Whiteness and media

Critical media studies have long been interested in racial representations. One of the first articles in media studies to address whiteness explicitly was Richard Dyer's 1988 essay White, which appeared in Screen. Although questions about the politics of racial representation had certainly been on the table long before that-in the regulations of the motion picture industry, as well as critical writing, Dyer turned our attention to the study of whiteness and its representational power. Since that time, studies in whiteness have flourished in communication studies and beyond. While it might not be necessary to point out, but I still ijisist on doing so, that discussions about whiteness are not new. Whiteness and its conflation with nationality has long been reflected in legislative discourses about immigration and citizenship restrictions to popular discourses about who is American. People of color as well have long held practical knowledge about the workings of whiteness for their own survival in a white-dominated society. Knowledge about when to speak out and when to remain silent, when to look and when to avert gazes, have all played important roles in the ways that whiteness functions. Whiteness, however, is a slippery topic precisely because whiteness is not a fixed property per se. It does not inhere in bodies. Instead, whiteness serves a number of social functions that serve to reinforce a system of domination, not only in relation to race, but sexuality, gender, class, location, and, certainly, nationality. As Sarah Projansky and Kent Ono conclude in their analysis of films that appear to challenge whiteness, issue is not whiteness, but what whiteness is so often used to do (771). The two review essays here offer differing perspectives on the critical study of whiteness in the media. Raka Shome's essay, Outing Whiteness,focuses on the ways that whiteness serves as domination yet outs itself in the process of securing its social position. Her review of popular images demonstrates the ways that whiteness serves as the organizing principle yet remains dynamic in differing contexts to resecure its positionality. She argues that we need to study whiteness from a critical perspective despite the risk ofrecentering whiteness. In contrast, Ramona Liera-Schwichtenberg's essay, Passing or Whiteness on the Edge of Town, takes the margin as her starting point and the role of passing in negotiating relations with whiteness.