Racial Spectacles Explorations in Media, Race, and Justice [Paperback]

Racial Spectacles: Explorations in Media, Race, and Justiceexamines the crucial role the media has played in circulating and shaping national dialogues about race through representations of crime and racialized violence. Jonathan Markovitz argues that mass media racial spectacles often work to shore up racist stereotypes, but that they also provide opportunities to challenge prevalent conceptions of race, and can be seized upon as vehicles for social protest. This book explores a series of mass media spectacles revolving around the news, prime-time television, Hollywood cinema, and the internet that have either relied upon, reconfigured, or helped to construct collective memories of race, crime, and (in)justice. The case studies explored include the Scottsboro interracial rape case of the 1930s, the Kobe Bryant rape case, the Los Angeles Police Departments Rampart scandal, the Abu Ghraib photographs, and a series of racist incidents at the University of California.

This book will prove to be important not only for courses on race and media, but also for any reader interested in issues of the media's role in social justice.

Introduction  1.  Exploding the Myth of the Black Rapist : Collective Memory and the Scottsboro Nine  2. Anatomy of a Spectacle: Race, Gender, and Memory in the Kobe Bryant Rape Case  3. Framing Police Corruption: The LAPD Rampart Scandal in the News  4. Reel Bad Cops: Hollywoods Appropriation of the Rampart Scandal  5. Racial Spectacles under an Anti-Racist Gaze: New Media and Abu Ghraib  Conclusion: Lessons from a Campus Movement

In this book some of our nation's most infamous racial spectacles explode into complex assemblages of meanings and counter-meanings. With dexterity and an eye for the overlooked, Markovitz traces the trajectories of testimony, examines the ephemera of lS8