Core Response #3 - Andrea

Of the readings this week, I gravitated towards Jennifer Esposito's close analysis of Ugly Betty the most as I felt it very clearly and straightforwardly put theory to practice. In Esposito's analysis, the author critiques concepts like “color-blindness” and “post-racial society” for further obscuring racial inequities embedded in institutions like popular culture. Particularly, Esposito emphasizes that this blindness towards racial hierarchies leads to the damaging proliferation of hegemonic ideology, which in turn supports the ruling class ideology (that of white, wealthy, men). While the first half of the article seems like a standard (dare I say basic? rudimentary?) run-through of concepts from critical race theory, putting the article into its historical context helps me understand why it might have been necessary to explicitly and repeatedly call out color-blindness in a “post-racial,” Obama-era America. 

In addition to acknowledging the ways media texts reify “difference” (and therefore, racial stereotypes) through the representations of marginalized/racialized bodies, Esposito also highlights the ways media texts open up audiences to contradictory depictions of race through representations of racialized “others.” While citing Coco Fusco, Esposito writes, “contradictory representations of cultural and racial difference exist to represent anxieties about identity as we, as a society, experience a shift in borders,” leading into a deconstruction of the ways Ugly Betty both critiques and reifies race, particularly relating the discussion to Betty’s experience with affirmative action as a Latina woman (525). I found this discussion of tension and contradiction a nice tie-in with many of our prior discussions in class, especially the ways media encourages and discourages audiences to pry open the cracks within these depictions of gender, race, and class. The writings build off of our lingering question of whether a critical analysis of these representations is encouraged by the media-makers themselves, or whether shows are more concerned with selling us the idea of analysis without actually providing a critical response to social issues. 

I believe that Esposito’s article, particularly her critique of individualistic meritocracy, speaks to this larger theme of neoliberalism that the Herman Gray essay hits on in regards to the packaging of Black culture to Black audiences to maintain profits. Both readings made me think about the ways even social issues are adopted by media texts not out of a sense of responsibility necessarily, but in the words of Gray for television to “negotiate and renegotiate, package and repackage, circulate and recirculate this common sense” (58). It is in this cultural molding of a Gramscian understanding of “common sense” that neoliberal media packages racial struggle while enabling and normalizing racial hierarchies.