Mixed Messages offers a critical analysis of a broad range of intersecting issues related to racial identity, media discourses, and public policy in the US--from film, music, and sports to policy issues like racial profiling, affirmative action and census-taking.
. In particular, this book examines:
· cultural texts, sites, and practices where the existing racial categories mix, merge, and/or rub up against each other in ways that unsettle the naturalness of race--from Spike Lee, to Eminem to Tiger Woods.
· the multiple ways that popular media discourses about race actively work to deny the possibility of identities that blend, blur, and/or cross over the existing racial categories.
· governmental and institutional policies that function (wittingly or otherwise) to create, maintain, reinforce, and police discrete and mutually exclusive forms of racial categorization.
Mixed Messagesattempts to follow through on the largely un(der)explored implications of the constructionist understandings of race in contemporary society and media. While it is now common for critics and scholars to acknowledge that race is a social construct, it is still the case that we continue to engage in argument and analysis that nonetheless treats the existing racial categories as if they were fixed and immutable phenomena: While avoiding the too easy (and too naive) notion that we can or should simply ignore race completely, Mixed Messages argues that any viable attempt to eradicate racism in the US will require us to abandon the “check one box only” philosophy that has dominated our collective understanding of racial identity, and to radically reconstruct the ways that we use the notion of “race” to organize both our individual and collective identities.
