Towards a Bibliography of Critical Whiteness Studies

Media Studies

Kevin Dolan

 

Because whiteness works so much by passing for the “natural” or “common sense,” the media are the key source of how hegemonic whiteness becomes a very powerful social construction, one that does not set boundaries but does strongly influence where we see and set our horizons.

Media scholars studying whiteness stress the power media makers can have in constructing reality rather than merely reflecting it, and in particular how — in both news and entertainment — the stories the media tell help whites define themselves and others. Many of these studies deftly expose how, despite all their claims about increasing diversity and promoting “tolerance,” the media continue to produce texts that reaffirm whites as the natural and deserved center of society. While casting and news sourcing may be less white than in the past, whites still wind up front and center and, in the end, even more supposedly deserving of the privileges and rewards bestowed upon them.

Many of the following scholars also examine how whiteness works in often unrecognized places, such as the effects of the media’s emphasis on individuals in storytelling, and in their aversion to examining how cultural, educational, political, economic and cultural structures maintain the status quo. Thus, these enduring problems of representation and storytelling are major reasons whiteness seems, as Ruth Frankenberg says, so malleable and yet so intractable.

 

Bernardi, D. (1996). The Birth of Whiteness: Race and the Emergence of U.S. Cinema. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press.

————. (1998). Star Trek and History: Race-ing Toward a White Future. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press.

————. (2001). Classic Hollywood, Classic Whiteness. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Calhoun, L. R. (2005). “Will the Real Slim Shady Please Stand Up?”: Masking Whiteness, Encoding Hegemonic Masculinity in Eminem’s Marshall Mathers LP. Howard Journal of Communications, 16 (4), 267–294.

Chaney, M. A. (2004). Coloring Whiteness and Blackvoice Minstrelsy: Representations of Race and Place in Static Shock, King of the Hill, and South Park. Journal of Popular Film & Television, 31 (4), 167-175.

Cramer, J. M. (2003). White Womanhood and Religion: Colonial Discourse in the U.S. Women’s Missionary Press, 1869-1904. Howard Journal of Communication, 14 (4), 209–224.

Dickinson, G., & Anderson, K. V. (2004). Fallen: O.J. Simpson, Hillary Rodham Clinton, and the Re-centering of White Patriarchy. Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 1 (3), 271-296.

Dubrofsky, R. E. (2006). The Bachelor: Whiteness in the Harem. Critical Studies in Media Communication, 23 (1), 39–56.

Dyer, R. (1997). White. London; New York: Routledge.

Entman, R. M., & Rojecki, A. (2000). The Black Image in the White Mind: Media and Race in America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Heider, D. (2000). White News: Why Local News Programs Don’t Cover People of Color. Mahwah, N.J.: L. Erlbaum Associates.

Hess, M. (2005). Hip-hop Realness and the White Performer. Critical Studies in Media Communication, 22 (5), 372-389.

Kintz, L. (2002). Performing Virtual Whiteness: George Gilder’s Techno-Theocracy. Cultural Studies, 16 (6), 735-773.

Kocela, C. (2005). Unmade Men: The Sopranos after Whiteness. Postmodern Culture, 15 (2).

Kraszewski, J. (2004). Country Hicks and Urban Cliques: Mediating Race, Reality, and Liberalism on MTV’s The Real World.
In S. Murray & L. Ouellette (Eds.), Reality TV: Remaking Television Culture (pp. 179–196). New York: New York University Press.

Lacroix, C. (2004). Images of Animated Others: The Orientalization of Disney’s Cartoon Heroines from The Little Mermaid to The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Popular Communication, 2 (4), 213-229.

Lipsitz, G. (1998). The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

McCarthy, C. (1998). Living with Anxiety: Race and the Renarration of White Identity in Contemporary Populary Culture and Public Life. Journal of Communication Inquiry, 22 (4), 354–364.

Morrison, T. (1992a). Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

————. (1992b). Race-ing Justice, En-gendering Power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, and the Construction of Social Reality (1st ed.). New York: Pantheon Books.

Morrison, T., & Lacour, C. B. (1997). Birth of a Nation’hood: Gaze, Script, and Spectacle in the O.J. Simpson Case. New York: Pantheon Books.

Nadel, A. (2005). Television in Black-and-White America: Race and National Identity. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas.

Nakayama, T. K., & Krizek, R. L. (1999). Whiteness as Strategic Rhetoric. In T. K. Nakayama & J. N. Martin (Eds.), Whiteness: The Communication of Social Identity (pp. 87-106). Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications.

Nakayama, T. K., & Martin, J. N. (1999). Whiteness: The Communication of Social Identity. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications.

Newkirk, P. (2000). Within the Veil: Black Journalists, White Media. New York: New York University Press.

Oguss, G. (2005). “Whose Barrio Is It?” Chico and the Man and the Integrated Ghetto Shows of the 1970s. Television & New Media, 6 (1), 3–21.

Projansky, S., & Ono, K. A. (1999). Strategic Whiteness as Cinematic Racial Politics. In T. K. Nakayama & J. N. Martin (Eds.), Whiteness: The Communication of Social Identity (pp. 149–174). Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications.

Railton, D., & Watson, P. (2005). Naughty Girls and Red-Blooded Women: Representations of Female Heterosexuality in Music Video. Feminist Media Studies, 5 (1), 51-64.

Reeves, J. L., & Campbell, R. (1994). Cracked Coverage: Television News, the Anti-Cocaine Crusade, and the Reagan Legacy. Durham: Duke University Press.

Rockler, N. R. (2002). Race, Whiteness, “Lightness,” and Relevance: African American and European American Interpretations of Jump Start and The Boondocks. Critical Studies in Media Communication, 19 (4), 398–418.

Sánchez, G. (1995). Reading Reginald Denny: The Politics of Whiteness in the Late Twentieth Century. American Quarterly, 47 (3), 388–394.

Stratton, J. (2005). Buffy the Vampire Slayer: What Being Jewish Has to Do With It. Television & New Media, 6 (2), 176-199.

————. (2000). “Seinfeld is a Jewish Sitcom, Isn’t It?” In Coming Out Jewish (pp. 282–314). New York: Routledge.

Streeby, S. (2002). American Sensations: Class, Empire, and the Production of Popular Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Tierney, S. M. (2006). Themes of Whiteness in Bulletproof Monk, Kill Bill, and The Last Samurai. Journal of Communication, 56 (3), 607–624.

Trechter, S., & Bucholtz, M. (2001). White Noise: Bringing Language into Whiteness Studies. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 11 (3), 3–21.

Watts, E. K. (2005). Border Patrolling and “Passing” in Eminem’s 8 Mile. Critical Studies in Media Communication, 22 (3), 187–206.

Watts, E. K., & Orbe, M. P. (2002). The Spectacular Consumption of “True” African American Culture: “Whassup” with the Budweiser Guys? Critical Studies in Media Communication, 19 (1), 1–20.