Postracial Resistance

Black Women, Media, and the Uses of Strategic Ambiguity

Ralina L. Joseph

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781479840366
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

How Black women in the spotlight negotiate the post-racial gaze of Hollywood and beyond From Oprah Winfrey, Michelle Obama, and Shonda Rhimes to their audiences and the industry workers behind the scenes, Ralina L. Joseph considers the way that Black women are required to walk a tightrope. Do they call out racism only to face accusations of being called “racists”? Or respond to racism in code only to face accusations of selling out? Postracial Resistance explores how African American women celebrities, cultural producers, and audiences employ postracial discourse—the notion that race and race-based discrimination are over and no longer affect people’s everyday lives—to refute postracialism itself. In a world where they’re often written off as stereotypical “Angry Black Women,” Joseph offers that some Black women in media use “strategic ambiguity,” deploying the failures of post-racial discourse to name racism and thus resist it. In Postracial Resistance,Joseph listens to and observes Black women as they perform and negotiate race in strategic ambiguity. Using three methods of media analysis—textual readings of the media's representation of these women; interviews with writers, producers, and studio executives; and audience ethnographies of young women viewers—Joseph maps the tensions and strategies that all Black women must engage to challenge the racialized sexism of everyday life, on- and off-screen.

1

“Of Course I’m Proud of My Country!”

Michelle Obama’s Postracial Wink

In the months leading up to the selection of the 2008 Democratic nominee, Michelle Obama was widely considered to be a liability to her husband’s campaign. In both anonymous online spaces and mainstream media outlets, journalists and lay-commentators alike attacked Ms. Obama with astoundingly racist, sexist vitriol. Black feminist theorist Brittney Cooper summed up these comments as focusing on Obama as “unpatriotic, unfeminine, emasculating, and untrustworthy,”1 while sociologist Natasha Gordon described how Obama “has been charged with epithets ranging from being ‘ape-like’ to a ‘terrorist’ to a ‘bitter, angry Black woman’ to President Obama’s ‘baby mama.’”2 If online comments were crude and explicit, mainstream press sentiments circulated barely sublimated racialized codes that amounted to one underlying assumption: Michelle Obama simply wasn’t the image of a First Lady.

Then, within a matter of months, the First-Lady-to-be’s popularity surged. While she would continue to dodge barbs from the extreme racist fringes of the country, her quickly climbing ratings demonstrated that the country was falling in love with Michelle Obama, mom-in-chief, down-to-earth fashionista. She was still an Ivy League-educated attorney, like her husband, but she didn’t make a big deal about it. Alongside Laura Bush, Michelle Obama enjoyed higher favorability ratings than any First Lady since Pat Nixon.3 What happened to precipitate such a flip? Did the country somehow magically become less racist and sexist, or did Michelle Obama do something to win the hearts and minds of America? This chapter explores one specific media event that helped create this shift, in which Michelle Obama played the ultimate magic trick: postracial resistance through strategic ambiguity.

* * *

Imagine that it is November 5, 2008, and you are Michelle Obama, on the cusp of potentially becoming the first Black First Lady of the United States.4 Along with the virtues of femininity, strength, maternity, humility, and grace, you must perform constant restraint. You must be cognizant that each and every one of your words is being scrutinized, taken out of context, and magnified for the world to dissect. You are in the midst of a constant media circus of neither your own creation nor desire. You must not only grin and bear the media’s obsession with you, but present yourself as happy to be in the midst of such a spectacle. How do you face open, unbridled hostility? And not just any type of hostility, but a particularly virulent, racist, misogynistic, anti-Black woman brand. What do you do?

This conundrum—how, as a minoritized subject, to negotiate a metaphoric straitjacketing in response to racist, misogynistic verbal attacks—is, of course, not just an issue for a potential First Lady. Ironically, because of her success, those “of difference,” whether race, gender, sexuality, class, or ability, received arguably fewer options to respond to the vitriol targeting our bodies in the Michelle Obama, first Black First Lady era. “We” were ostensibly past discrimination and even past identity.5 The mainstream media presented the ubiquitous cultural assumption that all Americans reached a moment “after” or “post” oppression that defaulted to “after” or “post” race.6 Scholarship exposing the danger of these posts has exploded in the past decade, illuminating, as communication scholar Catherine Squires, puts it, “the material stakes of so-called identity politics and how the rhetorical shenanigans of the post create another layer of difficulty in decoding and detecting regressive, oppressive tactics.”7

Postrace has been interdisciplinarily deconstructed by sociologists, critical race scholars, critical theorists, and communication scholars.8 Under the rubric of postrace scholarship, some authors such as geographer Anoop Nayak, building on the work of Paul Gilroy, celebrate how “post-race ideas offer an opportunity to experiment, to re-imagine and to think outside the category of race”;9 but others such as sociologist Brett St. Louis warn against “putative post-racial attempts to dismantle the meaningful symbolism and materiality of race.”10 Crucially, race/gender media studies scholars, from Mary Beltran, to Julietta Hua, to Kimberly Springer, have centered representations of women of color in their conjoined critique of race and gender and postrace and postfeminism, connecting illuminating yet largely single axis debates—race or gender—in postrace and postfeminism.11

To read Michelle Obama’s strategic ambiguity, and how effectively she resisted the ideology of postrace by using the tropes of postrace against themselves, I investigate two of her speaking events that were heavily hyped by the media: a before and after picture, if you will. In the first, Michelle Obama was verbally attacked for her line at a February 2008 campaign rally: “for the first time in my adult lifetime, I’m really proud of my country.” In the second event, four months later on the daytime talk show The View, Obama used strategic ambiguity to address criticism of these comments.

To make sense of the landscape of talk about and talk by Michelle Obama, I did an initial Lexis-Nexis search of the major U.S. newspapers using the terms “Michelle Obama” and “race,” from January 1, 2008, when Michelle Obama began to occupy the national consciousness after Barack Obama became a viable candidate following his January 2008 win at the Iowa caucus, to September 24, 2009, the date of my first search. This search produced a total of 959 articles, of which I found 84 to be particularly relevant because they showed sustained engagement with issues of Obama and racialization. From these eighty-four articles, I found that the “pride” event (in February 2008) and its reframing (in June 2008) was the most comprehensive “media spectacle,” to borrow media studies scholar Douglas Kellner’s phrase, because it encapsulated a number of the newspaper articles’ themes.12 These included Michelle Obama’s providing “Black authenticity” to Barack (negatively spun in this event, equating Blackness with bitterness); the obsession with her body (through the constant refrain of her height, described as “5’11” or “just shy of 6 feet,” and descriptions of her “fit” and “athletic” body); and, most importantly for my purposes, her Americanness, patriotism, and the American Dream. (Choosing an event with clear beginning and ending dates also helped me avoid, in the words of Gilbert Rodman, “one of the occupational hazards of studying contemporary culture … It’s a constantly moving target.”13) Michelle Obama affords minoritized subjects a model of how to resist the assumption that we are in a postracial culture, or how, to flip Audre Lorde’s famous phrase, to dismantle the master’s house with his tools in our new era of sanctioned racialized misogyny.

If, as sociologist Patricia Hill Collins writes, “in the post-civil rights era, the power relations that administer the theater of race in America are now far more hidden,”14 minoritized postcivil rights subjects need new ways to become powerful actors. Michelle Obama’s postracial resistance through strategic ambiguity provided us with this new model. Although the intentions behind her scripting are impossible to determine, I do believe that, as communication scholar Mary Kahl argues, Michelle Obama’s public statements exhibited an “awareness of the persona she is fashioning for herself.”15 Through her reframings, redefinitions, and coded language, Obama demonstrated her refusal to accept when anti-Black, anti-woman controlling images were superimposed by hateful conservative and fetishizing liberal media culture onto her body.

Situating Postrace

To make sense of Michelle Obama’s strategic refutation of postrace, and build on the previous chapter’s discussion of the theory and its uses, I briefly historicize some of the metatheoretical moves that have enabled twenty-first century post ideologies. The idea of being past identity is not new, although in this historical moment the popular media often presents it as such. Postracial ideology, reflecting both neoconservative and neoliberal leanings, can be traced not only to reactionary political thought but also to what were largely understood to be liberatory political and academic movements, at least in their time. I read central tenets of postrace against three landmark movements of thought and activism: postmodernism, civil rights and feminism, and women of color theory’s interrogations of identity. To answer how Michelle Obama resists postrace, I investigate how we have arrived at a moment in which postrace conscribed the landscape of talk by and around Obama.

In the Obama era, the media presented postrace, intended to mean post-bias, somewhere along the spectrum from fact to aspiration. In reality, the discourse and concomitant ideology of postrace dictated a contemporary, media-fueled moment in which “different” racialized and gendered identities (those of color and those female) were somehow magically granted equal status and were therefore expected to agree that historic, structural, interpersonal, and institutional discrimination were exclusively in the past. Those who merely referenced race or gender, much less racialized or gendered discrimination or racialized or gendered “pride,” got dismissed or attacked by the popular media as outmoded, irrelevant, paranoid, or even themselves “racist” and “sexist.” Racialized and gendered disparities that abounded and dictated life chances were simply not allowed to enter into the ideological space of postrace. Scholarship that deploys the term postrace has a tendency to quickly breeze past both identity categories and structures of discrimination, to think through the “possibilities” inherent in leaving behind identity, as opposed to thinking through the possibilities inherent in leaving behind minoritized people or ignoring inequities. I argue here that postrace was a fabricated realm where race-blind fiction supplanted racialized fact. As differential outcomes and structural inequalities were silenced in postracial ideology, they were, in effect, allowed to continue, unfettered. Interestingly, the body did not disappear in the ideology of postrace. Instead, the body of color was symbolically important as its freedoms and successes, despite its markers of racialized difference, were used to measure progress from the civil rights era.

Postracial ideologies, while present for decades, emerged on a large-scale in the 2008 election campaign, when Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton became the top two Democratic Party contenders for U.S. president; they crescendoed after Obama’s election. These two firsts were offered up in the popular media as evidence of the United States emerging as a truly meritocratic state. This new millennium moment of postrace, in which the fiction of meritocracy became hegemonic, defined the incredibly restrictive landscape in which Michelle Obama, an African American female icon and then potential First Lady, was allowed to speak. When frank discussions of difference were verboten, hypervisible Obama had to couch her words as she carefully fought off her verbal attacks. With help from her media team, Michelle Obama skillfully used strategic ambiguity to create a counternarrative to controlling images of Black women. Ideologies, including what Stuart Hall called the formulation of identities, are never complete but always in flux; counterhegemonic narratives like Obama’s speak back.16

Michelle Obama deployed strategic ambiguity specifically in reframing and redefining ideologies such as “American” and “patriotism” and in speaking of race, class, and gender in code.17 In resisting, reframing, redefining, and coding, Obama used the tactics articulated in women of color theory, also known as the U.S. third-world feminism. Cultural studies scholar Michelle Habell-Pallán illustrates that, for more than 30 years, “women of color [have been] initiating and advancing a politics of difference … in response to liberal essentialist notions embedded in the women’s movement and scholarship as well as to ethnic nationalism.”18 Women of color theory does not refer to the scholarship produced by a demographic group but to a particular way of reading or of what literary theorist Valerie Smith calls a “strategy of reading simultaneity.”19 Smith builds on critical race theorist Crenshaw’s ideas of intersectionality, where “ideologies of race, gender … class, and sexuality … are reciprocally constitutive categories of experience and analysis.”20 These are the instruments with which Obama and, following her, we ourselves can cut through both her racist marking as a Black bestial body and her postrace framing as an exemplar of Black achievement and the sign of the end of racism.21

Postrace is the culmination of a narrative of progress from a past notion of identity categories as biased, discriminated against, and particular, to a current notion of identity categories as unbiased, discrimination-free, and universal. Postrace has clear resonance with postmodern scholarship, particularly that which is associated with fragmentation, pastiche, and a play of identity—with the denial of any fixed meaning. One node of postmodernism originated with Jean-Francois Lyotard, who expressed a certain “incredulity [toward] metanarratives,” whereby he questions the previously assumed-to-be-sacred teleologies of Enlightenment progress. In poststructuralism, too, an “identity” lost much of its integrity.22 For example, Jacques Derrida’s critique of the so-called scientific nature and objectivity of language in Writing and Difference ass...