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5 Media Rep of Hurricane Katrina

Structual Racisn, and Media Representation.

These are the ractial formation issues.

Racial Formation

"The Sociohistorical process by which racial identities are created, lived out, transformed, and destroyed."

Racial Projects

"Racial rofmation is a process of historically situated projects in which uman bodies and social structres are reperesented and organized." - The simultaneous and co-constitutive ways that racial meanings are translated into social structures and become racially signified.

Racial formation as a social process

  • Macro Level
    • cultural signification, ideology, and social structure.
    • a vast web of racial projects mediated between the "dispersive" and the institutionalized and routinized on the full level.
    • In social ways, it is normalized and made a part of society, up to a socioeconomic level.
    • The associated costs of that process at the macro level.
  • Micro level.
    • Racial projects link signification and the social level through something called racial common sense.
    • It's not something inherently logical, but it might make sense within that culture.
    • The term common sense doesn't mean it's right; it's just a commonly held set of basic assumptions, especially about how race is viewed in society and society's commonalities.
    • Of course, the idea is that it shapes both our commonly held ideas and our internalized ideas about race.
    • operates at the level of everyday interaction.
    • We are all carrying ideas about race, whether we are cognizant of it or not; our interactions every day are shaped by these commonly held assumptions.
    • Our ability to interpret racial meanings depends on racial characteristics used to explain social difference.

Everyone learns some combination of the rues of racial classification, and of his or her own identity, through this internalized set of common sense assumptions, race itself becomes common sense.

How race forms through the intersection of racial projects, the circulation of ideologies, and their embedding in culture, etc. We wanna think about how this then relates to RACISM. Particularly between racial projects and racism.

Racist Racial Projects: a racial project can be defined as racist if it creates or reproduces structures of domination based on racial significations and identities.

Racist Racial Projects situated in matrix: "rather than envisionaing a single, monolithinc, and dominant racist project,we suggest that racist projects exist in a desnse matrix, operating at various scales, infiltrating social orfanizations, relationships, and experiences, like other racial projects, racist projects too converge and confilc, accumulate an tinteract with one another."

Colorblindness as a racist project: "in the post-civil-rights-era, racism has been largely, though not entirely, detatched from its perpetratiors, in its most advanced forms, indeed it had no perpetrators, is a newly invisible, taken for granted, common sense feature of everyday life and social structure. This is the situation that has allowed us courts and mainstream pilitical discourse to blck race consions reparative measures such as affirmative action, tp proclaim the us a colorblind society"

We don't have public arenas where racism is acceptable, as we did in the 80s, etc. (detached from its perpetrators. )

Racial identity, solidarity, and agency: As powerful as racism is, it does not exhaust race; it does not crowd out anti-racism or eliminate the emancipatory dimensions of racial identity, racial solidarity, or racially conscious agency, both individual and collective.

Anti racist projects: We define anti racist projects as those that undo or resist structures of domination based on racial significations and identities.

Anti-racism, and structures of domination: If racism is not merely a matter of explicit beliefs or attitudes, significations or identities in our vocabulary, but also necessarily involves the production and maintenance of social structures of domination, then the denial of individual intent is clearly insufficient to undo it.