The limits of representation activism: analyzing Black celebrity politics in LeBron James’ The Shop

On representation activism and Black celebrityhood

The Shop’s is designed and produced to appeal to both the alluring popularity of LeBron James in particular, and that of the Black celebrity more generally. The show’s guests include of some of the most globally visible Black cultural figures – basketball players Anthony Davis, Ben Simmons, Candace Parker; actors Will Smith, Martin Lawrence, Whoopi Goldberg; hip-hop musicians Drake, Snoop Dogg, Diddy, Pharrell Williams; entertainers Kevin Hart and Jamie Foxx, among many others. Despite the presence of these Black luminaries, LeBron is the show’s central figure who, regardless of his stellar basketball accomplishments, evokes a humility derived from this well-narrativized humble upbringing, his grounded social media presence, and approachable public persona, all of which ascribe him a down-to-earth aura; as if one could realistically find him in their local barbershop. Outspoken and unmistakably supportive of Black Lives Matter and other causes (Galily, 2019), LeBron rebukes the doctrine of (a)political neutrality espoused by the previous generation of superstar athletes (such as Michael Jordan and Charles Barkley) and is at the forefront of the contemporary revival of athlete-activism (a politics that harkens back to the mid-1900s athletes such as Paul Robeson, Muhammed Ali, and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar) (Bryant, 2018; Edwards, 2017).

In this vein, LeBron and HBO market The Shop as a forum for foregrounding critical and potentially uncomfortable conversation about race that the U.S.: the implication being these are the type of conversations needed to realize meaningful progress in the American racial formation. Simultaneously, LeBron and guests position The Shop as a pinnacle of positive Black representation, especially since it airs on a premium television network HBO (reports from Statista found only 31% of United States consumers purchase HBO subscriptions as of 2018, and the vast majority of them are White [Watson, 2018]). However, the following analysis demonstrates how the politics at the foundation of The Shop exhibits what Cashmore (2012) describes as the Black celebrity’s pact with post-racial America: that race will not encumber the material success of the Black entertainment elite as long that they embody, for the viewing masses, the myths of American meritocracy, individualism, and hyper-consumerism. The Black celebrity must sell diversion, amusement, and enjoyment; but never critical politics. Although The Shop appears to subvert dominant racial ideologies, by leaning into these American myths and obscuring structural influences of race-based discrimination, it precludes the possibility of a truly radical Black politics. As our analysis shows, the premise, content, and constitution of The Shop thus hinders racial progress by confusing Black bourgeois sensitivities, and the expression of “authentic” cultural codes of Blackness, for progressive and emancipatory racial representations. In sum, The Shop’s limitations arise from its flawed foundational logic of representation activism.

The “new social movement” paradigm is useful for understanding the goals of representation activism (Buechler, 2011; Laraña et al., 1994). As opposed to traditional social movements that often target state policy and economic redistribution, new social movements are characterized in part by their emphasis on collective identity, symbolic forms of resistance, and counter-hegemonic cultural tactics. Despite their currency, the efficacy of new social movements has been challenged and critiqued for, amongst other factors: lacking concrete and centralized strategy; pursuing optics at the expense of action; overlooking class dynamics; and mistaking depictions of staged and often ephemeral cultural empowerment for enduring political and material transformation (Buechler, 2011). As with The Shop, these critiques apply to activism that views empowerment through representation in media and the culture industry as an effective anti-racist strategy.

Representation activism falls into what Kehinde Andrews (2018) identifies as a common trap of contemporary racial activism: mistaking an increased proliferation of progressive ethnic/cultural symbolisms as an indicator of the material alleviation of oppressive racial barriers. Rather than maintaining a liberatory vision focused on the dismantling of an entire socio-political-economic system that oppresses Black people, some contemporary forms of Black activism evaluate racial progress by the ubiquity of “authentic Blackness” in popular culture (Andrews, 2018; Gilroy, 2000). This is not to say that the realm of popular culture cannot serve as a crucial site through which dominant understandings of race are produced, advanced, and at times contested. However, the pursuit of a Black authenticity only constructs an antiquated, universalized, essentialized/essentializing understanding of Blackness, and a concomitantly regressive, reductive, individualized/individualizing Black politics. Even if cultural transformation is the target of anti-racist activism, it is not coterminous with true material liberation. Romanticizing cultural transformation suggests that the problems facing Black people worldwide are merely “in our minds” (or on our screens) rather than “in our streets, our schools, and the political and economic system” (Andrews, 2018: 113). As we will demonstrate, it is also an inherently individualized solution that often favors the most privileged within marginalized communities, while failing to acknowledge the diversity of Black experiences. “Positive” images of Blackness in popular culture may be intended to provide aspirational empowerment; however, this alone falls short of prescribing an empowered collective. Resurrecting individualized Black achievement does not “automatically leads to that person using any successes they reap for the benefit of the community” (Andrews, 2018: 126). Race-oriented representation activism, as pursued through The Shop, thus falls short of achieving a focused and productive liberatory project.

Framework and methodology

Following Hall (1997) and cultivation theory (Gerbner et al., 2004), this analysis is based on an understanding of representation as not reflecting, but constitutive of and constituting, social reality. In televised media texts such as The Shop, this reality is formulated mainly through language and visualization, which cooperate to communicate and nurture a common interpretation of ideas, images, symbols, and meanings (Hall, 1997). Representation, then, does not depict essential meaning, but is a “signifying practice” that “produces meaning, that makes things mean” (Hall, 1997: 24, italics in original). The broader effects of the meanings produced through televised media, drawing from Gerbner et al. (2004) is the presumption of validity and formation of social reality, and thus influences our racial perceptions. However, because the media texts cannot be separated from questions of social power, analyses of media texts must always ask “in whose interests representations have been produced and whose definitions of reality we are seeing” (Thornham et al., 2009: 251). Race as represented through The Shop, then, is communicated as valid and authentic, and thus contributes to the construction of popular perceptions of Black people.

The Shop itself was chosen as the focus of this study due to how much is purports to encapsulate the vision of representation activism. As stated earlier, it unequivocally centers successful Black people, in a “Black” setting, discussing “Black” issues on a mainstream media platform popular among the White middle/upper class. In order to generate the empirical basis of this project, we conducted a textual analysis to interpret the content, visuals, discussion, languages of media, and other processes that collectively construct meaning within The Shop. Textual analysis can be used to identify the discursive, visual, and symbolic ways in which popular media texts are embedded within, and structured in relation to, prevailing cultural power relations (Markula and Silk, 2011). First, this entailed analyzing the show on the meta-level, analyzing the show’s production values and decisions in order to situate the show within the context of the cultural intermediaries responsible for its generation. Following Bourdieu, the role of culture intermediaries is understood as being to “construct value, by framing how others – end consumers, as well as other market actors including other cultural intermediaries – engage with goods, affecting and effecting others” orientations toward those goods as legitimate – with “goods” understood to include material products as well as services, ideas, and behaviors’ (Maguire and Matthews, 2012: 552). Hence, we examined how the show is described, promoted, and advertised, and researched by its cultural intermediaries: those compendium agents and stakeholders responsible for The Shop’s enactment. Next, we watched each of the 10 episodes that composed our sample (all that were released at the time of this writing, aired between August 2018 and June 2020) in order to systematically code the content of the show itself. We then transcribed the relevant dialogue, carefully noting the content, visual cues, and discursive context that accompanied them (Clarke and Braun, 2006). As part of the coding process, we defined relevant dialogue as anything relating to: Black culture; race relations; living as a celebrity; or relevant points of social critique. Lastly, we organized the data into broad thematic patterns reflecting the show’s depictions of Blackness and politics of representation. The three main themes comprise the analysis discussed next.

Universalizing the Black bourgeois experience

An underpinning logic of representation activism is that the inclusion of positive and counter-hegemonic examples of Blackness in mainstream media will benefit popular perceptions of Blackness, thus furthering racial progress. Successful and well-connected Black individuals – athletes, musicians, entertainers, etc. – can then act as a cultural vanguard of empowering Black representation, capitalizing fully on the opportunity to use popular media for popular media to be “salvational rather than toxic” (Jackson, 2006: 144). To its credit, The Shop contains dialogue that takes strides toward fulfilling this goal, providing a platform for Black celebrities to discuss their experiences and air their grievances unfiltered. In the first episode, LeBron states about Black Americans: “We move everything. We move the way people dress, we move the way people think, we move the way people dance, the music people listen to, we move the way people play sports.” Maverick Carter follows up by saying that Black culture is “America’s #1 export.” In episode three, LeBron, Snoop Dogg, and singer Mary J. Blige recognize the exploitation of Blackness in popular culture, with Wraithe summarizing the sentiment:

White people are still making money off of Black bodies. Whether it be movies, sports, things like that. . . So yeah we watch it, and we tune in, and we love it. . . But, there’s not that many Black people at the top.

The guests also lament the curse of celebrity, specifically what they designate as the double standards and unequal expectations between Black celebrities and White celebrities. In episode one, Black American football star Odell Beckham provides an anecdote about how White people see him on the street, pull out their phone to record, and ask him to dance, saying “I really feel like a zoo animal. . .like a show monkey or something, like I’m a puppet.” LeBron then sums up the issues with being a Black celebrity with the succinct statement: “no matter how big you become in America, no matter how much influence you think you got. . . when you’re African-American, it doesn’t matter. You’re still Black. You’re still Black in America.”

While unequivocally valid issues, this statement by LeBron and the lamentations about Black fame by other guests highlights the ways in which celebrity-oriented representation can obfuscate the diversity of marginalized experiences, often erasing the everyday experience of the most vulnerable in favor of the most privileged within a marginalized group. Despite The Shop’s presumed centering of Black experiences, there is remarkably little to which the working or lower class non-celebrity Black majority can relate, let alone perceive as liberatory. Among the topics discussed throughout various episodes are million-dollar contract disputes, how comedians are being “silenced” by “cancel culture,” being asked to sign too many autographs, the best ways for celebrities to tell their struggling families that they will not provide financial help, the racism of awards shows, and the difficulties of choosing which sports car to drive to celebrity Hollywood parties. It is no surprise then that most of the show’s critiques are aimed at Hollywood’s racial barriers; those that prohibit the Black elite from obtaining greater wealth and status. The guests do effectively link their issues to White supremacy, but the analysis never extends to the vernacular Black experience, the material conditions associated with the contemporary racial formation, or their broader connections to capitalism (which is not mentioned once).

Though economic class is discursively neglected in the show, the class privilege of the guests is far from hidden or obscured. It is instead flaunted through various signifiers of hedonistic and conspicuous Black consumption (Mukherjee, 2007). In their respective episodes, many of the guests wear gold jewelry and chains, fitted alongside clothing from high-end fashion brands such as Dolce & Gabbana, Gucci, and Louis Vuitton. Even the barbershop of season one – described by LeBron to be “a real barbershop, like the ones where I grew up” (“The Shop,” 2020) – is gilded with golden scissors, armrests, footrests, ladders, and gold-lined furniture on which the guests sip red wine, with season two’s barbershop setting featuring marble walls and countertops. The barbers themselves occupy the periphery, only receiving rare glimpses from the camera, and never speak or demonstrate their presence (unlike in real-life barbershops where they often dictate the conversation). Additionally, corporatism receives generous camera time. The cameras routinely pan onto the expensive sneakers worn by the guests, who use the visual exposure to promote their personal or sponsored brands (LeBron with his Nike clothing and personal “King James” logo, Snoop Dogg wearing his sponsored Adidas gear, and Travis Scott wearing his sponsored Jordan gear with his recent album name on it). Representation activism sometimes perceives visual significations of Black success, such as these, to counter the entrenched associations between Blackness and poverty (Dixon et al., 2019). However, conversations and visual cues of The Shop depict a tacit endorsement (and embodiment) of neoliberal corporate capitalism. As Marable (2015: 15) argues: “one could not struggle decisively against racism and remain a proponent of capitalism” (Marable, 2015: 15), a sentiment expressed by a rich tradition of Black radicals from W.E.B. DuBois to C.L.R. James to Malcolm X (Robinson, 1983). Despite The Shop’s endorsement, capitalism’s inveterately racialized nature renders it an adversary, rather than ally, of Black liberation.

If the premise of representation activism is that marginalized individuals can become empowered by seeing themselves (or examples of what they can/should aspire to be) in popular media, The Shop falls short by way of its circumventing of the class issues and differences which set the Black elite apart from the Black proletariat/precariat. In a sense, representation activism’s pursuit of empowering an individual marginalized subject through a universalizing media representative is a futile endeavor. There is no “common” Black experience, as critical race theory reminds us (Delgado and Stefancic, 1993; Hawkins et al., 2016). Even if one presumes that a common Black experience does exist, the class privileges of the marginalized individuals granted entry into commercial media often realistically preclude them from representing the experiences of the majority. Black celebrities certainly encounter new forms of oppression as they climb the social ladder (which Diddy argues in episode seven is a result of their unique “brain power” and chosen status as natural “unicorns”). However, this “neoliberal turn” in the Black political imagination that venerates merit and individual “hustle” only restricts the development of intersectional Black solidarity and collective advancement (Spence, 2015). The inclusion in popular media of the Black primarily-male elite is only empowering in a superficial, neoliberal sense, and is therefore antithetical to the interests of the Black majority that anti-racist endeavors must center.

The implicit conflation of the issues of the Black elite and the issues of the Black majority are often harmful for the most vulnerable within the Black community. Social, political, and economic elites within marginalized groups have a long history of utilizing their influence to co-opt the language of social justice and redefine the aims of identity politics to narrowly fit their own personal interests, rather than serve the interests of the more vulnerable members that elites claim to represent (Marable, 2015; Táíwò, 2020). The Black bourgeoisie may look, act, and talk like the Black proletariat, but the wide disparity in their class interests negates strong material commonality (Frazier, 1965). When Black cultural representatives are only granted legitimacy for their combination of elite status and dark pigmentation, what can result is the universalization of Black voices from those “too hungry for status to be angry, too eager for acceptance to be bold, too self-invested in advancement to be defiant” (West, 1994: 38). True liberation must prioritize the masses rather than a select few. Despite however noble their intentions may be, when only LeBron and other wealthy celebrities are given outlets to speak on behalf of the entire Black community, the focus tends to shift away from structure and toward issues that inhibit Black celebrities from advancing within mainstream White-controlled institutions as they exist. A radical anti-racist approach that aims to identify and reconstitute the structures of capitalism, colonialism, patriarchy, and White supremacy would better benefit everyday Black people oppressed by multiple structures of domination.

Commodifying an “authentic” Blackness

Representation activism often presumes that “more authentic depictions can increase positive perceptions of immigrants and people of color” (Godsil et al., 2016). However, we argue that representations of Blackness often cannot be truly “authentic” within a profit-driven capitalist media landscape. When the goal is to engage and resonate with as wide of a consumer base as possible, what often replaces progressive representation is a calculated, market-tested, commodified, managed version of Blackness, that is, incompatible with the anti-racist intentions of representation activism (Gilroy, 2000). The late capitalist moment has seen Blackness increasingly enter the sphere of popular culture, which has been accompanied by significant shifts in how Blackness is perceived by the White mainstream (Hall, 1996). However, these shifts have not resulted in a more nuanced understanding of Blackness that correctly recognizes it as a dynamic signifier of cultural, aesthetic, and embodied responses formed in negotiation with structural discrimination and exclusion from mainstream institutions. Instead, Blackness has been constructed in consumer culture as a tantalizing yet reductive and degrading source of fascination that contains signifiers of danger, roughness, urban authenticity, and a mystical natural embodiment of coolness (Andrews et al., 2011; Hall, 1996; Hooks, 1992). When these stereotypes become associated with profit, the culture industry constructs a Blackness, that is, marketed as rugged and dangerous enough to spark fascination, yet softened and safe enough as to not alienate a potential mainstream consumer (Gilroy, 2000). As a result, “African American rhetorics and their affiliated epistemes, politics, and subjectivities are hollowed out for more acceptable public consumption” (Nunley, 2011: 1). This managed presentation of Blackness is at the core of The Shop’s consumer appeal. Although it is seemingly an example of empowering Black representation, The Shop ultimately succumbs to and reproduces the harmful stereotype of Blackness as inherently “cool” by mobilizing signifiers that fetishize the ghetto, violence, and street toughness.

Before even watching, the description of The Shop makes its intentions clear. The series website describes The Shop as providing viewers a “one-of-a-kind barbershop experience, which for many provides a sanctuary for free-flowing and spirited discussions” featuring “distinguished individuals,” alongside a quote from LeBron that the show is for “anyone who has been in a real barbershop, like the ones where I grew up” (“The Shop,” 2020). According to LeBron, the show provides unscripted conversation: “the show is real, it’s candid, and it’s the essence of conversation” (Maple, 2018: para. 6); despite, apparently, the presence of the credited Dialogue Editor. What becomes immediately clear upon watching, though, is the show’s attempt to portray a raw and rugged Black authenticity associated with a ghetto upbringing; akin to the ways in which Black bodies are fetishized, essentialized, and assumed to be the “products, and/or progeny, of the mythologized (equally romanticized as demonized) American Ghetto” (Andrews et al., 2011: 70). The implicit appeal is that The Shop depicts Blackness in what viewers imagine as its “natural” form; the way America’s most visible Black celebrities talk, dress, and behave when removed from the spectacle of an NBA game, an awards show, or their respective realm of cultural performance. The show hinges on the imagined space of the Black barbershop, that is, often discursively positioned as a staple of underprivileged Black communities, where Black subjectivities are shared and performed unencumbered by the “disciplining gaze of whiteness” (Nunley, 2011: 3). If the appeal of the show was truly the content of the conversations, then the setting would not matter. Yet the reason the discussion takes place in a barbershop rather than, say, a coffeeshop, is the perception of the Black barbershop as one of the few Black spaces in which Whites do not have easy access, which is what makes it so enticing to HBO consumers fascinated by the performed essence of a pure Blackness.

The opening dialogue of the series demonstrates the racial politics at the show’s foundation. The debut begins with Carter asking White comedian Jon Stewart, “Jon, have you ever been in a Black barbershop?” to which Stewart jokingly replies “uhh, only to collect rent,” followed by resounding laughter from all the Black guests. Right after this brief exchange, it cuts to the opening credits: a montage of images of the brick-walled barbershop and Los Angeles mixed with cuts of the episode’s guests walking through the Los Angeles streets to bass-infused hip-hop song by Drake. A conscious effort is made to associate the show with Black (masculinity), hip-hop, and associated cultural significations. The tone for the series is set by the dialogue that immediately follows the opening credits. With an eclectic mix of humor, vulgarity, and traditionally Black vernacular, the guests discuss how conversation and honesty are central to Black barbershops. After Carter states that “somebody will call your ass out” if you lie in a Black barbershop, LeBron chimes in for the show’s first time with the following playful quip:

There’s gonna be one guy in the barbershop that’s not even getting a fuckin’ haircut. He’s only there to roast yo’ ass, and make an argument. You’re like, ‘damn nigga, you been here since 8:00 AM. It’s 6:00 in the afternoon, you still ain’t get yo haircut?’ He’s only there to start shit. He’s sitting on the couch and you’re like ‘you next?’ And he’s like, ‘naw I’m good. . . so your shoes busted as fuck.’ Like damn nigga! You need to get a haircut or get the fuck out of here! (sic)

This quote how language and rhetoric is deployed to establish the show’s attempt to highlight the “true” cultural and stylistic patterns of Black celebrities that viewers are unfamiliar with. This quote likely comes off as surprising even to LeBron’s biggest fans who have only heard him speak in his deliberate, measured manner when the cameras are rolling, and mainstream audiences are watching. For many, this is the first time that they may have heard LeBron not only speak in African-American Vernacular English (AAVE), but also swear, use slang, and say the N-word in such a casual manner. The implication to the viewer is that in the setting of The Shop, the “real” LeBron comes out; that is, to say, the essential speech patterns of the Black man no longer have to be concealed, and we are presented with the authentic LeBron in his natural habitat. Of course, there are no essential Black cultural patterns, as the notion of culture itself is always already hybrid, and “because racial designations of people are for the most part imaginary, then racial designations of culture are also products of our imagination – arbitrary and ambiguous” (Yousman, 2003: 372). However, the ease with which LeBron and other guests “talk Black” and blithely invoke the seductive perceived signifiers of Blackness strongly suggests to the viewer that The Shop is a space where an authentic Blackness is displayed.

The invocation of hip-hop culture – long associated with Black spaces and people, though not always in its current sanitized and depoliticized form (Rose, 1994; Yousman, 2003) – is another mechanism through which the show aims to establish a connection to the proverbial “streets” that occupy the post-industrial American urban landscape. Beyond the show’s theme song – by Drake, the most globally visible rapper in the world – a substantial portion of the show’s guests include prominent rappers and hip-hop moguls. These guests discuss a variety of topics, such as how their music was molded by street hustlers and gang members, how music served as a refuge from the harsh realities of the ghetto, and even the norms and etiquettes of “rap beefs” that often intertwine with codes of hypermasculinity. Regressive gender politics at various points in the show, especially in perhaps the show’s most controversial moment in episode six, when Black comedian Kevin Hart lambasts young Black rapper Lil Nas X for coming out publicly as gay. Applying a “colorblind” attitude to sexuality, Hart shouts over Nas X’s explanation of destigmatizing homosexuality to argue that Nas X should not need to “come out” because his sexuality should not matter. Neither Hart nor other guests acknowledge hip-hop culture’s notoriously toxic heteronormativity.

The aesthetics of the ghetto are also engaged in episode five. Hart’s complaints that his kids fail to understand how hard their father worked to escape the ghetto is followed by the quip from popular radio host Charlemagne tha God: “[the children of the guests] don’t understand the dangers of it. They don’t know there’s shooters here, drug dealers here. They just know that Dad came from [the ghetto], so it must be fun”; a perception The Shop ironically reaffirms. Even LeBron – despite being growing up in the “boring” Akron, Ohio instead of the inner-city ghettos, as White TV personality Jimmy Kimmel joked in episode three – admitted that the rappers of 1990s hip-hop culture and the streets “raised” him. A prominent guest in episode three is Ice Cube, the rapper-turned-actor who ironically starred in the 2002 comedy film Barbershop that served as one of the more brazen constitutors of the barbershop as a hyper-gendered spectacle of the Black ghetto (Mukherjee, 2007). In The Shop, Ice Cube mentioned that he formed the famous rap group N.W.A. (Niggas With Attitude) to try to change the perception that Compton was full of only gangbangers and drug dealers. However, he then claims that he agreed to star in the comedy film Friday as a way to show how much fun people have in the “hood.” The comment exemplifies the broader issues of the show’s treatment of hip-hop culture. Rather than capitalizing on the opportunity to explain hip-hop culture’s origins as a collective cultural response to structural discrimination constructed as a subversive critique of White authority (Rose, 1994), The Shop depicts hip-hop culture as an essential and apolitical feature central to the constitution of Blackness. This portrayal romanticizes the dangers and violence of the ghetto as an exciting place worthy of admiration and emulation, rather than a debilitating and traumatizing space resulting from structural forces and relations that were not, and still are not, inevitable.

The Shop demonstrates how popular commercial media, by its very nature, cannot provide representations of Blackness that serve anti-racist objectives. The profit motive at the center of (late) capitalism, concomitant with the incentive to exploit spaces, symbols, and images in addition to bodies and labor, has always victimized Black and marginalized communities, even as those communities have attempted to find success playing by capitalist rules (Marable, 2015; Robinson, 1983). Blackness within The Shop is portrayed as an identity to be displayed, and as a commodity to be consumed; likely not because of any particular nefarious intentions by its stakeholders, but because of the broader capitalist structures through which it exists and operates. The Shop embodies the culture industry’s “substantial investments in blackness provided that it yields a user-friendly, house-trained, and marketable ‘reading’ or translation of the stubborn vernacular” associated with Blackness (Gilroy, 2000: 242). Representations of Blackness, then, cannot be “positive” as long as Black experiences and identities are abstracted from the sociohistorical contexts out of which they emerged, and depicted as an essential expression inherent to Black bodies or individuals.

Mediating through the White racial frame

Regardless of whether a cultural text can generate an “authentic” representation of Blackness within capitalist media that can somehow benefit of the entire Black community, oftentimes such representations are constructed through what Feagin (2013) calls the “White racial frame,” referring to the overarching White worldview that “encompasses a broad and persisting set of racial stereotypes, prejudices, ideologies, images, interpretations and narratives, emotions, and reactions to language accents” (3). Such is the enduring overdetermining influence of Whiteness within the United States media economy, the meanings constructed through mass mediated representation are rarely free from the values and perspectives of the White mainstream, whom constitute the vast majority of the American consumer landscape in both quantity (volume of audience) and quality (purchasing power, hence advertiser appeal, of audience). It is likely that The Shop intends to appeal to a cross-racial audience. Yet, even if The Shop somehow can (contrary to our arguments) serve as valid media representation of and for a multiplicity of Black people, its makeup, content, and delivery suggests a mediation through the White racial frame, and thus dictates the show’s boundaries of the Black performance.

The Shop must be situated within post-Fordism’s longstanding strategic utilization of race/ethnicity (Blackness especially in the U.S. context) in attempts to accentuate commercial products with manufactured cultural significations (Back and Quaade, 1993; Hebdige, 1979). What results is media texts often using Blackness as nothing more than the “spice that can liven up the dull dish, that is, mainstream white culture” (Hooks, 1992: 14). With its hyperbolic glorifications of ghettos and hip-hop culture, the version of Blackness depicted coincides with and caters to perceptions of Blackness from White outsiders, rather than being rooted in contemporary quotidian Black proletariat life. The signifiers of presumed Black authenticity contribute to the “Afro-Americanization of white youth” (West, 1994: 121) which has invited White teenage consumers to “[listen] in on Black culture, fascinated by its differences, drawn in by mainstream social constructions of Black culture as a forbidden narrative, as a symbol of rebellion” (Rose, 1994: 5). Contemporary consumer culture, then, has constructed race as nothing more than an aesthetic, a performance, an alternate reality to be engaged with from a safe distance, or a purchasable commodity that can signal racial solidarity without any material sacrifice (Featherstone, 2007; Yousman, 2003). This portrayal of Blackness as merely a set of cultural significations to appreciate absolves individuals from partaking in active anti-racist behavior (Yousman, 2003). One can perhaps envision a White consumer exclaiming “I’m not racist, I love watching The Shop!”

The Shop also includes White guests as de facto White framing devices. Each of the three episodes of season one includes exactly one White guest; Jon Stewart in episode one, WNBA star Elena Delle Donne in episode two, and Jimmy Kimmel in episode three (later episodes include a maximum of two). These White guests (Stewart and Kimmel especially, along with actor Seth Rogan and American football star Rob Gronkowski) are likely recognizable to various audiences, but also interject the show with the subjectivity of a common White, middle-class viewer. The White guests seem to play the position of the average White American toward whom the Black guests explain their alternative cultural perspectives. The White guests often ask questions of the Black guests, sometimes respectfully retorting with perspectives of White or Jewish Americans, and using humor to ease the tension produced by potentially divisive discussions. For most of their screen time, they seem to dominate the conversation and dictate the terms of discussion (although it is not discernable whether this is coincidental or a production decision).

In one particularly striking scene at the beginning of episode three, Black American football star Todd Gurley discusses the effects of football on his physical health. After Gurley describes how his body is the sorest on Tuesdays after Sunday football games, Kimmel randomly interjects, “but do you stay sexually active on Tuesdays?” While undoubtedly intended as a crude comedic interjection (albeit masculinist; no women were present), the joke certainly conjures up stereotypes of the brutish, sexually-deviant, uncontrollable Black male, while minimizing his physical state. In addition, in episode one, Stewart is the first person to speak after the opening credits, asking explicitly the rules of Black barbershops, allowing the Black guests to explain the trajectory, boundaries, intentions of Black barbershop discussion (which is to explain clearly to the viewer what the show itself intends to be). The calculated inclusion of White guests invites engagement with a “natural” Blackness, guiding White audiences into the realm of the Black unknown and capitalizing on White American consumers’ simultaneous fear of and fascination with Blackness (Yousman, 2003). In these ways, The Shop’s pursuit of Black authenticity is implicitly framed through the White logics it claims to be countering. The reliance on White consumption restricts the advancement of collective Black interests and the exposure of structural hierarchies that oppress the Black community; barriers that benefit the racial majority of the U.S. consumer base, but must be critiqued for an effectively liberatory anti-racist project.

Conclusion: toward targeting the root causes of racial oppression

The treatment of Blackness in the television show The Shop is characteristic of the flaws inherent to representation activism: the idea that a greater quantity and quality of Black representation in mainstream media has the potential to facilitate racial equality. Black representation in commercial media often universalizes the experience of the Black male elite while erasing the structures of domination that continue to oppress everyday non-iconic Blacks. Additionally, the profit motive of commercial media often pressures Black representation to cater to the perceptions and sympathies of White consumers, dulling the potential for radical structural critique and constructing a commodified Blackness, that is, reductive, mediated, and essentializing.

Representation activism is also predicated on the neoliberal “colorblind” belief that racism is an individualized problem that exists within the hearts and minds of a few ignorant people, and can be solved through increased exposure, and that the empowerment experienced by marginalized individuals merely seeing themselves represented in media will provide the psychological boost they need to pursue success (Bonilla-Silva, 2014). Advocating for greater media representation as an antidote for iniquitous racial outcomes does not contend with the fact that White supremacy thrives not only symbolically in individual minds, but materially through its foundational and influence in broader structures, collective systems, and social institutions. In this way, representation activism is a form of superficial activism that offers “quick ethnic fixes and cheap pseudo-solidarities” that serve as an “inadequate salve for real pain” (Gilroy, 2000: 6), thus preventing “radical action by masquerading as a politics of liberation” (Andrews, 2018: 118). Not every form of activism needs to attack macro-level systems. However, tactics that shift the burden of oppression from real societal barriers to individual factors – such as a lack of empowerment, drive, and/or determination – only serve to vindicate and naturalize neoliberal capitalism, rather than critique and potentially undermine it. In doing so, the development of a class-conscious Black collectivity is contained.

The Shop demonstrates an instance where the doomed pursuit of constructing Black authenticity for White consumption further restricts racial equality. As Yousman (2003) argues:

While Whites and Blacks continue to be divided by the color line, while they continue to live separate and unequal lives, the fascination that Whites derive from gazing at and purchasing moments of ‘authentic’ Black life must be understood as inherently contradictory, and, in fact, a process by which White supremacy can be further played out in the marketplace. (p. 375)

Along with Yousman, the critiques discussed in this piece apply specifically to The Shop, but should also be considered by media scholars, anti-racists, and activists interested in racial representation more broadly. Improving racial representation in the name of racial empowerment is certainly worthy goal for those who wish to see a more diverse status quo in the short-term. However, for those interested in the “development of an anti-racist politics that [meets] the real material needs of all oppressed people” (Marable, 2015: 10), especially in the fight for Black liberation, representation activism within capitalist media is both an insufficient means and end. Instead, in considering realistically an ideal racial representation within our current reality, we suggest that media texts should feature voices, narratives, images, and content oriented toward exposing the structural barriers that oppress the most vulnerable within a particular community, rather than the most privileged. In other words, those whose lives are most constrained by numerous and intersecting structural formations must be centered in media texts that aim to catalyze and communicate visions of social transformation. Even if this cannot alone eradicate White supremacy and corroborating systems of capitalist exploitation, it can at least foster solidarity and prefigure a viable path toward collective Black liberation.