Representing race: Reproducing whiteness in the public imaginary

Cultural discourses regarding the presence, meaning and value of marginalized racialized groups are entangled with battles for visibility. Even as cultural practices move toward greater inclusion, the hegemonic stability of whiteness can be reproduced with apparent ease.  In this paper, I consider the reproduction of whiteness through racial significations in popular media.  I examine a variety of images from news, editorials, and advertising to develop insight into public discourses and cultural assumptions about the meanings of race while attending to intersections of class, gender and sexuality.

All forms of signification are polemical, strategic relations of power.  The efficacy of this power depends on people being predisposed to accepting an image or expression as a legitimate form representation—even if such representation is a caricature or a joke.  If processes of signification seem tangential to material inequalities, it is worth remembering that political and economic power are most often exercised—not as brute force or overt oppression, but as legitimate relationships, embedded in hegemonic forms of symbolic capital.  In an era where open expressions of racism are less tolerated than in the past, it is important to understand the cultural logics through which white racial domination continues to assert itself. This paper considers how groups are racialized within and across national boundaries in ways that sustain the cultural hegemony of whiteness.