Race as a discourse of power: approaches for communication studies

This article argues that the field of communication studies needs to understand how race functions as a discourse of power in order to more thoroughly reckon with the ways that race shapes key concepts in our field. This article aims to clearly lay out for communication scholars who don’t “do race” how race has shaped European liberal modernity’s logics, ways of knowing, institutions, and practices. I do so by building a framework from decades of critical race scholarship to help us see why understanding race beyond identity and representation is especially important in times when liberal humanism is in peril. I demonstrate what changing our collective understanding of race changes in how we theorize, research, and teach canonic topics in communication, such as advertising, citizenship, rights, and journalism.