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Race/Ethnicity in Media History

Catherine Squires

Race/ethnicity, like gender/sexuality, provides scholars with lenses through which to understand histories of media industries, media representations, and media technologies. Taking race/ethnicity into account compels us to broaden the topics and approaches used in media history. Relatedly, attention to the ways in which race/ethnicity have shaped not only media systems, but also scholarly institutions, makes reconstructing histories of early media an urgent and often frustrating endeavor, as the works and contributions of people of color are not always as well preserved or maintained as those created by Whites. This essay provides an overview of some key works that address these issues. I draw from scholarship produced in fields such as communication studies, American studies, and history, and incorporate contributions by documentary filmmakers and archivists. These interdisciplinary endeavors have enriched historical explorations of race/ethnicity in media and model how we might apply what Houston Baker Jr. (1994) calls “critical memory” to the practice of preserving and telling stories not only of people of color who have been excluded from prior scholarship, but also to reconsider how we pursue any subject within the field of media history.

Why “Race/Ethnicity”?

Like most scholars, I consider race and ethnicity to be social constructions, not biological or otherwise essential characteristics of individuals or groups. I recognize the work of geneticists and anthropologists who conclude that “race” is not a “real” category of human differentiation. However, race/ethnicity does continue to “matter,” and its everyday use and impact really has nothing to do with scientific data or theory. Race is a powerful social construction, and however changeable or based in falsehoods, has impact on how we view the world and categorize its peoples. As Omi and Winant (1994) helpfully explain, race is a “dimension of human representation.” Omi and Winant describe “racial formation” as the sociohistorical process by which racial identities are constructed, reformed, and destroyed as groups contest the meaning of race and concomitant stratification. Media have historically played a huge role in racial formation, structuring and normalizing dominant understandings of our society's racial/ethnic dimensions. Critical cultural scholars view media as institutions of ideological production, wherein racial projects – “interpretation[s], representation[s], or explanation[s] of racial dynamics” – are formed, challenged, and/or reinforced.

I choose to utilize “race/ethnicity” throughout this chapter to reflect the shifting, unstable definitions of these terms. Critical race theorists and historians have demonstrated how groups we now see as “ethnic” were referred to in racial terms in the not-so-distant past. Exemplary in this body of work are historical analyses by Roediger (1999), Ignatiev (1996), and Sacks (1994), who examined how Eastern European, Irish, and Jewish Americans were considered members of lesser races in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Likewise, scholars have deconstructed the ways in which “Asian American” and “Hispanic” are used to racially distinguish people even though the terms refer to region/geography rather than phenotype/biology (e.g., Chavez, 2001; Palumbo-Liu, 1999; Park, 2004; Perez-Torres, 2006). This is evident in how the US government, through its census categories and other official record keeping, continues to arrange groups by race and ethnicity in peculiar ways. “Hispanic” is considered an “ethnicity” while “Asian” and “Alaska Native” are considered racial categories. Moreover, the terms “race” and “ethnicity” are joined by the fact that everyone is assumed to have both: White Americans have ties to European ethnic groups; Asian Americans have roots in the ethnic and linguistic groups of the vast Asian continent; Latina/os Americans have ties to a variety of (Black) African, (White) European, and (brown) Native American populations; and so on. Given the ways in which race/ethnicity have been applied to groups over the last two centuries, media historians who investigate these social constructions must take care to understand how and why groups we think of today as “ethnic” may have been considered a “race” in past media representations.

Theoretical Inspirations for Histories of Media and Race/Ethnicity

The study of the role of social identities and social stratification provides the inspiration for including race/ethnicity in studies of media history. Racial/ethnic groups that have been marginalized have long been invested in reforming dominant media representations as part of liberation movements and tactics. Early attempts to combat stereotypes are seen in the eighteenth-century Black press, the NAACP's protests against Birth of A Nation, and Jewish protests against “Shylock” plays and anti-Semitic characters in early Hollywood films. However, mainstream scholarship has not consistently tracked or addressed these issues. Indeed, not until after the breakthroughs of mid-twentieth-century social justice campaigns did the establishment of ethnic studies departments provide stable spaces for researchers to examine the role of race/ethnicity in media, both in terms of representations and in how racial and ethnic stratification have influenced the structure and workings of mass media industries.

Sociologists as far back as W. E. B. Du Bois have looked at media both as an area of inquiry into the production and role of stereotypes and as a tool to combat racial/ethnic discrimination. As more universities began to recognize the need for creating ethnic studies departments, more work on media emerged. Scholars of the 1970s and 1980s looked to cinema to examine how racial representations established central stereotypes and, in so doing, justified and reinforced regimes of White supremacy. Books such as Donald Bogle's Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies & Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films (2001) and Jack Shaheen's The TV Arab (1984) unearthed the ways in which Hollywood film and mainstream television codified racial/ethnic stereotypes, and inspired new generations of scholars to look at US media through a critical historical lens.

Importantly, forays into explorations of race/ethnicity in media coincided with scholars' return to Marxist and Frankfurt School interests in ideology and hegemony. In the 1970s and 1980s the work of Stuart Hall and the Birmingham School revitalized interest in political economies of media, and social constructions of national identity and belonging that take place, in part, through media representations. Stuart Hall's (1996, 1997) work, as well as that of Edward Said's Orientalism (1979) and other volumes influenced scholars to deepen their look at media's role in forming national and racial identities. Hall's “encoding/decoding” model, along with rejuvenated interest in ethnographic methods, inspired a flurry of audience studies that attended to the role of race/ethnicity, class, and gender in audience responses to media texts. Key works include David Morley's Nationwide (1980), Henry Jenkins's Textual Poachers (1992), Janice Radaway's Reading the Romance (1984), Jacqueline Bobo's Black Women as Cultural Readers (1995), and Jhally and Lewis's Enlightened Racism (1992).

Michael Omi and Howard Winant's Racial Formation in the United States (1994) has provided crucial frameworks for understanding how media representations are part and parcel of social stratification systems, and how these representations may change in response to – or as part of – racial projects of the state, social movements, or other entities. Thus, media historians and scholars who utilize historical comparison in their work have drawn upon the aforementioned bodies of work to guide their interrogations of the past, and have structured important, complex renderings of media histories that debunk simple timeline and “great individual” approaches to historical inquiry. Moreover, their work often complicates earlier histories, and confronts issues that remain controversial as we continue to wrestle with the consequences of legal regimes of racial/ethnic stratification.

Postcolonial critiques, intersectional feminist theory, and deconstructionist approaches to race/ethnicity were instrumental in bringing concerns about racial and ethnic identity into the work of media scholars. Patricia Hill Collins's landmark work Black Feminist Thought (1992) included analysis of popular representations of Black womanhood, underscoring the necessity of combining race, gender, and class in media research. Shohat and Stam's Unthinking Eurocentrism (1994) similarly took on the ways Western assumptions and frames depict people of color worldwide, engendering a need to deconstruct the hegemonic modes of representation that dominate global corporate media. Their analysis underscores how our ways of looking are shaped by the sociopolitical environments structured by colonialism and apartheid-like systems.

The growing influence of cultural studies, critical race theory, and feminism alongside the emergence of “middle range” theories of media influence – such as agenda setting, framing, and cultivation theory – in the United States provided social scientists with language and tools to examine the continuing impact of racial formations on media output and public opinion. Robert Entman's work was on news frames and “modern racism” (1990) and Gamson and Modigliani (1987) delineated how frames for affirmative action shifted over a decade of discursive and legal battles in the public sphere.

Attending to race/ethnicity in historical inquiry enriches scholarship, regardless of whether the subject is explicitly recognized as part of a marginalized racial/ethnic group or its cultural expressions. Unpacking the large and subtle ways race/ethnicity have shaped our media systems, production, and reception serves to both complicate and complete our view of the past and its relationship to present-day media and imaginations of the future. Approaching media history from the standpoint that race/ethnicity always matter, in some way, to the development of communication around the globe also opens up vistas to the ways in which our media have long been global and involved with projects of identity and identification, even though these terms have become more prevalent in media scholarship since the 1980s.

In the sections that follow, I map studies of race/ethnicity and media history into four areas:

1. Rediscovering Roots: This section explores how scholars have unearthed and preserved contributions of people of color overlooked by prior historians.
2. Documenting Discrimination: This section reviews work that excavates histories of structural barriers, stereotype production, and other institutional exclusions in media history.
3. Multiculturalisms and National Identit(ies): This section explores scholarship that has acknowledged that our current era is not the first “multicultural” one to emerge. These works mine media history to reveal the complex interactions and power dynamics between racial/ethnic groups facilitated by media over the past two centuries.
4. Public Memory, Race and Media: This section looks at the ways in which media scholars have turned to the role of media's influence in public commemoration of historical events and figures, and how media figure into the representation of what our history and national identity mean in the face of different interpretations of and additions to dominant historical events.

Readers will note that many of the examples used to illustrate these themes in media history come from scholarship on African Americans. This is due to three factors. First, my own research and writings have been largely focused on Black Americans, thus I am more familiar with the literature concerning Blacks and media. Second, because of the dominance of the Black-White divide in discussions and investigations of race relations, and the specific, peculiar role of slavery and colonialism in structuring the transatlantic racial hierarchy, more scholars have addressed Black experiences with media in their studies than other groups. Paul Gilroy's generative text The Black Atlantic (1993) has been instrumental in fostering African diasporic studies in communication and other fields.

Third, in addition to the unique (albeit necessitated by Jim Crow) system of Black colleges (HBCUs), many Black/Africana studies departments were established at historically White colleges and universities (HWCUs) before the establishment of Latina/o and Asian American and Native American studies (Colon, 2003; La Bell & Ward, 1996; Sumida, 1998), so there is a greater store of work on African Americans in the United States than other racialized groups. This imbalance in scholarship, however, is quickly changing, as new generations of scholars in American studies, ethnic studies, postcolonial studies, and other disciplines delve into the histories of groups once obscured by attention to the Black–White dichotomy, and as critical race scholars provide more sophisticated theoretical apparatuses that reveal how this dichotomy contributes to the structure of other racialized identities in the United States and abroad. Concepts such as diaspora, hybridity, global flows, and mediascapes, showcased in the influential work of Arjun Appadurai, will continue to impact the field as scholars revisit past media formations and campaigns.

Rediscovering Roots

One major task for media historians of race/ethnicity is excavating the work and struggles of people of color who engaged in media production and protest. The race/ethnicity power dynamics of past centuries, however, make this task difficult, since people of color had access to fewer archival and economic resources to preserve their media heritage, and because White-dominated organizations set up to preserve and celebrate media contributions did not recognize the accomplishments of non-Whites. It is a cliché to say that the victors write history; the records and deeds of the oppressed often do not survive. Moreover, historians often consult the writings of journalists to understand the agendas and interests of the public and the powerful. Thus, the journalistic accounts created by and for people of color, whether of mundane events or social upheaval, help us understand and center the experiences of those excluded from the news of the day in so-called mainstream papers. In this section, I draw upon the extensive body of work on the African American press, which attests to the importance of discovering and preserving records of how people of color have created and deployed media. Study of these news pioneers and journalistic output also allows scholars to explore different ways of doing journalism, and complicates dominant narratives of journalism history that track a straight line from the eighteenth-century partisan press to twentieth-century newspaper barons who ushered in objectivity.

Press Pioneers

Historians Roland Wolseley (1990) and Armistead Pride and Clint Wilson III (1997) have provided broad accounts of the early pioneers of the Black press. These books give readers a sense of the long-running dual goals of Black newspapers to provide a public sphere for African Americans, and to create viable business models for publishing regular accounts of Black communities and political interests. Henry Suggs's (1996) collection of historical essays, The Black Press in the Middle West, 1865–1985, importantly demonstrates the geographic diversity of Black communities, undermining historical narratives that segment Black life into North vs. South. Likewise, the documentary film The Black Press in America: Soldiers Without Swords (Nelson, 1998) is a lively account of the popularity of Black newspapers and the influence of Black editors and writers within and outside their communities. These works show us how important Black periodicals have been, from a very early time in the nation's history, and how they continued to support a wide range of Black interests over two centuries.

In addition to broad surveys of the Black press, scholars have provided in-depth cultural and political studies of crucial individuals and eras in the development of the Black press and its interactions with both White and Black publics (e.g., Vogel, 2001). Jane Rhodes's (1998) biography of Mary Ann Shadd Cary, for example, takes readers into the heart of the free Black populations of Canada and New England, chronicling the intensity of the abolitionist movement and stark realities of the fugitive slave laws through the lens of Shadd Cary's pioneering journalism. The book usefully demonstrates the intersections of race and gender, illustrated through Shadd Cary's travels and writings, as well as the discrimination she faced as a Black woman working in a male-dominated field and movement. Melba Boyd documented the life of Broadside Press founder and poet Dudley Randall, on film (1996) and in a book (2003). Her work provides a detailed portrait of Black Arts Movement activity in Michigan, and its links to labor activism, Importantly, it documents the importance of Broadside to Black poets who were able to publish there before African American writers were sufficiently in vogue to gain entrée to White publishing houses.

Other writers have taken in-depth looks at how the Black press fostered talent in photography (Stange, 2001) and film criticism (Everett, 1996), and covered the Negro leagues and other Black athletic achievements (Wiggins, 1997). These works provide us with a three-dimensional portrait of past Black communities, reminding us that the Black press, like any other, supported and reflected not only the political interests of its readers, but also their entertainment and leisure activities. Because legal segregation and not-so-benign neglect meant the events and interests of people of color were rarely (if ever) seen in dominant newspapers, these works give us a sense of the breadth of activities going on in Black communities, businesses, and political organizations. Indeed, records in the Black press have been invaluable to historians looking to document events that are not recorded in “papers of record” and live only in fading memories of the participants – and, if they are lucky, on yards of microfilm. Penny Von Eschen's Race Against Empire (1997), for example, is essential reading for anyone interested in exploring how writers and editors of the Black press interacted across the Atlantic, connecting readers and thinkers in the United States, the Caribbean, Africa, and Europe long before “diaspora” became a buzzword in academia.

Diversifying the Archives: Preserving and Maintaining Records for Historical Research

In addition to telling the stories of early pioneers, historians and archivists have set their shoulders to the task of making early Black newspapers accessible and searchable to the public. These efforts have emerged in book form and, more recently, through digitization. Annotated bibliographies, such as Charlene B. Regester's multivolume Black Entertainers in African American Newspaper Articles (2002), allow curious readers to browse content to get a sense of the range of people and places covered by popular Black papers. Likewise, Donald Jacobs's Antebellum Black Newspapers (1976) indexed three early anti-slavery papers, including the first known Black-owned paper, Freedom's Journal. Voices of a Black Nation, Theodore Vincent's (1990) compilation of articles from various Black periodicals produced during the Harlem Renaissance, gives readers an immersion in the wide variety of political and cultural ideologies circulating in the Black public sphere. These books, available in research and some public libraries, are important starting points for researchers who need to familiarize themselves with the Black press, and laypersons who may stumble across references to Black newspapers or editors in other accounts of history.

Happily, digital archives of the early Black press have come online. It is imperative for the archives of periodicals created by and for people of color to keep pace with the digitization of better-known titles so that scholars are able to get equal access to multiple viewpoints on events in the past. Digitization also ensures that as technologies shift, periodicals made by people of color will not be lost or relegated to old technologies that may or may not be as easy to search or use as Internet-based archives. James Danky's African American Newspapers, 1827–1998 project is available through Readex; the International Index to Black Periodicals covers a range of African diaspora newspapers and magazines that launched in the twentieth century. ProQuest Historical Newspapers' database has included African American papers such as the Los Angeles Sentinel alongside its mainstream counterpart Los Angeles Times, but does not yet have a full range of Black titles covered prior to 1910. The Ethnic Newswatch: Historical database, also available through ProQuest, archives abstracts and full text articles from African American, Hispanic, Asian American, and Native American newspapers, from 1959 to 1989. Importantly, the database includes Spanish-language titles as well as English-language periodicals. Its companion database, Ethnic Newswatch, archives articles from 1990 to the present. For research on the mid-to-late twentieth century, and for scholars doing comparative research on news coverage of important events and political issues of the twenty-first century, this growing database will be very useful.

Rediscovering Roots in Other Media: Examples from Electronic Media

Of course, journalism is not the only area in which historians have worked to rediscover and preserve accounts and accomplishments of people of color in media. Work on film pioneers such as Oscar Micheaux has been done in earnest; most of the film reels from his early twentieth-century career have been lost. Revising the history of film to shift the focus from Hollywood to figures that have tried to work within or outside the dominant studio system has brought the accomplishments of Native American filmmakers into focus in books such as Wiping the War Paint Off the Lens (Singer, 2001) and Randolph Lewis's (2006) biography of director Alanis Obomsawin. Jeff Adachie's documentary Slanted Screen (2006) allows us to sample the artistry of actor Sessue Hayakawa, whose career is detailed in Daisuke Miyao's (2007) biography. This Japanese American was an acclaimed leading man in silent films before the infamous Production Code and anti-Asian sentiment closed off opportunities for other Asian actors to follow in his footsteps. Similarly, books on Latinos in Hollywood, such as Clara Rodriguez's Heroes, Lovers, and Others (2008) and Rubie and Reyes's Hispanics in Hollywood: An Encyclopedia of Film and Television (1994) lay out the stories of Latinos and Latinas who worked in film from the silent era to recent times. Such histories remind us that exclusion of people of color was never 100% complete, and that the color lines drawn by dominant media institutions were simultaneously permeable and dangerously rigid.

Historians of radio and recorded music have also recovered the contributions of early DJs and musicians whose stories were rarely told. William Barlow's Voice Over (1999) and Mark Newman's Entrepreneurs of Profit and Pride (1988) showcase the efforts of early African American radio hosts, such as Jack Cooper, and civil rights-era DJs like Martha Jean “The Queen” and Nat D. Williams who used their limited airwave access to communicate important events and counter-discourses to Black audiences. Maureen Mahon's Right to Rock (2004) and Rebee Garofalo's Rockin' Out (2008) recenter the experiences of Black musicians and producers, thereby demonstrating how conventions for classifying and marketing popular music genres and performers were profoundly shaped by racism within the industry and expectations of the audience's racial understandings. This body of work retells the story of blues and rock “n” roll, revealing how racism in the music industry obscured the contributions of African Americans and embedded the stereotype that Whites play rock “n” roll and Blacks play rhythm & blues. Revisiting the roots of media industries, cultural styles, and related practices has transformed traditional media histories from a monoracial narrative to one that views media production as a multiracial, if often segregated, enterprise.

Although the Internet is still considered a new medium, scholars have already staked out territory to write its history in an inclusive fashion, and to use the relatively low-cost World Wide Web to preserve and maintain older media. Anna Everett (2002) acknowledges the severity of the digital divide, but cautions us to recognize Black and Hispanic “early adopters” who went online in the early 1990s. This kind of recognition makes it more likely that people of color will be remembered in the history of digital communications, and resists the stereotype that positions Blacks and Latinos (as well as women of all colors) as technologically inferior. In a parallel project of memorializing people of color online, amateur and professional archivists have leveraged the Internet's multimedia flexibility to create sites to house “lost” images and texts. The Black Media Archive (http://thebma.blogspot.com/) has assembled webpages, podcasting, and hyperlinks to capture newsreels, radio interviews, photographs, and television clips that many people may have thought lost. Likewise, Densho: The Japanese American Legacy Project website (www.densho.org) hosts a digital archive of over 8,000 recorded interviews and more than 10,000 documents, photos, and news reports about the World War II internment of Japanese Americans. Included in the collection are digitized copies of newspapers produced in the internment camps, a crucial resource for scholars and teachers who want to center the experiences of Japanese Americans during the war.

When writing the history of the Internet, historians will have to include both narratives of the digital divide – which replicates and extends prior inequalities in media production and access – and stories of people of color who leveraged computer-mediated communication at an early stage in the World Wide Web's development. Balancing concerns about equality with the task of recognizing early accomplishments and innovation by people of color will prepare future historians of the Internet to avoid the problems of documentation and visibility that have hampered accounts of film, radio, and print media. And, utilizing new digital tools to facilitate preservation of documentary evidence of people of color in the media is quickly becoming an important part of media history endeavors that seek to make traditional media histories more inclusive and insightful.

Documenting Discrimination

Boxed Out: The Economics of Race/Ethnicity in Media Production

A large portion of the work in race/ethnicity in media documents the practices of legal and social discrimination, as well as violence, against people of color in the media industries. Histories of newspapers created by people of color remind us of how White control of the mainstream press meant aspiring journalists of color had little, if any, reason to believe their bylines would make it into the dominant papers. Relatedly, people of color could not trust mainstream news to give their communities regular or “fair and balanced” coverage. Parallel presses emerged in Latina/o, Asian, and Black American communities to tell the stories the White press refused to tell, or exaggerated into ugly stereotype. Patrick Washburn's A Question of Sedition: The Black Press During World War II (1986) diligently documents the ways in which the Black press negotiated its way through World War II, a time when the government was all too willing to silence “seditious” publications. For some – including FBI head J. Edgar Hoover – any protests against racism in the armed forces or other Jim Crow policies were “sedition” and linked to communist insurgency. Washburn's detailed illustration of government surveillance of and interference in the Black press during World War II is a sobering reminder of how assumptions about the First Amendment and the “free press” overlook the ways in which racial and ethnic groups have had their speech rights truncated through harassment and legal action.

In the past 40 years, scholarship on news produced by and for people of color has provided ample and detailed evidence of the resistance racial/ethnic minorities faced as they tried to create alternative public discourses through the vehicle of the press. The long history of Latina/o bilingual, English, and Spanish-language periodicals reveals the international scope of barriers Hispanic editors and writers had to overcome to produce news and opinion in the United States. As borders and international power relationships shifted between the Spanish–American War and the Mexican–American War, Latina/os in the Americas found that their journalistic freedoms ebbed and flowed with the politics of the times (Kanellos, 2000). Similarly, accounts of early pioneers of the Black press note how dangerous their work could be; Black editors and White abolitionist editors were often targeted for violence by pro-slavery Whites (Hutton, 1993; Ripley, 1993). This violence continued and escalated during and after the Civil War.

While today journalists lament the public's decreased trust in their profession, the lives of journalists of color illustrate greater dangers of being out of favor with the dominant public. Exemplifying the dangerous position of Black writers who dared speak out against lynching and other crimes against Blacks is the story of Ida B. Wells, whose paper, Free Speech, was destroyed at the hands of a White mob. She received many death threats throughout her life, and regularly carried a pistol (Duster, 1991; Wells & Duster, 1972). As Wells and her male colleagues, most famously Robert S. Abbott, editor of the Chicago Defender, urged Blacks to move North, Southern legislators sought to stem the tide of their cheap labor force by banning Black papers.

Beyond government interference and violence, subtler means of suppressing the voices of people of color continued after the civil rights movement spurred initiatives to integrate the media industries. Pamela Newkirk's Within the Veil (2000) documents the travails of the first generation of Black journalists who joined the ranks of the mainstream press in the 1970s and 1980s. Her book, along with Clint Wilson III's Black Journalists in Paradox (1991), provide us with a sobering history of the first attempts at integrating the White-dominated press, and the failures of policies that focused too much on numbers and not enough on transforming racist journalistic practices and assumptions.

The mix of legal and social barriers to people of color is also found in histories of other media industries. Myriad books have engaged these issues in the arena of film. Hollywood's infamous Production Code banned positive representations of interracial relationships. Moreover, Jim Crow hiring practices restricted the roles and spaces for people of color to appear in films, let alone make their own. Books by Peter Feng (2002), Robert G. Lee (1999), and Ono and Pham (2009) illustrate how Hollywood directors regularly used “yellowface” makeup on White actors rather than hire Japanese- or Chinese American actors for lead roles. For those actors of color who were given screen time the road was never easy, even with steady work. Biographies of Hattie McDaniel (Watts, 2007) and Dorothy Dandridge (Bogle, 1997), for example, provide ample anecdotes of how directors, producers, and casting agents pigeonholed even popular actors of color into servants and sirens, stereotypes reaffirming dominant racial ideologies. These and other actors made compromises as they negotiated Hollywood, and often faced harsh criticism from communities of color for their alleged participation in stereotype production.

Given the barriers to complex representations of racial/ethnic Others, many people of color tried to create alternative films, just as they had created their own periodicals. But film and television production opportunities were not a realistic option for people of color. The dominance of the Hollywood studios – all White owned – and the Jim Crow practices of craft unions that provided the labor for behind the scenes and on-camera jobs meant few places were available to people of color looking to make an impact. Thus, it was highly improbable for someone of color to rise through the ranks from within. Likewise, barriers to entrepreneurship kept people of color from establishing independent television stations or film studios. Scholars have documented how the FCC notoriously denied broadcasting licenses to African American and Jewish applicants until the courts forced their hand (Barlow, 1999; Honig, 2006; Savage, 1999). And, as Jesse Rhines summarizes in Black Film/White Money (1996), even when pioneering Black filmmakers such as the Noble brothers were able to raise money to make a film, getting distribution was quite another thing. Then and now, White domination of all aspects of the film industry made getting films into theaters nearly impossible for people of color. While Oscar Micheaux was able to become the one and only Black filmmaker of his time to regularly exhibit films in theaters – mainly in Black neighborhoods such as Harlem in New York, and Bronzeville in Chicago – the unrelenting financial pressures and lack of alternative distribution networks proved too much for even this maverick (McGilligan, 2008).

Stereotypes, Silence, and Sensationalism: Representational Trends in Mass Media

Institutional racism, unsurprisingly, was reinforced by racist representations in film. Jack Shaheen's Reel Bad Arabs (2001) presents a content analysis of 1,000 feature films, finding a mere 12 contained positive images of Arabs; over 900 presented caricatures of harems, sheiks, and crazy fundamentalists. Writers such as Robert Berkhofer (1979), Jacquelyn Kilpatrick (1999), and Beverly Singer (2001) demonstrate how cowboy films and other fantasies of the “Old West” cemented visions of “savages,” “noble warriors,” and “Indian princesses” populating the continent. As Kilpatrick (1999) explains, these images of Native Americans are built upon literature and lore produced during the European conquest of North America and the Caribbean, reminding us of the links between politics, ideology, and representational practices. Indeed, it is notable how Hollywood capitalized on the early literature of the frontier, making films of James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans (1826) and other novels that crystallized the stereotypes of the noble and ignoble savage during US western expansion. These representations positioned Native Americans (noble or not) as anachronistic beings, doomed to die out and unable to adjust to the modern world brought into being by new technologies and Euro-American cultural practices. These narratives justified broken treaties and genocidal policies of forced removal. Remade later as films in the 1950s and 1960s, these tales reassured White audiences that Manifest Destiny was both right and inevitable.

Some of the most compelling work on discriminatory media practices is contained in documentary films. Marlon Riggs's Ethnic Notions (1987) provides viewers with a sobering account of the ways in which slavery and Jim Crow shaped the most popular images of African Americans, from illustrations in nineteenth-century newspapers to early twentieth-century film. The follow-up, Color Adjustment (1991), continues the story into television, tracking the inclusion of African Americans from Beulah to The Cosby Show. Similarly Deborah Gee's Slaying the Dragon (1988) and Jeff Adichie's The Slanted Screen (2006) demonstrate how fears of an Asian “yellow peril” and other Orientalist approaches cast Asians and Asian Americans into a handful of stereotypical roles in Hollywood and on television. Likewise, Philip Rodriguez's documentary Brown is the New Green (2007), intersperses discussions of mainstream media's recent “discovery” of the Latina/o market with recollections and samples of Hispanic stereotypes that dominated US media throughout the twentieth century.

All of these films contain interviews with actors, actresses, and directors of color who describe their experiences navigating a media industry dominated by Whites and the limited range of choices they negotiate to remain working in their fields. Slaying the Dragon contains many segments where Asian American actresses such as Nobu McCarthy recount their frustration with casting agents and directors who wanted to see “lotus blossoms” and “dragon ladies” populate their films and shows. These interviews are paralleled with commentary from young Asian American women, who relay experiences with Whites who expect them to exhibit the characteristics of Madame Butterfly or Suzie Wong, illustrating how one-dimensional media portraits have an effect on audiences' perceptions of women of Asian descent.

Not surprisingly, the aforementioned films are leavened by the appearance and comments of many media and cultural historians. In Ethnic Notions, for instance, viewers are introduced to Patricia Turner, whose groundbreaking book Ceramic Uncles and Celluloid Mammies (1994) chronicles how common and widespread were images of African Americans as pickaninnies, grinning Sambos, and helpful mammies well into the twentieth century. Likewise, Slanted Screen uses testimony from Dr. Darrell Hamamoto, author of Monitored Peril: Asian Americans and the Politics of TV Representation (1994), to provide historical and sociological context for the stream of images presented in the film. Jackie Salloum's Sundance Award-winning short film Planet of the Arabs (2003) was inspired by scholar Jack Shaheen's work on televised and film portrayals of Arabs. The film itself delivers rapid-fire clips from many of the movies and shows analyzed in Shaheen's books.

These films play multiple roles in advancing the cause of media histories of race/ethnicity. First, the documentaries themselves contain oral histories of people of color in the media industries via the interviews with actors, actresses, writers, and producers. Their voices may never have been collected by other documentarians of Hollywood or television, making the films valuable for future generations of researchers and laypersons who have interest in these topics. Second, the films introduce viewers to academic researchers whose work informs the film, potentially broadening the audience for in-depth work on the subject of race/ethnicity in media. Finally, the images of media representations that are arrayed in these films trace timelines of representational politics in the United States. While the aforementioned scholarly works similarly provide a clear accounting of how representations of racial/ethnic groups have changed over time, the films have the added benefit of allowing the audience to visually experience these changes and alterations.

Multiculturalisms and National Identit(ies)

Historical investigations of media and race/ethnicity remind us of how contemporary discourses of multiculturalism and “post-racial” national identities are not so new. Moreover, these works show us how long the state and media have been interconnected in projects to form and reform social identities for various nation-building projects, as well as in response to direct challenges to racial inequalities. Importantly, these histories reveal assimilation projects and balkanized visions of “separate but equal,” as well as more cosmopolitan formulations for including (or exhibiting) marginalized groups in media.

Reinforcing Identity Boundaries Through Historical Narratives of Assimilable and Unassimilable Others

Many scholars have quoted an early short film by Thomas Edison that depicted the various “races” of Europe (complete with costume and stereotypical behaviors) being forged into “Americans” through assimilation. The media's role in assimilating racial/ethnic others – and demarcating those groups that should not be assimilated – has been an object of scholarly scrutiny at least since the publication of Robert Park's The Immigrant Press and Its Control (1922). Park's work explored whether the foreign-language presses would hinder or assist assimilation into American culture, and how those presses maintained and nourished ties with the home countries and customs. Since that time, other scholars have examined the issue from the vantage point of dominant media: how do mainstream media portray “typical” American culture, and how do their portrayals gauge possibilities for racial/ethnic Others to become American. Media have subtly and blatantly reinforced and amplified notions of Otherness in conjunction with racial projects that impacted legal definitions of citizenship and social understandings of who belongs in the United States.

The history of Native American representations in popular culture strongly illustrates how media have been integral to projects of assimilability and national identity. Even as US Americans violently displaced Native American tribes and broke legal treaties, “playing Indian” remained a favorite pastime for “real Americans.” Philip J. Deloria's Playing Indian (1999) explores long-standing practices of Whites appropriating Indianness as a symbol of American authenticity while simultaneously denying the rights of actual Native Americans. This inherent and violent contradiction set the stage for White-dominated media culture to use Native American/Indian identities to rewrite the trauma of colonial domination as kinder, gentler cultural interactions. In her deconstruction of pioneer films that feature romantic tensions between White men and Native American women, Joanna Hearne (2003) notes how the bodies of the women were sacrificed – literally and figuratively – to allow safe passage for White settlers who took ownership of the Great Plains. In movies such as Maya, Just an Indian, Hollywood filmmakers affirmed anti-miscegenation codes that doomed interracial relationships and used the drama of Native women's “willing” sacrifice to justify White takeover of Native lands. Indeed, these films and scores of other Westerns regularly positioned Whites as rightful inheritors of the land, reinforcing the Manifest Destiny ideology that positioned Native Americans as aboriginal, but not worthy of full citizenship in their own land. Notably, these movies are set in the nineteenth century, reinforcing the notion that Indians are only a part of the past, not the present, United States (Singer, 2001, p. 10).

Cross-racial romance has functioned as a recurrent trope in American media culture, and has mostly been deployed to reinforce a sense of White innocence and justify White appropriation of cultural and economic resources. Ono and Buescher (2001) take these issues into account in their analysis of the Disney cartoon retelling of the Pocahontas–John Smith legend. The authors excavate how Disney's ahistorical and mythological scripting of Pocahontas and her tribe creates a cipher into which American consumer culture can recycle the myth as a positive origin story, erase the devastation of the Powhatan tribe in the wake of English colonialism, and ignore its heroine's true end: death in England, far from the verdant landscapes of Disney's “virgin” America.

Although the “sacrifice” of the “tragic mulatto” or “half-breed” is often visible in media narratives of Black–White and Asian–White romance, it serves the same goals: reinforcing the color line and justifying White hegemony. Work by Cynthia Nakashima (2001) and Suzanne Bost (2002), and collections by Beltran and Fojas (2008), track how popular-culture images of mixed-race individuals and couples simultaneously broke and reinforced racial taboos. Likewise, Jacqueline Stewart's (2005) study of early silent films demonstrates how filmmakers' comedic shorts of race “mix-ups” – such as a White woman accidentally picking up a Black baby on a crowded, confusing city street – reflected anxieties about the Great Black Migration's impact on urban life, and animated for audiences the presumed horrors that could be unleashed if Blacks and Whites lived in close proximity.

Other work in this area has focused on disjunctures between official discourses of national identity or unity and the realities of racial discrimination on the ground. Yeidi Rivero's Tuning Out Blackness (2005), for example, shows how Puerto Rico's formal acknowledgments of African roots rarely resulted in televisual embrace of Blackness in the 1970s. Eschen's Satchmo Blows Up The World (2006) explores how the US State Department's Cold War-era attempts to use jazz musicians as ambassadors of American freedom in the midst of struggles for civil rights at home unleashed tensions between the cultural exports and their government, sometimes resulting in unexpected leverage in race relations policies.

Testing the Waters: Media and Narratives of Racial/Ethnic Tolerance

Recent histories of World War II and postwar media highlight the ways in which the federal government as well as private media firms attempted to promote interracial/ethnic tolerance. Some of these projects were clearly strategic: Barbara Savage's Broadcasting Freedom (1999) brings to life the Office of War Information's investments in radio programming aimed at quelling racial and ethnic tensions. Fearful that Axis propaganda would turn African Americans against the war, and wary of labor organizers who advocated interracial solidarity in the name of socialist brotherhood, the government turned to radio to assure Blacks that they were valued members of the public. Programs like Freedom's People joined Americans All in articulating an ethnically pluralist America, joined by a dedication to the American Dream. While these efforts were chiefly created to alleviate dissent, Savage shows how well-placed individuals in the government and radio programming units used the popularity of these shows to bring more discussions of race/ethnicity to the airwaves after the war, and extend the discussions beyond the Horatio Alger-style narratives of hard work and tolerance that dominated the government programs.

In the midst of the Red Scare and in the wake of Hitler's genocide, some studio heads in Hollywood saw a need for socially conscious films to address race/ethnicity. Gayle Wald's Crossing the Line (2000) studies how “message” films, such as Elia Kazan's Pinky (1949), were framed as tools in the war against intolerance. Many of these films, like Pinky, featured “passing” characters and interracial tensions. While the films tried to articulate positive characterizations of their main characters, people of color who populated the fringes of the story remained one-dimensional stereotypes. Similarly, Ed Guerrero (1993) and others have commented on the emergence of Sidney Poitier as the leading Black actor in the 1950s. Poitier was positioned as an “exceptional Negro” in all of his early films, and was rarely on screen with other African Americans or involved in racial tensions. The films In the Heat of the Night (1967) and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967) broke this unspoken rule of race avoidance. However, as analysts of these films note, Poitiers' characters remain beholden to White characters, who must provide him with either safe passage (Heat of the Night) or permission to marry their daughter (Guess Who's Coming to Dinner). These observations do not take away from the achievements of Mr. Poitier; rather, scholars point out that Hollywood's conservatism in racial matters results in representations that lag well behind contemporary events and, sometimes, public opinion and behaviors.

Another body of work explores genuine (and disingenuous) attempts to cross racial/ethnic divides to “understand” the Other via media or performance. Lutz and Collins's Reading National Geographic (1993) takes readers through the history of the venerable magazine, and exposes how its roots in colonial and imperialist projects shaped its narratives of “civilized” and “natural” societies. The paternalistic and voyeuristic relationship with the developing world that emerged not only framed racial/ethnic others as “primitives” or “exotic,” but also reinforced racial binaries that supported a vision of White, Western peoples as “sophisticated” and “civilized.” The authors track how visual techniques codified in the magazine have influenced travel photography and tourism advertising as well, such that the presentation of “natural” and “exotic” racial/ethnic others sets the tone for airline and cruise travel to locations in the Pacific Islands and other spaces. Importantly, the research includes reader-response studies with contemporary subscribers as well as textual analysis of photos and historical analysis of National Geographic's origins. Through this multifaceted look at an influential mass-market magazine, Lutz and Collins show the great impact media can have in shaping reader sensibilities about racial/ethnic Others, and how narrative and visual conventions reinforce troubling assumptions about the place of people of color in modernity.

In the realm of popular culture studies, three authors have staked out the role and impact of blackface entertainment in American media and ethnic/race relations. Eric Lott's Love and Theft (1992), Lhamon's Raising Cain (2000), and Melvin Ely's The Adventures of Amos “n” Andy (1992) delve into the psychological and social intricacies that emerged from the practices of minstrelsy. These authors argue that blackface should be considered one of America's earliest forms of mass entertainment, and chronicle the longevity of the practice and its many controversial facets. These books demonstrate how powerful racial imagery and mimicry have been in American culture, and how hard it can be to untangle the racist elements from the sometimes innovative, liberating creative moments of blackface entertainment that Lhamon argues are deeply embedded in contemporary dance, music, and visual arts. Blackface was and continues to be terrain for experimentation with racial identity and expression, even as it troubles us with its racist origins and assumptions of embodied difference. These histories are crucial texts for us to revisit, especially as we continue to see eruptions of blackface/voice and yellowface/voice in mainstream media, as well as under the radar on the Internet. On-air gaffes by Rosie O'Donnell, who mimicked Chinese vocalizations, and Don Imus and Rush Limbaugh's sidekicks, who brought us blackvoice mimicry about the Rutgers University women's basketball team and “Barack the Magic Negro,” reveal the continued use and abuse of minstrel and yellowface humor, a form that continues to titillate and shock audiences. Students and scholars can better appreciate these contemporary controversies with the complex historical visions offered by these texts.

Public Memory, Race and Media

Because of the racial/ethnic power dynamics of the United States, historians have long “been engaged in a struggle over what to say about America's past and how to say it” (Fabre & O'Meally, 1994, p. 3). This struggle has influenced media scholars' accounts of the origins and outputs of our media systems – specifically for media historians, the ways media contribute to public and personal memories – authorized and unauthorized narratives – of our nation's identity, key events, and esteemed individuals. Struggles over how the story is told and who can do the telling are intimately linked to questions of racial stratification. As Barbie Zelizer demonstrated in her generative book Covering the Body (1992), journalists and other media practitioners not only lay claim to “writing the first draft of history” but also participate in choosing and framing which individuals and issues merit continued memorializing well past the initial events that made phenomena “newsworthy.”

Following Pierre Nora, media manufacture and provide lieux de memoire. Newsreels, television retrospectives, articles, interviews in the archives, and other fictional and documentary materials mark where and how “certain landmarks of the past” are selected and invested “with symbolic political significance” (Fabre & O'Meally, 1994, p. 7). Therefore media, as much as formal history texts and museums, provide the public with frameworks and touchstones for thinking about our racial past, setting the stage for contrast with the present and speculation about the road to the future. These dynamics are well illustrated in contests over media representations of slavery, the civil rights movement, and the ways Black music culture became interwoven with “American” culture in the twentieth century. As Susan Willis and others note, the late twentieth century witnessed an explosion of Black cultural presence in mainstream mass media (Willis, 1994, pp. 178–179). How the experiences, memories, and stories of a people forcibly segregated from media production and inhibited from telling their experiences in public are represented by the same media systems that participated in segregation, stereotyping, and silencing presents complex, troubling questions for media scholars.

Kelly Madison's (1999) dissection of 1980s and 1990s Hollywood films about Black freedom movements is particularly instructive. She delineates how White characters were centered in films that were ostensibly about the struggles of African Americans to gain equal rights. However, in order to position Whites as heroes, Black leaders and laypersons were relegated to the sidelines. Madison suggests that the centering of White subjects at the expense of Black subjects reiterated the need to reclaim a sense of White racial innocence that was damaged by the challenges of the civil rights movement and shown to be a lie. Likewise, Ed Guerrero's (1993) examination of 1930s and 1940s films finds a fascination and fetishization of the antebellum South, most notably in Gone With the Wind (1939). These films present a fantasy of a genteel South with a peculiar, but benevolent, institution of slavery, where devoted slaves were happy in servitude. Thus, Hollywood served up a myth of racial harmony under White supremacy at a time when race relations were strained between North and South in the wake of the Great Black Migration, new immigration from Europe, and labor activism that alternately called for solidarity across racial lines or deployed racial animus to leverage economic and social gains. In both cases, Hollywood's depiction of the racial past served a need in the present and distorted the past.

Acts of Appropriation and Forgetting

Scholars who have incorporated Whiteness studies into their work on media history similarly find that representations of Asian cultures often center White experiences (Ono & Pham, 2009). From David Carradine's role in the 1970s TV show Kung Fu to Tom Cruise's star turn in The Last Samurai (2003), mainstream media reinforce the sense that Asians are “forever foreigners” and that Whites may be better able to inhabit and protect the most worthy Asian traditions. For example, Sean Tierney shows how, in Last Samurai, Cruise's character somehow is able to master the arts of samurai swordsmanship and honor codes in six short months; he kills Japanese men who have studied the forms their entire life, and becomes fluent in Japanese as well. He becomes the “true” inheritor of samurai tradition, displacing the other masters in the movie. This pattern of displacement occurs in many other films that feature White characters who learn martial arts in Asia or from Asians (Tierney, 2006). Like Leatherstocking in Last of the Mohicans, White men are portrayed as “supraethnic” as they absorb the “best” aspects of a “foreign” culture (Tierney, 2006, pp. 610–611). This exchange is one-sided: Whites absorb Others' traditions, and then the Other culture recedes – or is destroyed – as Western “civilization” advances.

These displacements replicate distorted and one-sided depictions of eras of intergroup contact and conflict. This is exemplified in Hollywood and pop fiction tales of the Whites and Native Americans interacting in the colonial era and during western expansion. Beginning with the multiple retellings of the Pocahontas-John Smith affair, to Dances with Wolves (1990), the 1992 remake of The Last of the Mohicans, and steamy romance novels, dominant media have invented fantasies of environmentally correct gentle natives, Manifest Destiny, an ever-receding frontier, and the inevitable extinction of Native American ways of life. As S. E. Bird (1999) puts it, even though the “noble” images have become more prevalent in contemporary film and television, the characters remain “either rooted in the past or in a conception of American Indians as traditional and primitive” (p. 78).

War and the Other: Revisiting and Rewriting Battles

Media accounts of past wars involve sensitive issues of national identity and purpose, and deserve special mention given the ways in which enemy construction is racialized (Merskin, 2006). Essays in From Hanoi to Hollywood (Dittmar & Michaud, 1990) evaluate the range of revisionist strategies for telling the story of the Vietnam War. From Rambo's “win” over stereotypically evil Vietnamese villains to Platoon's (1986) troubling depiction of White officer – African American troop relationships, the essays in the collection speak to “the power to make images that may displace, distort, and destroy knowledge of the history in which [others] participated” (Dittmar & Michaud, 1990, p.1). Thus, even though many films about the Vietnam War are progressive in that they incorporate anti-war messages, they simultaneously recycle disturbing stereotypes. For instance, Asian women appear either as helpless victims or hyper-sexed party girls searching for White GIs. And, because these films frame the story from the vantage point of White male main characters (mostly US soldiers), the Vietnamese remain a mass, and the Vietnamese soldier a savage, faceless enemy.

How soldiers themselves are represented is also problematic, as films often look back and incorporate contemporary desires for multicultural inclusion. These desires, while well intentioned, distort the actual racial dynamics of the armed forces during and before Vietnam. Leo Cawley's essay on war films shows how Hollywood portrays the infantry platoon “as a basket of antagonistic ethnicities that is transformed and elevated by American democracy when it forgets its differences and dedicates itself to defending that democracy” (Cawley, in Dittmar & Michaud, 1990, p. 73). Unfortunately, the price of this American interracial cohesion is usually dehumanizing racial/ethnic Others on the enemy side of the line. The soldiers bond as they “kill the Jap/Gook/Hun (fill in the blank).” The Dirty Dozen (1967) is exemplary of this formula, where the motley crew of White ethnics and one Black soldier take down the Nazis. This multicultural vision of the infantry as a crucible of the melting pot also comes at a cost of forgetting the very real racism and ethnocentrism Black, Hispanic, Native American, and Asian American soldiers experienced and continue to experience in the armed forces. More recently, the reboot of Captain America engages in a post-racial reimagining of World War II, where the Army includes Black soldiers in the elite unit led by Captain America, whereas in reality, Black soldiers were segregated until President Truman signed Executive Order 9981 in 1948. The contemporary impulse to “integrate” the silver screen simultaneously undermines our understanding of history, whitewashing the ugliness that preceded the integration of the US Armed Forces, including the abuse and lynchings of multiple Black servicemen between and after the world wars.

Commemorating “Progress” and Forgetting Opposition: Martin Luther King, Jr., Obama, and Media

One can easily see the intertwining of media, public memory, and race/ethnicity in the explosion of “commemorative editions,” coffee-table books, televised specials, and deluxe DVD sets generated in the wake of President Barack Obama's election in 2008. These trinkets blare a common theme: that with the election of a biracial Black man, the United States has proven that the racist past has truly passed. Multiple commentators in the press and members of the press have opined that we have, indeed, entered a post-racial era (see critiques by McKissack, 2008; Peterson, 2008; Wade, 2008). At the same time that media represent the election of Obama as the culmination of Martin Luther King's “dream” of American racial equality, many scholars have applied critical memory both to the construction of King's dream, and to the media's self-serving myopia in racial matters.

As Houston Baker Jr. (1994) argues so eloquently, dominant narratives of King's life paint him as an always-already revered man of peace; as an advocate of “colorblindness.” One needs only to look at the exhaustive analysis of news about King in Lentz's Symbols, the News Magazines, and Martin Luther King (1990) to see how far from true this picture of universal admiration is. Bostdorff and Goldzwig (2005) mapped out how President Ronald Reagan appropriated King's rhetoric, twisting the commitment to social justice into a belief in individual responsibility. Similarly, Ronald Turner (1996) charts the dangers of “distorting and deviating” from King's “color aware” approach to tackling racial injustice. He notes that conservative attempts to take on King's mantle deliberately leave out his commitment to anticolonial and antiwar movements, and his endorsement of affirmative actions to dismantle the apparatuses and effects of racial segregation. Other scholars have examined how neoconservative reappropriation of the “I Have A Dream” speech has followed Reagan's lead, actively rewriting King's legacy to advocate against the legislation and court decisions that dismantled Jim Crow (Brown et al., 2004; Hall, 2004).

Relatedly, in two special issues of the Black Scholar (2007, 2010), commentators and scholars have noted how Obama has been distanced from the more radical aspects of King's legacy, aspects that are already obscured in contemporary celebrations of King as a color-blind icon. Indeed, many comment on how much the campaign stayed away from issues of racial justice until forced to address race head-on in the wake of the Rev. Wright–YouTube scandal. Others have explored how memorials of King become terrain for Black and White political elites to contest the meaning of the civil rights movement (Polletta, 1998). Black political elites, as “insider/outsiders” in the federal government, have more at stake as they negotiate how to keep alive the more radical aspects of King's career and oppositional politics, while their White colleagues tend to emphasize King as a conciliatory figure who will help us “overcome” the racial past rather than insist upon confronting the meaning of institutional racism.

Harry Reed (1999) noted in the Journal of Negro History that public celebrations – including thousands of re-broadcast excerpts of the titular lines from the March on Washington speech – meditate on the “dream” more so than the critiques King launched against the US government, our class-segmented society, and the military–industrial complex. In his many, many other speeches, King spoke about public policy and justice, not dreams. Thus, concerns about media representations of the “dream” are simultaneously concerns about how we frame racial policy in the present and the future. That is, if dominant media discourse heralds Obama as the achievement of what conservatives see as King's dream of a “color-blind” nation, then countermemories of King are necessary to mount opposition to not only the policy prescriptions that extend from the color-blind representation of racial equality but also the distortion of our collective memory.

Remembering Race/Ethnicity

Our media system was built, in part, on practices of forgetting acts of violent oppression against people of color within and outside of the borders of the United States. Part of that forgetting has been amplified by structural racism that limited the opportunities for people of color to record and transmit their own stories through media. Thus, it will continue to be a challenge for historians to give voice to those silenced by those acts, and to chart the sometimes hard to trace legacies of people of color in media, whether in dominant venues or alternative ones. Media histories that attend to the complexities of race/ethnicity also urge us to guard against engaging in simplistic desires for a post-racial era in media, or to see the evidence of progress in representation as part of a simple upward trajectory toward a color-blind world. Rather, we must be diligent in our contemporary research to be inclusive of axes of difference so as not to replicate the mistakes and oversights of past media research.

The end of Jim Crow segregation law does not mean an end to the influence of race/ethnicity in media and historical accounts. Rather, as depictions of the events of 9/11, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and 2011's shocking terrorist bombing and shooting rampage in Norway have illuminated, our racial/ethnic identities continue to matter in how the media mark historical events and map out their significance for our future. In The Persistence of History: Cinema, Television, and the Modern Event, Vivian Sobchak writes that today, “history seems to happen right now – is transmitted, reflected upon, shown play-by-play [. . . T]here seems to be a sense in which we believe we can go right out and “be” in history: hence the people who flocked to the sides of the freeway to watch – and be in – the “historic” parade led by O. J. [Simpson]” (Sobchak, 1996, p. 5). Media events (Dayan & Katz, 1992) make us feel as though we are “witnesses to history” and, at least, vicarious participants in history. But our “witness” is framed carefully and orchestrated by editorial choices, camera angles, and narrators who walk us through events and aftermaths. When one racial group continues to have disproportionate decision-making power in media, then the question must be raised about how their assumptions shape our sense of history in the making, and possibly exclude important views and experiences as they pick and choose which events and individuals to record for posterity.

To close, media historians must continue to examine the past and our present research projects to ask whether de jure or de facto racial/ethnic exclusion has shaped our data or approaches. The answer to this question may require us to work harder to access archival materials or other sources that can illuminate if and whether those exclusions will change the nature of the inquiry. On the institutional level, we need to monitor whether our libraries have databases and other resources to support research on people of color in the media, and ask ourselves how to remedy imbalances. Likewise, as media scholars frame historical questions that involve race/ethnicity, we must guard against anachronistic uses of racial/ethnic terminology; that is, we must recognize that contemporary labels and approaches may not yield results when investigating the past, when nomenclature and attitudes allowed for a different range of discourse about race/ethnicity. Finally, as we continue to explore the past, we should endeavor to articulate what, if any, lessons our explorations hold for the present and future. Certainly today, as people experiment with the term “post-racial” to describe an immanent, better future, we should be bold in clarifying how race/ethnicity has shaped our media's past and present, and offer cautions for the future.

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