Imperiled Whiteness: How Hollywood and Media Make Race in "Postracial" America

IMPERILED WHITENESS

IMPERILED WHITENESS

How Hollywood and Media Make Race in Postracial America

PENELOPE INGRAM

University Press of Mississippi / Jackson

The University Press of Mississippi is the scholarly publishing agency of the Mississippi Institutions of Higher Learning: Alcorn State University, Delta State University, Jackson State University, Mississippi State University, Mississippi University for Women, Mississippi Valley State University, University of Mississippi, and University of Southern Mississippi.

www.upress.state.ms.us

The University Press of Mississippi is a member of the Association of University Presses.

Any discriminatory or derogatory language or hate speech regarding race, ethnicity, religion, sex, gender, class, national origin, age, or disability that has been retained or appears in elided form is in no way an endorsement of the use of such language outside a scholarly context.

Portions of chapters 3, 5, and 7 appeared in Obama, Trump, and the Politics of an Ape Planet, Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media 58 (Spring), 2018. https://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/jc58.2018/index.html

Reprinted by permission.

Portions of chapter 6 appeared in Race, the Final Frontier: Star Trek, Trump and Hollywood’s Diversity Problem from The Kelvin Timeline of Star Trek: Essays on J. J. Abrams’s Final Frontier, ed. Matthew Wilhelm Kapell and Ace G. Pilkington (Jefferson, NC: McFarland © 2019): 39–57. Reprinted by permission of McFarland & Company, Inc., Box 611, Jefferson, NC 28640. www.mcfarlandbooks.com.

Copyright © 2023 by Penelope Ingram

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

First printing 2023

∞

Library of Congress Control Number: 2023012315

Hardback ISBN 978-1-4968-4549-8

Paperback ISBN 978-1-4968-4550-4

Epub single ISBN 978-1-4968-4551-1

Epub institutional ISBN 978-1-4968-4552-8

PDF single ISBN 978-1-4968-4553-5

PDF institutional ISBN 978-1-4968-4554-2

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

To William and Thomas, with hope for a better future

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Media Events, Pandemic TV, and the Ruse of the Postracial

Chapter 1: White Identity Politics

PART I: CONTAGION

Chapter 2: We’re All Infected

Chapter 3: Simian Flu or Ebola Redux

PART II: ANIMALITY

Chapter 4: When the Looting Starts, the Shooting Starts

Chapter 5: Animals with Guns

PART III: MONSTROSITY

Chapter 6: Bioengineered Monsters

Chapter 7: Of Chimeras and Men

PART IV: POSTRACIAL RESISTANCE

Interlude

Chapter 8: Black Horror

Chapter 9: Animals with Technology

Conclusion: Media Matters

Notes

References

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I started writing this book in the fall of 2016, during the campaign and election of Donald Trump, and I completed it a few months after the inauguration of Joe Biden in 2021 when the coronavirus pandemic was still rampant and new variants were springing up with alarming rapidity. From a research perspective, investigating media’s role in racism and social extremism in the age of Trump proved to be a moving target. Occasions for analysis piled up daily: the White House careened from scandal to scandal (including two impeachment trials), and rallies celebrating white hate (Charlottesville, Capitol riots) and protests mourning Black death (Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and so many others) unfolded in real time.

Researching white supremacist and neo-Nazi movements is a depressing and degrading experience, and the support of family, friends, and colleagues has been invaluable during this long process. Peggy Kulesz, Amy Tigner, Tricia Jenkins, Bethany Shaffer, and Jennie Lawrence Hoffman provided many recreational escapes and opportunities to vent. Stacy Alaimo extended exceptional guidance and friendship over the years and was always available to talk through a question or a problem. In the deserted summer corridors of Carlisle Hall, Ken Roemer was a welcome friend and interlocutor whose patience, solicitude, wit, and conversation brightened some very long and solitary writing days. The College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Arlington offered financial support in the form of a Faculty Development Leave and an Endowment for Faculty Research Grant. The Department of English offered supplemental funds for the purchase of media and other materials. Margie Jackymack was particularly helpful in securing funding for me and explaining to various university officials that The Walking Dead comics and DVDs and other assorted zombie miscellany were legitimate research expenses. I am extremely grateful to Rodney Dunning for allowing me to use, gratis, several of his photographs of the Charlottesville Unite the Right rally. I would also like to thank my students at UTA for their interest in this project over the years and their enthusiasm for my classes on Race and Science Fiction, ‘Postracial’ Horror, and Diversity on the Big and Small Screen in the Age of ‘Colorblindness.’

My family was an unfailing source of encouragement throughout the writing of this book. Although my mother did not live to see me finish it, I know she would have been proud of the work accomplished herein and happy that I finally got my life back! My dad’s love and support and his constant question, Are you finished yet? kept me going at times when I wanted to quit. He offered valuable guidance and mentoring during the research, writing, and editing stages. I owe a big thank you to my sister, Louisa, who was always available for a quickish chat about politics and the state of the world and supported me during some very sad times.

Finally, I wish to thank my loving and patient husband, Cedrick May, for reading every single word of the manuscript and offering invaluable commentary and critique. It was in and through our many conversations about race and representation that I was able to clarify, amend, and hone my arguments. Finally, I dedicate this book with love to my sons, William and Thomas, who deserve a better world than the one they’ve got.

IMPERILED WHITENESS

Introduction

MEDIA EVENTS, PANDEMIC TV, AND THE RUSE OF THE POSTRACIAL

On March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic. The term is employed for those viruses that are able to infect people easily and spread from person to person in an efficient and sustained way (CDC 2020). While many Americans expected and feared such a declaration, Donald Trump’s administration repeatedly downplayed the severity of the virus and its likely impact on Americans, likening it to the flu and asserting in January 2020 that the US had very little problem and the virus was well under control, a sentiment he would repeat through February and March as the number of American deaths rivaled and eventually surpassed those in China and Europe (Watson 2020). By July 19, 2020, US deaths accounted for 142,926 of the 606,481 deaths recorded worldwide. By July 6, 2021, the number of US deaths had risen to 621,346 of a total worldwide toll of 4,003,549 (Worldometer, n.d.). Dahlia Schweitzer argues that [h]ow a society responds to disease, especially epidemic disease, can illuminate its relationship not only to science and medicine, but also to illness, fear, death, and identity (Schweitzer 2018, 33). The partisan response of the US reveals deep fissures in a cultural landscape riddled with competing truth claims. On February 28, Trump accused the Democrats of politicizing the coronavirus and called it their new hoax (Egan 2020). This talking point was quickly taken up by Fox News, with commentators like Sean Hannity repeatedly calling the Democrats’ assessment of the virus’s threat hysterical and the latest political cudgel in their war against Trump (Narea 2020). Rush Limbaugh, for his part, suggested the virus was a deep state plot (Grynbaum 2020; Henderson 2020). The pandemic became a global media event. As Hepp and Couldry make clear, media events are intended—by the media or by other social actors who have interest in constructing reality in specific, perhaps conflicting ways—to establish certain discursive positions and to maintain those actors’ power (Hepp and Couldry 2010, 12). In a time of extreme physical isolation, Americans were bombarded with messaging about the virus. From broadcast news to narrowcast cable shows to streaming entertainment, the pandemic was not so much endured as it was consumed.

In April 2020, when most Americans were bound by their states’ mandatory stay-at-home orders, Vulture magazine published a list of The 79 Best Pandemic Movies to Binge in Quarantine (Crucchiola and Ebiri 2020). Classic virus movies that mirrored the current situation like The Andromeda Strain (1971), Outbreak (1995), and Contagion (2011), which involve stories of airborne viruses infecting large swaths of the population, were popular, but the majority of films in this genre were zombie movies such as Dawn of the Dead (1978), 28 Days Later (2002), I am Legend (2007), World War Z (2013), Quarantine (2008), and Train to Busan (2016), where good people must defend themselves against murderous, rapacious, undead bad people. The ubiquity and popularity of Pandemic TV (by which I mean not just pandemic/infection movies but highly popular entertainment content streamed in high volume during the 2020 coronavirus lockdown) is an instructive example of how entertainment media products assume new meanings in changed contexts and how other discourses will set some of the terms in which any particular text is engaged and evaluated. As Dave Morley has argued, [O]ther discourses are always in play besides those of the particular text in focus—discourses which depend on other discursive formations, brought into play through ‘the subject’s’ placing in other practices—cultural, educational, institutional (Morley 1980, 154). Along with the text, the consumer, too, is positioned in a web of discourses that shape and intervene in their reception of the text. Recognizing the pandemic as a media event is a productive way to think about the ways that Pandemic TV fed into other media discourses surrounding the pandemic. In the context of the coronavirus, the lockdowns, the rising death toll, and the growing partisan politicization of the virus, these seemingly anodyne escapist programs helped shape our views of and response to the pandemic in real time. As Udo Göttlich argues, media events are "produced realities that play a special role in the dramatization of everyday life (Göttlich 2010, 172). The hybrid media platforms of news, entertainment, and social media produced the pandemic as a kind of reality commodity" defined and circulated in a myriad of ways. Along with debates about real vs. fake science, partisan branding was a key output of audience/consumer/voter engagement with the competing stories of the pandemic.

Programs in the Pandemic TV cycle created, shaped, and helped to reinforce prevailing fears of us and them. As Priscilla Wald notes, the outbreak narrative … accrues contradictions: the obsolescence and tenacity of borders, the attraction and threat of strangers, and especially the destructive and formative power of contagion. It both acknowledges and obscures interactions and global formations that challenge national belonging (Wald 2008, 33). Narratives of us and them are central to infection discourse, but also to populism, as the appeal of another Pandemic TV breakout hit, Tiger King, demonstrates. The true crime documentary, riddled with murder, misogyny, gay and straight polygamy, as well as extortion, is at its core a story about a white working-class hero’s struggle to secure his Oklahoma small business (a roadside zoo) from the rich animal-activist woman who wants to take him down. The narcissistic, delusional egomania of Joseph Maldonado-Passage, better known as Joe Exotic, and his obsession with painting his female rival, Carole Baskin, as a criminal, have prompted some commentators to draw comparisons between Joe Exotic and Trump (Sharf 2020). As one critic puts it, They are both compulsive liars, misogynists, and business cheats with a penchant for bitter grudges against perceived enemies.¹ Despite such a comparison, or perhaps because of it, Joe Exotic was enormously popular. Netflix data reveals that Tiger King was watched by more than thirty-four million viewers in the first ten days of its release and is Netflix’s most popular US Original of 2020 (Hersko 2020).

Tiger King was pushed out of its top spot in April 2020 by Waco, a limited series that dramatizes the 1993 standoff between the Branch Davidians, followers of cult leader David Koresh, and officers from the ATF and FBI. Although the FBI suspected the self-proclaimed messiah of practicing polygamy and child sexual abuse, it was the suspicion that the compound possessed a large stockpile of illegal weapons that precipitated the raid. The fifty-one-day siege in Waco, Texas, which resulted in the death of over seventy-six people, has long been considered proof by those on the far right that the federal government was seeking to limit the Second Amendment rights of citizens to bear arms. Waco was the event that prompted Timothy McVeigh to blow up an Oklahoma federal building in 1995, two years to the day after the Waco siege, and it was the memory of Waco that animated the 2014 armed-citizen defense of anti-government activist and cattle rancher Cliven Bundy in his standoff with federal and state law enforcement in Nevada. In other words, Waco, in its myriad permutations, represents a consistent and effective rallying cry to the right. During the pandemic, the populist David and Goliath message of Tiger King and Waco was consumed alongside news stories about fracases related to masking, government overreach, Chinese bioterrorism, and fake science, and helped to shape the way consumers of that media responded to the lockdown and reinforced their perspective on the role of the government in securing or restricting liberties. These media narratives constitute a form of cultural convergence wherein technology, politics, entertainment, and the event combine in a matrix of processes, which is not external to the user but occurs within the brains of individual consumers and through their social interactions with others (Jenkins 2006, 3).

Obviously, we cannot ignore the commercial interests of media providers and the marketing strategies that inform programming decisions; however, profit aside, in the context of an international viral pandemic, we need to consider how these fictional texts construct our reaction to and perception not just of pandemics in general, or of Joe Exotic’s guilt or innocence, or of the David and Goliath narrative proffered in Waco, but of the coronavirus crisis as it is taking place. We should consider how the discourse, dogma, scapegoating, and xenophobia inherent in the COVID-19 media event, because it functions as a shared reference point for many Americans, affect the way we understand and respond to the world around us. In other words, we should take note of how the sudden proliferation of narratives of us and them, whether in the guise of a zombie outbreak, a gun-toting tiger tamer, or a defiant cult leader primes our real-time response to the social, political, and economic dynamics of this pandemic. As Stuart Hall notes, Though the production structures of television originate the television discourse, they do not constitute a closed system. They draw topics, treatments, agendas, events, personnel, images of the audience, ‘definitions of the situation’ from other sources and other discursive formations within the wider socio-cultural and political structure of which they are a differentiated part (Hall 1980, 118–19). A media event doesn’t simply operate on a fictional plane to represent or remark upon something that happened in the past. Rather, it is so closely connected with the real that we can no longer find markers by which to distinguish the real from its representation, for it gathers up into itself the reality of the event that may or may not have preceded it (Fiske [1996] 2016, 2). In the communication/dissemination circuit of a hybrid media environment, media events produce a corollary event culture (Göttlich 2010, 173) that influences our perception of the pandemic—whether we see the virus as a natural pathogen or a foreign person, or whether we consider the closing of non-essential businesses as crucial to flattening the curve and keeping us safe or a dangerous restriction of our civil liberties.

CONVERGENCE CULTURE

Media events become part of the collective public consciousness in times of social crisis, indirectly interposing between and commenting upon real events, and priming our response to them. In a networked mediascape, the political cannot be divorced from the commercial and questions of power cannot be separated from industry concerns, even in the news. Film and television are consumed alongside their paratexts (blogs, zines, wikis, fan conventions, fan fiction, merchandise, spinoffs, etc.), and in the age of SVOD (Subscription Video on Demand), YouTube, and social media, these paratexts include news media. The versatility and myriad availability of entertainment and news programming produce a blurring of boundaries of each. Media studies scholars’ attention to convergence, transmedia, paratextuality, complexity, produsage,² and flow are attempts to analyze and make sense of new media and how they foster both personal and public engagement while acknowledging their simultaneous containment by and resistance to free market neoliberalism. Certainly, the kind of interactivity that takes place between shows and audiences in Pandemic TV is part of this circuit of communication. Entertainment media texts are complex and dynamic, and consumers derive enjoyment from them in a variety of ways. However, recognizing media’s pleasures and capacity to engage in contestatory discourse need not inhibit analyses of the cultural work entertainment can do. Producers and consumers of media are both constrained and enabled by larger social, economic, and political forces, and those constraints affect the way we receive and interpret media texts. As Harsin and Hayward recognize, Politics rarely happens without popular culture because culture is one of the modalities where the popular, as a constitutive site of political actors and actions, is made material (Harsin and Hayward 2013, 203). Because media are accessible on a number of platforms and devices, and generic boundaries are slipping partially as a result of modes of distribution and reception, the slipperiness between the real and the fictional and the effect of that slippage on consumers’ views about issues relating to cultural and national topics, as well as their conception of their place in culture, is worth examining further. This is especially true because, as Herman Gray notes, these crowded cultural and social spaces like [i]nternet-based social network sites (Twitter, Facebook) and user-generated content sites and distribution platforms (Instagram and YouTube) fulfill consumers’ desire for recognition and the quest for individual distinction (Gray 2013, 771).

In his extensive work on the relationship between culture and media, Gray has consistently and persuasively argued that popular and commercial culture has the power to organize, articulate, and disarticulate feelings and understandings that move people, enlisting and positioning them in different political and social configurations. Recognizing that entertainment media is the place where consumers make sense of real-world social, economic, and political struggles, Gray examines how media both contribute to and provide counterpoints to hegemonic meanings (Gray 1995, 7). Apocalyptic pandemic movies and programs like Tiger King and Waco provide an insightful window into how fictional³ narratives operate as forms of discourse, which make, rather than merely reflect or comment upon, social meaning. John Fiske argues that the most significant relations of any piece of discourse are to the social conditions of its use … [and] its function in deploying power within those conditions. Like Gray, he recognizes that [d]iscourses work to repress, marginalize, and invalidate others … and fight to promote and defend the interests of their respective social formations (Fiske 2016, 4). Tiger King’s extensive popularity among all segments of the viewing audience at a time of national economic anxiety brought about by a foreign virus illustrates how popular entertainment television operates as both a carrier and a producer of political and cultural messaging. In a similar vein, the re-release of Waco, which had originally aired in 2018 and recounts an event that many on the right consider the ultimate symbol of federal overreach during a time when most state governments closed businesses and ordered citizens to stay at home, magnifies and dramatizes the isolation and threat that were prevalent in some communities.

In their portrayal of sympathetic outsiders led by compulsive, strong-willed white men who will not capitulate to social dictates or norms, Tiger King and Waco operate discursively to support and reignite white working-class people’s perception of their marginality vis-a-vis prevailing systems of power. According to media and social media narratives that proliferated during lockdown, many (white) Americans shared this sentiment and railed against the intrusive power of government to regulate their freedom, even for the larger goal of keeping people safe. George Lipsitz observes that culture exists as a form of politics, as a means of reshaping individual and collective practice for specified interests, and as long as individuals perceive their interest is unfilled, culture retains an oppositional potential (Lipsitz 1990, 16–17). Imperiled Whiteness explores this negotiation between culture and politics, particularly the culture industries’ capacity to shape the interests of diverse publics for political ends, and the oppositional potential individuals in the culture industry can leverage against such practices.

IMPERILED WHITENESS

Obviously, entertainment programs in the Pandemic TV cycle don’t all elicit the same response among the viewing populace, but I contend that these shows do represent a carefully curated cluster of themes that target white audiences specifically and magnify a sense of perceived threat from an outside entity. Although the coronavirus has the capacity to infect all Americans and indeed disproportionately affects Blacks and Hispanics, Pandemic TV is a predominately white affair. White people are its victims and heroes; foreigners and outsiders contaminate and kill. Pandemic TV is the latest example in a cycle of programming explored in this book that buttresses and exploits an affective experience among a white populace, a feeling or sense of white vulnerability or loss that I call imperiled whiteness. Rather than identifying this sentiment in entertainment media alone, I utilize a convergence/transmedia approach, examining how entertainment media work in tandem with other forms of media, including news media and social media, as well as political discourse on the left and right to circulate meanings around race, culture, and differences in society at large. As Gavan Titley has argued, the idea that racism is debatable, which is to say it is open for contestation among different groups, is a result of the way public cultures are shaped by dense transnational networks of media flow and communicative connectivity that provide unprecedented possibilities to both extend and challenge racializing discourses, images, frameworks and information (Titley 2019, 3).

Reading fictional narratives through political ones, I argue that during the eight years of Obama’s presidency, 2008–2016, and beyond, a variety of media platforms, including film, television, news, and social media, turned whiteness into a commodity that was packaged and disseminated to a white populace. These outlets propagated a narrative of whiteness under attack and did so in the context and under the guise of progressive postracial film and television, including the most prominent postracial ruse of all—Obama’s presidency. Numerous scholars have noted that the concept of the postracial enables racism to proliferate in the wake of the supposed death of race (Goldberg 2015, 152) and has brought renewed attention to racism and who can define it (Titley 2019). Turner and Nilsen argue that postracial rhetoric employs colorblind ideology to celebrate an image of a multicultural society while simultaneously disregarding the systemic and institutionalized racism impacting minority communities (Turner and Nilsen 2019, 4). Similarly, Catherine Squires argues that postracial discourses obfuscate institutional racism and blame continuing racial inequalities on individuals who make poor choices for themselves or their families (Squires 2014).

While fully recognizing the covert centrality of whiteness to postracial discourses, I take a slightly different approach to argue that discourses of the postracial, in addition to reinforcing colorblind racism, enabled the rise of white identity politics among whites of different political leanings. In ways not possible in the late twentieth century, in climates where overt mainstream attention to white identity raised the specter of Nazism or the KKK, the rhetoric of postracialism allows for a celebration of white identity precisely because it disseminates the notion that racism and indeed, race itself, are seemingly obsolete. In the Obama-to-Trump era,⁴ this renewed attention to mainstream whiteness has enabled a resurgence of the rabid white nationalism previously confined to racist dog whistles and legislative actions that restricted minority rights. As the editors of a recent collection called Racism Postrace observe, postracial mythology is productive and generative, profound in its affective grasp on the cultural imaginary and dangerous in its capacities to confound and stymie struggles for racial justice and equality (Mukherjee et al. 2019, 4). I argue that it was the discourse of postracialism, perversely, that made way for expressions of white identity and for movements advocating racial justice for whites.

Michael Omi and Howard Winant argue that colorblindness is just the latest in a long line of reactionary discourses meant to contain and constrain racial groups not part of the white majority (Omi and Winant 2014). The e-racing of race that colorblindness purportedly delivers results in strategic ‘re-racings’ of non-white people especially in the context of workplace tokenism, criminality, and national security (Mukherjee et al. 2019, 7; see also Crenshaw 2012; Alexander 2010). I argue that white people, too, were subject to a discursive re-racing under the logic of colorblindness. Newly visible representations of whiteness surfaced in the context of narratives about Blackness and Brownness circulating on the airwaves. Images of whites in peril and under attack by an encroaching wave of otherness, forced to fight back and take back what is rightfully theirs, emblematized and reinforced the racialization of the social order.

WHITE IDENTITY POLITICS

Racial commodification is a way of managing the production of racial epistemologies as embodied in media representations (Saha 2018, 66). Typically, the commodification of racial identity in advertising and entertainment media occurs to non-white others, to whom diversity is sold with the promise of recognition and access (Gray 2013; Squires 2014; Harper 1998; Mukherjee et al. 2019). Herman Gray has argued that, in the 1980s, commercial culture produced, circulated and enacted Blackness as a site of struggle open to rearticulation (Gray 1995, 2). I argue that in the Obama-to-Trump era, entertainment media seized upon and exploited the disaffection, fear, and anxiety in the white populace. Politicians on the right stoked anxieties about losing ground and being left behind, and a form of commodified racialized whiteness was proffered to whites in a variety of forms. In this partisan postracial landscape, whiteness became an identity open to exploitation and definition. In a neoliberal marketplace, postracial mythology depends upon the leveraging of groups against one another. The magnification of white grievances has long been central to this calculus. What I identify in these media texts certainly participates in and reinforces this trope of victimization as privilege; however, much of that white affect arises from the hypervisibility of Blackness and Brownness (Knowles and Tropp 2016), as well as a proliferation of the ethnically ambiguous person as a symbol of melting and mixing that animates whites who fear being replaced or having their blood diluted. The commodification of whiteness builds on this emotional base through a shoring up of white identity politics, whereby white privilege arises not from its unmarked value but through its newly marked status.

Social scientists observe that the rise of identity politics on the right is viewed by whites as analogous to the kind of racial/ethnic/sexual pride practiced on the left, including an embrace of intersectional identities (Kaufmann 2019; Jardina 2019; Knowles and Peng 2005; Knowles and Tropp 2016). To many whites, a demonstration of white pride or solidarity is merely an expression of pride in their Western, white, European heritage, a sense of belonging to which all groups are entitled. In his 2019 book Whiteshift, Eric Kaufmann argues that ethno-cultural reference points dear to whites should be celebrated and embraced in the same way as minority group symbols and identities are. Otherwise, he cautions, we end up with ‘asymmetrical multiculturalism,’ where minority identities are lauded while white majority ones are denigrated (Kaufmann 2019, 519). However, as C. Richard King warns, [T]hese rhetorical counterpoints are meant to reframe and normalize, allowing white power discourse to thrive in a colorblind, multicultural milieu (King 2014, 222).

PERFORMING WHITE WITH THE ALT-RIGHT

Numerous scholars have demonstrated that internet platforms and social media sites like Parler and 4chan have contributed to a racial radicalization among certain groups of whites and have stoked the flames of white supremacy (Phillips 2012; De Cook 2018; Johnson 2018), what sociologists call out-group hostility, but far less attention has been given to the way that white identity not linked to extremism has been cultivated in mainstream media, both the news media and in films and television. I suggest that the rise of the alt-right during the Obama administration not only gave a political, rather than merely cultural, meaning to white racial identity, it also turned whiteness into a performance that could be demonstrated and enacted. Indeed, it was the public performance of that whiteness, which was covered exhaustively by the media (by pundits on the left and the right) and in Trump’s tweets, that turned whiteness into a saleable commodity exploited by the news and entertainment media. Importantly, this kind of white identity activism originates in mediated narratives of racial tensions during the Obama years, which were packaged and framed in ways that conjured white fears and stoked white pride. While the framing and agenda-setting perspectives of news outlets emphasized white group threat and stoked out-group hostility among whites, film and television depicted a white identity consistent with the postracial rhetoric of the time. How the media, in its myriad forms, co-opted the narrative around the postracial, making whiteness a disenfranchised commodity, and vivified white nationalist and neo-Nazi movements on the alt-right is central to my argument. So, too, is the part played by networked hybrid transmedia platforms and the blurring of the roles of consumers and producers of media texts. In the last few years, scholars have linked the rise of white supremacy to a networked media ecology where actors can mobilize and radicalize large groups at low cost and in a short period of time. As critics have shown, trolling and meme culture (Phillips 2016; Titley 2019; Johnson 2018) and the media’s response to these online behaviors have contributed to the popularity and even mainstreaming of these groups (Winter 2017). While dark social media sites do figure into my analysis, I am primarily concerned with mainstream news and entertainment franchises that also relayed race messaging, albeit in a postracial, colorblind package.

Anamik Saha notes that cultural industries shape the media products that we consume and, in turn, ideas about racial and ethnic difference as embodied in these texts (Saha 2018, 6). It is vital, then, that we move from analyses that examine how media represent race to an analysis of how they make race (Saha 2018, 11). And this kind of race-making occurs in and on a variety of networked platforms, including news, entertainment, and social media. In a networked convergent media landscape, infotainment and journalism utilize the same kinds of cinematic sensationalism and are accessed in the same way as cinematic productions (Downing and Husband 2005; Sim 2016). Audiences consume entertainment media in the context of the social moment and the discourses produced in that moment. In the Obama presidency, this convergence of politics and media was instrumental in establishing a heightened sense of racial identity among whites. However, these media events weren’t the sole construct of traditional media outlets. Because [c]rises, breaking news situations, and in general, instances when news changes too quickly for mainstream media to develop a coherent and fully sourced narrative, bring ambient, always-on news platforms to the fore of news reporting (Papacharissi 2015, 31), individual actors, too, participated in the narrativization and curation of these highly charged politicized events. In a twenty-four-hour always-on news environment, individuals can not only influence but instigate a media event (Fox 2016, 18). This convergence of broadcast, narrowcast, and consumer prodused content, along with a diverse range of TV shows and films released during Obama’s presidency, directly impacted and regulated America’s perception of and reaction to hot-button topics of his administration, including immigration, racial activism, and gun control. When viewed alongside the narrativization by the media of cultural flashpoints like DACA, #BLM, and debates over gun control and Second Amendment rights, these productions did more than entertain us; they intervened in and altered our understanding of the events taking place in real time.

SPECULATIVE FICTIONS

The fictional texts I examine in this project belong to the speculative fiction (SF) genre encompassing fantasy, science fiction, and horror. Numerous scholars and critics have acknowledged SF’s long tradition of political and social allegory. The genre, whether through literature or film, has utilized aliens with advanced technology to comment on everything from atomic warfare to the war on terror. Representations of imperiled whiteness find a fitting home in white science fiction and fantasy because the genre has long navigated race in a doubled fashion, being simultaneously accused of reactionary and progressive postures in its depiction of racial difference. I’ve chosen to examine white SF texts here because I see distinct parallels between the postracial rhetoric of colorblindness that claims not to see race and the tropes employed by white SF to represent racial otherness and make racial meaning through metaphor and allegory. Both rhetorical modes advance white concerns, be it white fragility or white heroism, through racial obfuscation. Alien difference is an oft-used metaphor for racial difference, and conservative ideologies of gender and race frequently get reproduced in SF, attesting to their seeming natural inevitability. Indeed, the history of SF betrays culture’s obsession with race and racial hierarchy and its efforts to conceal it. As Dominique Johnson observes, the uncritical historicity of many dystopian fantasies encourages its creators and consumers to reassert hegemonic divisions when convenient, and thus reproduce racial subordination while encouraging hostilities under the guise of harmless artistic interpretation (Johnson 2015, 261).

At the same time, white SF is frequently heralded as progressive and groundbreaking in its treatment of racial, ethnic, and gender differences. Star Trek, in particular, has defined itself through the philosophy of Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations, and many fans see in the franchise the promise of world(s) without divisions. Star Trek has long been lauded for its liberal vision in part due to the well-documented politics of its creator, Gene Roddenberry. Several scholars have disputed this easy characterization, recognizing in the series’ numerous spinoffs and iterations a contradictory and, at times, traditional ideology stemming from the liberal humanism of its creators and note that subsequent texts reflect the more conservative militaristic vision of global American dominance prevalent in the 1980s and ’90s (Bernardi 1999; O’Connor 2012).

As a genre, then, white SF serves as a precursor to the colorblind fantasies peddled by the postracial, and at the same time, continues to enact and embody latent racial tensions still extant in American life. I include the modifier white in front of SF because, as numerous scholars have argued, the genre is permeated with racial assumptions, hierarchies, and anxieties. By contrast, Black SF creatives, like early pioneers George Schuyler, Samuel Delany, and Octavia Butler, and more recently Afrofuturists like Nnedi Okorafor, Nalo Hopkinson, and N. K. Jemisin, consistently foreground questions of race in innovative and provocative ways. Their texts frequently challenge white SF through direct engagement with racialized/racist metaphors or through racial world-building that ignores the tropes used in white SF altogether. Part four of Imperiled Whiteness will examine the challenge that two Black SF creatives (Jordan Peele and Ryan Coogler) present to white SF. While it may seem odd to include the work of Black filmmakers in a book titled Imperiled Whiteness, I do so as a means of pointing to the potential in the genre to rewrite and reimagine racial representations in SF. Adilifu Nama argues that:

At its best, science fiction cinema challenges the audience to envision a world beyond our current conditions, for better or for worse. Whether or not the genre openly confronts the issue of black racial formation, American SF cinema still reflects the nation’s struggle to confront and resolve the nagging problem of race, if for no other reason than that the ideological impulses, premises, possibilities, and limitations of black representation in American SF cinema have been and will continue to be a function of the oscillating state of race relations in American society. (Nama 2008, 41)

In utilizing the tropes and allegories central to white SF of contagion, animality, and monstrosity in ways that disrupt a white racial imaginary, Peele and Coogler offer a different kind of cultural race-making, what Ralina Joseph calls postracial resistance, which has the capacity to re-form the genre in important and necessary ways.

Instead of presenting an extended list of SF films from 2008–2016 that represent race as simply progressive or regressive, I examine three highly rated, profitable, and popular film and television franchises produced during Obama’s presidency—The Walking Dead (2010–2022), The Planet of the Apes’ prequels (2011–2017), and the Star Trek reboots (2009–2016). The popular impact of these programs can be measured by their profitability and longevity. Star Trek and Planet of the Apes are two of the most lucrative and longest-running film and television franchises of all time. The Walking Dead has just wrapped its eleventh season and, at the nadir of its popularity in 2014, was one of the most-watched TV series in history. Rise of the Planet of the Apes, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, and War for the Planet of the Apes have together earned over two and a half billion dollars worldwide, and the three Star Trek films have earned just over a billion. Eric King Watts notes that colonial ventures, slave economies, concerns over widespread disease transmission, and global commercial traffic involving bodies and other consumables provide affective investments for the repetition and enjoyment of postracial fantasies (Watts 2017, 321). I’m interested in the way these popular twenty-first-century stories reproduce, refashion, and maintain the well-traveled and well-interrogated colonial tropes of contagion, monstrosity, and animality in progressive postracial vehicles. I have chosen to examine SF texts because of the covert race-work that they do. The stories they tell seem innocuous because they’re fantastic and unreal; yet these speculative texts, because they offer alternate realities, or, rather, because they transpose our reality into a fictional world, have considerable power to structure and guide our response to the social landscape. These programs are written and produced in a purportedly postracial space where diverse identities and cultures are foregrounded yet consistently feature white people under attack and the heroic, galvanizing measures they must take in order to retaliate in the face of encroaching danger.

FRANCHISES AND PARATEXTS

I’ve selected franchises rather than individual films because analyzing a movie franchise or serial franchise allows for a reading of racial meaning across texts and, in the case of Star Trek and Planet of the Apes, across decades. Both Star Trek and The Planet of the Apes have extensive paratexts, which include films, books, television shows, comics, and other media. As Jonathan Gray argues, [A] filmic or televisual text and its cultural impact, value, and meaning cannot be adequately analyzed without taking into account the film or program’s many proliferations. Each of these proliferations holds the potential to change the meaning of the text, even if only slightly (Gray 2010, 2). This transmedia approach enables a consideration of the role played by prequels, sequels, and paratexts in the construction of the narratives being presented.

In the case of Star Trek and Planet of the Apes, for example, an understanding of the original 1960–70s productions and their overt engagement with the politics of their own eras enhances our understanding of the franchises’ later films. The early texts emerged during a period of racial turmoil at the waning of civil rights activism and the rise of Black Power movements. Star Trek: The Original Series (TOS) and the original film in The Planet of the Apes (1968) cycle both have been read as racially recuperative and inclusive of gender and cultural differences. As Daniel Bernardi has argued, race and racial differences are an integral part of Star Trek and its paratexts. The Star Trek mega-text is both implicitly and explicitly about the meaning of race: about integrated casts and crew; about anthropomorphic aliens and intergalactic half-breeds; about the discovery and exploration of extraterrestrial worlds and cultures; about space colonies, colonizers, and dissident movements; about a utopian [E]arth where there is no poverty, no crime, and … no racial discrimination (Bernardi 1999, 3). In these productions, Black characters are no longer structurally absent but instead have speaking roles—in the case of Star Trek’s Lt. Uhura (Nichelle Nichols), ongoing significant ones.

But, as Nama notes, [B]y the mid-to-late 1970s, Black Power politics was almost completely extinguished, the blaxploitation film craze was in a precipitous decline, and a white cultural backlash against the perceived excesses of the struggle for racial justice was gathering a full head of steam (Nama 2008, 22). The later films in the original Apes franchise (Beneath, Conquest, and Battle) reflect this reversal. Just as I demonstrate the current Apes reboot draws from racial tensions surrounding Black Lives Matter activism and the rise of white nationalism, these earlier films are part of their own historical media event. Paratexts, whether prequels, sequels or reboots, are always in dialogue, whether intended by the filmmakers or not, with the original representation. Analyzing these current franchises through their earlier intertexts, in addition to the media discourses that surround them, offers a perspective on the cultural race-work being undertaken in these newer iterations, particularly the two-pronged representation of whiteness in peril and in power.

The Walking Dead franchise, which is so large AMC calls it The Walking Dead Universe, includes the original comic series by Robert Kirkman, the AMC network television program The Walking Dead (TWD), two spinoff series: Fear the Walking Dead and The Walking Dead World Beyond, a live after-show featuring TWD actors called Talking Dead, numerous video games based around plots from various seasons, as well as The Walking Dead Universe Twitch Stream, multiple fan blogs, and a variety of merchandise including clothing, mugs, wine glasses, Funko Pops, toys, posters, etc. Significantly, AMC was one of the first networks to target fan participation through its live-tweeting Story Sync experience, which allowed fans to take polls, answer trivia questions, and access exclusive content while watching the broadcast. An analysis of TWD’s extensive range of paratexts is clearly beyond the scope of this book,⁵ but an examination of aspects of fan engagement with the show on social media is relevant, especially in relation to two racially polarizing (from a fan perspective) characters: white Merle, an explicitly racist redneck, and Black Michonne, an intelligent, skilled fighter. As Angie Fazekas argues, [F]andom has an ongoing and overwhelming problem with race … [D]espite claims of progressives, there is a significant tension in transformative fandom between its unmet potential to be a space of gender subversion and radical sexual politics and the way it often ends up falling short and falling back on racist narratives (Fazekas 2020, 95). Fan interaction should be understood as another kind of produsage and, when read in the context of the cultural and political climate of the program’s production, forms part of the show’s media event. SF is critical to this examination of how cultural tastes of diverse publics are shaped in and through media texts, for no other form of entertainment produces as vast a transmedia consumption as SF. Although fans engage with different genres in myriad ways, the capacity of SF texts to generate extensive paratextual universes has had a more profound impact on culture than any other literary, dramatic, or comedic genre.

While speculative fiction has a long history of fashioning public perceptions of the other, I would argue that a key component of this allegorical power is SF’s secure distance from reality. By absorbing real-world issues into the relatively ‘safe’ realm of fantasy, … [the] relatively marginal status [of SF] frees the genre to express ideas suppressed in the political public sphere (Takacs 2012, 176). Indeed, the futurity of events depicted in speculative texts can obscure racialist meaning … and often masks the presence of race and racism (Lavender 2011, 30). Although the three franchises belong to the SF genre, they are quite different in tone and scope. It is possible, however, to identify trends across the franchises, specifically the kinds of storylines that are foregrounded: whites under attack by monstrous others—others that, in every case, are not human but can be seen to stand in for humans of color. These representations are two-pronged, both depicting white people in peril and the courageous measures they employ to combat the incipient threat. These programs are written and produced in a purportedly postracial space where diverse identities and cultures are central to the story. However, despite the inclusive casting and the depiction of multiracial resistance to global threats, whiteness prevails. The effect is a fostering of in-group solidarity without overtly stoking out-group hostility. As Ashley Jardina notes, however, the two sentiments are connected: "[H]istory is replete with examples of how in-group favoritism can be a source or component of group hostility, oppression, and violence … [for] the same factors that have led to the increased salience of white identity