The black man suffering at the hands of whites, the white woman sexually threatened by the black man. Both images have long been burned into the American conscience through popular entertainment, and today they exert a powerful and disturbing influence on Americans' understanding of race. So argues Linda Williams in this boldly inquisitive book, where she probes the bitterly divisive racial sentiments aroused by such recent events as O. J. Simpson's criminal trial. Williams, the author of Hard Core, explores how these images took root, beginning with melodramatic theater, where suffering characters acquire virtue through victimization. The racial sympathies and hostilities that surfaced during the trial of the police in the beating of Rodney King and in the O. J. Simpson murder trial are grounded in the melodramatic forms of Uncle Tom's Cabin and The Birth of a Nation. Williams finds that Stowe's beaten black man and Griffith's endangered white woman appear repeatedly throughout popular entertainment, promoting interracial understanding at one moment, interracial hate at another. The black and white racial melodrama has galvanized emotions and fueled the importance of new media forms, such as serious, "integrated" musicals of stage and film, including The Jazz Singer and Show Boat. It also helped create a major event out of the movie Gone With the Wind, while enabling television to assume new moral purpose with the broadcast of Roots. Williams demonstrates how such developments converged to make the televised race trial a form of national entertainment. When prosecutor Christopher Darden accused Simpson's defense team of "playing the race card," which ultimately trumped his own team's gender card, he feared that the jury's sympathy for a targeted black man would be at the expense of the abused white wife. The jury's verdict, Williams concludes, was determined not so much by facts as by the cultural forces of racial melodrama long in the making. Revealing melodrama to be a key element in American culture, Williams argues that the race images it has promoted are deeply ingrained in our minds and that there can be no honest discussion about race until Americans recognize this predicament.

"First published in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux"--T.p. verso.

Playing the Race Card reflects and engages the dynamic nature of racialized experience in Western contexts. It examines today's anti-racism project to discern how it might benefit from integrating strategies that work toward the development of critical consciousness as its main goal. So that the privileged and the oppressed alike may reflexively examine their own subject positions, this book identifies and addresses the need to develop a working model for anti-racism strategies. Given the need to understand and move beyond static conceptions of race and racism, Playing the Race Card offers both a critique of mainstream/privileged perceptions of racial oppression, as well as a direction forward within a more «organic» approach to social reform.

Race neutral leadership is not an option. Education leaders are on the frontline in the fight for racial justice and must co-construct practices to disrupt storylines, policies, and practices that perpetuate opportunity gaps. Drawing from established research and the wisdom of teachers, young people, parents, community members, policy advocates, and school leaders, Play the Race Card is a guide for frontline leaders at every level to confront and disrupt racism, whiteness, and anti-Black racism. Designed for leaders working to support educators in building transformative and provocative policies and practices, this book provides a road map for building anti-racist leadership capacity in today’s turbulent political environment. Features include Eight interrelated tenets of Frontline Leadership Strategies for supporting faculty, staff, students, and the broader community in practices centering racial justice and equity Guidance for dismantling the lies and beliefs that perpetuate inequities Design principles and strategies to cultivate opportunity-rich and robust curriculum, instruction, relationships, and assessment The frontline isn’t always a comfortable place, but it’s where education leaders are needed right now. Lead the fight for truth in your school community and help change history—by putting our nation back on the path to racial justice.

Did George Bush's use of the Willie Horton story during the1988 presidential campaign communicate most effectively when no one noticed its racial meaning? Do politicians routinely evoke racial stereotypes, fears, and resentments without voters' awareness? This controversial, rigorously researched book argues that they do. Tali Mendelberg examines how and when politicians play the race card and then manage to plausibly deny doing so. In the age of equality, politicians cannot prime race with impunity due to a norm of racial equality that prohibits racist speech. Yet incentives to appeal to white voters remain strong. As a result, politicians often resort to more subtle uses of race to win elections. Mendelberg documents the development of this implicit communication across time and measures its impact on society. Drawing on a wide variety of research--including simulated television news experiments, national surveys, a comprehensive content analysis of campaign coverage, and historical inquiry--she analyzes the causes, dynamics, and consequences of racially loaded political communication. She also identifies similarities and differences among communication about race, gender, and sexual orientation in the United States and between communication about race in the United States and ethnicity in Europe, thereby contributing to a more general theory of politics. Mendelberg's conclusion is that politicians--including many current state governors--continue to play the race card, using terms like "welfare" and "crime" to manipulate white voters' sentiments without overtly violating egalitarian norms. But she offers some good news: implicitly racial messages lose their appeal, even among their target audience, when their content is exposed.

Winner, 2020 American Book Award, given by the Before Columbus Foundation How games have been used to establish and combat Asian American racial stereotypes As Pokémon Go reshaped our neighborhood geographies and the human flows of our cities, mapping the virtual onto lived realities, so too has gaming and game theory played a role in our contemporary understanding of race and racial formation in the United States. From the Chinese Exclusion Act and Japanese American internment to the model minority myth and the globalization of Asian labor, Tara Fickle shows how games and game theory shaped fictions of race upon which the nation relies. Drawing from a wide range of literary and critical texts, analog and digital games, journalistic accounts, marketing campaigns, and archival material, Fickle illuminates the ways Asian Americans have had to fit the roles, play the game, and follow the rules to be seen as valuable in the US. Exploring key moments in the formation of modern US race relations, The Race Card charts a new course in gaming scholarship by reorienting our focus away from games as vehicles for empowerment that allow people to inhabit new identities, and toward the ways that games are used as instruments of soft power to advance top-down political agendas. Bridging the intellectual divide between the embedded mechanics of video games and more theoretical approaches to gaming rhetoric, Tara Fickle reveals how this intersection allows us to overlook the predominance of game tropes in national culture. The Race Card reveals this relationship as one of deep ideological and historical intimacy: how the games we play have seeped into every aspect of our lives in both monotonous and malevolent ways.

The second edition of The Routledge Companion to Race and Ethnicity offers readers a broad overview of scholarly exploration of the ways that humans have organized themselves (and have been organized) according to racial and ethnic divisions. More than 80 scholars from around the world and representing multiple academic traditions contribute entries to this accessible yet sophisticated volume that addresses contemporary issues in historical context. The first half of the book challenges readers to grapple with some of the most controversial aspects of categorization, prejudice and discrimination through focused chapters ranging from the notion of Whiteness to the supposed biological rationale for racial categorization. The second half is comprised of 70 shorter entries on specialized concepts, persons and groups that are crucial to understanding these issues. Taken as a whole, this volume provides a broad, multi-disciplinary and global overview of issues that continue to provide challenges to notions of equality and justice.