HERE Center

Critical Race Theory Resources

Media Studies

Sentences that come directly from the article are in quotation marks. CSUN students, faculty, and staff can access most articles through the University Library using CSUN credentials. Please use the library’s interlibrary loan services if an article of interest is not available.

 

Banjo, O. (2011). What are you laughing at? Examining White identity and enjoyment of Black entertainment. Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, 55(2), 137–159. https://doi.org/10.1080/08838151.2011.570822

  • Integrating CRT, entertainment theories, and empirical methodology, this study examines “predictors of Whites' enjoyment of stereotyped entertainment when Blacks and Whites are the targets of humor.” Findings reveal that cultural competence is crucial to digesting racial humor and useful to cultivating cultural cohesion.”

 

Carter-Francique, A. R., & Richardson, F. M. (2016). Controlling media, controlling access: The role of sport media on Black women’s sport participation. Race, Gender & Class, 23(1-2), 7–33. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26529186

  • This paper “provides a critical argument as to how Black females’ historic and contemporary controlling images in the media contribute to their marginalized participation in sport.” Employing intersectionality theory, it explicates how sport media “hinders Black females’ access and opportunity in sport at the structural, political, and representational levels.”

 

Couros, A., Montgomery, K., Tupper, J., Hildebrandt, K., Naytowhow, J., & Lewis, P. J. (2013). Storying treaties and the treaty relationship. International Review of Qualitative Research, 6(4), 544–558. https://doi.org/10.1525/irqr.2013.6.4.544

  • CRT is used as this study’s theoretical foundation. This paper describes “the work of young people and their teachers in creating digital stories in which they explore the significance of treaty education and what it means to be a treaty person.” It also explores the challenges associated with this work, including “the ongoing systems of oppression that influence and inform the relationships between First Nations and non-First Nations people in Canada.”

 

Jeffries, D., & Jeffries, R. (2017). Marxist materialism and critical race theory: A comparative analysis of media and cultural influence on the formation of stereotypes and proliferation of police brutality against Black men. Spectrum: A Journal on Black Men, 5(2), 1–22. https://doi.org/10.2979/spectrum.5.2.01

  • Using Marxist and CRT frameworks to call codified culture into question, this essay “explores how diverse modes of expression are crushed by the restraint of the individual and through a lack of variance that prohibits progress for Black males in American society.”

 

Kohnen, A. M., & Lacy, A. (2018). “They don’t see us otherwise”: A discourse analysis of marginalized students critiquing the local news. Linguistics and Education, 46, 102–112. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.linged.2018.07.002

  • A fight at a high school in the southeastern U.S. got local news coverage. The authors analyze two data sources related to this event: one local news report and a discussion of that news report that occurred in an Intensive Reading class at the school. The authors draw upon discourse analysis and critical race media literacy to argue: “1) the local media representation presented a version of events that used coded language and visual images to create a figured world in which students of color were silenced and a master script was perpetuated; and 2) students, having been taught critical literacy…and media literacy, resisted the media representation and constructed a counter-story based on their own figured worlds.”

 

Lawson-Borders, G. (2019). Tilted images: Media coverage and the use of critical race theory to examine social equity disparities for Blacks and other people of color. Social Work in Public Health, 34(1), 28–38. https://doi.org/10.1080/19371918.2018.1562402

  • This analysis uses CRT to analyze the 2016 report Racism’s Toll: Report on Illinois Poverty to illustrate the challenges faced in addressing social issues and how they are covered in the media. CRT “provides a prism through which to examine coverage of health, housing, and education disparities and provides a context for understanding and seeking ways to change disparities in social policies and programs.”

 

Mitchell, T. A. (2020). Critical Race Theory (CRT) and colourism: A manifestation of whitewashing in marketing communications? Journal of Marketing Management, 36(13-14), 1366–1389, https://doi.org/10.1080/0267257X.2020.1794934

  • Utilizing the lens of CRT, this study “explores connections between colorism and the alleged practice of whitewashing the skin tones of Black women in print media marketing communications.”

 

Odartey-Wellington, F. (2011). Erasing race in the Canadian media: The case of Suaad Hagi Mohamud. Canadian Journal of Communication, 36(3), 395–414. https://doi.org/10.22230/cjc.2011v36n3a2375

  • Between May and August 2009, Suaad Hagi Mohamud, a Canadian of Somali origin, “was stranded in Nairobi, Kenya, because Canadian authorities voided her passport on the erroneous grounds that she was an impostor and consequently procured her prosecution by Kenyan authorities. This article “adopts a critical race perspective in discussing mainstream media coverage of the case and suggests alternative media discourses that engage with the race question in relevant cases.”

 

Ogden, L. P., Fulambarker, A. J., & Haggerty, C. (2020). Race and disability in media coverage of the police homicide of Eric Garner. Journal of Social Work Education, 56(4), 649–663. https://doi.org/10.1080/10437797.2019.1661918

  • This thematic content analysis use frameworks of stigma and CRT “to examine how mass media represented the life and police homicide of Eric Garner.” Findings demonstrate how “systemic racism and ableism are reflected in and created through the media’s stigmatizing processes of labeling and stereotyping, as well as through voices it chooses to amplify or ignore. As such, media can be framed as a tool of structural oppression.” Critical consumption of mass media is proposed as a core social justice-oriented skill for social workers.

 

Pritchard, D., & Stonbely, S. (2007). Racial profiling in the newsroom. Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, 84(2), 231–248. https://doi.org/10.1177/107769900708400203

  • This article discusses “a form of racial profiling in which African American reporters write stories mostly about minority issues, while white reporters write stories mostly about government and business. Interviews with journalists documented the widespread belief that experience as a member of a racial minority helps the newspaper provide better coverage of minority issues. However, journalists of all races spoke of racial diversity only when they were talking about minority reporters and minority-oriented topics. The hegemony of whiteness was such that none of the journalists appeared to have thought about the role of whiteness in the coverage of the largely white realms of politics and business.”

 

Robinson, S. (2017). Legitimation strategies in journalism: Public storytelling about racial disparities. Journalism Studies, 18(8), 978–996. https://doi.org/10.1080/1461670X.2015.1104259

  • In Madison, Wisconsin, “a member of a typically marginalized community challenged the status quo with the proposal for a charter school dedicated to Black youth. A year of debate ensued in mainstream news organizations and social media.” Drawing on CRT, this research “compares the legitimation strategies of journalists to school officials, activists, and others writing online.”

 

Rodríguez, I. (2007). Telling stories of Latino population growth in the United States: Narratives of inter-ethnic conflict in the mainstream, Latino and African-American press. Journalism, 8(5), 573–590. https://doi.org/10.1177/1464884907081054

  • This article focuses on “the reporting of statistics on race and ethnicity released by the US Census Bureau in 2003, when the public was first informed of a historical ‘benchmark’: ‘Hispanics’ had become ‘the nation's largest minority.’” Based on a frame analysis of stories published in 20 mainstream, 9 Latinx, and 10 African-American publications, the article “traces dominant patterns in news discourses that privileged conflict and competition as the preferred frame for the interpretation of population trends,” and their implications for inter-ethnic relations between Blacks and Latinx.

 

Stamps, D. L. (2021). B(l)ack by popular demand: An analysis of positive Black male characters in television and audiences’ community cultural wealth. The Journal of Communication Inquiry, 45(2), 97–118. https://doi.org/10.1177/0196859920924388

  • To showcase affirmative examples of Black male roles in scripted television, this essay analyzes portrayals in the series This Is Us (2016–current), Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt (2015–2019), S.W.A.T. (2017–current), and A Million Little Things (2018–current). This work adopts CRT and community cultural wealth as mechanisms “to examine depictions of Black male television characters to illustrate how each offers various forms of cultural capital, including aspirational and resistant capital, for minority audiences.”

 

Tobias, H., & Joseph, A. (2020). Sustaining systemic racism through psychological gaslighting: Denials of racial profiling and justifications of carding by police utilizing local news media. Race and Justice, 10(4), 424–455. https://doi.org/10.1177/2153368718760969

  • Drawing upon critical theory and CRT to conduct a critical discourse analysis, this article examines Hamilton Police Services (HPS) and local media discourses on street checks in Hamilton, Ontario from June 2015 to April 2016, and their use of gaslighting techniques, “a form of psychological abuse that is used to manipulate object(s) in order to deceive and undermine the credibility of the target.” Despite the widespread coverage that the Hamilton Police Service received as a result of being linked to systemic racist practices, a year later, the HPS was able to avoid being implicated in deliberately conducting racial profiling through strategic tactics in the discourse they relied upon and presented in the media. The authors suggest that “gaslighting is part of a systemic, historical process of racism that has been used by the police and government organizations to both illegally target people of color and deny complicity in racial profiling.”