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I am teaching our core graduate communication theory course this fall @UNCHussman. I have taught it once before, and it is clear that our field is long overdue for a reckoning with race and ethnicity. THREAD
As a field not only are we overwhelmingly white and from the global north, but questions of race, ethnicity, and power have been far from our analysis. Not in every corner of the field, but at the center of it; especially in political communication and journalism.
In reviewing my previous communication theory syllabus, it is clear that I have personal work to do as a professor when it comes to ensuring that my courses have a developed racial analysis.
There are also gaps in my research, which I have self-critiqued: "Although these books claimed to analyze the new workplaces at the intersection of technology and politics, there was no discussion of gender in either of them (or race and ethnicity)." https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444819835573
It is also clear that much of our field lacks a developed racial analysis, and generally vacates questions of power.
It is telling that our field traces its origins to The War of the Worlds and not Birth of a Nation, the 1913 film portraying the Confederacy as a lost cause, whites the victims of black aggression, and black Americans as animals.
Talk about media effects. The film sparked a wave of recruits to the Ku Klux Klan and President Woodrow Wilson applauded it from the White House, the first motion picture screened there, reportedly saying “it is like writing history with lightening.” https://www.jstor.org/stable/2710093?casa_token=1rSQ5t3cF3IAAAAA%3AQjA6PFLsbZYkeXDILUgOst9fLxS8uNv7WfkIU6Ub3DFdVfDvkPYD-6S6__E2i6OkH4aR5HZh_yZTeIFbjkCCF-C5eIuHRgPHK7KYz8e03WR6Ybtdton7&seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents
The failure to center analysis of Birth of a Nation in our field is willful ignorance. That we as a field are animated by the power of a radio broadcast about extra-terrestrials and largely silent about a film that played to audiences in the White House is a legacy still with us
It is in the racial silences in much of the field and its favoring of questions of epistemology over race, identity, and power.
There have been a number of recent works that offer a sustained racial critique of the field. @paulachak and @sjjphd's: “The Disavowal of Race in Communication Theory” https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14791420.2020.1771743?journalCode=rccc20
“These theoretical approaches fail on multiple fronts.... They fail to challenge white Eurocentric dominance...fail to recognize the racial contract that underpins the social contract, and fail to assess the structuring of inequalities associated with racial capitalism.”
"Of Experts and Tokens: Mapping a Critical Race Archaeology of Communication” by @Rupalijee
“A disgraceful white boys' club persists in the field of Communication.” https://academic.oup.com/ccc/advance-article/doi/10.1093/ccc/tcaa009/5850243
“A disgraceful white boys' club persists in the field of Communication.” https://academic.oup.com/ccc/advance-article/doi/10.1093/ccc/tcaa009/5850243
"White lies: a racial history of the (post)truth" by Robert Mejia, @MSUMKay, and Curtis Sullivan. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14791420.2018.1456668?casa_token=x7QPepN8RCoAAAAA%3A1l0DnT5SZhqvpnbcMV9fUj5LBVezgd4rFobOTDidAQGAiLdEh3d4BHn728WhrecXziH8a_geQlZsqg
'“By situating epistemology as the problem...post-truth critics have inadvertently and uncritically re-centered whiteness; that is post-truth critics tend to presume a universal (white) subject as the victim of disinformation, when it is people of color who have the most to lose"
#CommunicationSoWhite by @paulachak, @rachelkuo, Victoria Grubbs, and @cmcilwain. https://doi.org/10.1093/joc/jqy003
"We find that non-White scholars are significantly underrepresented as published authors and under-cited as producers of value in the field of communication. We also found that non-White scholars are more likely to engage race as an analytic in our field.”
It is clear that there is a lot of work to be done. All of us need to critically examine our knowledge production practices and syllabi - and especially those classes that take up questions of democracy, public life, and journalism.
@icahdq divisions such as @poli_com and our journals must address the structural inequities so powerfully illuminated by #CommunicationSoWhite. Division meetings at conferences should be as attentive to racial analysis of knowledge production as they are to finances.
Our divisions must recognize, support, produce, and promote scholars of color. Our research in political communication and journalism in particular must center race and ethnicity as objects of analysis, and critically analyze structures of power.
To be accountable to #CommunicationSoWhite is to expand our research questions and objects of analysis, to center racial analysis and power, to attend “to structures of power embedded within knowledge production,” and to restructure our normative commitments and models.
And, it is to be accountable for our progress, or lack thereof, in all these things.
To end with the conclusion from #CommunicationSoWhite:
“In the absence of a deliberate racial analytic, communication scholarship normalizes Whiteness....Any economy of knowledge production that perpetuates the ongoing universalization of a specific expression of humanity will continue to institute racial subjection.”
