The Colorblind Screen: Television in Post-Racial America

The election of President Barack Obama signaled for many the

realization of a post-racial America, a nation in which racism was no longer a

defining social, cultural, and political issue. While many Americans espouse a

colorblind racial ideology and publicly endorse the broad goals of

integration and equal treatment without regard to race, in actuality this

attitude serves to reify and legitimize racism and protects racial privileges

by denying and minimizing the effects of systematic and institutionalized

racism.

In The Colorblind Screen, the contributors examine

television’s role as the major discursive medium in the articulation and

contestation of racialized identities in the United States. While the dominant

mode of televisual racialization has shifted to a colorblind ideology that

foregrounds racial differences in order to celebrate multicultural

assimilation, the volume investigates how this practice denies the significant

social, economic, and political realities and inequalities that continue to

define race relations today. Focusing on such iconic figures as President

Obama, LeBron James, and Oprah Winfrey, many chapters examine the ways in which

race is read by television audiences and fans. Other essays focus on how visual

constructions of race in dramas like 24, Sleeper Cell, and The Wanted

continue to conflate Arab and Muslim identities in post-9/11 television. The

volume offers an important intervention in the study of the televisual

representation of race, engaging with multiple aspects of the mythologies

developing around notions of a post-racial America and the duplicitous

discursive rationale offered by the ideology of colorblindness.