Postracial Resistance by Ralina L. Joseph

Author:Ralina L. Joseph
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New York University Press

5

“They Got Rid of the Naps, That’s All They Did”

Women of Color Critiques of Respectability Politics, Strategic Ambiguity, and Race Hazing

Throughout this book, I’ve assessed the gamut of stereotypes that media aim at Black women and posited that Black women celebrities performatively resist such stereotyping through the postracial resistance of strategic ambiguity. At our very first gathering before watching the first episode of the show, the women who signed up for our viewing party were already anticipating heavy use of, as Robin Means Coleman deems stereotypes, “unvarying” and “negative” portrayals. Means Coleman explains that “a stereotype is a conventional, formulaic, oversimplified conception, opinion or belief. It promotes an unvarying pattern of a group that has come to be associated with negative portrayals.”1 Valentina predicted, “I think they’re gonna paint, you know, certain characters in like a certain light, that kind of thing, based on their ethnic background. I think a lot of it’s gonna be based on … their ethnicity.”

These young women were sophisticated consumers of media, of the type media scholar Racquel Gates describes as “ever more savvy about how reality shows are produced to convey ‘reality,’ … [and] well aware that the portrayals they see are manipulated in various ways by the process of production.”2 Such manipulation, the women in my group pointed out, was racialized and gendered, and applicable to their real lives as well as the lives they analyzed on screen. This chapter, building on the last chapter’s focus on the anti-strategic ambiguity practice of community-building through hate-watching, presents the idea that a resistance to stereotyping defies strategic ambiguity through rejecting respectability politics. Although not naming it as such, they saw the behaviors I designate in this book as postracial resistance through strategic ambiguity as not just impacting the individual attempting such a posture, but negatively infecting the rest of a woman of color community; they saw strategic ambiguity, at times, as no less than a form of race hazing. Respectability politics, as a concept, sits over the whole book, and came to the fore most explicitly in chapter 3 on Shonda Rhimes’ press coverage. In this chapter, I push further on what the flouting of stereotypes and respectability politics looked like when it was enacted by a group of young women of color media consumers who rejected postrace.

“It’s Like Fancy Porn So You Don’t Call It Porn”

The stereotypes the participants were immediately attuned to were misogynistic images of Black women. Jen, not mincing words, provided one theory: “I think some of the modeling shows are, are like porn. But it’s like fancy porn so you don’t call it porn … Yeah, like you’re taking nude photos. And it’s great that it’s like artistic and you put like a pearl screen over them, you know, but it’s still—if this other stuff is pornographic so is that.” Jen posited that “this other stuff”—images labelled as pornographic—create the same dynamics as a commercial network reality television show. Jen was neither moralistically condemning nor dismissing pornography, but rather casting a wider net over what constitutes pornography.

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