Abstract
After the 2008 election of President Barack Obama, many White politicians and pundits were quick to proclaim that the United States had turned the corner on racism. In fact, President Obama served as a beacon of hope for many Whites who believed that his election somehow reconciled the history of systematic racial inequities in the United States. This postracial delusion proved to be perhaps a fabulous fiction, nonetheless. Critical race and mass communication scholars continue to examine the nuanced ways in which coded and covert racialized language and actions of some Whites normalize standards of racial domination in all sorts of everyday interactions. One such scholar, Dr. Libby Lewis, shows how journalists of color negotiate, transact, and even challenge the ingrained practices of White racial performances in the television news media, thereby placing the myth of postracial consciousness in an unremitting tension and conflict. In her book, Lewis, a Lecturer at the University of California, Los Angeles, launched an unequivocal indictment of the racist, sexist, heterosexist, and even ageist practices that percolate through the supposedly fair and objective newsroom culture. The strength of this book lies in its detailed use of qualitative approaches featuring more than 100 interviews with mostly Black journalists who discussed their experiences of enduring multiple forms of oppression while working in the television news industry. Lewis used what she calls, a multilayered method of “thick transcription” of these interviews to speak not only to the racialization of the workplace, but also to the realities of intersecting oppressions under conditions of Whiteness. Lewis’s book represents a timely contribution, as we need insights into the seeming paradox of heightened aspirations of racial transcendence celebrated during Obamamania and the invisible hand of Whiteness that ultimately influence social transactions between Black journalists and their White counterparts.
How does race materialize in the inflection of an individual’s speech, in how individuals choose to fix their hair or manage their time, or in the clothes they pick from their closet? How does complicated identity politics of race, gender, and sexuality force journalists of color to self-police difference to fit into corporate newsroom culture? In her book, Lewis provides a peek behind the scenes of the television news industry, where professionalism, branding, and marketing are built upon a monolithic White heterosexual male imaginary. She situates her work within Ralph Ellison’s conceptual frame of the “inner eyes,” which borrows from W. E. B. Du Bois’s double-consciousness, to illuminate the quotidian strategies and tactics of Black journalists navigating White spaces where Blackness is constantly under surveillance. The “inner eyes” metaphorically represents the peculiar disposition of the eyes of Black journalists, who narrate a reality where they must orient their behaviors in the face of a professionalizing process that restricts Black subjectivity and mobility.
Lewis’s interviewees hold nothing back in explaining how they negotiate, call out, resist, and even acquiesce to the racial, gendered, and heterosexual hierarchies of the professional newsroom culture. Some asserted that White media owners and upper level management conform to White supremacist standards of beauty, requiring Black on-air talent to use cosmetics that lighten their skin tone and to contour their noses, while appealing to White cultural norms of thinness. Some expressed outright anger with image consultants who asked them to straighten their hair because those in upper level management viewed African hairstyles and textures as unprofessional. Others openly lamented the impunity of autocratic news directors who verbally abuse female journalists. Still, some Black journalists believed that it is best to assimilate to White cultural norms of the newsrooms, and chose to “play their cards”—or emphasize difference—once they had achieved success in their careers. Lewis also provides readers with rare access to the inner workings of so-called weekend “ghetto shows,” and to the policing of gay and lesbian bodies. She points out, most importantly, the hypocrisy in television news media, where objectivity means reinforcing a White heteronormative male universality rather than simply reporting what is seen. Lewis views the Black body as an “empty canvas” where White media owners, managers, and producers inscribe their own professional standards with the dripping ink of Whiteness.
Lewis concludes with a discussion on how the “Obama phenomenon” created a schism between the racialized experiences of Black journalists and the myth of postracialism circulating in the television newsroom. This phenomenon obscures oppressive conditions of working in society as postracial frames become universal appeals about all of us. Although there are many other examples and stories in this book attesting to how Blacks are heavily scrutinized as they overcome oppressive modalities operating in the television news industry, I was left pondering about the evolution of race-transcendent Black media icons who involuntarily become extensions of racial apathy. Black journalists from Jayne Kennedy, to Bryant Gumbel, to Gwen Ifill and Oprah Winfrey overcame obstacles and paved the way for their contemporaries such as Tamron Hall, Don Lemon, and Pam Oliver. Yet Lewis reminds us that the path to racial equality is always under construction as people of color must carry around the invisible weight of Whiteness.