MODULE 2, UNIT 3

Construction of Race and Ethnicity 

Goal:  Explain how race and ethnicity are constructed in media and how residual, dominant, and emergent discourses compete for prominence.

The Construction of Non-white, Marginalized People

Dominant representations of non-white and ethnic minority Americans have been maintained over centuries of ideological media messaging. As with the unit on gender, we’ll look back in history at residual discourses for context on portrayals of race and ethnicity. Indeed, discriminatory ideology about race and representation challenged by the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement has been an issue Americans of color have faced and pushed back upon for 400 years.

Dominant white power structures, which have controlled media messaging and images, have worked to control representations of people of color, and as such, dictated audiences’ understanding of non-white and ethnic minority Americans. Dominant representations continue to reflect this power imbalance. As with the gender unit, an array of emergent discourses of media representation are giving audiences refreshing new ways to think about race and ethnicity moving forward. Not surprisingly, these emergent discourses also can be threatening to those in power, who aim to control and maintain dominant media messaging and existing power structures.

Where is there backlash, and how is media messaging and power connected?

What is race?

To analyze media representations of race first requires an understanding of what race is. Similar to the way people think about sex, many people think of race as a biological designation. In fact, it’s a cultural construction. Sociologist Estelle Disch explained the complex meaning of race:

The term race is itself so problematic that many scholars regularly put the word in quotation marks to remind readers that it is a social construction rather than a valid biological category. Genetically, there is currently no such thing as “race” and the category makes little or no sense from a scientific standpoint. What is essential, of course, is the meaning that people in various cultural contexts attribute to differences in skin color or other physical characteristics. . . .^[1] 

Genetically, biologically, only one race exists: the human race. The idea that distinctions exist between races is “not a biological fact.”^[2] Historian Noel Ignatiev, in How the Irish Became White, clarified “no biologist has ever been able to provide a satisfactory definition of ‘race’ . . . The only logical conclusion is that people are members of different races because they have been assigned to them.”^[3] Socially and culturally, however, race has become a symbol that holds immense power.

The malleability of the meaning of race is demonstrated by the fact that from the founding of the United States until the 1900s, Germans, Irish, Italians, and Russians were not considered white. They were considered “colored or other.”^[4] For example, in 1751, none other than Benjamin Franklin worried that Germans would take over Pennsylvania and would “Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them, and will never adopt our Language or Customs, any more than they can acquire our Complexion.” Franklin identified their complexions as too “swarthy” to be white:

[T[]he Number of purely white People in the World is proportionably very small. All Africa is black or tawny. Asia chiefly tawny. America (exclusive of the new Comers) wholly so. And in Europe, the Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians and Swedes, are generally of what we call a swarthy Complexion; as are the Germans also, the Saxons only excepted, who with the English, make the principal Body of White People on the Face of the Earth.^[5] 

Groups of people now considered the whitest of the white – including Swedes, French people, and Germans (people Hitler would later declare to be the master Aryan race)  – were at that time deemed to be too swarthy of a complexion to be considered white. But, as Ignatiev noted, these groups, along with the Irish, became white because they were assigned white, not because they just were white.

Part of the way race was assigned in the Americas was through public discourse and laws. The primary identification of early settler colonists was on the basis of nationality or religion. This would be replaced, according to documentary producer John Biewen, when a “totalitarian framework based on rigid notions of race and sex … was constructed on this continent … plank by plank. That process started not too long after the first African people landed in Jamestown on a Dutch ship in 1619 – about twenty people, stolen from Angola. But the project took decades to complete.”^[7] 

Saying that race is a social construction does not make its power any less real. That is the point of this Handbook: social constructions, like media representations, have power.

What is Ethnicity?

Ethnicity is social categorization based on an individual’s membership in or identification with a particular cultural historical, linguistic, or ethnic group. Ethnicity is interesting because it is basically something that constructs minorities. Ethnicity is also a power construct: a dominant majority determines the construction of minoritized identities.

For example, America’s dominant group – white Christian Americans – are typically thought to have no ethnicity, even though they have a cultural flavor. The same is true of white Christian British people: they are the dominant majority, and although they have cultural and ethnic language practices, they are so dominant as a group that they are not considered “ethnic” by themselves or by other minority groups. In India, the dominant group is the HIndi majority (79.8%), and they define themselves against the “ethnic” minority Muslim (14.2%), Christian (2.3%), Sikh (1.7%), Budhists (0.7%), Jains (0.4%) and other minority populations.^[8]  As such, the dominant group defines ethnicity as having language and cultural differences from the dominant norm.

In the United States, some minoritized ethnic identities are prominent, like Hispanic communities. The whole Hispanic identity, which shouldn’t be connected to a racialized identity (Hispanic just means Spanish speaking), includes black, brown, and white people.^[9] The only reason Hispanic people are considered an ethnic group is because their identity is in relation to the dominant majority (which positions itself as not having an ethnicity). To maintain power, the dominant group uses media and other institutional mechanisms – such as the police or government policies – to otherize, but also racialize and criminalize, those subordinate groups that might threaten that power.

As a social construct, ethnicity can also vary in meaning and significance across different societies and contexts. People can belong to multiple ethnic groups due to factors like mixed heritage or migration, and ethnic identities can evolve over time as societies change. In this way, ethnicity is as complicated and multifaceted as race. (Note: When we refer to someone’s race or ethnicity in this section, we are drawing from data or research that identifies them as such, or data or research based on peoples’ self-disclosures, i.e., how they identify themselves.)

The Power Playbook

For every one of these dichotomies – gender, race, and ethnicity – the dominant group uses the same power playbook: one that normalizes – and makes invisible – the dominant identity and their power. The dominant group is always “normal,” and the non-dominant group is always “other.” In the U.S., the power playbook reads as follows:

• Male is normal; female is other.
• Heterosexual and cisgender is normal; LGBTQ+ is other.
• White is normal; non-white is other.
• Christian is normal (in the U.S.); non-Christian, or nonbelievers are other.
• English-speaking is normal (in the U.S.);  non-English speaking is other.

Using the power playbook – on women, the LGBTQ+ community, First Nations people, Black and brown Americans, non-English-speaking people of various ethnic heritages – the “normal” dominant can otherize minority groups, and define them against the normalized dominance of white, Christian manhood. You hear people use this discourse when they talk about “normal Americans”or “real Americans” – they are assuming that those listening understand the “commonsense” parts of the power playbook they are deploying, and that their own membership as a “normal” or “real” American is self-evident.

In doing so, they have created and circulated stories that also normalize the power structures they control, and have worked to maintain a dominant ideology that mirrors and supports their value systems. Bringing back this Handbook’s earlier discussions on ideology and hegemony (Module 1, Unit 4), if the stories and larger myths that make up a culture are so established, powerful and omnipresent, it is often difficult and awkward to question them.

Examples of the dominant group’s hold on power appear everywhere in American society.  In the local, state, and federal government, and in the leadership of finance, business, military, legal, religious, and educational institutions. In federal holidays (although some have been added, as a result of emergent discourses, including Martin Luther King, Jr. Day {1983} and Juneteenth {2021}, and there is a push to reconsider Columbus Day as Indigenous Peoples’ Day).^[10] And, of course, in media. The dominant group even has power in the representation of entries in the English-language Wikipedia, which has a  disproportionate number of articles about the roles and accomplishments of white, Christian, heterosexual men.^[11] 

Where do you see evidence of this group’s dominance (and normalcy) in your everyday life?

Researching Race and Ethnic Representation in Media                

Some of the most comprehensive media research on race and ethnicity comes from the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, which has an ongoing research project to study diversity and inclusion in the entertainment industry.”^[14] Researchers at the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative have analyzed how the patterns of race and ethnicity play out in media representations. By tracking media content (films, music, TV series), they look for past and present trends, collect statistics and examples, and document who is represented and how they are represented. In other words, how does the dominant group represent non-dominant groups in the media they control? Or, how much do the non-dominant groups control the way they are represented? For example, in a series of studies that analyzed films and race/ethnic representation, Inclusion Initiative researchers found that:

• Of the 51,158 characters that appeared in films produced 2007-2019, only 5% were Hispanic/Latino, and only 2.2% of all leads and co-leads went to Hispanic/Latino actors.^[15] 
• Across 1,600 top-grossing films from 2007 to 2022, which involved 1,784 directors, the storytellers were still primarily white and male: Only 6% directors were Black (86% of Black directors were men), 4% were Latino (93% men) , and 5% were Asian (89% men).^[16] 

Representation: Putting Marginalized Groups in their Place 

In our discussion of Narratives (Module 1, Unit 3), we talked about how stories matter: Which stories, who tells them, who hears them. Stories are important, and some people do not want them told. But, if certain groups have the power to tell the story, and control the characters inside it, then these groups also have power to control culture.

For centuries, the dominant population in the United States, Great Britain, and Western Europe has been defining the stories that get told, telling them from their perspective, and disseminating them through major mass media channels that they also control. No matter what country or region, dominant groups have sought to define themselves in the best light and suppress any story that represents them otherwise. It’s essential to their staying in power. In the United States, during the decades after the colonial era, we saw an exertion of this control when white Christian men took over the captivity narratives that were mesmerizing readers from 1682 through the mid-1700s. First written by women, these stories featured inept husbands and pathetic rescuers. They documented both female agency and Native American humanity.

Threatened by these representations, the dominant group rewrote captivity narratives, and, using all the media channels at their disposal at the time (books, newspapers, and magazines) successfully spread a national myth about the imperative of imperial expansion. These stories recast white Christian men as heroes at the center of the story. For captivity narratives specifically, white women settlers were recast as helpless or hysterical victims in need of saving from native savages. First Nations people were reframed as an inferior race. The dominant narrative now defined First Nations people both as brutes who raped and pillaged who needed conquering by any means necessary, and as simplistic, child-like fools. In instances when a First Nations person or tribe was aiding the dominant group (e.g., in the American myth of Thanksgiving^[17]), they were elevated to “noble savage.” The dominant group used these representations to justify land acquisition and horrific acts of indigenous subjugation through genocide. The economic benefits of this suppression and recasting ensured continued dominance and power. Through the power playbook, the dominant ethnic group’s power was so normalized that it became ideologically cemented in the national story as common sense.

Martin Luther King, Jr., argued in 1963 that America had not yet confronted the tragedy of its annihilation of First Nations people in America, and instead embraced it through its cultural mythology:

Our nation was born in genocide when it embraced the doctrine that the original American, the Indian, was an inferior race. Even before there were large numbers of Negroes on our shore, the scar of racial hatred had already disfigured colonial society. From the sixteenth century forward, blood flowed in battles over racial supremacy. We are perhaps the only nation which tried as a matter of national policy to wipe out its indigenous population. Moreover, we elevated that tragic experience into a noble crusade. Indeed, even today we have not permitted ourselves to reject or feel remorse for this shameful episode. Our literature, our films, our drama, our folklore all exalt it. Our children are still taught to respect the violence which reduced a red-skinned people of an earlier culture into a few fragmented groups herded into impoverished reservations.^[18]

Not surprisingly, the dominant group used the same character representations – brute, childish fool, and noble savage – to depict enslaved Africans and later both enslaved and free Black people, whose aspirations to full citizenship and equality posed a threat to the economic and social order since the first slave ships landed in Virginia in 1619. As chattel slavery became the economic engine for continued expansion and great wealth, the stories  of Black “inferiority” became a common-sense myth to justify the horrifying, murderous, and inhumane treatment of Black people. For centuries, Black Americans have fought against an array of negative and dehumanizing media portrayals.^[19] Other minoritized groups – in terms of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, race, religion, language, class, and other dimensions – have also fought the myths, stereotypes, and misrepresentations constructed by the dominant population, including those spread by media.

Cultural “othering” is powerful. It justified a host of horrible tragedies that the powerful brought down onto Black Americans, including torture, rape, and enslavement; the denial of full citizenship; the terrorism of decades of lynching; the denial of the right to vote; the massacres at Wilmingon, N.C. (1898), Tusla, Okla. (1921), and elsewhere; Jim Crow laws that enforced segregation and inequality; police brutality; and mass incarceration.^[20] 

One of the most disturbing and enduring portrayals of Black Americans in media was one of the United States’ first blockbuster films. The film Birth of a Nation (1915), directed by D. W. Griffith (a Kentucky native whose father was a Confederate colonel during the Civil War), is considered a “masterpiece” in early 20th-century storytelling. The wildly successful historical fiction film (originally titled “The Clansman”) is also one of the most racist films ever created and because of its tremendous success, is an example of a residual narrative.

The story critiques the Reconstruction period after the Civil War by portraying freed Black people and bi-racial leaders as sloppy, drunken fools who are incapable of governing. The three-hour film also manages to work in a captivity narrative by portraying a Black “savage” who is a freedman and soldier – played by a white actor in blackface – who stalks a young white woman through a wooded and hilly terrain. The woman (who is filled with childish wonder) ultimately leaps to her death in her terrified attempt to escape her “savage” predator. The scene offered the necessary proof that “Black savages” must be stopped by the heroic Ku Klux Klan (the Black character who stalks the woman is lynched in the film), and legitimized white supremacy and the end to Reconstruction in 1877, which meant federal troops would be pulled out of the South and there would be no oversight on how southern states would treat Black Americans.

Birth of a Nation reasserted white supremacy in the United States. It was the first film shown in the White House (President Woodrow Wilson screened it, and reportedly said afterward that “my only regret is that it is so all terribly true.”), and Chief Justice Edward D. White of the U.S. Supreme Court watched it as well, confiding to the writer of the book the film was based on that “I was a member of the Klan, sir.”^[21] The film screened across the country, often with protests against the film’s racist narrative. Yet the film’s message inspired the resurrection of the Ku Klux Klan, spreading terror among Black, Jewish, and Catholic Americans. As one historian noted, “Birth of a Nation was the midwife in the rebirth of the most vicious terrorist organization in the history of the United States.”^[22]

   
An obsequious cotton field laborer, tipping his hat to the white plantation master.

Black characters are portrayed as foolish, silly imbeciles who burst into dance and entertain the wealthy white landowners.
A scene portraying Black elected officials who are attempting to govern, but they are shown swigging alcohol and leering, eating fried chicken legs (the man standing), taking off their boots and putting their bare feet on their desks, and falling into a state of general laziness and disorder.

A white actor in blackface portraying the film’s “dangerous savage,” who lusts after a naive, young white woman.

The young white woman, seen here being charmed by a squirrel, ultimately runs for her life to escape “the savage” and jumps off a cliff to her death.

The power playbook: otherize the people who threaten the hegemonic power and then fit them into various tropes that then, by repetition and recirculation, become common sense.

Media is about power. We defined power in the introduction of this Handbook as “the ability to get things done.” The ability to get things done in the context of this chapter means being able to do things with how people understand race by controlling the stories and the representation of diverse racialized groups. It even means constructing the very idea that there are multiple races, rather than just one.

Other resources

• The Annenberg Inclusion Initiative’s Inclusion List 
• The Evolution of Black Representation in Film
• Racist Stereotypes in TV and Film that White People don't see

Media Education Foundation

• White Like Me: Race, Racism and White Privilege in America
• Latinos Beyond Reel: Challenging a Media Stereotypel (2012)
• How Racism Harms White Americans (2013)
• The Mean World Syndrome: Media Violence & the Cultivation of Fear: Featuring George Gerbner & Michael Morgan (2011)
• The Souls of Black Girls: Media Images of Beauty & the Self-Esteem of African-American Women (2008)
• Not Just a Game: Power, Politics & American Sports (2010)
• The Great White Hoax:  Donald Trump & the Politics of Race & Class in America (2017)

Other research

Robert Entman, The Black Image in the White Mind: Media and Race in America (University of Chicago, with Andrew Rojecki), 2001.

Robert M. Entman and Kimberly A. Gross, “Law and Contemporary Problems” Vol. 71, No. 4, The Court of Public Opinion: The Practice and Ethics of Trying Cases in the Media (Autumn, 2008), pp. 93-133 (41 pages).

Robert M. Entman, “Blacks in the News: Television, Modern Racism, and Cultural Change,” Journalism Quarterly, 69(2), Summer 1992. 341-361. [Online]. Available: https://www.aejmc.org/home/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/Journalism-Quarterly-1992-Entman-341-611.pdf

Enck-Wanzer, S. M. (2009). All’s fair in love and sport: Black masculinity and domestic violence in the news. Communication & Critical/Cultural Studies, 6, 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1080/14791420802632087

hooks, bell. (1992). Black looks: Race and representation. South End Press.

Jackson, L. M. (2017, August 2). We need to talk about digital blackface in gifs. Teen Vogue. https://www.teenvogue.com/story/digital-blackface-reaction-gifs.

L. Tosaya and R.L. Joseph (2021, April 27). A look into digital blackface, culture vultures, & how to read racism like black critical audiences. Flow. https://www.flowjournal.org/2021/04/a-look-into-digital-blackface/

B. Yousman (2003, November). Blackophilia and blackophobia: White youth, the consumption of rap music, and white supremacy. Communication Theory, 13(4), 366–391.