Race

The study of race in communication and media has been closely tied to the social and cultural histories that have shaped how people have viewed race, both conceptually and in practice. It has been over a century since the African American intellectual icon W.E.B. Du Bois (1868-1963) wrote: “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line-the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the f sea” (Du Bois 1903, 19). Yet societies and the intellectuals, activists, policy makers, and journalists who have chronicled race continue to struggle in conceptualizing that color line and, more importantly, in interrogating whether such a line arbitrarily exists. Race has long been associated with color, an I-Other frame, and with the idea that power and privilege are inscribed through one’s hue. Race as a signifi er has been heavily centered in the United States, as George Frederickson (1934-2008) and Graham Richards have argued, but that does not diminish its importance in other parts of the world, especially through mediated spheres of discourses (Frederickson 2002; Richards 2012). Over the past 30 years or so, scholars have wondered whether race is merely performative (Moten 2003; Fleetwood 2011) and whether identities that are always in fl ux can be categorized.