July 22, 2009.
80. Lillian Morgeau, “Gaining Ground: Getting to Post-Racial by Way of Pop Cul-
ture,” Sunday Oregonian, March 29, 2009.
81. Lenox Magee, “Post-Race USA—Are we There Yet?” N’Digo, February 19, 2009.
82. Glenn Gamboa, “Jackson: About Face on Race?” New York Newsday, July 5, 2009.
83. Andrew Dansby, “Michael Jackson 1958–2009: Legacy Lies in his Art, not Scan-
dals,” Houston Chronicle, June 26, 2009.
84. “A New Post-Racial Political Era in America.” All Things Considered, NPR, Janu-
ary 28, 2008.
85. Shelby Steele, et al., “The President is No Redeemer, Post-Racial or Otherwise,”
Wall Street Journal, November 9, 2010.
86. Pam Spaulding, “Ring in the Post-Racial New Year: Obama Effigy in Plains,
GA,” Pam’s House Blend, January 3, 2010, http://pamshouseblend.firedoglake.
com/2010/01/03/ring-in-the-postracial-new-year-obama-effigy-in-plains-ga/. The
story was also posted on Therawstory.com on January 5, 2010.
87. Charles J. Ogletree and Johanna Wald, “A Little Less ‘‘Post-Racial,’’ a Little More
Listening,” Washington Post, July 24, 2010.
88. Bonnie Goldstein, “A Child Will Lead Us: Post-Racial Atti-
tudes,” Politics Daily, July 22, 2010, http://www.politicsdaily.
com/2010/07/22/a-child-will-lead-us-post-racial-attitudes/.
89. Lauri Apple, “Liveblogging the Apotheosis of Michelle Bachmann,” Wonkette.
com, August 10, 2010.
90. Di Hall, Letter to the Editor, Fresno Bee, 2010, http://wonkette.com/417300/
liveblogging-the-apotheosis-of-st-michele-bachmann-of-minnesota-and-other-
midterm-primaries.
91. Steve Dickler, “Tea Party New Source for Hope, Change,” Island Packet, Septem-
ber 14, 2010.
92. Ron Todt, “Conservative Blogger says Obama Not ‘Post-Racial,’” Associated Press,
July 31, 2010.
93. “Shirley Sherrod and a ‘Post-Racial’ America,” Los Angeles Times, July 22, 2010.
94. See images and footage at “Slideshow, Offensive Tea Party Signs, YouTube video,
2:15, posted by “naacpvideos,” September 2, 2010, http://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=uPKhH7tYIj8; “Tea Party Racism: What the Media Won’t Show You
About Teabagger Racism,” YouTube Video, 5:28, posted by “ronaldjacksonX,”
February 9, 2010, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S38VioxnBaI&feature=re
 Notes to Chapter 2 >> 217

lated; “10 Most Offensive Tea Party Signs and Extensive Photo Coverage from
Tax Day Protests,” Huffington Post, April 16, 2009, http://www.huffingtonpost.
com/2009/04/16/10-most-offensive-tea-par_n_187554.html?ref=tea-party; and
Arian Campo-Flores, “Are Tea Partiers Racist?” The Daily Beast, April 25, 2010,
http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2010/04/25/are-tea-partiers-racist.html.
95. See, for example, t-shirts and bumper stickers for sale with the slogan “Obama:
African Lion or Lyin’ African” at zazzle.com. Or do a Google search for “Obama
pimp” and see the many ugly Photoshop mash ups of the president and first lady
as pimp and prostitute.
96. Mary Sanchez, “Post-Racial U.S.? Not Happening,” Modesto Bee, July 26, 2010.
97. Ibid.
98. David Dante Troutte, “‘‘Post-Racial’ Blame Games,” Politico.com, July 22,
2010. http://www.seattlepi.com/national/politico/article/post-racial-blame-
games-896291.php.
99. Pam Spaulding, “More Post-Racial America: Blacks Still Barred from Juries, KY
Segregated Clubs Still Live On,” Pam’s House Blend, June 2, 2010, http://www.
pamshouseblend.com.
100. Ibid.
101. Tim Barker, “Campus Hate Crimes Defy Idea of Post-Racial America,” Salt Lake
Tribune, April 10, 2010.
102. Brian Gilmore, “We Need a Post-Racial and Post-Poverty America,” Modesto Bee,
January 17, 2010.
103. Ibid.

Notes to Chapter 2
1. See, for example, Todd Gitlin, Twilight of Common Dreams: Why America Is
Wracked by Culture Wars (New York: Henry Holt, 1996). See critiques of the “class
over race” approach in Aldon Morris and Carol McClurg-Miller, eds., Frontiers in
Social Movement Theory (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992).
2. See, for example, Samuel Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations,” Foreign Affairs
72, no. 3,(1993): 22–49. For discussion and critiques of the “clash” paradigm
and assumptions about the benefits of assimilation to Western values, see Tariq
Modood, “Is Multiculturalism Dead?” Public Policy Research 15, no. 2 (June–
August 2008): 84–88. See also Douglas Hartmann and Joseph Gerteis, “Dealing
with Diversity: Mapping Multiculturalism in Sociological Terms,” Sociological
Theory 23, (2005): 218–40, on competing definitions of multiculturalism and how
assimilation is one of many mechanisms for managing diversity of groups in
society.
3. See Douglas Hartmann, Xuefeng Zhang, and William Wischstadt, “One (Mul-
ticultural) Nation under God? Changing Uses and Meanings of the Term
‘Judeo-Christian’ in the American Media,” Journal of Media & Religion 4, no. 4
(2005): 207–34, on the increasing use of “Judeo-Christian” as a term to describe a
narrowing sense of common moral foundations for citizens in the United States.
218 << Notes to Chapter 2

For a defense of the notion that the United States is essentially a Judeo-Christian,
conservative, free-market ordered, and superior country, see Dennis Prager, Still
the Best Hope: Why the World Needs American Values to Triumph (New York:
Harper Collins, 2012). Also see discussion of how the Christian Right frames
liberals and Democrats as degraders of Judeo-Christian and free market values
in Chris Hedges, American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008).
4. Harris-Lacewell, Barbershops, Bibles, and BET, 255.
5. Ibid., 38.
6. Birgit Meyer and Annaliese Moore, “Introduction,” in Religion, Media and the
Public Sphere, ed. Birgit Meyer and Annaliese Moore (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 2006).
7. Ibid., 1.
8. John T. McGreevy, Parish Boundaries: The Catholic Encounter with Race in the
Twentieth-Century Urban North (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).
9. Henry Goldschmidt, “Introduction,” in Race, Nation and Religion in the Americas,
ed. Henry Goldschmidt and Elizabeth McAllister (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2004), 5.
10. Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States: From
the 1960s to the 1990s, second edition (New York: Routledge, 1994), 56.
11. Robert Fanuzzi, “Frederick Douglass’s ‘Colored News Paper’: Identity Politics in
Black and White,” in The Black Press: New Literary and Historical Essays, ed. Todd
Vogel (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2001), 55–70.
12. Charles Payne, I’ve Got the Light Of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the
Mississippi Freedom Struggle. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007). See
discussions of black churches and responses to LGBT rights in Cassandra Chaney
and Le’Brian Patrick, “The Invisibility of LGBT Individuals in Black Mega-
Churches,” Journal of African American Studies 15 (2011): 199–217; Christopher
Lisotta, “Homophobia of All Hues,” Nation, May 17, 2004; and Eric Daniel, “Black
Clergy in the 2000 Election,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 42, no. 4
(2003): 533–46.
13. Numerous news outlets and activists have noted, in hindsight, that initial reports
that African Americans had “tipped the balance” for Prop 8 in California were
wrong, and that in polls African Americans report more support for gay mar-
riage than other groups. See, for example, Jorge Rivas, “People of Color More
Likely to Support Gay Marriage,” Colorlines.com, May 23, 2012, http://colorlines.
com/archives/2012/05/people_of_color_more_likely_to_support_gay_marriage_
than_whites_abc_poll_finds.html; Scott Keyes and Jay Legum, “Two African
American Pastors Explain Why they Support Gay Marriage,” ThinkProgress.
org, July 12, 2012 http://thinkprogress.org/lgbt/2012/07/12/515269/african-
american-marriage-equality/?mobile=nc; and Jenee Desmond Harris, “Blacks
and Gay Marriage,” TheRoot.com, May 24, 2012, http://www.theroot.com/buzz/
african-american-support-marriage-equality-higher-general-pop.
 Notes to Chapter 2 >> 219

14. Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction and the Meaning of
Liberty (New York: Random House/Pantheon Books, 1997); Harriet A. Washing-
ton, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black
People from Colonial Times to the Present (New York: Random House, 2008).
15. See discussions of outrage over the billboards that stated things such as “Black
children are an endangered species” in Miriam Z. Perez, “Past and Pres-
ent Collide as the Black Anti-Abortion Movement Grows,” Colorlines.com,
March 2011, http://colorlines.com/archives/2011/03/past_and_present_col-
lide_as_the_black_anti-abortion_movement_grows.html; Sarah Ostman,
“Women Speak out Against Anti-Abortion Billboards Targeting African
Americans,” Austin Talks.org, July 1, 2011, http://austintalks.org/2011/07/
women-speak-out-against-anti-abortion-billboards-targeting-african-americans/.
16. “Controversial Ad Links MLK, GOP,” Washington Post, October 19, 2006, http://
www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/18/AR2006101801754.
html.
17. E.R. Shipp, “Black Republicans Have Gall to Call King One of Their Own,” New
York Daily News, October 8, 2006, http://articles.nydailynews.com/2006-10-08/
news/18351594_1_national-black-republican-association-michael-steele-demo-
cratic-party.
18. Tali Mendelberg, The Race Card: Campaign Strategy, Implicit Messages, and the
Norm of Equality (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).
19. Sharon Schmickle, “Christian Coalition Sets Sights on Broader Racial Appeal,”
Minneapolis Star Tribune, January 31, 1997.
20. Reed, quoted in ibid.
21. Although Warren’s views on these issues lean progressive, he is also known
for being anti-abortion and anti-gay marriage. President Obama was heav-
ily criticized for inviting him to give an invocation at his 2008 inauguration.
See Alexander Mooney, “Obama’s Inaugural Choice sparks Outrage,” CNN.
com, December 17, 2008, http://articles.cnn.com/2008-12-17/politics/obama.
warren_1_gay-marriage-gay-equality-gay-rights-proponents?_s=PM:POLITICS.
22. For reports on racial reconciliation events and mergers, see postings in the Baptist
Press, such as this article on churches in Louisville, KY, that merged in 2009:
David Winfrey, “2 Churches, in Uniting, Envision Model for Racial Reconcilia-
tion and Changing Lives,” September 2, 2009, http://www.bpnews.net/bpnews.
asp?id=31185. Also see commentary on racism and religious separation in David
Van Biema, “Can Megachurches Bridge the Racial Divide?” Time.com, January 11,
2010, http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1950943,00.html.
23. Although this chapter focuses on media outreach by a particular coalition of faith-
based groups and conservative politicians, I mention these other initiatives to note
that black audiences of Christian faith may or may not discern differences between
mediated appeals like JSIII and the aforementioned desegregation efforts. Perhaps
people who have engaged in intra-faith, anti-racist initiatives would be more or less
skeptical of the billboards and commercials mentioned in the earlier section.
220 << Notes to Chapter 2

24. Rove and his operatives were linked to an attack ad that claimed that John
McCain’s adopted daughter—who is from India—was actually a secret black love
child born to a black mistress. See Jennifer Steinhauer, “Confronting Ghosts of
2000,” New York Times, October 19, 2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/19/
us/politics/19mccain.html?pagewanted=all.
25. For an interesting look at Republicans’ racial code word strategies, see Stefan
Forbes, dir., Boogeyman: The Lee Atwater Story, (Interpositive Media, 2008). See
also Mendelberg, The Race Card.
26. Teles, “The Eternal Return of Compassionate Conservatism,” 109, my italics.
27. Ibid.; Tasha S. Philpot, Race, Republicans and the Return of the Party of Lincoln
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007).
28. Tracy Van Slyke, “Bush Meeting Black Clergy: Will Try to Mend Some Fences
while Seeking Help on Social Issues,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, December 20, 2000.
29. David Kirkpatrick, “Black Pastors Backing Bush are Rarities, but not Alone,” New
York Times, October 5, 2004.
30. Teles, “The Eternal Return of Compassionate Conservatism.”
31. Laurie Goodsteing, “Minister, a Bush Ally, Gives Church as Site for Alito Rally,”
New York Times, January 5, 2006.
32. Tom Krattenmaker, “A ‘War’ on Christians? No,” USA Today, March 27, 2006.
33. Kimberly Hefling, “Conservatives to Rally One Day Before Alito Hearings,” Asso-
ciated Press, January 6, 2006.
34. Michelle Hiskey, “Herb Lusk II: First Prayer,” Atlanta Journal Constitution, Febru-
ary 4, 2006.
35. Hefling, “Conservatives to Rally.”
36. Ibid.
37. Max Blumenthal, “Who Are Justice Sunday’s Ministers of Minstrelsy?,” Huffington
Post, January 6, 2006, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/max-blumenthal/who-are-
justice-sundays-m_b_13348.html.
38. Italics mine. Note: all example quotations from the Justice Sunday III broadcast
come from the official transcript that I downloaded from the FRC website. I
watched the entire DVD while reading through the transcript to ensure there
were no significant changes to the text as spoken.
39. Kevin Coe and David Domke, “Petitioners or Prophets? Presidential Discourse,
God, and the Ascendancy of Religious Conservatives,” Journal of Communication
56, (2006): 309–35.
40. Blumenthal, “Who are Justice Sunday’s Ministers?”
41. Many scholars have written about the patriarchal biases in some strands of black
nationalism. See Toni Morrison, ed., Race-ing Justice, En-Gendering Power;
Patricia Hill Collins, Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the
New Racism (New York: Routledge, 2004); bell hooks, We Real Cool: Black Men
and Masculinity (New York: Routledge, 2004). For specific discussion of black
feminist responses to the billboard campaigns that posited black mothers’ wombs
were the “most dangerous place” for black children, see Kimala Price, “What is
 Notes to Chapter 3 >> 221

Reproductive Justice?: How Women of Color Activists Are Redefining the Pro-
Choice Paradigm,” Meridiens 10, no. 2(2010): 42–65.
42. James Bennett, Religion and the Rise of Jim Crow in New Orleans (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2005); Michael Emerson and Christian Smith, Divided
by Faith: Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2000).

Notes to Chapter 3
1. See, for example, Herman Gray, Watching Race: Television and the Struggle for
“Blackness” (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995); Robin R. Means
Coleman, African American Viewers and the Black Situation Comedy: Situating
Racial Humor (New York: Garland, 1999).
2. Melvin P. Ely, The Adventures of Amos ‘n’ Andy: A Social History of an American
Phenomenon (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1991).
3. Means Coleman, African American Viewers; Janette Dates and William Barlow,
eds., Split Image: African Americans in the Mass Media (Washington, DC: Howard
University Press, 1990).
4. In addition to Gray, Means Coleman, and Dates and Barlow, see also Christine
Acham, Revolution Televised: Prime Time and the Struggle for Black Power (Minne-
apolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004); Sut Jhally and Justin Lewis, Enlight-
ened Racism: The Cosby Show, Audiences, and the Myth of the American Dream
(Boulder, CO: Westview, 1992); Darnell Hunt, ed., Channeling Blackness: Studies on
Television and Race in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).
5. Jerry Large, “A New Era Begins: The Significance of the Barack Obama Victory
for America,” Blackpast.org, n.d., http://www.blackpast.org/?q=perspectives/
new-era-begins-significance-barack-obama-victory-america-and-world.
6. Schiappa, Beyond Representational Correctness.
7. Tim Arango, “Before There was Obama, There was Bill Cosby,” New York Times,
November 7, 2008.
8. The British movie Secrets and Lies, directed by Mike Leigh (October Films, 1996),
tells the story of a black optometrist who seeks her birth mother—only to find
she is white and uncomfortable telling the rest of the family the story. The birth
mother keeps her daughter a secret until she lets slip at a party that the black
woman she’d been pretending was a colleague is actually her daughter.
9. Romney’s “joke” was part of the infamous “47 percent” remarks he made during
a fundraising event for wealthy donors. See David Corn, 47 Percent: Uncovering
the Romney Video that Rocked the 2012 Election (New York: Harper Collins, 2012).
In the wake of the Newtown, Connecticut shootings, gun advocates—includ-
ing some Republican lawmakers—widely suggested that women would be better
protected from all kinds of violence if they had guns, at the same time that they
refused to support the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act. See
Madeline Morgenstern, “GOP Rep: ‘I Wish Elementary Principal Had an M4
in her Office,’” TheBlaze.com, December 16, 2012, http://www.theblaze.com/
222 << Notes to Chapter 3

stories/2012/12/16/gop-rep-i-wish-elementary-principal-had-an-m4-in-her-
office-takes-his-head-off-before-he-can-kill-those-precious-kids/. Fox commen-
tator Dana Perino was one of many who argued that domestic violence victims
would be well served by guns and by making “better choices” in their lives. See
Melissa Jeffersen, “Dana Perino: ‘Female Victims of Violence Should make Bet-
ter Decisions,’” Huffington Post, December 6, 2012, http://www.huffingtonpost.
com/2012/12/06/dana-perinovictims-of-vio_n_2251761.html.
10. Mary Vavrus, Postfeminist News (Albany: SUNY Press, 2007) 49.
11. Ibid.
12. Amy Allen, “Mommy Wars Redux: A False Conflict,” New York Times, May 27,
2012.
13. Smith, quoted in Watts, “Nearly Apocalyptic Politics,” 217.
14. Watts, “Nearly Apocalyptic Politics.”
15. Mary Beltran and Camille Fojas, eds., Mixed Race Hollywood (New York: New
York University Press, 2008); Ralina Joseph, “Tyra Banks is Fat: Reading (Post-)
Racism and (Post) Feminism in the New Millennium,” Critical Studies in Media
Communication 26, no. 3, (2009): 237–54;
16. Suzanne Bost, Mulattas and Mestizas: Representing Mixed Identities in the Ameri-
cas, 1850–2000 (Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 2002); Carolyn
Streeter, “The Hazards of Visibility: ‘Biracial’ Women, Media Images and Narra-
tives of Identity,” in New Faces in a Changing America: Multiracial Identity in the
Twenty-First Century, ed. Loretta I. Winters and Herman L. DuBose (Thousand
Oaks, CA: Sage, 2003), 194–221.
17. Squires, Dispatches from the Color Line; Kim M. Williams, Mark One or More:
Civil Rights in Multiracial America (University of Michigan Press, 2008); Kathleen
Odell Korgen, ed., Multiracial Americans and Social Class: The Influence of Social
Class on Racial Identity (New York: Routledge, 2010).
18. G. Reginald Daniel, “Multiracial Identity in Global Perspective: The United States,
Brazil, and South Africa,” in New Faces in a Changing America, 247–86.
19. Michelle Elam, The Souls of Mixed Folk: Race, Politics and Aesthetics in the New
Millennium (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011).
20. Ibid., xix.
21. Bambi Haggins, Laughing Mad: The Black Comic Persona in Post-Soul America
(New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007).
22. Jonathan P. Rossing, “Deconstructing Postracialism: Humor as a Critical Cultural
Project,” Journal of Communication Inquiry 36, no. 1 (2012): 44–61.
23. Leonard M. Baynes, “White Out: The Absence and Stereotyping of People of
Color by the Broadcast Networks in Prime Time Entertainment Programming,”
in Media Diversity and Localism, ed. Phililp Napoli (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence
Erlbaum, 2007), 11–26; Robert Entman and Andrew Rojecki, The Black Image in
the White Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000); Leon E. Wynter,
American Skin: Pop Culture, Big Business and the End of White America (New
York: Crown, 2002).
 Notes to Chapter 3 >> 223

24. Jonathan Kraszewski, “Multiracialism on The Real World and the Reconfiguration
of Politics in MTV’s Brand during the 2000s,” Popular Communication 8, (2010):
132–46.
25. Leilani Nishime, “Aliens: Narrating U.S. Global Identity through Transnational
Adoption and Interracial Marriage in Battlestar Galactica,” Critical Studies in
Media Communication 28, no. 5 (2011): 450–65.
26. Squires, Dispatches.
27. This television strategy updated the token/only tactics of the 1960s, exemplified
by I Spy and Julia. The difference here, especially in the case of Diff ’rent Strokes,
is that the black children became vehicles for racial difference not only via skin
color but behaviors, such as the use of black vernacular.
28. On the heels of the success of the 1989 film, a TV version of the movie was
launched in 1990, but it was cancelled after twelve episodes. This chapter does not
draw from that incarnation of the program.
29. For a good critique of the Judd Apatow universe and similar humorous takes
on extended male and female heterosexuals’ adolescence, see Chris Lehmann,
“HBO’s Female Regression Analysis: American Pop Culture Teems with Charac-
ters Afraid of Adult Responsibilities,” In These Times, May 17 2012, http://inthe-
setimes.com/article/13184/hbos_female_regression_analysis_girls_and_veep/.
Also see Hilary Radner’s discussion of the differences between Apatow’s “homme
coms” and “chick flicks” in Neo-Feminist Cinema: Girly Films, Chick Flicks, and
Consumer Culture (New York, Routledge 2010).
30. It seems the writers were trying to make a reference to Sekou Toure, but in the
reading of the line, it sounds like Camille says “Turunga.” To catch the error,
one must have knowledge of the actual African leader Toure; if not, the African-
sounding name is, it seems, sufficient to do the work the writers sought, which is
to show Camille as a racially/ethnically hip Baby Boomer.
31. Hill Collins, Black Sexual Politics; Wahneema Lubiano, “Like Being Mugged by a
Metaphor: Multiculturalism and State Narratives,” in Mapping Multiculturalism,
ed. Avery F. Gordon and Christopher Newfield (Minneapolis: University of Min-
nesota Press, 1996), 64–75.
32. Cherie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua, eds., This Bridge Called My Back: Writings
by Radical Women of Color, second ed. (Boston: Kitchen Table/Women of Color
Press, 1984). Some of the essays in this collection speak to the pattern in some
feminist circles wherein women of color are pressed to “solve” or suppress their
feelings about race problems which white feminists won’t address.
33. Willa Paskin, “The Showrunner Transcript: Parenthood and Friday Night Lights’
Jason Katims on Portraying Families Realistically,” Vulture.com, May 20, 2011,
http://www.vulture.com/2011/05/jason_katims_showrunner_transc.html.
34. For example, Joel experiences internal conflict about being a stay-at-home dad,
and is featured in scenes where he navigates play dates and school performances;
Julia is often seen preparing for work at her law firm in her office or at home;
Kristina has angst about whether to return to the workplace or is occupied with
224 << Notes to Chapter 4

the day to day planning of the household as well as Max’s special needs. The
camera follows Sarah as she searches for jobs, visits her kids’ schoolteachers, and
laments her failure to find steady employment. Even the patriarch and matriarch,
Zeek and Camille, have many scenes where they voice concern about financial
deals (Zeek) or what careers or vocations to pursue in semi-retirement (Camille).
35. This sensibility is also reinforced during Season Two through a storyline focused
on Joel and Julia and the issue of who makes decisions about childbearing. Add-
ing on to the existing thread of Julia’s inability to consistently bond with their
daughter, the post-feminist theme develops further as Joel pines for a return to
his (manly) construction work, his feelings exacerbated by emasculating remarks
from Zeek. Joel’s anger toward Julia for assuming he’d continue being a stay-at-
home dad with a second child suggest that, like Jasmine, Julia has chosen work at
the expense of family, endangering their happiness.
36. The show has gotten sparkling reviews in the traditional press, (e.g., “NBC’s Par-
enthood makes a case for itself,” Los Angeles Times, April 7, 2010) and online (e.g.,
Grantland’s Juliet Litman and David Jacoby told readers “Why It’s Time to Binge-
Watch Parenthood” in a January 23, 2013 post after the season finale.) Accord-
ing to ratings posted on TVbythenumbers.com, Parenthood has done well with
viewers in the 18–49 range, and its numbers improve when DVR recording data
is included. In November of 2012, it was tied for first among adult viewers 18–34
for Tuesday primetime dramas. In 2011, the show was credited with bringing NBC
back into second place in primetime viewers after lagging behind CBS and ABC
for years.
37. In 2012 the show won a PRISM Award from the Entertainment Industries Council
for realistic portrayals of mental health issues, as well as the award for Best Drama
of 2012 from the National Association of Multi-Ethnicity in Communications.
38. Kelly Kessler, “They Should Suffer like the Rest of Us: Queer Equality in Narrative
Mediocrity,” Cinema Journal 50, no. 2 (2011): 139–44; Christina M. Laveccia, “Of
Peerenting, Trophy Wives, and Effeminate Men: Modern Family’s Surprisingly
Conservative Remediation of the Family Sitcom Genre,” Harlot: A Revealing Look
at the Arts of Persuasion 6, (2011), http://harlotofthearts.org/index.php/harlot/
issue/view/6.

Notes to Chapter 4
1. Stanley Fish, Doing What Comes Naturally: Change, Rhetoric, and the Practice of
Theory in Literary and Legal Studies (Durham, NC: University of North Carolina
Press, 1989), 141
2. It is also notable that the Ku Klux Klan used showings of the film to recruit
members. Catherine Squires, African Americans and the Media (New York: Polity
Press, 2009); Thomas Cripps, Slow Fade to Black: The Negro in American Film,
1900–1942 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977).
3. Cripps, Slow Fade to Black.
 Notes to Chapter 4 >> 225

4. Ely, The Adventures of Amos n Andy.

5. Nancy Cornwell and Mark Orbe, “‘Keepin’ it Real’ and/or ‘Sellin’ Out to the Man’:
African-American Responses to Aaron McGruder’s The Boondocks,” in Say It
Loud! ed. Means Coleman (New York: Routledge, 2002), 27–43.
6. See chapters in Means Coleman, Say It Loud!, especially Debbie A. Owens,
“Media Messages, Self-Identity and Race Relations,” 77–93; Leslie B. Inniss and
Joe Feagin, “The Cosby Show: The View from the Black Middle Class,” 187–204;
Squires, “African Americans and the Media.”
7. Means Coleman, Say It Loud! 19
8. Kenneth K. Hur and John P. Robinson, “The Social Impact of ‘Roots,’” Journalism
Quarterly 55, no. 1 (1978):19–83; Richard G. Carter, “How ‘Roots’ and ‘Black.White’
Broke Racial TV Ground,” Television Quarterly 37, no. 1(2006): 55–60.
9. Malinda S. Smith, “Racism and Motivated Ignorance,” The Ardent Review 1, no.1
(April 2008): iv.
10. Ibid., vii.
11. Ibid.
12. Schiappa, Beyond Representational Correctness.
13. Kathleen Battles and Wendy Hilton-Morrow, “Gay Characters in Conventional
Spaces: Will and Grace and the Situational Comedy Genre,” Critical Studies in
Mass Communication 19, no. 1 (2002): 87–105.
14. Schiappa, Beyond Representational Correctness, ch. 3.
15. See discussions of parasocial contact in David Giles, “Parasocial Interaction: A
Review of the Literature and a Model for Future Research,” Media Psychology 4,
(2002): 279–305; see discussion of literature and results of a new study regarding
the ways television figures address viewers in Tilo Hartmann and Charlotte Gold-
hoorn, “Horton and Wohl Revisited: Exploring Viewers’ Experience of Parasocial
Interaction,” Journal of Communication 61, (2011): 1104–1121; also see results of
experimental studies of Will & Grace and attitudes regarding homosexuality in
Schiappa, Beyond Representational Correctness.
16. Schiappa, Beyond Representational Correctness, 97.
17. Travis Dixon and Cristina Azocar, “Priming Crime and Activating Blackness:
Understanding the Psychological Impact of Overrepresentation of Blacks as
Lawbreakers on Television News,” Journal of Communication 57, no. 2(2007):
229–53.
18. Jerry Kang, “Trojan Horses of Race,” Harvard Law Review 118 (2004): 1489–1593;
Michael K. Brown, et al., Whitewashing Race: The Myth of a Color-Blind Society
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004).
19. Robert Entman and Andrew Rojecki, The Black Image in the White Mind; Dixon
and Azocar, “Priming Crime and Activating Blackness”; Martin Gilens. Why
Americans Hate Welfare: Race, Media and the Politics of Antipoverty Policy (Chi-
cago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). Mary Beth Oliver and Dana Fonash,
“Race and Crime in the News: Whites’ Identification and Misidentification of
226 << Notes to Chapter 4

Violent and Nonviolent Criminal Suspects,” Media Psychology 4, (2002): 137–56;

Mendelberg, The Race Card.
20. See review in Squires, “African Americans and the Media,” 233–40.
21. Although a great number of studies in social cognition use experimental
methods, some early studies of media and parasocial interaction utilized focus
groups as well as experimental studies and surveys. See Giles, “Parasocial Inter-
action,” for a review of these studies. While audience and fan studies from the
critical cultural studies approach don’t use terms like “parasocial interaction”
to describe fans’ feelings toward media figures, the thick descriptions of fan
discourse resonate with the language used in survey instruments in experimen-
tal studies. For example, participants in both types of studies (through survey
questions or interview prompts) are asked to characterize whether and how
they compare themselves to media figures, how much time they spend with
their favorite media, and how close or real they feel the media figures are to
their lives.
22. Kang, “Trojan Horses of Race,” 1489.
23. Ibid., 1513–16.
24. Incidents of online racist, homophobic, and sexist speech and harassment via
social media get significant media attention. In the past few years, several young
people’s suicides have been attributed to social media harassment; anti-racist
organizations, journalists, and scholars have catalogued significant numbers
of hate websites and chat rooms. See, for example, the Southern Poverty Law
Center’s information about hate sites at http://www.splcenter.org/what-we-do/
hate-and-extremism; James Clementi, “Letters to My Brother,” Out Magazine,
http://www.out.com/news-commentary/2012/02/01/tyler-clementi-james-letters-
my-brother; Jeff Sonderman, “Women Journalists Confront Harassment, Sexism,
When Using Social Media,” http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/media-lab/
social-media/153944/women-journalists-confront-harassment-sexism-when-
using-social-media/; Lisa Nakamura and Peter A. Chow White, eds. Race After
the Internet. (New York: Routledge 2012). See discussions of gender, sexuality, and
hate speech online in essays such as: Cory L. Armstrong and Mindy McAdams,
“Believing Blogs: Does a Blogger’s Gender Influence Credibility?”, Ryan Rog-
ers, “Video Game Design and Acceptance of Hate Speech in Online Gaming,”
and Cynthia A. Cooper, “Anti-Gay Speech on the Internet and the Movement to
Counteract Cyber-Hate,” all in Rebecca Ann Lind, ed. Race/Gender/Class/Media:
Considering Media Diversity Across Audiences, Content and Producers, third edi-
tion (Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2012).
25. Smith, “Racism and Motivated Ignorance,” vii.
26. I used cues from photos as well as explicit statements about discussants’ racial
identity to make this determination. In all excerpts, I substitute first or first and
second letters of discussants’ names.
27. Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Beyond the Double Bind: Women and Leadership (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1995); Deidre Johnson and Debra Swanson,
 Notes to Chapter 5 >> 227

“Undermining Mothers: A Content Analysis of the Representation of Mothers in

Magazines,” Mass Communication & Society 6, no. 3 (2003): 243–65.
28. Hill Collins, Black Sexual Politics; Susan Douglas and Meredith Michaels, The
Mommy Myth: The Idealization of Motherhood and How It Has Undermined All
Women (New York: Free Press, 2004).

Notes to Chapter 5
1. Robert Asen, “A Discourse Theory of Citizenship,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 90,
no. 2 (2004), 191.
2. Ibid., 199.
3. Racialicious was originally founded by multiracial activist Jen Chau of Swirl, a
multiracial activist organization, and Carmen Sognovini.
4. HighJive, “Culturally Clueless FAQs Number 3,” Racialicious.com, March 4, 2009.
5. Channing Kennedy, “Latino Grandfather, Pregnant Woman Tasered at Baptism—
But Don’t Call the Cops Racist,” ColorLines.com, August 3, 2009.
6. Jamilah King, “Jeff Chang: It’s Bigger than Politics, the Real Shift is
Cultural,”ColorLines.com, November 4, 2010.
7. Andrew Grant-Thomas, “Obama’s Speech Addressed Several Categories of People
and Communities except Race and Ethnicity,” Racialicious.com, February 1, 2010.
8. Thea Lim, “Racialicious Responds to ‘The End of White America,’” March 17,
2009.
9. Ninoy Brown, “Blanco: In Solidarity with 1.3% of UCSD, ” Racialicious.com,
February 23, 2010.
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid.
12. Daisy Hernandez, “Prop. 8 Update: America’s Post-Gay and Post-Racial,” Color-
Lines.com, January 26, 2010.
13. Naima Ramos Chapman, “Melissa Harris Lacewell Speaks at Facing Race,” Color-
Lines.com, September 25, 2010.
14. HighJive, “Culturally Clueless FAQs Number 4,” Racialicious.com, March 5, 2009.
15. Kai Wright, “Queer Blogger Roundtable,” Colorlines.com, June 29, 2010.
16. Julianne Hing, “Meet the Delegates: David Ochoa.” ColorLines.com, August 27,
2008.
17. “Scholar Henry Louis Gates Arrested, for Nothing, at His Own House,” BlackS-
nob.com, July 21, 2009.
18. Fiqah, “Past-Time Paradise: Down-Home Racism in ‘Post-Racial’ America,”
Racialicious.com, June 25, 2010.
19. Ibid.
20. Smith, “Motivated Ignorance.”
21. Ope Bukola, “Dr. Laura, Interracial Relationships, and the Challenge of Anti-
Racist Responses,” Racialicious.com, August 19, 2010.
22. Terry Keleher, “Four Tips for Interracial Parenting,” ColorLines.com, December
22, 2010.
228 << Notes to the Conclusion

Notes to the Conclusion

1. Nugent’s remarks were roundly criticized on the Left. See Meredith Bennett-
Smith, “Ted Nugent: Gun Owners’ Next Rosa Parks, Will Sit Down on Front
Seat of the Bus.” Huffington Post, January 10, 2013, http://www.huffington-
post.com/2013/01/10/ted-nugent-gun-owners-nex . . . osa-parks-front-seat-
bus_n_2448750.html?view=print&comm_ref=false.
2. Julie Dermansky, “When Martin Luther King Day and Gun Appreciation Day
Come Together,” Atlantic, January 2013, http://www.theatlantic.com/national/
archive/2013/01/when-martin-luther-king-day-and-gun- appreciation-day-come-
together/267400/.
3. David A. Love, “Does Slavery Have Any Place in the Gun Control Debate?” The
Griot.com, January 23, 2013.
4. Melanie Hunter, “Gun Rights Advocate,” CNS News, January 11, 2013. http://
cnsnews.com/news/article/gun-rights-advocate-if-blacks-had-gun-rights-day-
one-slavery-might-not-have-happened.
5. In a blog post, the Anti-Defamation League listed multiple instances, from
the Drudge Report blog to Fox News to former Major League Baseball pitcher
John Rocker, using the Hitler and gun control argument. “Holocaust Imagery
Taints Gun Control Debate,” ADL Blogs, January 24, 2012, http://blog.adl.org/
civil-rights/holocaust-gun-control-debate.
6. Evan McMorris-Santoro, “Gun Appreciation Day Leader,” Talking Points
Memo, January 11, 2013. Comment from reader with screen name Shak-
ezula, first comment, http://livewire.talkingpointsmemo.com/entry/
gun-appreciation-day-leader-if-blacks-had-guns.
7. Michael Tesler, “TheReturn of Old-Fashioned Racism to White Americans’
Partisan Preferences in the Early Obama Era,” Journal of Politics 75, no. 1 (2013):
110–23.
8. Gary Segura and Ali A. Valenzuela, “Hope, Tropes and Dopes: Hispanic and
White Racial Animus in the 2008 Election,” Presidential Studies Quarterly, 40, no.
3 (2010): 494–514.
9. Cindy D. Kam and Donald R. Kinder, “Ethnocentrism as a Short-Term Force in
the 2008 American Presidential Election,” American Journal of Political Science 56,
no. 2 (2012): 326–40.
10. For a very accessible discussion of a handful of studies on race and recent elec-
tions, see Thomas B. Edsall, “The Persistence of Racial Resentment,” New York
Times, February 6, 2013. See also Darrel Enck-Wanzer’s commentary on the Tea
Party’s emergence and rhetoric in “Barack Obama, the Tea Party, and the Threat
of Race: On Racial Neoliberalism and Born Again Racism.” Communication,
Culture & Critique 4 (2011): 23–30.
11. Tim Wise, “We Twisted King’s Dream, So We Live with His Nightmare,” Color-
lines.com, January 17, 2011.
12. See discussion of these sentiments—articulated by commentators of various
racial backgrounds—in Wornie L. Reed and Bertin M. Louis, “‘No More Excuses’:
 Notes to the Conclusion >> 229

Problematic Responses to Barack Obama’s Election,” Journal of African American

Studies, 13, no. 2 (2009): 97–109.
13. Most infamously Bill O’Reilly said on his eponymous Fox News show that the
demographic shift was endangering the power of the “white establishment,”
The O’Reilly Report, Fox News, November 11, 2012, http://nation.foxnews.com/
bill-oreilly/2012/11/07/bill-o-reilly-white-establishment-now-minority.
14. Mark Hanrahan, “White Student Union,” Huffington Post, October 12, 2012,
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/11/white-student-union-towson-
university_n_1958868.html.
15. Kenneth J. Bindas, “Re-Remembering a Segregated Past: Race in American
Memory,” History and Memory 22, no. 1 (spring/summer 2010): 113–34.
16. Darrel Enck-Wanzer, “Decolonizing Imaginaries: Rethinking ‘the People’ in the
Young Lords’ Church Offensive,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 98, no. 1 (2012): 1–23.
17. Ibid., 5.
18. Robert Wuthnow, “Democratic Renewal and Cultural Inertia: Why Our Best
Efforts Fall Short,” Sociological Forum 20, no. 3 (2005): 343–67.
19. Ibid., paraphrasing Jean Elshtain, 348.
20. Ibid., 345.
21. Ibid, 346.
22. Ibid., 352
23. Ibid., 353.
24. See studies by Michael Dawson, Lawrence Bobo, and colleagues at http://www.
michaeldawson.net/data/. In the summary of the studies, the authors note, “The
one consistent theme that can be gleaned from analysis of the data across all stud-
ies is the continuing, profoundly deep and bitter chasm between black and white
opinion across a wide range of political issues and evaluations of individuals,
organizations, and American society.”
25. Paul Shackel, “Public Memory and the Search for Power in American Historical
Archaeology,” American Anthropologist 103, no. 3 (2001): 655–70.
26. Ibid., 656.
27. Ibid.
28. The Southern Poverty Law Center keeps an extensive record of white supremacist
group activity. Also see recent work on white supremacist organizations in Ghas-
san Hage, White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society
(New York: Routledge, 2000); and Jesse Daniels, Cyber Racism: White Supremacy
Online and the New Attack on Civil Rights (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield,
2009).
29. Renee Romano and Leigh Raiford, eds., The Civil Rights Movement in American
Memory (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006); Kelly Madison, “Legitima-
tion Crisis and Containment: The ‘Anti-Racist-White-Hero’ Film,” Critical Studies
in Media Communication 16 (1999): 399–417; Jennifer Hyland Wang, “‘‘A Struggle
of Contending Stories’: Race, Gender and Political Memory in ‘Forrest Gump,’”
Cinema Journal 39, no. 3 (2000): 92–115.
230 << Notes to the Conclusion

30. Ed Gurerro, Framing Blackness: The African American Image in Film (Philadel-
phia: Temple University Press, 1993).
31. Kirk Savage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War and Monument in Nine-
teenth- Century America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999).
32. Marlon Riggs, “Color Adjustment” (San Francisco: California Newsreel, 1991).
33. Madison, “Anti-Racist White Hero”; Kristen Hoerl, “Burning Mississippi into
Memory? Cinematic Amnesia as a Resource for Remembering Civil Rights,” Criti-
cal Studies in Media Communication 26, no. 1 (2009): 54–79.
34. Bindas, 121–22.
35. See, for example, Brown et al, Whitewashing Race. For a defense of the idea that
whites really are victimized by affirmative action, even if racial resentment is
misguided, see Nicholas Laham, The Reagan Presidency and the Politics of Race:
In Pursuit of Colorblind Justice and Limited Government (Westport, CT: Praeger,
1998). For arguments that affirmative action harms people of color because it
gins up white racial resentment, see Shelby Steele, The Content of Our Charac-
ter: A New Vision of Race in America (New York: Harper Collins, 1990). Often
overlooked in criticisms of Steele’s work is that he does argue that conservative
claims to colorblindness rest on a desire to remain “innocent” of racism. While he
doesn’t play out this argument in ways similar to critical race theorists, he main-
tains that “racial innocence and guiltlessness [are] preconditions for entitlement
and power” ( 9) which facilitated Reagan-era attacks on affirmative action and
welfare programs.
36. Jennifer Seibel Trainor, “‘My Ancestors Didn’t Own Slaves’: Understanding White
Talk about Race,” Research in the Teaching of English 40, no. 2 (2005): 140–67.
David Roediger, “White Workers, New Democrats, and Affirmative Action, ” in
The House That Race Built, ed. Wahneema Lubiano, (New York: Vintage, 1998);
Thomas Nakayama and Judith N. Martin, eds., Whiteness: The Communication of
a Social Identity (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1998).
37. Judge Richard Ceibull apologized with this caveat: “This is a private thing
that was, to say the least, very poor judgment on my part. . . . I did not for-
ward it because of the racist nature of it. Although it is racist, I’m not that
way, never have been.” Associated Press, “Montana Judge Apologizes for
Racist Email about Obama’s Mother,” Christian Science Monitor, March
1, 2012, http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Latest-News-Wires/2012/0301/
Montana-judge-apologizes-for-racist-email-about-Obama-s-mother.
38. Bindas, 122–23; Jacqueline Dowd Hall, “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the
Political Uses of the Past,” Journal of American History 91, no. 4 (2005): 1233–63;
Christopher Metress, “Making Civil Rights Harder: Literature, Memory and the
Black Freedom Struggle,” Southern Literary Journal 40, no. 2 (2008): 138–50.
39. Cathy J. Cohen, Democracy Remixed: Black Youth and the Future of American
Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).
40. One of the few news pieces I could find that actually contained interviews
with poor and working-class white voters who were voting for Obama was
 Notes to the Conclusion >> 231

Margot Roosevelt, “Southern Whites Troubled by Romney’s Wealth, Religion,”

Reuters.com, September 11, 2012, http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/09/11/
us-usa-election-poll-bible-belt-idUSBRE88A05H20120911.
41. Christopher Federico, Howard Lavine, and Christopher Johnston, “The Unex-
pected Impact of Coded Appeals,” Campaign Stops blog, New York Times.com,
September 10, 2012, http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/10/the-
unexpected-impact-of-coded-appeals/. Most recently, people expressed surprise
that Oberlin College, widely known as a liberal school, was the site of another
outbreak of racist graffiti and costumes. Richard Perez-Pena, “Racist Incidents
Stun Campus and Halt Classes at Oberlin,” New York Times, March 4, 2013.
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Index

abortion: and anti-choice rhetoric, 3, 34; and Democratic Party: and post-racial strategies,
Black communities, 71, 76, 78, 82 26, 51; and voters of color, 82; and white
advertising: and post-racial representations, voters, 31–32
7, 8, 97, 105, 133, 201 Douglass, Frederick, 72, 80
affirmative action: and class, 9; and college
admissions, 29, 36–37; opposition to, 24, The Feminine Mystique, 15
45, 78, 201; and post-racial news frames, feminist, 119–120, 143, 163
165, 190
African American churches: and faith-based Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., 47, 51–54, 182
initiatives, 73–75, 77; and GLBT rights, 70, GLBT: activism, 70, 171, 178; coalitions
180; and political activism, 67–69; theo- with people of color, 185; discrimination
logical diversity of, 70 against, 34, 130; gay marriage, 68, 70–71,
anti-racism, 11, 51, 64, 73, 130, 165–168, 170 75, 82–83, 178, 189

Battlestar Galactica, 104, 130 homophobia, 70, 180

The Black Snob, 169–170, 182
Booker, Cory, 25–30, 32, 34, 39, 46 interracial: conflict, 7–8, 104, 135; families,
Bryant, Joy, 151, 160, 162 42, 97–104, 108–109, 113, 119, 121, 129–131.
Bush, George W., 33, 63, 66, 68. See also com- See also post-racial: aesthetics
passionate conservatism intersectional analysis, 12, 167, 170, 176, 180

Census, 4, 23–24 Jackson, Jesse, Jr., 24, 26, 32, 34, 45

civil rights movement: and Hollywood repre- Joshua Generation, 17, 25, 26, 30–31, 34, 44
sentations, 200–202; and public memory, Justice Sunday III: audience reactions to/
75, 79–81, 170, 187 media distribution/purpose of, 75–76;
Clinton, Bill, 23, 193 speakers, 78; sponsors, 66–67; Supreme
Clinton, Hillary, 193–194 Court nominees, 76
colorblind: discourse, 11, 18, 21, 24, 101, 183;
public policy, 36, 52, 167 Katims, Jason, 107, 120, 127, 144, 159–161
ColorLines, 169, 172–173, 178, 189 King, Alveda, 78, 83, 85, 92–95
compassionate conservatism: and faith- King, Martin Luther, Jr.: conservative appro-
based initiatives, 74–75; and voters of priation of, 31, 61, 71–72, 80–81, 187, 189–
color, 73. See also Bush, George W. 190; holiday and Obama inauguration, 44
The Cosby Show, 3, 98; and comparisons to
Obama family, 54, 98 Lusk, Herbert, 76–79; 81–83, 92–95, 180

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234 << index

model minorities, 3, 104, 168 172, 198; stereotypes, 21, 43–44, 55, 104,
Millennial Generation, 14, 40 106, 123, 138, 143–144, 159, 162–164,175–176,
multiculturalism, critiques of, 5, 8, 65–66 193
Racialicious, 168–169, 171, 173, 175, 183–184
NAACP, 24, 58–60, 98, 135, 176 racism: individualized, 6, 10, 12, 49, 52, 64,
neoliberalism, 6–7, 24, 100 133; institutionalized, 6, 11, 17, 49, 52–54, 57,
64, 136, 166, 171–173; and public opinion,
Obama, Barack: and 2008 election, 4, 18, 198; and violence, 1, 47, 49, 60, 63, 135, 166,
37–41; and white voters, 43–47. See also 170, 182–183, 188, 200, 203; and white privi-
post-racial: politicians lege, 7, 10, 167, 178, 183–184, 190
Reagan, Ronald, 9, 31, 34, 80
parasocial interaction, 98, 138, 163–164 Reed, Ralph, 68, 72
Parenthood: audience responses to, 144– Republican Party: and Black candidates,
184; depictions of black women, 34–35; and post-racial discourses, 23–25,
114, 121, 123, 164; depictions of interracial 32–36, 48–52, 56–57; and voters of color,
couple, 109–114, 120–128; movie 68–74
version, 106–107; television version, Romney, Mitt, 99, 204
107–110
post-feminism: definition of, 100; discourses Santorum, Rick, 70, 85–87, 90–94
in media, 105, 114, 124. See also post-racial Sharpton, Al, 26, 32, 46
post-racial: aesthetics, 100–105; and celebri- Sherrod, Shirley, and Andrew Breitbart,
ties of color, 3, 20–21, 41, 49, 55, 149; com- 57–61, 173, 178
edy, 9–11, 56; cultural consumption, 54–55, Sotomayor, Sonia, 50–51, 54, 173
165; discourses of national identity, 8–9;
emergence of, 3, 5; and multiculturalism, 8; Tea Party: racial opinions of, 188; racist com-
and neoliberalism, 6–7; politicians, 17–18, munications of, 48, 53, 59, 101, 195; and
22–26, 30–33, 41, 44 reverse-racism, 56–58; and whiteness, 101,
188–189
race: as biological, 11, 16, 27, 143, 148, 166; and
religion, 67–69; as social construction, 5, Washington, Harold, 29–30
11, 101, 167. See also intersectional analysis; Wright, Jeremiah, 41
racism
racial: discrimination, 9, 68, 72, 99; inequal- zombies: and racism, 101; and racial stereo-
ity, 59–60, 171; profiling, 4, 8, 9, 47, 51, 53, types,114, 118, 129, 131
About the Author

Catherine R. Squires is Associate Professor of Communication Stud-

ies at the University of Minnesota. After receiving her Ph.D. from
Northwestern University in 1999, Dr. Squires was Assistant Professor
in Afro-American and African Studies and Communication Studies at
the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. From 2007 to 2013, she held the
inaugural Cowles Chair for Journalism, Diversity, and Equality at the
University of Minnesota. Dr. Squires’s first book, Dispatches from the
Color Line: The Press and Multiracial America, examined discourses of
race mixing in twentieth-century U.S. news.

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