Race, Representation, and Satire 1666919276, 9781666919271

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Race, Representation, and Satire

Race, Representation, and Satire Edited by Christopher P. Campbell

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www​.rowman​.com 86-90 Paul Street, London EC2A 4NE, United Kingdom Copyright © 2024 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Campbell, Christopher P., editor. Title: Race, representation, and satire / edited by Christopher P. Campbell. Description: Lanham : Lexington Books, 2023. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “This book analyzes representations of race and ethnicity in the context of satire, parody, and comedy. Over thirteen chapters, contributors unpack the ways these depictions can enlighten audiences or reinforce bigotry-or, sometimes, how they do both”—Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2023042036 (print) | LCCN 2023042037 (ebook) | ISBN 9781666919271 (cloth) | ISBN 9781666919288 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Racism in popular culture—United States. | Satire in popular culture—United States. Classification: LCC E184.A1 R3165 2023 (print) | LCC E184.A1 (ebook) | DDC 305.800973—dc23/eng/20230929 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023042036 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023042037 ∞ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Contents

Introduction: Satire as the “New News” Christopher P. Campbell

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PART I: SATIRE AS OPPOSITION

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1 Atonement: What Reparations and Racial Justice Look Like on Atlanta Keli Dailey 2 #ColoradoBorderWall: Mimetic Discourse as Emancipation Daleana Phillips 3 Reservation Dogs, Visual Sovereignty, Performative Indigeneity, and the Cultural Imperative of Native American-Produced Media Haley Rains (Muscogee Creek)

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4 “Voldemort under My Headscarf”: The Oppositional Muslim Gaze of We Are Lady Parts 63 Reham Bohamad 5 Class is in Session: Abbott Elementary’s “Step Class” and the Oppositional Gaze as Counter-Hegemonic Practice Loren Saxton Coleman, Symone Campbell, and Maika Moulite 6 Squid Game: South Korea’s View of Itself and the West Yasue Kuwahara and Bo-Kyung Kim Kirby

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7 Alternative Media Representations: An Outsider’s Construction of Race on The Daily Show with Trevor Noah 125 Tawfiq O. Abdullah v

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Contents

PART II: SATIRE, CHALLENGES, AND MISSED OPPORTUNITIES 141 8 Just Jokes? Dave Chappelle’s The Closer and the Intersectional Challenges of Satire Christopher P. Campbell

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9 Latin History for Morons: Comedic Revisions and Race in the Work of John Leguizamo Manuel Avilés-Santiago and Danny Méndez

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10 Guess Who’s Muslim: Using Satire to Show What “Islam Truly Is” Omar Hammad

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11 The Case of Kim’s Convenience: Cause for Celebration or a Cautionary Tale? Tamar Gregorian

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12 Missed Opportunities: Discursively Dismantling the Hyper-Wokeness of the Sitcom Community 217 Gina M. Masullo 13 “Polo, Small but Tough”: Arab and Muslim Representations in a Volkswagen “Commercial” Meshari Thamer Alotaibi

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Index 247 About the Contributors

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Introduction Satire as the “New News” Christopher P. Campbell

Writing for Rolling Stone magazine in 1992, media critic Jon Katz observed that young audiences were tuning out traditional journalism and gathering much of their understanding of current events through entertainment media, a clash between what he termed “Old News” and “New News.” He argued that popular music, prime-time TV, and the film industry were often more effective at providing audiences with more complicated and more accurate views of the world. “Straight news—the Old News—is pooped, confused and broke,” he wrote. “In the place of Old News, something dramatic is evolving, a new culture of information, a hybrid New News—dazzling, adolescent, irresponsible, fearless, frightening and powerful.” He explained, The New News is a heady concoction, part Hollywood film and TV movie, part pop music and pop art, mixed with popular culture and celebrity magazines, tabloid telecasts, cable and home video. Increasingly, the New News is seizing the functions of main-stream journalism, sparking conversations and setting the country’s social and political agenda. (1992, p. 33)

Among those conversations were those that addressed race and racism, and Katz noted that film director Spike Lee and rapper Ice Cube were “well ahead of [their] mainstream competitors on racial issues” (p. 35). That was in 1992, decades before the advent of social media and the smartphone, and the prescience of Katz’s observations resonates more than 30 years later. The “New News” is on steroids, with young people flocking to social media and streaming services that shape their views of the world, including their outlook on race and ethnicity. Much of that content comes in the form of satire, and this book examines the role that humor, sarcasm, and parody in contemporary media play in providing audiences with representations of race and ethnicity, representations that have the potential to 1

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either enlighten audiences or reinforce bigotry (or, sometimes, to do both). This book is designed for readers to consider the potential of satire to affect attitudes about race and ethnicity, and I encourage them to view the material before and/or after reading the chapters (especially for those who are using this book as a text in a class that examines race and media). The chapters in Part I: Satire as Opposition examine media that challenge audiences to reconsider notions about race that are rooted in ideas and images popularized in traditional media and popular culture. The first chapter, “Atonement: What Reparations and Racial Justice Look Like on Atlanta,” was written by Keli Dailey, who left a successful career as a journalist to pursue online and stand-up comedy, and now teaches a college course called “Can Comedy Save Democracy?” The chapter is a scene-by-scene analysis of an episode of the popular FX network television series Atlanta that uses satire to make the “case for reparations” laid out in cultural critic Ta-Nehisi Coates’ influential Atlantic essay in 2014. Dailey argues that the episode similarly demonstrates how the “curse of Whiteness”—the way that the legacy of slavery and the history of American racism—won’t be lifted until the United States atones appropriately for the horrors of slavery and its hideous legacy. In chapter 2, “#ColoradoBorderWall: Mimetic Discourse as Emancipation,” Daleana Phillips examines internet memes as rhetorical texts and addresses the intertextual functions of memes designed to evoke humor and persuade audiences on political issues. Specifically, the chapter looks at online ridicule of President Donald Trump’s xenophobic discourse on immigration and border security. Next, in “Reservation Dogs, Visual Sovereignty, Performative Indigeneity, and the Cultural Imperative of Native AmericanProduced Media,” Haley Rains (Muscogee Creek) examines a popular FX sitcom as an example of Indigenous media production and how it promotes sovereignty and challenges a media landscape that has historically belittled, underrepresented, and stereotyped Native Americans. In chapter 4, “‘Voldemort under My Headscarf’: The Oppositional Muslim Gaze of We Are Lady Parts,” Reham Bohamad employs bell hooks’ notion of the “oppositional gaze” as a conceptual framework to examine a BBC/ Peacock sitcom about a punk rock band made up of Muslim women whose behavior and songs subvert the traditional misrepresentations that have dominated images in Western popular culture for more than a century. She specifically examines the stinging lyrics in the band’s songs. (We considered including the show’s most subversive song, “I Want to Fuck a Terrorist,” in the chapter’s title, but decided it might be detrimental to list on an emerging scholar’s curriculum vitae.) Next, in “Class Is in Session: Abbott Elementary’s ‘Step Class’ and the Oppositional Gaze as Counter-Hegemonic Practice,” Loren Saxton Coleman, Symone Campbell, and Maika Moulite also employ the notion of the oppositional gaze in their examination of satire in

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the award-winning ABC comedy and how humor and wit are used to challenge existing systemic and debilitating norms about Black women and TV’s representation of public schools that serve primarily Black students. The final two chapters in part I offer “outsider” views of satirical media popular among American audiences. In “Squid Game: South Korea’s View of Itself and the West,” Yasue Kuwahara and Bo-Kyung Kim Kirby analyze the representation of South Korea, including its relationship with the United States and the West, through a close reading of the mega-popular Netflix series Squid Game as a satirical text. The authors examine the program’s satire in the context of the issues facing contemporary Korea and the way the country’s recent history served as the fodder for satire that resonated across the world. Finally, in “Alternative Media and Representation: An Outsider’s Construction of Race on The Daily Show with Trevor Noah,” Tawfiq O. Abdullah examines the popular late-night Comedy Central talk show as an example of alternative media—nontraditional video and online content that has the potential to disrupt traditional representations. He highlights the importance of hegemonic power in media representation and argues that, in an American context, it sometimes requires an outsider with power to elevate the conversation about race in a manner impossible by in-group members. The chapters in Part II: Satire, Challenges, and Missed Opportunities examine the efforts of satirists who sometimes miss their marks and contribute to the kind of intolerance they aspire to ridicule. In “Just Jokes? Dave Chappelle’s The Closer and the Intersectional Challenges of Satire,” I explore the controversy that arose from the transphobic invective in his popular Netflix special The Closer and consider the danger of satire that ignores intersectionality, the way in which discrimination based on race, ethnicity, gender, and class intertwine. Next, in “Latin History for Morons: Comedic Revisions and Race in the Work of John Leguizamo,” Manuel Avilés-Santiago and Danny Méndez make a similar argument regarding the work of another popular comedian’s Netflix special. They argue that John Leguizamo effectively invites the audience to reflect on—and laugh about—Latin American history as it is (mis)taught to people who are assumed to be bigoted. But they also argue that his performance demonstrates the limitations of Leguizamo’s comedic revisionism by examining some of the program’s patriarchal and homophobic sarcasm. In chapter 10, “Guess Who’s Muslim: Using Satire to Show What ‘Islam Truly Is,’” Omar Hammad illustrates how the content of a satirical web sitcom on YouTube, Guess Who’s Muslim (2016), aimed to challenge the stereotypical ways Muslims have been framed in the United States and the West; instead, he found that the program may actually reinforce those stereotypes to Western non-Muslim viewers. Next, Tamar Gregorian looks at “The Case of Kim’s Convenience: Cause for Celebration or a Cautionary Tale?” Her

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examination of a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation sitcom that attracted a large Netflix audience first acknowledges the critical acclaim that it generated among media critics. Then, she looks at the coverage of the behind-the-scenes anxiety among the program’s actors and producers of color who became concerned about the lack of Asian representation behind the scenes of a show about Koreans in the West. Next, in “Missed Opportunities: Discursively Dismantling the HyperWokeness of the Sitcom Community,” Gina M. Masullo examines the hyperwoke approach to race and racism in the NBC sitcom Community (the final season aired on Yahoo! Screen) and argues that the program often critiqued stereotypes in a way that ended up reinforcing them. Finally, Meshari Thamer Alotaibi, in “‘Polo, Small but Tough’: Arab and Muslim Representations in a Volkswagen ‘Commercial,’” examines a viral advertisement that was viewed by some of its online viewers as a legitimate VW commercial and by others as a parody. He analyzes the potential readings of the ad from both perspectives and finds that they are equally problematic in their reinforcement of the prevalent traditional media stereotypes of Muslims as sadistic terrorists. As I near the end of a career in which I have frequently written and edited work about contemporary racism and the media, I find it disheartening to observe content—in both traditional media (like the Old News) and alternative media (New News)—that often fails to provide audiences with thoughtful and authentic representations of people of color. Instead, many remain largely invisible and continue to be victimized by stereotypes and myths from that have lingered for centuries. But I also find it heartening that there appears to be an increasing number of authentic, thoughtful representations, some of them described in this book. I am also heartened by the fact that many of the chapters in this book were written by young scholars who are following in the footsteps of cultural critics like Stuart Hall, bell hooks, Edward Said, Jack Shaheen, and others, who pioneered the important critical theory and methodology that allows us to consider the way the media represent race and ethnicity. It is especially heartening to see that this work is continuing in an age of new technologies that are capable of constructing satirical media content about race and racism—New News—in ways that Jon Katz could never have imagined in 1992. REFERENCE Katz, J. (1992, March 5). Rock, rap and movies bring you the news. Rolling Stone, 33–35, 40–78.

Part I

SATIRE AS OPPOSITION

Chapter 1

Atonement What Reparations and Racial Justice Look Like on Atlanta Keli Dailey

Comedy’s most famous punchline about U.S. slavery reparations? That came in the G. W. Bush era, about a dozen years before Ta-Nehisi Coates (2014) famously argued “The Case.” At the time, even a Black woman like me thought paying damages to African descendants of slavery (ADOS) was Afro-radical sci-fi from the fringe. Nothing could legitimate this idea! Not even Congress’ longest-serving Black member, Rep. John Conyers, who, in 1989, regularly introduced a reparations bill to simply study what was done to whom. (Every year, the House stopped him, saying, “We ain’t got energy for all that.”) By the early 2000s, when I settled in to watch a much-loved sketch TV program about race in America called Chappelle’s Show, the idea of reparations was just a joke. Before this well-known scene from a 2003 episode (Chappelle, 2012) begins, the Black comedian Dave Chappelle performs an emcee interpolation: “If we do ever get our reparations, which I doubt.” After more preamble setting up his thesis—“You can’t just give Black people all this money and turn them loose on the streets”—he throws us to a fake newscast. The anchor is also Dave Chappelle, in whiteface and blonde wig. He informs us that “reparations checks went out today.” Footage shows exultant Black people spending their new fortunes in frivolous and stereotypical ways. They buy lifetime supplies of cigarettes; line up outside liquor stores; load up on Escalade trucks; and drive up stocks for fried chicken. (“However, watermelon is surprisingly flat,” a fake financial reporter says.) In a show known for iconic catchphrases (“I’m Rick James, Bitch!” “Cocaine is a hell of a drug!”), the line I remember most here is when a Black man (also played by Chappelle) is asked if a nearby child is his son. He responds, “No, no, I just bought this baby cash!” 7

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Not only are we told the central premise of the sketch, reparation payments, won’t ever happen, Chappelle’s Show makes Black people the target of the joke. “Because they’ll waste it” jockeys with other bad faith arguments against restitution. The shallowness, the impracticality and, with that punchline about child trafficking, the amorality of Blacks get presented by an important African-American performer (albeit one who abruptly quit this popular Comedy Central show because he didn’t like a non-Black crew member’s laughter at him—Chappelle said it made him wonder if his comedy was reinforcing racial stereotypes). What is possibly our best-known, reparationscomedy product ridicules repair. It says no way we’ll get our “40 acres and a mule” (a never-fulfilled land/beast promise to former slaves declared by Gen. William Sherman’s end-of-the-Civil-War, disregarded Field Order No. 15). But if America ever attempts any ADOS compensation, Chappelle’s Show says, chaos is a’coming. A whole generation passed before high-profile, Black-led TV imagined another funny reparations rollout. Ordinarily, the FX network series Atlanta is about a rising rapper and his manager. The latter is played by the show’s creator, Donald Glover (aka the indie rapper Childish Gambino). From its 2016 debut to its final fourth season in fall 2022, Atlanta has offered a kind of incredulity dramedy: The Black main characters find themselves overtaken by suddenly bizarre situations. They spiral toward an absurd climax that leaves them bewildered, chased, diminished. The humor is located in their disbelief or discomfort. The lesson is usually about how much absurd crap Black Americans go through, how we’re a people who “had seen both too much and not enough,” as Hanif Abdurraqib (2022, p. 65) writes in A Little Devil in America. But “Big Payback,” a standalone, Season 3 episode that originally aired April 7, 2022, does not build on the core Atlanta characters. Instead, we follow a White middle-aged man—a cubicled professional called Marshall Johnson (The Hangover actor Justin Bartha, investing the protagonist with frowny, hounded energy). It’s the first day that civil cases are successfully levied against individual White descendants of American enslavers. Let’s interrogate this Atlanta episode (Murai, 2022) scene-by-scene, illustrating the potential of satirical television to provide audiences with sophisticated constructions of complicated notions around race, Whiteness, and the case for reparations.

TACKLING WHITE FRAGILITY When we meet Marshall at a cafe, he’s clueless about the drama unfolding between a Black male customer and a White cashier. What the matter is stays

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unclear because the viewer is patched only into Marshall’s earbuds, which play “Radiolab” (a real-life, “deep questions” public radio show that’s been criticized for privileging a Western way of knowing). Marshall unplugs his ears in time to hear the exasperated Black man acquiescing his place in line, “Go ahead,” before leaving empty-handed. Moments later, we join Marshall in his car, where he realizes he absentmindedly pocketed a madeleine cookie without paying. Which is theft. Instead of rectifying anything, he smiles at his undeserved, sweet reward and eats it. Viewers are forced to recognize that suspicion would never find such a White man. Marshall has significant mobility—so much that he can steal. We witness Marshall passively accepting the racial dynamic where the Black customer is treated as illegitimate while he, the White customer, enjoys ill-gotten, buttery gains. This is a study of someone feeling both social privilege and rejection of responsibility. That’s an accessible, level-one read. Because for me that yellow cookie molded like a seashell scales the scene up to a Proustian reference. In Remembrance of Things Past, Proust observed, “The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of intellect” (1932, p. 34). With all that is to come for Marshall—as a memory of American sin is invoked and involuntarily unblocked for him—I keep coming back to this madeleine’s symbolism. Very soon he’ll be forced to remember an ancestral wrong and a history we are living every day. But right now in the story all Marshall does is gobble up the cookie and drive away. A shark-colored car begins tailing him. Ominous music plays. When I watched the episode with my college Can Satire Save Democracy class in Oakland, California, and later with my mother in San Antonio, Texas, everyone assumed it was the Black café patron pursuing Marshall to retaliate. They were reinforced in this idea, when the title card popped up, saying “Big Payback.” That’s a lyric from James Brown’s funky hit “The Payback-Part 1,” which had been intended for a Blaxploitation film’s soundtrack. In the song, Brown vows revenge on the man who stole his money and his girl. With the Atlanta characters we’ve met so far, it seems to make sense that the Black patron would be involved. But what racial assumptions does this episode already implicate the audience with? Are we really thinking that Cookie Thief Marshall is acting with probity as our hero? Are we settling into White expectations—regarding the Black other with suspicion? To be fair, the main premise about modern Blacks getting paid for wrongs done to ancestors hasn’t been introduced yet. Not even in the next few scenes showing Marshall’s marital dramas. He shows up at his estranged wife’s Craftsman home to carry out dad duties (presumably it’s his old house, too, because Marshall asks for a specific lamp). As he drives his preteen daughter Katie to school, it’s easy to ignore the public radio station playing in the background, reporting on a Black man successfully suing a Tesla bigwig over

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slavery. The private civil lawsuit might substantially impact racial matters around the world, especially in America, the news says. Marshall and we viewers don’t really tune into this aural wallpaper because from the backseat the daughter is chattering about her parents reuniting. We also join Marshall in ignoring cell phone calls from an unknown number. Comedy products mark a place in cultural time. (For example, as homophobic as Eddie Murphy’s 1983 stand-up special Delirious was, it responded to the AIDS crisis.) With all the claims of discrimination against Black workers at Tesla factories, I wonder if Atlanta name-checked the electric carmaker for this reason. The episode also aired at a time when Republicans across the country were introducing gag rules around what they termed “critical race theory,” but is better described, as the New Yorker put it, as “conservative hysteria that seeks to envelop American history in a shroud of innocence and ignorance” about slavery and racism (Taylor, 2022). Most notable in real life by this episode’s April 2022 airing were new green shoots rising from the ordinarily dry conversation about reparations. America was awakening to systemic racism. While plenty of conservatives were unwoke, the greater national conscience seemed alert after The New York Times introduced “The 1619 Project,” locating slavery as America’s foundational event. That same year a New York Times op-ed (Hunter, 2019) railed that U.S. reparation payments have only been given to slaveholders. (TLDR: Abe Lincoln gave enslavers loyal to the Union $300 per enslaved person when 1863’s Emancipation Proclamation freed their human capital.) In summer 2020, the police killed another unarmed Black man, George Floyd; however, this time it ignited a reckoning. An estimated 15–26 million protestors took to American streets in 10,600 demonstrations, and antiracist and systemic racism books climbed to the top of U.S. bestseller and banned books lists. That interest and tumult gave us unexpected movement on Black equity and racial justice issues. Work was finally happening beyond the HR 40 reparations bill, first introduced by Rep. Conyers (D-Michigan) in 1989, reintroduced every Congressional session, and now carried forward by Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas). Media outlets suddenly tracked where the 2020 Democratic presidential candidates stood on reparations (two top contenders identified as Black Americans). Impatient with our federal crawl, lower ladders of government set up task forces and made headway into compensation for both slavery and racial segregation. As of this writing, the small, liberal cities of Asheville, North Carolina, and Evanston, Illinois, are competing with my hometown San Francisco and the rest of the progressive Californian to be the first to deliver recompense. This Atlanta episode captures the spirit of the robust discourse around repair for ADOS while showing us where we might be headed. In real life, we center the ways Blacks have been ’buked and scorned as the foundation

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for whether anything’s owed. When California’s reparations task force cataloged state-sanctioned harms to Black residents from the Gold Rush era to modern day, their 2022 report totaled nearly 500 pages—almost 200 fewer than Alex Haley’s Roots. But making fun of something to expose its truth (a definition of satire) need not be a mirror reflecting those injuries nor even a reparations story focused on Blackness at all. “Satire addresses the failures and limitations of its contemporary moment with clear intentionality,” as Danielle Fuentes Morgan puts it in Laughing to Keep from Dying (2020, p. 1). According to a fall 2022 survey by the Pew Research Center, 77% of Black adults “say the descendants of the enslaved in the U.S. should be repaid in some way, while 18% of White Americans say the same.” This Atlanta satire understands White resistance and tackles White fragility—it presents a mainstream, public radio listener like Marshall and shows him freaking out if reparations roll down on him like waters and inconvenience him like a mighty stream. In the next sequence, we are in an office park. On the elevator, a White coworker initiates a conversation with Marshall. “Can you believe this guy? This Tesla guy owes him a lot of money,” the infuriated coworker sees Marshall as part of his in-group. “It’s not like he’s going to notice. He’s rich,” is Marshall’s disinterested reply. Then, a busybody White-presenting woman assails Marshall in the hall, saying there’s layoffs coming. Their beleaguered company owners were being sued with the same reparations lawsuit that got the Tesla guy. “Personal litigation. They can just look you up and force you to pay,” she says conspiratorially. She adds that everyone’s looking into their family trees to see if “they’re in the clear.” As the viewer, I’m wondering what website reveals slave-owning legacies. “There’s no smoke on my end,” says Marshall, automatically absolving his ancestry. The office manager regards a cluster of Black coworkers at a distance, who seem to be celebrating the legal news. The camera also appraises the Blacks from afar, so that we are held away, not privy to their perspectives and, therefore, their Black interior. “Lucky them,” the busybody says to Marshall. “They don’t have a care in the world!” Luck, not justice, is the diagnosis. Marshall gets yet another unknown caller, and the viewer is realizing there’s more dread than humor so far. Then it’s drive time with Marshall and his daughter Katie again in tow. It seems like he’s listening to Black talk radio, from the reveling tone of the presenters: “Whatcha going to do with your apolo-cheese?” They banter about “cheese,” or cash, like it’s “The Breakfast Club” with Charlamagne tha God. This doesn’t seem like the programming our protagonist would normally tune in to. Marshall passes a gas station where he notices Black people with sporty luxury vehicles. “Are we racist?” his daughter Katie interjects from the backseat. News of reparations has gotten to her school. Here is where

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unmistakable humor begins. “Were we slave owners?” She continues. “Do you see any slaves in our backyard?” Marshall wise-acrely responds. “Mr. Pedro,” the girl replies, referring to their landscaper.

UNPACKING “SHENIQUA” Evening. Interior of the townhome where Marshall lives. We see him cooking spaghetti for his child and writing an “I’m sorry” greeting card, presumably to his estranged wife (allowing us once again to place responsibility for some wrongs upon Marshall). Another unknown call is ignored, and outside we see the scary Jaws car from earlier pull up. Loud knocking at the door. A paunchy White man serves Marshall with an envelope that suggests litigation. Then a loud-LOUD Black woman named Sheniqua Johnson “of the St. Louis Johnsons” pushes her way in, wearing a DKNY velour tracksuit and live-streaming on her phone. She is addressing her Instagram viewers and sometimes Marshall. “You owe me money!” she accuses, offering the backstory that “my great-great grandmother and father (worked for yours) for 12 years.” That adds up to $3 million, she explains. This is an unexpected confrontation for both the hero and the audience. But that surname quickly positions Sheniqua Johnson among Marshall Johnson’s lineage, a kinship, either through blood or treasure, neither by consent. Sheniqua (played by Melissa Youngblood) exhibits rather off-putting intrusive behavior, nosing around the townhome like a real estate appraiser, and ignoring Marshall’s protests. She says there’s good stuff in the bathroom, and that “Jamal’s gonna love this spot.” To Marshall’s threat that he’ll call the cops, she taunts before exiting, “Your family’s got blood on its hands. And don’t bother calling the police, because I’ve already been there.” Wait. Cops would not view her as an intruder, because of reparations? A civil claim would neutralize trespassing laws and racial disparities in policing? It seems like a bit of improv that the Atlanta makers hope the audience won’t catch because they needed a shot where Sheniqua exits peacefully while Marshall and the daughter are left gobsmacked. Can we unpack “Sheniqua?” The name conjures a caricature of Black womanhood made readily visible without the need for any other adjectives or qualifiers. A narrow image can be erected. It’s a joke name. Like when you try to make up a name to tell you that person’s character and behavior and race before you even meet them. The kind of name that prejudiced job screeners would avoid. The name signals her outrageousness. An entry on the crowdsourced slang website urbandictionary​.c​om will tell you it’s the equivalent of a troublemaking White woman being called “Karen.” Yet the

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name Sheniqua (or Shaniqua or Shanika) means “God is gracious,” according to the baby names site kidpaw​.c​om (n.d.). It’s one of those invented Black American names embraced by a people deracinated of their African culture and language. It looks toward Africa but cannot be traced there. It is mediumhard to pronounce. A quick search on “Sheniqua Johnson” yields around 60 real people on Instagram, being RNs and financial coaches. But the naming of this Atlanta character, and the outlines of her aggressive portrayal, come off as parody. There is a negative trope of the too-loud, big-gestured, big-boned Black woman giving a pronounced performance of American Blackness. It was presented as the boilerplate from its first entrance onto Blackface stages and carried on by Black background actors there for comic relief, not to be mistaken for a person with agency. Let’s just say this Sheniqua doesn’t have the gravitas of Michelle Obama or Issa Rae or Amanda Gorman or Lizzo or Tracee Ellis Ross or Amanda Seales or Quinta Brunson. She is not even like the other fictional Black women in the third season of Atlanta, named Vanessa (aka Van), Candice, Xosha, and Shanice. They are complex, independent, cultured, and alluring (even in that one cannibal episode where Alexander Skarsgård plays himself, but with a fetish for Black women). So, is Atlanta satirizing Black womanness here? Worse. The regard Marshall our protagonist and by extension, we viewers are giving Sheniqua Johnson feels like misogynoir, like a joining of sexism and racism. She’s moving through the world without a man. A female demanding inheritance and taking aim at great-great patriarchal wealth sounds dangerous. Why is this middle-aged Black woman doing all this work alone? Where is this Jamal she referenced? Is he a man or a child? This woman showed up to lay a claim on some man’s assets in a surprise ambush? Is it, as Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe reminds us, “the Negro community has been forced into a matriarchal structure . . . because it is so far out of the line with the rest of American society” (Spillers, p. 65)? The implication of this trope is that Black women are worthy of contempt for being so outside the norm, so “man-like.” Next morning Marshall sneaks out, looking over his shoulder, seeming wary of another Sheniqua encounter. At the office, almost all the Black employees are gone, implying work was a burden to them. In the restroom, a White man is wearing a T-shirt with “I owned slaves” in large print. Marshall is horrified when he learns that this “accountability shirt” is part of a reparations judgment (the coworker has to wear it twice a week—including on Sunday)! The busybody office manager reveals to Marshall she’s untarnished. “Ashkenazi Jew, baby!” She exclaims, adding that her people were once enslaved. Marshall wants in: The Byzantine Empire kept his ancestors

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captive through the fifteenth century. “The Austro-Hungarians were slaves as well,” he says. The office manager rolls her eyes. “Cmon, Marshall. That was like a million years ago.” This exchange embodies conventional wisdom that positions U.S. enslavement in a long-ago past. Abdurraqib writes that, “The problem with approaching history in America is that too many people measure things by distance and not by impact” (2022 p. 80). Apply that to the enslavement of Austro-Hungarians versus U.S. chattel slavery, this scene implies, and you come down on the latter having more significance. Suddenly, we hear a voice yelling “Marshall Johnson!” Sheniqua is in the parking lot with a bullhorn. She hollers that Marshall’s forebears enslaved her family. That he owes her a lifetime of pay. It is embarrassing to our White protagonist for her to show up like a repo man or Dog the Bounty Hunter. Still, her ancestor line doesn’t feel like real people, just concepts. What gets reified is her intrusion, her high-volume spectacle. Yet, there is also one small score for Sheniqua: When Marshall goes out to make an entreaty to her to be quiet, it’s a wealth gap implication. “How much money do you make a year?” she challenges him. “I bet it’s more than I do.” (Black women get 63 cents to every dollar paid a White man.) Racial capitalism motivated slavery, and its inequalities linger. The historical order of this nation has remained unshuffled for 400 years. And Marshall doesn’t take a moment to question why that is . . . yet. We jump to Marshall, miserable in a break room. Two Black guys (the only Black coworkers to return) are bragging about what they’ll do with their reparations wealth. Our protagonist soon enlists one named Lester in some emotional labor, asking for guidance on how to handle Sheniqua. “I’m just a guy, y’know, trying to get by,” says Marshall pathetically, forgetting he also steals cookies. “I feel like this woman is harassing me.” Lester retains his social mask. He tolerates this version of events. And this transaction. Marshall tries to take from the Black guy, apparently absent Black friends, and clearly not close to Black people if he’s cozying to a visibly annoyed coworker. Marshall is trying to make Lester his magical negro—his Ghost Whoopi Goldberg or every other Black character who serves to help the White protagonist actualize! Permission is craved by Marshall. Lester misses a golden opportunity to allow the Black man to show up as his historical self. To invoke the 2.5 million Africans who died during the Middle Passage, to plead for the total U.S. slave population who, concluded J. David Hacker’s research in 2020, contributed 410 billion hours of labor (Hacker, 2020, pp. 840–55). Lester and the Atlanta writers don’t make any case about intergenerational trauma. Instead, Lester advises him to pay Sheniqua and apologize, explaining, “I grew up around Black women.” This smacks of racial essentialism about melanated ladies. Lester’s advice makes us sound like a monolith of unreasonability.

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“YOUR DAUGHTER’S GONNA BE OKAY” Hard cut to Marshall, discounting that advice, now soliciting White colleagues. They indulge Marshall’s self-righteousness and encourage him to fight Sheniqua’s claim. It’s what Marshall would rather hear, and it’s a surface engagement with the world changing around them. Not one coworker wrestles with how people who captured other human beings and sold them in a marketplace to make wealth are the ones at fault. How White ancestors set into motion this generational karma. Marshall is beckoned by his White-presenting estranged wife with a text, “We need to talk. Now” punctuated with a black hand emoji. On the porch, she attacks. What’s with this talk of his ancestors being slave owners? If he has to privately pay reparations, she would like the divorce finalized. She can’t take the financial hit. He shoots back—how come she’s so sure she’s not an enslaver’s descendant? “I’m Peruvian,” she says. “You were White yesterday!” Marshall exclaims, which provokes satiric laughter but isn’t engineered simply for laughs. It requires viewers to engage with a question: “What is Whiteness?” Because the episode slowly allows Whiteness to become raced in a way that’s newly disadvantageous. Drilling Whiteness down into Ashkenazi, Peruvian, and Austro-Hungarian history also highlights the absurdity of race, the fluidity of a pale color line when it is most or least advantageous. Mostly, “people are Black or they are not,” as Fuentes Morgan puts it. “The racial categorization is ultimately solid and secure” (2020, p. 18). But here we get treated to 50 shades of White! When relationship to a slave-owning White is harmful, they begin to move past an oversimplified accepted understanding of “White.” As Richard Dyer argues in “The Matter of Whiteness” (2004, p. 10), “As long as race is something only applied to non-White peoples, as long as White people are not racially seen and named, they/we function as a human norm. Other people are raced, [White people] are just people.” What we are witnessing also: Marshall is not allowed to self-define his race. Like Blacks, a racial inheritance is assigned. When his no longer brings gains, he is slowly faced with a new horror. “This is not happening,” Marshall says, fleeing his wife’s porch, passing the lamp he wanted to borrow in the trash. Driving up to his townhome, he’s confronted by the scene of an all-Black cookout on his tiny lawn. Marshall stumbles upon this tableau—Sheniqua and friends on a grill, on lawn chairs, playing games. The R&B throwback “Make it Last Forever” by Keith Sweat is playing, a 1987 jam that aired on Black radio stations. There’s humor in how comfortable the Black people made themselves, building an encampment like Africanized bees taking over Marshall’s front yard. But who is this punchline serving? Sheniqua sees Marshall making a U-turn and sics a young male on him, an apparent track star,

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who on foot nearly catches up with Marshall’s sensible sedan in what could be a scene from The Terminator. This is absurdity! A man fleeing his home in a 3,000-pound car, pursued by a 180-pound man. Next, we see that the chaos has driven Marshall to a mid-level hotel. His darkened room is the perfect setting for Orpheus’ journey down into despair. Attorneys are on TV, advertising help with so-called “restitution taxes.” (They’re a Black and White legal team, equipped, they say, to handle either party). It’s a quick turnaround for lawyers to throw up a shingle, but we can assume this could be lucrative, considering the United States was built on slavery and real-life reparations estimates say that 12 trillion dollars are owed, according to an unaffiliated interview podcast series called “Reparations: The Big Payback” (The Black Effect Network, 2021). Unmoored, collapsing into his dawning fate, a frail Marshall cries as he has a cookie for dinner. It’s not a madeleine, but the humor here is based on the confectionary’s callback. It looks like a chunky chocolate chip and appears to taste like powerlessness. He eats through open-mouthed sobs. His entitlements have fallen apart. Now we are in the hotel’s lobby bar. Playing is Roberta Flack’s 1969 song “First Time Ever I Saw Your Face.” Marshall is seated on a lounge chair a bit removed from the other guests. Another disheveled White guy holds a drink, and Marshall does the movie standard, “I’ll have what he’s having.” They’re strangers. But they enter a moment of White fraternity, soon recognizing they are both the target of restitution taxes. The other man is named Earnest, he says in a slight Southern drawl, but his friends call him E. Regular viewers will realize Earnest is the full name of the Black protagonist of the past two Atlanta seasons played by Donald Glover. So we perk up and pay attention. Go on, we say to our screens. E looks like a good ole boy but delivers a tour-de-force monologue, a smoldering sermon, a self-indictment of his own enslaver inheritance. E reveals the story about his supposedly self-made White ancestor: “Turns out he had a lot of help.” The nation’s moral failures are not theoretical nor administrative, says E, as he locates the old brutalities heaped upon Black people in his family tree, and shorthands what the great 2014 essay by Ta-Nehisi Coates, “The Case for Reparations,” makes explicit: An appeal for a correction to the “injury gap” and a “recompense for past injustices.” “What do they deserve?” E primes and frames. “We were treating slavery as if it were a mystery buried in the past. Something to investigate if we chose to. And now that history has a monetary value, confession is not absolution. And in the case of this person . . . to Sheniqua, to them, slavery is not past, I mean, it’s not a mystery,” says E. “It is a cruel, unavoidable ghost that haunts in a way we can’t see.” He sips from his snifter. “So now (your child) has to build wealth and success from the ground up. It’s similar to the position we put them in . . . But we’re gonna be okay. Your daughter’s gonna be okay.

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The curse has been lifted from her, all of us. We were running from it, but now we’re free.” It’s the first time Marshall gives an audience to anybody asking him to face the truth about his ancestors. We already know where Marshall is in this argument—we have seen him in denial, in flight, in disbelief, in disinterest, in desperation, and in “affliction” as Complex media wrote (Rodriguez, 2022). In his view, he’s been hounded and persecuted. This scene serves as a discourse between two White men holding differing points of view on reparations but friendly enough to work out the truth. About the value of confession not being enough: That was brought really home to me when Bryan Stevenson guested on “The Problem with Jon Stewart” podcast (Stewart, 2022). Stevenson is the “Just Mercy” lawyer who has gotten wrongly convicted Black men (plural) off death row and still promotes grace and kindness. Stevenson isn’t satisfied with ancestral apologies. He said in a tort-loving, litigious, Christian America he can’t believe we think acknowledging a history of slavery is enough. Because that’s just a start. In religion, one must confess and atone for a sin. And definitely in law, Stevenson noted in the podcast, you don’t just say, “Sorry, I’ll never do that again.” You have to make somebody whole. The E monologue about reckoning with slavery and the American selfmade White man myth is the most dialectical the episode gets: It’s a White guy penalized for the sins of his forefathers reasoning his support for reparative action. Although he himself looks blue collar in comparison to Marshall, with fewer resources to lose, E has come to acceptance that sounds like it’s in the neighborhood of approval. He, as the cultural journalist at Complex puts it, is the one to “break down the ways reparations would be beneficial to Black people, but also a way for White people to understand that they’re deserving of it” (Rodriguez, 2022). It’s right around this E speech that I’m wondering who this episode is for. My Black students gave finger snaps of affirmation when E said “it’s not history to them” and laughed at his effort to brace Marshall with a “we’re gonna be okay.” But I wonder if this “Big Payback” is a Black entreaty to White people to acknowledge their own culpability and then come up with what accountability truly looks like. Maybe it’s a message to those who treat Black bondage as a closed book and say present-day Blacks should “get over slavery.” In Laughing to Keep from Dying, Morgan Fuentes says, “Through the implementation of satire, the satirist asserts their own humanity, and the humanity of their in-group, in the face of its mainstream disavowal” (2020, p. 10). This reparations comedy walks resistant Whites through their fears of the rollout and holds their hands about what is possible. As Blacks, we always consume White-packaged TV and films with White narratives at the center—we have to if we want to watch anything on the damn TV! But the

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way this Black cultural product Atlanta has presented Whiteness asks White people to investigate their own power. The path we’ve been led down and the stereotypes played upon get us to this hotel-lobby climax, which no one in the Black audience mistakes. People with Black sympathies have put their words into White players. Reparations are raised up by E and celebrated as important, and Marshall comes to terms with it. This scene is the most subversive, strongly arguing reparations to Marshall, an average White dude who doesn’t want to play a role in this racial justice. The Black people I know who have consumed the episode recognize it also as a message of solidarity addressed to us, even if all the Black characters are withdrawn, obscured, and unknowable. We understand the logos—the appeal to the Black audience’s sense of logic and a clear critique of the White protagonist. “I want to share this with young people,” said a middle-aged Black student in my satire class. “People I know need to see this.” Newly inspired by E to be more curious about the claims of his great-great paternal debt, our hero Marshall seeks out Sheniqua’s Instagram. Cyberstalking, he encounters a video of her that further enables his transformation: Sheniqua’s teaching her children, her “babies” as she triumphantly declares, to ride bicycles. Sheniqua finally takes a break from her postbellum bountyhunter role and is humanized. Presented as wholesome. This is only for her Instagram followers, her in-group that is bearing witness in support of her. (It’s understandable she hid her true caring self while doing civil litigation to get some individual justice.) Marshall is an interloper on her ’gram (though he was livestreamed on it when they first met). He is not the intended viewer. She demonstrates the pleasure of being a mother—something that the enslaved Black mother was denied. Sheniqua celebrates as her children learn and wobble through a safe sphere. It’s a moment where she transcends racialization as well as the frame of racial essentialism put upon her (by the writers and Marshall and Lester and, thusly, the viewers). This is the show’s first attempt at not emphasizing her otherness, instead placing her in league with Marshall, who himself is a father. It’s an equalizing gesture—all parents are proud of their children’s milestones. We finally see her vulnerability, and it’s the closest we come to a Black interior. For the journey of the White protagonist by the end, I cautiously relent, Sheniqua had to be sketched quickly as the antagonist. The ways available to the writers of this episode include her performance of race and gender as forceful; she never makes a coherent argument for the retroactive justice for the past, Sheniqua is just demanding and outside the norm of civil behavior. Based on where this episode crests, I get it and I’m also uncomfortable about what had to be exploited—Black womanness—to arrive here. I hope viewers of every background feel something like warmth and regard for Sheniqua by episode’s end, that her life is affirmed in her quest to redeem her ancestors. I

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hope that the critique of Whiteness is clear, too. But, as Abdurraqib has written about subversive POC messages sent to non-POC, it’s hard to “trust that said audience will understand themselves to be on the receiving end of the wound and not being invited to mock the wounded” (2022, p. 87). The final culmination of this hotel scene: In the background you can see E stand above the rim of the pool (my mother guessed right away he was going to kill himself now; she is the person in the theater always ruining it for you). E takes out a handgun and shoots himself in the temple. Blood spurts dramatically as he limply falls into the water. “There’s more where that came from,” a young Black waiter tells a shocked Marshall. Does it make me unhappy that the case for reparations is pled most coherently by a White man, who balances out the picture to get us on a common historical ground, then commits suicide? It’s the type of satire this show leans into, the absurd, the dark, the jarring, an audience surprise to elicit nervous chuckles or an “Oh shit!” The way Atlanta does the unexpected, you’d say it was the Black Twilight Zone. Having the awakened guy choose suicide allows him to play the magical White guy in a way. He guides the reparations-resistant hero into making a choice. As the actor who played Marshall said in an interview with Complex, “He could either end up in that pool or he can continue down that road of acceptance” (Rodriguez, 2022). After a commercial break, we’re inexplicably on a bus with a handsome Latino. He makes eyes at a White female bus driver, who returns his flirty gaze. With him, we enter the service area of a restaurant, and there is Marshall, readying for his waiter shift. He is cheerful, positive, relaxed, and playful with the Latino coworker, who chides Marshall that he’ll be made a busboy if he keeps speaking Spanish slang. When the manager asks those who have to garnish their wages for “restitution taxes” to line up and notes that Marshall pays a full 15% (“ouch”), there is no anger in this denouement. Just acceptance that Marshall now has less. Then Marshall hustles into a fine dining room and—here’s the visual punchline—it’s mostly filled with Black diners. Perhaps, they are indulging in access to pleasures that reparations provided. They’re definitely being served by Whites. A role reversal. The economic order’s flipped. And it’s not a redistribution of imbalanced wealth administered through the state—our United States of Litigious America instead blessed a private party corrective. This final scene’s soundtrack is Minnie Ripperton’s otherworldly “Les Fleurs” (just like the ending of the work of another Black horror auteur, Jordan Peele, in the movie Us). The song is harmonic and high-register—imagine some awesome angel in the Garden of Eden flying close to your head, singing about a flower blooming to spread love and joy. “He finds beauty and power,” a lyric goes. For our hero, Marshall, he’s at ease for the first time. He has juice that he was lacking before in his separated-dad, cubicle-worker

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purgatory (where he was pathetic and aggrieved). It is implied that Marshall has escaped some kind of psychic death that he was on the path to meet (and E did physically meet). He teetered at the edge of White precarity and, through the admission that Blacks are deserving of recompense, he rights himself. Accepting his restitution garnishment seems like a catalyst for Marshall’s personal growth . . . which is essentially a Bryan Stevenson argument. That if we right the past wrongs, America will progress. Moving to repair an ancestral wrong, to remember the harm, as bell hooks says in “Art on My Mind,” (1995, p. 64) “evokes the coming together of severed parts, fragments becoming whole.” Moving Marshall into a space where he takes accountability for America’s past is redemptive and reminds me of the symbolism of that madeleine cookie, getting us to remember beyond our time period. Because the past animates the present and future, history is alive, and the generational impact of slavery continues. Re-member, so we can all move closer together. Coates, in “The Case,” says, And so we must imagine a new country. Reparations—by which I mean the full acceptance of our collective biography and its consequences—is the price we must pay to see ourselves squarely. The recovering alcoholic may well have to live with his illness for the rest of his life. But at least he is not living a drunken lie. Reparations beckons us to reject the intoxication of hubris and see America as it is—the work of fallible humans. Won’t reparations divide us? Not any more than we are already divided. (Coates, 2014)

Is this Atlanta episode a dramatization of fears for White resource-guarders? Is it inaccurately portraying reparations as a zero-sum game, where the individual has to give up something? Isn’t it more realistic that our government makes redress with tax monies and policies? This 22-minute satire doesn’t answer all your questions about a reparations rollout, nor even its own question from the radio earlier: “What will this do for Black and White relations?” Would the White grievance community commit more domestic terrorism? What happens to overpolicing of Black communities? What about gag rules around teaching about slavery and racism in the classroom? And the effort to suppress Black voters in states like Georgia? We don’t even journey back to Sheniqua Johnson to see how the money has changed her life. “Big Payback” was never an A/B storyline—we stayed with Marshall the whole time, and never lingered in any aspect of Black life. We were fully in Marshall’s grand timeline, like it was The Matrix, traveling with him as he is being dislocated from his sense of self in the world.

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THE CURSE OF WHITENESS But look how far I’ve come, in the context of this expressive satirical form, in accepting reparations as credible and debating how the show portrayed its consequences. And that’s why, as a Black descendant of the enslaved, I love the “Big Payback” resolution, the new reality, because it envisions a Black futurity where reparations are possible and (excluding self-inflicted harm) peaceable. And it does so while going outside traditional reparations frames detailing Black follies or pains. When we attempt antebellum reckonings, it is typically made by Black cultural workers who center the Black experience. Often, it’s Black creatives and journalists depicting the horrors of slavery (the sketch comedy Key and Peele found some defensible humor in this) or what grew out of slavery (Jim Crow laws, lynchings, “race riots,” the War on Drugs, and other confrontations with racism). The POV of “Big Payback” gives us a flawed-but-fresh satirical vision that instead tests the White role in reparations, expands the framing beyond the impact of bondage upon Blacks, and tells us we’re mostly going to be okay if repair happens. Unlike Chappelle’s narrowest idea of reparations nearly 20 years ago, Atlanta understands that the stakes are much higher than how Blacks gonna spend their come up. “The simplest and most honest idea,” says Abdurraqib, is “that racism is about power, and the solving of it relies—in part—on people willing to give up power” (2022, p. 183). This satire attempts to work like a critical framework for articulating how reparations might make the well-meaning Whites lose their minds even temporarily, especially if they perceived themselves to be losing something. In interviews with the Black creatives behind Atlanta, they say the third season was about “the curse of Whiteness.” I’m drawn to this read. Maybe the “curse” here is an unwelcome change the White individual has to do to make repairs? Or is the curse a Whiteness that you wear as a cloak of privilege until it’s suddenly a liability and you can’t get it off you—its racial inheritance no longer bringing only gains? Or is it simply denying and avoiding White accountability? It’s the artist who opens up space and imagines what could be. The satirist conceptualizes justice through laughter and leaves it up to the audience to determine the next course of action, posits Morgan Fuentes, when she says, “The responsibility of the satirist to invent a counter-narrative that eschews the status quo and allows space for justice grows more immediate and intense. And it is our responsibility as audiences to continue to demand this intentionality from our satirists” (2020, p. 163). It may be that this show is situated in a better racial-justice time period, when there were optimistic, IRL conversations happening about repairing systemic harms done to Blacks. “Fishing villages write fishing songs,” as Boots Riley said in story for the Moth Radio Hour (2017). So, too, do we get

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comedy products from a culture with a more evolved ethical frame around reparations? There may be similar performance products now made in our live theaters and the NYC comedy circuit imagining what racial justice might look like, but they’re too exclusive and inaccessible, geographically and financially. We can stream the story of this moment, and laugh at the slowly overtaken White protagonist. We can feel inspired by the social context of 2022 remixed as this favorable vision of forthcoming reparations. There’s never been anything like “Big Payback” in popular media before. I’m grateful you and I can say we lived to see it.

REFERENCES Abdurraqib, H. (2022). A Little Devil in America: In Praise of Black Performance. Random House Trade Paperbacks. New York. Borum Chatto, C. (2017). The Laughter Effect: The Serious Role of Comedy in Social Change (Executive Summary). Center for Media & Social Impact, School of Communication, American University. Washington, DC. Chappelle, Dave, performer. (2012). Chappelle’s Show: The Complete Series. Comedy Central. Coates, T. (2014, June). The case for reparations. The Atlantic. https://www​.theatlantic​.com​/magazine​/archive​/2014​/06​/the​-case​-for​-reparations​/361631/ Dyer, R. (2005). The matter of Whiteness. In White Privilege: The Other Side of Racism (P. Rothenberg, Ed.). Hampshire: Worth Publishers. Fuentes Morgan, D. (2020). Laughing to Keep from Dying: African American Satire in the Twenty-First Century. Champagne-Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Hacker, J. D. (2020, May 13). From ‘20. and odd’ to 10 million: The growth of the slave population in the United States. National Library of Medicine. https://www​ .ncbi​.nlm​.nih​.gov​/pmc​/articles​/PMC7716878/ hooks, b. (1995). Art on My Mind: Visual Politics. New York: The New Press. Hunter, T. W. (2019, April 16). When slaveowners got reparations. New York Times. https://www​.nytimes​.com​/2019​/04​/16​/opinion​/when​-slaveowners​-got​-reparations​ .html Jasanoff, M. (2022, May 9). Race ancestor worship. The New Yorker. kidpaw​.co​m. (n.d.). https://www​.kidpaw​.com​/names​/shaniqua Murai, H., director (2022). The Big Payback. Atlanta. Season 3, episode 4. https:// www​.imdb​.com​/title​/tt8544122/ Pew Research Center. (November. 28, 2022). Black and White Americans are far apart in their views of reparations for slavery. https://www​.pewresearch​.org​/fact​ -tank​/2022​/11​/28​/black​-and​-white​-americans​-are​-far​-apart​-in​-their​-views​-of​-reparations​-for​-slavery/ Proust, M. (1932). Remembrance of Things Past, Vol. 1 Swann’s Way. Random House. New York. Reparations: The Big Payback. (2021). The Black Effect Network (podcast).

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Riley, B. (2017, August 29). Treasure Island. Moth Radio Hour podcast. https:// themoth​.org​/stories​/treasure​-island Rodriguez, K. (2022, April 8). Justin Bartha breaks down ‘Atlanta’ reparations episode. Complex. https://www​.complex​.com​/pop​-culture​/atlanta​-big​-payback​-reparationsepisode​-justin​-bartha​-interview/ Spillers, H. (1987). Mama’s baby, papa’s maybe: An American grammar book. Diacritics, 17(2), 64–81. Stewart, J. (2022, February 21). America needs to admit how racist it is. The Problem with Jon Stewart (podcast), with guest Bryan Stevenson. https://www​.youtube​.com​ /watch​?v​=k2C0FHfy6RA Taylor, K.-Y. (2022, May 15). American racism and the Buffalo shooting. The New Yorker. https://www​.newyorker​.com​/news​/our​-columnists​/american​-racism​-and​ -the​-buffalo​-massacre

Chapter 2

#ColoradoBorderWall Mimetic Discourse as Emancipation Daleana Phillips

“You get a wall. You get a wall. And everybody gets a wall,” Oprah Winfrey exclaims as she points toward her audience. The famous “You get a car” GIF was one of many images remixed, appropriated, and adapted to mock a geographical gaffe made by President Donald Trump at the Shale Insight Conference in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania in 2019. Trump proudly announced that the United States was building a wall in the nonborder state of Colorado, which is located 450 miles north of Mexico. Trump boasted that the Colorado border wall was a “beautiful wall, a big one that really works—you can’t get over, you can’t get under” (Liptak & Kelly, 2019). Social media did not miss an opportunity to ridicule Trump’s gaffe with an onslaught of user-generated content that captured the attention of both politicians and the mainstream media. Colorado Governor Jared Polis tweeted, “Well this is awkward. Colorado doesn’t border Mexico. Good thing Colorado now offers free full day kindergarten so our kids can learn basic geography” (Chan, 2019). Colorado Representative Diana DeGette also jibed at Trump by asking on Twitter, “Is NEW Mexico going to pay for it?” (Chan, 2019). Senator Patrick Leahy, from Vermont, tweeted an intertextual meme displaying a map of the United States rewritten with a black marker to exclude New Mexico, thereby making Colorado a border state. Leahy, entitled the meme “Sharpie Gate,” referencing another of Trump’s geographical blunders in which he used a felt-tip marker to alter a hurricane’s track on a weather map. Memes following Trump’s geographical gaffe also offered structural engineering advice for constructing Colorado’s Border Wall, such as lining used snow skis around the perimeter, mounting a snow corridor around the state and, for exercise enthusiasts, constructing a rock-climbing wall. Another category of memes served as a social corrective to mock Trump’s gaffe, whether it was truly his geographical ignorance or a “Freudian slip” in which 25

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he mistook Colorado for Arizona or New Mexico. Taken together, these memes use humor to reveal hegemonic ideologies along the intersection of race, class, and citizenship in contemporary political discourse. The purpose of this critical rhetorical analysis is to examine a set of memes collected from Twitter after Trump’s geographical gaffe using the hashtag #ColoradoBorderWall. This project joins a growing conversation about the relevance and significance of memes in political discourse by examining humor’s role in exposing underlying ideological structures legitimated and objectivated as reality. Davis (1993) suggests that humor has the capacity to “assault” reality as it seeks to denaturalize, distort, and debunk. Raimi McKerrow’s (1989) critical rhetorical theory provides a complimentary framework for examining the role of political humor in memes as its aim is to “unmask or demystify the discourse of power” (p. 91). This chapter presents an overview for understanding memes as rhetorical texts and addresses the intertextual and rhetorical functions of memes that intend to evoke humor and ultimately persuade audiences on political issues, specifically, Trump’s presidential authority and xenophobic discourse on immigration and border security.

MEMES AS RHETORICAL TEXTS Internet memes are pertinent texts for examining political discourse among teens and young adults because they are among the most popular forms of online communication. According to a social media behavioral survey conducted by YPulse, 75% of social media users between the ages of 13 and 36 share memes, 55% sharing them weekly and 30% daily (2019). TamaRutigliano (2018) adds that millennials reportedly view between 20 and 30 memes a day, and the use of memes in advertising has the capability of yielding an audience reach larger than traditional marketing techniques with significantly higher engagement rates. While memes may appear as trivial or innocuous jokes spreading and mutating across the internet, they are a “distinctive product of current digital culture” entrenched within the global economy and political systems. Currently estimated at $2.1 billion, the meme industry has established its relevancy as a dominant medium for communication on social media (Amra & Elma, 2022). Shifman (2013) defines internet memes as “units of popular culture that are circulated, imitated, and transformed by individual internet users, creating a shared cultural experience in the process” (p. 367). Because memes are created with an awareness of one another, they often share common characteristics across the dimensions of content, form, and stance. While memes take various forms, many are humorous and involve image-macros

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with text captioned or superimposed on the images appropriated from popular culture and news media. Davis, Love and Killen (2018) argue that memes have become a language of their own, using a shared vernacular of symbols, syntax, and grammar among social media users (p. 3902). Brown (2022) suggests that beyond constructing a language, memes have the “capacity to transform cultures and construct identities between people. These shareable visual jokes can also be powerful tools for self-expression, connection, social influence and even political subversion.” The ability to easily grab attention, engage and entertain audiences, and make memes a formidable apparatus of political persuasion. Huntington (2016) argues that internet memes are appealing because of their intertextuality, “by which they take images from dominant media structures, juxtaposing and remixing them to create new layers of meaning” (p. 78). Intertextuality, according to D’Angelo (2009), “describes the relationship between and among texts” (p. 33) based on Kristeva’s formulation that “any text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations” (Kristeva cited in D’Angelo, 2009, p. 37). Memes are dialogically connected to other texts through strategies of intertextuality such as “citations, quotations, allusions, borrowings, adaptations, appropriations, parody, pastiche, imitation and the like” (D’Angelo, 2009, p. 33). Examining the rhetoric of intertextuality within memes is useful for identifying their visual arguments within political discourse. Huntington’s (2016) research on “The Pepper Spray Cop” meme is a quintessential example of how these rhetorical strategies reveal arguments “regarding essences of human liberty” through intertextuality and synecdoche during the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) Movement. This meme originated on the University of California Davis campus in 2011, when a photographer captured a picture of Lieutenant John Pike casually pepper spraying a group of protestors as if he was “spraying his garden for weeds” (p. 83). This image has since been photoshopped and inserted in historical images, such as a painting of the Declaration of Independence. Huntington argues that memes can be effective means of activist rhetoric and that “The Pepper Spray Cop” demonstrates how the myth of the American dream is at odds with the myth of meritocracy and fairness, thereby expressing the sentiments of the OWS movement. Memes derive their rhetorical power from source texts and contexts of events they appropriate and remix, often yielding at least “partial” political narratives and enthymematic arguments. Visual enthymemes depend on an agreement between the rhetor and audience. The premises put forth in visual images are dependent upon the interaction of the image with the context, as well as the audience’s interpretation. Memes present a rhetorical situation in which a process of “meaning making” occurs when an anonymous creator sends a message via meme, and it is received and remixed, reappropriated, or

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combined to create a new meme. Carlson and Frazer (2017) argue “that the meme-making process is always a meaning-making process” as they have the potential to “become entangled in the achievement of new political arrangements and the production of new subjects” (p. 4). The rhetorical situation or context is essential for interpreting meaning because it “unites the ideas of common language and argument fields,” which is important for images because visual arguments operate through symbolic codes and the audience’s process of decoding them (Weska, 2012, p. 225). To be persuasive, visual enthymemes must incorporate material aesthetics and opinions from a socio-historical and cultural context that resonate with the intended audience (Wekesa, 2012; Kjeldsen, 2018). Memes, Humor, and “LOLitics” Internet memes constitute a significant segment of political humor on social media. While not all memes are political, there has been a growing prevalence of political memes following the aftermath of Trump’s 2016 election, which continues to blur the “boundaries between popular culture and political expression” (Penney, 2020, p. 791). For example, in a Forbes (2017) analysis, the most popular keywords generated from over 10,000 memes revealed that 60% were associated with politics. “MAGA,” “Donald Trump,” and “Conservative” were in the top five most referenced. Political memes boomed during Donald Trump’s campaign, prompting Politico Magazine to refer to the election as “World War Meme” (Schreckinger, 2017). Internet memes descend from a longstanding tradition of political humor where irony, satire, and parody “sustain democratic public culture” (Mortensen & Neumayer, 2021) by challenging authority through strategies used to mock or delegitimate authority, exposing hypocrisy and hegemonic ideologies, and establishing identity politics through Manichean divides (i.e., “us vs. them”) (Ross & Rivers, 2017). Tay (2014), referencing the internet parlance of “Laughing Out Loud,” coined the phrase “LOLitics” to describe this “category of digital texts created by ordinary individuals that, like most political humour, are usually responses to news events or gaffes committed by political figures” (p. 46). Memes, like editorial cartoons, are created by people outside of media production who “play” with the meaning of news, politics, and popular culture. Sobande (2019) argues that political memes incorporate “digital manipulation, image juxtaposition and ironic humor . . . [to] constitute a form of ‘visual argument’ that artfully blends popular culture and politics in entertaining and incisive fashion” (p. 158). Burroughs (2020) suggests that memes’ capacity for “operat[ing] as stitching devices, which meld platforms, ideology, and geopolitics” makes them valuable components within online political discourse (p. 191).

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Humor pervades all social contexts, including politics (Lynch, 2002). Mortensen and Neumayer (2021) conceptualize “the politics of memes as playful appropriates of contexts that occur at the intersection of the political and the humourous” (p. 2369). Like enthymemes, humor relies on its audience to interpret the context as funny and playful, thereby framing the discourse from an alternate standpoint outside of serious discourse (Witkin, 1999; Kuipers, 2008). Kuipers (2008) explains: “Humor and joking are important negotiations over the meaning of things: the construction of norms, the debate about what is ‘going on’ in a particular situation” (p. 374). Satire and parody are communicative aspects of political humor strategically employed to generate feelings of inclusion or exclusion depending on the audience’s interpretation of the joke. As with tweets on social media, a critical rhetorical examination of memes in political discourse is important because an increasing body of scholarship suggests that memetic humor has the potential to influence political discourse and outcomes (Penney, 2017; Ross & Rivers, 2017; Hristova, 2014; Peters & Allan, 2021; McLoughlin & Southern, 2021). The creation and circulation of political memes are no longer considered innocent entertainment, but “increasingly central to how large numbers of predominantly young citizens experience politics” (Dean, 2019, p. 256). McLoughlin and Southern (2021) argue that on a microlevel, memes may contain policy information or stances prompting low-threshold engagement such as meme creation and diffusion as a form of political participation (p. 63). On a macrolevel, as Mkhortykh and Gonzalez (2020) argue, political memes serve as rhetorical devices where “activists can bring together citizens and mobilize support for collective protest action by challenging the state’s control over the public sphere” as they discovered in their analysis of the use of social media in protests in Venezuela and Ukraine (p. 344). Memes have emerged as a relevant source of political scholarship within an era of media convergence as the boundaries are continuously blurred between “interpersonal and mass, professional and amateur, bottom-up and top-down communications” (Shifman, 2013, pp. 6–7). Social media simplifies creative processes for generating widespread political content, thereby making ordinary citizens more engaged and less passive audiences to messages of political elites (Lillekar & Jackson, 2010). Ross and Rivers (2017) argue that memes should be considered “artifacts of participatory digital culture” because they “are an organic means through which citizens can respond in almost real time to contemporary political events with no fear of delay or censorship from mainstream media” (p. 3). Because of their capacity to circumvent traditional media, they can facilitate “active, polyvocal citizenship” (Milner, 2013, p. 2361). Memes seamlessly transmit potentially emotionally charged and persuasive messages to massive audiences, thereby making them

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increasingly important in shaping political discourse (Mkhortykh & Gonzalez, 2020).

A CRITICAL RHETORICAL FRAMEWORK McKerrow’s (1989) conception of critical rhetoric is beneficial for examining memes because it seeks to unmask dominant ideologies embedded within discourse to reveal how conceptions of reality and truth are naturalized as “common knowledge.” Barthes (1972) references mythical speech as the act that “transforms history into nature” (p. 128). He suggests that mythical speech, once uttered, “is immediately frozen into something natural; it is not read as motive, but as reason” (p. 128). Critical rhetorical approaches attempt to situate knowledge within a symbolic process, instead of viewing it as an objective or naturalized product. It is within this symbolic process that rhetoric is “inherently persuasive” (Brown, 1990, p. 189). Situating knowledge within a symbolic process opens the discourse to multiple meanings. The aim of critical rhetoric is to examine the “integration of power/ knowledge in society—what possibilities for change the integration invites or inhibits and what intervention strategies might be considered appropriate to effect social change” (McKerrow, 1989, p. 91). McKerrow presents four features that define critical rhetoric and its objectives. First, is that it shares a “critical spirit” with theorists such as “Horkehimer, Adorno, Habermas, and Foucault” (p. 92). Second, she argues that critical rhetoric must be concerned with how discourse permeates itself into power/knowledge dynamics, as well as demystifying these relationships in the process. Third, McKerrow (1989) views critical rhetoric as not being “detached and impersonal; it has as its object something which it is ‘against’” (p. 92). The final feature she presents is that critical practices must have consequences in terms of possibilities for action or future action (p. 92). McKerrow (1989) describes her framework as a transformative practice rather than a directive to be carried out or a traditional methodology. McKerrow offers eight principles for establishing an orientation toward a critical rhetoric. She argues these principles are not exhaustive, nor is each principle necessary to practice critical rhetoric. An examination of #ColoradoBorderWall memes specifically engages the principles of materiality of discourse, influential discourse, absence and presence, and an emphasis on performative action to “establish a critical rhetoric as theory and praxis” (p. 109). Applying this framework to #ColoradoBorderWall memes illuminates the integration of power and knowledge operating within discourse. The power/ knowledge integration is an important feature within the symbiotic relationship among memes, as a medium, and the message decoded by audiences.

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As Marshall McLuhan (1964) famously explains, “‘The medium is the message because it is the medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action” (p. 108). #ColoradoBorderWall memes circulate unregulated outside the confines of traditional mass media, facilitating the necessity to examine symbiotic relationships among the rhetorical situation or context, memetic humor and rhetorical strategies, persuasive content, and emancipated ideologies.

#COLORADOBORDERWALL: THE RHETORICAL SITUATION Trump’s geographical gaffe and the subsequent onslaught of memes are situated within the dynamics of major U.S. institutional political change. Stuckey (2017) suggests that Trump’s election serves as a harbinger of this political change, as his presidency reflects the lack of political coherency and rhetorical order associated with institutional stability (p. 669). This is not to say that Trump’s election or presidency caused this political change, but that his presidency aligns with already weakened political institutions and norms, while his brazen rhetoric precludes the possibility of an ethical civic culture (Terrill, 2017, p. 500). Stuckey (2017) argues that “dramatic political change will always take place in a certain kind of affective environment—anger and fear, hope and trepidation, are not unique to the Donald Trump presidency but always color the rhetoric of such movements” (p. 668). Current political change and rhetoric, Stuckey (2017) believes, is centered on questions of “identity, privilege, and belonging” (p. 687). These questions are evident in Trump’s rhetoric on building a border wall between the United States and Mexico because, as DeChaine (2009) explains, “The specter of the border haunts the language of social relations” (p. 43). At the Shale Insight Conference in October 2019, Trump reinforced his rhetorical arguments on curtailing illegal border crossings made during a widely publicized immigration reform speech a few months prior. In that speech, he espoused fears of immigrants as national burdens (requiring welfare and employment), criminals (involved with drug cartels and human smuggling), and invaders crossing the U.S.-Mexican border illegally. During both speeches, he uses rhetorical markers that Stuckey (2017) identifies with moments of heightened political change, “a dependence on hyperbole; an accompanying tendency toward incivility; a certain vagueness regarding means and ends; and a reliance on hope and nostalgia” (p. 676). Trump’s rhetoric is hyperbolic as it attempts to overwhelm audience’s emotions and circumvent rationality. His arguments evoke incivility by labeling Mexicans coming into the United States as being involved in criminal activity. Terrill

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(2017) argues, “Where others have cloaked their racism and misogyny in coded language apt to be most clearly decoded by a specific target audience, Trump speaks plainly, unconstrained by the bogeyman of ‘political correctness’” (p. 498). His proposals, to “Make America Great Again” (an appeal to nostalgia), vaguely emphasize plans to secure the U.S.-Mexico border as they do not identify a clear path for funding, construction, and enforcement. The rhetoric of the Trump administration along with contemporary media discourse on immigration use the border as a spectacle and attempt to distinguish citizens from illegal aliens based on intersectional statuses related to race, class, and gender (Cisneros, 2011). Cisneros (2011) argues, “Obsession over the literal and symbolic border between American and foreigner . . . is motivated in part by fear of the dilution and dissolution of US citizenship. As a result, alienization of the non-citizen is fundamental to the rhetorical maintenance of US identity” (p. 26). Border rhetoric, through political and media discourse, constructs our notions of belonging in the national imaginary, as well as how this membership is determined. Chavez (2008) argues that Latinx, particularly those assumed to be from Mexican descent, are defined outside of the national imaginary and therefore “outside of the practices of citizenship/subject-making and incapable of feelings of belonging” (p. 46). While citizenship contains a legal aspect, it operates subjectively and is applied based on perceived deservedness by the ruling collective, thereby, emphasizing the point that citizenship does not necessarily result in equal membership of “the body politic” (Roman, 2001, p. 81). Chavez (2008) argues that this subjectivity creates a segmented citizenship that emphasizes the rights and privileges of some citizens over others: “Such differences, once constructed and normalized, rationalize and justify governmental practices and policies that stigmatize and punish certain categories of immigrants and their children” (p. 46). Latinx, regardless of citizenship status, are racialized as foreign and unassimilable into the national imaginary. Surveillance practices, such as racial profiling and border enforcement, reveal how citizenship status is symbolically “inscribed” on bodies outside the national imaginary (Romero, 2008). Ngai (2004) states, “Immigration policy is constitutive of Americans’ understanding of national membership and citizenship, drawing lines of inclusion and exclusion that articulate a desired composition—imagined if not necessarily realized—of the nation” (p. 5). Furthermore, she explains that our focus on illegal or undocumented immigrants as being the most undesirable foregrounds national sovereignty as a primary principle for generating immigration policy. This explains why the U.S.-Mexican border has become center stage for productions of “illegality” and continued contestations on national belonging, as well as policies of restriction and deportation (De Genova, 2002).

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THE #COLORADOBORDERWALL MEMES Trump’s geographical gaffe spawned several memes; however, two dominant themes emerged: prototypes for Colorado’s Border Wall and U.S. map reconfigurations. This critical rhetorical analysis examines seven memes that exemplify these dominant themes. Utilizing McKerrow’s critical rhetorical framework, this analysis examines humor and rhetorical strategies used in the #ColoradoBorderWall memes. The first category of memes is image-macros of proposed walls deemed suitable to surround the Southern border of Colorado. One meme displays an image-macro of used skis standing side-by-side with tall evergreen trees behind them, symbolizing Colorado’s reputation as a refuge for nature and snow sport enthusiasts. The caption says, “Donald—I’ve been working on this design for the Colorado wall, what do you think?” The second meme is an image-macro of a snow corridor on the Tateyama Kurobe Alpine route in Northern Japan. The walls of this snow corridor can reach up to 20 meters. In the image-macro, the snow walls tower over tourists and their charter bus, while the caption says, “First group of tourists to get an up-close look at the new #colororadoborderwall.” The final meme is an image-macro of an indoor rock-climbing wall with the caption, “Breaking News: Prototype of the #ColoradoBorderWall unveiled.” The second category of memes reconfigures the border between the United States and Mexico. Three memes redraw the border using a black Sharpie marker, referencing Trump’s weather-related gaffe with Hurricane Dorian. Explaining #SharpieGate is necessary because the meaning is remixed and appropriated to #ColoradoBorderWall. On August 29, 2019, the White House displayed an image of Hurricane Dorian’s path provided by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which did not include the state of Alabama in its path. However, Trump sent a series of tweets in early September saying, “In addition to Florida—South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama, will most likely be hit (much) harder than anticipated. Looking like one of the largest hurricanes ever. Already a category 5” (KnowYourMeme, 2019). Trump received a barrage of tweets ridiculing him for including Alabama. The National Weather Service even tweeted a correction saying that Hurricane Dorian would not impact the state of Alabama to alleviate residential fears. Trump unleashed a Twitter rant indicating his correctness about the hurricane’s trajectory and his victimization by “#fakenews.” On September 4, the official White House Twitter account tweeted the original photo but with a black circle drawn to extend the original trajectory of the hurricane to include Alabama. Trump was quickly called out for doctoring the weather map with a Sharpie by a news station, which added that falsifying a weather report is illegal. Shortly after these allegations, new variations of

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manipulated weather map memes circulated throughout social media ridiculing Trump, resulting in #SharpieGate. The #ColoradoBorderWall memes allude to #sharpiegate through appropriating images of a U.S. map manipulated by a Sharpie to justify Trump’s assertion that Colorado is a border state. Two of the memes display the same U.S. map, with a Sharpie drawn around the U.S.-Mexico border with the exception of New Mexico. On this map, “New” is crossed out leaving only “Mexico” visible. In one meme, Donald Trump holds up this version of the manipulated map on a giant posterboard, labeled U.S. Border Wall. Trump appears to be in mid-sentence, leading the audience to assume he is defending the placement of the Colorado Border Wall, as he did with the trajectory of Hurricane Dorian. The second meme simply shows an image of the manipulated map, excluding New Mexico, with the caption “Out of the news cycle for 24 hours, and wake up to discover Trump is building a wall with Colorado, and his audience applauded. Grandpa would have his keys taken away; he needs nuclear codes taken way.” The third edited Sharpie map draws the US-Mexico border to exclude not only New Mexico but also Arizona and half of Texas. The caption says, “The White House just released this map proving Colorado does border Mexico.” The final meme in this category is written primarily in Spanish and contains an English caption at the bottom of the image. In Spanish, at the top of the map, it says, “Let’s support Donald Trump: Yes, to the Border Wall.” Below the map is a caption in Spanish that says, “I will gladly send you the plans and don’t worry we Mexicans will pay for the work, when you get off the land to start building.” The map is appropriated from a pre-1848 U.S. map prior to the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and 1850 purchase of Western Texas. The map says, “El Muro De Donald Trump” (Donald Trump’s Wall) and reflects the U.S.-Mexican “border” prior to Mexico’s cessation of land upon losing the Mexican-American war. This map redraws the border to exclude California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, and parts of Colorado and Wyoming. The English caption at the bottom of the meme resembles multiple-choice responses on a geography or history exam. The question posed is, “What’s a #coloradoborderwall?” A.) A U.S. president revealing ignorance of U.S. geography? B.) A U.S. president jumbling the “Latino ones”? C.) Senility? D.) A restoration of Mexico’s borders pre-Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo? E.) All of the above? (Heanay, 2019) This meme explicitly exposes hegemonic ideologies underlying Trump’s gaffe within the historical context of U.S. expansion and immigration reform.

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A CRITICAL RHETORICAL ANALYSIS OF THE #COLORADOBORDERWALL MEMES The #ColoradoBorderWall memes require an audience to be knowledgeable about the rhetorical context of Trump’s geographical gaffe to generate humor and persuasion effectively. The intended audience for these memes is likely to be critical of Trump and/or his obsession with building a wall at the U.S.Mexican border, as memetic rhetorical strategies range from playful ridicule to questions of presidential legitimacy. The #ColoradoBorderWall memes establish their persuasive arguments by appropriating images from existing sources outside the rhetorical context and using parody and satire. The appropriated images of potential Colorado border wall prototypes and reconfigurations of the U.S.-Mexico border are remixed and repurposed within the rhetorical context of the memes to persuade audiences to laugh and possibly participate in creating and spreading their own #ColoradoBorderWall memes. Prototypes and Map Edits Memes focusing on prototypes for the Colorado border wall rely on cultural stereotypes to generate humor. Colorado, popular for its tourist attractions, boasts four national parks and diverse landscapes for outdoor enthusiasts. These memes capture the state’s reputation for being a snow skiing haven as well as a tourist destination for sightseeing and exploring nature. The #ColoradoBorderWall prototype memes all address an aspect of fun and leisure in the composition of the proposed Colorado border wall, which presents a stark contrast when juxtaposed to various constructions of the actual U.S.-Mexican border. These images remain largely absent in discourse. Learish (2022) describes the actual U.S.-Mexican border wall as a series of piecemeal barriers that vary in size, shape, and age. Sections of the “wall” include low fences, high barriers, dividers with steel slats and areas with checkpoints and pedestrian passages. Other parts of the border have no structure at all, demarcated instead by rivers and mountains.

Juxtaposing #ColoradoBorderWall with the U.S.-Mexican border wall exposes underlying racial and economic ideologies associated with unequal membership within the national polity. As a collective, this group of memes illustrates how Trump’s gaffe exposes “unconscious” or hegemonic assumptions about who belongs in the national imaginary. DeChaine (2009) explains that borders serve as ordering apparatuses that “perform both division and containment functions, differentiating the self from others, one culture from another, desirable elements from undesirable ones, and, often enough, ‘us’ from ‘them’ (p. 44). Geographically,

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and logically, Trump’s “border wall” should reside between New Mexico and Mexico and not between Colorado and New Mexico. However, Trump mentioned he is building a wall around Colorado, a state with a relatively high White population (67%) and a relatively low percentage of Hispanics (22%) for a southwestern state (U.S. Census Bureau, 2021). New Mexico, by contrast, has the highest percentage of Hispanics (46%) in the nation (World Population Review, 2023). Based on the rhetorical situation and Trump’s record for exhibiting racist and xenophobic immigration rhetoric (Kang & Yang, 2022), this gaffe reveals his thoughts and beliefs about racial belonging within the national imaginary. The #ColoradoBorderWall memes illustrate how race and class intersect when these memetic prototypes are juxtaposed to the actual U.S.-Mexican border wall. The former is comprised of leisure, attraction, and adventure, whereas the latter appears ominous and threatening. Additionally, memes referencing the map reconfigurations exemplify a race and class intersection as well. For example, Colorado has the seventh highest median household income in the nation ($85,000), whereas New Mexico is among the poorest states, ranking forty-seventh in the nation ($53,463; WiseVoter, 2023). Building a wall around Colorado, rather than New Mexico, emphasizes societal values and privileges associated with the White middle class. In this respect, Colorado resembles the nostalgic “MAGA” vision from Trump’s national imaginary that needs protection from outsiders threatening to contaminate “the body politic” (Roman, 2001). The meme appropriating a U.S. map prior to the Treaty of GuadalupeHidalgo (1848) playfully and explicitly illustrates racial contentions within the national imaginary. Referencing Mexico’s cessation of land during the U.S.-Mexican war reveals historical struggles over race and inclusion into the polity (Ngai, 2004). Ngai (2004) explains that as a social construct, race is always historically specific and contingent on a “confluence of economic, social, cultural, and political factors” (p. 7). While early national quota systems (1920) classified and segregated Europeans by nationality, their Whiteness defined them as more desirable than non-Whites. While European ethnic classifications were “uncoupled” from their racial identity, this was not the case for Asians and Mexicans (p. 7). Ngai (2004) argues, “The legalization of these ethnic groups’ national origin cast them as permanently foreign and unassimilable to the nation . . . These racial formations produced ‘alien citizens’ . . . with formal U.S. citizenship but who remained alien in the eyes of the nation” (p. 8). An allusion to the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo within the meme is historically relevant because the cessation of land following the MexicanAmerican War complicated conceptions of citizenship and nationality. Ngai (2004) explains, “Manifest Destiny touted the Anglo-Saxon, and during the

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Mexican-American War, expansionists wanted to take all of Mexico, but abandoned the idea because they did not want to bring a populous colored race into the nation” (p. 50). The Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo extended U.S. citizenship to inhabitants of the conquered territories who did not return to Mexico, which consequently necessitated them as being racialized as “White” (Ngai, 2004, p. 50). This allusion reveals that struggles over national belonging and citizenship cannot be disentangled from race. Early immigration quotas were designed around the notion that the American nation descended from Europe and therefore should resemble Europe and maintain a predominantly White populace (Ngai, 2004, p. 27). While cloaked in neoliberal discourses, these ideologies still operate insidiously within U.S. immigration policy. Humor as a Rhetorical Strategy Satire and parody are especially evident in the series of #ColoradoBorderWall memes. Martinez and Atouba (2021) define political satire as “a form of political communication that uses humor, irony, and/or parody to provide substantive criticism of political actors, political institutions, media, and the various absurdities of our sociopolitical systems” (p. 461). Parody, while also functioning as a form of mockery and ridicule, also uses a “burlesque” style of imitation to accomplish its criticisms (Kreuz & Roberts, 1993, p. 102). In addition to political criticism, parody assists in demystifying hegemonic ideological assumptions. Meme-making has the potential to demystify “conditions of domination” through visual rhetoric and humor (McKerrow, 1989). Because memes involve images and texts, their use of humor has the potential to expose contradictions within dominant hegemonic discourse through playing with meaning. Bakhtin regards humor’s “carnivalesque” space “as a possible alternative to the bourgeois public sphere, allowing for a different mode of ‘popular’ civic participation” (Kuipers, 2008, p. 377). The memescape provides content creators opportunities to engage with what Foucault calls “spaces of dissension” within ideological articulations. Duerringer (2016) describes them as “instabilities that, if stressed, can pull down the entire structure,” as well as being opportunities to “pry apart taken-for-granted associations and schemes that otherwise operate below the level of the said” (p. 2). Internet memes circumvent the exclusionary character of mass media, allowing more equal footing for political engagement. As Zidani argues, “Memes have been used across the world both to reinforce and disrupt power relations in the political and cultural landscape” (p. 2383). The #ColoradoBorderWall memes address these “spaces of dissension” through their creative satirical and parodic styles that mock Trump’s intelligence and mental fitness, racism, immigration policy, and presidential

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legitimacy. The map reconfiguration memes were more likely to directly mock Trump’s intelligence by questioning his knowledge of U.S. geography. One of the possible answers on the “El Muro De Donald Trump” quiz says, “A U.S. president revealing ignorance of U.S. geography?” indicating his lack of elementary-level knowledge. This same meme also gives another option of “Senility?” which questions Trump’s mental fitness for leadership and may also allude to agist implications for his leadership. One of the Sharpie memes explicitly engages with agist assumptions surrounding his mental fitness: “Trump is building a wall with Colorado, and his audience applauded. Grandpa would have his keys taken away; he needs nuclear codes taken away.” By comparing Trump to a grandfather, this meme suggests that Trump is too old for the presidency and needs to be relieved of important duties, especially his responsibility for the country’s nuclear arsenal. All the map reconfiguration memes implicitly address Trump’s racism through their reconstruction of the U.S.-Mexican border to exclude states with higher proportions of Hispanic populations. However, the “El Muro De Donald Trump” meme directly addresses race as a possible answer from the multiple-choice listing: “A U.S. president jumbling the ‘Latino ones’?” This meme directly addresses Trump’s verbal error and racial bias in constructing his national imaginary. This answer also reveals the inequality of citizenship and belonging based on racial attributes, as many Latinx living in New Mexico and Arizona are U.S. citizens. Another multiple-choice option in this meme that alludes to race is “restoration of Mexico’s borders pre-Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo?” This addresses the complicated colonial past between the United States and Mexico its relevance to race, xenophobia, national sovereignty, and the U.S.-Mexican border. As a collective, the #ColoradoBorderWall memes serve to delegitimate Trump’s presidency through mocking and ridiculing him personally, as well as his immigration policies focusing on the U.S.-Mexican border wall. In theories of legitimacy, Habermas believed that political actors, such as Trump, gain legitimacy through warranted actions in the public sphere (Ritzer, 2000). However, legitimacy is also negotiated and upended in the public sphere. The #ColoradoBorderWall memes’ satirical humor serves to delegitimate Trump’s political leadership in the public sphere and create distrust and uncertainty about his policies. As Davis, Glantz and Novak (2016) argue, “In some instances, the Internet can indeed act as the great equalizer” as memes become viral and influential, they are able to delegitimize and topple powerful corporations and political actors’ regimes (p. 80). This gives credence to memes being a form of political engagement capable of harnessing strategies of humor and rhetoric to make persuasive arguments.

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THE EMANCIPATING POSSIBILITIES OF MEMES AS POLITICAL DISCOURSE A critical rhetorical analysis of the #ColoradoBorderWall memes situates Trump’s gaffe within the context of his speech at the Shale Energy Conference as well as within an atmosphere of political change. Trump’s speech constituted a dominant discourse reflecting embedded ideologies indicative of institutional political change such as nativism and rightwing populism. As Stuckey (2017) mentions, during climates of institutional political change, people question belonging, identity, and privilege often through expressions of anger, fear, and hope. Nativist and populist ideologies and rhetoric reflect symbolic struggles over determining boundaries between ingroups and outgroups, as well as spawning a general distrust of political elites. Chavez (2008) explains: “Restrictions on immigration and citizenship have always been about how we imagine who we are as a people and who we wish to include as part of the nation, whether this is explicitly recognized or not” (p. 25). Conceptions of the inclusion within national imaginary are real in their consequences, impacting the lives of undocumented and legal immigrants as well as Latinx citizens. Analyzing #ColoradoBorderWall memes opens political and media rhetoric to symbolic interpretation, which has the capacity of moving ideological discourses “toward emancipation” (Makus, 1990, p. 496). Trump’s geographical gaffe, like a “Freudian slip” or parapraxis, functions as a verbal error that expresses “unconscious wishes, attitudes, or impulses” (American Psychological Association, n.d.). Trump’s gaffe functions as a verbal error exposing aspects of hegemonic ideologies related to race, class, and citizenship within the national sovereignty. Against the backdrop of the U.S.-Mexican border wall, Trump’s gaffe is a reminder of the performative nature of the border, as DeChaine observes, “whose primary function is to designate, produce, and/or regulate the space of difference” (p. 44). As a collective, this series of memes use rhetorical strategies and humor to playfully expose “spaces of dissension” and negotiate ideological contradictions of inclusion and exclusion into the national imaginary (Hall, 1980). This analysis demonstrates how memes expose and challenge dominant ideologies as a potent form of visual political rhetoric. Collectively, these memes use elements of visual rhetoric to persuade audiences that Trump lacks the basic education/knowledge and mental fitness to be a U.S. president while also criticizing his xenophobic and restrictive immigration policies. Circumvention of exclusionary mass media, instantaneous dissemination, and virality, coupled with the ability to legitimate and delegitimate political actors through persuasive humor and rhetorical strategies demonstrate the necessity for examining memetic political discourse. As our society continues

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to grapple with issues of identity, privilege, and belonging, examining political memes assists in emancipating hegemonic ideologies from their naturalized positions. As DeChaine (2009) explains, “Notwithstanding the nativism and xenophobia that have historically shaped and continue to shape popular attitudes toward undocumented migrants in the United States, the problem of immigration, it seems, lies not with the migrant, but with the border” (p. 44). The #ColoradoBorderWall memes provided fertile ground for examining the construction of meaning surrounding Trump’s geographical gaffe and its relevance to race, class, citizenship, and immigration policy as it pertains to the U.S.-Mexico border.

REFERENCES American Psychological Association. (n.d.). Parapraxis. In APA Dictionary of Psychology. https://dictionary​.apa​.org​/parapraxis. Amra & Elma. (2022). Meme statistics report for 2022. https://www​.amraandelma​ .com​/meme​-statistics/. Brown, H. (2022, September 28). The surprising power of internet memes. BBC Future. https://www​.bbc​.com​/future​/article​/20220928​-the​-surprising​-power​-of​ -internet​-memes. Burroughs, B. (2020). Fake mimetics: Political rhetoric and circulation in political campaigns. In M. Zinders & K. McLeod (Eds.), Fake News: Understanding Media and Misinformation in the Digital Age. MIT Press, 191–200. Carlson, B., & Frazer, R. (2017). Indigenous memes and the invention of a people. Social Media & Society, 3(4): 1–12. Chan, J.C. (2019). Colorado governor has perfect response after Trump says “We’re building a wall in Colorado.” The Wrap. https://www​.yahoo​.com​/entertainment​/ colorado​-governor​-perfect​-response​-trump​-010117151​.html. Chavez, L.R. (2008). The Latino Threat: Constructing Immigrants, Citizens, and the Nation (2nd ed). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Cisneros, J.D. (2011). (Re)Bordering the civic imaginary: Rhetoric, hybridity, and citizenship in La Gran Marcha. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 97(1): 26–49. D’Angelo, F.J. (2009). The rhetoric of intertextuality. Rhetoric Review, 29(1): 31–47. Davis, M. (1993). What’s so Funny? The Comic Conception of Culture and Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Davis, C.B., Glantz, M., & Novak, D.R. (2016). You can’t run your SUV on cute. Let’s go!: Internet memes as delegitimizing discourse. Environmental Communications, 10(1): 62–83. Davis, J.L., Love, T.P., & Killen, G. (2018). Seriously funny: The political work of humor on social media. New Media & Society, 20(10): 3898–3916. Dean, J. (2019). Sorted for memes and gifs: Visual media and everyday digital politics. Political Studies Review, 17(3): 255–266.

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DeChaine, R.D. (2009). Bordering the civic imaginary: Alienization, fence logic, and the minutemen civil defense corp. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 95(1): 43–65. De Genova, N.P. (2002). Migrant “Illegality” and deportability in everyday life. Annual Review of Anthropology, 31: 419–447. Derda, M., & Watts, H. [@MattDerdaMusic]. (2019, October, 24). [Tweet]. Twitter. https://twitter​.com​/search​?q=​%23c​olor​adob​orderwall​&src​=typed​_query. Duerringer, C.M. (2016). Who would Jesus bomb? The republican Jesus meme and the fracturing of ideology. Social Media & Society, 2(1): 1–12. Forbes. (2017, April 14). How politics ruined memes. https://www​.forbes​.com​/sites​/ priceonomics​/2017​/04​/14​/how​-politics​-ruined​-memes/​?sh​=4d7f75807f76. Hall, S. (1980). Encoding/decoding. In Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (Eds.), Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies, 1972–79. London: Hutchinson, pp. 128–38 (Encoding and Decoding in Television Discourse, 1973). Hansen, J.A. [@revdrjanet]. (2019, October, 24). [Tweet]. Twitter. https://twitter​.com​ /revdrjanet​/status​/1187316200617005056. Heaney, C. [@chrheaney]. (2019, October, 24). [Tweet]. Twitter. https://twitter​.com​ /search​?q=​%23c​olor​adob​orderwall​&src​=typed​_query. Holly. [@Msdesignerlady]. (2019, October, 24). [Tweet]. Twitter. Twitter​ .com​ / msdesignerlady​/sta​tus/ 1187256323936866304. Hristova, S. (2014). Visual memes as neutralizers of political dissent. TripleC, 12(1): 265–276. Huntington, H.E. (2016). Pepper spray cop and the American Dream: Using synecdoche and metaphor to unlock Internet memes’ visual political rhetoric. Communication Studies, 67(1): 77–93. Kang, Y., & Yang, K.C. (2022). Communicating racism and xenophobia in the era of Donald Trump: A computation framing analysis of the US-Mexico cross-border wall discourses. Howard Journal of Communication, 33(2): 140–159. Kjeldsen, J.E. (2018). Visual rhetorical argumentation. Semiotica, 220: 69–94. KnowYourMeme. (2019). Donald Trump’s Hurricane Dorian map Sharpie edit. https://knowyourmeme​.com​/memes​/donald​-trumps​-hurricane​-dorian​-map​-sharpie​ -edit/. Kreuz, R.J., & Roberts, R.M. (1993). On satire and parody: The importance of being ironic. Metaphor and Symbolic Activity, 8(2): 97–109. Learish, J. (2022). U.S.-Mexico border wall: What it really looks like. CBS News. https://www​.cbsnews​.com​/pictures​/u​-s​-mexico​-border​-wall​-what​-it​-really​-looks​ -like/. Lilleker, D.G., & Jackson, N.A. (2010). Towards a more participatory style of election campaigning: The impact of Web 2.0 on the UK 2010 general election. Policy & Internet, 2(3): 69–98. Liptak, K., & Kelly, C. (2019). Trump says US is building a wall in Colorado—A state that doesn’t border Mexico. https://www​.cnn​.com​/2019​/10​/23​/politics​/trump​ -us​-building​-wall​-colorado​/index​.html. Lynch, O.H. (2002). Humorous communication: Finding a place for humor in communication research. Communication Theory, 12(4): 423–445.

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Makhortykh, M., & Gonzalez Aguilar, J.M. (2020). Memory, politics and emotions: Internet memes and protests in Venezuela and Ukraine. Journal of Media and Cultural Studies, 34(3): 342–362. Makus, A. (1990). Stuart Hall’s theory of ideology: A frame for rhetorical criticism. Western Journal of Speech Communication, 54: 495–514. Martinez, A., & Atouba, Y. (2021). Political satire TV shows in the Trump’s Era: Examining their impact on Latinx viewers’ political knowledge, political engagement, and trust in institutions. Southern Communication Journal, 86(5): 460–471. McKerrow, R.E. (1989). Critical rhetoric: Theory and praxis. Communication monographs, 56: 91–111. McLoughlin, L., & Southern, R. (2021). By any memes necessary? Small political acts, incidental exposure and memes during the 2017 UK general election. The British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 23(1): 60–84. Mortensen, M., & Neumayer, C. (2021). The playful politics of memes. Communication & Society, 24(16): 2367–2377. Osincup, P. [@paulosincup]. (2019, October, 24). [Tweet]. Twitter. https://twitter​ .com​/paulosincup​/status​/1187398582426456065​/photo​/1. Ngai, M.M. (2004). Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Nissenbaum, A., & Shifman, L. (2017). Internet memes as contested cultural capital: the case of 4chan’s /b/ board. New Media & Society, 19(4): 483–501. Penney, J. (2020). ‘It’s so hard not to be funny in this situation’: Memes and humor in U.S. youth online political expression. Television & New Media, 21(8): 791–806. Peters, C., & Allan, S. (2021). Weaponizing memes: The journalistic mediation of visual politicization. Digital Journalism. https://doi​.org​/10​.1080​/21670811​.2021​ .1903958. Ritzer, G. (2000). Sociological Theory (5th ed.) New York: McGraw-Hill. Roman, E. (2001). Members and outsiders: An examination of the models of United States citizenship as well as questions concerning European Union citizenship. University of Miami International and Comparative Law Review, 81. Romero, M. (2008). Crossing the immigration and race border: A critical race theory approach to immigration studies. Contemporary Justice Review, 11(1): 23–37. RootsWings&ThingsTravel. [@RootsWingsBlog]. (2019, October, 24). [Tweet]. Twitter. https://twitter​.com​/RootsWingsBlog​/status​/1187441579834904576​/photo​ /1. Ross, A.S., & Rivers, D.J. (2017). Digital cultures of political participation: Internet memes and the discursive delegitimization of the 2016 U.S. presidential candidates. Discourse, Context, and Media, 16: 1–11. Schreckinger, B. (2017). World war meme. Politico Magazine, March/April. https:// www​.politico​.com​/magazine​/story​/2017​/03​/memes- 4chan​-trum​p-sup​porte​rs-tr​ olls-​inter​net-2​14856​/. Shifman, L. (2013a). Memes in a digital world: Reconciling with a conceptual troublemaker. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 18: 362–377. Shifman, L. (2013b). Memes in a Digital Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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Sobande, F. (2019). Memes, digital remix culture and (re)mediating British politics and public life. IPPR Progressive Review, 26(2): 151–160. Stuckey, M.E. (2017). American elections and the rhetoric of political change: Hyperbole, anger, and hope in U.S. politics. Rhetoric & Public Affairs, 20(4): 667–694. Tama-Rutigliano, K. (2018, August 10). Memes a digital marketing tool for every industry. Forbes. https://www​.forbes​.com​/sites​/for​besc​ommu​nica​tion​ scouncil ​ / 2018 ​ / 08 ​ / 10 ​ / memes ​ - a ​ - digital ​ - marketing​ - tool​ - for​ - every​ - industry/​ ? sh​ =7cb4723d2664. Terrill, R.E. (2017). The post-racial and post-ethical discourse of Donald J. Trump. Rhetoric & Public Affairs, 20(3): 493–510. Trumplieoftheday. [@Trumplieofthed1]. (2019, October, 25). [Tweet]. Twitter. https://twitter​.com​/Trumplieofthed1​/status​/1187754559311097858​/photo​/1. U.S. Census Bureau (2021). Quick Facts, Colorado. https://www​.census​.gov​/quickfacts​/CO. Weska, N.B. (2012). Cartoons can talk? Visual analysis of cartoons on the 2007/2008 post-election violence in Kenya: A visual argumentation approach. Discourse & Communication, 6(2): 223–238. WiseVoter. (2023). Median household incomes by state 2023. https://wisevoter​.com​/ state​-rankings​/median​-household​-income​-by​-state/. Witkin, S.L. (1999). Taking humor seriously. Social Work, 44(2): 101–104. World Population Review. (2023). New Mexico population 2023. https://wor​ldpo​ pula​tion​review​.com​/states​/new​-mexico​-population. YPulse. (2019, March 5). 3 Stats that show what memes mean to Gen Z & Millennials. https://www​.ypulse​.com​/article​/2019​/03​/05​/3​-stats​-that​-show​-what​-memes​ -mean​-to​-gen​-z​-millennials/. Zidani, S. (2021). Messy on the inside: internet memes as mapping tools of everyday life. Information, Communication, and Society, 24(16): 2378–2402.

Chapter 3

Reservation Dogs, Visual Sovereignty, Performative Indigeneity, and the Cultural Imperative of Native American-Produced Media Haley Rains (Muscogee Creek)

From its inception, the American film and entertainment industry has exploited America’s fascination with American Indians. One of the first films ever made, Buffalo Dance (1894), directed by William K. L. Dickson, features Native American dancers. The 16-second black and white film features traditional Sioux dancers Hair Coat, Parts His Hair and Last Horse. The film depicts the three men dancing in a circle while two other men pound drums directly behind them. It is significant that this earliest of films set in motion a pattern that many subsequent filmmakers and photographers would repeat: the American Indian as a subject of entertainment for White audiences. The list of films and television series featuring Native American people made by non-Native filmmakers is long (spanning two centuries), and these depictions have evolved according to the social, economic, and political needs of American society. One of the most commercially and critically successful films of the twentieth century featuring Native American people is Dances with Wolves (1990). The film is, aesthetically speaking, a cinematic masterpiece, possessing a compelling storyline, rich characters, and breathtaking cinematography. Kevin Costner, the star and director of the film, attempts to challenge the stereotypical image of the Plains Indian “savage” by crafting a more complex, multidimensional depiction of the Sioux people. Dances with Wolves, however, is not without its faults—and critics. Like many other works featuring Native American people, Costner’s Dunbar is the White protagonist, clearly positioned as the “White Savior” upon whom Natives depend for their rescue and survival, a practice, Liza Black (Cherokee) argues, is all too familiar to Native people. Black observes, “Films with 45

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Native characters place whites and white consciousness at the center of the narrative and . . . they construct and see Indians from the perspective of the white characters” (2020, p. 36). In Costner’s film, the Lakota adopt Dunbar into their community, thus helping him survive against the harsh conditions on the American plains. Still, it is Dunbar who, with his new wife (who is also White), must leave the Lakota community to protect it from the U.S. Army. In other words, while Costner tries to invert the White savior motif, ultimately, he recreates it. Although Dances with Wolves is guilty of reinscribing the White savior narrative, it was arguably one of the first films of its kind, a film that attempted to deconstruct stereotypes and portray Native American people in a more nuanced light, promoting a sense of understanding and empathy toward Native people—an effort few of its Hollywood predecessors ever attempted. With the emergence of streaming platforms like Hulu and Netflix in the twenty-first century, a demand for diverse content, notably television series, has arisen; as a result, Native American-produced series have been making a splash on popular networks. Recent television series featuring Native American creators, writers, actors, and storylines include Basketball or Nothing (2019), Rutherford Falls (2021), and Dark Winds (2022). One of the most celebrated series is Reservation Dogs, an FX comedy and drama series created by Sterlin Harjo (Muscogee Creek and Seminole) and Taika Waititi. The series premiered in August 2021 on FX on Hulu and was picked up for a third season in 2023. The series follows the lives of four Native American teenagers as they navigate reservation life in contemporary Oklahoma. This chapter aims to examine Reservation Dogs as an example of Indigenous media production and how it succeeds in promoting visual sovereignty—and, in a few ways, misses the mark.

NATIVE AMERICANS AND MEDIA IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY In the twenty-first century, there has been a slight shift from the usual White savior motif; recent films, like Hostiles (2017), directed by Scott Cooper, and Wind River (2017), directed by Taylor Sheridan, still place the White experience in the center of the film but have attempted to explore the Native American perspective from a position of understanding and even camaraderie. The plot of Sheridan’s Wind River (2017) consists of the death and subsequent investigation into the murder of a Native American woman on the Wind River reservation in Wyoming. The film features the White female FBI agent Jane Banner (Elizabeth Olson) and the White male hunter/

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tracker Cory Lambert (Jeremy Renner). For Cory Lambert, this film is about redemption. His daughter, half-White and half-Native American, was also murdered on the reservation. So, the search for the murdered Indigenous woman’s killers is a search for a resolution to Lambert’s conflict, losing his daughter. The White protagonists, Lambert and Banner, come to the rescue of the grief-stricken Indian father (Gil Birmingham—Comanche) and tribal police officers (Graham Greene—Oneida) to find the killers and avenge the women’s deaths. The killers were, in fact, deranged White men who savagely (so to speak) raped and caused the death of the Indigenous woman; so, at least, it was not the usual “savage/noble savage” Hollywood motif. One should give Sheridan (who also wrote the film) credit for that. The film is heart-wrenching and captivating; it is just disappointing that, yet again, Native American people are incidental—a background—to the White protagonists’ heroism and justice. Hostiles is similar to Wind River in that the Native Americans in the film exist merely as plot drivers, peripheral characters—a just cause for the White hero. However, Hostiles does a good job of trying to find a middle ground. Both the main characters, Captain Joseph Blocker (Christian Bale) and Rosalee Quaid (Rosamund Pike), identify with the Native American family (Wes Studi—Cherokee and Adam Beach—Saulteaux) with whom they are traveling to Montana inasmuch they are all products of their time. Both Chief Yellow Hawk (Studi) (a notoriously fierce war chief) and Blocker (a decorated army captain) fight to protect their families and their communities, which require the brutalizing of their enemies in battle. Once it becomes apparent that they all must work together to defend against the Comanche (the Indian “savages” also commonly referred to as “the bad Indians”), Blocker, Quaid, and Yellow Hawk come to understand each other, and Blocker finally recognizes the humanity in his Native counterpart (and former enemy). Hostiles, like Wind River and Dances with Wolves before that, is an exceptionally well-made film with first-rate production values, stunning cinematography, and an outstanding cast; however, it still falls short. The Indigenous perspective throughout the film is virtually absent, the protagonist is White, and the blood-thirsty savage theme persists. According to Liza Black, portrayals of Native American people in Westerns have been particularly egregious. The Western genre, argues Black, “reifies white supremacy and Indigenous erasure” and “celebrate[s] the defeat of Native America and present[s] white settlers as both innocent and brave” (Black, 2020, p. 2). These problematic portrayals of Native American people exemplify the privileging of Euro-American perspectives and histories to the exclusion of Native American perspectives, which has structural (epistemological) implications for Indigenous people. According to Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz and

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Dina Gilio-Whitaker (Colville Confederated Tribes), non-Native Americans’ superficial understanding of Native American people and culture keeps them “in a state of ignorance, forever misinformed and condemned to repeat the mistakes of history, silently eroding their own humanity when they fail to recognize their roles in—or, more specifically, the ways they benefit from— the ongoing injustice of a colonial system” (Dunbar-Ortiz & Gilio-Whitaker, 2016, p. 4). Furthermore, misrepresentations of Native American people by non-Native American filmmakers tend to replicate the dominant culture’s values and objectives, and these misrepresentations have severely diminished Native American peoples’ ability to control their own narratives. Tragically, this control over Indigenous narratives often manifests in structural inequality and violence toward Native American people, such as the loss of Indigenous political autonomy and limits on tribal sovereignty. As Dunbar-Ortiz and Gilio-Whitaker observe, “Structural violence against native people often entails a staggering assortment of legislation, court cases, executive decisions, and municipal and state actions that directly affect their lives” (2016, p. 4). In other words, structural inequality and violence are often the direct outcomes of a lack of accurate representation. What emerges out of these characterizations is also a gross misunderstanding of the experiences of actual Native American people and cultures. In reality, Native American cultures—past and present—prioritize family; believe in the stewardship of the land and the protection of its natural resources; are incredibly adaptive to their surroundings; have a strong sense of community; are often spiritual; believe in restorative justice and democracy; and value (and often defer to) women. Furthermore, prior to European colonization, Native Americans formed highly sophisticated, complex societies with thriving economies and expansive trade routes throughout the Americas. These Indigenous attributes contradict the ideology of rugged individualism embodied in Americans’ narratives about themselves and their history, which are used socially and politically to support Western notions of American exceptionalism and progress. Consequently, American Indians have been relegated to background actors—antagonists—in a dramatized account of American history. Historically, all of the noble and remarkable attributes of pre- and postcontact Indigenous civilizations were (and are) excluded from popular culture depictions of Native American people because none of these characteristics make for good villains. To make convincing villains, Native American characters must be one-dimensional and lack any admirable and redeeming traits; they must appear ferocious and inhuman. Simply put, unflattering depictions of Native American people make them easier for audiences to dislike; desirable, endearing characteristics are reserved for White protagonists.

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VISUAL SOVEREIGNTY AND THE CULTURAL IMPERATIVE OF NATIVE AMERICAN-PRODUCED MEDIA Contemporary Native American filmmakers are pushing back against inaccurate, oversimplified depictions of American Indians by exercising what Michelle Raheja (Seneca) refers to as their “visual sovereignty.” According to Raheja, visual sovereignty is “a strategy by which Indigenous artists are able to challenge colonial representations of Native peoples and to imagine new worlds that aid in political struggles for self-determination” (Raheja, as cited in Teves et al., 2015). Visual media is a tool through which Native American people can contest historical misrepresentations of their identities, histories, and cultures, thus expanding the possibilities for dialog, understanding, and even the celebration of Indigenous knowledge and perspectives. Jacquelyn Kilpatrick (Choctaw and Cherokee) states this is only possible if audiences can hear Native American voices: “For a dialogue to truly exist, the represented subject must be able to talk back” (1999, xvi). According to Raheja, by appropriating the Western practice of filmmaking, Native American filmmakers “can deploy individual and community assertions of what sovereignty and self-representation mean and, through new media technologies, frame more imaginative renderings of Native American intellectual and cultural paradigms” (2013). With respect to Michelle Raheja, I offer my own definition of the term. Native American Tribal Nations are and have always been inherently sovereign entities; their sovereignty is not granted to them by any external entity. Therefore, I define visual sovereignty as the inherent power to govern oneself and control one’s narrative (and the narrative of one’s people) via self-representation in art, film, photography, performance, and other forms of visual media. There are structural, social, environmental, and political benefits associated with visual sovereignty. Indigenous media makers and artists support causes to protect Indigenous lands and resources, aid in cultivating Indigenous self-determination, and foster autonomy and self-efficacy within Native American communities by asserting their cultural imperatives through film, art, and other forms of visual media. Native American filmmakers also provide valuable insights into the life of modern American Indian people, benefitting Native and non-Natives alike. Not only do today’s Indigenous filmmakers showcase the multitude of talents that American Indians possess (particularly their talent for storytelling), but they also serve as interpreters of the current condition of their people. In their films, Native American filmmakers grapple with issues of poverty, alcoholism, addiction, suicide, unemployment, and dysfunctional family dynamics while simultaneously exploring and celebrating Native American

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resistance, humor, love, culture, history, and gratitude to ancestors and language. A prime example of visual sovereignty is the film Smoke Signals (1998), directed by Chris Eyre (Cheyenne and Arapaho) and written by Sherman Alexie (Spokane-Coeur d’Alene). The characters in Eyre’s film are complex and have been developed to a greater extent than stereotypical Hollywood Indian characters. Throughout the film, Smoke Signals shows audiences the funny, awkward, and challenging moments that many Native American people experience, particularly when they venture off the reservation. The film was groundbreaking at the time of its release because it was one of the first films to include a Native American director, writer, and cast. Smoke Signals allowed non-Native audiences to see a more multifaceted—more human—portrayal of Native American people while also allowing Native American audiences to identify with the complicated, layered characters they see on screen—a privilege, historically, they have been denied. As Amanda J. Cobb (Chickasaw) observes, “For too long Hollywood filmmakers have created and disseminated stereotypical and frequently racist images of American Indians. Because American Indian people have had extremely limited access to Hollywood as writers, producers or directors, those distorted images have gone largely unchecked” (2003, p. 206). Smoke Signals was able to reach global audiences and captivate them with its humorous and charming story. The film also provided insight into the Native American experience in contemporary American society and dismantled misconceptions about American Indian people in popular culture. According to Cobb, the film “challenge[s] popular culture by creating popular culture, using the very medium that has arguably threatened Native American sovereignty the most—the Hollywood film” (2003, pp. 207–08). The creators of Smoke Signals took something traditionally European (cinema) and turned it into something with which Native American individuals and communities can identify and from which they can benefit. By, as Raheja observes, “engaging and deconstructing whitegenerated representations of Indigenous people” (2010, pp. 1906–08), Eyre brought the Indigenous perspective to mainstream society and created a space for the Native voice.

VISUAL SOVEREIGNTY AND RESERVATION DOGS Reservation Dogs has been widely well-received by audiences, winning two Independent Spirit Awards, a Peabody Award, and garnering a Golden Globe nomination. Devery Jacobs (Mohawk), one of the show’s stars, also won a 2021 Gotham Award Nomination for Outstanding Performance in a New Series. Writing for NPR, John Powers called Reservation Dogs “one of the

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best and most original shows on TV” (2022). Like Smoke Signals, the show’s cast, creator, directors, and writers are all Indigenous. Over two seasons, the show explores various Indigenous topics and themes, including humor, tragedy, unresolved grief, survival, popular culture, stereotypes, and more. The show also gives audiences an intimate view into the lives of contemporary Native American youth. Audiences see how they decorate their rooms with Native American empowerment imagery, like posters of the 1969 Occupation of Alcatraz and stickers that read “Indians discovered Columbus.” Audiences also see what their relationships with their families are like and learn that they frequently use slang words with Indigenous roots like skoden (let’s go then) and stoodis (let’s do this) and overuse the phrase “shit ass” (a running gag throughout both seasons). Now that Native Americans are behind the lens and in the writers’ room, audiences can see twenty-firstcentury Indigenous peoples’ perspectives and experiences in a way they have not seen before. Audiences finally get a glimpse into these characters’ intimate worlds. Perhaps, one of the most favorable outcomes of the show is that it has created the opportunity for Native American people to see themselves on television in a way that is authentic and consistent with their contemporary experiences. David Treuer (Ojibwe) wrote in The Atlantic, “I realized that this was a show like I’d never seen before: a show that was about me and my life, that was somehow made for me. And by me, I mean us. And by us, I mean Indians” (2022). The show also serves as a vehicle through which its Indigenous creators creatively and humorously critique non-Native American society. Audiences witness the Native American characters’ navigation, rejection, and distrust of White people and Western culture. Characters frequently make comments that distinguish themselves from White people; for example, in season 2, episode 5, “Wide Net,” Bev (played by Jana Schmieding—Cheyenne River Lakota) tells Rita (Sarah Podemski—Anishinaabe/ Ashkenazi), “White people go to Cancun, we go to IHS conferences. It’s our way.” In other words, for Native Americans, an Indian Health Services (IHS) conference is the equivalent of a vacation to Mexico. Reservation Dogs also embraces voices from other historically disenfranchised communities. The show frequently borrows from Black culture. The characters don hip-hop-inspired clothing, including Wu-Tang Clan and Death Row Records t-shirts. Season 1, episode 4, “What About Your Dad” (the title being a nod to the film Smoke Signals), opens with a hip-hop music video titled “Greasy Frybread.” The music video features Punkin Lusty (played by Sten Joddi—Mvskoke), a Native American rapper decked out in chains and a gold grill on his teeth rapping about frybread—a staple food on many reservations. In an interview with Terry Gross at NPR, Harjo spoke about the influence of rap music in his life and how Native American youth often

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identify with hip-hop culture: “It helped us in our own identity and in our own struggle” (Gross, 2022). Reservation Dogs has also afforded Native American actors and creatives a space in which they are free to be themselves. The show’s stars do not need to conform to outdated stereotypes like the stoic, mythical savage, or vanishing Indians they have historically played in American cinema. Of Reservation Dogs, Harjo observes, “We’re just being Native” (Treuer, 2022). While Reservation Dogs celebrates Native American people and culture, it does not pull punches when parodying and critiquing Native American individuals and communities. In season 2, episode 6, “Decolonativization,” directed by Tazbah Chavez (Bishop Paiute) and written by Erica Tremblay (Seneca–Cayuga), Reservation Dogs takes aim at Native American social media influencers. The main characters attend a fictional community symposium called the Native American Reclamation and Decolonization Symposium (NARDS). Rita, one of the event’s organizers, incentivizes attendees with a $15 gift card to Sonic Drive-In for participating in the symposium. The symposium facilitators are Augusto Firekeeper (played by Elisha Pratt) and MissM8tri@rch (played by Amber Midthunder—Fort Peck Sioux). MissM8tri@rch begins the event by introducing herself in her native language—a language no one in the room appears to understand, judging by the exchange of confused glances between the main characters. She introduces herself as “a PhD student at Dartmouth, an auntie, a beader, a sister, and a friend.” She then proceeds to deliver a land acknowledgment, which is a statement that speakers and event coordinators will often read at the beginning of an event to honor the Indigenous peoples who originally inhabited and stewarded the territory where the event occurs. Land acknowledgments have become a common practice within universities, too. Many universities also now include land acknowledgments on their websites. MissM8tri@rch acknowledges the Caddo, Osage, and Muscogee in her statement, but she doesn’t stop there. She says, “Before them were our Neanderthal relatives” and “before that, even, the Dinosaur Nation—Dinosaur Oyate.” She goes on, “Before that, the Star People. Also, our reptilian relatives, above and below Earth.” MissM8tri@rch cannot read the room and therefore fails to realize the participants meet her absurd statements with skepticism—particularly her assertion that Neanderthals lived in what is today Oklahoma (there is no evidence that Neanderthals ever lived in North America). Tremblay and Chavez are commenting on two issues: (1) land acknowledgments and the paradox of originality and (2) land acknowledgments as a performative act. First, all tribes had predecessors. Every people is preceded by another people; therefore, land acknowledgments likely exclude names of other cultures that once inhabited a given territory. This fact is especially

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true considering most regions in North America were inhabited by several tribes throughout history. Take, for example, the Black Hills of South Dakota. Today, most people generally refer to this land as Očhéthi Šakówiŋ territory (which encompasses all of the Sioux Nation). The Black Hills are considered sacred to the Lakota (one band of the Western division of the Sioux Nation), and in the eighteenth century, they claimed the territory; however, throughout history, several tribes occupied the area, including the Arikara, Cheyenne, Crow, Kiowa, and Pawnee. So, this moment in the show raises the question: How far back in history must one go when delivering a land acknowledgment, and who is the definitive original inhabitant of a given territory? Moreover, who decides? The second issue is the sometimes self-indulgent nature of land acknowledgments. Land acknowledgments, while often well-intentioned, may appear performative and reflect the speaker’s desire to signal their own virtue, enlightenment, and Indianness to the audience. MissM8tri@rch, donning a colorful ribbon skirt (a popular clothing item in contemporary Native American communities), a stylish scarf wrapped around her head, and large, extravagant beaded earrings, stands in contrast to the main characters’ causal attire, which includes baseball caps and t-shirts. One might interpret her wardrobe as an attempt to enhance (and sell) her self-perception of authentic indigeneity. When it is his turn to introduce himself, Firekeeper (in what appears to be an affected Native American accent) says into the microphone, “Before I say anything, I want to say some things.” He proceeds to share that he is an actor, model, poet, and hatmaker. He also shares that he is a “young elder” who carries “knowledge beyond [his] years and experience,” to which Willie Jack (Paulina Alexis—Nakota Sioux) reacts with a painful cringe. This interaction suggests that Firekeeper, in a case of classic irony, is unaware of how his vanity and lack of modesty are not sitting well with his Indigenous audience. Later in the episode, as a part of a community-building exercise, the influencers instruct the participants to journal a happy moment from their lives. When MissM8tri@rch asks Jackie (Elva Guerra) to share her journal entry, she refuses, saying it is because she is among her enemies (she was an antagonist in season 1). MissM8tri@rch responds sternly, “That is a colonized way of thinking, sister.” She goes on, “We never had enemies amongst our own back in the day. We could fight, yes, but . . . mostly we just made love, ate berries. Sometimes the deer would even eat out of our palms. It was beautiful.” Through this interaction, Tremblay and Chavez seem to suggest that influencers like MissM8tri@rch idealize precontact Indigenous people and experiences and, consequently, absolve Native people of basic human emotions and reactions. In essence, this idealization both robs historical Indians of their

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personhood and fails to consider the complexities of contemporary Native American relationships by implying that to have enemies is to be colonized; to live in perpetual utopic bliss is to be traditionally Indigenous. In reality, the main characters are trying to work through immediate issues within their lives, including conflicts with each other. For any society, there is a need for some conflict resolution, but for the show’s main characters, clearly, this symposium is not it. The influencers’ platitudes and essentialisms are not helpful, and the main characters’ issues persist. Later in the episode, the main characters sit down to share a meal and converse with the influencers. Firekeeper comments to Bone Thug Dog (played by Jude Barnett—Seminvle/Ogahpah) about his hair. He says, “It makes my spirit happy seeing that I can inspire young Natives such as yourself to grow their hair out.” Bone Thug Dog responds, “I just met you today.” This clever exchange not only displays the witty humor that Native people often possess but also suggests that influencers like Firekeeper believe they exert influence over other Native American people when they actually do not. Furthermore, Firekeeper holds himself up as a role model and standard for Indianness, implying that all Indians should act like him—a belief quickly dispelled by Bone Thug Dog in this exchange. At another table, Willie Jack asks MissM8tri@rch where she is from. She responds, “I’m from the Lakota Oyate in Pine Ridge.” Willie Jack asks, “What’s it like there?” MissM8tri@rch replies, “Well, actually, I am from the Bay Area.” She says, “My body grew up in the Bay Area, but my spirit lives with my ancestors.” One can infer from this exchange that the influencers’ new-age Indian consciousness has no direct connection to the reservation experience. Furthermore, the influencers’ rhetoric comes across as inauthentic and artificial, even though they portray themselves as “authentically Indigenous.” Perhaps what Tremblay and Chavez are suggesting is that, in reality, the main characters who live on the reservation are living a truly authentic experience; moreover, they feel a sense of superiority over the influencers whose platitudes about Indianness do not resonate in the real world or apply to the lives of the young Indigenous characters who reside on the reservation. At the end of the symposium, MissM8tri@rch says to the audience, “Just being here today is an act of decolonization.” Cheese (Lane Factor—CreekSeminole and Caddo) replies, “Um, what exactly do you mean when you say ‘decolonization’?” MissM8tri@rch replies, “Well, decolonization is the undoing of colonialism.” Cheese replies, “Well, I know the definition, um, but I was asking, uh, how are the things we did today supposed to do anything?” implying that although the symposium activities were supposed to bring awareness to the “true Indian experience,” there was nothing particularly Indigenous about them. The activities were team-building exercises that one could find at any workplace meeting or workshop. Touchéd, MissM8tri@rch

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responds, “Well, uh, I like to think” but is interrupted by Firekeeper. “Allow me to speak for you, sister” (a problematic move in and of itself). “We here as Indigenous people are braiding together the hairs of our ancestral ways. That is decolonization.” Bear Smallhill (D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai—Oji-Cree) responds, “Yeah, that doesn’t make any sense.” Although Firekeeper invokes a metaphor without adding any real meaning (his response is essentially a tautology), this exchange raises an important question: What does decolonization mean? Does simply labeling something “decolonized” make it decolonial, regardless of its practical outcome? In this instance, the main characters are young people working through internal conflicts and navigating interpersonal relationships. What can a sense of indigeneity and decolonization contribute to their challenges? It is possible, of course, that it could provide spiritual and personal guidance, but that is unlikely to occur when the messengers are perceived with such skepticism. Firekeeper closes with a performance that involves shaking a rattler and repeating the words “We are still here,” to which Willie Jack says under her breath, “I’m about to not be here” before getting up from her seat and leaving. Firekeeper and MissM8tri@rch end the symposium by sharing their social media handles and encouraging audience members to follow them, suggesting that the influencers are primarily concerned with self-promotion. Perhaps, Tremblay and Chavez are trying to tell us these kinds of presentations do more harm than good or, at the very least, do not produce their intended effect. The symposium participants were unpersuaded by the influencers’ displays of self-aggrandizement and were unwilling to oblige the influencers’ need for an audience to confirm their constructed identities. Perhaps, the episode’s creators want to displace the monolithic idea of Indianness advanced by the influencers and instead suggest there are multiple manifestations of indigeneity; Native identity is not reducible to one look or one way of speaking. Ironically, even the contemporary reservation experience, as depicted in this series, does not singularly—and necessarily— embody the full range of Indigenous identity and experience. The episode also raises some essential questions: What does express or confer Native identity, if not the performances by the influencers? Are some traditional values preferable to the empty metaphors and platitudes Firekeeper and MissM8tri@rch invoked? Could they have communicated their messages in a more substantive, compelling way? To be sure, by invoking Indigenous humor in the way that Tremblay and Chavez have so cleverly done, they are making an important contribution to the critical dialog about what it means to be Native in contemporary society. While Reservation Dogs has been overwhelmingly well-received by Native and non-Native audiences alike, some critics argue that it reinscribes stereotypes about Indians by perpetuating the misconception that all Native

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American people live on reservations, utilize free Indian health clinics, and eat frybread, for example. While this is almost certainly not the creators’ intent, it is worth mentioning that recent Native American–produced films and television shows are set almost exclusively on Native American reservations. Although demonstrably more authentic than depictions of Native Americans by non-Natives, these works often fail to account for the diversity of Native American experiences. Only 22% of the 5.2 million Native Americans in the United States live on tribal and trust lands. In other words, the overwhelming majority of Native American people in the United States do not live on reservations. Of course, the reservation experience is one of many valid Native experiences, but it is not the only one. There is a continuum of Native American identities and experiences that filmmakers have yet to portray in films and series depicting Native American people and culture. Indigenous filmmakers have a great responsibility; real-world consequences exist for the media they create. As media-makers, they either add nuance and depth to crucial conversations about Indigenous people or reinforce negative images that further marginalize Indigenous communities. In other words, Indigenous visual sovereignty extends beyond simply self-representation; it has an extraordinary power to amplify Indigenous voices in a way that empowers them—socially, politically, economically, or otherwise. The Indigenous-produced film Blood Quantum (2019), written and directed by the late First Nations filmmaker Jeff Barnaby (Mi’kmaq), is a fascinating reconceptualization of the reservation motif. The film is set on a First Nations reserve in Canada. It follows the story of a group of First Nations people trying to survive a plague that has turned everyone into violent, homicidal zombies. Barnaby’s Indigenous characters are immune from the zombie-creating disease and already know how to survive apocalyptic pandemics brought on by outsiders (i.e., European settlers). At one point in the film, James (Devery Jacobs) tells a non-Indigenous man who has come to her reserve for protection from the zombies, “Don’t forget . . . ain’t nobody immune here but us, so feel safe here.” In his film, Barnaby created a postapocalyptic world in which only Indigenous people know how to survive. He has, quite brilliantly, reconceptualized Indigenous peoples’ violent history of European colonization and turned it into something that empowers them. Instead of recreating the motif that Indigenous people are impoverished, live on reservations, eat government food, and rely on government services, he has reclaimed the reservation/ reserve as a place of Indigenous resilience, autonomy, and self-determination. Barnaby has made Indigenous people the heroes of their own stories, which is a testament to the vital importance of Indigenous and Native American self-representation in film and media. Barnaby has rejected the White savior

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motif, reimagined the reservation, and illuminated the power, resilience, and wisdom of ancestral (and contemporary) Indigenous people. Visual sovereignty also presents the potential for undesirable effects, such as non-Native Americans continuing to exert social control over Native American people. In Reservation Dogs, William “Spirit” Knifeman (played by Dallas Goldtooth—Mdewakanton Dakota and Dińe) is a Lakota warrior spirit who died in the battle of Little Big Horn. He frequently visits one of the main characters, Bear Smallhill (D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai), and offers ancestral guidance and wisdom, albeit unsolicited and often questionable. Knifeman, adorning Plains Indian regalia, frequently appears on horseback and can be heard war-hooping and behaving in stereotypical ways. Harjo states that he included this character as an entry point for White audiences to engage with the show: “That character is so important because I think it’s what allows white people into the world . . . What they’re used to is that image. We give them what they want and then we flip it right after” (Treuer, 2022). Nevertheless, including this character in the series raises important questions: First, why pander to White audiences? Considering the show’s critical success, audiences are clearly captivated by its rich, complex characters; so, why include a Northern Plains Indian character to serve as Smallhill’s spirit guide—especially since the show’s main characters are members of an Oklahoma tribe? Does the show really need this character, especially since Harjo states his purpose is to entice White viewers? Invoking a stereotype as a strategy to engage non-Native viewers—as a means to ultimately present a more authentic view of Indigenous people—strikes me as a concession fraught with potential problems for an Indigenous artist. Perhaps, the inclusion of this character in the series suggests Native American filmmakers may feel obligated to embrace the Plains Indian stereotype because they know that non-Native Americans consider Plains Indians to be “authentically Indian.” PERFORMING INDIGENEITY Performance is a crucial tool Indigenous people use to assert their right to self-definition. Performative practices are also instrumental in the preservation of Indigenous cultures. Furthermore, they serve as vehicles by which ethnic differences and critiques of national belonging are navigated and negotiated within Indigenous communities. While performance practices are undoubtedly essential to creating and perpetuating cultural identities, they can also be used as mechanisms for producing and reproducing stereotypes. The Plains Indian stereotype appears frequently in Native-produced works. Some people have criticized the film Smoke Signals for stereotypically portraying Native Americans. In one scene, the main character, Victor Joseph

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(Adam Beach—Saulteaux), tells his travel companion, Thomas Builds-TheFire (Evan Adams—Coast Salish) that he needs to stop smiling so much because Indians are not supposed to smile; they are supposed to be stoic, like warriors that “just came back from killing a buffalo” (a Plains Indian stereotype). Thomas responds by telling Victor that their people (the SpokaneCoeur d’Alene) did not hunt buffalo and that they were fishermen. This scene suggests that Indigenous people may feel obligated to present themselves, through their behavior, appearance, or otherwise, in ways that make them easily identifiable as “Indigenous” to non-Natives; failure to do so results in them not being seen as “real” Indigenous people. As Stephanie “ “Lani” Teves (Kānaka Maoli) observes, “Indigenous peoples and other communities of color are accused of betraying their heritage when they step into arenas that were not intended for them or when they act in ways that somehow disrupt the outdated, so-called real or traditional modes of how they are supposed to act” (2018, p. 9). Although Native filmmakers attempt to reject colonial characterizations of Native American people through these characters, clearly, they still feel pressure to include characters that perform, appear, and behave in ways that are stereotypically Native—a decision that has pernicious effects. According to Teves, “Native people ‘playing Indian’ might seek to alter stereotypes, but such performances often work to reaffirm stereotypes and expectations of what indigeneity ‘ought’ to look like for stubborn non-Native audiences (be they in the classroom or the courtroom or at the beachside bar) who are profoundly attached to the fantasy of the premodern Native” (2018, p. 6). Harjo is keenly aware of this paradox: “When Native Americans have been afforded the opportunity to tell our stories, we have often succumbed to the pressure to perform a kind of cultural show-and-tell, to lift the buckskin curtain so outsiders can peer in . . . The problem with many Native projects of the past is that they’re for white people” (Treuer, 2022). This practice of performing indigeneity has also contributed to a pan-Indianism in which the appearances and practices of members of hundreds of distinct tribes with unique tribal traditions become indistinguishable, resembling primarily Plains Indian tribes. Perhaps, the Plains Indian culture is popular among Native American people (even those who do not belong to one of the Plains tribes) because non-Native Americans—due to their history of romanticizing Plains Indians—view Plains Indians as the only “real” or “authentic” Indians. Consequently, some Native American people may feel compelled to dress in the stereotypical Plains Indian attire and appropriate Plains Indian cultures because they desire to signify their indigeneity in a way easily identifiable to non-Indians. To put it another way, I surmise that many Native American people have internalized the notion that Plains Indians are the most authentic Indians, which is a misconception rooted in early misrepresentations of Native American people

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by non-Indians. As Teves observes, “While affirming authenticity and realness can sometimes be a necessary tactic to push back against stereotypical imagery of Natives, it re-embeds a belief that our ‘real’ selves existed prior to colonization—this is dangerously similar to imperialist ideas of the ‘noble savage.’” (2018, pp. 14–15). Teves argues that while ethnic performances are helpful in challenging and rejecting stereotypes about Indigenous people, they can also recreate stereotypes by either explicitly or implicitly asserting that “real” Indigenous people existed only prior to European colonization. Ultimately, performing indigeneity can create division among tribal people, especially when some Indigenous people use these performances as the standard of Indianness against which they measure all other Indigenous people. Teves observes, “These performances have high stakes, often requiring a romanticized performance of indigeneity that Indigenous peoples in turn problematically use to police one another and begin to regard certain behaviors as ‘traditional’ or ‘natural’” (2018, p. 13). This practice can leave tribal people feeling disconnected from their communities. “There are so many Kānaka Maoli who feel that their voices are irrelevant because they were told for too long that they weren’t ‘Hawaiian enough’” (p. 173). The expectation that one must perform one’s indigeneity, especially in a way that aligns with others’ perceptions of indigeneity, also presents a challenge for Indigenous people who either cannot present themselves as Indigenous (due to their appearance, language, or otherwise) or who choose not to perform their indigeneity (for a myriad of reasons). In other words, performing indigeneity is a double-edged sword. Although Native peoples’ claims of authenticity through performance are direct responses to those who seek to label them as “vanishing” or “extinct,” they also imply that Indigenous people must prove their “authentic indigeneity” via performance. As Teves observes, “Such perceptions of indigeneity, when internalized, keep communities demobilized, contained, and motionless” (2018, pp. 15–16). While these instances of deliberate stereotypical performances can certainly reinscribe stereotypes and isolate tribal members from their communities, Native Americans also sometimes leverage these stereotypes to their benefit. In the comedy skit titled “The Indian Store” by the all-Native American comedy group The 1491s (2013), Dallas Goldtooth and Bobby Wilson (Sisseton-Wahpeton Dakota) (who has also appeared and been a writer on Reservation Dogs and Rutherford Falls) portray “Indian Store” employees who sell Native American–themed gifts, art, books, and jewelry. Part of their sales strategy is to perform their Indian identities for their customers. They adorn themselves with Native American jewelry, open their buttondown shirts to reveal their bare chests, and speak slowly in affected “Native American” accents. Goldtooth tells his customers that he had to “go on a vision quest and ask for the raccoon spirit to come to [him]” while holding

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a small hand drum. Goldtooth and Wilson’s performances are a nod to how Native American people sometimes perform their identities in stereotypical ways, especially when there is a monetary incentive to do so, and how these stereotypes have become the way that Native Americans are expected to act—especially in the presence of non-Indians. Although performing Native American stereotypes may help Indigenous people reap real benefits—politically, socially, economically, or otherwise—they can also have less desirable effects on Indigenous individuals and communities. American Indians who do not conform to stereotypical representations of Native Americans may be seen as “less Indian” and not a part of their culture, isolating them from each other and their communities.

A CAUSE FOR CELEBRATION While complex—and often contradictory—Native American representation in popular culture is essential, and Native Americans need to see themselves on the big screen; for this reason alone, the production and subsequent success of Reservation Dogs and other recent Native-American-produced media is a cause for celebration. According to Beverly R. Singer (Tewa and Diné), the growing number of Native-produced works creates a “growing sense of unity about our place in history and the role we have in helping to shape the future” (2001, p. 295). She argues that Native American filmmakers can use film to mitigate the lasting impacts of colonialism on Indigenous communities and challenge Western practices, systems, and structures that have “coerced a sense of inferiority in us” (p. 295). Native American and Indigenous visual sovereignty presents an exciting opportunity to illuminate the efforts of Indigenous people to protect their lands and resources, cultivate Indigenous intellectual freedom, foster tribal autonomy, and assert Indigenous cultural imperatives. Furthermore, in a content-driven world that is always searching for new stories and diverse forms of entertainment, media and art can translate to lucrative careers for Indigenous people; therefore, the power derived from Indigenous filmmaking can be cultural, personal, and financial. What is most important, however, is that performance (and film) is used to deconstruct Western narratives of Indigenous erasure. Moreover, the value of producing their own media and film is that Native American people can reserve the right to define themselves, their cultures, and their customs as they see fit. The success of recent Native-produced works raises the question: Where do we go from here? What stories will we see next? What possibilities exist for Native American storylines set outside of the reservation? Will we see

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stories about Native American people occupying spaces from which nonNatives have historically excluded them? What would a Native American Grey’s Anatomy look like? What about a Native American Succession? The possibilities are endless; this is only the beginning.

REFERENCES 1491s. (2013, December 23). The Indian Store. [Video]. YouTube. https://youtu​.be​/ NuzPoidV4nI Barnaby, J. (Director). (2019). Blood Quantum [Film]. Prospector Films. Black, L. (2020). Picturing Indians: Native Americans in Film, 1941–1960. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press (Kindle Edition). Cobb, A. J. (2003). This Is What It Means to Say Smoke Signals: Native American Cultural Sovereignty. Hollywood’s Indian: The Portrayal of the Native American in Film (Second edition). Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky. Cooper, S. (2017). Hostiles [Film]. Entertainment Studios Motion Pictures. Costner, K. (1990). Dances With Wolves [Film]. Orion Pictures. Dickson, W. K. L. (Director). (1894). Buffalo Dance [Film]. Edison Manufacturing Company. Dunbar-Ortiz, R.; Gilio-Whitaker, D. (2016). “All the Real Indians Died Off” And 20 Other Myths About Native Americans (Myths Made in America). Boston: Beacon Press. (Kindle Edition). Eyre, C. (1998). Smoke Signals [Film]. Miramax. Gross, T. (2022, September 19). ‘Reservation Dogs’ Co-creator Says the Show Gives Audiences Permission to Laugh. NPR. https://www​.npr​.org​/2022​/09​/19​ /1123452609​/reservation​-dogs​-sterlin​-harjo​-native​-stories Kilpatrick, J. (1999). Celluloid Indians: Native Americans and Film. Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press. Norris, T., Vines, P. L., & Hoeffel, E. M. (2012, January). The American Indian and Alaska Native Population: 2010. C2010BR-10. U.S. Census Bureau. https://www​ .census​.gov​/history​/pdf​/c2010br​-10​.pdf Powers, J. (2022, August 8). ‘Reservation Dogs,’ now in Season 2, remains one of the most original shows on TV. NPR. https://www​.npr​.org​/2022​/08​/08​/1115613218​/ reservation​-dogs​-indian​-native​-american​-hulu Raheja, M. H. (2013). Reservation Reelism: Redfacing, Visual Sovereignty, and Representations of Native Americans in Film. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. (Kindle edition) Sheridan, T. (2017). Wind River [Film]. Acacia Filmed Entertainment. Singer, B. R. (2001). Wiping the War Paint off the Lens: Native American Film and Video. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. (Kindle Edition). Teves, S. N. (2018). Defiant Indigeneity: The Politics of Hawaiian Performance. Chapel Hill, NC: UNC Press Books. (Kindle Edition).

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Teves, S. N., Smith, A., & Raheja, M. (Eds.). (2015). Native Studies Keywords. Tuscon: University of Arizona Press (Kindle Edition). Treuer, D. (2022, August 1). Sterlin Harjo’s genre-mixing, cliché-exploding series captures coming of age as a Native kid like no TV show before it. The Atlantic. https://www​.theatlantic​.com​/magazine​/archive​/2022​/09​/reservation​-dogs​-fx​-sterlin​-harjo​-native​-american​/670603/

Chapter 4

“Voldemort under My Headscarf” The Oppositional Muslim Gaze of We Are Lady Parts Reham Bohamad

While there is no empirical evidence that media exposure causes Xenophobia or Islamophobia, research has shown that the media plays a major role in establishing and formulating the public’s views and attitudes. Therefore, the media’s role cannot be entirely ignored, for “it has the ability to shape and influence public attitudes that could create, feed into and subsequently justify Islamophobic and anti-Muslim attitudes and expressions” (Allen, 2012, p.3). Scharrer and Ramasubramanian (2015) suggest that the media has a fundamental educational role in informing and shaping audience members’ perception of things they have never personally encountered. The authors also explain that audience members usually lack the ability to critically view media content, whether positively or negatively; hence, they have the tendency to internalize media bias. A plethora of studies have shown mass media to articulate dominant social values, ideologies, and changes, and that these features often lead to misrepresentation or framing minorities in stereotypical portrayals in the media (Hall, 1990; Van Dijk, 1991). Muslims are frequently “othered” and depicted using a negative lens in pop culture. Jack Shaheen (2003) noted that in movies, Arabs and Muslims have been portrayed since 1896 as “Public Enemy #1, brutal, heartless, uncivilized religious fanatics and money-mad cultural ‘others’ bent on terrorizing civilized Westerners, especially Christian and Jews” (p. 72). This led the Western audience to have a monocular image of Islam as a religion of terror, violence, and danger. Not only that, but Western media tends to show Muslims to be coming from one ethnicity. They are Arabs (people whose language is Arabic) from the Orient land of the Middle East, when in fact, most of the world’s 1.9 billion Muslims are non-Arab speakers from Southeastern Asian countries such as Indonesia and South Asian countries 63

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such as India and Pakistan (“Muslim majority countries,” 2021). As Shaheen observed, “Only 12 percent of the world’s Muslims are Arabs. Yet, the moviemakers ignore this reality, depicting Arabs and Muslims as one people and the same people” (2007, p. 174), disregarding how diverse and nuanced Muslims are, and with many different stories to tell. The representation of Muslims in Western media is one of the “primary ways of defining Muslims” to Western audiences (Khan & Eid, 2011, p. 185); therefore, it is vital to highlight to the average Western spectators the importance of knowing and caring about Muslim representation and stereotypes. It is crucial because hating of “the others,” or Xenophobia, leads to the suffering of innocent people every time the media vilifies an ethnic, racial, or religious group (Shaheen, 2007). Several studies have shown a direct link between negative depictions of Muslims in the media and the Western public support of policies that are targeted to hurt Muslims or restrict their civil rights (Saleem, Prot, Anderson & Lemieux, 2017; Nisbet, Ostman & Shanahan, 2009), while exposure to positive images has been shown to have the opposite effect (Zaheer, 2019). Much of the literature that examines Muslim depictions in the media has focused mainly on the representation of male Muslims (Spalek & Imtoual, 2007). This could be due to mainstream pop culture depicting only male Muslims when referencing Islam by casting them as terrorists and oppressors of women (Mishra, 2007). When Muslim women are represented in the media, they are usually portrayed in a negative, narrow, and linearly stereotypical way—exotic, oppressed, threatening, silent, with no agency, often with veiled faces (Read, 2002; Falah 2005; Spalek & Imtoual, 2007; Khan & Eid, 2011; Watt, 2012). Such negative and limited representation has led many nonMuslims to view Islam—and especially female Muslims—as homogenous and fixed. Western media produces a monocular image about the Islamic act of covering for women, constructing it as a symbol of religious fundamentalism, backwardness, chauvinism, and terror (Zine, 2006; Watt, 2012). Many Westerners do not realize that there are plenty of young, European and North American-born Muslim women who choose to wear a hijab even though their own Muslim mothers chose not to (Watt, 2012). That is, Muslim women do not necessarily associate veiling with oppression or gender inequality, disproving traditional gender roles that there is no Muslim, fixed, single, female image or identity (Bullock, 2003; Read, 2003). In recent years, there have been some positive attempts toward correcting the misrepresentation of Islam and its followers in Western pop culture as a part of multicultural diversity initiatives. Both European and North American media outlets have increased their efforts toward more inclusivity of Muslims in the production process, whether it being employing them as producers, cast directors, or writers of movies or shows that “tell stories that are unflinchingly

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authentic” and challenges earlier negative stereotypes of both Muslim men and women (Gecsoyler, 2022; Eid & Khan, 2011). In the summer of 2021, a British sitcom called We Are Lady Parts (henceforth WALP) was coproduced and broadcast by the American streaming service Peacock and the British network Channel 4. With a title that references the popular 1980s mockumentary about a fictional rock band (This Is Spinal Tap), the show centers around members of an all-female Muslim punk band. The six-episode series was written and directed by Nida Manzoor, a BritishPakistani Muslim woman who centered the plot around five characters: • Amina, a doctoral science student who spends most of her time in the laboratory working on her experiments while daydreaming about playing the guitar in public; • Saira, a Halal butcher by day and the band’s lead singer by night; • Ayesha, an Uber driver and the drummer; • Bisma, a radical cartoonist and a mother to a girl, who plays the bass for the band; and • Momtaz, the band manager and publicist, who works in a lingerie store. What makes this show stand out from all the previous “nontraditional” shows that portrayed Muslims in general and Muslim women in particular, is that each character challenges a previous assumption on how a Muslim woman should look, how she should behave, and what she can or cannot do or even say. WALP provides a disparate new look at the modern Muslim woman, who might be highly educated; might be a radical feminist mother in a happy marriage; family-focused, independent, ambitious; tattooed, a smoker; an intellectual, with real agency; or simply a rebellious human being. That is, the program provides a view of Muslim women as the diverse group that they actually are—in other words, just like everyone else. The series aims to show who Muslim women are and what they stand for. “We are sisters who pray together, play together, speaking our truth to whoever is willing to listen,” according to the show’s writer and director (Manzoor, 2021). This new representation of Muslim women generated media interest and both Muslim and non-Muslim viewers’ attention. Manzoor’s “Muslim gaze” is her way of “looking back” to challenge the dominant stereotypical image of Muslim women that was imposed by dominant Whiteness and had been perpetuated by Western media for the past century. The Muslim female spectator experience resembles that of Black women spectators and their approach of challenging media narratives through an oppositional gaze, a term coined by feminist scholar bell hooks in 1992. She explains that “there is power in looking” as it provides “the ability to manipulate one’s gaze in the face of structures of domination that would contain it,”

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opening up the possibility of agency (1992, pp. 115–16). The oppositional gaze here works as a form of resistance to the planned, ingrained, hegemonic, and racist media narratives that were created based on racist views (Boylorn, 2008). In doing so, both Muslim and Black women are able to “navigate the hegemony of U.S. content, their marginalisation in British mass-media, and situate them within a Black (and Brown) experience that transcends Britain’s borders” (Sobande et al., 2020, p. 413). This chapter will employ hooks’ (1992) notion of the “oppositional gaze” as a conceptual framework to examine the final two episodes of the six-episode first season of WALP, titled “Represent” and “Sparta,” to examine how “media of the oppositional gaze . . . call out . . . Whiteness for its oppressive tendencies” (Maddox, 2019, pp. 139–140). It will include an examination of the subversive song lyrics performed by the band, often loaded with the kinds of obscenities not uncommon in the punk rock genre. This approach is obvious in a song like “Voldermort Under My Headscarf.” The lyrics mock the non-Muslim Western fear of Muslim women’s hijabs (headscarves) and serve as Manzoor’s way of making fun of that fear. Western media has constantly focused on the veil of Muslim women and often linked it with women’s oppression to associate Islam with malevolence. Samantha Feder (2013) argues that the veil serves as a form of resistance to its wearer, allowing them to challenge Western perception of beauty standards, contest the sexual objectification of their bodies, and assert their religious identity. The song references Voldermort, the arch-antagonist in the famous (and very British) Harry Potter novel series. “I’m sorry if I scare you,” the song begins, evoking the racist attitudes of the non-Arab West. As it continues, it compares hijab-clad women to the book’s mysterious Dark Lord: “You find me terrifying . . . Voldemort’s alive. He’s alive. He’s under my head scarf.”

MUSLIMS IN EUROPE: THE THREAT TO MAINLAND IDENTITY As in the United States, political and media discourse in England and Europe has reflected nationalism and xenophobia in recent years, despite efforts on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean to embrace multiculturalism. However, these integration policies are often cloaked in neoliberal rhetoric that obscures the legitimation of White supremacy. As Korteweg and Triadafilopoulos (2013) explain, “At the highest level of abstraction, integration policies seek to manage diversity by accepting those differences that do not overtly challenge the values and practices of majority society while attempting to alter those perceived as problematic” (p. 115). France’s legal restriction on the Islamic

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headscarf is a quintessential example of how integrationist policies conceal cultural racism and uphold White supremacy. Thomas (2006) argues, “While formally applicable to signs of all religions—headscarves, yarmulkes, and overly large crosses .  .  . the law was clearly passed mainly in response to concerns about Muslim students wearing headscarves” (p. 237). Integration policies, such as France’s law on “conspicuous religious signs,” institutionalizes and normalizes cultural racism through neutral or postracial neoliberal rhetoric. Western Europe tightened its immigration policies in the 1970s due to an oil crisis and the ensuing high rates of unemployment. Many guest workers opted to stay rather than returning home, which spurred the most recent migration trend, family reunification. Zolberg and Woon (1999) argue that family reunification was a catalyst for the transformation of the Muslim population in the Netherlands from single males to families. This shift led to a rapid expansion of the Muslim population. Concurrent with family reunification, politicians were becoming more liberal in terms of support for gender equality and gay rights. However, many political leaders perceived Muslims to be at odds with these values due to the generally patriarchal and sexist treatment of women in Islam. Dutch integration laws and policies are a poignant example because they especially targeted Muslim women under the premise of gender equality. The Islamic headscarf remained an iconic symbol of women’s oppression and their lagging assimilation into Dutch society. Korteweg and Triadafilos (2013) point out that “the word ‘Muslim’ is not mentioned in the initial policy document, [but] through these associations ethnic and minority women became shorthand for women and girls of Muslim backgrounds” (p. 121). These Dutch integrationist laws and policies operated covertly through their use of a neoliberal discourse that obscures racial/ethnic/religious discrimination through the ideals of meritocracy. The media tend to present a simplistic depiction of Islam as fundamentalist and oppressive, being at odds with Western democratic values. Political debates and media coverage often depict women wearing hijab, abaya, or burqa as a visual representation for discriminatory ideology directed toward Islam. Within these representations of Islam, Muslims are seldom included into the news discussion as experts or witnesses, and the news reporters and commentators speaking on behalf of Islam are overwhelmingly White. D’Haenens and Bink (2006) argue, “It comes to no surprise, then, that the . . . population has a distorted (negative) image of the ‘average’ migrant population” (p. 136). Media representations are important because many people gain most of their information about minorities solely from the visual perceptions that the mass media provide (Watt, 2012). Hence, media plays an integral role in

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creating and distributing ideologies, which contribute to the general cultural “production of knowledge” (Hall, 1990). Many underestimate the power of the mass media to influence their perception of people they have never met and places they have never traveled (Watt, 2012). Thus, constant negative media coverage of Muslims and Islam continues to shape peoples’ attitudes toward them (Brown, 2014). Negative Western representations of Muslims are not recent but in fact have been “operational and deep-rooted” in the Western culture ever since their first encounters with Muslims or Arabs (Ridounai, 2011; Shaheen, 2006). Shaheen (2006) explains: “We inherited the Arab image primarily from Europeans in the early days, maybe 150 years, 200 years ago. The British and the French who traveled to the Middle East and those who didn’t travel to the Middle East conjured up these images of the Arab as the oriental other” (p. 3). While these images have shifted over the last century, elements of the oriental other remain in current media representations. Grosfoguel and Mielants (2006) argue, “Orientalist views are characterized by racist, exotic and inferior essentialist representations of Islam as frozen in time” (p. 8). This image, alongside other cultural aspects misrepresented through media and film, is often shaped by politics (Ramji, 2016). Politics and Western media images are connected. They establish and perpetuate a specific image of minorities to “enforce mythical images” and “mythical images help enforce policy” (Shaheen, 2006, p. 6). After the events of 9/11 in America, many European countries faced similar security concerns and held similar political debates about religious freedom and discourses concerning garments like hijab and niqab (Byng, 2010). Muslim women who wear symbolic religious attire like abayas and hijabs arouse suspicion because they are not ideologically congruent with Western, non-Muslim society. Muslim women often feel compelled to Westernize their appearance and stop wearing their abayas. Other women go so far as to remove their hijabs and/ or turbans to fit into White mainstream society and receive more equal treatment. Gould (2014) analyzes how the European endeavors to liberate women through “unveiling” mirror theocratic arguments make “veiling mandatory.” She argues, “Both policies deploy the veil as one of that system’s most richly signifying commodities. Veiling, unveiling, misveiling all propose different kinds of bargains with the state that regulates women’s dress codes” (p. 223).

“AIN’T NO ONE GONNA HONOUR KILL MY SISTER BUT ME” We Are Lady Parts, contextually, is a product of this struggle over discourse. Muslim women have often been the “quiet subject” of mainstream media in

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limiting stereotypical tropes. The series’ first episode was aired in May 2021 in both England and America simultaneously. The show was set and shot in the East London area where the highest population of Muslims in Great Britain resides (Religion in Tower Hamlet, 2011). Muslim women are usually depicted in the media in domestic settings, caring for either their kids or parents; they often have sharp facial expressions. But at the beginning of episode 5, “Represent,” director Manzoor shows the band members laughing and enjoying street food while walking around an open market by themselves with many people of color in the background. Despite her intention to provide a diverse and “real representation” of Muslims in England, there was no visible sign of White people in the entire episode. Neglecting the presence of White Londoners might lead the non-European, non-Muslim spectators to think that Muslims are an isolated group that chooses not to assimilate with the predominantly White society, thereby affirming previous negative stereotypes about them being unassimilable created by the media in Western countries. But Manzoor seems more focused on displaying the diversity within the Muslim community. Manzoor made sure to display the different social classes of the Muslim community in the West. With Muslim immigration to Europe being a result of a shortage of labor post–World War II, their image as uncivilized, illiterate peons has not changed much, particularly women’s images. The media counts, as Marasigan (2021) observes, “the religious head covering of Muslim women (hijab) as not just a religious marker but a hindrance to intellectual autonomy and free decision-making”—therefore, they’re oppressed and in need of saving. In this series, Saira and Momtaz both live in sketchy neighborhoods and work, respectively, as a halal butcher and lingerie salesperson. Both would count as members of the working class. Aisha and Bisma are part of the middle class, as Aisha works as an Uber driver, a job with flexible hours, who has a full drum set in her well-furnished bedroom and a brother who’s doing his PhD at the same university as Amina. Bisma is a stay-at-home mom by choice who’s married to a financial advisor and sells her own comics as a hobby. Amina is shown to come from an upper-middle class family as she is a full-time PhD student at one of England’s prestigious educational institutions, Queen Mary University. Amina’s cultural capital is evident through her enjoyment of museums, attire, poise, and engagement with extracurricular activities, such as her museum patronage. Manzoor is careful not to confuse social class and cultural capital with the characters’ intellects and cultural literacy. In one scene, Saira is shown to recite the poem “Speak” by the Pakistani revolutionist poet Faiz Ahmad Faiz, and in another, Momtaz shows remorse to Saira by stating “Mea Culpa,” a Latin verse that comes from a prayer of confession in the Catholic Church, which means “I am sorry.” Both Saira and Momtaz exhibit intellectualism

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and engagement with activities that showcase their interest in higher-level cultural concerns, such as poetry and personal enlightenment. Saira and Momtaz’s intellectualism and concern for feminism and enlightenment are juxtaposed with Amina’s best friend Noor, who is arguably the most posh and wealthy character. Noor’s character reinforces the image of the perfect female Muslim, who follows the rules of dress and decorum. Her primary interest throughout the show is planning her own wedding and finding a decent husband for Amina. Her character remains static throughout the series, with only a slight indication that she is capable or willing to negotiate aspects of Western culture that oppose her conservative version of Islam. Creator/author/director Manzoor stated that she wrote the show for “the women who weren’t actually on TV that I wanted to represent and show on TV. Oftentimes, I haven’t been so thrilled with the representation on TV of Muslim women as oppressed and lacking agency, and often lacking joy and humor” (Ravindran, 2021). Thus, she chose to write her first show under the comedy umbrella. But why? According to twentieth-century philosopher Henri Bergson, laughter is concerned with humans as social creatures rather than as private individuals: Its goal is to correct these socially “inconvenient” mindsets gently but firmly. We laugh at people who are too odd or too rigid to allow for societies to evolve and improve themselves. It is in this sense that laughter is corrective. This is often reflected in the songs performed by the band, and in this episode, the band performs “Ain’t No One Gonna Honour Kill My Sister but Me,” which combines elements of humor and urgency for change, mocking the brutal act of “honor killing”—murders by family members who perceive the women to have dishonored their families. As the UAB Institute for Human Rights (Price, 2022) explains: Honor killings and crimes are committed against a family member who is deemed to have acted socially or culturally unacceptably, and thus is seen to be bringing dishonor to the family. These are almost always carried out by male relatives, and the victim is almost always a woman; 93 percent of honor killing victims are women. According to the United Nations, 5,000 women and girls are victims of honor killings every year.

During the same year WALP was released, the British newspaper The Guardian published a report about the rise of HBA (honor-based abuse) among the Muslim community in the United Kingdom by an alarming 81% since 2016 (Siddique, 2021). HBA results from Muslim women not following their families’ or communities’ expectations, and in some cases, for not following their government’s expectations of them. In early 2023, for instance, women in Iran were leading a peaceful protest movement against their conservative Islamic government who killed a 22-year-old woman named Mahsa Amini

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for “failing to fully cover her hair and defying the country’s strict dress codes” (Abbasi, 2022). Since honor killing is commonly linked with Islamic countries and Muslim communities, it was not surprising for Manzoor to address it in one of the band’s songs; it drips with sarcasm: “I’m gonna kill my sister” because “she stole my eyeliner .  .  . And she’s been stretching out my shoes with her fucking big feet.” The mockery of the very notion of “honor killing” continues in the classic repetitive rhythm of punk rock: It’s an honour killing, it’s an honour killing. I’m gonna kill my sister (Die, die, die). (Manzoor & Manzoor, 2021)

The song is the band’s way of shooting back at the patriarchal Muslim culture that embraces strict gender roles that are reinforced by laws and customs that keep women in a position of inferiority (Kulczycki & Windle, 2011). The humorous listing of the absurd reasons behind this song’s honor killing—stealing eyeliner or stretching out shoes with big feet—is the band’s critique and illustration of the triviality behind the reasons for the actual honor-killing of Muslim women, some of which are “contacting persons of different faiths, initiating a separation or divorce, being a victim of rape, and even such alleged misdemeanors as flirting” (Kulczycki & Windle, 2011, p. 1443). The band’s punk/feminist perspective on honor killing further attacks the patriarchy within Islam by suggesting that it is their own responsibility to kill a sister: “Do you want to kill her, Mister? She’s mine, mine, mine.” The song ridicules the horror that nearly all honor-killing cases are performed by a victim’s close male relatives. A female honor killing of another female is beyond cultural comprehension. These satirical lyrics problematize hegemonic ideologies prevalent within patriarchal cultures, including Islam. There was frequent use of humor and profane language not only in WALP lyrics but also in the members’ dialog throughout the show. Cursing is a form of cathartic release like crying as it helps people to vent and effectively express emotions like pain, frustration, and anger. According to cognitive scientist Benjamin Bergen (2016), curse words are useful and powerful. However, like any powerful tool, he noted that this type of language can be utilized in a harmful way. While swearing is usually inspired by forbidden and inappropriate areas such as “sex (f-ck), bodily functions (sh-t), religion (hell)” once it’s targeted at a specific group of people such as the N-word, then it becomes harmful and destructive (Steinmetz, 2016). But using curse words has been proven to alleviate the perception of pain, whether physical or emotional (Stephens & Umland, 2011), which can be interpreted in WALP as the band’s way of bearing the pain caused by the rejection of their MuslimPunk identities from some members of their social circle and the Muslim

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community. Swearing also can be funny and liberating, and it can stimulate emotions (Bergen, 2016). In the series, the use of profane words is a form of resistance, something heightened in the punk rock genre. Cursing or swearing are labeled “bad words,” and in punk, music bands use them to shock, challenge, break the rules of society, and imply urgency to cause change (Genre studies, n.d.). In the “Represent” episode, when Aisha’s girlfriend and famous social media influencer Zarina was asked to help launch the band, she labeled them as “The Bad Girls of Islam.” In more conservative Muslim communities, music is regarded as a sinful act, and so is swearing, meaning if you do both, you’re regarded as a bad Muslim. Manzoor depicted this in the scene in the final episode of the first season, “Sparta,” when Amina was meeting with a third potential husband at a café, and he jumped to ask if she was “a bad girl?” and “naughty?” for being in a band and “playing naughty music.” In Islam, there is a more significant focus paid to women’s modesty and chastity than to men’s (Siraj, 2011), and Muslim women are expected to cover their whole body minus their face and hands. Covering their head with a hijab is regarded as “more than a dress code,” as Perez observed: “The hijab encompasses modest behaviors, manners and speech. The inner humility as exhibited through etiquettes and morals completes the significance of the physical veil” (Perez, n.d.). So the expected reaction from a Muslim woman in a negative situation such as Amina’s is to be silent, not look back, put her head down as a sign of embarrassment for her actions, and to walk away. Manzoor challenged this by making Amina lock eyes with the offender and start defending her reputation and actions by saying, “I am not a bad girl . . . It’s not naughty music. It’s meaningful. It actually has something to say.” Manzoor sends a message to all Muslim women that people’s perception of them doesn’t have to define who they really are or how religious they should be. Once a woman’s reputation is damaged in a Muslim community, no explanation or justification is enough to rebuild it. Manzoor shows this in a scene where Amina is on an imaginary dating show and the contestant accuses her of being a bad girl for playing music in a punk band; when Amina tries to explain to him that she’s not bad and those lyrics have meanings, his response is condescending. Then he follows up by asking her, “Do you do a blowjob?” Amina responds, “Fuck this!” and storms out. In her article titled “The surprising health benefit of swearing” psychologist Emily Waters (2017) observes that “swearing can give us a greater sense of power and control over a bad or negative situation.” Amina’s aggressive reaction was Manzoor’s way to send an oppositional message to Muslim women that they can take back control over their lives, that their actions don’t have to define them or how

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religious they should be, and that swearing is not always “bad” and can be a powerful tool to send a message. While the show provides a rather optimistic image of how some Muslim families do support their daughters’ adventures, it also sheds a light on the other, and more realistic, type of Muslim families. Saira, portrayed as a non-hijabi, South Asian woman, has lost connection with her family due to her punk lifestyle and practice of what is considered loud, vulgar, and antiestablishment music. When Saira visits her sister’s grave for her birthday, she accidentally falls asleep on her tombstone and is later woken up by her estranged mother covering her with a blanket. The mother’s first question, after Saira’s greeting, was, “Are you still doing music?” When she finds out about her continued participation in this “sinful” act, she turns down Saira’s request to visit the family house. Her mother’s face is filled with dismay as she explains simply that it is “not a good time” for Saira to visit. This plotline is more realistically aligned with the “lucky-not-to-be-honor-killed” Muslim women who did not follow their Muslim families’ expectations of being “sweet, quiet girls” and only resulted in becoming disowned. “FISH AND CHIPS FOR TEA” The lyrics of Fish and Chips for Tea, performed in episode 5, also illustrate the complex experiences of Muslim women as they navigate between Western culture and Islamic values in terms of assimilation as it pertains to feminism, Xenophobia, racism, and cultural imperialism. “I am alpha and omega,” it begins, then lists the disparate influences on the identities of young Muslim women in the West, including Nintendo, Sega, Babylon, and Hackney. They list their many-sided attributes: Madonna, whore, the girl next door, zombie queen. In true punk fashion, they sing, “Fuck it, let’s get high,” before listing a series of descriptive acronyms: P.O.C., B.A.M.E., D.O.A., and P.T.S.D. The song ends, Broken by the empire, raised by MTV But still, it’s fish and chips for tea. (Manzoor & Manzoor, 2021)

The author, Nida Manzoor, being the product of immigrant parents herself, made sure to highlight the identity struggles of second-generation Muslim immigrants in their new historically Christian homeland with this song that she coauthored with her siblings (Pickard, 2021). After WW11, Muslims migrated to Europe to help with the labor shortage to rebuild the damaged cities, hence the reference to being “Hackney in the dark”—Hackney is a type of stallion noted for its high stamina and quickness that made it suitable to be used as a war horse in the fifteenth century and later used for everyday

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riding and subsequently typified as the sort of horse available for hire in the early twentieth century (Watts, n.d.), like the Muslims who were brought to Europe to help with the everyday work of rebuilding destroyed cities. By the time Muslim men settled, they started bringing over their female family members, which increased their visibility in public spaces (e.g., veiled and face-covered women) and attracted Europeans’ attention (Khader, n.d.). When they sing, “I am a woman, I am a creature,” they reference how White Europeans regarded Muslim women. Similar to how Americans first regarded Native Americans as primitive and savage “creatures,” Europeans regarded the newcomer Muslim women as such for all their strange, nonWhite looks, manners, and not resembling “the girl next door.” Muslim women are required by their faith, culture, and community to be the epitome of virtue and purity, a heavy expectation to carry, especially since any act of engagement with males outside of marriage is regarded as bad and sinful, like listening to music and being a member of a punk band. The lyrics, “I’m Madonna, I’m the whore,” refer to the identity negotiation Muslim women go through to gain their community’s acceptance and blessing. Many aspects of acceptable European female behavior and traditions are considered haram (forbidden) in Muslim culture, thereby presenting a challenge for assimilation and maintaining a reputation as a virtuous Muslim woman. Muslim women’s lives are extremely polarized and limited by the dimensions of the Madonna and the whore, resulting in them constantly navigating an impossible, constant line between purity and sin. Listening to music, playing in a punk band, dating, not wearing a headscarf, speaking too loudly, having an opinion contrary to Islamic clerks—things of very little consequence in Western culture but viewed in Islam as forbidden, as whorish. In recent years, the growth of the Muslim immigrant population in Europe was paralleled with growing attention from the media and public discourse, particularly on the role played by second-generation Muslims who were born and raised in Western countries and their level of assimilation, acculturation, and involvement in violent actions like terrorist attacks or riots. The lyrics “I’m a zombie queen, I will eat your brain,” refer to such negative and violent stigmatizations of Muslims in Western media. Being conceived as foreign and religious invaders of a pure and Christian Europe, Muslims are perceived to be infecting conventional European values, norms, and mores with variations of their traditions. The fear of the colonizer becoming colonized is evident in the use of such a vicious metaphor as a zombie eating a brain. The fact that she labels herself as the zombie queen further emphasizes the symbolism of female Muslims as extreme threats to European customs and traditions. The Xenophobia and nativism spreading across Europe support their fear that their Christian traditions and customs are being perverted by a growing presence of Muslim culture infiltrating their everyday lives and rituals.

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The young generation of Muslims growing up in Europe goes through an existential phase, where they negotiate and develop layered identities that are constantly challenged by negative prejudice from their Islamophobic host societies that treat them as the misfits of the motherland. The band references this problem in the lyrics “I’m a P.O.C.-B.A.M.E.- D.O.A.P.T.S.D.” that showcases the racism and Xenophobia they face as P.O.C. (persons of color), B.A.M.E. (Black, Asian and minority ethnic), D.O.A. (dead on arrival), with P.T.S.D (posttraumatic stress disorder). The lyrics acknowledge the challenges they face in their assimilation experience, which can subsequently lead them to lean on marijuana to get high in an effort to forget their negative experiences. As Giuliani, Tagliabue and Regalia (2018) explain, Second generation Muslims need to negotiate multiple issues pertaining to identity processes and need to combine feelings of belonging to their ethnic and religious community with those to the host country. Furthermore, they face these challenges within a social and political context characterized by terrorist events and growing religious discrimination. (p. 67)

However, all the discrimination and hostility to their presence didn’t stop the growing Muslim community from developing a multicultural identity that helped them actively network with the mainstream society, participate in the political scene, commit to being part of the society, and identify as citizens of the homeland (Maxwell, 2006). The song’s reference to being “broken by the empire” refers to the forcible actions of imperialism and colonization that were imposed by Great Britain and the West during the nineteenth century, when European and Christian values were forcibly spread to historically Muslim countries in the Middle East, Northern African, and South Asia. The second part of this lyric, “raised by MTV,” references contemporary cultural imperialism and hegemony. Naseer et al. (2014) point out that popular culture assists its spread: “Media has a direct impact on cultures by mesmerizing viewers with entertainment cultural products, fast music, popularizing different fashions, lifestyles, language, and cultures” (pp. 523–524). In this way, media functions as a hegemonic tool for establishing the status quo in Western countries and covertly challenging the cultural norms of non-Western societies. Manzoor’s transgressive program and music showcase how second-generation immigrants who come from broken, colonized countries were indoctrinated and raised by Western media to fully assimilate and embrace the Western values as their own. Fish and chips—the quintessential British food—for tea—a British mainstay brought to the country from the Muslim countries it once colonized.

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“I WANT TO FUCK A TERRORIST” The most outrageous and shocking lyrics of the series occur in the final episode. Zarina, a social influencer hired by Momtaz, presents the band as “The Bad Girls of Islam: Haramed and Dangerous.” During a series of individual interviews with each of the band members, Zarina asks challenging questions about the intersection of their punk, feminist, and Muslim identities. In the article she publishes on social media, she twists their words and presents them as infidels of Islam. An example of Zarina’s duplicity occurs when she interviews Bisma about being a “stay at home mother”: “So, your husband prefers that you don’t work?” Zarina asks Bisma. “What? No. No.” Bisma responds in surprise.

“So, you’re choosing not to work?”

“Well, yeah.” “And is this you trying to uphold traditional Muslim value?” Bisma, shocked by the question, replies, “What? No. No. Traditional values? No, fuck that.” (Manzoor & Manzoor, 2021)

In her online article, Zarina writes that Bisma said “fuck traditional Muslim values” without providing the context of her answer. Director/ writer Manzoor made Zarina’s character the antagonist whose role was to problematize the band’s challenge to their Muslim identity. Zarina’s article results in a social media backlash against the band that Manzoor depicts through a barrage of tweets hurling insults toward the band members, including: “F*@&off. This is GREAT BRITAIN” “This is not representation . . . take it down!” “#ladyparts #fakemuslims.” “Just some #FAKEMUSLIMWOMEN @lady-parts” “Should be banned! #ladyparts #fakemuslims.”

These tweets were posted mostly by Muslim and White Brits, illustrating the attack on the band from both their religious community and secular British society. Amina is the last band member to find out about Zarina’s misrepresentation of the band and discovers this through a hostile confrontation from her best friend Noor and her group of conservative Muslim friends after they found out about her being a member of a punk band. In the article, Zarina indicates that Amina wrote a song called “Bashir with a Good Beard” “because she is horny.” Noor and her friends tell Amina that she has “betrayed them” because

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her involvement in this band’s negative representation will increase “all the hate we get as Muslim women.” In response to Zarina’s article, Saira angrily grabs her guitar and shouts for her bandmates to suit up for practice. The band members suggest putting out a response to defend themselves against Zarina’s article, but Saira argues that they should do it through a song she was working on called “I Want to Fuck a Terrorist.” The band members argue that this will support Zarina’s portrayal of their music, but Saira’s response is, “If they think we are the naughty girls of Islam desperate for attention let’s give the people what they want . . . They will see what they want to see right?” Then, Saira wails on her guitar and belts out, “I want to fuck a terrorist. I want to fuck a terrorist.” The sardonic lyrics continue: “They’re sexy and tough I like when they blow up.” (Manzoor & Manzoor, 2021) Saira’s response encompasses the complicated notion described by bell hooks’ oppositional gaze as she uses extremely satirical and shocking lyrics to fight back against the unjust misrepresentation of their band. hooks’ theory argues that non-White people have the tool of gazing back to challenge the power dynamic that White media producers use to maintain the stereotypic images of non-White people in mainstream media. She explains, “Clearly, it is that way of seeing which makes possible an integrity of being that subvert the power of the colonizing image. It is only as we collectively change the way we look at ourselves and the world that we can change how we are seen” (hooks, 1992a, p. 6). She argued that the hegemonic, White gaze that dominates media representation is challenged by new and more complicated representations of Blackness in the media and through developing Black content by Black creators (hooks, 1992b). Similarly, Manzoor’s oppositional Muslim gaze provides a new representation in which Muslim women have the tools and agency to claim the power over their lives and bodies—that even when covered up head to toe, their sexuality is their own. Manzoor challenges the patriarchal expectation of Muslim women being quiet, polite, and innocent by singing their physical needs loud and clear, using bitterly satirical and profane language: “I want to fuck a terrorist.” The song lyrics attack the band’s online trolls, who have demonized WALP as either ethnic outsiders or heretics of Islam. Societal reaction to controversial music (and, perhaps, especially to the transgressive nature of punk music) is generally muted in Western societies, but the band, We Are Lady Parts, is regarded as sinful by the conservative Muslim community and as terroristic by White Europeans. Mansoor’s gaze attacks both. Post 9/11, Muslim men were often targeted by racist White people in the West based on their appearance. Many Brown, bearded men were assumed to be Muslim terrorists and faced hostility in public. Manzoor’s choice of the

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word terrorist in the song highlights the effect the media has on Westerners’ perceptions of Muslims, where any negative media coverage can cause a wave of hate toward Muslims. Since Zarina’s article labeled the band members as “The Bad Girls of Islam,” why not engage in a “bad” action like sex with a “bad” Muslim man like a “terrorist” and cause their community the damage expected from them? The use of such subversive lyrics here demonstrates the Muslim oppositional gaze, with humor or comedy serving a corrective purpose. Satire challenges these socially inconvenient and rigid mindsets gently but firmly by making people laugh at culturally sensitive topics to push them to positively evolve and improve. As comedy theorists Bergson and Barreca explain, “Comedy (satire) is social . . . Comedy is based on shared experience, attitudes, and values; creates in-groups and out-groups by mocking aberrations from the norm or the norm itself” (cited in Finny, 2004, p. 6). Manzoor does exactly that to challenge Muslim norms and Western stereotypes.

THE PROMISE OF BETTER REPRESENTATION There were other TV shows produced before WALP that attempted to counter the negative, stereotypical representation of Muslims in Western mainstream media, such as Ramy (Hulu), Mo (Netflix), Man like Mobeen (BBC), and Citizen Khan (BBC2). However, the focus in these shows was mostly on Muslim men and their life struggles; very few scenes or episodes focused on Muslim women and their challenges. Though there has been a slow movement to fill this gap through shows such as We Are Lady Parts (Peacock), Ms. Marvel (Disney+), and Why Are You Like This (ABC+), it’s not enough to overcome the long history of the invisibility, misrepresentation, and stereotypes of Muslims in Western popular culture. A 2022 study by the School of Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California noted after examining over 200 TV shows that Muslims were depicted in stereotypical roles with little diversity and featured mostly male characters. Furthermore, when Muslim women were shown, they tended to be portrayed as frightened, endangered, and victims of violence (Khan et. al, 2022). The emergence of WALP and other Muslim female-focused shows with more complicated representations are a necessity to show the diversity of Muslim women, their lives, dreams, struggles, accomplishments, complexity, and intersectionality. In her first written-produced-directed TV show, Nida Manzoor chose the comedy genre because women were expected “to be nice,” and satire is often anything but nice. Satiric comedy deals with serious, aggressive, and controversial topics, using ridicule to highlight the absurdity of human cruelty and intolerance. Therefore, this was not the place for “nice” women to be, and

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Manzoor wanted to challenge that and show the diversity and adversity that Muslim women deal with in their daily lives and to push for more liberal ideologies as the “norm”—for instance, having female Sheikhas (clerics), befriending men, choosing their own partners. In this sense, satire is a form of the oppositional gaze that challenges what’s forbidden and offers a plea for change. Though Manzoor created Muslim content that is directed to Muslim audience in Western countries by showing the girls as well educated, holding liberal views, all the while being committed to their religion, she presents them as isolated from the mostly White society as there were very few scenes with White characters in the series. What makes this show unique is its subject matter. Clearly, WALP positively depicts diverse representations of Muslim women (coming in all colors, shapes, and ethnicities, with different levels of religiosity and sexual preference) who share a sense of sisterhood and the passion to play and pray. Manzoor challenges the Muslim community by presenting a gay character in Aisha to resist the image of the “perfect Muslim woman” and provide a true representation of this silent group of Muslims. Manzoor successfully depicts the complex personality of each character and how their struggles with their faith and its expectations are only a part of their identity. Though popular entertainment is designed as “commodities made, produced, and marketed to entice any and all consumers” (hooks, 2016) to attract audiences and generate profit, mainstream media is perhaps slowly progressing, but it is not where it should be and it is in dire need of more efforts to provide more space to underrepresented minorities to tell their stories in the hopes of more realistic, complicated, and less stereotypical representation.

REFERENCES Abbasi, H. (2022). Mahsa Amini did not die from blows to body, Iranian coroner says amid widespread protests. NBC News. https://www​.nbcnews​.com​/news​/world​ /mahsa​-amini​-death​-iran​-morality​-police​-protests​-coroner​-report​-rcna51169 Allen, C. (2012). A Review of the Evidence Relating to the Representation of Muslims and Islam in the British Media. Birmingham, AL: Institute of Applied Social Studies. https://issuu​.com​/drchrisallen​/docs​/chrisallen​-appg​_muslims​-media​_evidence​ -october2012 Bergen, B. (2016). What the f: What Swearing Reveals About Our Language, Our Brains, and Ourselves. New York: Basic Books. Boylorn, R. M. (2008). As seen on TV: An autoethnographic reflection on race and reality television. Critical Studies in Media Communication, 25(4), 413–433. Feder, S. (2013). (Re)envisioning the veil. Implicit Religion, 16(4), 443–459.

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Gecsoyler, S. (2022, June 23). ‘‘They will butcher our stories”: How British TV is failing Muslims. The Guardian. https://www​.theguardian​.com​/tv​-and​-radio​/2022​/ jun​/23​/british​-tv​-failing​-muslims​-ms​-marvel Genre studies: Punk Rock. (n.d.). Rebel Music Teacher. http://www​.rebelmusicteacher​.com​/blog​/2017​/1​/23​/genre​-studies​-punk​-rock#:~​:text​=Profanity​%20tends​ %20to​%20be​%20rampant​,with​%20the​%20intent​%20to​%20shock. Giuliani, C., Tagliabue, S., & Regalia, C. (2018). Psychological well-being, multiple identities, and discrimination among first and second generation immigrant Muslims. Europe’s Journal of Psychology, 14(1), 66–87. Hall, S. (1990). The emergence of cultural studies and the crisis of the humanities. The Humanities as Social Techonolgy, 53, 11–23. https://www​.jstor​.org​/stable​/778912 Hooks, B. (1992a). Black Looks: Race and Representation. New York: Taylor and Francis. Hook, B. (1992b). The oppositional gaze: Black female spectator. In A. Jones (Ed.), The Feminism and Visual Cultural Reader (pp. 94–105). New York: Routledge. Hooks, B. (2016, May 9). Moving beyond pain. bell hooks Institute. http://www. bellh​​ooksi​​nstit​​ute​.c​​om​/bl​​og​/20​​16​/5/​​9​/mov​​ing​​-b​​eyond​​-pain​ Imperialism, Cultural. (n.d.). Encyclopedia. https://www​.encyclopedia​.com​/history​ /encyclopedias​-almanacs​-transcripts​-and​-maps​/imperialismcultural#:~​:text​=Cultural​%20imperialism​%20is​%20responsible​%20for​,provided​%20a​%20justification​ %20for​%20colonialism. Khan, S., & Eid, M. (2011). A new-look for Muslim women in the Canadian media: CBC’s Little Mosque on the Prairie. Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication, 4(2), 184–202. Khan, A., Pieper, K., Smith, S. L., Case, A., & Wheeler. S. (2022, September). Erased or Extremists: The Stereotypical View of Muslims in Popular Episodic Series. University of South Carolina Annenberg Inclusion Initiative. https://assets​ .uscannenberg​.org​/docs​/aii​-study​-muslim​-erased​-or​-extremists​-20220901​.pdf Kulczycki, A., & Windle, S. (2011) Honor killings in the Middle East and North Africa: A systematic review of the literature. Violence Against Women, 17(11), 1442–1464. Manzoor, N. (Writer), & Manzoor, N. (Director). (2021). We Are Lady Parts [TV series]. In S. Fletcher-Jones, M. Freeland, T. Bevan, & E. Fellner (executive producer), Working Title Television and NBC Universal International Studios. Muslim Majority Countries. (2022). https://wor​ldpo​pula​tion​review​.com​/country​ -rankings​/muslim​-majority​-countries Nasser, M., Nawaz, Y., Azhar, Z., Andleeb, Z., Ahmed, U., & Riaz, F. (2014). A sociological analysis of cultural imperialism of international media on Pakistani youth. Mediterranean Journal of Social Sciences, 5(3), 523–532. Nisbet, E. C., Ostman, R., & Shanahan, J. (2009). Public opinion toward Muslim Americans: Civil liberties and the role of religiosity, ideology, and media use. In A. Sinno (Ed.), Muslims in Western Politics (pp. 161–199). Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Pervez, S. (n.d.). Hijab in Islam: Modesty, humility and dignity. https://www​.whyislam​.org​/hijab​-in​-islam​-modesty​-humility​-and​-dignity/

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Pickard, M. (2021, May 19). Making the band. Drama Quarterly. https://dramaquarterly​.com​/making​-the​-band/ Price, A. (2022, December 5). How the North Korean Regime Uses Cult-Like Tactics to Maintain Power. UAB Insitite for Human Rights Blog. https://sites​.uab​.edu​/humanrights​/tag​/honor​ -killings/ Ravindran, M. (2021 June, 4). We Are Lady Parts creator Nida Manzoor on shattering Muslim stereotypes and why representation isn’t a ‘fad’. Variety. https://variety​ .com​/2021​/tv​/global​/we​-are​-lady​-parts​-linda​-lindas​-nida​-manzoor​-1234989061/ Religion in Tower Hamlets. (2015, April 21). https://www​ .towerhamlets​ .gov​ .uk​ / Documents​/Borough​_statistics​/Ward​_profiles​/Census​-2011​/2015​-04​-21​-Faith​-key​ -facts​-Revised​-data​.pdf Saleem, M., Prot, S., Anderson, C. A., & Lemieux, A. F. (2017). Exposure to Muslims in media and support for public policies harming Muslims. Communication Research, 44(6), 841–869. Scharrer, E., & Ramasubramanian, S. (2015). Intervening in the media’s influence on stereotypes of race and ethnicity: The role of media literacy education. Journal of Social Issues, 71(1), 171–185. Shaheen, J. G. (2003). Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood vilifies a people. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 588(1), 171–193. Shaheen, J. G. (2007). Hollywood’s reel Arab women. Media Development, 54(2), 27–29. Siddique, H. (2021, October 21). ‘Honour-based’ offences soared by 81% in last five years. The Guardian. https://www​.theguardian​.com​/society​/2021​/oct​/31​/honour​ -based​-offences​-soared​-by​-81​-in​-last​-five​-years Siraj, A. (2011). Meanings of modesty and the hijab amongst Muslim women in Glasgow, Scotland. Gender, Place and Culture, 18(6), 716–731. Sobande, F., Fearfull, A., & Brownlie, D. (2020). Resisting media marginalisation: Black women’s digital content and collectivity. Consumption Markets & Culture, 23(5), 413–428. Steinmetz, K. (2016, December 15). Swearing is scientifically proven to help you *%$!ing deal. Time. .https://time​.com​/4602680​/profanity​-research​-why​-we​-swear/ Stephens, R., & Umland, C. (2011). Swearing as a response to pain – Effect of daily swearing frequency. The Journal of Pain, 12(12), 1274–1281. van Dijk, T. (1991). Racism and the Press. London: Routledge. Watts, P. (n.d.). Why are Black cabs called Hackney cabs? Londonist. https://londonist​.com​/2016​/10​/why​-are​-black​-cabs​-called​-hackney​-cabs We Are Lady Parts: Season one. (n.d). Rotten Tomates. https://www​.rottentomatoes​ .com​/tv​/we​_are​_lady​_parts​/s01 Zaheer, M. (2019, June 21). How Muslims Became the Good Guys on TV. BBC. https://www​.bbc​.com​/culture​/article​/20190620​-how​-muslims​-became​-the​-good ​ -guys​-on​-tv

Chapter 5

Class is in Session Abbott Elementary’s “Step Class” and the Oppositional Gaze as Counter-Hegemonic Practice Loren Saxton Coleman, Symone Campbell, and Maika Moulite

The first season of Abbott Elementary was nominated for seven Emmys and won three: Sheryl Lee Ralph for supporting actress in a comedy series, Quinta Brunson for Best Comedy Writing, and another for outstanding casting in a comedy (Maas, 2022). Season 2 premiered September 22, 2022, with 2.8 million viewers, making Abbott ABC’s highest-rated show during the Wednesday primetime lineup (Maas, 2022). While Brunson often downplays what some highlight as the show’s “education advocacy” (Schneider, 2022), the series uses comedy, specifically satire, to tackle systemic issues in public education, like underfunded schools and underpaid teachers, particularly in predominantly Black neighborhoods. Satire is often employed in media practice as a form of humor that mocks or ridicules cultural norms and critiques and challenges them (Birthisel & Martin, 2013). Satire uses comedy to raise consciousness. Abbott Elementary is classified as a mockumentary, which is a situation comedy that incorporates confessionalism (Harris, 2014). The mockumentary genre has become popular over the past two decades, apparent in shows like The Office, Parks and Recreation, and Brooklyn Nine-Nine. In 2021, Abbott Elementary emerged as the most recent primetime mockumentary, this one with a Black woman lead and diverse cast, across race, age, and gender. In this critical and cultural analysis, we conceptualize Abbott Elementary as a counter-hegemonic media practice and rich media text worthy of critical investigation for its use of satire to provide an alternative representation of Black women, illuminate community-building in inner-city public schools, and call attention to the systemic challenges in those schools. 83

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As such, this chapter, guided by bell hook’s notion of the oppositional gaze and Patricia Hills Collins’ Black Feminist Thought, critically examines Abbott Elementary’s episode 9, “Step Class,” as a discursive text. Using critical discourse analysis (CDA), we explore how the mockumentary creates conditions for the emergence of the oppositional gaze as a counter-hegemonic practice. More specifically, our analysis will investigate how satire is used to challenge existing systemic and debilitating norms about Black women and TV’s representation of public schools that serve primarily Black students. TELEVISION, SATIRE, AND THE BLACK COMMUNITY Media scholars have detailed the ways in which satire on primetime television is used to navigate systemic issues detrimental to the Black community. Here, we provide an overview of systemic issues concerning the Black community depicted in primetime television and how satire in television shows has been specifically employed to address the aforementioned systemic issues pertaining to the Black community. Then, we provide a brief overview of how satire addressing issues of race in Black sitcoms has evolved over time, helping to develop an emerging genre of television, the mockumentary. Lastly, a discussion of past and present Black mockumentaries highlights the role satire has played in addressing important issues of race and other systemic issues, particularly in television shows depicting public school settings. Primetime Television and Representation Primetime television as defined by Nielsen takes place Monday through Friday between 8 p.m. to 11 p.m., when most Americans are tuned in to programing (Neilsen, 2011). While populations have become increasingly more diverse, representations of various marginalized groups have not evolved to meet this new reality. In particular, women are significantly underrepresented on primetime television with less frequent roles than their male counterparts (Sink & Mastro, 2017). Additionally, the roles that women do have typically subscribe to gendered stereotypes regarding the occupations of characters and emphasize sexuality and Eurocentric beauty standards, while other representations of women, including those of certain ages, are missing entirely (Sink & Mastro, 2017). Though Sink and Mastro’s (2017) quantitative content analysis of primetime television provides insight into the ways that gender is represented on television, conversations of race are overlooked. Ethnic minorities are largely excluded from primetime television (Tukachinsky, Mastro, & Yarchi, 2015), and underrepresentation in media reinforces which social groups merit status and respect and which ones do

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not (Sink & Mastro, 2017). Prior to the Civil Rights Movement, representation of Black people on television was virtually nonexistent with the few depictions available relying overwhelmingly on stereotypes (Mastro & Robinson, 2000). While the 1970s were marred by a resurgence in minstrellike portrayals of Black characters, the success of The Cosby Show in the 1980s ushered in sitcoms that typically favored Black people with thriving careers and upscale lifestyles like Living Single (1993–1995) and Girlfriends (2000–2008) (Mastro & Robinson, 2000). As television began to include more Black people in on-screen roles, their appearances were primarily concentrated on shows that featured all Black casts (Khanna & Harris, 2015) or as the comedic relief in all-White environments, like Arnold and Willis Jackson in Diff’rent Strokes (1979–1986) (Fuller, 2011). Representation of Black people during primetime increased; however, they were predominantly depicted in comedies, with Black people being six times more likely to play in a comedy role than drama and mostly appearing in sitcoms (Glascock, 2003). Over the last decade, Shonda Rhimes shows’ Grey’s Anatomy, Scandal, and How to Get Away with Murder shifted the racial and gendered landscape on primetime television. The three-hour block of primetime television created by Rhimes’s Shondaland undoubtedly changed the way that network television was produced and consumed (Everett, 2015). Scandal was groundbreaking in that it was the first network drama in nearly 40 years that featured a Black female protagonist (Gomez & McFarlane, 2017; Lambert, 2017). Though revolutionary in many regards, the show grappled with tropes that have frequently been associated with mediated representations of Black women (the help, the Jezebel, and the slave mistress) through a process of refraction that seeks to ultimately “depoliticize race and gender, while seeking to conceal the depoliticization” (Gomez & McFarlane, 2017). While there were representations that broke out of the norm for a Black lead, other aspects reinforced stereotypes (Lambert, 2017). Mainstream media has generally used these sexualized (and other) representations of Black women to reinforce their subjugated role in society (Kretsedemas, 2010) or as a punchline (Fuller, 2011). Recent mediated representations of race and gender have shied away from explicitly naming racism and sexism, which is typical in post-racial and post-feminist society, implying that humanity has moved past these systemic issues when that is far from the case (Gomez & McFarlane, 2017). While this phenomenon is prevalent in a primetime television drama like Scandal, it raises the following question: What role has comedy in television played in grappling with issues of race and gender and also perpetuating the more recent “post-racial” and “post-feminist” concepts?

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Satire and Representations of Race Researchers have highlighted the role of satirical television representations contributing to the reproduction of cultural discourses (Charles, 2010). Though satire and parody are frequently used interchangeably, there are nuanced differences between the two. Satire mocks human folly, vice, culture, etc., to provide critique and is not universally appealing given its dependence on the viewer’s personal beliefs and background (Birthisel & Martin, 2013). For satire to hit its mark, audiences must be in on the joke or else they may misinterpret the point that is trying to be made (Birthisel & Martin, 2013). For instance, the creators of All in the Family (1971–1979) intended for the main character Archie Bunker to stand in as “an example of exaggerated excess as hyperbole” to critique racism (Birthisel & Martin, 2013; Thompson, 2009). While Archie Bunker was depicted as bigoted and close-minded, audiences liked the character, and Vidmar and Rokeach’s (1974) reception study found that the sitcom was more likely reinforcing rather than dismantling stereotypical and racist portrayals of African Americans and other marginalized groups (Birthisel & Martin, 2013). Prior to shows like All in the Family, That Was the Week That Was, and The Smothers Brothers, satire was largely absent from television until broadcasting turned to narrowcasting with the introduction of cable (Thompson, 2009). Numerous genres of television programs have used satire as a tool to discuss various social issues, including issues of race (Birthisel & Martin, 2013). Sketch comedy shows, such as In Living Color (Cooks & Orbe, 1993), Chappelle’s Show (Thompson, 2009; Birthisel & Martin, 2013; Hill, 2020), and Saturday Night Live (Becker, 2021), have played a predominant role in interrogating representational politics on television. On these shows, Black American satire is used as a subversive tool to challenge racialized anxieties in conjunction with humor to resist oppressive systems (Great, 2022). Scholars have also suggested that Black sitcoms, such as Sanford and Son, Good Times, and The Jeffersons, use storytelling differently than mainstream and predominantly White-casted sitcoms (Coleman & Mcllwain, 2005). In these Black sitcoms, the act of storytelling is largely shaped by comedy embedded with hidden truths and messages pertaining to issues of race (Coleman & Mcllwain, 2005). As such, the characteristic of comedy and satire in Black television has evolved as a form of cultural expression to discuss complex societal issues (Coleman & Mcllwain, 2005). Satire, Sitcom, and Mockumentary The popularity of Black characters in television comedies has fluctuated considerably throughout the years (Tukachinsky, Mastro, & Yarchi, 2015).

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Many scholars have critiqued Black television comedies, crediting them for their reliance on negative and stereotypical roles of Blacks to promote humor while assimilating into White ideas of Blackness (Gray, 1995; Hough, 1981; Nelson, 1996), which can be seen in the earliest Black television comedies such as Amos & Andy and Beulah during the 1950s and Julia and The Bill Cosby Show in the 1960s and early 1970s (Coleman & Mcllwain, 2005). In Living Color has also been critiqued for reinforcing negative stereotypes of Black people in its satire because audiences (Black and otherwise) were not always able to distinguish between the characters’ fictional portrayals and real life (Cooks & Orbe, 1993). However, Black sitcoms shifted from 1972 to 1983, a period referred to as the era of “Social Relevancy and Ridiculed Black Subjectivity,” also known as the Lear Era due to producer Norman Lear’s efforts to represent full ranges of Blackness on television (Coleman & Lawrence, 2019). Black sitcoms during this time consisted of a departure from their previous assimilationist tendencies and a move toward addressing the social and political experiences of Black Americans directly. The Lear Era was the first time Black sitcoms represented Black Americans as subjects rather than objects through the incorporation of Black-centered worlds and experiences without discarding their culture while simultaneously using satire to get the messages across (Coleman & Mcllwain, 2005). Subsequent to the Lear Era, the late 1980s and early 1990s saw a dramatic increase in Black sitcoms given the success of The Cosby Show, Amen, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, and Hangin’ with Mr. Cooper (Tukachinsky, Mastro, & Yarchi, 2015). Black sitcoms also incorporated the use of confessionalism, which is a distinct characteristic of the situation comedy subgenre called the mockumentary (Harris, 2014). The confession tendency of mockumentaries includes characters engaging in reflection by documenting personal information about themselves and other characters (Harris, 2014). The Office, which first aired in 2005, has typically been regarded as a sitcom to establish what the mockumentary is, portraying the show as a fictional documentary through the use of confession (Thompson, 2007). However, Black primetime mockumentaries, such as The Bernie Mac Show, first aired in 2001 (Wilson, 2022). The mockumentary style of documenting personal information has also appeared in episodes of other Black sitcoms including The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air (Wilson, 2022), Sister, Sister, Moesha, Martin, and Girlfriends. The Boondocks is also a Black sitcom that uses the mockumentary style of documenting personal information to directly address racial and political issues (Kelly, 2014). Black mockumentaries have persistently used comedy and satire to address structural issues of race (Carter, 2015).

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Satire, Race, and Representation of Schools and Education Satirical television shows representing school life often take on larger meanings, reflecting social, cultural, historical, religious, economic, and political issues in the school setting (Kantor et al., 2000). Race has also been grappled within satirical content in television shows depicting school settings, particularly in Black mockumentaries. One Black mockumentary in particular, Everybody Hates Chris, has been explored as such (Bore, 2017). In Everybody Hates Chris, issues of race were addressed with comedic undertones through the inclusion of racial stereotyping and racial slurs exhibited by characters at Chris’s predominantly White school, including Chris’s teacher Ms. Morello and school bully Caruso (Bore, 2017). Abbott Elementary is the most recent Black show of its kind to express and critique issues of race in a satirical form. Black mockumentaries like Everybody Hates Chris and Abbott Elementary use “comedic modality as a form of insulation” (Palmer, 1987, p. 45), which makes it easier for audiences to experience feelings of relief because racism, as a difficult subject matter, is acknowledged and positioned as a subject of laughter (Bore, 2017). Ultimately, Black mockumentaries do not often offer solutions to educational problems or promote change; however, they overemphasize the situations and challenges faced by all members in school settings (Kantor et al, 2000). Thus, this study explores how the mockumentary specifically creates conditions for satire to be used to challenge existing systemic and debilitating norms represented in television depictions of the Black community, specifically Black women and public education in marginalized communities. THE OPPOSITIONAL GAZE AND BLACK FEMINIST THOUGHT bell hooks (2012) stated that mass media are the most “powerful covert teacher” of White supremacy. In her 1992 essay, “The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators,” she presented the “oppositional gaze” as a practice of resistance among colonized Black people. She wrote: The “gaze” has been and is a site of resistance for colonized black people globally. Subordinates in relations of power learn experientially that there is a critical gaze, one that “looks” to document, one that is oppositional. In resistance struggle, the power of the dominated to assert agency by claiming and cultivating “awareness” politicizes “looking” relations—one learns to look a certain way in order to resist. (p. 271)

Here, hooks explains that the “gaze,” or looking away, is a deliberate action that resists the “negation” of Black representation in television or mainstream

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movies. For example, hooks (1992) asserts that the oppositional gaze responded to limited and stereotypical Black representation in mainstream film with Black independent cinema. The act of looking, or the gaze, also helps explain how Black audiences have critically engaged with media texts historically. hooks writes, “Before racial integration, black viewers of movies and television experienced visual pleasure in a context where looking was also about contestation and confrontation” (p. 271). The gaze supports the notion that media consumption processes are active and, more importantly, the Black audience is critical and active, too. For hooks, the oppositional gaze only emerges as resistance when Black women actively resist the dominant ways of knowing and looking. She writes: Black female critical thinkers concerned with creating space for the construction of radical black female subjectivity, and the way cultural production informs the possibility fully acknowledge that importance of mass media, film in particular, as a powerful site for critical intervention. (hooks, 1992, p. 280)

The primary goal of Black feminism is to construct a political movement that calls out and challenges the exploitative nature of capitalism and the “double-bind” of race and sexuality and, more importantly, creates systems that protect, value, and respect Black women’s bodies and minds (Taylor, 2001). While the Black Feminist movement has been documented and marked with some contestation and debate, the recognition of a distinct Black women’s culture remained consistent. Patricia Hill Collins (2000) offers seven core themes of Black feminist thought, three of which are particularly relevant to our work—challenging controlling images (e.g., mammies, matriarchs, welfare queens, and the jezebel) that are used to justify Black women’s oppression; recognizing the power of self-definition to create empowering identities; and rethinking concepts of Black women’s activism. Through self-definition, Collins (2000) argues that Black women can examine and challenge power dynamics that help reject controlling images that limit and marginalize Black women. These controlling images are pervasive in mass media. Black women, specifically young Black women, are “othered” in mass media through images like “ratchet women,” “baby mamas,” and “Black Barbies” (Walton, 2013). Still, young Black women and girls are represented as hypersexual, emotionally unstable, and uneducated compared to their White counterparts in various forms of media (Jacobs, 2016). Although the oppositional gaze often analyzes how Black women resist in the context of film, our research employs the oppositional gaze as a framework to investigate Abbott Elementary, a primetime television series, as a site of critical intervention. Using Collins’ (2000) self-definition concept coupled with hooks’ (1992) oppositional gaze, we explore Abbott Elementary and its mockumentary genre as a counter-hegemonic practice. How does

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the mockumentary provide space for Black women to look away and create something new? How does “Step Class” use satire/humor to reject controlling images of Black women and critique systems of power? What alternative narrative does “Step Class” convey about Black women and public education in marginalized communities? We investigate Abbott Elementary’s “Step Class” as a response to a dearth in Black women represented in primetime comedy television and a challenge and alternative to stereotypical and debilitating narratives about inner-city public schools.

ABBOTT ELEMENTARY’S “STEP CLASS” AS A MULTIMODAL DISCURSIVE TEXT bell hooks states that Black women’s lived experiences locate us in the “margins,” with a unique vantage point. This vantage point shapes our levels of consciousness and provides us with a different worldview, which equips us with the perspective to “criticize the dominant racist, classist, sexist hegemony as well as envision and create a counter-hegemony” (hooks, 1984, p. 16). To investigate Abbott Elementary’s “Step Class” as a counter-hegemonic practice that challenges dominant ideologies about Black women on television and in public school education, we employ a CDA. Discourse is the social practice of language and works to legitimize, perpetuate, and naturalize various forms of social power (Wodak and Meyer, 2009). As such, CDA investigates the relationship between language and power (Wodak & Meyer, 2009). While power and power relations remain largely invisible, CDA as an analytical approach provides us with a framework to critically examine linguistic manifestations of power, unmasking the connections between discourse and larger societal issues in historical, political, and economic contexts (Robinson & Rich, 2017). Fairclough (2013) notes that CDA helps unmask or denaturalize ideologies to help people liberate themselves from interlocking power structures. To employ CDA, it’s important to first conceptualize Abbott Elementary’s “Step Class” as a multimodal discursive text, which helps us understand that discourse is not just written/verbal but can also be a combination of various modes. For example, visual communication is also used to mask power structures and hegemonic practices as objective representations (Jancsary et al., 2009). Power is enacted through the practice of looking or the gaze (Jancsary et al., 2009). As such, we use a specific multimodal discourse analysis (MCDA) to investigate Abbott Elementary’s “Step Class” as counter-hegemonic practice. Kress (2010) writes that MCDA as an analytical approach highlights how communicators choose to employ different semiotic resources, and each of these resources produces different and distinct

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meaning. In Erikkson’s (2022) MCDA of fitness regimes on reality television, the choices, or modes of discourse, analyzed were: spoken language (defined as interactions between participants and voice-overs), audio (music and sound effects), visual (what to record and how), and graphics (written texts and figures). While we are not analyzing reality television, this model of MCDA is relevant because of its emphasis on the various modes of discourse on television that translates to the sitcom genre. For our analysis, we examined spoken language in the verbal and nonverbal interactions between characters on screen during the “Step Class” episode, audio—as music played during the episode and any sound effects—and visual—as the camera’s affordances in mockumentary television (e.g., camera angles, eye contact with camera, camera position, and confessionals from characters). “Step Class” is of particular importance because of its emphasis on the popular tradition of stepping among the Black community (Fine, 1991). Step teams and performances are present among youth groups and the widely known National Pan Hellenic Council, consisting of historical Black fraternities and sororities (Fine, 1991), in which Ava states she holds membership and was the step mistress of her sorority’s step team. Stepping is specific to the Black community and involves combinations of dancing, singing, chanting, and speaking, rooted in Black folk traditions and communication patterns (Fine, 1991). One of the most noticeable communication practices involved with stepping that can be seen in “Step Class” is nonverbal communication. Cooke (1972) examined nonverbal communication patterns in the Black community as discursive practices. Kinesics was highlighted as a form of nonverbal communication that involves patterns of physical movement specific to the Black community. It was suggested that physical movement is often conspicuously performed to communicate strong messages to others in the Black community (Greene & Stewart, 2011). Through stepping’s various nonverbal tendencies, which include synchronized movement, it can express the Black community’s group identity, style, and unity. Engaging in these rituals serves as a “sign of Black identity and a symbol of Black unity” (Shuter, 1979, p. 142). Stepping and other forms of nonverbal communication have also been reserved for in-group use and are typically not performed with those outside of the Black community (Greene & Stewart, 2011). “Step Class’s” explicit engagement with the Black community’s cultural traditions via stepping position the episode as a rich site of critical inquiry. In this particular episode, Janine (Quinta Brunson), a newer teacher at Abbott Elementary, leads the school’s step team. Ava (played by Janelle James), the principal, proposes to help Janine with the step team, and there is disagreement on their approach. Other teachers are skeptical of Ava’s involvement. Audiences watch Ava and Janine work together to prepare for

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the culminating step show at the end of the episode. After our long “preliminary soak” (Hall, 1975) of the episode, we identified three major themes and explicated the multimodes of discursive activity in each theme to convey how satire and the production format of mockumentary provide conditions for counter-hegemonic practices. Black Women Are Human Black women are frequently represented on television as mammies, matriarchs, welfare queens, jezebels, and in other stereotypical roles (Collins, 2000). These controlling images play a role in reinforcing the subordinated position of Black women and have real-world implications. Collins (2000) argues that Black women can reject these controlling images, emphasizing their role as agentic beings who can subvert hegemonic depictions of Black women as deviant. Abbott Elementary is one such avenue for this subversion, and the show uses the comedic tools of satire present in the mockumentary format to challenge these assumptions. Mockumentaries use techniques that are typically used with nonfiction discourse (Mast, 2009). One such example of a style leveraged in “Step Class” is that of the hand-held camera. The gaze of the viewer adjusts based on various aspects such as who is speaking or even who the invisible cameraperson draws the viewers’ attention to, signaling that attention should be focused here. For instance, when Ava and Janine first discuss the possibility of Ava joining the step team’s preparations, the camera zooms in on each of them each time they make a counterpoint to what the other has said before them. These rapid visual moments reflect the tension of Ava and Janine’s exchange while also adding the element of humor that is present in satirical comedy. This is significant and reflects the dual nature of Black representation in primetime television, one that considers the external gaze while simultaneously attempting to simply exist as a Black woman in a public space. Though Black people are underrepresented on television (Tukachinsky, Mastro, & Yarchi, 2015), they are frequently depicted in comedy shows when they are (Glascock, 2003). However, the camera’s focus on Abbott Elementary repeatedly centers Black women, something that is intermittent at best within primetime television. Additionally, Ava and Janine represent varied depictions of Black women, expanding the representations of Black women in mockumentaries. Ava and Janine even engage with the camera differently. Where Ava gazes directly at the camera only when she’s making a joke, Janine frequently glances at the camera particularly when she and Ava are arguing about Ava’s potential role with the step team. Conversely, Ava’s gaze bounces around, focusing on the people in front of her in the scene, teachers Janine, Barbara (Sheryl Lee Ralph), and Melissa (Lisa Ann Walter).

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Additionally, the assumption that Black women must be devoted and proficient professionals or caretakers is also challenged in this episode of Abbott Elementary. When Ava’s grandmother is brought to work by Ava’s aunt, Ava must decide if she will prioritize her work or her family at that moment. The camera pans and allows the viewer to see Ava as not just the principal of a Philadelphia school but also a granddaughter, a niece, and a person. Subsequently, Janine is within the frame, observing Ava in a very humanizing moment, one that provides context for why she is slacking in her duties to the step team. Where Janine was previously aware of the camera’s presence when Ava initially mentions that she’d like to help out with the step team (in a way that demonstrates she is not completely relaxed in front of the lens), when she confronts Ava directly about how her actions will impact the students, she says that Ava “can’t think of anyone other than [her]self.” However, when Janine bears witness to Ava comforting her grandmother, it is evident by the expression on her face and downcast eyes that she can see that Ava does in fact care for others. These moments of observation don’t simply end with Janine being aware of Ava’s familial issues, she then makes time to apologize to Ava. This is particularly meaningful because this is the second time that Ava apologizes in the episode. When Black women are frequently represented as the most undesirable or disagreeable, Janine’s ability to apologize demonstrates that Black women are human and capable of making errors as well as amends. Further, at the end of the episode, there is a moment where Janine practices stepping by herself and Ava happens upon her rehearsal. The camera peeks into the room and, at that moment, Janine is not aware of it. When Janine and Ava begin dancing in tandem, Janine has finally let go of her need to control the way she is perceived on camera and instead delights in a moment of sisterhood and silliness with Ava. It is reminiscent of the joy displayed by the little girls on the step team. This is crucial for the characters, emphasizing the school building as a place for Black freedom, for women and girls alike. Black Girlhood Black girls are viewed as more adult than their White counterparts across all age ranges (Epstein et al., 2017). This adultification has real-world consequences, which lead to “harsher punishments, fewer leadership and mentorship opportunities, more punitive exercise of discretion, and greater use of force and harsher penalties” for Black girls (Epstein et al., 2017). Subsequently, Abbott Elementary’s handling of the students present on the step team exhibits a level of care that is not typically reserved for Black girls. Additionally, though the young Black girls on the step team are considered in

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various ways and engaged with directly, there are instances where the hegemonic power structures are reinforced. For instance, when Ava suggests that they should create a new routine, one that incorporates the music of hip hop star Cardi B and not “royalty-free music,” Janine is resistant. Further, Janine either makes a guess (or outright lies) about what the girls on the step team want, saying that “the kids would be devastated if we had to start over.” While this exchange could’ve simply ended there, Ava asks the girls on the team directly, “How many of y’all wanna do a new routine?” When the students all raise their hands unanimously, Janine exclaims a student’s name rhetorically, “Jasmine!” The student lowers her hand sheepishly, but she is not punished for not going along with Janine’s perspective. In fact, the girls resume their dancing and playing and, just as importantly, Ava joins in their playfulness, signaling that the school is a safe space for young Black girls to express themselves, even when they disagree with their adult teachers. The students are also protected from witnessing what may be a contentious disagreement. As soon as Janine and Ava begin to have a difference of opinions in front of the girls regarding the routine, Janine tells the students that they can “take five.” As the girls move to talk among themselves, Janine is able to ask Ava directly what she doesn’t like about the routine. Epstein et al.’s Girlhood Interrupted: The Erasure of Black Girls’ Childhood (2017) found that participants in a survey perceived that Black girls needed less nurturing, less support, less protection, and less comfort than White girls. The fact that Janine almost immediately shields the girls from the potential exchange of words and that Ava follows her lead with no resistance subverts these preconceived notions that Black girls are not worthy of care. At Abbott Elementary, Black girls are protected from the words of adults and given space to simply be children. Similarly, Black girlhood is protected at Abbott Elementary by all of the adults on the show; it is a community effort. Barbara even states, “I love a good step show. It’s good for the kids.” When Ava first mentions that she would like to help with the step team, Barbara and Melissa are quick to speak up on behalf of the children, reminding Ava that she is usually the first to leave school at the end of the day. Further, when Ava does not relent in her pursuit of assisting with the step team, Barbara and Melissa speak directly with Janine. Though there is an element of gossip in their dialog, they are driven by their care for the girls on the step team and their desire for the girls to not be let down. Conversely, when the girls successfully complete their performance, Ava praises them directly and the little girls beam, demonstrating how Black girls are in fact worthy of admiration. However, there are moments when hegemonic ideology about the ways that Black girls are perceived are reflected on the show. The first visual that

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we see of the steppers is of a little Black girl doing a back-bend. It is only when Janine is having the girls practice the original routine that the young girls’ movements are policed. However, in the moments when they are simply being, the little girls are able to be silly and dance. Even when the girls should be focused and instead perform TikTok dances with Janine saying “no TikTok dances,” the girls are still giggling. They know that it is a safe environment for them to goof off. However, when the girls on the step team are finally about to perform for the school, Janine tells the teachers who are in attendance at the show to look away when the girls get to a part of the routine that is “risqué.” Though it is not stated explicitly, this behavior reinforces the belief that Black girls’ dancing must come with a disclaimer. It upholds the perception that Black girls know more about adult topics and even sex (Epstein, 2017), although one can argue that Janine made this statement as someone who is aware of the presence of the camera and how young Black girls are generally perceived. Communities in School Throughout the episode, several step scenes portray what community in school signifies, particularly in an inner city, predominantly Black publicschool setting. As previously stated, Janine is seen reinforcing structure with her step master teaching style, ultimately policing the bodies of young Black girls. Contrastingly, Ava’s teaching style as the step master reinforces the concept of community building with the girls through instances of gossiping. Ava engages in a form of gossip that has historically taken place in safe social settings for Black women, such as Black beauty shops and the Black church (Florini, 2015). The conversational nature of Ava and the girls while at school involves heavy use of Black cultural commonalities, such as Ava’s reference to a popular film—“I’m telling yall, it was like Bring It On but with Black people on both sides, so you know they ain’t gonna never make that movie”—and the students simultaneously breaking out in laughter suggesting that, through satire, they understand the underlying issues of race concerning screenplays. This exchange mimics the gossiping that takes place at historically significant Black social spaces where community is an integral component needed for the gossiping to take place (Florini, 2015). In several instances when speaking with the girls, Ava initiates conversation with them that resembles gossip. First, when Ava encourages the students to dish—“I got the tacos, now who got the tea?—one student responds, “I heard Miss Cooper is dating Mr. Peace and Coach Wilson.” During another scene, Ava is shown sitting “criss-cross applesauce” with the girls eating and gossiping even more while they prepare for step practice. This time Ava shares her experience attending the BET program 106 & Park and jokingly

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reveals information about the time she spent with the Black music show’s cohost, Terrance J. As Ava and the girls begin to grow a tight bond, Janine is seemingly disappointed because the girls are enjoying step class with Ava more than her. She reveals to her coworkers Gregory (Tyler James Williams) and Jacob (Chris Perfetti) that “it just hurts that they didn’t choose me.” Janine goes on to say that she envisioned step class as a place of belonging and fun for the girls, no matter what hardships they faced in their home lives, but she had to come to terms with them finding that space with Ava. Once Janine finishes admitting this, the camera veers to the hallway where Ava and the girls can be seen walking in a pack, engaging in more gossip as Ava details her experience dating NBA star Allen Iverson, and the girls and Ava all break out in laughter together. Through Ava’s satirical life recollections, which mimic gossiping, Ava has broken down barriers of the hierarchical orders between students, teachers, and the principal, contributing to aspects of community building in school. Through gossip, Ava has also conveyed how language can be used to challenge cultural norms that suggest Black children should not converse with adults or, more specifically, joke with adults (Johnson, 2022). We see other representations of communities in school signified in this episode. During a step class scene, Janine has students on the stage practicing their structured step routine to a song with a modern beat, but no vocals. Janine is gazing at the students as they practice their routine, ensuring that it is done correctly and precisely. Ava disrupts the routine, telling Janine the step she came up with and the music chosen are “wack.” When Ava says to Janine, “How did you manage to make stepping dorky? Somebody put on some good music,” one student responds, “Like Cardi?” and Ava answers, “Great minds. Let’s move this to the floor. We’re going to need some room.” Ava also suggests that moving to the floor, having room to all dance together unstructured, and eating snacks at the same time will aid in all the students’ bonding, while Janine suggests bonding takes place through the students having structure and discipline during step practice. During this scene, Ava repositions the students from the stage to the gym floor. From the camera’s angle, Ava and the students can now be seen at equal levels practicing the routine together, Ava included. In this moment, Ava disrupts hierarchical structures, signified by kinetic movement of the students on the stage, enforced by Janine. Cultural scholars have suggested that social identities are signaled, formed, and negotiated through bodily movements (Desmond, 1993). Dancing in a Eurocentric context is regarded as a pastime, entertainment, or an art form; racially marginalized groups’ dance forms are not considered as such (Desmond, 1993). Janine reinforces this Eurocentric context during step class when she teaches step from The Big Book of Step, focusing on structure and discipline and not including the important Black

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cultural characteristics needed for stepping. Although Janine condemns it, Ava challenges this discourse when incorporating these Black cultural characteristics into step class, such as the students dancing freely, doing their routine off the stage, and practicing to Cardi B’s music. Additionally, the step class allowed gender discourses to be challenged. During the first step practice, when Janine is the only step master, the class is composed of Black girls. Once Ava joins as step master, we can see a young boy join the step team, and Ava affirms the inclusion of the student by stating, “Ladies and Jeremiah, get in formation.” Jeremiah (James McNamara) joining the step team is another example of counter-hegemonic discourses displayed throughout the episode because different dance styles as art forms are predominantly performed by women and girls (Desmond, 1993). This form of counter-hegemonic discourse also signifies the role of community building in schools specifically by Black women. The inner-city public school setting embraced Jeremiah into this space, thus breaking powerful barriers and cultural norms. The concept of space and place was an integral component of this episode that highlights the important role of community. The teacher’s lounge is the first setting shown in the episode, where teachers, principal, and janitor alike all participate in a discussion about what their “favorite” day of the week. The conversation begins with Melissa, but we see Ava interact with the teachers while making her coffee; even the janitor, Mr. Johnson (William Stanford Davis), identifies his favorite day. Later, this space is seen again where teachers are eating lunch and discussing their favorite pizza joints in Philly. Lastly, the role of community was also explicitly shown among the school staff. At the step show, Ava leaves due to challenges her elderly grandmother is experiencing. Although Janine was the only staff member aware of Ava’s family challenges, the staff bands together to stall for time, distracting the students. At this moment, Mr. Johnson, the janitor, emerges as “Mr. Johnson, the magician,” entertaining the students with magic tricks to ensure Ava has enough time to figure out her situation. The transformation of power is distributed throughout the school community, and different roles are enacted to ultimately help maintain and uplift the school community.

BLACK MOCKUMENTARIES AS COUNTERHEGEMONIC DISCOURSES Stuart Hall (1981) stated that the “media’s main sphere of operations is the production and transformation of ideologies” (p. 28). He also explained the differences between language and ideology, in his assertion that language is the primary vehicle in which ideological discourses are (re)produced and

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transformed. Media produce and reproduce representations of the social world, which helps us understand how the world works and why it works the way it does. Media construct a definition of what race is and define the problem of race (Hall, 1981). For example, Collins (1990) theorized that media construct and perpetuate controlling images of Black women. However, Hall (1977) stated that ideology is “composed of texts that are not closed” (p. 333), and “counter-tendencies” often appear in the fringe or cracks of dominant forms. We conceptualize Abbott Elementary’s “Step Class” as what Hall describes as a “counter-tendency” or a counter-hegemonic practice that denaturalizes dominant ideologies of race, gender, and public-school education in inner-city districts. More specifically, we analyzed the multimodal discursive activity in “Step Class,” and how it created conditions for the oppositional gaze as counter-hegemonic practice. One way that “Step Class” denaturalizes ideologies of race and gender is through its use of satire to reject controlling images of Black women on television. As mentioned earlier, satire is only effective when audiences are in on the joke (Birthisel & Martin, 2013). The mockumentary genre, the position of the camera, and perspective of the audience play an integral role in ensuring that the audiences understand the joke in “Step Class.” For example, when Ava shows Janine the new step routine, the camera pans out from Janine stepping in practice to her stepping into the teacher’s lounge. In the lounge, Melissa and Barbara are shocked by Janine’s stepping and still skeptical of Ava’s involvement. In response to their skepticism, Janine says, “Maybe Ava hasn’t risen to expectations because no one believes in her. Ava’s a good leader. I believe in her.” As Janine looks into the camera, audiences are seamlessly brought into mutual understanding of the joke. In this exchange, Janine acknowledges Ava as the Sapphire, or the missing, inactive principal. Through the camera’s angle and Janine’s gaze, audiences are made aware of the joke and the challenge to her colleagues to think of themselves as active agents in the school community who play an integral role in helping Ava understand who she is as a leader and how she leads as principal. Satire is often used to grapple with various social issues on television (Birthisel & Martin, 2013). Abbott Elementary as a television series more broadly deals with systemic issues of social capital, funding, and equity as it relates to public education. In this episode, satire is used to critique and challenge various systems of power. For example, it uses the concepts of space and place to democratize power. Audiences see this in various ways throughout the episode. For example, the teacher’s lounge is shown as a safe space where everyone, including principal, teachers, and custodians alike, can actively participate. Similarly, as mentioned in the analysis, the step team’s physical transition from the stage to the floor to step, sing, and dance with Ava transforms step practice into a nontraditional educational place that

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affirms positive development and racial identity for Black girls, which Robinson and Ward (1991) highlight as “resistance for liberation” strategies (p. 89). bell hooks (1992) argues that “looking and looking back, [B]lack women involve ourselves in a process whereby we see our history as counter-memory, using it as a way to know the present and invent the future” (p. 282). In this research, we employ the oppositional gaze coupled with Collins’ (2000) concept of self-definition to examine how “Step Class” critiques and challenges existing power dynamics to reject controlling images of Black women and public education in marginalized communities and, most importantly, creates alternative definitions and representation. Black women are represented as human, with complex ranges of emotions. In contrast to the Strong Black Woman controlling image, Ava is shown as a democratic leader who, unlike Janine, prioritizes the girls’ freedom of expression and body motion as a means to structure and organization. Ava makes room for structure and play during the step team’s various practice sessions and final performance, which Janine eventually appreciates and acknowledges as valuable for the step team. The audience also sees how Ava helps Janine make room for both structure and play for herself, as seen in the last scene of the episode with both Black women stepping in motion together. Similarly, although audiences see Ava’s attempt to uphold the Strong Black Woman stereotype by trying to “silently” cope with the responsibility of caring for a sick family member while serving as the school’s principal, Janine unveils Ava’s struggle, albeit for selfish reasons. As Janine storms out to find Ava and confront her about missing the step show, the camera shows Janine as a witness to Ava’s role as caretaker and nurturer. In this one scene, “Step Class” represents Black women as leaders, nurturers, and caregivers, in their families and at their jobs, conveying the complexity and multiplicity of Black womanhood, especially in professional spaces. While Ava and Janine’s characters both challenge controlling images, it’s important to note that our analysis shows that their characters also perpetuate dominant ideologies of race and gender. For example, Ava can be conceptualized as what Hall (1981) defines as the clown or entertainer. In his writing on racist ideologies in media, he defines the clown/entertainer as one who is humorous and physically graceful on screen, and particularly dangerous, because it’s not always clear if audiences are laughing with or at the entertainer/clown. This also speaks to the danger of using satire to grapple with issues of race and other social issues, because as stated earlier, it is only effective when the audiences are in on the joke. Although satire is complex and can be difficult to land, our analysis shows that “Step Class” uses satire to also convey alternative narratives about public education in marginalized communities. The episode shows a diverse community in school where power is (re)distributed among students, teachers,

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and staff alike, and freedom of expression is critical pedagogy. Literature suggests that mockumentaries do not offer solutions to educational problems or promote change, and instead overemphasize the challenges faced in school settings (Kantor et al., 2000). Our research suggests that Abbott Elementary’s “Step Class” is not just promoting change but enacting it. Critical and cultural theorists have placed significance on media as a “powerful pedagogical agent for representing the world” (Kincheloe, 2005, p. 80). Multimodal CDA centers how discourse reproduces and challenges dominant ideologies (Jancsary et al., 2009). Our research investigated how spoken language, visual and graphic modes of discourse in Abbott Elementary’s “Step Class” worked together to contest dominant ideologies and representations of Black women and public schools primarily serving Black students. As hooks (1992) stated in her explanation of “black female spectatorship”: “We do more than resist. We create alternative texts that are not solely reactions. As critical spectators, black women participate in a broad range of looking relations, contest, resist, revision, interrogate, and invent on multiple levels” (p. 280). This episode, produced and written by a Black woman (Quinta Brunson), with three central Black women characters, uses satire to represent a world to audiences where Black women are human, complex social agents, Black girls are free and affirmed, and public schools are diverse and democratized communities.

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Hill, M. (2020). Funny “haha” or funny because I’m black? assessing viewers’ reactions to chappelle’s show. The Southern Communication Journal, 85(4), 209–218. https://doi​.org​/10​.1080​/1041794X​.2020​.1797146 hooks, b. (1984). Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center. Boston: Southend Press. hooks, b. (1992). The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators. Boston: Southend Press. Hough, A. (1981). Trials and tribulations—thirty years of sitcom. In R. Adler (Ed.) Understanding Television. New York: Preager. Jacobs, C. E. (2016). Developing the “oppositional gaze”: Using critical media pedagogy and Black feminist thought to promote Black girls’ identity development. The Journal of Negro Education, 85(3), 225–238. Jancsary, D., Hollerer, M. A., & Meyer, R. E. (2009). Critical analysis of visual and multimodal texts. In R. Wodak & M. Meyer (Eds.), Methods of Critical Discourse Studies, 3rd edition. (pp. 1–22). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Johnson, A. (2022). Grown Black woman voice: A framework for existence, persistence, Resistance in Higher Education and Beyond. Journal of African American Women and Girls in Education, 2(2), 86–100. Kantor, K., Kantor, N. L., Kantor, J., Eaton, M., & Kantor, B. (2000). “I will not expose the ignorance of the faculty”: The Simpsons as school satire. In Images of Schoolteachers in America (pp. 197–212). New York: Routledge. Kelly, R. N. E. (2014). Ha, Ha! Made You Look... at Yourself: The “Animated MockumDentary” Manufactures Dissent. Doctoral dissertation, Long Island University, The Brooklyn Center. Khanna, N., & Harris, C. A. (2015). Discovering race in a “post-racial” world: Teaching race through primetime television. Teaching Sociology, 43(1), 39–45. https:// doi​.org​/10​.1177​/0092055X14553710 Kincheloe, J. L. (2005). Critical Constructivism Primer (Vol. 2). New York: Peter Lang. Komsa, P. (2018). The American Tradition of Social Satire in South Park Television Series. Polish Journal of English Studies, 4(1), 57–77. https://proxy​.library​ .upenn​.edu​/login​?url​=https:/​/www​.proquest​.com​/scholarly journa​ls/am​erica​n-tra​ ditio​n-soc​ial-s​atire​-sout​h-par​k/doc​view/​26234​55760​/se-2​ Kress, G. R. (2010). Multimodality: A Social Semiotic take on Contemporary Communication. New York: Routledge. ​​Lambert, C. A. (2017). Post-racial public relations on primetime television: How scandal represents olivia pope. Public Relations Review, 43(4), 750–754. https:// doi​.org​/10​.1016​/j​.pubrev​.2017​.07​.004 Mast, J. (2009). New directions in hybrid popular television: a reassessment of television mock-documentary. Media, Culture & Society, 31(2), 231–250. Mastro, D. E., & Robinson, A. L. (2000). Cops and crooks: Images of minorities on primetime television. Journal of Criminal Justice, 28(5), 385–396. https://doi​.org​ /10​.1016​/S0047​-2352(00)00053-2 Maas, J. (2022, Sept. 22). TV ratings: ‘Abbott Elementary’ season 2 premiere steady with spring finale on heels of Emmy wins. Variety.

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https://variety​.com​/2022​/tv​/news​/abbott​-elementary​ - season​ - 2​ - premiere​ - ratings steady-1235379705/. Mastro, D. E., & Robinson, A. L. (2000). Cops and crooks: Images of minorities on primetime television. Journal of Criminal Justice, 28(5), 385–396. https://doi​.org​ /10​.1016​/S0047​-2352(00)00053-2 Nielsen (2011). What Time is really primetime? https://www​.nielsen​.com​/insights​ /2011​/what​-time​-is​-really​-primetime/ Nelson, A. M. (1996). The objectification of Julia: Text and contexts of Black women in American television comedies. Feminist Generations Conference, Bowling Green, OH. Sink, A., & Mastro, D. (2017). Depictions of gender on primetime television: A quantitative content analysis. Mass Communication & Society, 20(1), 3–22. https://doi​ .org​/10​.1080​/15205436​.2016​.1212243 Thompson, E. (2007). Comedy verité? The observational documentary meets the televisual sitcom. The Velvet Light Trap, 60(1), 63–72. Thompson, E. (2009). “:I am not down with that”: King of the hill and sitcom satire. Journal of Film and Video, 61(2), 38–51. https://doi​.org​/10​.1353​/jfv​.0​.0029 Tukachinsky, R., Mastro, D., & Yarchi, M. (2015). Documenting portrayals of Race/ Ethnicity on primetime television over a 20-year span and their association with national-level Racial/Ethnic attitudes. Journal of Social Issues, 71(1), 17–38. https://doi​.org​/10​.1111​/josi​.12094 Palmer, J. (1987). The Logic of the Absurd: On Film and Television Comedy. London: BFI. Robinson, S. J., & Rich, M. D. (2017). B(l)acklash: Tamera, Tia, and the “white man’s whore,” Critical Studies in Media Communication, 34(5), 464–479. Robinson, T. L., & Ward, J. V. (1991). A belief in self far greater than any one’s disbelief: cultivating resistance among African American girls. In C. Gilligan, C. A. Rogers, & D. Tolman (Eds.), Women, Girls, and Psychotherapy: Reframing Resistance (pp. 87–103). New York: Haworth. Schneider, M. (2022). Quinta Brunson on winning emmys with Sheryl Lee Ralph, why ‘Abbott Elementary’ wasn’t ready to be named best comedy yet and changing the stakes in season 2. Variety. https://variety​.com​/2022​/tv​/features​/quinta​-brunson abbot​t-ele​menta​ry-em​mys-s​eason​-2-12​35372​493/ Vidmar, N., & Rokeach, M. (1974). Archie Bunker’s bigotry: A study in selective perception and exposure. Journal of Communication, 24(1), 36–47. Walton, D. (2013). Essence’s images study: Bonus insights. http://www​.essence​.com​ /2013​/10​/07essence​-images​-study​-bonus​-insights Wilson, A. (2022). Where did you go?! Trans-diegetic address and formal innovation in Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s television series Fleabag. Critical Studies in Television, 17(4), 415–435. https://doi​.org​/10​.1177​/17496020221108923 Wodak, R., & Meyer, M. (2009). Critical discourse studies: History, agenda, theory and methodology. In R. Wodak & M. Meyer (Eds.), Methods of Critical Discourse Studies, 3rd edition (pp. 1–22). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Chapter 6

Squid Game South Korea’s View of Itself and the West Yasue Kuwahara and Bo-Kyung Kim Kirby

Squid Game is a South Korean drama series created by Hwang Dong-hyuk (2021) for Netflix. Released worldwide on September 17, 2021, it reached the No. 1 position in 90 countries in 10 days, became Netflix’s biggest hit later in the year, and remained one of the most-watched shows as of September 2022 (Tan, 2021; Taylor, 2022). The series was critically acclaimed, too, nominated and earning numerous awards for the director, the creative staff, and the actors. Particularly noteworthy is the fact that Squid Game was the first non-English television series, and director Hwang and actress Lee Yoo-mi (who played Ji-yeong) were the first Asians and Koreans to win the Prime-Time Emmy Awards. Other actors, such as Lee Jung-jae (Gi-hun) and O Yeong-su (Il-nam), also became the first Asians to receive other prestigious awards, including the Golden Globe and the Screen Actors Guild awards (Squid Game Awards, 2022). While South Korean films and television series have firmly established their place in the global market in recent years, what made Squid Game a popular and critical success? It has been widely pointed out that the dystopian drama that combines thrills, horror, violence, and humor represents a neoliberal capitalist society—where a handful of people hold power and privilege and the rest are trapped in the system—appeals to global audiences that saw their experiences reflected in the dramatic series (Lee, 2021; Lee, 2021). To those who know South Korea (Korea henceforth), it is a parody of Korean society during the past thirty years that has given priority to neoliberalism over traditional cultural values. The rise of South Korea not only in the global economy but in the entertainment industry for the past two decades is remarkable. Its economy is the fourth largest in Asia and the tenth in the world, with Hyundai Motors Company ranking third in the world’s vehicle 105

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market (IANS, 2022) and Samsung competing with Apple for first place in the smartphone market (Team, 2022; Song, 2018). The Korean Wave, which refers to the popularity of Korean popular culture overseas, began in the neighboring countries of China and Japan in the 1990s and has expanded its reach to six continents, changing the flow of global popular culture, which was long dominated by the U.S. entertainment industry (Ter Molen, 2014). Behind the glamorous image created through TV dramas, K-pop idol groups and advertising content, however, are issues that challenge traditional values and are changing Korean society. Squid Game director Hwang presents a satirical view of such society by contrasting nostalgic recollections of Korea during the industrializing period and the changes caused by neoliberalism, including references to historical incidents, such as the 2009 Ssang Yong Motor strike and the financial crisis of 1997 (Minsun, 2021). Thus, it offers a special meaning to the Korean audience and those who know Korean society and its economy. This chapter analyzes the representation of South Korea, including its relationship with the West, through a close reading of Squid Game as a satirical text. The results of the analysis are presented in the context of the issues facing the country today. The next section discusses changes that took place during the past sixty years and the issues that ensued and became the fodder for the satire in Squid Game.

THE TRANSFORMATION OF KOREA Known as the “Miracle on the Han River,” South Korea’s transformation from an underdeveloped country to a modern industrial capitalist state took place under the military government of Park Chung Hee (1961–1979) (Nilsson-Wright, 2021). People migrated from rural to urban areas en masse to escape the drudgery of agriculture and work in the emerging manufacturing industry. A large number of white-collar, managerial, and technical workers produced by this shift began to form the middle class (Koo, 2020). The emerging middle class supported the Park government’s economic policies while increasingly feeling uneasy under its repressive rules. The middleclass opposition to the authoritarian regimes of Park and Chun Doo-hwan, who seized power through a military coup following the assassination of Park, became a campaign for democracy in the 1980s and ended the term of Chun as president in 1987. Having experienced the success of the 1988 Seoul Olympics that raised Korea’s international stature, the middle class— an aspiration for the masses—not only increased its numbers but enjoyed unprecedented prosperity for the following ten years. The Asian financial crisis of 1997 that started in Thailand reached South Korea in no time and became a major blow to the middle class, resulting in “huge unemployment,

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massive layoffs, widespread bankruptcies, frozen wages, and a growing number of homeless people” (Koo, 2020, p. 109). Due to the intervention by the International Monetary Fund, the Korean economy quickly recovered but the experience with the financial crisis led to a fundamental restructuring of not only the business system but also Korean society, establishing neoliberalism as a dominant ideology (Koo, 2020). As companies began to reward employees based on merits instead of seniority as they had traditionally done, the middle class was divided into two groups—a small number of privileged workers and the rest who never regained their precrisis earnings—and the gap between them kept widening. This inequality did not exist only in the economic sphere but extended to social and cultural spheres as well. According to Koo, such inequality can be observed in heightened consumerism, such as the consumption of imported luxury items and the growth of “well-being” culture (an obsession with health and beauty) achieved through the purchase of healthy foods, cooking appliances, gym membership, and various services, including plastic surgeries, as well as the emergence of Gangnam as the upper-middle-class residential area with shops specializing in luxury items. The “Luxury Hall” of the Galleria Department Store, an exclusive retailer of world-famous fashion brands, opened in September 1997, when most people were suffering from the financial crisis, and its prosperity has only increased since then (Koo, 2020). Education is another area where inequality is evident and maintained. Korea has the highest percentage of college graduates per population (70%) among the world’s most economically sound countries as higher education is deemed essential to success in society; the most prestigious universities are perceived to increase chances for success because of their extensive alumni networks. Starting at an early age, children are sent to private tutoring classes after school to prepare for the entrance exams at those universities (Yoon, 2021). Ironically, these private classes mostly exist in Gangnam, thus solidifying the dominance of the privileged middle class in prestigious universities and subsequently in society. Another aspect of Korean education with its focus on globalization is the high value it places on the knowledge of and ability to speak English. Spending time in English-speaking countries, such as England, the United States, Canada, and Australia, is essential to achieve the desired language competency—the longer a child stays in these countries and the younger a child is, the better. It is even common for a child and mother to move to another country while the father remains and works in Korea to finance their overseas stay (Finch & Kim, 2020). Needless to say, it requires financial resources, and the cost is prohibitive to most middle-class families. In reality, however, many of them feel that they have no choice but to buy luxury items, participate in the well-being culture, and send their

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children to a foreign country to keep up with the middle-class lifestyle, thus ending up in huge debt and further polarizing the middle class (Kim, 2020). The group that was most affected by neoliberalism was those born after the mid-1980s. Starting with the “880,000 Won Generation,” named for the meager earnings available to recent college graduates, they have been labeled variously by mass media as the spec generation and the dirt spoon generation. What these labels indicate is the frustration these young people felt about a society that did not allow them to achieve middle-class status despite their compliance with the expectations set by their parents and grandparents. For instance, the 880,000 Won Generation label referred to youth who earned only 880,000 won (approximately $900), a fraction of the average wage, from temporary or irregular jobs despite their college degrees. Facing such reality, college students began to engage in ferocious resume-building activities to make their “specifications,” that is, characteristics, desirable to employers. They were called the spec generation who, exhausted from their activities to obtain desirable skills and knowledge, sometimes died from overwork. As the lack of secure jobs continued into the new millennium, some students gave up on spec building, dropped out of college, and resigned from having middle-class families of their own. Ultimately, these youths were deemed to have been born with dirt spoons in their mouths, not silver or gold (Cho & Stark, 2020). But for the next generation of young Koreans, the label has become the FIRE (financially independent, retire early) tribe. The goal of this generation is to “create a sufficient cash reserve and a stable revenue stream through investment in cryptocurrencies, stocks, real estate or some combination of the three” (Koo, 2022) so that they can spend the rest of their lives worry-free. This illustrates the zeitgeist of Korean society today—get rich quick. Needless to say, the FIRE tribe is inspired by the rare cases of success seen on social media. Of course, such success is an exception rather than a rule, thus most of them fall into debt. Those who do not achieve their goals often seek a quick solution to their financial problems through gambling, often making their financial situations worse (Koo, 2022; Son, 2021; Gene, 2021). This generation has expressed increasing frustration about their circumstances, including a sense of fatality, sometimes in the form of anger toward women and foreigners. Many young men are angry toward women, and some think that young women should complete military service like young men, and they believe women are receiving preferred treatment as a result of the feminist movement (something most Korean women would dispute). Another reason why young men are perceived to be so angry is a belief that many women look down on men who are not good-looking or are poor or uneducated. The controversy surrounding the murder of a young woman in a unisex restroom near the Gangnam subway station in April 2016 illustrates

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such anger. While the murderer said that he had stabbed her to death because of his inability to acquire a girlfriend, some criticized the victim for drinking at night (Cho & Stark, 2020). This reflects the gendered norms in Korea that resulted from a rigid hierarchy based on Confucianism and have been maintained as the core of its societal culture despite democratization and capitalism. Historically, women were expected to serve their fathers, husbands, and eldest sons (Kim, 2020). Such a perception continues, and women are marginalized in the labor market, and their talent is underutilized. The employment rates, earnings, and leadership positions among women are lower than those of men even though women’s participation in tertiary education is higher than men’s. Furthermore, the persistent gender norms still prescribe child-rearing as a woman’s responsibility, and this causes many women to leave the job market when they bear children. Unfortunately for the mothers who aspire to work, the gendered job market makes it virtually impossible for them to go back later in their lives. Frustrated by such gendered socioeconomic norms, an increasing number of young women are delaying marriage or choosing no marriage, and this phenomenon has caused a change in the family—a fundamental unit of society. Korea has the lowest fertility rate among the world’s developed countries (Kim, 2020; Finch & Kim, 2020). As the Korean economy was globalized during the 1980s and 1990s, the country began to attract migrant and immigrant laborers from other parts of Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America who were willing to work in the menial jobs left by the Korean middle class. In addition, with the urbanization of Korean society, there were not enough women willing to marry farmers in the rural areas, and foreign brides from China, Vietnam, and other Southeast Asian countries were brought in to fill the void, creating a “multicultural family,” which constituted 20% of all families in 2020 (Kim, 2020; Ahn, 2018). Integration of migrant workers and multicultural families has not been an easy task for Koreans who have historically believed in “Koreanness”—“exclusive association with a single ethnicity” (Lee, 2020, p. 157). Many Koreans believe that they are descendants of a god’s son and, therefore, need to maintain pure bloodlines. Thus, they look down on foreigners, especially people from poor countries. Many of the immigrants have been treated very poorly at work and on the streets (Yoon, 2021). Additionally, North Koreans who fled their country for better prospects in the South are also treated badly due to their unique political situation, their inability to understand South Korean culture, and their unstable economic situation. Polarization of the middle class, overvaluation of education, disenfranchised youth, inequality between sexes, and discrimination against non-Koreans are the vital issues facing South Korean society today. Needless to say, these issues are interrelated and make it difficult for many to thrive in their own country (Jung, 2021). The satire in Squid Game focuses on these issues.

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SQUID GAME The first season of Squid Game, named for a children’s playground game, consists of nine episodes with each episode approximately 60-minute long except for Episode 8 which is only 33 minutes. In terms of structure, the first and second episodes introduce the issues surrounding Korean society, which were discussed earlier, and the following several episodes focus on these issues individually through the interactions between the main characters. In the opening of the series, people who are deeply in debt are invited to the six-day game competition that promises a huge sum of money (45.6 billion won/$38.4 million) for the winner. Four hundred fifty-six people who accepted the invitation are picked up by a minivan, rendered unconscious, and taken to an unknown island where they are watched by armed, maskwearing soldiers in pink jumpsuits. Contestants are instructed to play one game a day. All but one game are traditional children’s games well known in Korea: Red Light, Green Light—Participants move forward to a goal line while observed by a mechanical doll. They lose when they fail to stop on red, and their movement is detected. Ppopgi (Dalgona)—Participants must take out the shape in the middle of the round honeycomb toffee candy without breaking it. Tug of War—Two opposing teams pull the rope to tug the other team off a bridge. Marbles—Played in pairs, teams aim to get all of their opponents’ marbles. Glass Tile Game—This is the only game that does not have real-world origins. Participants must choose glass tiles that hold their weight to pass to the other side of a chasm and avoid death. Squid Game—The name comes from the shape of a playing field drawn on the ground that resembles that of a squid. The offensive team must reach a specified spot, and the defensive team must stop it. It is the most violent game of all, and director Hwang used it as the name of the drama series for this reason (Stevenson, 2022). Despite the innocent nature of children’s games, those who fail in the program’s games die violent deaths or are immediately shot to death by masked soldiers dressed in pink. These deadly games are played for the pleasure of four English-speaking billionaires called VIPs whose identities are not known because of the masks they wear. The entire competition is controlled by the Front Man, a mysterious Korean man. While all the participants except the winner are dead by the end, the drama series takes an unexpected turn as it is revealed that one of the participants is the mastermind behind the

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competition. An ambiguous conclusion of the final episode leaves a possibility for a much anticipated second season. In the first episode, the viewer gets a glimpse of contemporary Korean society through the protagonist Seong Gi-hun. Having been laid off from a car company due to the company’s mismanagement, he fell out of the middle class, got divorced from his wife, lost custody of his daughter, and lives with his mother who, despite her advanced age and health issues, still works to support the two of them. His income as a part-time chauffeur is hardly enough to pay the money he owes to the bank and to loan sharks. He steals money from his mother and spends it on horse racing, hoping that he will win a big. When he wins some (about 456 USD), it is stolen by a North Korean pickpocket (a woman who later becomes a key player in the games), and he cannot even afford a birthday present for his daughter who is going to move to the United States with her mother and stepfather. Gi-hun’s willingness to do anything to earn money is shown through a street hustler’s card game at a subway station, which leads him to the get-rich-quick survival competition of children’s games. Gi-hun, an antiheroic protagonist, represents disenfranchised youth born after the mid-1980s. Although he did not go to college, he is very proud of his childhood friend Cho Sang-woo, who graduated from Seoul National University at the top of his class and works as an international broker. Sang-woo’s accomplishment is particularly noteworthy because he is from Ssangmumdong in Gangbuk where, unlike in Gangnam, private tutoring classes are not available. Ssangmum-dong is in the Dobong district, which has been part of Seoul since 1963 during the migration to urban areas. Today, it is seen as the place for the impoverished but, because of its historic buildings and alleyways, also is viewed with nostalgia and a sense of warmth. Therefore, it is a shock to Gi-hun to see Sang-woo participating in the competition. Other people Gi-hun meets in the first episode are the Norse Korean pickpocket, Kang Sae-byeok, a Pakistani migrant worker, Ali Abdul, who saves his life during the first game, and an old man with a brain tumor, Oh Il-nam. Neoliberal Capitalism and the Get-Rich-Quick Zeitgeist The satire in Squid Game ridicules the get-rich-quick zeitgeist prevalent among the public, especially younger generations. Money-worshipping behavior prevails in a society where many young Koreans are perceived to be willing to do anything to become rich. They dream about getting huge sums of money at once with not much effort through things like the lotto, gambling, or through investments (Lau, 2021). In the drama, 456 people who are deeply in debt are desperate enough to participate in a mysterious competition, knowing that they might not survive. Immediately, more than

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half of them (250 participants) are shot to death by armed guards when they fail to keep still in a simple children’s game, Red Light and Green Light. Realizing the risk involved, those who survived the first game vote to end the competition, but 187 of them return to play more because the competition offers them the hope of winning a big sum of money in just five days while the society outside offers no such hope. The returning players bet their lives on the competitions as if they were betting on horse racing. The irony is that they are the race horses and, unlike horse racing, the loss is irreversible as it results in their own demise. Other ironies abound in Squid Game. When children play their version of Squid Game and other games, they use the words “Live” and “Die” in a playful manner (as seen in the first episode), but when grown-ups in the show play them, they actually live or die. The fear of death each player feels is undeniable, but it is overcome every time large sums of money are added to an enormous plexiglass piggy bank that hangs ominously over their heads—the prize for the game’s survivor. Astute audience members will note that the coffins used to bury dead players resemble a birthday present Gi-hun gives to his daughter in the first episode, decorated with ribbons and a big bow. Gi-hun’s present is a pistol-shaped cigarette lighter, an odd gift that he, in yet another irony, needed help from a child to claw the random prize out of a children’s arcade game. When we see the dead players burned in their coffins, it seems as if death were a similarly odd gift to those who are stricken with debt. The colorful settings for the deadly games enhance the show’s irony. The room the players go through before and after the games is painted in pastel colors, colors more likely for a nursery because they connote softness, calmness, and relaxation. They make a sharp contrast to the deadly settings of the games, represented in bold colors of blood red and green (the color of the players’ uniforms) as well as black in “Tug of War” (Episode 4) and “Stepping the Glass Bridge” (Episode 8). The Red Light and Green Light game in Episode 1 is played under a bright blue sky. Additionally, the recognizable music used in the series creates similar effects. The players wake up to Hayden’s Trumpet Concerto and get an explanation of the games while Johann Strauss II’s The Blue Danube plays. The latter accompanies the players to and from the games. The mismatch between well-known classical music pieces and deadly games enhances the craziness of the games and the get-rich-quick zeitgeist. While all the players in the competitions represent the problem with debt and the notion of getting rich quickly, another interesting group of characters is the pink-clad soldiers who work to facilitate the games and monitor the players (Schmidt, 2021). They operate under strict rules—they must wear masks all the time, they must follow the schedule, and they cannot leave the game site. Conversations among the group are prohibited, and they can

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answer only when addressed by their superiors. Their rooms look like prison cells with only cots, toilets, and washbasins monitored by a camera. Unlike the rest of the game facility, the colors of their rooms are white and chrome. If they violate the rules, the pink soldiers are killed. In Episode 5, when Player 111 kills a soldier and escapes, another soldier who pursues him observes that while losing a player is a problem, losing a soldier is not. This soldier is afraid of the repercussion resulting from the loss of a player and even offers his help to cover up the murder by burning the body, demonstrating that the soldiers are scared of the game organizer to whom they are replaceable. Who are these pink soldiers? Throughout the series, there are a few occasions when they are seen without masks and uniforms and they all look like typical Korean men—they are not different from the players. If the game players are trying to change their fate by gambling their lives because of the get-richquick zeitgeist, the pink soldiers represent those who accept their situation in an oppressive society. The show’s most sarcastic view of neoliberal capitalism is expressed in the game organizer’s insistence on fairness, equal opportunity, volunteer participation, and strict adherence to the rules. In Episode 1, asked why pink soldiers wear masks, a high-ranking soldier tells the participants that it is the rule not to disclose their identities “for the sake of fairness and secrecy.” He also reminds them that participation is strictly voluntary. When the survivors of the first game complain about the cruelty they just experienced as they watched hundreds of the competitors shot to death, the same pink soldier tells them that the organizer’s intention is not to harm them or collect debts but to offer an opportunity to win the prize money. Then he says that it is the rule that the players cannot refuse to play the game or leave the game and, if they break the rule, they will be eliminated just like those who were killed in the first game. In Episode 5, titled “A Fair World,” the Front Man who oversees the games tells the soldier who offered help to Player 111 to cover up a murder in order to protect himself: You’ve ruined the most crucial element in this place. Equality. Everyone is equal in these games. Players compete in a fair game under the same conditions. These people suffered from inequality and discrimination out in the world, and we offer them one last chance to fight on equal footing and win. But you have broken that principle. (Dong-hyuk, 2021)

The next episode opens with the players on their way to the fourth game who are greeted by the dead bodies of Player 111 and four pink soldiers hanging in the mid-air with this announcement: “You are witnessing the fates of those who broke the rules of this world for their own benefit and furthermore tainted the pure ideology of this world. Here you are all equal, with equal opportunity and no discrimination.” The line is not so different from the

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defense of inequality offered in many capitalist societies (including those in the West), where the oppressed recognize that it is just the defense of an ideology that helps those in power and not the oppressed; the announcement says, “you are equal,” not “we are equal.” The players are repeatedly told of the importance of the rules that ensure equality and fairness, but they know that, as Deok-su says in Episode 7, “There are no rules in hell.” The games are played by the rules set by the organizer for the enjoyment of the VIPs, the billionaire guests who witness the games. They are the chess pieces who drop off the board despite their will to survive. It is a microcosm of neoliberal capitalism, including South Korea’s political economy. Education, Religion, and Corruption The game players in the show come from all walks of life, including those who usually enjoy prestige in society. Squid Game proposes that they do not always deserve that respect and presents a critical view of the overvaluation of education in contemporary Korean society. The audience learns that after graduating from Seoul National University, Sang-woo got a job at a securities company and was the head of the investment team at the time of the competition. While his mother believed that he was in the United States for business, Sang-woo was actually in a small hotel in Seoul, hiding from the police who wanted him for an embezzlement charge. He invested money stolen from his clients, but it resulted in a 6 billion won (nearly 5 million USD) loss. Knowing the disappointment his mother would experience, Sang-woo considered suicide but instead decided to participate in the dangerous competition. His experience demonstrates that a good education does not promise a bright future. This is partly because of his background. Sang-woo is from an impoverished family (he represents the “dirt spoon” generation) and does not have any support in the form of networks from his family and relatives. Without networks, it is difficult to achieve success despite a good education. His experience underscores the problem of corruption inherent in Korean society. Getting into the best university, Seoul National University in the drama, is very difficult, but it guarantees a bright future for those who make it in the form of a relationship with alumni. This relationship is important in Asian countries that place the highest cultural value on group participation, but it often leads to corruption, which has been inherent in the industrialization of Korea, especially under the Park Jung Hee administration (NilssonWright, 2022). Even though it gradually improved among middle-level officials, corruption is still easily found among high-level officials, businessmen, and politicians, as seen in the impeachment of President Park Geun-hye in 2016 and the bribery allegations involving Air Bus and Korean Airlines in 2020. Such corruption is also illustrated in the program by a doctor (Player

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111) who removes organs from dead players for several pink soldiers who secretly sell them in the black market in exchange for inside information on the games, leading to their deaths. Squid Game also derides the hypocrisy of competition among spiritual institutions. South Korea today is a religious marketplace. In addition to three major religious groups—Buddhism, the Catholic Church, and the Protestant Church—there are numerous new religions as well as Confucianism and folk religion, which are generally perceived as customs or traditions rather than religious creeds (Baker, 2020). Interestingly, 56% of Koreans say that they have no religion while about 15% of them identify themselves as atheists (Religion, 2021; Population, 2021). What this means is that nearly 40% of Koreans consider themselves nonreligious but believe in some kind of god (or gods). Thus, both new and traditional religions compete to get their attention by, for instance, establishing schools or influencing politicians, leading to additional widespread corruption (Baker, 2020). In Squid Game, a Christian pastor (Player 244) maintains a holier-than-thou attitude and asks for forgiveness for the participants’ despicable acts by praying to God. In Episode 5, after surviving a tug-of-war, he says that he prays for the opposing team players who sacrificed their lives to save his team. Ji-yeong (Player 240) points out the hypocrisy: “Ridiculous, you killed them!” The theme of religious hypocrisy is also evident in the next episode when it is revealed that Ji-yeong was a victim of child molestation by her own father, a Christian pastor, who prayed for forgiveness after he had molested her. In the same episode, Player 244, also a pastor, refuses to team with women and an old man because the game requires that he risks his life and he says they are incapable of helping him. In Episode 7, the pastor’s selfishness under the disguise of his strong belief in God leads to his own demise. Becoming the first player in a competition on a glass bridge, he starts praying despite others’ urge to move on. When the player behind him attempts to overtake him, the minister pushes him down, saying with a grin on his face, “The judgment day has come, we are all going to hell!” He is then pushed down by the next player; the irony is apparent. Family, Mother, and Women Family plays a prominent role in Squid Game as in Korean society. Most of the characters are motivated to join the competition because of their families. Gi-hun was disappointed with himself when he realized that he might lose his daughter, who was moving to the United States with her mother and stepfather, which motivated him to join the competition. Realizing the deadly nature of the competition after the first game, he along with other participants votes to end the competition. Yet the need for his mother’s expensive surgery

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forces him to return to it. Exploited by his employer who did not pay him for six months, Ali joined the competition to send money to his parents in Pakistan and to take care of his wife and son in Korea. Sae-byeok’s goal is to reunite her family by getting her mother out of North Korea and her brother from a foster facility. She and Gi-hun promise to each other that the one of them who survives the game will take care of the other’s family. Il-nam misses his family and keeps looking for his house during an episode in which the players compete in the marble game. It is also a cultural belief that a mother is the center of a Korean family. She is a very strong figure who provides endless support (mentally and financially) to her children until they die—the ages of children do not matter. Most children expect that and do not show appreciation directly to their mothers even though they greatly appreciate it. The viewer sees this from the onset of the series. Gi-hun (age 47) asks his mother for more allowance, complaining that his original allowance of 2 won (20 USD) is too small. He even takes an ATM card from his mother’s hiding place and withdraws 50 won (500 USD) without guilt. Another example: Having survived the deadly competition, Gi-hun gets Sae-byeok’s brother out of a foster facility and leaves him with Sang-woo’s mother along with a suitcase full of money, thus fulfilling the promises to his competitors in the final games. Sang-woo’s mother lost her beloved son but gains a young boy who becomes a surrogate son, embodying a future. She is also a surrogate mother to Gi-hun after the death of his own mother. This is a symbolic conclusion that illustrates the significance of a mother with whom the future (and hope) is left. Interestingly, in an early episode, Sang-woo’s mother is seen gutting and cutting squids while talking proudly about her son to a customer in her fish store, ironically implying her power over the squid (and the game). It is also interesting to note that the only fathers we see are Gi-hun’s daughter’s stepfather (a minor character) and Oh Il-nam, who sometimes talks about his son. Another father whom we don’t see but hear about is Ji-yeong’s father, who molested her. Gi-hun’s ex-wife tells him that he has no right to be a father because he did not even attend the birth of their daughter. The absence of fathers also indicates the importance of mothers as a cornerstone of the family. Not only mothers but other women play active roles in Squid Game. Partly due to Confucianism deeply embedded in Korean society and culture and partly because of the traditional family-head system, women’s status was regarded as subordinate to men legally until the 1980s (Finch & Kim, 2020), and such perception lingers on socially to this day. The attitude toward female players reflects this as they are regarded as less desirable team members, mainly because of their physical inferiority. The female characters, however,

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are depicted as more mature and smarter than their male counterparts regardless of their age. In Episode 1, Gi-hun’s 10-year-old daughter is portrayed in a realistic and sympathetic fashion. She does not complain about the odd pistol-shaped lighter gift and the lousy fast food he buys her for her birthday. She also does not tell Gi-hun that she will move to the United States with her mother and stepfather soon, so as not to make him sad. The two main female characters also serve to demonstrate the strength and intelligence of women. While the players are deprived of all their belongings upon admittance to the competition site, the two women, Sae-byeok and Minyeo (Player 212) are successful in smuggling in a pocketknife and a cigarette lighter that they use to survive the games and secure vengeance against male rivals. Another woman who chooses her own destiny is Ji-yeong, who we learn was convicted for murdering the father who had molested her after he had killed her mother. She heroically loses the marble game intentionally to spare the life of Sae-byeok. Mi-nyeo’s declaration that “I’m very clever”— without formal education—applies to all of the show’s female characters and provides a feminist critique of a Korean society that does not treat women as men’s equals. Nostalgia versus the Effects of Neoliberal Capitalism Contemporary Korean society also embraces a nostalgia for traditional Korea because of the issues created by a shift to neoliberal capitalism. The tension between traditional cultural values and neoliberalism is an important theme of Squid Game. Nostalgia is expressed through the children’s games that were popular between the 1950s and the 1980s, well before video games and K-pop got children’s attention (3 ways kids have fun in Korea, n.d.). The series begins with Gi-hun’s recollection of playing Squid Game as a child, and the deadly competition often gives him an occasion to reminisce about his childhood years, such as the food packed in an aluminum lunch box in Episode 2. Gi-hun talks about how they used to warm the lunch boxes on top of the coal-burning stove—a common practice in schools. During the marble game in Episode 6, the old man Il-nam reminisces about a house he lived with his wife and son. It is revealed later that Il-nam is the mastermind behind the competition. On his deathbed, he tells Gi-hun, whom he often compared with his son and called him Gganbu (old and close friend/partner), that life is not fun whether one has money or one doesn’t. Because he does not respond to Gi-hun’s sarcastic remarks that an old man should be taken care of by his daughter-in-law in Episode 1, it seems that Il-nam worked hard to become a successful money lender but lost his family and realized in his old age that human relationships were more valuable than money. He continues to tell Gi-hun that he joined the competition to

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experience the worry-free joy of his childhood and admits that he kept Gi-hun alive because it was so much fun to play with him. He says he was able to recall the things from the past that he had long forgotten, and it had been so long since he had that much fun. Looking down from his room on the seventh floor, he stakes his life on a bet with Gi-hun that nobody will rescue a homeless man on the street. He thinks that in the Korean society of today, people don’t want to help a stinking, dirty, abandoned man and, as if to confirm his words, we see people pass the man by without a glance. A final passerby searches the man’s pockets, leaving the impression that he is stealing from the homeless man; however, as the falling snow begins to bury the homeless man, police arrive with the passerby to save the homeless man. Il-nam loses the bet (and his life), and arrival of the police gives a glimpse of hope to Gi-hun, who just shared the old man’s experience. He won the competition and the huge prize money but lost his mother, best friend, and others for whom he cared. Mi-nyeo’s words to the surprised players as to the reason she was spared from playing the marble game in Episode 6—“Don’t throw away the marginalized and weak. That’s the beautiful rules of the old game”—is echoed here. It is a nostalgia for traditional Korea and a criticism of current Korean society, which prioritizes meritocracy over a traditional collectivist culture. Il-nam’s sentiment is also expressed through the mysterious VIP spectators who possess the wealth that allows them to buy, eat, and drink anything they desire but are bored and thus find enjoyment in spectating the deadly games. To them, the players are the equivalent of the horses in horse races. Not only the players but also other people are dehumanized—they are seen as furniture and decorations in the room where the VIPs watch the games. Whether they are aware of it or not, VIPs are dehumanized, too, as the golden animal masks they wear illustrate. The color of the masks symbolizes their riches, but their full faces are never shown except for one who pursues a sexual encounter with detective Jun-ho. The ostentatious colors and decorations in their room suggest their inhumane desire to enjoy death, making a sharp contrast to the white space where the players prepare for the last three games and that indicates the lack of desire for anything but survival. Dehumanization is also represented by a mechanical jazz band and a singer whom the Front Man, who oversees the games, listens to in his room. The importance of interpersonal relationships is shown in several episodes through the interactions among individual players and the teams they form. Korea, like other Asian cultures, is a collectivist society that places the highest cultural value on groups. According to Edwin J. Nichols, this is due to their historical experience as nomads in an Asian continent where individual survival depended on groups, as the group protected the members (Nichols, n.d.). This is seen after a riot among the players resulting from the killing of

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a player by Deok-su for which he was not punished. Gi-hun and Sang-woo form a team with other players they know to ensure their safety. For the first time, team members tell their names to one another because they feel they cannot trust others without knowing their names. Until that point, they were known to each other by their player numbers—a characteristic of a bureaucratic society. The team builds a barricade, takes turns to watch over others during the night, and devises a strategy for all members to survive the game. Under normal circumstances, once Koreans become acquainted with somebody, they treat the person with care. They work hard to build and maintain interpersonal relationships, as seen in the relationship between Sang-woo and Ali. Other than their huge debts, these two characters share little in common but begin to build a relationship when they are dropped back into society together after the first game. Sang-woo buys food and gives bus fare to a penniless migrant worker and even lets him use his cell phone out of his concern for the weak and marginalized of Korean society. Returning to the competition and becoming a member of the same team, Sang-woo tells Ali to call him “Hyung” (brother) instead of “SaJangNim” (president), which immigrants and migrant workers often use to show their respect to Koreans. The care Sang-woo shows toward Ali represents the traditional value placed in interpersonal relationships. However, realizing that he must defeat his partner to win the marble game, Sang-woo tricks trusting Ali to win. Even Gi-hun, who is the most humane of all the characters, cheats on Il-nam, taking advantage of his seeming senility. These episodes sarcastically suggest that in a neoliberal capitalist society characterized by meritocracy and competition, traditional cultural values lose their grip on people. The longing for traditional cultural values is also illustrated in the tension between Sang-woo, who climbed up the ladder of success despite his humble origin, and Gi-hun, who represents the disenfranchised youth of contemporary society but who is rooted in cultural tradition. While Gi-hun is proud of and genuinely respects his genius childhood friend, Sang-woo shows mixed emotions toward him because of the shame caused by his fall from a successful international broker to a criminal. Getting the information from Sae-byeok, who secretly explored an air vent, Sang-woo, a smart man, gains a hint about the ppopgi game but does not share it with Gi-hun and ends up feeling guilty about not helping his friend. Being told to form a pair for the marble game, Gi-hun goes to Sang-woo, but Sang-woo asks Ali to pair with him because his intelligence and Ali’s physical strength will enable them to win most games. While his intelligence certainly helps himself and his team as seen in a tug-of-war, it subordinates his emotions and prevents him from connecting with those about whom he cares, as illustrated by his manipulation of Ali in the marble game and his act to push the player off the bridge in the glass bridge game.

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His discourse with Gi-hun after this incident clearly indicates the tension between traditional cultural values and contemporary culture. While Gi-hun says that he survived owing to the player who was an experienced glass craftsman and thus was able to discern a tempered glass that sustained a player’s weight, Sang-woo insists that it is his own hard work alone that saved him. Gi-hun then asks him if he would kill even a childhood friend. Frustrated by the question that sees through his inner struggle, Sang-woo replies, “It is the dumbest question in this situation!” and continues saying that Gi-hun’s nosy attitude and pea-size brain have resulted in who he is today. To this, Gihun says that he takes responsibility for his pathetic life but asks Sang-woo why the pride of Ssangmun-dong, the genius of Seoul National University, is “floundering around in this shitpit with a dimwit like” himself? This is an accusation of society that places unnecessarily high values on education. In the end, Gi-hun tries to stop the game to save Sang-woo’s life, but Sang-woo kills himself after saying that unlike in his childhood days, nobody tells him to come back home to eat supper any longer and apologizing to his childhood friend. His last words seem to indicate that he worked hard to climb up to the top, but his humble origin did not allow him to deal with success properly because Korean society is still controlled by the so-called old-boy system as exemplified by chaebol (a large family-owned business conglomerate) like Samsung, Hyundai, and the LG Group, often resulting in corruption. It is too late for him now, but Gi-hun tells his friend, “Let’s go home.” SQUID GAME AND THE WEST Squid Game is a sarcastic view of contemporary Korean society by Korean director Hwang Dong-hyuk. Its extraordinary success demonstrated that it appealed to viewers across the globe who saw their experience with neoliberal capitalism reflected in the series. Inequity created by capitalism is a universal theme, and the viewers regardless of their familiarity with Korean society and culture were able to relate to the drama. On the other hand, how does the show affect outsiders’ impressions of Korea, especially those who are in the West? The series unquestionably presents Koreans as a bloodthirsty and cold-hearted horde who would do anything to gain wealth. The focus on the cruelty among Koreans might comfort those who feel uneasy about the news regarding the increasing dominance of Asian countries, that is, Korea, China, and India, in the world’s economy. Interestingly, the VIPs are all English-speaking White men, reflecting the uneven distribution of wealth in the world as well as the U.S. dominance and influence in Korea for the past 70 years. The VIPs’ praise of the grandness of the competition Il-nam organized may be a declaration that Korea has achieved unbridled success,

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possibly indicating the reverse flow of international popular culture from the United States to Asia. The series also confirms the yellow-peril stereotypes of Asians that have existed in mass media (Shim, 1998; Kawai, 2005; Zhu, 2013). First, Oh Ilnam, who is the mastermind behind the whole competition, is reminiscent of Dr. Fu-Manchu, the supervillain in the popular novels written by English author Sax Rohmer between 1913 and 1915, “a brilliant, powerful character who plots the destruction of Western civilization, who commands the resources of Western science and Eastern magic, and who governs an army of devoted assassins” (Hoppenstand, 1992, p. 285). The viewers are never certain who Il-nam is and what to think about him because he is introduced as a frail old man dying of brain tumors and who is assumed to have been killed in the middle of the competition. Then, he comes back as the mastermind behind the game. He is supposed to be the primary antagonist, but it is not easy to accuse him of all the deaths due to what the viewers learn about him. Undoubtedly, he possesses the brilliance of Fu-Manchu, including the ability to manipulate both the players in the drama and the audience, as well as an army of devoted assassins—pink soldiers led by the Front Man. Historically, the Fu-Manchu stereotype led to the creation of the Dragon Lady stereotype, which possessed all of his characteristics along with sexual charm to lure men. This stereotype is most apparently reflected by the character of Minyeo, but all the female characters support it through the strength they show in the series (Hoppenstand, 1992). Finally, the stereotype of an emasculated Asian man is represented by the protagonist Gi-hun, who may be perceived as a good man but in reality, cannot support his mother or his daughter. The absence of fathers in the show also reflects this stereotype (Park, 2013). The tension between South Korea and the West is expressed in the final scene of the series as well. Gi-hun, who witnesses the death of Il-nam, finally gets over the depression that lingered on for over a year after winning the competition. His first act is to cut and color his hair red, inspired by the photos of White models in the beauty salon. The color red has a double meaning. First, it seems to symbolize his transformation to become part of the West as he decides to move to the United States to reunite with his daughter. Second, director Hwang picked the color to connote the person’s “inner resentment” (Mahal, 2022, p. 393). Gi-hun’s inner resentment is against the VIPs who organized the competition and who were Westerners. Thus, seeing a Ddakji game between the same recruiter and another man at the airport subway station, he recalls the inhumane conditions he was subjected to by the VIPs and thus decides to rejoin the competition to reveal the identity of those who commit such atrocities against Koreans. When he calls to rejoin while walking down the boarding bridge, the viewers hear the Front Man telling him, “Get on the plane. It’s for your own good.” Upon hearing this, Gi-hun turns around

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and walks away from the airplane. The audience would have to wait to find out the fate of Gi-hun and the Front Man in the second season.

REFERENCES 3 ways kids have fun in South Korea. (n.d.). CBC. https://www​.cbc​.ca​/cbckids​/olympics​/pyeongchang2018​/blog​/three​-ways​-kids​-have​-fun​-in​-south​-korea. Ahn, J. (2018). Mixed-race politics and neoliberal multiculturalism in South Korean media. Palgrave Macmillan. Baker, D. (2020). Religion in. twenty-first century. Korean lives. In Y. Kim (Ed.), Routledge handbook of Korean culture and society (pp. 91–104). Routledge. Cheung, K. (2021, October 10). The women in “Squid Game” deserve better than their supposedly heroic acts onscreen. Salon. https://www​.salon​.com​/2021​/10​/10​/ squid​-game​-women​-patriarchy​-capitalism/. Cho, H., &. Stark, J. (2020). South Korean youth across three decades. In Y. Kim (Ed.), Routledge handbook of Korean culture and society (pp. 119–133). Routledge. Dong-hyuk, H. (Executive Produder). (2021). Squid Game. https://www​.imdb​.com​/ title​/tt10919420​/fullcredits/​?ref_​=tt​_ql​_1. Finch, J., & Kim, S. (2020) The Korean family in transition. In Y. Kim (Ed.), Routledge handbook of Korean culture and society (pp. 134–148). Routledge. Gene, C. (2021, December 18). The real Squid Game playing out in Korea. Sim Economics Society. https://www​.simecons​.com​/post​/the​-real​-squid​-game​-playing​ -out​-in​-south​-korea. Hoppenstand, G. (1992). Yellow devil doctors and opium dens: The yellow peril stereotype in mass media entertainment. In J. Nachbat, & K. Lause (Eds.), Popular culture: An introductory text (pp. 277–291). Bowling Green State University Popular Press. IANS. (2022, August 16). Hyundai Motors ranks third in global vehicle sales in 2022 first half. Auto​.co​m. https://auto​.economictimes​.indiatimes​.com​/news​/passenger​ -vehicle​/cars​/hyundai​-motors​-ranks​-third​-in​-global​-vehicle​-sales​-in​-2022​-first​-half​ /93581761. Kim, Y. (2020). Korean culture and society: A global approach. In Y. Kim (Ed.), Routledge handbook of Korean culture and society (pp. 3–27). Routledge. Jung, M. (2021, October 25). S. Korea ranks 4th in ‘relative poverty’ among 38 OECD. The Korea Herald. https://www​.koreaherald​.com​/view​.php​?ud​ =20211025000835#:~ ​ : text ​ = S. ​ , poverty’%20among%2038%20OECD%20 members&text=South%20Korea%20ranked%20No.,wealth%20disparities%20 in%20the%20country. Kawai, Y. (2005). Stereotyping Asian Americans: The dialectic of the model minority and the yellow peril. Howard Journal of Communications 16(2), 109–130. Koo, H. (2020). The muddled middle class in. globalized South. Korea. In Y. Kim (Ed.), Routledge handbook of Korean culture and society (pp. 107–118). Routledge.

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Son, S. A. (2021, October 7). Squid Game: the real debt crisis shaking South Korea that inspired the hit TV show. The Conversation. https://theconversation​.com​/ squid​-game​-the​-real​-debt​-crisis​-shaking​-south​-korea​-that​-inspired​-the​-hit​-tv​-show​ -169401. Song, S. (2018, January 26). S. Korea’s electronics industry No. 3 by production. The Korean Herald. https://www​.koreaherald​.com​/view​.php​?ud​=20180126000750. Squid Game Awards. (2022). IMDB. https://www​.imdb​.com​/title​/tt10919420​/ awards/. Stevenson, R (2022, July 1). All squid games in order: Origins and meaning explained. Retrieved January 22, 2023, from https://screenrant​.com​/squid​-game​-in​ -order​-origin​-meaning/. Tan, M. (2021, September 30). Squid Game: The smash-hit South Korean horror is a perfect fit for our dystopian mood. The Guardian. https://www​.theguardian​.com​ /tv​-and​-radio​/2021​/oct​/01​/squid​-game​-the​-smash​-hit​-south​-korean​-horror​-is​-a​-perfect​-fit​-for​-our​-dystopian​-mood. Taylor, J. C. (2022, September 30). 10 most-watched shows on Netflix, ever. Collider. https://collider​.com​/top​-10​-most​-watched​-series​-on​-netflix​-ever/. Team Counterpoint. (2022, August 24). Global smartphone market share: By quarter. Counterpoint. https://www​.cou​nter​poin​tresearch​.com​/global​-smartphone​-share/. Ter Molen, S. (2014). A cultural imperialistic homecoming: The Korean wave reaches the United States. In Y. Kuwahara. (Ed.), The Korean wave: Korean popular culture in global context (pp. 149–187). Palgrave Macmillan. Yoon, M. (2021, October 10). ‘Squid Game’ pokes at the Far side of Korea. The Korea Herald. http://www​.koreaherald​.com​/view​.php​?ud​=20211008000592. Yoon, M. (2021, November 27). Exam skills won’t help you survive ‘Squid Game’. The Korea Herald. https://www​.koreaherald​.com​/view​.php​?ud​=20211125000543. Zhu, Z. (2013). Romancing “kung fu master” – From “yellow peril” to “yellow prowess”. Asian Journal of Communication 23(4), 403–419.

Chapter 7

Alternative Media Representations An Outsider’s Construction of Race on The Daily Show with Trevor Noah Tawfiq O. Abdullah

Marginalization and silencing of minority Others have long been a concern of scholarly discourse (Pearce et al., 2020; Ortiz et al., 2019). Given how societies are structured, individuals’ and groups’ power and voices are unbalanced. There is a tendency for dominant groups and more powerful individuals to silence minority groups and subalterns (Miranda et al., 2016). In communicating issues concerning societal members, the media is indispensable. The traditional media has failed to represent the interests and views of all societal members and is often flippant with the grievances of the marginalized, focusing on content and issues addressing dominant groups (Lievrouw, 2011). Furthermore, access to the media was limited when traditional media was the only option for people before the introduction of the internet (Ortiz et al., 2019). Even with the internet, the digital divide and lack of media literacy still cut out some societal segments (Van Dijk, 2017). With the increasing divergent voices enabled by the internet, resulting in tipping points that challenge the mainstream media, media audiences now have different angles on stories and issues. There is often divergent information that allows audiences to make informed decisions on fundamental aspects of life affecting them. Alternative media has capitalized on this burgeoning democratization of media information, and their audiences are expanding and becoming more attractive (Sandoval & Fuchs, 2010; Fuchs, 2010). With the increasing relevance of alternative media, they deserve scholarly attention. The Daily Show with Trevor Noah (hereafter referred to as simply TDS) is an example of alternative media that gained traction in the United States. In this chapter, I aim to assess the representation of race on TDS and examine the effectiveness of a medium outside the mainstream in providing a more nuanced understanding of race and racism. I posit that media 125

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content spaces are locations for power contestation consisting of different actors with divergent interests working to determine media representation. I highlight that it sometimes requires an outsider with power to cut through the courageous conversation of race in a manner impossible by in-group members.

THE RISING INFLUENCE OF ALTERNATIVE MEDIA Alternative media like comedic news-talk programs, podcasts, hashtag campaigns, and memes are “media forms that are on a smaller scale, more accessible and participatory, and less constrained by bureaucracy or commercial interests than the mainstream media and often in some way in explicit opposition to them” (Coyer et al., 2007, p. 1). The idealist media practice of objectivity (a foundational notion within traditional journalism) theoretically checks the excesses of capitalist and journalistic influences on media practice and sustains divergent viewpoints, according to Curran (2007). Nevertheless, it is sometimes counterproductive because it produces deprecated reporting and the privilege of powerful voices. Hence, there is a need for a pluralistic media landscape that imbibes the advocacy, interpretivism, subjectivism, broader participation, and wider diversity that characterize alternative media. The mainstream media is growing simultaneously with the proliferation of alternative media and is driven by capitalism. Despite their primary focus on commercialization, they may accommodate alternative content when it is in their financial interest. Their dominance and commercialization are rising, yet traditional media is not monolithic and free of opposition. The rising influence of the internet and digital media has engendered alternative media and counterculture narratives (Curran, 2007). There are many conceptual perspectives of alternative media. One perspective conceptualizes alternative media in terms of collectivism and participation. It suggests that there is alternative media practice in mass media, provided a collective of people participates in the production process. However, there is a contention between these participatory mass media proponents and civil societies. The former claim that mass media structures accommodate all societal groups; alternative media is unwarranted. The latter regard this claim as false because mass media is conventional and ipso facto marginalizes unorthodox viewpoints (e.g., Hardt, 1990). This debate concerns the conceptual differences between mainstream and alternative media—mainstream media appeals to a mass audience in a conventional safe format, while alternative media diverges from conventionality.

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Moreover, in contrast, alternative media is unorthodox in style and leans toward social change. Therefore, claiming that mass media enables participation for all societal groups is untoward. The crux for alternative media proponents is that media participation is many and different; therefore, mere participation in media production is not equivalent to alternative media (Denning, 1990). Mass media has significant scale and consumption, yet participation in production is limited to a few because consumption differs from participation, and production involves high capitalization that excludes many economically disadvantaged people (McChesney, 2016; Hamilton, 2000), thereby possessing an inherent paradox. Whereas alternative media opens up participation in media production and plays an essential role in forming social movements (Moore, 1997), opposing the narrative and professionalism of mass media, they are often caught up in a dilemma of using the same mass media structures they antagonize. Moreso, the mass media’s excellent professionalism in production may not necessarily mean democratization; instead, media organizations and the social cause they support may be more vital than the content they produce in delineating them as alternative media (Schudson, 1978). There is also contention about the format of alternative media participation and collectivism. To achieve alternative media, William (2011) proposes alternative media that is independent of mainstream structures but uses similar producers as mainstream media and establishes media education norms. This stand has been criticized for its preoccupation with existing media instead of communication. It depends on existing undemocratic media structures rather than seeking democratic communication in emerging media forms (Spark, 1993). In this sense, alternative media should seek low-barrier participation, independent of mainstream media, operate with informal organizations with minimal capitalization for entry or participation, and ingrain themselves in mainstream society instead of being isolated (William, 2011). This position leads to an argument for an intermediate participation position in alternative media practice. Holt (2018) claims that the use of the term “alternative media” in scholarly literature is problematic because “such a classification is imprecise and implicitly could give the reported media the status of equivalent, ‘interchangeable’ alternatives to established journalistic media” (p. 52). He conceives alternative media as antisystemness: “These alternative media channels need to be analyzed in the light of their position as a perceived corrective of traditional media and of constrained public discourse” (p. 52). However, there is a common streak among all available concepts of alternative media. In content and structure, alternative media offers deviant content and assumes horizontal organization than vertical organizational structure.

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THE DAILY SHOW Bailey et  al. (2018) categorize Comedy Central’s The Daily Show as rhizomatic alternative media because of its inherent inextricable multiforms, by which it is simultaneously critical of the establishment and conforming with mainstream media structure as distribution outlets. Besides, TDS shares the attributes of alternative media: (1) it is deviant in views (deep contextualization, separate from journalistic standard) and delivery style (comical, with audience engagement) compared to mainstream media professionalism; (2) it is critical about political leadership and societal laxness; (3) it maintains an independent organization (Comedy Central) and production while depending on mainstream marketing structure; and (4) it coheres a community of viewers with similar interests in humor and counter-narratives of public affairs. TDS is televised through a subscription to the cable television company Paramount Media Network. Trevor Noah anchored the comic talk show from 2015 through 2022 after comedian John Stewart ended his 16-year run as the show host. Stewart coined the term “fake news” to describe the satiric bent of the program, a phrase co-opted by President Donald Trump to describe journalistic coverage that challenged his often-distorted version of the truth. While TDS remains essentially satiric of the American political class, the entry of Noah marked a shift from a White anchor to a mixed-race anchor of Black South African and Swiss origins. Race and its representation became some of the core issues on the show. Noah’s tenure on the show coincided with Trump’s presidency; thus, the temperament of Trump’s leadership was a constant satirical subject on the show. Racialization concerns were also salient issues that Noah often associated with Trump. RACE AND REPRESENTATION Omi and Winant wrote that race is “a concept which signifies and symbolizes social conflicts and interests by referring to different types of human bodies” (2014, p. 55). This classical view of race is the classification method that groups people into different groups based on their biological features. Contemporary conceptualizations of race have shifted from past biologism constructed during the slavery and colonization epochs to more nuanced viewpoints of race accounting for modernity (while retaining social conflict as a constituent of race) (Winant, 2000). Neo-classical conceptions of race include ethnicity-based theories (construction of race as collective identity), class-based theories (group stratification by economic position and competition), and nation-based theories (race construction in geopolitical terms of peoplehood, unity, and citizenship).

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The concept of racism is important to the media representation of race. It is described as the resulting social conflict among groups owing to the perpetuation of racial differentiation, devaluation, disempowerment and partiality in resource, and privilege allocations to minorities and subalterns (William, 2004; William & Mohammed, 2013; Bonilla-Silva, 1996). Race scholars hardly define racism (only a quarter of the existing literature does), and when they do, they define it differently (Paradies, 2006). Some scholars see it as detrimental to minority groups while reinforcing privileges for dominant groups. Others attribute it to the ideology of inferiority or superiority instead of both. Racism can be systemic (i.e., racism occurring in societal formal structures and institutions) and can be interpersonal (racist social interactions between people). However, some scholars define racism as the differential treatment of one racial group compared to another without necessarily identifying the group having positive or negative treatment. Nevertheless, the evolving neo-classical conceptions of race allow a broader study of race representation in media and an understanding of racism in the outside world. Stuart Hall observed that “representation connects meaning and language to culture” (2020, p. 1). Involved in media representation of Others and in-group members is constructing meanings using language accepted in a cultural grouping. Representation is the language of media because it consists of (1) linguistic qualities used in portraying groups and (2) codes of communication employed in media content. Codes of representation refer to the signs, sounds, images, and symbols employed in representing Others. Representation is socially constructed, and the manner of media representation of Others is determined by what is acceptable in a cultural setting or group (Hall, 2020; Dyer, 2013). So, representation and meaning are culturally bounded. Meanings ascribed to representation are multitudinous depending on the consumer of media content (Dyer, 2013). It entails how dominant groups perceive themselves, minority Others, and the outside world’s reality. The representations in media are not realities of the outside world but symbolic representations reflective and connecting with actualities of the outside world. Therefore, media representation is a glimpse of the semblance of peoples’ conditions. Besides meanings of groups in mediated conditions, representation is the discursive formation of power relations between different societal groups. Dyer (2013) identifies White and heterosexuals as dominant groups, while minority ethnicities, gays, lesbians, disabled people, and others as subaltern groups. These two groups are often interlocked in power formation constructed in media representations. He argues, “How we are seen determines in part how we are treated; how we treat others is based on how we see them; such seeing comes from representation” (p. 1). Hence, media representation has far-reaching ramifications that cannot be discounted for minority Others.

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Media representation can institutionalize social inclusivity and exclusivity connected to privileges and benefits and vice versa obtainable by minority Others in actual life (Abdullah, 2022a, 2022b; Dyer, 2013). In the case of The Daily Show, representation involves alternative constructions of race and discourse on racism that encapsulate social conflict because it belongs to an alternative media genre. Trevor Noah primarily utilizes symbolic parallelism, symbolic contrast, and caricature to represent race on the show. Symbolic parallelism draws similarities of representational codes of signs, images, and language between two or more subjects of interest. Instead of drawing similarities between two subjects of interest, the symbolic contrast draws the differences in two or more subjects of interest. Perkins (1975) describes a portrait caricature as a representation of the spatial form of a subject that notably departs significantly and purposefully from the subject’s original form. It includes deliberate inaccuracies to emphasize aspects of the subject that are discernible in the caricature form than the actual form. Neo-race conceptualizations and race theories like ethnicity-based theories, class-based theories, and nation-based theories guide the analysis of race representation in this chapter. Although they have their theoretical limitations, they afford the analysis a wiggling space for exploring racial significations beyond the classical race conceptualization of biologism. Notably, the analysis applies ethnicity-based and nation-based theories. The former conceives race as a culturally structured model of collective identity, and the latter perceives race in geopolitical terms bequeathed by the decolonization of the postwar era (Omi & Winant, 2014). In these broader conceptualizations of race, it is possible to assess media representation of race from different flanks. Hall (2003) proposed three approaches to interpreting media texts: preferred reading, negotiated reading, and oppositional reading. Decoding meanings of race and significations assumes preferred reading to understand how a minoritized individual understands race in the American context. The media audience interprets and accepts the meanings the message sponsor or sender wants the audience to take from the message. Significations of race from Noah’s perspective were interpreted. Also, there was an additional interpretation of race focusing on power.

THE DAILY SHOW WITH TREVOR NOAH: AN OUTSIDER TAKES ON RACISM IN AMERICA Besides accessing the show on cable television, parts of the show’s video productions are available online. A Google search of “Trevor Noah discusses race on The Daily Show” generated a curated result of the video clips of TDS’s episodes, where race is a topical issue. This analysis focuses on

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language and images as representational codes of race in episodes of the program that are posted on TDS website. Those representations include examining how paleo-racist America is comparable to apartheid South Africa, how neo-racism in post-racial America and post-racial South Africa differs, the notion of reparations for Black Americans, and the ways America and Africa are equal in terms of leadership foibles. In America, they make you work for your racism; you know you got to figure it out. (Noah, 2020a)

Noah regularly compares American racism to South African apartheid in discourse about earlier racism. Both countries had a White population domination of Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC). The inequality between the White class and minority Others climaxed in the mid-late 1960s when riots broke out in American cities, leading to hundreds of deaths and thousands of destroyed buildings. On July 28, President Lyndon Johnson instituted the Kerner Commission to investigate the causes of the civil disorder and recommend solutions to the social conflict. The Commission’s report, titled Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, unequivocally stated that: Segregation and poverty have created in the racial ghetto a destructive environment totally unknown to most White Americans. What White Americans have never fully understood but what the Negro can never forget—is that White society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, White institutions maintain it, and White society condones it. (Kerner Commission, 1968)

Higginbotham (1973) explains that America was not caught up in the riotous struggle of the 1960s by accident. It was because of early and past chains of racist practices that manifested diversely: the slavery era that conveyed over twenty million slaves from Africa to the New World through the harrowing “middle passage” marked by millions of deaths through suffocation, disease, and insanity; the doctrine of “separate but equal” of the North in Roberts v. The City of Boston in 1850; the doctrine of “separate but equal” entrenched by the U.S. Supreme Court in Plessy v. Ferguson, which consequently resulted to total separateness and inequality for Black Americans; the fraud and violence that disenfranchised the Black Americans from voting in most Southern states; the lynch mobs and vigilante movements responsible for thousands of deaths and intimidation of millions; corporate and unions’ leaders who socially excluded minorities from opportunities; the realtors and power brokers who contrived stringent racial ghettos precluding Black Americans from free housing options; and leadership of international and national crime syndicates that proliferated the urban communities with narcotics

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and other deleterious substances to instigate uncontrollable plague despite disproportionally affecting Black Americans. In all, the White population precipitated these ugly racial developments, and Black Americans are not in any way responsible for these deplorable conditions. In one episode of the show, Noah compared and contrasted racism relating to the two regions: Whenever I see all the stuff about voter registration and voter I.D. laws and etcetera and etcetera, that is one of the few moments I miss South African racism because what I like most about South African racism is just straight up. You know they are just like no Blacks okay, no Blacks okay, and you know where you stood. Unlike in America, they make you work for your racism; you know you got to figure it out. (Noah, 2020a)

Thus, racism is common in both America and South Africa, and it is about White dominance, according to Noah. Of course, the only difference is that the White population was the majority in America and the minority in South Africa. Madala (2003) describes the milieu under apartheid South Africa before 1994: Black South Africans had undergone fifty years of an oppressive system whose essential characteristics were disempowerment, disenfranchisement, repressive laws, and unprecedented human rights violations resulting in untold suffering for the great majority (italicized for emphasis) of our population. Apartheid affected the Black population socially, politically, and economically. It was a complex set of practices aimed at domination and subjugation in different degrees of the African, the colored, and the Indian. (p. 744)

Similarly, Perry (2007) notes that the American Civil War formally ended in 1865, and the conflict over racial oppression, the cause of the war, was protracted through alternative means. Even though racial parity existed de jure after the war, the social reality of minorities was far from this. To some degree, vestiges of racism lingered as segregation, poll tax, lynching, victimization, and others until laws were serially enacted to reduce or abolish these inequities. Essentially, racism in both America’s and South Africa’s pasts is discernible from the domination of White people over other races. The nature of racism changes later between the two regions, as noted by Noah. Many scholars have noted that despite the revocation of racism by law in America, there are still residual forms and effects of it in modern times. As Perry writes, “Racism continued to be the American social disease” (2007, p. 153). Noah distinguished racism in the two regions of America and South Africa through differentiated communicative racism. Minorities work differently to find their actual positions in the overall societies because the dominant group in South Africa is forthright about racial disparity to others, while

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in America, discourse about racism is muffled, equivocal, and beguiling. As a result, American minorities have to learn more complicated lessons and work through higher cognitive processing routes to accept their subaltern position. Minorities in South Africa short-circuit processing complex language used for communicating the social structure that places them in a marginal position despite their majority population. They are swift in realizing their realities in the grand scheme of things. In this sense, White Americans are represented as covert and ambiguous about racial discourse and issues, while South African Whiteness is represented as overt and upfront regarding racial disparity. In the YouTube video, “What Trevor Noah misses about South African racism,” he illustrates this cognitive complexity in American society by explaining how Republicans beguilingly shift policy positions to satisfy the Black population. He explains that the initial pro-gun stance of the White-dominated Republican party became less pro-gun when it realized that such legislation might allow Black Americans to amass arms to revolt against their White oppressors as promoted by the Black Panthers or the Black Panther Party (History, 2022). I promise you, I genuinely think that [what] will switch things up if all Black people just came up and say we are all going to vote Republican, you will be surprised . . . this is how you realize how much Black people’s decisions affect the general Republican ideology in America. Look at the NRA; it’s a great example, alright and look at guns in America. People who were always like, “There is need for gun freedom in America. Guns are free, guns are free, Second Amendment, Second Amendment” . . . then the Black Panther just came along, and they were like, this country is dangerous for Black people. So, they say, “All you, our brothers and sisters, you get guns, you get as many guns as you can, and you prepare for war.” And then the White people are like, we need to restrict the guns, they were like “we need oh no no no, too many guns, bring it in, bring it in.” Like you see immediately, it is like bring it in, bring it in. And it’s amazing; it’s the same thing as voting. (Noah, 2020b)

The policy shift is not in the interest of the Black people but is calculated to have their votes during the election. For example, the debate around gun possession by the Black Panther was generated to resist the massacre of Blacks through guns by White police officers. As the Black Panthers urged the Black people to amass guns for protection, the government introduced disarmament or gun control. The Black population felt it was for their protection and decided to vote for Republicans, but it was meant to discourage them from gun possession. Trevor Noah on Reparations In his characteristic conversational manner, Noah asked his live audience if there was anything they wanted to chat about in the YouTube video, “Trevor

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on race in America—Between the scenes.” An audience member argued for reparations for the White population in the same way the Black population in America is demanding because poverty also scorches some segments of the White population. Noah rebutted the audience member and represented Black Americans as a race deserving reparation resulting from the long years of oppressive domination by White Americans: But reparation is a specific conversation about a specific time in America. And that Black people were slaves. I have even heard people say there are some of the Irish who were endangered. Yes, look at slavery, look at the number, look at the time, look at the level of work. You could not work to your freedom. Most Black people in America, this was a time when you lived and died as a slave. And that’s what reparation is about. And I hear what you’re saying, but I think there is completely new separate conversation that needs to be had about the now because if you are not careful about what you do, is combine everybody’s sufferings into the same bowl, and you make it seems all injustices have the same weighting. And they don’t. Just like crimes, theft isn’t the same as murder; we don’t try them the same way. As much as a reason why a person is suffering today, I feel for everybody that’s suffering. I know what it’s to be poor, what it’s like to suffer. I didn’t come from a wealthy family, we struggled when I was growing up, but I also understand that there are levels of that suffering you know. (Noah, 2020c).

Noah argued for Black people’s deservedness and its justification by identifying injuries from slavery, Black people’s deprivation of the right to land possession, disenfranchisement, limited access to loans, and partially high loan interest. In this respect, the American government must pay reparation to the Black community due to these injustices. He acknowledged that the White population suffered injustice too, but the one suffered by the Black community weighs more. So, he represented the Black race as deserving reparation from the American government, thereby legitimizing the Black race’s clamor for reparation. The White community was represented as privileged and undeserving of such benefits because White privileges exist for White advantages. The demand by the White community for the same kind of reparation as the Black community is more or less the invocation of their White privilege. These calls are different issues that must be separated and given different treatments. The call for reparation for Black people is directed to the government, not White individuals who are quick to exonerate themselves from the past social injustices toward Black people. Donald Trump as America’s African President Synecdochally, Noah represents Africa and America using caricatures of leaders from the two regions, showing how the leaders are similar on the one hand

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and on the other how they equated the two regions to the same moral stratum despite their differences in development. In the YouTube video titled “Donald Trump, American African President,” there is Donald Trump, decked in military regalia, representing America. He draws similarities between Trump and several African leaders attached to notorieties of dictatorship, totalitarianism, corruption, and other leadership weaknesses. They include Idi Amin Dada of Uganda, Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, Muammar Ghaddafi of Libya, and Yahya Jammeh of Gambia. The representation of a democratically elected Donald Trump in military gear signposts his despotic temperament despite being a leader of democratic America, the leading democracy in the world. In the video, Noah described Donald Trump as an “American African President.” TDS adroitly projects sound bites of these African leaders, sounding similar to Donald Trump’s public speeches. Below are some comparisons between Trump’s public speeches and some African leaders’ public statements. Donald Trump and Jacob Zuma on attitudes toward immigration: Trump: When Mexico sends its people, they’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crimes, their rapists, and some, I assume, are good people. Jacob Zuma: The influx of illegal migrants, crime, unfair business practices, and drugs. It’s also not true that all foreign nationals are involved in criminal activities. There are some who are, but not all of them. (quoted in Noah, 2020d)

Donald Trump and Idi Amin on egotism: Trump: I say not in a braggadocious way, I’ve made billions and billions of dollars. I made tremendous amount of money. I’m really rich. I’ve a great temperament. They love me anyway; I don’t have to do this. I’ve done an amazing job, I’ve a great intellect. God helped me by giving me a certain brain. Idi Amin: The people love me very much. I’m very popular. I’m very powerful. I’m the one who has got the money. I’ve got a very good brain. (quoted in Noah, 2020d)

Noah infers that Trump has the same attitude as these African leaders. At this level of symbolic comparison, the foibles of political leadership put Africa and America in the same moral rank. America is more affluent than Africa and remains a bastion of democracy. However, in the historical epoch of Trump’s administration, America pandered to a lower taste of democratic principles through the conduct of its president. “A VIEW HIS COMPETITORS COULDN’T DELIVER” This chapter assesses race representation on The Daily Show with Trevor Noah, an alternative media. It explores race representation and identifies

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how race on the show has been represented by comparing and contrasting racialization based on biologism, ethnicity, and geopolitical differentiations. Race representations found include (1) paleo-racist America is comparable to apartheid South Africa; (2) neo-racism in postracial America and postracial South Africa differs; (3) warranted America’s restitution for Americans; and (4) America and Africa are equal by leadership foibles. The manner of criticism and comedic delivery of race representation on TDS is outstanding and generally unavailable in mainstream media and programming, especially in the form of television journalism that the program ridicules. A newscast is a mechanical routine governed by professionalism and faux objectivity where news anchors and reporters read the news to audiences. It is devoid of the production and delivery features of comedy, live audience, audience participation, and the audience responses that characterize TDS. These peculiarities enable fresh perspectives on issues, often contrasting with the narratives in mainstream news media and with steeper contextualization for better audience understanding. The personality of Noah on the show accentuates its alternativeness and the power he wields as a talented media personality weighing on media representation of race on the show. He is an outsider who immersed himself in America and addressed issues on the show with uncommon candor. A Washington Post article about him and the show describes his delivery on the late-night program: It was a view his competitors couldn’t deliver. (And yes, there is at least one other daily late-night host from abroad—the British James Corden—but he’s known more for “Carpool Karaoke” than incisive comedy about U.S. politics and race). As Americans, we sometimes can be so steeped in our reality that we fail to see ourselves as we truly are. Noah, on the other hand, wasn’t fully of this place and could therefore sometimes see it and us more clearly. He also didn’t do it with the kind of harshness often associated with the genre. (Izadi, 2022)

Thus, he was able to examine issues from an outsider’s perspective that have been impossible from in-group members, magnifying the alternativeness of the show. Beyond identifying and assessing race representation, this chapter emphasizes the relevance of media power in influencing race representation on the show. There is the convergence of interests of many power streams in race representation on the show. Political leadership’s interest diverges from race representation on the show because President Donald Trump, as de jure political head, was often a subject of satirical attacks about race and other moral shortcomings. Overall, the political and economic climates in which the show exists encourage dissenting and critical views of leadership and societal weaknesses that are far less available in mainstream media. This

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development whittles down the unilateral influence of a political figure (in this case, Trump) to dictate media representation. Noah-tenured TDS was not only an alternative medium to the mainstream’s framing of race and political issues in America but also reflected American reality to Americans, which was impossible by an American anchor. Thus, Noah’s personae as an outsider in the overall race discourse on the show manifested in three aspects: (1) the alternative media in which he worked, (2) his migrant status in America, and (3) his race membership. First, he served as an omniscient narrator as an anchor for alternative media on the outside, counteracting the mainstream’s representation of race in America. Second, he was a migrant observer of social issues about race in America in contrast to natives or permanent residents. Last, he is of color and mixed race, historically minoritized despite having partial Caucasian parentage. In all respects, he was an out-group and minority member who communicated American race reality to American and global audiences with candidness served with luxuriant satire, acerbic humor and in a gusty manner. REFERENCES Abdullah, T. O. (2022a). Framing of the US’2016 Presidential election: a content analysis of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton’s campaign speeches. Atlantic Journal of Communication, 30(3), 297–315. Abdullah, T. O. (2022b). “You can watch a documentary”: Representation and intersectionality of immigrants to the United States in documentary film genre. Howard Journal of Communication, 34(3), 223–236. Bailey, O. G., Cammarts, B., & Carpentier, N. (2008). Understanding Alternative Media. McGrawHill. Bonilla-Silva, E. (1996). Rethinking racism: Toward a structural interpretation. American Sociological Review, 62(3), 465–480. Curran, J. (2007). Foreword. In K. Coyer, T. Dowmunt, & A. Fountain (Eds.), The Alternative Media Handbook (Vol. 27). London: Routledge. Denning, M. (1990). The end of mass culture. International Labor and WorkingClass History, 37, 4–18. Dyer, R. (2013). The Matter of Images: Essays on Representations. New York: Routledge. Fuchs, C. (2010). Alternative media as critical media. European Journal of Social Theory, 13(2), 173–192. Hall, S. (2020). The work of representation. In S. Hall (Ed.), The Applied Theatre Reader (pp. 74–76). Routledge. Hamilton, J. (2000). Alternative media: Conceptual difficulties, critical possibilities. Journal of Communication Inquiry, 24(4), 357–378. Hardt, H. (1990). News workers, technology, and journalism history. Critical Studies in Media Communication, 7(4), 346–365.

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Higginbotham Jr, A. L. (1973). Racism and the early American legal process, 1619–1896. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 407(1), 1–17. History. (2022, January 25). Black Panthers. https://www​.history​.com​/topics​/black​ -history​/black​-panthers Holt, K. (2018). Alternative media and the notion of anti-systemness: Towards an analytical framework. Media and Communication, 6(4), 49–57. Izadi, E. (2022, October 3). Trevor Noah was a late-night comedy unicorn.) https:// www​.washingtonpost​.com​/arts​-entertainment​/2022​/12​/08​/trevor​-noah​-daily​-show​ -legacy/ Kerner Commission. (1968). National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders. Supplemental Studies for the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders. US Government Printing Office. Lievrouw, L. (2011). Alternative and Activist New Media. New York: Polity. Madala, T. H. (2000). Rule under apartheid and the fledgling democracy in postapartheid South Africa: The role of the judiciary. North Carolina Journal of International Law & Commercial Regulation, 26, 743. McChesney, R. W. (2016). Rich Media, Poor Democracy: Communication Politics in Dubious Times. Champagne, IL: University of Illinois Press. Miranda, S. M., Young, A., & Yetgin, E. (2016). Are social media emancipatory or hegemonic? Societal effects of mass media digitization in the case of the SOPA discourse. Management Information System Quarterly, 40(2), 303–330. Moore, M. (1997). Is the left nuts? (Or is it me?). Nation, 265(16), 16–17. Noah, T. (Host). (2020a). South African racism vs. American racism – Between the scenes. The Daily Show. https://www​.youtube​.com​/watch​?v​=XUuLDkDSJKg Noah, T. (Host). (2020b). Growing up in South Africa – Between the scenes. The Daily Show. https://www​.youtube​.com​/watch​?v​=4cDC4wEY9SQ Noah, T. (Host). (2020c). Trevor on race in America - Between the scenes. The Daily Show. https://www​.youtube​.com​/watch​?v​=4cDC4wEY9SQ Noah, T. (Host). (2020d). Donald Trump – America’s African president. The Daily Show. https://www​.youtube​.com​/watch​?v​=2FPrJxTvgdQ Omi, M., & Winant, H. (2014). Racial Formation in the United States. New York: Routledge. Ortiz, J., Young, A., Myers, M., Bedeley, R. T., Carbaugh, D., Chughtai, H., … & Wigdor, A. (2019). Giving voice to the voiceless: The use of digital technologies by marginalized groups. Communications of the Association for Information Systems, 45. https://doi​.org​/10​.17705​/1CAIS​.04502 Paradies, Y. C. (2006). Defining, conceptualizing and characterizing racism in health research. Critical Public Health, 16(2), 143–157. https://doi​.org​/10​.1080​ /09581590600828881 Pearce, K. E., Gonzales, A., & Foucault Welles, B. (2020). Introduction: Marginality and social media. Social Media+ Society, 6(3), 2056305120930413. Perkins, D. (1975). A definition of caricature and caricature and recognition. Studies in Visual Communication, 2(1), 1–24.

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Perry, R. J. (2007). Race and Racism: The Development of Modern Racism in America. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Sandoval, M., & Fuchs, C. (2010). Towards a critical theory of alternative media. Telematics and Informatics, 27(2), 141–150. Schudson, M. (1981). Discovering the News: A Social History of American Newspapers. New York: Basic Books. Sparks, C. (1993). Raymond Williams and the theory of democratic communication. In S. Splichal & J. Wasko (Eds.), Communication and Democracy (pp. 69–86). Norwood, NJ: Ablex. Van Dijk, J. A. (2017). Digital divide: Impact of access. The International Encyclopedia of Media Effects, 1–11. Williams, D. R. (2004). Racism and health. In K. E. Whitfield (Ed.), Closing the Gap: Improving the Health of Minority Elders in the New Millennium (pp. 69–80). Gerontological Society of America. Williams, D. R., & Mohammed, S. A. (2013). Racism and health I: Pathways and scientific evidence. American Behavioral Scientist, 57(8), 1152–1173. Williams, R. (2011). Culture is ordinary (1958). In I. Szeman & T. Kaposy (Eds.), Cultural Theory: An Anthology (pp. 53–59). Wiley-Blackwell. Winant, H. (2000). Race and race theory. Annual Review of Sociology, 26(1), 169–185.

Part II

SATIRE, CHALLENGES, AND MISSED OPPORTUNITIES

Chapter 8

Just Jokes? Dave Chappelle’s The Closer and the Intersectional Challenges of Satire Christopher P. Campbell

Dave Chappelle was a young stand-up comedian, a year-and-a-half out of high school and working in nightclubs in New York City, when in 1994 he made his first appearance on Late Night with David Letterman. The program was the “mecca,” as he described it, for stand-up performers looking to advance their careers (Letterman, 2022). Chappelle began that routine by telling the audience that he was particularly interested in Black history, and he encouraged tourists in New York to visit Washington Square Park, “where they have two trees where they used to hang criminals back in the old days. But they would actually hang black people and white people from different trees.” He pauses, then smiles. “Not that they’d mind.” But no further punchline was really necessary. The look on Chappelle’s face—now familiar to the huge audiences who attend and view his stand-up appearances—captures the sheer absurdity of racism, something that his best comedy has always done. Chappelle is now perhaps the most well-known comedian on the planet. In 2019, he won the prestigious Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, which recognizes individuals who have had an impact on American society in ways similar to the distinguished 19th-century novelist and essayist Samuel Clemens, best known as Mark Twain. As a social commentator, satirist, and creator of characters, Clemens was a fearless observer of society, who startled many while delighting and informing many more with his uncompromising perspective on social injustice and personal folly. (Kennedy Center, 2022)

Begun in 1998, when Richard Pryor was the first recipient, the award has gone to the giants of American comedy and satire, among them Letterman, George Carlin, Ellen DeGeneres, Eddie Murphy, Tina Fey, and Jon Stewart. 143

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Chappelle has also been nominated for and won numerous Emmy awards, twice winning the Emmy for Outstanding Guest in a Comedy Series for his bookend appearances as host of Saturday Night Live—first, in 2016, when he famously attempted to assuage the audience’s grief over the recent election of President Donald Trump, and second, in 2020, after Trump lost his reelection bid. Neither of those appearances included the transphobic nature of jokes that had become common in his stand-up routines. Those jokes began getting the attention of critics after his appearance at a series of performances at Radio City Music Hall in New York City in August 2017; that attention compounded after his 2019 Netflix special titled Sticks and Stones and in 2021’s follow-up, The Closer, which consisted largely of a defense of his transphobic humor. When Chappelle and the popular comic/podcaster Joe Rogan (who became a darling of conservatives for his racist behavior and for dismissing the effectiveness of coronavirus vaccines) appeared together at a sold-out arena concert in New Orleans in the fall of 2021, Rogan defended the weighty controversies the comedians had recently generated as “just jokes” (Spera, 2021). That’s often the excuse when comics stray into controversial areas, and, of course, things are usually much more complicated than that. For instance, Chappelle’s generally insightful analysis of anti-Black racism was compromised by the transphobic nature of much of the humor in the controversial stand-up performances in his Netflix programs. The Closer, which began airing earlier in 2021, was the sixth in a series that Chappelle created for Netflix in a deal that paid him $120 million; they remained among the most popular shows on the streaming service for months afterward (Zilco, 2022). This chapter will examine Chappelle’s career in television, including a discussion of Chapelle’s Show, the popular program on Comedy Central from which he famously walked away. I will then explore the controversies that arose from the transphobic (and possibly homophobic, sexist, and antisemitic; more on that later) satire in The Closer and what may have been his attempt at redemption in the monolog that he delivered as host of SNL in November 2022. I will consider the danger of satire that ignores intersectionality, the way in which discrimination based on race, ethnicity, gender, and class intertwine, and employ cultural critic Stuart Hall’s notions about the complicated way that meanings are generated in media texts, a process that attempts to identify “the politics of signification” (Hall, 1980, p. 138). CHAPPELLE’S SHOW Dave Chapelle began his stand-up comedy career as a 14-year-old when he was a student at Duke Ellington School for Performing Arts in Washington, D.C.

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Already a successful stand-up comic and film actor, he gained wide notoriety from his Comedy Central program, Chapelle’s Show. Its 28 episodes originally aired for three seasons between 2003 and 2006 and featured stand-up routines and sketch comedy, much of it satirizing notions about race and racism. He gained even wider notoriety when he opted to step away from the program and his $50 million contract. He explained that decision during a 2022 interview on the Netflix series My Next Guest Needs No Introduction with David Letterman. Early in that program, Letterman praises Chappelle’s work and rolls the tape of Chappelle’s 1994 performance on his old late-night talk show. He quickly transitions to a question about why the comedian gave up on Chappelle’s Show, a question that Chappelle has largely avoided answering. He explains that as he was performing a sketch on the program that prompted laughter from a White crew member—laughter that seemed not to reflect a grasp of the satirical point of the sketch. Writing for Looper, Michael Bedard (2022) explains: The crew member laughed at Chappelle rather than with him by the sound of it. As Chappelle puts it, “It just raised an interesting question to me, which I was already wrestling with in the first place.” It sounds like Chappelle was already grappling with a serious dilemma: Did his show satirize racial stereotypes or reinforce them? He seems to have understood the immense power and respect the show gave him. At one point in the interview, Chappelle mentions that he was “bigger than [he] was comfortable with.” Even if his intentions were good, the way it was coming across to audiences, including that one crew member, seemed to be getting lost in translation, and he rightfully wondered how he should proceed with his career.

In his take on Chappelle’s decision to leave the show, cultural critic Jelani Cobb (2021) observed that Chappelle had “been conflicted about the effect of his brand of racial humor, which relied heavily on enacting stereotypes in order to ridicule them. He had begun to wonder whether his audience got the second, more subtle layer of his work, or whether it was entertained purely by the stereotypes.” That is, Chappelle understood that the humor underpinning the show’s satire was complicated and problematic. Lisa Glebatis Perks’ (2010) analysis of Chappelle’s Show’s “polysemic” humor attempts to “uncover the discursive scaffolding upon which the polysemy is based” (p. 272). She examines some of the program’s most notorious sketches, among them “Clayton Bigsby: Blind White Supremacist” and “Reparations” (described in the first chapter of this book). Both sketches traffic in outlandish representations of African Americans, which Perks describes as “stereotypes on steroids, pushing the signifiers past the breaking point at which the cultural semiotic system can no longer safely harbor them” (p. 276).

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Chappelle provided context for the program’s sketches during his stand-up introductions, often noting the outrageousness of the representations, sometimes apologizing for their stereotypical nature but always defending them in terms of their comedic value. “When you do stereotypical kinds of jokes,” he told the audience at the beginning of the show’s second season, “there’s no room for subtlety.” The problem is that the true nature of his humor is actually not subtle at all; in fact, to understand the satirical point of much of Chappelle’s humor is to grasp the many layers on which it is built. Perk describes “three prominent discursive clashes at the heart of Chappelle’s Show’s polysemic humor: egregious stereotyping versus subtler mediated racism, inverted racial stereotypes versus traditional stereotypes, and serious versus nonserious discourse”: The discord created by the collisions destabilizes the original discourses, opening a rhetorical space to question cultural definitions of race and racial discrimination. The inclusion of conflicting discourses that circulate around issues of racial stereotypes, racial epithets, discrimination, and White privilege magnifies the semiotic system of racial stereotypes, plays with semiotic bonds of racial signifiers, and gently pushes the comedic generic constraints so as to make serious issues more palatable to a diverse audience. The substantial polysemy of Chappelle’s Show . . . harbors a potential power to encourage viewers to alter their existing schema (whether in progressive or regressive ways) because comedically couched social messages can be received on viewers’ own terms, subtly inviting, not demanding persuasion. And therein lies the progressive sociopolitical power and weakness of humorous discourse: This charismatic, comfortable, and nonauthoritative form of persuasion can not only be readily received, but also easily ignored. (2010, p. 286)

Chappelle acknowledged the complicatedness of the satire—and the unintentional harm it might do—when in 2006, he decided to step away from the program and his $50 million deal with Comedy Central. He then spent much of the next decade largely out of the public spotlight, occasionally doing stand-up, before signing a deal with Netflix that would include three standup specials to air in 2017. When his Netflix deal was extended, he released Sticks and Stones in 2019, when his transphobic jokes drew an onslaught of criticism that he spent much of 2021’s The Closer defending (Dellatto, 2022). DECODING THE CLOSER In his seminal essay, “Encoding/Decoding,” Stuart Hall (1980) describes “decoding” media texts at three levels of analysis. The first is the “preferred” reading—the denotative, commonsense meaning that was “encoded” by the

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producer of the text. Next are connotative readings, which he describes as “negotiated” and “oppositional” levels of interpretation. “Negotiated codes,” he writes, “operate through what we might call particular or situated logics: and these logics are sustained by their differential and unequal relation to the discourses and logics of power” (p. 137). That is, audience members often look beneath the intended meaning of a text. Finally, Hall describes a third level, in which an audience member “detotalizes the message in the preferred code in order to retotalize the message within some alternative framework of reference.” Hall argues that such a reading is a significant political moment, “the point when events which are normally signified and decoded in a negotiated way begin to be given an oppositional reading. Here the ‘politics of signification’—the struggle in discourse—is joined” (p. 138). Scholars who examine media through this lens (which I have done often over the course of three decades) typically identify the preferred meaning of a media artifact before moving to the negotiated level, at which they identify ulterior motivations within the encoding process—for instance, corporate advertisers pushing political positions though they are far more interested in increasing sales of their products than the political ideas they appear to be endorsing (see for instance, Campbell, 2003; 20l9b). Ultimately, an oppositional reading uncovers a media text’s underlying hegemonic meanings—for instance, news organizations citing traditional journalistic values to defend coverage that stereotypes and misrepresents people of color (see Campbell, 1995; 2016). But Chappelle’s The Closer, I think, requires a change in the three-step process that Hall has described. I will first describe the program’s “preferred” reading; that is, I’ll attempt to explain Chappelle’s satirical intentions. Second, I will jump to the “oppositional” reading because the program engendered an extraordinary backlash from audiences and cultural critics who wholeheartedly rejected any kind of positive reading of the program. Finally, through a “negotiated” reading, I will aim to unpack the complicated way that the readings of the performance reflect both the potential and the limitations of satire as a way to address racism, discrimination, and injustice. The Preferred Reading: Artistic Freedom and Expression Chappelle defended The Closer in a 2022 appearance at his alma mater, the Duke Ellington School for Performing Arts, where the school’s students had protested its plans to name its theater for its most famous graduate because of the transphobic nature of his humor (Blistein, 2022). The event was recorded and became his sixth Netflix special, What’s in a Name. Originally intended to be a ceremony at which the school would officially announce Chappelle as the theater’s eponym, the event allowed Chappelle to explain his decision to

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ask instead that the school name the space the Theatre for Artistic Freedom and Expression. “Rather than giving this theatre my name,” Chappelle says, “I would like to give these students my message.” Much of Chappelle’s lecture recounts his days at the school, and he discusses his decision to pull the plug on Chappelle’s Show. Ultimately, however, he launches into a defense of The Closer on the basis of artistic freedom. He calls the show a “masterpiece” and offers this explanation: The more you say I can’t say something, the more urgent it is for me to say it. It has nothing to do with what you’re saying I can’t say. It has everything to do with my right and my freedom of artistic expression. It’s worth protecting for me, and it’s worth protecting for everyone else who endeavors in our noble professions.

Notably, Chappelle does not defend or apologize for the transphobic nature of the humor to which the school’s students had objected. Referring to them as “instruments of oppression,” he tells the students that they have somehow misunderstood the brilliance of The Closer, which he described as “the most watched special in the world,” adding, “I say this with all humility, it is a masterpiece, and I challenge all my p—my peers—to make its equal. They cannot. I am sure. It will be decades before you ever see someone in my genre as proficient as me. I am maybe a once-in-a-lifetime talent. I am telling you the truth.” This is an odd moment for Chappelle, and his braggadocio seems out of character. Indeed, Chappelle has been a quietly generous philanthropist, donating not only to his alma mater but also to support his adopted hometown of Yellow Springs, Ohio, and to the families of victims of a mass shooting in Buffalo, New York, and of the Flint, Michigan, water crisis. But he remains adamant in his defense of The Closer: “The more you say I can’t say something, the more urgent it is for me to say it.” The Closer, like much of Chappelle’s work, is full of offensive, provocative, and outrageous material that requires a First Amendment defense, including his prolific use of the N-word. The word “used to be a word of oppression,” he once told 60 Minutes, “but . . . when I say it, it feels more like an act of freedom” (Leung, 2004). The use of the word by Black comedians and rappers has been hotly debated for decades. Randall Kennedy, who has authored a book about the word, defended it “as a tool of antiracist protest, or as a comedic intervention, or as a gesture of solidarity, or as a sly term of endearment,” arguing that such uses of the word “manifest a wonderful capacity to transmute ugliness into art” (quoted in Smith, 2022). On the other hand, even Richard Pryor stopped using the word late in his career, describing it as “a wretched word”:

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Its connotations weren’t funny, even when people laughed. To this day I wish I’d never said the word. I felt its lameness. It was misunderstood by people. They didn’t get what I was talking about. Neither did I . . . So I vowed never to say it again. (quoted in Jackson, 2005)

Chappelle’s audiences certainly expect to hear the N-word used liberally during his performances, but other comments in The Closer are equally outrageous and also require the “artistic expression” defense. A running gag that begins early in The Closer is Chappelle’s description of his idea for a science fiction film in which aliens originally from Earth return to the planet to claim it for their own. “It’s a pretty good plot line, huh? I call it Space Jews.” After light applause, and recognizing the joke’s antisemitism, he tells the audience, “It only gets worse from here.” And it does. Chappelle jokes that the feminist movement needs a male leader and offers to serve as its leader. “I will make sure you will get equal pay for equal work. I will make sure that nobody harasses you or fucks with you on the job. I will protect all of your interests. And all that I ask for in return . . . is that you suck my dick.” He compares the vaginas of transgendered women to artificial meats like Impossible Burgers: “You know what I mean? It tastes like pussy but that’s not quite what it is, is it? It’s not blood, that is beet juice.” The crudity of much of the humor in The Closer, according to Chappelle, “has everything to do with my right and my freedom of artistic expression.” Oddly, much of the program’s humor is consistent with the outraged pundits who have over the last several decades dominated Fox News and AM talk radio with assaults on women and the LBGTQ community right along with their assaults on people of color. The humor Chappelle is defending is much more in line with the outrage that appeals to conservative audiences than to liberals, who have an appreciation for more subtle forms of political and social satire (Young, 2022). Indeed, much of the humor in The Closer seems to be designed for the Make America Great Again crowd, which embraces outrage about anything that challenges White, male, middle-class, heteronormative hegemony. As Dannagal Goldthwaite Young (2022) observes in her book Irony and Outrage: The Polarized Rage, Fear and Laughter in the United States, Because of their contrasting psychological needs and motivations, liberals and conservatives in the United States have frequently occupied distinct social and cultural spheres over the last century . . . The forerunners of today’s genre of conservative outrage arose from an explicit, organized rejection of liberal values by members of the conservative establishment. (p. 7)

Chappelle’s “artistic freedom” argument is not about defending the rights of people who have been historically mistreated and victimized by hegemonic

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power; instead, he finds himself defending the right to be outraged by liberal ideologies. This kind of comedy of outrage is consistent with his decision to tour with right-wing provocateur Joe Rogan or to introduce the world’s richest man, Elon Musk (whose $44 billion purchase of Twitter was designed to provide a forum for right-wing outrage) during a performance in San Francisco that was met with “loud and sustained boos” from the audience (Andrews-Dyer, 2022). Given Chappelle’s history as a satirist whose best work attacks the kind of bigotry in which he now appears to be dabbling, it seems that his defense of The Closer calls for a more nuanced argument, which I’ll discuss in my “negotiated” reading of the program. Meanwhile, much of the oppositional criticism of the program pointed to the danger inherent in Chappelle’s apparent outrage. The Oppositional Reading: Claiming Victimhood Among the many African American cultural critics to skewer The Closer was Jelani Cobb (2021), who observed in The New Yorker that Chappelle “was attuned to nuances in his work” and of the possibility that in “riffing on the racial absurdities of American culture” he was reinforcing rather than undermining them. He pointed out that the humor in The Closer, especially given the rhetoric that flourished during the Trump Era, ran the risk of compounding the injustices facing the transgendered community: “The most reactionary and dangerous parts of our current politics and culture are driven by powerful people who claim to be the victims of groups that are far more vulnerable than they are” (2021). Craig Jenkins, writing for Vulture, also viewed the program through an oppositional lens, observing the problematic nature of Chappelle’s embrace of the transphobic comments of Harry Potter author J. K. Rowling and other pop culture icons, including rapper DaBaby and comedian-actor Kevin Hart, all of whom had resisted the criticism that followed their bigoted comments. Jenkins suspected them all of cashing in on the publicity surrounding their controversial stances: “This framing ignores how each one’s stubbornness in the face of backlash for the awful thing they said only led to more awfulness, how these are stories about refusing to budge when asked for a meager concession by fans who want to support, how each one still sits on the same mountain of cash,” adding, “You can almost count on attracting a fishy crowd when you get too edgy.” He concludes that Chappelle knows this intimately, as someone who walked away from $50 million in part because it freaked him out that his show could get a white person to laugh freely at racial stereotypes. Where is that guy? In The Closer, Dave’s too busy defending millionaires, especially himself, to get that it’s quirky to say the LGBTQ community breaks careers during his sixth time devoting a prickly

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portion of a new special to poking at every corner of the umbrella. If the velvet mafia exists, why do bathroom bills persist? (2021)

NPR’s Eric Deggans also questioned Chappelle’s defensive rationalization of his transphobic jokes—that people who are offended are not only gay, they are White. “Because some gay people have access to white privilege in America, all their concerns about stereotyping and marginalization are hollow and subordinate to what Black people face,” Deggans observes, noting that such a rationalization ignores the fact that there are plenty of non-White gay people who face oppression for both their sexual orientation and their race: Of course, opposing these public statements of homophobia isn’t just about making gay people feel better; it’s about keeping the anger and prejudice behind those words from becoming widely acceptable or turning into action. Too often in The Closer, it just sounds like Chappelle is using white privilege to excuse his own homophobia and transphobia. (2021)

Deggans also questions Chappelle’s intent with his Space Jews gag, which he said “felt like a dare.” Indeed, at a time when antisemitic hate crimes were rising exponentially (Associated Press, 2023), such a joke seemed especially ill-considered. Deggans writes that Chappelle “knows, in the moment, that such a punchline will briefly break the spell he has on the audience, make them rethink their allegiance to him, at least for a second. And he’ll have to work a little to get them back on his team again—which he does.” He adds, “He also knows reviewers like me will quote the joke and criticize him for it, which I am. I don’t really care what point he’s trying to make; a joke that sounds like antisemitism gets a hard pass from me” (2021). The oppositional reactions of these critics especially highlight the danger of a prominent comedian echoing popular public sentiment about transgendered people, especially at a perilous moment in which they have become targeted by conservative politicians and activists. Americans became even more conservative on transgender issues in the 2020s. A Pew Center survey conducted in 2023 found that 60% of respondents believed that one’s gender is determined by the sex assigned at birth, up from 54% in 2017 (Meckler & Clement, 2023). Republican voters have especially become more resistant to trans rights. While polls show that Democrats have moved toward thinking that someone can be a gender different from the one they were assigned at birth, Republicans have moved dramatically in the opposite direction. While 61% of Republicans believed in 2017 that gender is determined by sex at birth, that percentage increased to 73% in 2022 (Blake, 2023). As Washington Post columnist Aaron Blake observed,

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The fact that this question has been as lopsided on the right for as long as it has speaks to how receptive an audience there was for this political strategy. If you don’t think someone can be a gender different from the one they were assigned at birth, it’s not that difficult to talk you into opposing transition-related medical care and bathroom restrictions. And as a spotlight has been cast on these issues, Republicans have indeed moved in that direction. (2023)

Recognizing the political capital that can be harvested from antitrans legislation, conservative state legislatures and governors have approved hundreds of laws since 2022, banning books, limiting pronouns, restricting bathrooms, outlawing gender-affirming care, and regulating sports participation. Vox noted that the political debate over trans rights “is escalating at a volatile time” (Narea and Cineas, 2023), finding that • Trans Americans are four times more likely to be victims of violent crime than their cisgender peers. • 86% of trans or nonbinary youths reported negative effects on their mental health stemming from the political debate around trans issues. • Nearly half had seriously considered suicide in the past year. Oppositional readings of The Closer rightly question Chappelle’s motivation to ridicule transgendered people, who make up only about 1.6% of the population of the United States but find themselves under assault (sometimes literally) from a barrage of self-serving messaging that has inundated state and national politics. How is it that the country’s most prominent comedian, one who has been recognized for his biting satire about the absurd horrors of discrimination, has aligned himself with such messaging? A Negotiated Reading: Critiquing White Fragility? Media sociologist Herman Gray, whose prolific work addresses contemporary racism and the media, described “the politics of ambivalence” (p. 142) in his assessment of the groundbreaking early-1990s sketch comedy In Living Color, which aired on the fledgling Fox network. In Watching Race: Television and the Struggle for “Blackness” (1995), Gray praises the show’s “transgressive” representations of race, but he is equally troubled by aspects of the program that were clearly misogynistic and homophobic, and he noted that much of its humor “came at the expense of the working class and the poor” (p. 131): There are, to be sure, problems that complicate the meanings of the show and the critical cultural potential it might hold as popular culture—its use of humor, its staging of and privileging of race (as well as middle-class heterosexual

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dominance) as the leading edge of its critique . . . Part of In Living Color’s rich potential has always been its transgressive and irreverent stance, but a culture politics based on irreverence and transgression is tricky. What the shows signifies in its representations of race, gender, class, and sexuality is necessarily contingent and indeterminate. (p. 181)

Gray notes that the show’s creators often defended its humor with the same “it’s just jokes” argument employed by Chappelle and Joe Rogan. Observing the polysemic nature of the program’s satire, Gray writes that “this getting the jokes, is, for me, still politically unsettling” (p. 145). Gray’s critique of In Living Color is similar to Perks’ polysemic analysis of Chappelle’s Show, and given the fact that Chappelle had similar concerns and walked away from that program, one might conclude that the comedian is keenly aware of the complicated politics of his comedy. So where was that awareness when he used the considerable forum proffered through his multimillion-dollar deal with Netflix to choose sides in one of the country’s most divisive political debates? His “preferred” defense is that he is simply exercising artistic freedom and that The Closer represents his comedic genius. The “oppositional” audience notes the potential harm of one of the world’s most popular comedians greedily aligning himself with homophobes and political reactionaries. A negotiated reading of the program might recognize the polysemy that Perks utilized in her critique of Chappelle’s Show, though the humor in The Closer appears to be much less complicated (and generally less funny). Chappelle’s apparent “preferred” reading of The Closer is that it is a brilliant example of artistic expression, and that to read it as bigotry is to miss the point? I find that explanation disingenuous, and I believe that much of Chappelle’s humor is, instead, ultimately aimed at White progressives who have embraced the notion of postracialism while advancing LGBTQ and other liberal causes while failing to reverse the even more profound discrimination that has befallen generations of African Americans. That discrimination is easy to document. Nearly 22% of Black people in America live in poverty, more than twice the rate for White Americans (Kaiser Family Foundation, 2021). White Americans are 40% more likely to hold bachelor’s degrees than African Americans (Post-Secondary National Policy Institute, 2022). The average African American family has a median net worth of $24,100 compared to $189,000 for the average White family (RAND, 2022). African Americans are incarcerated at five times the rate of White Americans (Prison Policy Initiative, 2022). These disparities have held steady for decades, and the economic disparities have even worsened since the 2008 financial recession. Meanwhile, the myth that a “postracial” America in which the country has overcome its history of racial discrimination persists. Most White

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Americans continue to believe that they are more likely than people of color to be discriminated because of their skin color (Pew, 2021), an attitude that has spanned generations. Most White millennials, like most white Baby Boomers and Gen Xers, do not believe that racism is one of America’s most pressing issues. Even White millennials who hold progressive attitudes about same-sex marriage and socialism and identify as liberal Democrats don’t consider racism to be a pressing problem (Lewis, 2017). In The Closer, Chappelle complains that he has been accused of “punching down” when his satire is aimed at the transgendered community, the idea that it is inappropriate for comedians to ridicule groups that are themselves victims of discrimination. He defends himself on the grounds that as an African American he is the member of a group that has been so extraordinarily victimized that to punch down is not even possible, and he challenges the White gay community to “stop punching down on my people.” He jokes in the program that he is actually jealous of the LGBTQ community because of their rapid success in achieving equal rights: “If slaves had oil and booty shorts on, we might have been free 100 years sooner.” Such a joke, which draws upon an entirely ridiculous stereotype, effectively makes Chappelle’s point. The obvious ridiculousness of the representation serves to disarm any notion that it is a homophobic joke. Similarly, the Space Jews gag that begins early in The Closer is used to establish the controversial nature of his performance, but, again, the stereotype on which it is based is so completely absurd that rather than being antisemitic, it also functions in a polysemic fashion as an attack on antisemitic tropes. Some of Chappelle’s jokes are designed to provoke White feminists, using clearly misogynistic language while insisting on his own feminist beliefs. He cites the racism that Sojourner Truth faced from in the early days of the women’s movement, observing that White women “didn’t conflate the issues of women’s rights and slavery.” Then he disparages Whiteness within the contemporary feminist movement’s protests: It was, it was White, it was like .  .  . they were doing shit, like going to the Golden Globes and all of them would be like “Let’s all go to the Golden Globes and wear black dresses. And give these men a piece of our minds.” Bitch, that is not gonna work. You think Martin Luther King is gonna be like, “I want everybody to keep riding the bus, but wear matching outfits.”

He then declares himself a feminist and agrees to serve as the male leader of the movement in exchange for oral sex. The over-the-top crudity of the punchline is central to much of Chappelle’s satire, and it is possible that that crudity is designed not only to provoke outrage but also to challenge his audience to examine the complex ways that racism, antisemitism, and feminism intersect. That is, Chappelle’s vulgarity can be read as a critique of White

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fragility that dispels the notion of postracism and reminds his audiences that anti-Black racism persists. The humor in his comments about gays, Jews, and women is not unlike the polysemic nature of the humor in Chappelle’s Show, requiring the audience to recognize that he is ridiculing stereotypes rather than reinforcing them. But such humor runs the risk of being misinterpreted, and Chappelle appears to use that risk as a way to provoke outrage, which requires him to defend it in terms of artistic freedom. But the outrage that The Closer provoked did not seem to come from audience members who might have understood that; instead, they reacted to the transphobic humor in the program that lacked the same kind of sophisticated polysemy. For instance, the humor seems designed to humiliate and antagonize the trans community and lacks the intricacy of his best humor. “Gender is a fact, this is a fact,” he says. “Every human being in this room, every human being on Earth had to pass through the legs of a woman to be on Earth. That is a fact,” and the live audience laughs. He continues with the crude comparison of genetically engineered meat to anatomical surgery: “It’s not blood. It’s beet juice.” There is no case to make that such crudity could be read to ridicule attacks that are routinely made on the trans community; indeed, the humor is hardly different from that of right-wing Senator Ted Cruz, who has retweeted Chappelle’s antitrans tirades. His conservative audiences howl when Cruz jokes that “my pronouns are kiss my ass” (Papenfus, 2022). There is nothing sophisticated about these jokes. As Steven Kearse observed in The Nation, Chappelle never seems to consider that the people whom he skewers as “too sensitive, too brittle” might actually be the opposite: too hardened by experience to trust him as he promises solidarity but practices hate. Comedy has become a treacherous space in the past decade, a haven where “joking” has become cover for all manner of bigoted and reactionary politics. (2021)

It seems unlikely that Chappelle is unaware of the dangers related to antitrans satire, even if he believes it is a way to draw attention to anti-Black discrimination. Kimberly Crenshaw (1989) coined the term intersectionality to describe the interconnected ways that discrimination functions. She argues that the way to resist inequity related to race, gender, and class, is to identify their connectedness: It seems that placing those who currently are marginalized in the center is the most effective way to resist efforts to compartmentalize experiences and undermine potential collective action. It is not necessary to believe that a political consensus to focus on the lives of the most disadvantaged will happen tomorrow in order to recenter discrimination discourse at the intersection. It is enough, for now, that such an effort would encourage us to look beneath the prevailing

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conceptions of discrimination and to challenge the complacency that accompanies belief in the effectiveness of this framework. (p. 167)

Other scholars examining racism in the media have argued for decades the dangers of ignoring the overlapping ways that racism, sexism, homophobia, and classism function. As Gray (1995) observed about In Living Color: For some, the show’s strategies of representation produce critical insights; for others . . . they produce representations that are dangerous and embarrassing. In the end, the show’s meanings depend on how it organizes its audiences and negotiates the discourses, debates, and circumstances that enable and constantly reposition it within the larger society. (p. 181)

Likewise, bell hooks (1997) used the phrase “White supremacist capitalist patriarchy” to describe this intersection because I wanted to have some language that would actually remind us continually of the interlocking systems of domination that define our reality and not to just have one thing be like, you know, gender is the important issue, race is the important issue, but for me the use of that particular jargonistic phrase was a way, a sort of short cut way of saying all of these things actually are functioning simultaneously at all times in our lives and that if I really want to understand what’s happening to me, right now at this moment in my life, as a black female of a certain age group, I won’t be able to understand it if I’m only looking through the lens of race. I won’t be able to understand it if I’m only looking through the lens of gender. I won’t be able to understand it if I’m only looking at how white people see me. (p. 7)

In his defense of The Closer, Dave Chappelle makes the case that he is exercising his artistic freedom when he ridicules members of the LGBTQ community along with women and Jews, thereby ridiculing the very notion of intersectionality. My negotiated reading is that his real intent is to provoke White liberals who have embraced the notion of postracialism—the idea that anti-Black racism is a thing of the past—while embracing other aspects of progressive political causes like LGBTQ rights. While some members of Chappelle’s audience object to his vulgarity, including his habitual use of the N-word, they recognize his otherwise comedic brilliance and his critique of White privilege. “There is justified anger among Black folks when some people use white privilege to escape the oppression we face,” NPR media critic Eric Deggans wrote. “But . . . just because some members of a group use their privilege in terrible ways, that’s not a green light to visit unfair prejudices on everyone in that group” (2022). In his Emmy-award appearance on the Saturday Night Live episode that followed Donald Trump’s election in 2016, Chappelle’s opening monolog

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intimated that White progressives had underestimated the appeal that Trump’s thinly veiled racism had for many White Americans, and the show’s first sketch hammered home the point, which I described in an analysis of race and millennial media: Joined by another popular African American comedian, Chris Rock, the two attend an election-night party with a small group of white Millennials prepared to celebrate Democrat Hillary Clinton’s victory. As the night wears on, and as Trump’s election become apparent, Chapelle and Rock feign mock surprise as the other partygoers are shocked that somebody such as Trump could actually have won the election. “Oh my God,” one said, “I think America is racist.” The skit’s keen insight into progressive white America’s failure to grasp the role that contemporary racism played in the election was a more telling analysis than that undertaken by journalists and spoke to pop culture’s potential to address America’s racial divide. (2019a, p. 194)

My observation at the time was that the skit’s hilarious—but important— message functioned as a kind of useful, postmodern journalism that provided insights about racism that eluded traditional news coverage of Trump’s presidential campaign. I don’t believe I can make a similar case for The Closer, which in its crudeness and unpleasantness lacked the kind of subtle, witty satire of which Chappelle is capable. I believe he could successfully argue that his intent is to emphasize the point that other social movements—especially those that have advanced rights for women and the LGBTQ community—have benefited from the same White privilege that has hindered the slow progress to establish racial equality in the United States. But that’s not an argument he has advanced, nor does The Closer make that point, directly or in polysemic terms. UNTANGLING INTERSECTIONALITY Perhaps, Chappelle’s return to host Saturday Night Live in 2022 offered some hope that he has moved beyond his transphobic rants. His monolog mostly ignored the fallout from The Closer, and he began by ridiculing the antisemitic remarks recently in the headlines that were made by two prominent African Americans, rapper Kanye West and NBA star Kyrie Irving. He appears to acknowledge criticism of his antisemitism in The Closer and tells the audience that he will begin with a prepared statement: “I denounce antisemitism in all its forms, and I stand with my friends in the Jewish community.” He pauses before adding, “And that, Kanye, is how you buy yourself some time.” He riffs on the notion of Jewish control over Hollywood, comparing it to Black political clout in places where racist police violence thrives.

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He acknowledges that there are a lot of Jewish people in the entertainment industry, “but that doesn’t mean anything. There’s a lot of Black people in Ferguson, Missouri. That doesn’t mean they run the place.” He feigns objection to Irving’s suspension from the NBA for promoting an antisemitic film on social media, arguing that Irving “was nowhere near the Holocaust—in fact, he’s not even certain it existed.” Although his appearance sparked some backlash from critics, others acknowledged that the humor on display here was more in line with the edgy, polysemic satire for which Chappelle is known. TV producer Jonathan Goldman compared Chappelle’s humor to that of another winner of the Mark Twain Prize, George Carlin, and noted that there is a difference between bigotry and social commentary: “It’s not for the faint of heart but if we’re going to survive, we have to understand nuance” (quoted in Timsit, 2022). The Closer, however, largely lacked that kind of nuance, and rather than providing useful social commentary, Chappelle aligned himself with reactionary politicians whose anti-LGBTQ attitudes and public policy are difficult to separate from the racist attitudes and policies that Chappelle ridicules. His “artistic freedom” defense seems hollow. He could certainly be exercising it to ridicule laws that limit basic rights for underrepresented groups. The discriminatory attacks on the LGBTQ community are very much part of a larger strategy that includes bans on critical race theory and blatantly racist voting laws, all things that seem ripe material for Chappelle. Why ridicule trans people? Why appear with Joe Rogan and Elon Musk? Artistic freedom? I’ve argued that a “negotiated” reading of The Closer could note that the program serves as a subtle way to alert White progressives who have embraced the notion of postracialism that anti-Black racism persists and deserves the kind of political attention enjoyed by other movements of underrepresented groups. But satire is not effective if audiences are not in on the joke. If Chappelle’s intent was for his audience to understand the subtlety of his message, it seems like that would be an argument worth defending, rather than just saying “the more you say I can’t say something, the more urgent it is for me to say it.” Such a defense for The Closer seems disingenuous in the light of the severe criticism generated by its crudity. “Untangling homophobia, transphobia, racism and white privilege,” as Deggans (2021) writes, “requires a lot more effort and understanding than Chappelle makes here.” It also seems that in a perilous political moment in which the United States is deeply divided over issues of race, gender, and class that our country’s greatest satirist might be better served by ridiculing hegemonic power and not its victims.

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REFERENCES Andrews-Dyer, H. (2022). Dave Chappelle brings Elon Musk on stage at comedy show and boos abound. Washington Post. https://www​.washingtonpost​.com​/arts​ -entertainment​/2022​/12​/12​/dave​-chappelle​-elon​-musk​-booed/ Bedard, M. (2022, Oct. 22). The real reason Dave Chappelle quit his sketch show. Looper. https://www​.looper​.com​/266269​/the​-real​-reason​-dave​-chappelle​-quit​-his​ -sketch​-show/ Blake, A. (2023, May 1). How the Republican Party has shifted against transgender rights. Washington Post. https://www​.washingtonpost​.com​/politics​/2023​/05​/01​/ republicans​-transgender​-rights​-polls/ Blistein, J. (2022, June 8). Netflix drops 40-minute video of Dave Chappelle lecturing high school kids. Rolling Stone. https://www​.rollingstone​.com​/culture​/culture​ -news​/dave​-chappelle​-high​-school​-theater​-netflix​-whats​-in​-a​-name​-1379805/ Campbell, C. P. (1995). Race, Myth and the News. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Campbell, C. P. (2003). Commodifying 9/11: Advertising, myth and hegemony. In F. Bailey, M. Brown & S. Chermak (Eds.), Media Representations of September 11 (pp. 47–65). Westport: Praeger Publishing. Campbell, C. P. (2016). #IfTheyGunnedMeDown: Postmodern media criticism in a postracial world. In R. Lind (Ed.), Race and Gender in Electronic Media: Challenges and Opportunities (pp. 195–212), New York: Routledge. Campbell, C. P. (2019a). “Trust me I’m am not a racist”: Whiteness, media and millennials. In R. Lind (Ed.), Race/Gender/Class/Media (pp. 194–199). New York: Routledge. Campbell, C. P. (2019b). Commodifying the resistance: Wokeness, whiteness and the historical persistence of racism. In L. S.Coleman & C. P. Campbell (Eds.), Media, Myth and Millennials (pp. 11–26). Lexington: New York. Cobb, J. (2021, Oct. 24). The power of Dave Chappelle’s comedy. The New Yorker. https://www​.newyorker​.com​/magazine​/2021​/11​/01​/the​-power​-of​-dave​-chappelles​ -comedy​-netflix​-the​-closer Crenshaw, K. (1989). Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: A black feminist critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory and antiracist politics. University of Chicago Legal Forum, 1989(1). https://chicagounbound​.uchicago​ .edu​/cgi​/viewcontent​.cgi​?article​=1052​&context​=uclf Deggans, E. (2021, Oct. 5). For Dave Chappelle, punchlines are dares. His new special, ‘The Closer,’ goes too far. NPR. https://www​.npr​.org​/2021​/10​/05​/1043435919​ /dave​-chappelle​-new​-netflix​-special​-the​-closer​-review Deggans, E. (2022, Nov. 17). I critiqued Dave Chappelle and his fans questioned my Blackness. NPR. https://www​.npr​.org​/2022​/11​/17​/1137241883​/dave​-chappelle​-snl​ -anti​-semitic Dellatto, M. (2022, July 8). Netflix releases another Dave Chappelle special—Despite past employee protests. Forbes. https://www​.forbes​.com​/sites​/marisadellatto​/2022​

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/07​/08​/netflix​-releases​-another​-dave​-chappelle​-special​-despite​-past​-employee​-protests/​?sh​=76ac29f337c2 Gray, H. (1995). Watching Race: Television and the Struggle for “Blackness”. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Hall, S. (1980). Encoding/decoding. In S. Hall, D. Hobson, A. Lowe, & P. Wills (Eds.), Culture, Media Language (pp. 28–138). London: Hutchinson. hooks, b. (1997). Cultural criticism and transformation (video produced by Sut Jhally). Media Education Foundation. https://www​.mediaed​.org​/transcripts​/Bell​ -Hooks​-Transcript​.pdf Jackson, D. Z. (2004). The N-word and Richard Pryor. The New York Times. https:// www​.nytimes​.com​/2005​/12​/15​/opinion​/the​-nwordand​-richard​-pryor​.html Jashinsky, E. (2021, Oct. 21). In ‘The Closer,’ Dave Chappelle cements the legacy of his brilliant run at Netflix. The Federalist. https://thefederalist​.com​/2021​/10​/07​/in​ -the​-closer​-dave​-chappelle​-cements​-the​-legacy​-of​-his​-brilliant​-run​-at​-netflix/ Jenkins, C. (2021, Oct. 15). Dave Chapelle’s endless feedback loop. Vulture. https:// www​.vulture​.com​/article​/dave​-chappelle​-the​-closer​-comedy​-review​.html Kaiser Family Foundation. (2021). Poverty by race/ethnicity. https://www​.kff​.org​ /other​/state​-indicator​/poverty​-rate​-by​-raceethnicity/​?currentTimeframe​=0​&sortModel=​%7B​%22colId​%22:​%22Location​%22,​%22sort​%22:​%22asc​%22​%7D Kearse, S. (2021, Nov. 9). Dave Chapelle’s comedy of bitterness. The Nation. https:// www​.thenation​.com​/article​/culture​/dave​-chappelle​-review/ Kennedy Center. (2022). https://www​.kennedy​-center​.org​/whats​-on​/marktwain/ Letterman, D. (presenter). (2022, Oct. 21). My Next Guest Needs No Introduction. Season 3, Episode 3. Netflix. Leung, R. (2004, Oct. 19). Chappelle: An act of freedom. 60 Minutes II. https://www​ .cbsnews​.com​/news​/chappelle​-an​-act​-of​-freedom​-19​-10​-2004/ Meckler, L. & Clement, Scott. (2023, May 5). Most Americans support anti-trans policies favored by GOP. Washington Post. https://www​.washingtonpost​.com​/ education​/2023​/05​/05​/trans​-poll​-gop​-politics​-laws/ Papenfuss, M. (2022, July 23). Ted Cruz makes crass crack about gender pronouns, met with cheers. Huffpost. https://www​.huffpost​.com​/entry​/ted​-cruz​-pronouns​ -obergefell​_n​_62d​c70c​fe4b​06e2​13fbface0 Perks, L. G. (2010). Polysemic scaffolding: Explicating discursive clashes in Chappelle’s Show. Communication, Culture and Critique, 3, 270–289. Pew. (2021, Nov. 11). Deep divisions in views of America’s racial history. Trust Magazine. https://www​.pewtrusts​.org​/en​/trust​/archive​/fall​-2021​/deep​-divisions​-in​ -views​-of​-americas​-racial​-history Post-Secondary National Policy Institute. (2022). Black students in higher education. https://pnpi​.org​/black​-students/ Powell, K. (2017, April 19). Dave Chappelle is an American folk hero. The New York Times Style Magazine. https://www​.nytimes​.com​/2017​/04​/19​/t​-magazine​/dave​ -chappelle​-profile​.html Prison Policy Initiative. (2022). Updated charts provide insights on racial disparities, correctional control, jail suicides, and more. https://www​.prisonpolicy​.org​/blog​ /2022​/05​/19​/updated​_charts/

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Rand (2022). To help African Americans gain generational wealth, look to the housing market. https://www​.rand​.org​/blog​/2022​/12​/to​-help​-african​-americans​-gain​ -generational​-wealth​.html Smith, M. D. (2022, Feb. 18). Is using this word ever okay? And who has the power to decide? The Washington Post. https://www​.washingtonpost​.com​/outlook​/2022​/02​/18​/is​-using​-this​-word​-ever​-okay​ -who​-has​-power​-decide/ Spera, K. (2021, Oct. 28). Dave Chapelle, Joe Rogan defend themselves at sold-out N.W. show: ‘These are just jokes’. The Times Picayune. https:// www​.nola​.com​/entertainment​_life​/keith​_spera​/dave​-chappelle​-joe​-rogan​-defend​ -themselves​-at​-sold​-out​-n​-o​-show​-these​-are​-just​/article​_55dd1f3e​-388a​-11ec​-9f3f​ -d777db9101a9​.html Sumi, G. (2021, Oct. 15). Review: Dave Chappelle special The Closer is a big f–k you. NOW. https://nowtoronto​.com​/movies​/reviews​/review​-dave​-chappelle​-special​ -the​-closer Timsit, A. (2022, Nov. 13). Chappelle returns to SNL with no apologies – And many jokes about Kanye. Washington Post. https://www​.washingtonpost​.com​/lifestyle​ /2022​/11​/13​/dave​-chappelle​-snl​-kanye​-antisemitism/ Young, D. G. (2022). Irony and outrage: The polarized landscape of rage, fear, and laughter in the United States. New York: Oxford University Press. Zilco, C. (2022, Feb. 18). The controversial Dave Chapelle-Netflix romance continues: 4 new specials to come. Indiewire. https://www​.indiewire​.com​/2022​/02​/chappelles​-home​-team​-dave​-chappelle​-netflix​-1234700785/

Chapter 9

Latin History for Morons Comedic Revisions and Race in the Work of John Leguizamo Manuel Avilés-Santiago and Danny Méndez

The use of satire as a narrative instrument to talk about ethnicity and race and to address issues related to racism and discrimination has a long tradition in U.S. media history. Historically, satire has been leveraged in literature, visual, and performing arts and media to tackle race through exaggeration, parody, and power inversion to highlight privilege, unfairness, and injustice. Another common use of satire is as a means of deploying irony and sarcasm to mock and ridicule racist attitudes and behavior with the aim of devaluing them in social discourse. As Gray and Jones (2009) have pointed out, satire—in standup and situation comedy and in theater and film—has often proven successful both in terms of box office numbers and in introducing shame around the use of racist tropes in everyday life, thereby countering the hegemony of such tropes across other genres as well—from reality TV to textbooks. Due to their viral and cult appeal, satirical narratives can now spread worldwide almost instantly via the global structure of web-based media. Gray and Jones have also suggested that, besides relying heavily on an audience who potentially shares the performer’s political perspective, this kind of entertainment can capture public sentiment and energize civic culture more widely, engaging viewers as citizens by provoking debates and attracting their attention to politics. Many other scholars—including Danielle Fuentes-Morgan (2020), Richard J. Powell (2020), Lisa A. Guerrero (2021), Brandon J. Manning (2021), and Charisse L’Pree Corsbie-Massay (2022)—have explored the role played by satire in contemporary popular culture to create images and tropes that deconstruct the racism of everyday life—even if, unlike the strategies of the civil rights movement, this technique constitutes a form of soft power and thus shares its concomitant weaknesses. 163

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Fuentes-Morgan (2020) looks at African American satire as an instrument of social justice when laughter and ethical beliefs are intertwined in a revolutionary way. The case studies with which she engages vary from works produced by Suzan-Lori Parks, Leslie Jones, and Dave Chappelle to Get Out and Atlanta, all of which subject race and racialization across today’s Black culture to a critical gaze. Guerrero (2021) explores how Black satire is used in TV, film, and literature to depict the complexities of being a racialized individual amid racism. Via cultural studies, psychoanalysis, and trauma theory, she offers insightful analysis of, for instance, television’s Chappelle’s Show, Spike Lee’s film, Bamboozled, and novels like Paul Beatty’s The White Boy Shuffle and Percival Everett’s I Am Not Sidney Poitier. Corsbie-Massay (2022) draws case studies from a wide variety of popular satirical sources— such as The Daily Show, The Onion, Saturday Night Live, and Family Guy— to focus on the difference between content that disrupts discourse and content that ends up reinforcing stereotypes. In contrast to the robust corpus of scholarship on Black satire, there is a paucity of inquiry into Latinx satire. Some of what has been undertaken revolves around the work of political cartoonist and satirist Lalo Alcaraz. For example, H. D. Fernández-L’Hoeste’s Lalo Alcaraz: Political Cartooning in the Latino Community (2017) offers a comprehensive view of the cartoonist’s work and discusses how Alcaraz’s political and social satire addresses the injustice, inequity, and discrimination experienced by this community. Similarly, Mauricio Espinoza (in Serrano 2021) explores how Alcaraz’s use of satire exposes and denounces mainstream anti-immigrant rhetoric and attitudes, illustrating the complexity at the core of the U.S. immigrant experience. While satire can be a powerful tool to address racism and discrimination, it can also be used to reinforce stereotypes and perpetuate harmful attitudes. Furthermore, it can turn on stereotypes and end up in denial, pretending this is a positive didactic argument. The valorization of satire often overlooks its frequent use of racist and sexist ploys while ostensibly attacking hegemonic ideologies around, precisely, ethnicity, race, gender, and sexuality. As Jennifer Alvarez-Dickinson observes, “Humor, particularly satire, can attempt to regulate in-group behavior. Latino comic performers frequently ridicule ‘inauthentic’ Latinos, such as pochos (Anglicized Mexicans) and vendidos (sellouts)” (p. 421, in Aldama et al., 2012). This attempt at regulation speaks to the notion of comedic revisionism, the reinterpreting or reimagining of history or historical events through comedy; as a complex and nuanced tool, it’s important—for content creators and scholars—to consider the sociocultural and historical context and the audience that it faces. Guillermo Hernández explains in Chicano Satire (1991) that parody and satire ridicule or invalidate the normative principles of the person, community, idea, or act being satirized. At the same time, “satire is also present when

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rival groups appeal to the loyalty of members who must decide upon the validity of opposing value systems” (p. 5). A careful analysis must consider what constitutes “normal” in the context of a given satire and who determines the power dynamics between and within groups. Satire and parody are often used by Latinx people and cultural communities—in sum, to both flesh out and refine a group’s social history: “[Satire] is a genre that—along with others to which it is closely allied: comedy, humor, jest, parody, wit, irony, and so forth—includes a variety of rhetorical devices designed to represent the marginal. In the ridicule made of foreigners and their alien traits such as language, customs, and values, there lies an implicit reaffirmation of a dominant group’s linguistic, social, and ethical standards” (p. 2). Hernández also points out that marginalization often works via dyads formed by negative archetypes (e.g., sinner, fool, and coward) with positive counterparts (e.g., saint, sage, and hero). In this chapter, we examine actor-producer-comedian John Leguizamo’s career as a comedian in Hollywood and explore the way his life experiences inform the rhetorical devices he employs in his comedic work, particularly his monologue shows. We specifically examine his oneman comedic performance Latin History for Morons, which originally aired on Netflix in 2018 and invites the audience to reflect on—and laugh about— Latin American history as it is (mis)taught to people who are assumed to be bigoted. The resulting blend of fact, falsehood, and humor requires an insider audience whose members “get” the errors presented and their ongoing manufacture within the dominant domain of White North Americans. This chapter demonstrates, however, that there are limitations to Leguizamo’s comedic revisionism by inquiring the following: What are the intended effects of the lessons imparted onstage by Leguizamo’s patriarchal comedic presence?

LEGUIZAMO IN A NUTSHELL John Alberto Leguizamo Peláez was born on July 22, 1960, in Bogotá, Colombia, to Luz Marina Peláez and Alberto Rudolfo Leguizamo. When he was a child, Leguizamo’s family moved to New York and lived between Queens and Jackson Heights. In season 8, episode 7 of the PBS series Finding Your Roots, aired in 2022, Leguizamo volunteered to have his genealogy explored. The researchers found that his ancestry includes European (mostly Spanish), Indigenous, and distant African roots. The search for identity has been a constant motif in Leguizamo’s work as a comedian and showbiz personality. He has been in more than 100 films, produced more than 20 documentaries and 30 television shows, and he has starred on Broadway. During the mid-1990s, he rose to fame for his role as Luigi in Super Mario Bros (1993), his critically acclaimed performance as Chi-chi in Too Wong Foo, Thanks for everything!

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Julie Newmar (1993), and his supporting role in Carlito’s Way (1995). Real name recognition, however, mostly came with his comedy specials, including Mambo Mouth (1991), Spic-O-Rama (1993), Freak (1998), Sexaholic . . . A Love Story (2002), and Ghetto Klown (2011). His comedic approach is classic standup—a mix of his public persona and fictionalized characters in the line of other comedians going back to the work of Richard Pryor and Freddie Prinze during the 1970s. Like them, Leguizamo has often taken satirical approaches to race and ethnicity, particularly denouncing bigotry directed at people with dark skin among Latinxs and harshly critiquing Hollywood casting. During the last decade, Leguizamo has been very vocal regarding colorism. In his 2011 autobiographical one-man Broadway show, Ghetto Klown, he talks about his first television gig: a role as a Colombian cocaine prince on the 1980s TV series Miami Vice. In the 2011 bit, he mentions a piece of misbegotten advice from his beloved grandfather: “Only White Latinos make it to Telemundo . . . Stay out of the sun. Walk on the shaded side of the street. Don’t even eat dark food” (Isherwood, 2011). Leguizamo’s anecdote highlights the issue of colorism in Spanish-language television, particularly on Telemundo and Univision, where these networks tend to promote a Eurocentric beauty ideal by featuring lighter-skinned Latino celebrities and models, while darker-skinned Latinos are underrepresented. In a 2022 interview for the entertainment weekly Deadline, Leguizamo denounced colorism while acknowledging his privilege as a light-skin Latinx: “I’ve benefitted from being light skin, and I stayed out of the sun so I could work. I definitely would not go in the sun. For years I was so pasty so that I could work. All the Latinos who’ve made it so far, a lot of them were light skin. What happened to all the Afro Latinos and the majority of the Indigenous Latinos? They don’t get a shot” (Cordero, 2022). He went on to address the cost of speaking out against colorism and discrimination in the entertainment industry: “Being vocal has a cost. When I became politically conscious and then political on my social [media], I lost half my followers. Then I got a lot of hate tweets like, ‘Go back to your country. Go back to Mexico.’ I’m not Mexican but I’ll gladly go back to Mexico because it’s a great country” (Cordero, 2022). Leguizamo’s criticism of the industry has also tackled the issue of casting choices. In 2022, he wrote on Instagram of James Franko’s casting as Fidel Castro in the upcoming film Alina of Cuba: “How is this still going on? How is Hollywood excluding us but stealing our narratives as well? No more appropriation Hollywood and streamers! Boycott! This [is] F’d up! Plus seriously difficult story to tell without aggrandizement, which would be wrong! I don’t got a [problem] with Franco but he ain’t Latino!” But what preceded Leguizamo’s active advocacy against colorism was his Netflix special, Latin History for Morons (2018).

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Latin History for Morons is a monodrama that intertwines elements of autobiography and storytelling (the beginning of the piece recounts an anecdote about his son, and the program later features other accounts of family interactions) framed within a satirical simulacrum of a classroom and leavened with self-deprecating humor. That autobiographical and self-deprecating humor is something in which Leguizamo takes pride, even claiming to be its stylistic progenitor in an interview with the Chicago Tribune: “I have transformed the one-man show. I have pioneered the one-man show. There were no autobiographical one-man shows before me; American comedy was mostly light and superficial. There would be no Louis C.K. without me. No Larry David without me. I was the first person to take my own life and make it dramedy” (Jones, 2019). Typically, perhaps, this overlooks the entire history of Black standup, even though Leguizamo has admitted at other times that Richard Pryor’s movies and style were a major influence (Woods, 2023). The autobiographical motive of the show is Leguizamo’s attempt to help his son select a Latinx hero for his school history project. The boy is being bullied about his heritage and has chosen to be a “cowboy” instead of an “Indian.” Thus, the didactic format of the standup routine is legitimated as a dialogue between comedian-father and son. This content acquires particular relevance given that—as noted by culture critic Jimmy Noriega—it premiered in 2018, two years into Donald Trump’s presidency, and the “US climate of racism, xenophobia, and isolationist discourse, especially where immigrants and people of color (in particular, those of Latin American descent) are being targeted by the current administration” (Noriega, 2018, p. 100). In this Trump-era political context, Netflix sponsored an outpouring of liberal and woke-influenced entertainment, for which it has been pounded by right-wing media (Montlake, 2022). Streaming Satire: A Close Reading of Latin History for Morons Latin History for Morons is a play on words based on the instructional reference book series “For Dummies.” This collection of publications is characterized by striking and recognizable black and yellow covers, a cartoon figure known as “Dummies Man,” and simple prose with step-by-step instruction on complex subjects like computer programming, philosophy, and games like chess and Dungeons and Dragons. The Complete Idiot’s Guides follow a similar how-to approach, providing a basic understanding of complex and popular topics. In both cases, the terms “dummies” and “idiot” are presumably used by marketers to assure their audience (with humor) that their guides are straightforward and comprehensible even if their topics seem intimidating, an advertising approach aimed at putting the guides in reach of an otherwise inexpert and potentially

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intimidated mass of consumers. The guides’ pedagogy relies on explaining a topic step by step, using clearly defined basic terminology, and profiling people and ideas in simple terms. This style is appropriated by Leguizamo with a nod to the idea that even those ignorant toward Latinx culture—that is, dominant White culture—can learn if the lesson is simple enough. At its core, Latin History for Morons extends the autobiographical shows Leguizamo created and performed on stage for cable networks like HBO. In this sense, Leguizamo’s work can be subsumed under the notion that performance art and entertainment can make performers “practitioners of political agendas” (Schlossman, 2002). For performers, the personal—raised to become the topic of a monologue with broad reach and appeal—can reveal a political dimension at its core; that is, a dynamic of power whereby the subject becomes self-aware. Throughout Latin History for Morons, Leguizamo focuses on the racist bullying his son, whom he calls Buddy throughout the show, endures at school. Leguizamo recounts one of his initial responses—to talk with the bully’s father, who dismisses him with yet another racist remark: John, I’m terribly sorry. I had no idea my boy had called your son a beaner. But, hey, at least he didn’t call him a wetback, right, John? [chuckles] What, John? What? I’m not a racist, John. John, my family donates to the diversity program every year, John. I come from a long, long line of philanthropreneurs. (Lequizamo, 2018)

These slights provoke Leguizamo to analyze his own sense of his people’s history as well as his personal past, recollect the racism he himself had experienced in middle school, and lead the audience on a series of journeys through time that begin with one to the 1970s. During one of his history classes, middle-school John had asked his teacher, Mr. Flynn, why Latinos were not represented in the history textbooks. He responds: “Mr. Leguizamo, you wanna know what these people have contributed to this country? Drugs and violence. Now sit your ignorant ass down.” This newly racist dismissal prompts middle-school John to seek the advice of his Uncle Sanny, a partially deaf man who, Leguizamo claims, received all of his information from PBS. The irony here, of course, is that both pedagogical spaces—the middle-school classroom and the PBS television screen—are publicly funded and thus spaces of the same (mis)education. At this point, Leguizamo begins the history lesson portion of the show in earnest, declaring himself to be a “ghetto scholar”: So, yo, ever since my son got bulli—Yo, yo, yo, I put a fatwa on that bully, and I went on a intellectual jihad. So now I’m a self-professed ghetto scholar, holla. Coo-coo. So, people, tonight’s lesson is .  .  . Latin History for Fucking Morons. And that’s you. I’m sorry, but it’s true, okay? Tonight, I’m only gonna

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be talking about our founding forefathers and our empires, the kind of shit that they keep out of our history textbooks. So pay attention ’cause you’re gonna be quizzed. A’ight? A’ight. (Lequizamo, 2018)

Using African American Vernacular English in satire has been identified as a common strategy for addressing race, ethnicity, and discrimination. Another example of comedians using ethnic linguistic vernacular goes back to Latino comedian, Freddie Prinze (Beltran, 2008), who was known for his use of slang, a combination of English and Spanish and elements of Puerto Rican Spanish. As well as adding authenticity and relatability for audiences this specific linguistic choice may serve as a means of subverting stereotypes, challenging the dominant narrative, and drawing attention to how language and dialects can be used to marginalize and discriminate against certain groups. In the case of Latin History for Morons, using Ebonics in satire can court controversy—unintentionally or with purpose—or, indeed, to provoke. When satire is meant to be didactic, the linguistic and dialectic mix can be confusing as the potential impact of the vernacular may serve to reinforce the harmful stereotypes the comedian is supposedly exploring. In Search of Latinx DNA: The Genetics of Laughter More keys to identity formation are introduced throughout Leguizamo’s history lesson, including the notion of genetics and genealogy in Latin American and Latinx identities. The quest to pin down lines of descent further complicates how Latin American and Latinx people choose to identify themselves and highlights the nuances of their racial, ethnic, and cultural heritage. However, this lesson as we have seen throughout Leguizamo’s performance is tinged with an implicit and explicit racist discourse: So let’s start by looking at Latin DNA. Now, I’ve done a lot of research to find out that we Latin people are all at least 40% Indian. And by “Indian,” I mean . . . [Native American chant] Not, [spoken in East Indian accent:] “Please to be taking down your pants . . . so I can be examining your rectum.” We are also 25% Black. That’s right, baby. After the conquistadors enslaved all the Indians, and they died off, they imported Black people to fill in they vacancies. So we are definitely Blackified . . . Okay, maybe not so much. We’re also 25% White, 25% Jewish, 25% Lebanese, and 40% I don’t know what the fuck. For a grand total of 180%. (Lequizamo, 2018)

This obsession with precise percentages and ethnic/racial categories—even as it is mocked, with “exact” results including “I don’t know what the fuck” and adding to 180%—responds to the late neoliberalist trend toward genetic essentialism and genomic science that reprises the Social Darwinism of late

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nineteenth- and early twentieth-century racism. The confluence of genetic testing and ancestry companies (e.g., AncestryDNA and 23andMe) is also symptomatic of this trend. Genetic essentialism in the mass media promotes an image of genes not as code dictating the end product of protein-making machines but as directors and controllers of macro-body features that make people who they are (Dar-Nimrod et al., 2021). According to Marcon, Rachul and Caulfield (2021), this trend permits people to “use scientific ‘proof’ to align themselves with or distance themselves from socially ascribed identities” (p. 135). Leguizamo’s insistence on a “hybridity” based on the various ethnic/racial percentages he references generates a “liminal space where negotiation and struggles occur” (Squires, 2010). He adds: And that is us Latino people. And trust me, I know it’s confusing, I know it’s confusing . . . because we Latin people are a bastardly people, and the reason we’re such bastards is because those white European conquistadors came here in the 1500s without women. And these horny son-of-a-bitches were sexing up all our fine native honeys, and these conquistadores would be like, “Gonzalo, psst. Gonzalo. I never thought I was going to say this, but can you fuck too much? Cause I think I’m sick of fucking. I don’t think I ever wanna fuck again. I’ve reached the fucking end.” These conquistadors were like NBA players at a Kardashian pool party. (Lequizamo, 2018)

While Leguizamo’s lessons teach that Latin history has been wrongfully eclipsed, they leverage the very Social Darwinist ideology that legitimated that eclipse as enacted by White European and U.S. historians along with White Latin American writers. However, much they aim to highlight potential historical heroes for the Latinx community and Leguizamo’s audience, his lessons are complicatedly rooted in a space dominated by White cisgender men. Consequently, his performance perpetuates the unfortunate fact that Latinx identities and pedagogy are built on a fragmented foundation complicit with a macho and White legacy that transforms, for instance, rape into “sexing up” and “fucking.” This inconsistency—presumably developed for the sake of humorous tropes that feed back into the oppressive eclipse of Latin American and Latinx history—prefaces a good faith effort to dismantle assumptions about preColumbian America by first questioning Columbus’s status as a “discoverer” and pointing out that 73 million people were already present in the Americas at the time of Columbus’s arrival. By imparting this lesson to Buddy, John hopes to equip his son to fight the school bully. Unfortunately, the school bully does not appreciate the comebacks John has taught his son, prompting Buddy’s refusal to take any more advice from his father. By his own description, John is increasingly losing his ability to retain power as father/teacher to Buddy/the show’s audience of morons—the very group represented by Buddy’s bully.

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Fleshing Out “Ghetto Rage” Further compounded by Buddy’s assignment, John’s frustration and anger prompt him to seek help from his therapist, who represents yet another figure unaware of Latinx cultures. John calls his feelings “ghetto rage” in his initial therapy session—a rage tinged with frustration born of his ignorance regarding figures from his own culture, which is exposed when he fails to name even one such “hero” in a therapy word association exercise. John’s naming of only White men after hearing the words “success,” “genius,” and “legend” provokes him to state, “I’m brainwashed. No, worse. I’m whitewashed.” We can relate what Leguizamo calls “ghetto rage” to the connections among performance, humor, and rage explained by José Esteban Muñoz in Disidentifications: Queer of Color and the Performance of Politics, who notes that “comedy does not exist independently without rage” (p. xi). Muñoz further asserts that rage persists beyond the rhetoric of irony and satire that sublimates it. Such rhetorical ploys, which may satisfy aesthetically, fail to produce an activist solidarity that can reclaim space in a society colonized by Whiteness and heteronormativity. Leguizamo’s performance appropriates the “history lesson” as a sublimated form of ghetto rage—the rage of the father at the bullying of his son; the rage against a dominant history that ignores the cruelties of its foundation—that transforms the pedagogical exercise into a standup exorcism seeking to expel the stereotypes that surround Latinx and Latin American communities. Leguizamo suspects that the lack of historical knowledge about Latin American and Latinx history is motivated by and coordinated with systematic and systemic bigotry against people of color. Despite initiatives for Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging (DEIB), Latinx people and their countries of origin are often ignored by both Latinx and non-Latinx communities, a pointed extension of the “for morons” aspect of the performance. This irony is satirized by Leguizamo, whose therapist prescribes attending a DEIB congress in Texas to help cure John’s ghetto rage: But I was nervous as fuck, and they call us . . . out on the stage, and this moderator, this Texan guy, just rips right into me. He’s like, “Ah, Mr. ‘Liquidzamo.’ I’m intrigued by this niche history of Latin America you’re telling us about, but you’re an outsider and a foreigner, and your comments are a direct attack on American exceptionalism, so I-I’m-I’m gonna have to agree with Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina when he says that Hispanics and Blacks are not traditional Americans.” And boom. The alcohol hits me. [cheering and applause from the Netflix audience]. (Lequizamo, 2018)

What follows is an onstage enactment of ghetto rage in the ironic setting of a DEIB convention that ignores the complex and rich history of Latinx and Latin American communities. John responds with:

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You best, you best, uh, back the fuck off . . . with your jingoistical, xenophobic, inaccurate bullshit, ’cause you seriously talking out the side of your mouth, you punk-ass bitch! Because the establishment of these here United States was only made possible through one of the most comprehensive campaigns of ethnic cleansing that the world has ever known. Am I getting through to you now, motherfucker? Do you know me? Huh? You know me? You know me? (Lequizamo, 2018)

John’s ghetto rage set off this tirade of profanity-laden language that critiques the use of exceptionalism and xenophobic rhetoric. He ended his argument by stating that the United States was only made possible through an ethnic cleansing process that invalidated the history and presence of Indigenous people. In a comedic move that further extends this moment of irony, at the end of his reenacted tirade, John advises his son to remain calm in arguments, especially as a person of color. The Limits of Satire: Pinning Down the Moving Punchline Leguizamo succeeds in highlighting, through humor, the hurdles Latinx communities face as they try to recuperate their history—to teach it to the ignorant and pass it down to younger generations. Indeed, his comedy fits within the broad framework of a progressive account of U.S. history. However, the show ultimately exposes the complicated nature of culturally intimate humor (Cooper, 2008). Although this form of humor enables marginalized groups to connect and assert their identity by sharing experiences and utilizing in-group dynamics to counter stereotypes and oppose prevailing cultural narratives, it may also give rise to potential difficulties and unintended consequences. Some possible outcomes include misunderstandings or misinterpretations by individuals outside the group, the unintentional reinforcement of stereotypes, and the perpetuation of existing power imbalances between majority and minority groups. Via this culturally intimate humor, Leguizamo expects and receives echoing applause and validation from the Latinx audience. Nonetheless, the broader Netflix audience may complicate any critical examination of genuinely portrayed lived experiences, even with Leguizamo’s intentional self-deprecating approach. Self-deprecation is a common narrative trope among monologists. A monologist tells a humorous story starring themselves to entertain a live audience. However, in contrast to stand-up comedians, monologists do not involve their audience directly beyond accomplices and listeners. Monologists deliver a more narrative-focused account than does a stand-up comedian, who uses laughter as the key to his score. The further the monologist diverges from the script, the more they must rely on an emotional connection to retain the audience’s interest. Within this spectrum of monologue formats,

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the monologist takes their audience on a journey through their story with audience members doing little more than reacting. For Leguizamo, the journey involves an amalgamation of body movements, facial expressions, and variations in vocal inflection and accents, which captivates the audience’s attention and highlights the comedic revisionism of history. Throughout his performance, John Leguizamo varies his voice and adapts the motion of his body to cosplay historical figures from Latin American and his personal history. These visual and audio interjections complement and enliven the lesson he imparts with the aim of eliciting both laughter and reflection—especially when wrenching past figures from their ossified historical contexts and presenting them in, so to speak, their potential contemporaneity. His portrayals of historical figures such as Moctezuma utilize physical humor to accentuate the fact that, due to the grand cataclysm visited by Europeans upon the Indigenous cultures of the Americas, we know comparatively little about even key figures from the period. Moreover, of course, a motivated forgetting traverses official U.S. history. What is satirized here, therefore, is the skewed attention given to historical events that are White and Europe-centered—and the fact that Latinx people and Latin Americans in the United States contribute to reproducing this social and pedagogical bias. In previous performances, Leguizamo had developed this topic by using mimicry and assimilation to navigate the historical gaps in his Latino background, mirroring the collective U.S. consciousness that he had assumed when he was a young man. This consciousness demanded a certain kind of historical amnesia. The mature Leguizamo uses caricatures to make an audience laugh; the young Leguizamo uses mimicry to blend in (Chirico, 2016). Such performances are mimicries in the sense that Leguizamo emulates from mainstream U.S. culture in them as a means of adapting to the dominant majority. In Latin History for Morons, the middle-aged Leguizamo battles against this dynamic: what is at stake is Buddy’s honor (cultural, physical, and social) and John’s attempt to stop reinforcing the same imitative gestures in the next generation so that assimilation and the eventual erasure of Latinx and Latin American history are not the only viable forms of identity for his son. Second-generation immigrants typically move outside their parents’ identification with their countries and cultures of origin. This creates a certain anxiety for first-generation immigrants, who want to convey successful skill sets to their children but also want them to know the tacit history of their ancestry and cultural heritage. Leguizamo’s history lesson is thus as relevant to Latinx (both English and Spanish speakers) as it is to non-Latinx audiences. But this is the problem with Leguizamo’s culturally intimate humor, especially given its explicit connection to the title’s satirical objective: What are the specific learning outcomes that will decretinize the supposed morons imbibing the lesson? When what is embodied and voiced on stage relies on racially and

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sexually held stereotypes of Latinx and Latin American people in the United States and Latin America for its laughs, what impact does this approach have on the stated didactic purpose? What, ultimately, are the social and cultural takeaways meant to be processed by the audience? Returning to Muñoz’s transformations and disidentifications gives us another opportunity to the links between humor and rage in Leguizamo’s performance. Though not himself a queer performer of color, his characterizations often challenge (and sometimes reinforce) stereotypes about LGBTQ+ people. An excellent example is when John describes Moctezuma’s weakness over and awe of Europeans—especially Hernan Cortés—as contributing factors to Mexico’s colonization: “But Moctezuma got played by Cortés, so we have a word in Spanish for Moctezuma: un pendejo. So, Moctezuma goes up to Cortés and says, [in feminine voice:] ‘Your lord, you have come to your city, Mexico. Here, sit on thy throne, oh, Quetzalcoaltl.’” The implication that a pendejo, not a strong masculine leader, was responsible for the downfall of the Aztecs is not a serious claim. Rather, it is a humorous claim that transforms the conquest of Mexico into a homophobic joke resulting from Leguizamo’s choice to depict, both in body and in voice, a feminized and queered Moctezuma. Cortés, in this scenario, appears in the role of a strong, smart, macho man, ironically appealing to him sexually. Why would Leguizamo make this choice? The classic colonialist version of conquest, in which the immoral savage is civilized, is supposedly being deconstructed in this monologue—this understanding of conquest and its fallout is precisely the moronic assumption that history, properly taught, should dispel—but here, instead, colonialist conquest is reinstated as a variant: The colonizers, here, bring masculinity. Throughout the part of the show on Indigenous populations in Latin America and the Caribbean, Leguizamo continues to employ this problematic duality. Some Indigenous peoples— like the Incas—are portrayed as masculine and active; the Taíno, however, are labeled “peaceful” and “docile”—a characterization that, Leguizamo hints, results in their tragic end. This is expressed in blatantly homophobic language during one of the multiple moments in the monologue when Leguizamo disrupts the stage performance to address an audience member chosen as a stand-in to represent White mainstream society by his silent presence. At this point, John had been discussing Columbus’s colonization of the Americas and emphasizing Latin Americans’ cultural contributions. Breaking into different dance moves featuring musical genres from Latin America, he briefly forgets the history lesson he had been imparting but then realizes that he must continue it: So where was I? [Addressing the audience member]: No, Mr. Obvious, I know I was dancing. So, long before .  .  . Columb-ass .  .  . yo, we were

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happy-go-lucky tribes . . . And I know why those Taínos were so peaceful in the Caribbean, too, ’cause they’d be like .  .  . [In a Jamaican accent]: ‘Hey, blood clot . . .’ Now, the Taínos were the gentlest people that the universe has ever seen .  .  . Let’s forget the Taínos for now because they were so gentle. (Lequizamo, 2018)

The problematic usage of a Jamaican accent to describe the Taíno’s “gentle” disposition as an implicit parallel to their presumed passivity, submissive, and weak character is further problematized by the slur “blood clot,” which in Jamaican vernacular is a pejorative term for gay men. Adding to the situation’s complexity, Jamaica is one of the few Caribbean islands that lawfully prosecute LGBTQ+ people. THE LIMITS OF COMEDIC REVISIONISM Leguizamo’s representation of different ethnic, racial, and sexual minorities in the monologue is highly satirical, as indicated by the over-the-top intonations, accents, gestures, and stances he adopts. This is a comedic vernacular that has long utilized stereotypes for comic effect. However, here Leguizamo proposes—comically—to deconstruct the very history tied to that vernacular. Reducing these stereotypes to a punchline before the conciliatory gaze of a laughing White audience is problematic because it reconciles them to Leguizamo’s “side” of history through yet another sacrifice of the Other—in this case, the homosexual and feminized Other. This is not the first time Leguizamo’s comedy has been criticized for a too-easy acceptance of such regressive stereotypes and for the way his approach aligns his Latinx humor with a White heteronormative perspective. Mambo Mouth, for example, was fiercely critiqued by Coco Fusco (1991), who called it a work that displays a latent “refried machismo” in its portrayal of Latinx people. As a result, Fusco argues, Leguizamo’s representations come to be sustained by misogynistic humor—a humor that confirms assumptions held about Latinx communities. Michael Omi’s (1997) insightful observation that jokes take on a different meaning when told across the “color line” underscores the harmful nature of such humor, as it delimits the audience’s responsibility and reinforces existing racial inequalities. Laughter may defy precise explanation, but humor can have a social function in reproducing cultural oppression, making it essential to consider how White U.S. audiences process racially and ethnically based jokes. As a satire and comedic performance, Latin History for Morons exploits ever-present stereotypes—one might even call them the structural constituents of the “moronic”—that are displayed to an audience willing to laugh at them but unprepared to reflect on them.

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This 2018 performance was one of a number of programs spotlighted during the Trump era as examples of asserting progressive history by using humor to critique hegemonic history (and the eclipse of Latinx history) taught in the public school system in the United States. John Leguizamo’s comic revisionism can be applauded for its boldness in tackling race, ethnicity, and colorism among not only Latinx people but also Latin Americans. Yet the price for that boldness was the sacrifice of women and of the LGBTQ+ community, who are again treated to the traditional stereotyping of standup comedy. REFERENCES Aldama, A. J., Sandoval, C., & García, P. J. (Eds.). (2012). Performing the US Latina and Latino borderlands. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Alvarez-Dickinson, J. (2012). The Latino comedy project and border humor in performance. In A. J. Aldama, C. Sandoval, & P. J. García (Eds.), Performing the US Latina and Latino Borderlands. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Beltrán, M. C. (2009). Latina/o Stars in U.S. Eyes: The Making and Meanings of Film and TV Stardom. Champagne-Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Brantley, B. (2017, March 28). Review: John Leguizamo turns nutty professor in ‘Latin history for morons.’ The New York Times. https://www​.nytimes​.com​/2017​ /03​/27​/theater​/john​-leguizamo​-latin​-history​-for​-morons​-review​.html Chirico, M. M. (2002). Laughter and ethnicity in John Leguizamo’s one-man worlds. Latin American Theatre Review, 36(1), 29–50. Chirico, M. (2016). Performed authenticity: Narrating the self in the comic monologues of David Sedaris, John Leguizamo, and Spalding Gray. Studies in American Humor, 2(1), 22–46. https://doi​.org​/10​.5325​/studamerhumor​.2​.1​.0022 Cooper, E. (2008). Looking at the Latin “freak”: Audience reception of John Leguizamo’s culturally intimate humor. Latino Studies, 6, 436–455. https://doi​.org​/10​.1057​ /lst​.2008​.40 Cordero, R. (2022, January 26). John Leguizamo calls out colorism in Hollywood, says he avoided sun for fear of losing roles. Deadline. https://deadline​.com​/2022​ /01​/john​-leguizamo​-colorism​-hollywood​-1234920205 Corsbie-Massay, C. L. (2022). Diversity and satire: Laughing at processes of marginalization. Wiley. Dar-Nimrod, I., Kuntzman, R., MacNevin, G., Lynch, K., Woods, M., & Morandini, J. (2021). Genetic essentialism: The mediating role of essentialist biases on the relationship between genetic knowledge and the interpretations of genetic information. European Journal of Medical Genetics, 64(1), Article 104119. https://doi​.org​ /10​.1016​/j​.ejmg​.2020​.104119 Domínguez, A. (2022, February 4). On John Leguizamo and colorism. Latino Rebels. https://www​.latinorebels​.com​/2022​/02​/04​/leguizamocolorism Espinoza, M. (2021). Migra Mouse immigration, satire, and hybridity as Latino/a decolonial acts. In N. L. Serrano (Ed.), Immigrants and Comics: Graphic Spaces of Remembrance, Transaction, and Mimesis. New York: Routledge.

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Fernández, L. (2022). Laughing at or with Latinos?: Changing the scope of the camera’s narrative gaze in Midwest-based comedies. In F. L. Aldama (Ed.), Latinx TV in the Twenty-First Century (pp. 27–42). Tuscon: University of Arizona Press. Fernández L’Hoeste, H. D. (2017). Lalo Alcaraz: Political Cartooning in the Latino community. Oxford, MS: University of Mississippi Press. Fusco, C. (1991, April 9). Macho mouth. Village Voice (p. 24). Gray, J., Jones, J. P., & Thompson, E. (2009). Satire TV: Politics and Comedy in the Post-Network Era. New York: New York University Press. Green, J. (2017, November 15). Review: John Leguizamo goes for easy laughs in ‘Latin history.’ The New York Times. https://www​.nytimes​.com​/2017​/11​/15​/theater​ /latin​-history​-for​-morons​-review​-john​-leguizamo​.html Guerrero, L. A. (2021). Crazy Funny: Popular Black Satire and the Method of Madness. New York: Taylor & Francis. Gussow, M. (1991, June 14). A mambo mouth with salsa feet. The New York Times. https://www​.nytimes​.com​/1991​/06​/14​/theater​/critic​-s​-choice​-theater​-a​-mambo​ -mouth​-with​-salsa​-feet​.html Hernández, G. (1991). Chicano Satire: A Study in Literary Culture. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Isherwood, C. (2011, March 22). A queens guy toughs it out in Hollywood. The New York Times. https://www​.nytimes​.com​/2011​/03​/23​/theater​/reviews​/john​-leguizamos​-new​-solo​-show​-ghetto​-klown​-review​.html Jones, C. (2019, October 29). Leguizamo out to change how America sees Latinx people: Comedian’s new show gives ‘morons’ valuable lessons in Latin history. Chicago Tribune. https://www​.nbcnews​.com​/news​/latino​/john​-leguizamo​-out​ -change​-how​-america​-sees​-latinx​-people​-n1232555 Lequizamo, J. (Writer, Performer). (2018). Latin History for Morons. https://www​ .netflix​.com​/title​/80225421 Manning, B. J. (2022). Played out: The race man in twenty-first-century satire. Princeton, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Marcon, A. R., Rachul, C., & Caulfield, T. (2021). The consumer representation of DNA ancestry testing on YouTube. New Genetics and Society, 40(2), 133–154. https://doi​.org​/10​.1080​/14636778​.2020​.1799343 Montlake, S. (2022, June 10). ‘Woke capitalism’ on the rise—and running into resistance. The Christian Science Monitor. https://www​.csmonitor​.com​/USA​/Politics​ /2022​/0610​/Woke​-capitalism​-on​-the​-rise​-and​-running​-into​-resistance Morgan, D. F. (2020). Laughing to Keep from Dying: African American Satire in the Twenty-First Century. Champagne-Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Noriega, J. (2019). Latin history for morons by John Leguizamo [Review]. Theatre Journal, 71(1), 100–102. Omi, M. (1997). In Living Color: Race and American Culture. Oakland, CA: University of California Press. Powell, R. J. (2020). Going There: Black Visual Satire. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Serrano, N. L. (Ed.). (2021). Immigrants and Comics: Graphic Spaces of Remembrance, Transaction, and Mimesis. New York: Routledge.

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Squires, C. R. (2010). Running through the trenches: Or, an introduction to the undead culture wars and dead serious identity politics. Journal of Communication Inquiry, 34, 211–214. Wood, J. M. (2023, January 31). No labels: John Leguizamo refuses to be pigeonholed. MovieMaker. https://www​.moviemaker​.com​/from​-class​-clown​-to​-zombie​ -hunter​-2537

Chapter 10

Guess Who’s Muslim Using Satire to Show What “Islam Truly Is” Omar Hammad

Since the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Muslim identity in the United States and other Western nations has been at the center of a situation that Stuart Hall et al. once termed a “moral panic” (1978). Although Islam is a religious faith, scholars of Islamophobia across academic disciplines have demonstrated that it is partly rooted in the racialization process and that subsequently Muslims in the United States and other Western nations are racialized as a non-White group (Aziz, 2021; Bayoumi, 2010; Garner & Selod, 2015; Kumar, 2019; Selod & Embrick, 2013). Hall discussed the “moral panic” in the context of 1970s Britain, where the mainstream press disproportionately featured stories of violent crimes where the perpetrators were Black (Hall et al., 1978). After the September 11, 2001, terrorist attack, Muslims joined African American and other minoritized communities at the center of Anglo America’s moral panic. The U.S. television and film industries have played a role in promoting stereotypes about Islam and Muslims. Some of these stereotypes include tropes identifying all Muslims as terrorists (Shaheen, 2003), all Muslim women as oppressed (Abu-Lughod, 2013), and Muslim societies as uncivilized (Said, 1978). The U.S. news media has also played a part in fanning the flames of fear of Islam and Muslims. For example, a 2018 study from Georgia State University on the U.S. news media’s coverage of terrorist attacks showed that incidents “carried out by Muslims [between 2006–2015] receive[ed] on average 357 percent more media coverage than those committed by other groups” (Kearns et al., 2018). Because of the U.S.’s status as a superpower since World War II, its cultural industry does not only influence discourse about Islam within its borders but also in nations across the globe, particularly in Western nations. This chapter will examine how humor can be used to challenge Islamophobia and Orientalist myths and will invite U.S. viewers to critically reflect 179

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upon commonly held Orientalist/Islamophobic notions that are largely taken for granted in Western discourse about Islam and Muslims. It will discuss how young North American Muslims are deploying humor on the Internet in efforts to contest racism and discrimination and how misinformation in Western discourse about Islam and Muslims poses a unique challenge to Muslim content producers hoping to use satire as a means of dispelling myths about Muslims and Islam to non-Muslim audiences. Specifically, I will illustrate how the content of a satirical web series on YouTube, Guess Who’s Muslim (2016), produced by a Canadian Muslim, aimed to challenge the stereotypical ways Muslims have been framed in the United States and the West but may actually reinforce those stereotypes to Western non-Muslim viewers.

FRAMING ISLAM AND MUSLIMS IN U.S. MEDIA Cultural and literary critic Edward Said (2003) argued that Orientalism is the dominant discourse in the West that frames Arabs, Muslims, and/or Islam in negative ways. From the “Orientalist lens” (Said, 2003), Arabs/Muslims are portrayed in the media as primitive, barbaric, violent, and overtly sexual. According to Said, the tentacles of Orientalist discourse in the West extend throughout academia, the arts, and mainstream media (Said, 2003). U.S. and Western politicians, anti-Muslim pundits, special interest groups, the news media, and popular culture have all played a role in framing Islam and Muslims as demonized “others.” There is ample evidence that the demonization, trivialization, and plethora of negative tropes about Muslims and Islam in the West have in fact spanned centuries and mediums (Hammad, 2022; Said, 2003; Shohat & Stam, 2002). Orientalist discourse in the West is central not just to understanding how stereotypes of Arabs and Muslims function but understanding how Western identity is defined (Kumar, 2010; Said, 2003). This type of discourse functions as the template that seeps into various platforms of traditional media (like broadcast/cable television and cinema) when depicting Muslims through the Orientalist lens (Said, 2003). Additionally, as cultural studies scholars have pointed out, the power and reach of the U.S. film and television industry do not just influence the tastes and opinions of the average American but the perspectives of citizens of other nations across the world (Hall, 1973; Said, 2003). As Orientalists promote what they perceive to be uniquely Western values (i.e., intelligence, rationality, morality, and technological advancement), they simultaneously contrast those values with a fabricated, generalized, and exaggerated “other,” (i.e., uncivilized, immoral, violent, backward, and stupid), which emphasizes the “superiority” of “The Occident” over “The Orient” (Said, 2003). Kumar (2010) updated Orientalist political rationale by

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providing five discursive frames, and she outlined their implications on political policy in justification to the second Iraq war and the war in Afghanistan post-9/11. Although Kumar’s aim was to display the political ramifications that the five discursive frames have on U.S. foreign policy in Muslim nations and on the daily lives of U.S. Muslims, these frames are also useful in recognizing the types of Muslim stereotypes in mainstream U.S. and Western media. Kumar argues that these five discursive frames are articulated by the “primary definers” and adapted by the mainstream media, which constitute an apparatus of “secondary definers.” Referencing the work of Hall et al. (1978), the “primary definers” to which Kumar refers are institutions such as government foreign policymakers, think tanks, Islamophobic religious leaders as well as Orientalist-tinged academics who limit discussions regarding Islam to what they see as deficiencies inherent within the faith. These deficiencies, or, as Kumar stated, five discursive frames, include: (1) Islam as a monolithic religion—The perception that there is a singular interpretation of Islam practiced by Muslims around the world. Implicit in this idea is also the notion that the most extreme or conservative interpretation of Islam is what normative Islam actually preaches. (2) Islam as a uniquely sexist religion—Isolating Islam as a religion that breeds misogyny while ignoring the historical longevity and global pervasiveness of misogyny. (3) The “Muslim mind” as incapable of rationality and science—Islam is based on a philosophy that is antithetical to science and rational thinking. (4) Islam as inherently violent—The most prevalent of the frames in U.S. media that disregards the impact of occupation, injustice, mental health issues, and oppression as partially responsible for violence committed by Muslims and instead solely shifts the blame to Islam. (5) The West as democratic––Whereas Islam spawns terrorism and is premised on the violent nature of Islam while elevating the idea of Western exceptionalism. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, the U.S. television and film industries have framed Arab and Muslim characters in stereotypical ways (Alsultany, 2012; McAlister, 2005). Films in the silent era, such as The Arab (1915), Intolerance (1916), Cleopatra (1917), and The Sheik (1921), depicted Arab men as ruthless and sexually deviant (Shaheen, 2003). The plots of these films often centered on Arab sheiks taking Western women as sex slaves (Shaheen, 2003). This stereotype continued through the decades. For example, one episode of the Showtime network’s Homeland (2011) depicts a scene where the assistant of a Saudi prince is interviewing an American

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woman for the position of sex slave; the Prince, sitting and observing, gazes at the American woman with carnal lust. Throughout the twentieth century and into the millennium, a bevy of Muslim stereotypical characters would be depicted in U.S. popular news and popular culture, such as the “greedy oil sheik,” “helpless Muslim woman,” “the backward extremist,” and the “violent Muslim terrorist” (Abu-Lughod, 2013; Alsultany, 2012; Shaheen, 2003). Just as with racial stereotypes about other minoritized groups, stereotypes about Arabs and/or Muslims can evolve and change over time. For example, after the COVID-19 pandemic began, the Asian pollutant stereotype reemerged and was used to marginalize the Chinese American community. Similarly, the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks provided a fertile environment for Orientalist tropes about Islam and Muslims to be proliferated and promoted in the geopolitical environment that followed. Although the 2000s saw an increase in diverse U.S. Muslim characters in mainstream television programs, that presence of “positive” depictions of Muslim characters was contingent upon their embrace of supposed ideals of Western patriotic values or disassociation from the perceived tenets of Islam (Alsultany, 2016). As Evelyn Alsultany (2016) noted, Muslim characters could be “included in liberal multiculturalism only when and if Islam is, at minimum, not that important to their identity, and ideally, completely irrelevant” (p. 609). Alsultany (2012) coined the term “simplified complex representations” to describe how U.S. cable and television network programs like 24 (2001–2014) or Sleeper Cell (2005–2006) featured “good” Muslim characters fighting Muslim terrorists. Shows such as those also featured sympathetic Muslims who were rendered as victims of discrimination in the post-9/11 world. While it can be argued that these depictions are improvements compared to the past, Alsultany (2012) pointed out that the lives of the Muslim characters featured in these programs—whether positive or negative depictions—still centered on the topics of terrorism or extremism. The American broadcast television and cable industries have been two of the largest producers of Orientalist stereotypes of Muslims. In the few instances when mainstream network broadcast and cable networks in the United States have attempted to produce more diverse understandings of Islam and Muslims, there have been negative repercussions. One example is the reality TV show All-American Muslim, which debuted on the TLC cable television network in November 2011 and ran until January 2012. The show featured a group of Lebanese American Muslims coming from a diverse set of U.S. lifestyles. The cast of the show included a police officer, football coach, punk rocker, and club-going “fashionista” going about their normal daily lives in ways that showed that they were “average Americans.” After just one season, however, the show was canceled, not solely due to ratings, but spurred on by a xenophobic campaign led by the Florida Family Association

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(FFA) (Rosenberg, 2012). ThinkProgress, a U.S. progressive news website, described the FFA as a group more concerned with propagating anti-Muslim sentiment than promoting family values (Rosenberg, 2012). The New York Times pointed out that David Katon, the head of the FFA, was its only member (Freedman, 2011). Katon wrote emails to the advertisers of All-American Muslim complaining that the show was not “realistically” depicting American Muslims because “it excluded extremists” (Freedman, 2011). Ultimately, this individual campaign proved successful and led to Lowe’s hardware store, and an additional 65 other companies pulling their sponsorship of the show (Maitland, 2011; Rosenberg, 2012). Unlike All-American Muslim, fictional TV shows that featured Muslims in politicized situations received high ratings and were renewed for additional seasons, like Homeland, Tyrant, and 24, which were perceived to have done a “better” job of adhering to the stereotypical Muslim norms by corporations and mainstream audiences. It is important to note that in the early 2020s, an increasing number of U.S. Muslim comedians and actors, such as Hasan Manji, Ramy Youssef, and Iman Vellani, have been featured in U.S. corporate media productions. Streaming services such as Hulu and Netflix offer some programs with Muslim characters outside of the historical Orientalist stereotypes that have permeated U.S. broadcast network and cable television shows. However, programs that include Muslim characters are still subject to the U.S. entertainment industry’s hegemonic filters that have historically depicted Muslims within the frames of orientalism and Islamophobia. Moreover, it would be an error to overlook the abundance of misinformation circulated about Muslims and Islam in Western discourse and its effect on how Americans perceive the faith and the community. It could be said that YouTube offers a platform for more “grassroots” production of Muslim-produced content not beholden to the interests of sponsors or the pressures or at the whims of streaming service executives interested in replicating some of the tropes of the network model.

SPREADING AND COMBATTING ISLAMOPHOBIA IN THE AGE OF DIGITAL MEDIA Before discussing the findings of my research on Guess Who’s Muslim, it is important to briefly discuss how digital media has affected the proliferation of the Orientalist/Islamophobic stereotypes about Muslims in the United States and other religious minorities. On November 10, 2022, professional basketball player Kyrie Irving of the NBA’s Brooklyn Nets was suspended by the team for tweeting a screenshot of the movie poster for a documentary titled Hebrews to Negros: Wake Up Black America (2018). The Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center condemned Irving because

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his tweet featured a film filled with antisemitic tropes such as “Jews control the media and the world” and that “famous high-ranking Jews” worship the devil (Blistein, 2022). Pseudo-documentaries promoting conspiracies about religious minorities on the Internet are not a new phenomenon. In the 2000s and 2010s, a particular subgenre of these documentaries emerged that was predicated on swaying viewers against Islam/Muslims in the United States and other Western nations. Stein and Salime (2015) drew parallels between the Islamophobic pseudo-documentaries of today, such as Obsession: Radical Islam’s Threat to the West (2005) and The Third Jihad (2008), and those of the past, which demonized Jews in Europe (Stein & Salime, 2015). These pseudo-documentaries also feature scenes that apply to Muslims negative stereotypes typically associated with other historically marginalized groups in the United States—for example, the incorrect idea that darker-skinned people are more likely to be criminals. The aim is to provoke fear in viewers by painting an alarming picture of Islam. Another repeated message is that any observant Muslim is, by default, a “radical Muslim.” The popularity and influence of these documentaries have been so strong that the U.S. law enforcement community has screened them to educate and train members about the “dangers” of Islam. In fact, The Third Jihad was screened to “nearly 1,500 [NYPD] officers partaking in anti-terrorism classes” (Lean, 2012, p. 151). Obsession (2006), The Third Jihad (2008), and similar pseudo-documentaries, which depict Muslims and Islam as foreign and destructive, are available to purchase on streaming services such as Amazon and are free to stream on websites such as Dailymotion and YouTube, to name a few. In the digital age, websites like YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook provide easily accessible platforms for Islamophobic content to spread (Grewal, 2017; Lean, 2012; Sheehi, 2010). Alongside the rise in the presence of Islamophobic websites that disparage Muslims and Islam in many Western nations, there has also been a growing number of Western Muslims using the Internet to combat such rhetoric (Eckert & Chadha, 2013; Evolvi, 2017; Hammad, 2022; Shresthova, 2016). For example, Sangita Shresthova (2016) has observed how U.S. Muslims are using new media to tell stories in a “climate where the compatibilities and conflicts of an American and Muslim identity are actively debated” (p. 166); these stories are “in defiance of the stereotypical depictions of American Muslims,” which are “pervasive in the content worlds of mainstream media” (p. 166). Giulia Evolvi (2017) examined a blog titled Yalla Italia, which is produced by and geared toward second-generation Italian Muslims to tell “stories of second-generations that cannot only unproblematically reconcile their Muslim and Italian identities, but whose hybridity allows for a better understanding of multiple cultural, religious, and linguistic codes” (p. 129). The examples mentioned earlier, as well as the case of Guess Who’s Muslim,

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which will be discussed later, show that Western Muslim counterpublics (Fraser, 1990) are carving out their own space in the digital sphere on websites such as YouTube.

GUESS WHO’S MUSLIM I conducted a textual analysis of four episodes of a 2016 web series titled Guess Who’s Muslim (GWM), produced by a Canadian Muslim named Jonathan Abdilla and shown on the YouTube channel West Dawn Media. Although Guess Who’s Muslim was produced by a Canadian Muslim, the satire is aimed at U.S. audiences and attempts to combat Orientalist stereotypes manufactured by the U.S. entertainment industry. Furthermore, from a historical perspective, Canada and the United States have both emerged from the same colonial/imperial efforts of European powers such as France and the United Kingdom where Orientalist discourse originated. GWM partly centers on the protagonist, Donald Jr. (played by Dustin George), and his struggles in revealing to his non-Muslim parents that he has converted to Islam. While the synopsis of the program may seem serious, the content is satirical. The humor stems from Donald Jr.’s parents’ attempts to show that they are accepting of their son’s conversion by “doing things that Muslims do.” Unfortunately for Donald Jr., “the Muslim things” his parents do are based on stereotypes about Muslims promoted in the U.S. and Western media. I coded the program according to Kumar’s (2010) discursive frames and compared some of the characters of GWM to the stereotypical representations of Muslims found in mainstream U.S. television and cinema. The four episodes of GWM consist of roughly eight minutes per episode (29 minutes, 33 seconds in total). Each show was viewed and coded to detect visual, textual, or audio indicators in which the producers of GWM responded to the dominant frames that Kumar (2010) outlined. Episode 1 begins with Donald Jr. sitting inside a car talking with his friend Omar (Maxim Amirian), who is also Muslim. Donald Jr. is having a heart-to-heart conversation with Omar about his concern over how his parents will react to his embrace of Islam. When Omar assuages his friend’s fears, Donald Jr. takes a deep breath, steps out of the car, and walks toward his home to talk to his parents. The scene then cuts to Donald Jr.’s parents, Ann (Diana Brugos) and Donald Sr. (Michael Pacitti), anxiously awaiting their son’s arrival. “Remember what the group said. We must be accepting,” says Ana to her husband just before Donald Jr. approaches the door. The parents let him in and welcome their son warmly. Lighthearted music in the scene begins to play and semiotically cues viewers that Donald Jr. and his family are no different from the “all-American”

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families one might view on popular family shows such as Modern Family (2009–2020) or even The Brady Bunch (1969–1974). To the average viewer, Donald Jr. is the typical Anglo American protagonist you might see on a show like How I Met Your Mother (2005–2014) or The Big Bang Theory (2007–2019). He is wearing a button-down shirt and dark jeans. His “Western” clothes and his respectful and well-adjusted demeanor cannot be confused with the extreme portrayals of unkempt Muslim terrorist characters found on shows such as 24. Donald Jr.’s Muslim identity contrasts with how Muslim converts have been portrayed in Western news outlets. A perfect example can be seen in a headline that appeared in the April 1, 2017, edition of the English news magazine The Economist that stated, “Converts to Islam are likelier to radicalize than native Muslims” (2017). Despite being published in a reputable magazine, this report and others like it tell the sensationalized story of a seemingly “normal” American or Western boy whose life changed for the worse after he chose the “inherently violent” religion of Islam over the liberal principles of Western democracy. Another example of this trope appeared in the January 3, 2023, edition of the New York Post about Trevor Bickford, a convert to Islam, who was arrested for attacking three New York City police officers with a machete. The article noted that the family of the attacker became concerned about his “increasing obsession with Islam” and “reading the Qur’an daily” (Marino, Brown, & Fitz-Gibbon, 2023). It also discussed how Bickford’s neighbors were shocked to see him commit a terrorist attack because he “seemed like a typical teenager, a former honor student and part of a championship-winning high school team.” Interestingly, the articles only briefly mentioned that Bickford had been struggling with depression and mental health issues since his father passed away from a drug overdose. On GWM, Muslim-convert Donald Jr. seems like many young people of his age. His appearance and behavior implicitly push back against the frame that supposedly “[t]he West spreads democracy, whereas Islam spawns terrorism” (Kumar, 2010). A little over a minute into episode 1, we see Donald Jr. and his parents sitting down in their moderately sized living room, which is indicative of their working-class background. The room is well lit and is in contradistinction to the extreme poverty and the war-torn settings in which Muslims are usually depicted in U.S. news coverage. At the same time, it is in contrast to the homes of a rich “oil sheikh” that might be seen on a show like Homeland (2011–2020). Occasionally, the upbeat musical score of GWM pauses to emphasize humorous parts of the program. Before Donald Jr. has the chance to tell his parents that he has become a Muslim, Ann and Donald Sr. begin telling their son that they have noticed changes in his behavior. The central source of humor in episode 1 is the parent’s mistaken conclusion that Donald Jr. is gay based on “evidence” that their son is increasingly hanging

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out with big-bearded men who wear long dresses. Donald Sr. refers to these men as his son’s “bears” (LaCroix, 2015). When Don Jr. finally reveals to his parents that he has become a Muslim, his parents ignore his words and continue to operate on the assumption that he is gay. Based on the ways in which Islam has historically been framed in the mainstream media, they would expect their son’s change of religion and cultural affiliation to be far more dramatic—more violent. Instead, it is comedic. The episode ends with Donald Jr. leaving the house in frustration after numerous attempts to explain that he has changed his religion, not his sexual orientation. Episode 2 begins with the viewer only hearing the voices of Donald Jr.’s parents, apologizing to their son for their assumption that he was “coming out” as gay. “From the bottom of our hearts, it’s an honest mistake,” Donald Sr. tells his son. Ann adds in an innocuous motherly tone, “[W]e thought you were a gay.” Donald Jr. then looks into the camera with a look of befuddlement. Although his parents are not visibly present in the scene, it is implied that Donald Jr. is making eye contact with Ann and Donald Sr. Donald Jr. seems to be scrutinizing their appearance. After a moment of silence he then asks with hints of confusion in his voice, “Why are you guys dressed like that?” After this, his parents appear on screen; Donald Jr.’s confusion is now understood. Ann is dressed in the niqab, which is a garment of clothing worn by some Muslim women that covers their entire body from head to toe. The niqab is most commonly worn in Saudi Arabia and Yemen, and although there may be societal pressures on women to wear niqabs in those nations, it is not required by law. Most Muslim women in the world do not wear this garment; however, Donald’s parents have assumed that all of them do. Similarly, Donald Sr. is wearing a thawb and keffiyeh. The thawb, worn by some Muslim men, is a robe that covers the body from shoulders to toes; the keffiyeh is a scarf that is wrapped around the top of the head. In a number of Middle Eastern nations, the thawb and keffiyeh are common articles of clothing; however, in the West, most Muslim men do not wear this attire. Donald’s parents dressing in this way to “embrace” their son’s new religion only highlights the lack of knowledge that many Western non-Muslims have about Islam. Ann explains how they acquired their “traditional Muslim garb,” saying, “[W]e did some research on the internet.” With this line, the show is humorously pointing out that much of what is available on the internet regarding Muslims is unreliable. The idea that all Muslims dress the same reflects Kumar’s frame that “Islam is a monolithic religion” (2010). Later in the conversation, Donald Jr. is left in a state of shock when Ann reveals that she has worn the niqab for a week straight and that wearing it has proven “a little awkward in the shower.” Ann’s revelation to her son is obviously intended to elicit laughter from the viewer based on her mistaken belief that

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Muslim women are required to be completely covered at all times—even in the shower. It can also be understood in relation to the frame that Islam is a uniquely sexist religion (Kumar, 2010). This flow of negative information from the media surrounding Islam and its treatment of women makes it easier to understand why Ann may have believed that Islam requires its female adherents to wear their clothes in the shower. Kumar (2010) notes that the clothing of Muslim women “has been the subject of much controversy” and has been “used to advance a taken-for-granted argument about the need for the West to rescue Muslim women” (p. 262). Later in the episode, Donald Jr. is so taken aback by the extreme actions his parents have carried out in supposedly partaking in his new faith that he questions whether they have actually converted to Islam themselves. His mother replies, “No, no, no. We haven’t converted. We just want to know where you’re coming from.” Ann then makes a statement that horrifies Donald Jr., to the amusement of the viewer: “We haven’t fully beheaded any infidel yet,” as if murder is part of the process of converting to Islam. Stunned, Donald Jr. replies, “Whoa, what?!” His father confidently supports his wife, “Apparently, this is something very popular amongst your people.” This interaction captures the frame that Islam is a religion that uniquely spawns terrorism (Kumar, 2015). One might argue that this exchange is just satirical absurdity and should be viewed only in a comedic context, sort of a parallel to the ethnic comedy in a popular film like My Big Fat Greek Wedding (2002). However, in relation to the content that can be seen daily in the 24-hour cable news cycle, the connections between the family’s conversation in this episode and everyday U.S. media portrayals are frighteningly clear. For example, during an interview with Muslim Civil Rights lawyer Arsalan Iftikhar, CNN’s Don Lemon once asked Iftikhar, “[D]o you support terrorism?” (Ferguson, 2015). This question implied that simply being Muslim meant automatically embracing terrorism. Ironically, Iftikhar appeared on the show to condemn the Charlie Hebdo terrorist attack in France. In the interview video (still available on YouTube in 2023), Iftikhar raised his eyebrows and gasped at the blunt ignorance of such a question uttered by a famous journalist. Similarly, Donald Jr., dismayed by his parents’ belief that Islam promotes murder, replies, “[Y] ou guys are confused!” This and other encounters that betray his parents’ ignorance of Islam are a microcosm of the situation Western Muslims face living in a country where they are the minority. Only 1.1% of the total U.S. population is Muslim (Mohamed, 2018). Episode 2 ends with a scene reminiscent of many U.S. TV shows and Hollywood movie plots from the 1980s to the 2000s, in which a Muslim terrorist character tortures a Western hostage. However, in GWM, there is a twist to this stereotypical scenario. Omar, Donald Jr.’s Muslim best friend, has been

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tied up by Donald Jr.’s non-Muslim parents. He is held hostage in their basement, unable to talk coherently because his mouth has been gagged. Realizing that their perceptions of Islam were incorrect, Donald Jr.’s parents seemed regretful and apologetically told Omar, “Look, there’s been a misunderstanding. We thought this was the Muslim thing to do.” They then removed Omar’s gag, allowing him to speak. The moment they do, he loudly shrieked, “[Y]ou people are crazy!” The scream was so over-the-top that the viewer has no choice but to laugh. Donald Sr. and Ann then proceed to untie Omar. Omar runs out of the house while comedic sound effects and whistles emphasize his dash out the house, capping off the episode by further using humor to point out the absurdity of Muslim stereotypes. Episode 3 strayed from the linearity of the previous two episodes. It centered on the events that led the parents to believe it “was Islamic” to kidnap and take Omar hostage. The opening scene is a flashback to Omar running out of Donald Jr.’s parent’s basement from the previous episode. The scene then fades to black, and a caption appears: “One week earlier.” The viewer then sees Ann and Donald Sr. on their computer researching “what is Islam?” The couple turns to what many people do in the digital age when exploring a topic of interest—Wikipedia. As they are reading intently, the camera crosscuts between the faces of Anne and Donald Sr. and the Wikipedia page about Islam on their computer monitor. Their expressions indicate that they have made a realization about their son. “Donald Jr.’s not gay. He’s Muslim!” Ann tells her husband. Donald Sr., looking confused, states, “He’s changed his citizenship?” Donald Sr.’s response may seem comical, but as a U.S. Muslim who grew up in a neighborhood where there were not many Muslims, I heard questions similar throughout my childhood and even into my college years. In the next scene, Donald Sr. suggests to his wife that they “go full Muslim” in order to draw a stronger connection with their son. Ann looks at Donald Sr. with a look of approval. We then see the parents searching and shopping for “Islamic” clothing on the e-commerce website Amazon. The scene fades to black, and we then see Donald Sr. and Ann answering their door to receive their first Amazon order from a delivery driver who appears to be a White male in his 50s. As he hands the box to the parents, he smiles. Ann and Donald Sr. grab their package with a sense of giddiness as they walk away from the driver. They open the box and are happy to see it is the “Muslim clothing” they ordered. After seeing what was inside their package, the parents are on the computer again investigating topics related to Islam. This time they are dressed in their new Muslim garb and attentively watching a YouTube video titled, “What is Islam, explained by a non-Muslim.” Again, the parents get up to answer the door to receive another package from the same delivery driver. This time he is not smiling and seems disturbed when he notices that the parents are dressed in “Islamic clothing.” The driver may

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also have been disturbed by what he was delivering. Donald Sr. has ordered a “second wife” on the Internet because he thought it was “the Muslim thing to do.” The Muslim woman that Donald Sr. had purchased is wrapped in brown packing paper typically used to ship delicate packages. GWM is again drawing attention and satirizing the frame that “Islam is a uniquely sexist religion.” As the episode progresses, the viewer finally learns about what parents inspired the parents to take Donald Jr.’s friend Omar hostage in the first place. They are watching a terrorist recruitment video on YouTube. The video is a satirical depiction and not real and comes from the writer of GWM. It features supposed Muslim men in violent poses holding machine guns. At one point in the video, a caption appears: “[J]oin our ranks.” At this moment Ann and Donald Sr. seem to make a realization. “We have to do it. We have no other choice,” Donald Sr. says to Ann. In the next scene, Donald Sr. is holding up a sword while Ann is clutching a machine gun. GWM is responding to the frame that the West “spreads democracy,” whereas Islam spawns “terrorism” (Kumar, 2016). As Ann and Donald Sr. are taking steps to draw closer to Islam, the viewer witnesses their embrace violent interpretations of the faith, a stereotype which has proven to be dangerous to Muslims everywhere. In the context of how Muslims have been depicted in U.S. media outlets or spoken about by prominent politicians, there is no distinct line between reality and fiction. In 2010, Texas Representative Louie Gohmert stated on the floor of the U.S. Senate that Muslim women from the Middle East were traveling to the United States to have babies “[a]nd then they would return back where they could be raised and coddled as future terrorists” (Hu, 2010). With such conspiracy theories about Muslims being promoted so openly by elected officials, it is not surprising that the non-Muslim characters of Donald Sr. and Ann would believe that Islam and terrorism are one and the same. Toward the end of the episode, we see Ann and her husband standing by the door nervously awaiting someone’s arrival. Omar, Donald Jr.’s Muslim friend, enters the home. As Omar walks in, he notices Ann and Donald Sr. in their new clothes and appears confused. The three then make their way to the living room and sit down. Omar is nervous and asks the parents, “[W]hy are you guys dressed like that?” Donald Sr., hoping to change the topic, offers Omar a cup of tea. Omar reluctantly accepts and starts to take a sip, but before he can move the cup from his mouth, Donald Sr. lifts it to force Omar to drink it all. The parents then look at each other and nod. “He’ll be out in less than a minute,” Donald Sr. states to Ann. “Do you think I gave him enough?” Ann asks her husband while holding a medical prescription bottle. The camera shot zooms in on Omar’s face who looks nauseous and eventually passes out because he has been drugged by Donald Jr.’s parents.

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In the next scene, we see an unconscious Omar tied up and dressed in an orange jumpsuit in the parents’ basement. Behind him is a black flag with the symbol of a cartoonish sword. His unlikely captors, Donald Jr.’s parents, emerge. They are studiously observing an unconscious Omar. Donald Sr. and Ann are both startled when they hear the doorbell ring. They hasten upstairs to answer to see who it might be. They peek out their window and realize it is a police officer. Interestingly, the parents are dressed again contemporary Western clothing. They may have changed their clothing because they realized that their Islamic clothing would arouse suspicion. They both compose themselves and finally open the door. The officer greets them and states he is responding to a noise complaint. The parents’ erratic behavior concerns the officer, who asks to come inside to inspect the house further. Eventually, he makes his way to the basement. He sees Omar bound and gagged. And just like that, the viewer is led to believe that Donald Sr. and Ann’s misguided plot to connect with their son’s faith has been disrupted. But rather than freeing Omar and arresting the parents for kidnapping on terroristic charges, he utters to himself, “old people these days, me sick with their kinky stuff.” To the officer, the parents are involved in sexual bondage activities. This elderly White non-Muslim couple could not possibly be terrorists from his perspective. The audience is prompted to consider if the officer would hold the same view if the roles were reversed and Omar had bound and gagged Ann and Donald. To Ann and Donald Sr.’s relief, the police officer finally leaves. The next scene jumps to the parents dressed back in their Islamic clothing, again looking at an unconscious Omar. The officer’s visit to their house has made them reflect on what they have done to their son’s friend. “I can’t believe Junior would really want us to do something like this,” Ann tells her husband. Omar begins to awaken, but before he can make a sound, the parents place a black hood over his head as the episode closes. While episode 3 centers on the events that preceded the parents taking Omar hostage, episode 4 takes place after Omar has been freed. The episode opens with Donald Jr., his parents, and Omar sitting in the family living room. The family shares one couch while Omar sits in the corner on the recliner. He has a look of anger on his face. Being that he was poisoned, gagged, and tied by Donald Jr.’s parents, it is understandable. The camera zooms in on the four characters seeming to build up to a crescendo that would lead to a dramatic dialog. Instead, Donald Jr. asks his parents, “[W] hat did you think of the mosque?” A light tempo score that has been present throughout the series plays in the background; the music matches the calmness of the conversation. Ann replies, “Oh, it was nice,” and Donald Sr. adds, “It was good Junior.” The four had just come back from a visit to the local mosque that Donald Jr. attends. “You guys don’t seem impressed,” Donald Jr. tells his parents. The parents then shared that the event was “more ordinary”

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than expected and that based on their research about Islam on the Internet, they thought they would see “more exciting” things in the mosque, such as “special effects” and “polygamy.” Ann tells her son that the mosque’s Imam “was just so ordinary” because he only spoke about “prayer and doing good, and yadda, yadda, and yadda.” What follows is a dialogue between the parents and Donald Jr. reminiscent of the prototypical U.S. network TV sitcoms that focused on nuclear families from the 1950s to 1990s. Donald Jr. points out to the parents that Islam “is not what you see in the media” and that “over a billion Muslims across the world that live boring lives just like you guys.” As this occurs, the background music changes to signify that a moral lesson is being given by one of the characters. This was the same type of scene common on television programs such as Full House (1987–1995) and Family Matters (1989–1997) in the 1980s and 1990s. Donald Jr. and his parents begin apologizing to one another for their failure to communicate directly and openly. “I promise you guys, from now on, I’ll be open with you, and I’m sorry I didn’t talk to you for so long,” Donald Jr. states. This wholesome moment abruptly ends when Omar interrupts and states, “[F]or the record, and I want to be abundantly clear about this, nothing you guys did was Islamic. Your statement and actions do not reflect the Muslim view.” In the next scene, we see the family slowly walking Omar to the door. The series seems as if it is going to have a “happy Hollywood ending.” But suddenly, the lights have been shut off in the house, and loud sirens can be heard outside the house. The music becomes darker and similar in tone to what you might hear in a horror film. Everyone in the house is panicking and screaming. Donald Jr. questions Omar, “[D]id you call the cops?” “No, but I should have!” Omar responds angrily. Donald Sr. then states, “I don’t understand. Tim said everything was going to be okay. I met him online. That’s the guy who’s been messaging me. He was teaching me about ISIS.” The camera then shows Omar covering his mouth in disgust. “You guys weren’t actually trying to become terrorists, were you?” Donald Jr. states with frustration and confusion. “No, we’re not terrorists. We’re not even Muslim,” says Donald Sr. Again, GWM is reiterating how many non-Muslims in Western nations feel that terrorism is synonymous with Islam. “Dad, that’s not how it works!” screams Donald Jr. As the sirens get louder and the lights of the police shine into the windows, the tension is palpable. Omar then turns to Donald Jr. and tells him he will go outside and speak with the police, “I’m gonna go tell them about your wacko parents.” Donald Jr. tries to prevent his friend from leaving, to no avail. Omar opens the door and is met with a barrage of police bullets. He is dead. The police then enter the front of the house. Donald Jr. and his parents have run to the back. The parents apologize to Donald Jr. for everything that has transpired; they urge him to flee the house. Donald

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Jr. walks away sadly. We see the parents sauntering toward the officers, and within seconds they meet the same fate as Omar. They are both shot in front of Donald Jr. As Donald Jr. is about to run a white flash appears on the screen. The next scene shows him getting out of his bed in a panic. As he awakens, he finds Omar opening his door. “Donnie man, you’re supposed to be at your parents’ place by like five.” The ending of GWM hearkens to that of the U.S. TV sitcom The Bob Newhart Show (1972–1978), where the famous last episode of the entire series ends with the lead character waking up from a dream, seemingly inferring that the plot of the entire series before that moment was, in fact, a dream. Donald Jr. tells Omar that he does not want to go see his parents because he just had a nightmare. Omar responds “[E]veryone knows nightmares are from Shaytaan (Satan in Arabic) bro. Besides, what’s the worst that can happen.” Omar’s line concludes episode 4 with a comedic touch. The plots of the four episodes of GWM center on Donald Jr. “coming out” to his parents as a Muslim and their attempts to prove their support of their son’s decision to convert to Islam by embracing the most blatant stereotypes of Islam found in U.S. media. It is worth pointing out that the well-intentioned parents have depended on media images about Muslims that are most readily available online (and in decades of U.S. TV shows and films), thus highlighting the dominant discourses that permeate the online media landscape when it comes to Islam. This textual analysis of GWM demonstrated how the show implicitly and explicitly responded to all of Kumar’s (2010) five frames. The first episode implicitly contested the frame that Islam is inherently violent and the West spreads democracy. There is no contradiction between Donald Jr.’s identity as a Muslim and as a native of a Western nation. There is nothing “inherently violent” about Donald Jr. or the other Muslim character on the show, his Muslim friend Omar. Furthermore, episodes 2, 3, and 4 explicitly respond to all five of Kumar’s frames that “Islam is a monolithic religion; Islam is a uniquely sexist religion; Islam is inherently violent; the West spreads democracy, whereas Islam spawns terrorism; and the Muslim mind is incapable of rationality and science.”

HOW DID U.S. NON-MUSLIMS PERCEIVE THE PROGRAM? As a U.S. Muslim myself, I understood the satirical elements of Guess Who’s Muslim but was interested in examining whether non-Muslim viewers would understand the humor, so I conducted semiscripted interviews in April 2018 with ten college-educated non-Muslims ranging in age from 18 to 24. Everyone I spoke with viewed the first two episodes of GWM. Before

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the participants were interviewed, they were given a survey with 31 questions where they were asked to share their YouTube and television viewing habits, political leanings, perceptions and knowledge of Islam/Muslims, and the sources—print, TV, internet, college courses, or socialization—that informed them about Islam and Muslims. After filling out the survey, participants then viewed the episodes. As each participant viewed each episode, I noted their body language and facial expressions. Afterward, participants were interviewed on four factors: how humorous they found the program, if at all; the show’s depiction of Islam/Muslims in comparison to network/cable network programing depictions; whether they personally identified with the characters of GWM; and the impact they thought that the show might have on the “average” American. All of the ten participants were non-Muslim, U.S.-born citizens who lived their entire lives in the United States. Of the ten participants interviewed, five identified as male and the other five as female. Six participants identified as White, two as Black, one as Hispanic, and the other as Asian. All participants were undergraduate students. What follows is a condensed version of the findings of this study (Hammad, 2020); the full version was originally published in the Journal of Media and Religion. All the participants were residents of Staten Island, New York, a borough known for its conservative politics. Staten Island was well suited to carry out interviews about the possible impact that GWM might have on U.S. nonMuslim populations who might be more likely to have negative opinions about Muslims/Islam. According to the U.S. Census Bureau (2021), 56.1% of Staten Islanders were White. Since 1990, Staten Island has only voted for one borough president who was not a Republican. In 2017, the Pew Research Center reported that 68% of Republicans believed that “Islam [wa]s not part of mainstream American society” (Lipka, 2016). Staten Island was also the only borough in New York City that Donald Trump won in the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections. Based on the surveys, 60% of the participants answered they were not knowledgeable about Islam while the rest stated that they were somewhat knowledgeable. Eighty percent of participants viewed more hours of YouTube content than television network programming. All 10 participants noted that at least one of the characters reminded them of a friend or family member. Marianna (a pseudonym, as are all of the participants identified here), a 21-year-old Latina American majoring in psychology, said that Donald’s struggle to communicate with his parents was the same way she feels when having conversations with her parents. Gena, age 22 and majoring in finance, thought the dynamic between Donald Jr. and his parents was similar to her own because her Italian American parents, like Donald Jr.’s, are “super supportive.” Some participants empathized with Donald Jr. because his conversion to Islam marked him as a member of a

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marginalized community in the United States—Muslims. Ramina, a 25-yearold African American female majoring in biochemistry, said the show made her reflect on the similarities of living in the United States as a Black or Muslim person. She spoke about how both groups face daily microaggressions involving racism and discrimination because of their racial and/or religious identity. Half the participants stated that they enjoyed the program so much that they were interested in watching the third episode of GWM. Three of the interviewees who were not interested in watching the third episode said they worried that Americans ignorant of Islam would absorb the stereotypes as true. Oleg, a 21-year-old White Russian male majoring in psychology, stated, “It probably could do some good. Unfortunately, you know there is the phenomenon of confirmation bias, and people just don’t really look into what they don’t believe.” Six participants were concerned with one scene in episode 2 reminiscent of many U.S. TV shows and Hollywood movie plots, where the Muslim terrorist character is torturing a Western hostage. A Muslim American viewing this scene, with their own firsthand knowledge that terrorism is not a tenet of Islam, might clearly see the absurdity and humor of two middle-aged White parents enacting their misguided understandings of Islam. However, as some of these interviewees pointed out, for people unfamiliar with Islam, whose only exposure to it might be from U.S. mainstream media, the humor might not be evident. Three interviewees feared those ignorant of and/or discriminatory against Islam/Muslims would believe that the stereotypes that GWM parodied are true. Donnie, a 22-yearold Asian male majoring in finance, stated in a dubious tone, “I hope they [Americans] would believe it’s satire?” Responses demonstrated that while the majority of participants enjoyed the show, producing a program from the perspective of such a historically marginalized community in the United States can lead to unintended decoded readings. Mitch, a 25-year-old Black male majoring in mechanical engineering, confirmed those fears when he stated that he “did not know that Muslim men marry more than one wife” after being asked what he learned about Islam from watching the show. While polygamy is technically permitted in Islam, the practice is not widely conducted in the West or, for that matter, in most Muslim-majority nations. In fact, it is nearly impossible to do if one strictly follows the Quranic verse in the chapter titled “Women” that states “marry whichever [other] women seem good to you, two, three, or four. If you fear that you cannot be equitable [to them], then marry only one” (The Quran, 2004, Women 4:3). Many Muslim jurists have stated that the condition of a man treating all of his wives “with equal fairness” makes polygamy impossible “since men cannot ever be perfectly fair and just among them” (Hathout et al., 2006).

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The interviewees were asked if they would share GWM on social media. The frames in which Islam and Muslims have been presented in the United States by the primary and secondary definers have created an environment where some interviewees felt that virally sharing GWM would make them vulnerable to critiques from their family and peers who held stereotypical views of Islam. Five out of ten participants stated that they would share the episodes they viewed with their friends or family members through a cell phone text. Fewer were inclined to post the show on their Twitter or Facebook pages; only four participants said they would do so. The most common reason given by those who did not want to post about the show was the fear of backlash they would incur from friends and family members who already viewed Islam/Muslims negatively and could use the show as “fuel” for negative beliefs regarding Muslims.

WHAT “ISLAM TRULY IS” The findings of this research illustrate how the GWM series attempted to critique Orientalist myths common in Western societies, helping create a North American Muslim counterculture to contest the dominant U.S. cultural order. However, while parodying these pre-existing frames and stereotypes, GWM may be reinforcing or even introducing them to viewers who lack contact with Muslims or lack sufficient knowledge of Islam to interpret the jokes as humor rather than reality. The findings of this study also suggest that non-Muslim viewers of GWM may find parodying terrorism too taboo in the particular historical moment we live in today. It is important to note that many participants said they would be reluctant to post GWM to their social network accounts, fearing that others would take the fictional satire of the show as fact or as a criticism or negative portrayal of Islam. This begs the question of whether or not a satirical program that centers on Muslim stereotypes, such as GWM, faces different obstacles in conveying its intended message in relation to other programs that parody other marginalized groups with the same aim—combatting stereotypes. In this regard, the average U.S. citizen’s ignorance of Islam may impede GWM’s pursuit of educating non-Muslim viewers about what, as Donald Jr. states, “Islam truly is,” since they may misconstrue the satire and decode the content in terms of prominent negative stereotypes about Muslims. YouTube is a contemporary source of cultural production, and GWM is competing with all of those other products out there that employ tropes. So GWM is important, and a lot depends on the cultural literacies of audiences and society’s prioritization (or lack thereof) of cultural education.

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REFERENCES Abu-Lughod, L. (2013). Do Muslim women need saving? Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Alsultany, E. (2012). Arabs and Muslims in the media: Race and representation after 9/11. New York: NYU Press. Alsultany, E. (2016). The cultural politics of Islam in U.S. reality television. Communication, Culture & Critique, 9(4), 595–613. https://doi​.org​/10​.1111​/cccr​.12121 Aziz, S. F. (2021). The racial Muslim: When racism quashes religious freedom. Oakland: University of California Press. Bayoumi, M. (2010). The God that failed: The neo-Orientalism of today’s Muslim commentators. In A. Shryock (Ed.), Islamophobia/Islamophilia: Beyond the politics of enemy and friend (pp. 79–93). Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Blistein, J. (2022, October 29). Kyrie Irving boosts antisemitic movie peddling ‘Jewish slave ships’. Rolling Stone. https://www​.rollingstone​.com​/culture​/culture​-news​/kyrie​ -irving​-boosts​-antisemitic​-movie​-peddling​-jewish​-slave​-ships​-theory​-1234620125/ Council on American-Islamic Relations. (2016, March 11). Press release. https:// www​.cair​.com​/press​-center​/press​-releases​/12804​-steven​-emerson​-falsely​-claims​ -uk​-city​-is​-muslim​-only​.html Council on American-Islamic Relations, New York. (2020, August 19). CAIR-NY calls for NYPD hate crime probe after Muslim teen assaulted with baseball bat in Staten Island. https://www​.cair​.com​/press​_releases​/cair​-ny​-calls​-for​-nypd​-hate​ -crime​-probe​-after​-muslim​-teen​-assaulted​-with​-baseball​-bat​-in​-staten​-island/ Eckert, S., & Chadha, K. (2013). Muslim bloggers in Germany: An emerging counterpublic. Media, Culture & Society, 35(8), 926–942. Evolvi, G. (2017). Hybrid Muslim identities in digital space: The Italian blog Yalla. Social Compass. Ferguson, D. (2015, January 13). Muslim human rights lawyer thanks Don Lemon: Your ‘dumb-ass’ question made me famous. Raw Story. https://www​.rawstory​ .com​/2015​/01​/muslim​-human​-rights​-lawyer​-thanks​-don​-lemon​-your​-dumb​-question​-made​-me​-famous/ Fraser, N. (1990). Rethinking the public sphere: A contribution to the critique of actually existing democracy. Social Text, 25/26, 56–80. https://doi​.org​/10​.2307​/466240 Freedman, S. G. (2011). Waging a one-man war on American Muslims. New York Times, 16(12). Ghanem, K. (2017, August 29). Beauty across the Middle East: Oman. Vogue Arabia. https://en​.vogue​.me​/beauty​/oman​-batoola​-face​-covering/ Grewal, I. (2017). Saving the security state: Exceptional citizens in twenty-firstcentury America. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Garner, S., & Selod, S. (2015). The racialization of Muslims: Empirical studies of Islamophobia. Critical Sociology, 41(1), 9–19. Hall, S., Critcher, C., Jefferson, T., Clarke, J., & Roberts, B. (2013). Policing the crisis: Mugging, the state and law and order. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Hammad, O. (2020). North American Muslim satire on YouTube: Combatting or reinforcing stereotypes? Journal of Media and Religion, 19(4), 127–144.

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Hammad, O. (2022). Digital Islam: The emergence of Muslim Counterpublics on Social Media (Doctoral dissertation, Rutgers University School of Graduate Studies). Hathout, M., Jamil, U., Hathout, G., & Ali, N. (2006). In pursuit of justice: The jurisprudence of human rights in Islam. Muslim Public Affairs Council. Kearns, E. M., Betus, A. E., & Lemieux, A. F. (2019). Why do some terrorist attacks receive more media attention than others? Justice Quarterly, 36(6), 985–1022. Kumar, D. (2010). Framing Islam: The resurgence of orientalism during the Bush II era. Journal of Communication Inquiry, 34(3), 254–277. https://doi​.org​/10​.1177​ /0196859910363174 LaCroix, E. (2015, April 16). NYC bear guide. TimeOut New York. https://www​ .timeout​.com​/newyork​/lgbt​/nyc​-bear​-guide Lean, N. (2012). The Islamophobia industry: How the right manufactures fear of Muslims. Pluto Press. Lipka, M. (2016). Muslims and Islam: Key findings in the US and around the world. Pew Research Center, Fact Tank. https://www​.pewresearch​.org​/fact​-tank​/2017​/08​ /09​/muslims​-and​-islam​-key​-findings​-in​-the​-u​-s​-and​-around​-the​-world/ Maitland, S. (2011, December 12). Russell Simmons bashes Lowe’s for pulling advertising from TLC’s ‘All-American Muslim.’ New York Daily News. https:// www​.nydailynews​.com​/entertainment​/tv​-movies​/russell​-simmons​-bashes​-lowe​ -pulling​-advertising​-tlc​-all​-american​-muslim​-article​-1​.990448 McAlister, M. (2005). Epic encounters: Culture, media, and U.S. interests in the Middle East since 1945. Oakland: University of California Press. Mohamed, B. (2018). New estimates show U.S. Muslim population continues to grow. Pew Research Center, Fact Tank. https://www​.pewresearch​.org​/fact​-tank​/2018​/01​ /03​/new​-estimates​-show​-u​-s​-muslim​-population​-continues​-to​-grow/ Rosenberg, A. (2012, March 7). TLC has cancelled ‘All-American Muslim.’ ThinkProgress. https://archive​.thinkprogress​.org​/tlc​-has​-cancelled​-all​-american​-muslim​-c4df9b9e76e8/ Said, E. W. (2003). Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient. London: Penguin. Shaheen, J. G. (2003). Reel bad Arabs: How Hollywood vilifies a people. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 588(1), 171–193. https:// doi​.org​/10​.1177​/0002716203588001011 Sheehi, S. (2010). Islamophobia: The ideological campaign against Muslims. Atlanta: Clarity Press. Shohat, E., & Stam, R. (2002). Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the media. New York: Routledge. Shresthova, S. (2016). Between storytelling and surveillance: The precarious position of American Muslim youth. In H. Jenkins, S. Shresthova, L. Gamber-Thompson, N. Kligler-Vilenchik, & A. Zimmerman (Eds.), By any media necessary: The new youth activism (pp. 149–185). New York: NYU Press. Stein, A., & Salime, Z. (2015). Manufacturing islamophobia: Rightwing pseudodocumentaries and the paranoid style. Journal of Communication Inquiry, 39(4), 378–396. https://doi​.org​/10​.1177​/0196859915569385 The Quran (M.A.S, Abdelhaleem, Trans.). (2004). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. U.S. Census Bureau. (2021, July 1). QuickFacts. Richmond County, New York. U.S. Department of Commerce. https://www​.census​.gov​/quickfacts​/fact​/table​/ric​hmon​ dcou​ntyn​ewyork​,US​/PST045221

Chapter 11

The Case of Kim’s Convenience Cause for Celebration or a Cautionary Tale? Tamar Gregorian

Vanity Fair’s Brian Ng (2021) describes the Canadian Broadcast Company’s (CBC) Kim’s Convenience, redistributed on Netflix, as a “celebration of the Canadian import—a show about an Asian family that isn’t just about an Asian family” (2021, para. 1). The CBC debuted Kim’s Convenience in 2016 in Canada. Netflix picked it up for redistribution in 2018 and the show had a successful run that came to a controversial ending after five seasons in April of 2021. An adaption of Ins Cho’s 2011 stage play, the show was welcomed and hailed a victory from reviewers like The Guardian’s Annie Hariharan (2020) who used words like “corny,” “wholesome,” and “heartwarming” to describe the show upon its launch (2020, para. 1). Choi, a writer and actor, wrote the play while he struggled to find acting roles for himself, basing the storyline on his own experiences working in his family’s Canadian convenience store upon immigrating from South Korea (Ng, 2021). Many of the show’s episodes weave together storylines between the first- and second-generation immigrant experiences of the Kim family. Viewers meet the Kim family and are introduced to the complexities of their daily lives in the first episode. The family—a Canadian Korean family led by the patriarch and matriarch Mr. and Mrs. Kim (known to their children as Appa and Umma)—are the owners of a neighborhood convenience store, presumably in Toronto. Mr. and Mrs. Kim (played by Paul Sun-Hyung Lee and Jean Yoon respectively) deal with the day-to-day tasks of overseeing their business and family. The Kims’ two adult children, Jung (Simu Liu) and Janet (Andrea Bang), are an integral part of the series. Janet, who still lives at home, is “overparented,” in her character’s own words, throughout the series. While the premise of the show is built around the family’s business, a convenience store in a large, multicultural city, each episode, about 20-minutes long, focuses on several aspects of the Kims’ lives—exploring topics such as 199

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the family’s immigrant background, popular culture, race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation as well as the generational differences the Kims face in the Western world (Hariharan, 2020). This chapter first examines both the critical acclaim that the show generated among journalistic media critics as well as coverage of the behind-the-scenes discomfort among the program’s actors of color (along with writer Choi) about what became a lack of Asian representation behind the scenes. Next, it uses cultural critic Stuart Hall’s (1973, 1980) framework to critically examine the series, in particular an episode titled “Gay Discount” (Season 1, Episode 1), and argues that work must be done to ensure that what is celebrated on screen is held to the same level as what is celebrated off screen.

BREAKING BARRIERS? ASIAN MEDIA REPRESENTATIONS Paek and Shah (2003) define stereotypes as those that “reduce[s] people to a few, simple, essential characteristics, which are represented as fixed by nature” and the impact those stereotypes have on “society’s dominant racial (and other) ideologies” in their study analyzing how Asian Americans and other minorities are portrayed in advertisements in U.S. magazines (Paek & Shah, 2003, p. 228). Sugihara and Ju (2022) discuss the media’s representation of Asian Americans, which has been fraught with issues for decades. Asian Americans, they state, have either been ignored and underrepresented in mainstream media and/or veiled with stereotypes and problematic tropes such as the “model minority,” “perpetual foreigner,” “yellow peril,” and “exotic being.” and these tropes have contributed to violence against Asians in America (Sugihara & Ju, 2022, para. 9). Sugihara and Ju (2022) explain the media’s dominance and ability to create narratives that lead to perception and treatment: Media creates the narrative foundation for how people of color are perceived and treated in the real world. Negative portrayals have profound and insidious consequences, which is why this is not just a representation issue but also a social justice issue. Stereotypical portrayals of Asian American characters flood our screens again and again. These repeated reminders of dehumanizing stereotypes make it psychologically easier to hurt that group of people.  .  .  . When people see Asian Americans as being “foreign,” it creates an “in-group/ out-group” mentality, making it easier to treat Asians in America with hostility and to engage in acts of violence and discrimination against them. (Sugihara & Ju, 2022)

Sugihara and Ju (2022) make the connection between Asians being “depicted on-screen as foreign, exotic, and inherently un-American” and

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anti-Asian sentiment, not only in recent years but even dating as far back as the 1850s when Americans feared that Asian immigrants arriving in the United States would take away their jobs—the beginning of the trope “yellow peril” (Sugihara & Ju, 2022). Sun et  al. (2015) observe that “it is important to note that stereotypes often merge and morph with each other to create ‘hybrids,’” referring to Asian women who are, for example, portrayed as both smart and sexy (Sun et al., 2015, p. 299). In their study, the researchers conducted focus groups of college students from various racial groups including Asian American, and White and Black populations to determine how the media represented Asian Americans. The study’s findings led the researchers to advocate for the need for “comprehensive media literacy intervention” with a focus on “corporate hegemony” (Sun et al., 2015, p. 295). This need for “education” is one that Sun, Liberman, and Butler say “emphasizes a contextual approach that teaches students the political economy within which mainstream media are produced, yet also points students toward alternative media systems that exist beyond the purely profit-driven system that they have come to accept” (Sun et al., 2015, p. 295). Lastly, Qin Zhang (2010) used cultivation theory in “Asian Americans Beyond the Model Minority Stereotype: The Nerdy and the Left Out,” “to examine whether people’s perceptions of Asian Americans are consistent with media stereotypes and whether the media activated racial-ethnic stereotypes affect people’s interaction behaviors with Asians” (Zhang, 2010, p. 20). Zhang’s (2010) study concludes that “people’s perceptions about Asian Americans are much aligned with the media representations, and these stereotypes impact people’s interaction with Asians” (Zhang, 2010, p. 35). A conversation about Asian American media portrayals in the past decade wouldn’t be complete without a look at the American Broadcast Company’s (ABC) 2015 series Fresh Off the Boat. Written by Eddie Huang about his own life, Fresh Off the Boat was heralded and celebrated for being one of the first Asian American family sitcoms since All American Girl debuted in 1994. Throughout its five seasons, Fresh Off the Boat featured the Huang family’s assimilation and daily lives as they tried their best to live their version of the American Dream. In short, 22-minute episodes, viewers met the Huang family—Louis (Randall Park), Jessica (Constance Wu), Eddie (Hudson Yang), and his brothers Emery (Forrest Wheeler) and Evan (Ian Chen). Some welcomed Fresh Off the Boat and commended the network on making the Asian American family and story mainstream and others, including the writer himself, criticized ABC for the “racist nature of the title” and “its reliance on stereotypes” (LaMay, 2019, para. 2). LaMay (2019) concludes:

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Fresh Off the Boat is undoubtedly revolutionary in respect to it being the first Asian-American-centric sitcom in 20 years. Not without its flaws, the sitcom is taking short strides in the right direction and if the trend continues, there will be a place across all forms of media for Asian-American voices to be heard. And Eddie Huang, despite being an outspoken critic of the show, has admitted that, although he does not watch the show, he is still proud of the work it is doing to be a gateway into the Asian-American world. With the Asian population in the United States growing faster than any other group, it is time the media began to reflect that.

Yam (2020) interviewed Eddie Huang who cut ties with the show after its first season for ABC’s unwillingness to really draw from his book and at times, painful upbringing to keep the show light and funny. Huang said that the network “totally stripped the pain and struggle of being an immigrant in this country and being a minority.... They used yellow faces to tell, you know, white narratives solve family problems on a couch at 22 minutes. It’s just not realistic” (Yam, 2020). LaMay (2019) suggests while a sitcom like Fresh Off the Boat is making strides in the right direction, a sitcom just isn’t enough that more films and in-depth media inclusion are necessary since there is “proof that there is an audience for other media focused on Asian-American protagonists and stories” (LaMay, 2019, para. 21). Cue Kim’s Convenience. The New Yorker’s Hsu (2019) observed: Even for someone who grew up on soft-lit eighties sitcoms, there’s almost nothing edgy about the show, the occasional frictions of multicultural Toronto notwithstanding. The parents learn to see beyond their prejudices, and each new, eccentric customer expands their world view; meanwhile, the children begin to decipher their largely affectionless household as a space of love and support. In the end, everyone more or less gets along. And yet this quality is precisely why I kept watching. The show’s sense of conviviality and community seemed impossible. Our most prestigious television series often double as commentaries on modern life. Though “Kim’s Convenience” is set in the present, it feels like watching an alternate timeline. (para. 2)

Hsu (2019) adds that though there are some issues with nuances of some of their Korean accents, the show, overall, “doesn’t bother overexplaining itself to non-Asian audiences. It’s a caricature, but in its best moments, you forget who is laughing at whom” (2019). Ng (2021) adds that the “blustery Mr. Kim” and “subtly sardonic Mrs. Kim . . . are set in their ways . . . and. . . their kids [are] caught between filial piety and following their dreams” (2021). Hariharan (2020), writing for The Guardian, adds that the Kims’ experiences are ones that immigrants can relate to, including “parents who use food to say they love you” and even the familiar struggle that “younger generations” face

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as they are “being constantly tested to prove their allegiance to country and culture” (Hariharan, 2020). Hariharan’s (2020) review looks beyond the comedic cast and touches upon the characters they play, noting that “too often, Asian characters are shown as one-dimensional high achievers” (Hariharan, 2020, para. 8). Case in point: Jung is portrayed as an attractive and charming character who has a stable job but does not have a passion for the transportation industry (he works at a car rental company) or the same drive for creating a career for himself, unlike his sister. Janet’s passion for art and photography seems to be more than a hobby. Jung’s character breaks from the portrayal of Asian characters in film and television, who are typically portrayed as high-functioning, studious, and career-driven individuals, playing into the “model minority” trope. Instead, Hariharan (2020) adds that the “show goes beyond stereotypes, taking the risk of showing rifts in the family” (Hariharan, 2020). Hariharan (2020) likens the show to other popular television series from the 2010s, such as My Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, The Good Place, and even the film Crazy Rich Asians, as part of a “burgeoning popular culture trend” in which Asian characters are given prominence (2020). Before concluding her review, however, Hariharan (2020) also notes that the show’s focus on Asians comes during a time when many are the targets of racism and hate crimes: Kim’s Convenience has succeeded because it didn’t do what was obvious, or more specifically, what would have seemed obvious to a white audience; rarely has a show centered an Asian family cast without centering its story lines on being Asian. But perhaps what has resonated most with Asian viewers of Kim’s Convenience is that this series—an oasis where integration, not mere tolerance, is standard—exists at a time marked by bleak coverage about the hatred of our community.

Kim’s Convenience was picked up for a second, third, fourth, and fifth seasons due to its popularity and won several Canadian Screen Awards, but in March 2021, it was announced that the show would not be renewed since two of its co-creators, including Choi, were leaving. On the heels of the announcement came an even more surprising twist as several cast members publicly criticized the lack of diversity behind the scenes. Several leading cast members, including the actors who played Jung, Janet, and even Mrs. Kim, spoke out about issues on the set, and Liu and Yoon also used their platforms and fame to call attention to the rise in racism against Asians that saw an increase in spring of 2021 (Hariharan, 2021; Krishna, 2021). Other reviews of the show, including Priya Krishna’s (2021) for the New York Times, hailed Kim’s Convenience as “quietly revolutionary” (Krishna, 2021). Krishna (2021) interviewed several Asian Americans about their thoughts on the show, particularly focusing on the role that food plays in the

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show. Several of them observed that “in not explaining every detail of Korean food culture, the award-winning Canadian sitcom speaks volumes” (Krishna, 2021). For example, in Krishna’s (2021) interview with James Park, a social media manager for Eater, Park said that “American shows need to take note” in how Kim’s Convenience “centers nonwhite experiences” and adds that the show’s formula should “serve as a blueprint for any onscreen representation of immigrant characters (Krishna, 2021). It feels refreshing . . . and “doesn’t make you feel like just another stereotype,” Park explained (Krishna, 2021). Reviewers of Kim’s Convenience, including Zhu (2016), Krishna (2021), Ng (2021), and Hariharan (2020), point to various factors that give the show the credit it’s due for not only making Asian characters the prominent characters but also using the comedic immigrant experience to prove points such as the fact that not all Asians are high achieving, obedient children who do as their parents say (Zhu, 2016; Krishna, 2021; Ng, 2021; Hariharan, 2020). The Los Angeles Times’ Carras (2021) also spoke about the “immigrant experience” that Liu and others cast members shared about the show that was given the mainstream media attention it deserved. Carras (2021) quoted Liu, the actor who played Jung and later found stardom as the hero of the 2021 Marvel film Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings: Kim’s is one of the most unique shows to hit the air, with its focus on individual and communal growth, family, and most importantly: immigrant culture. Kim’s gave me my first opportunity to portray an Asian character with significant story arcs and subtleties that most Western Asian actors can only dream of. The show was integral in allowing me to find my voice and shape the perspective and platform that I now have.

Yet, despite the show’s adulation for its depiction of race and identity in front of the camera, news of the unrest behind the scenes continued as the cast’s leading actors claimed, according to the Hollywood Reporter’s Gardner (2021) and Time’s Andrew Chow (2021), who wrote that “a far harsher climate existed behind the scenes: one filled with internal conflicts and dominated by a mostly white creative team who allegedly created a culturally inhospitable environment and racist narratives.” Jean Yoon—who played Mrs. Kim—spoke out about the “overtly racist” and “culturally inaccurate” storylines and said that the lack of Asian and even Korean writers in the room made life “very difficult” and the “experience of working on the show painful” (Chow, 2021). Fitzmaurice (2021) wrote about Jean Yoon’s feelings about the show’s “painful” problems behind the scenes, and Houpt (2021) wrote about Appa’s frustrations with the show’s cancellation, citing that Paul Sun-Hyung Lee, the actor who played Appa, “signed off” on social media with his character’s upbeat catchphrase, “OK, see you!,” and that both fans and members of the

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Asian Canadian community who applauded the show for its representation of Asians were seemingly disappointed in the producers’ decision to cancel the show (Houpt, 2021). Yoon’s comments, along with other cast members, including Simu Liu, who plays Jung, came as a surprise to many fans who saw Kim’s Convenience as “a beacon of representation and multiculturalism,” according to Chow (2021, para. 3), who points to what he calls the “larger conflict playing out across the film and TV world, in which creatives of color are calling attention to the differences between rote diversity and deeper forms of representation” (Chow, 2021). For example, when the actors, who were relatively unknown at the start of the series, signed onto their roles, they were paid at low rates which were, according to the actors’ claims, not scaled to match the show’s success in Canada. According to the lead actors, that made them feel like they never really had a “seat at its table” (Chow, 2021). Soon, news of Choi’s (the original screen writer and co-creator of the show) indifference on the set was noticeable too. Perhaps making things worse was that as news of the show’s end surfaced, so too did news that Shannon (Nicole Power), Jung’s love interest and boss, would be getting her own spin-off. Power was one of the only non-Asian leads in the series (Chow, 2021, para. 11). Volmers (2021), who interviewed Appa/Paul Sun-Hyung Lee, wrote that following the announcement of the show’s cancellation (after the CBC originally had decided to pick it up for a sixth season) Lee was disappointed for a host of reasons, namely that “while representation in front of the camera was fantastic, I think we really sort of failed as a group in terms of representation behind the scenes,” he says. “We didn’t cultivate. We didn’t develop young writers or writers of colour or producers . . . or people to step up” (Volmers, 2021). Cheung (2021) writes that the “cast members’ revelations about how lack of behind-the-scenes representation or meaningful support for its Asian cast come at a time of growing dialogue about anti-Asian racism and violence in society” as well (Cheung, 2021), adding that “sadly, their experience is universal among many shows and projects with diverse onscreen representation, without the off-screen diversity to back them up or provide growth opportunities and support to the people who are the faces of these projects.” The glowing reviews of Kim’s Convenience and the barriers it was breaking on screen differed considerably from the news that had begun to trickle out from behind the scenes. With so many hailing it a leader in breaking down the barriers and stereotypes often associated with Asian shows and cast member characteristics, could Kim’s Convenience be both a cause for celebration and concern?

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DECODING REPRESENTATION IN “GAY DISCOUNT” Perhaps an examination of the first episode of Kim’s Convenience, titled “Gay Discount,” can shed light on these questions. Using the lens of Stuart Hall’s (1973) theory of encoding/decoding and the observations of Campbell et al. (2014) on the notion of representation, this essay aims to determine whether the show is a true “celebration” of Asians making their mark on the big screen or rather a cause for concern. An analysis of the first episode of the first season is important in uncovering the answers to that question. While there are five seasons, the first episode and first season were specifically hailed a success and, as the show was newly debuted and celebrated, still unmarred by the rumors of racism behind the scenes, it seems the most fitting for analysis. Hall’s (1980) framework of the encoding/decoding model of communication argues that messages are produced and disseminated (encoded) with a “preferred” meaning, then interpreted (decoded) by receivers of the messages in ways that are linked to audience members’ socialization, education and backgrounds; that is, the message-receivers may find “negotiated” and even “oppositional” meanings unintended by the producers. This analysis will begin with a description of the text’s “preferred” meaning; in this case, the first episode of the series functions in the common semiotic language of TV sitcoms, introducing the primary characters and establishing the settings, themes, and conflicts that will surface in the series. “Gay Discount” opens with Mr. Kim being visited by a customer, one who viewers can presume is a regular customer of the store because he calls him by his name, Mr. Kim. The customer introduces Mr. Kim to a friend, Roger, and they ask Mr. Kim to help them promote the gay pride parade happening soon in the neighborhood. Mr. Kim quickly gets defensive and refuses to put up the flyer in his store. The customer gets defensive and tells Mr. Kim that it is not okay and that he is going to report him for being homophobic. The befuddled Mr. Kim, in return, argues back, stating that he is not homophobic and can prove it because he is, in fact, offering a “gay discount” in honor of the gay pride parade. It’s clear to the viewers, and from Mr. Kim’s face, that he dug himself out of that hole and came up with the discount on the fly. He rationalizes, still, his distaste for the parade and says he doesn’t want to put the poster up because he doesn’t like parades since they produce too much noise, traffic and trash. He adds that he also doesn’t like the design of the poster, calling it “messy,” and telling the customers they can “do better.” Mr. Kim sticks to his guns on the poster, but he does quickly begin offering the “gay discount” to those who he claims to know are gay; he can tell, as he says, because he has “gaydar.” Viewers meet Janet in the next scene, a university student and daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Kim. Janet is seen rushing around their home, lobbying Mr.

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Kim, her father, for the keys to the family’s van. She needs a vehicle for a school project, and we see Mr. Kim ignore her pleas and leave. We also meet Mrs. Kim, who is seemingly ignoring the conversation between Mr. Kim and Janet, as she has her own agenda. Mrs. Kim shows Janet the new church directory in her plea to get Janet to go to church to “find Jesus” and “hook around” and find herself “a cool, Christian Korean boyfriend.” Janet, frustrated by her mother’s attempts to get her to find a boyfriend, leaves in sheer exasperation. In the next scene, we see Mr. Kim using his “gaydar” to determine if customers are gay as news of the “gay discount” has clearly spread. As one can imagine, it doesn’t go over well with every customer. Then, finally, we meet Janet’s brother Jung, who has been mentioned previously, and viewers finally meet him at his place of employment—Handy Rental Car. Jung and his buddy are cleaning cars, pressuring Janet to take them to lunch, while Janet begs Jung to use his employee discount to get her a rental car to use for the day. Janet, still exasperated, claims to be “overparented” because Jung isn’t around and, for the first time, we learn about Jung’s estrangement from their father. We next briefly meet a few new characters (pun intended), including Shannon, Jung’s overbearing boss and maybe a future love interest (because Shannon is not shy about her affection for Jung). Back at the store, we meet Mr. Chin, a friend of the Kims and fellow business owner. Mr. Kim and Mr. Chin go into the nuances of sexuality and sexual preference. Their dialogue is interrupted by another customer, a Black woman, who has learned about the discount and upset that she won’t be able to use it because she is not gay. Mr. Chin warns Mr. Kim, under his breath, that it’s illegal and anti-straight, and Mr. Kim quickly doubles down and says he’ll give her the discount, since she is Black, during Black History Month in February. Next, viewers are taken into a scene in which Janet and, later, Mrs. Kim are seen interacting with two young Asian men who have entered the store to provide their resumes for a “job opening.” We learn that Mrs. Kim has put an advertisement in the church newspaper, looking for a boyfriend for her daughter, since Janet doesn’t seem interested in helping herself find her “cool Korean Christian boyfriend.” Janet is furious and Mrs. Kim reminds her that if she doesn’t “mingle, you stay single.” Mr. Kim, surprisingly, comes to the rescue and tells Mrs. Kim to back off and that Janet is a grown girl and doesn’t need her mother to find her a boyfriend. In fact, Mr. Kim adds, Janet won’t need a boyfriend because she’ll be too busy when she takes over the store. Mrs. Kim adds that she can’t take over the store because she’ll be too busy with all her babies. Janet, at her wits end, fusses at both of her parents as their expectations for her and her future aren’t in alignment with her own. As the three argue back and forth and the

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potential suitors try to leave, Mr. Kim gives one of them advice. He uses his “gaydar” to tell one of them that it is his lucky day because he is offering a “gay discount” in honor of Gay Pride Week. The young man says that he isn’t gay, but Mr. Kim doesn’t let up, telling him that it is okay and that sometimes “gay takes time.” Mr. Kim’s “gaydar” is further put to the test when he is seen stressing over the cash register, foreshadowing that there are either financial problems on the horizon or that money is missing. Meanwhile, Mrs. Kim is obsessing over Janet’s future. She rushes over to see her son, Jung, at work at the car rental store, expressing concern over the fact that Janet is going “to die alone.” Jung warns his mother to “back off,” and that “Janet being single is not a crisis.” Even when Shannon, Jung’s boss, tries to get into the office in which Mrs. Kim has Jung holed up, Mrs. Kim pushes back and insists on talking to her son for a few more minutes. The viewer then sees Mr. Kim, back in the store. He is seen making friends with Therese, a drag queen, whom he asks questions about their preference in dressing like a woman. Mr. Kim, though upfront about his confusion, has a way of expressing his acceptance through his confusion. In almost the same breath, Mrs. Kim comes into the scene, clearly trying to hide the fact that she had visited Mr. Kim’s estranged son, but Mr. Kim stops her and tells her that he thinks someone has been stealing from the store. He says that money is missing from the store and asks her to investigate it. Mr. and Mrs. Kim then are seen asking Janet several questions, including where she got money for the car rental, insinuating that she stole the money from the store. To distract him, Mrs. Kim jumps in to ask whether Janet is hungry and wants her to make her food. As an upset Janet exits the scene, Mr. Kim rings up his new friend, the drag queen Therese, with the “gay discount.” Mrs. Kim then quickly solves the case of the missing money—the “gay discount.” Mrs. Kim next tells Mr. Kim that he needs to apologize to Janet and the two get into a fight over it, with Mrs. Kim screaming as she walks away, saying that he is pushing Janet away like he did Jung. He says he knows that Jung stole from them (establishing the reason for their estrangement), and Janet says that she is being punished because of his hang-ups with Jung. Mrs. Kim also apologizes to Janet and says she can “hook around” with whoever she wants. Janet accepts her mother’s apology and then tells her father that in lieu of an apology, which she says will “kill him,” she will settle for him returning the rental car. Mr. Kim, it seems, doesn’t know that his son works at the rental car store, and Janet seems to be working her own agenda, forcing Mr. Kim to see and speak to his son. Unfortunately, in the next scene, we see that Janet’s plan is thwarted when Jung sees his father before his father sees him, and asks

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Shannon, his boss, to deal with Mr. Kim. Shannon, concerned with Jung’s meddling family, agrees to help Mr. Kim. Meanwhile, back in the store a young Asian man is seen entering. Mr. Kim tells him they are not hiring, but the young man says he is here for Janet. Mr. Kim tests his Korean knowledge and Mrs. Kim is seen beaming with pride. As Janet exits the store, it seems this has been her agenda all along. It was a set-up, only instead of Mrs. Kim setting up Janet, Janet has the last laugh by finding her own suitor. Viewers of the first episode have now met the program’s key characters and understand the premise of a situation comedy that offers a rare glimpse of two generations of living in the West. Reviewers generally responded with adulation of Asian representations that defied stereotypes: the characters hardly fit the mold of the model minority, or any other tropes historically attached to Asians in film and television. Plus, the script and main characters—especially Mr. Kim—received high praise for comically capturing the complexity and humanity of life among two generations of an immigrant family. This “preferred” reading of the program, however, was challenged over the course of its five seasons, as cast members and the Korean Canadian writer who created the show brought attention to a lack of diversity behindthe-scenes that led to less authentic representations.

STUART HALL AND THE COMPLEXITY OF MEDIA REPRESENTATION Stuart Hall (1973, 1980) suggests that audiences play an active rather than a passive role and that individuals play central roles in the decoding of messages. Hall also argues that the semiotic analysis of any message involves separating the literal meaning of the sign from any meanings associated with that sign. This provides individuals the opportunity to understand the relationship between a sign and its denotative meaning(s) and the changes to the meaning that occur over time and via analysis. He suggests that audiences may not apply the same connotations to the signs intended by their producers and writes, “In actual discourse most signs will combine both the denotative and connotative aspects” (1980, p. 133). That is, the actual process of interpreting a message is essentially subconscious and people generally understand the literal meaning of a message and any associated connotations without separating the two (Hall, 1973; Hall, 1980). Hall’s (1980) work also focuses on issues of hegemony and the hegemonic power of the media, suggesting that producers and consumers can be interchangeable—recognizing the role of the dominant or hegemonic code in which the encoder wants the decoder to recognize and decode the message.

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Hall (1980) refers to this as the professional code, which works with the dominant code in that it reproduces the dominant party’s code. The other codes, according to Hall (1980), are the negotiated code that legitimizes the hegemonic definitions and the oppositional code, which is known as the “globally contrary code,” which makes it possible for the audience to understand the literal and connotative meanings. Hall (1980) challenged the components of the communication model in that meaning is not fixed or determined by the sender, the message is never transparent, and the audience is not passive (Hall, 1973; Hall, 1980). A simplistic analysis using Hall’s (1980) work would point to the preferred reading as one that suggests that the show’s first episode in particular paves the way for Asian characters to be leads, breaking down stereotypes and barriers, while a negotiated reading suggests that the episode’s main goal was comedic relief and perhaps to garner ratings and forecast whether it gets picked up for yet another season. An oppositional reading would suggest that the writers and producers of the first episode had a larger purpose in mind and wanted to change the narrative and increase and improve representation of Asians on television. After all, Hall (1980) writes that the actual process of interpreting a message is essentially subconscious and people generally understand the literal meaning of a message and any associated connotations without separating the two (Hall, 1980). However, media researchers know that this is complicated by the fact that the media create master narratives, as Campbell et al. (2014) write. As viewers we can “explore entertainment media and address concerns raised in the creation, distribution, and consumption of popular culture through the media” (Campbell et al., 2014, p. 198). Whether through their discussion of cultural bifurcation or cultural blurring, Campbell et  al. (2014) urge us to continue to “look closely at the mass culture debates” and question the role that the media play in society and whether they are ruining culture (Campbell et al., 2014, p. 205). They discuss and provide examples of representations regarding gender, race, class, and sexuality and show how, through various media channels, these examples result in “powerful narratives about personal and collective experiences and perspectives” (Campbell et al, 2014, p. 227). They go on to explain that representation plays a role in the “reflective and socializing processes” and these are the reasons that individuals and groups are reduced to stereotypes. While the authors suggest that these stereotypes are often used to “help develop our understanding of group dynamics” they are also “used to reassert dominant ideologies and hegemonic power” (Campbell et al., 2013, p. 228). Megan Liu (2021) juxtaposes the nature and purpose of the show in an article in Duke University’s Chronicle. “Many praised the show for treating the Kim family as just such: a family, first and foremost” (Liu, 2021). News

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surrounding the show went from celebration to criticism and, adding insult to injury, news of the show’s demise came with an announcement of Shannon (Nicole Power), Jung’s boss and girlfriend on the show, getting her own spin-off. Liu (2021) adds: Of course, with the spinoff aiming to feature a white character, the goal to capitalize on the success of “Kim’s Convenience” replaces the original intent of the show to share an authentic Asian-Canadian experience. This isn’t to deny the show’s emotional impact on its viewers, or that its joyful spirit and humanity, at first blush, could ever give way to insensitive foundations. But treating “Kim’s Convenience” as a paragon of Asian immigrant representation ignores the difficulties that stemmed from a corporate denial of Asian immigrant autonomy and creativity.

While Kim’s Convenience was welcomed and celebrated on the screen, the view behind the scenes couldn’t have looked more different. Liu (2021) adds that while the show was “quietly revolutionary,” it left many problems in its wake. KIM’S CONVENIENCE: A CAUTIONARY TALE As Campbell et al. (2014) point out, part of the problem is that those who get to tell the stories—take for example, the writers on Kim’s Convenience—tell them from their own perspectives and angle. This immediately limits who gets to tell the stories and what kinds of stories are told. When the “nondominant group” is not in charge, for example, what relevance do these stories hold? Conversations surrounding the role that the audience plays should also include the level to which audiences are media literate and how the pervasive nature of the media influences the way we think about individuals and groups, in this case Asians, in society. Media’s omnipresent role in society, coupled with the entertainment factor it provides through popular culture, particularly in the case of television series such as Kim’s Convenience, raises several issues with respect to representation and stereotypes. Though technology has provided a new layer for fans to engage with the producers of series such as Kim’s Convenience, viewers must work to ensure that what is celebrated on screen is held to the same level as what is celebrated off screen, behind the cameras in this case. Deadline’s Dino-Ray Ramos (2020) spoke about the Think Tank for Inclusion and Equity’s (TTIE) in “Behind the Scenes: The State of Inclusion and Equity in TV Writing” report that was released in May 2020. The TTIE reported that “although the industry has seen an increase in efforts to monitor

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and track representation in writers’ rooms, underrepresented voices are still jumping over hurdles” (Ramos, 2020, para. 1). An initiative of the Pop Culture Collaborative and Women in Film, the TTIE works to shed “light on inequities in television writing while giving suggestions on how to use this insight to form solutions and change processes and opportunities for writers from diverse backgrounds within writers’ rooms, networks, and studios” (Ramos, 2020). Partly as a result of its past surveys, the underrepresented TV writers (women, non-binary, people of color, LGBTQ, and people with disabilities) have seen increases in salary, representation as well as initiatives to make the workplace safer for marginalized communities (Ramos, 2020). TTIE reported startling, yet not surprising, statistics about the level of underrepresented writers who experience discrimination in the industry. In fact, 68.5% of respondents said they experienced discrimination and 18.8% of the respondents reported a lack of underrepresented upper-level writers in the room. With respect to this analysis, 39.4% respondents reported witnessing an “erasure and/or stereotyping of underrepresented characters on their shows” (Ramos, 2020). Another 10.2% said they were fired for pushing back on stereotypical characters and storylines, and 33.9% reported being asked to “change a character’s identity to increase the odds of selling a project” (Ramos, 2020). There is a lot of complexity in Kim’s Convenience that was missed by the media but is obvious once you look at the coverage over time. While there was a lot of positive coverage of the show when it first came out, notably from members of the Asian community who praised the show for its level of representation with a majority Asian cast and for avoiding the common stereotypes of Asians in television, as time went on and accusations of discrimination came to light so too did the negative coverage. However, the negative coverage focused on the real-life treatment of the cast behind the scenes and did not touch on the representation of Asians in the show itself, which seems like a missed opportunity to determine whether Kim’s Convenience really did ultimately break from Asian stereotypes. It’s hard to believe that a show that limited Asian voices in the writing room would have avoided any stereotyping. In fact, it could be argued that the whole premise of a Korean convenience store owner is a common entertainment trope in and of itself. It is common enough where comedian Dave Chappelle used it as the foundation of a joke, and Asian store owners have appeared frequently in television and movies. Even the idea of an immigrant as a local small business owner is itself a common trope. Hall’s (1973, 1980) theoretical framework doesn’t provide us any concrete answers, but instead allows us to view Kim’s Convenience through different lenses and forces us to discuss the show with more nuance than its supporters or critics have done. Hall’s (1973, 1980) theoretical framework

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helps us avoid the general tendencies of media today to wholeheartedly approve or condemn creative work, and instead view it from different angles. This discussion was not intended to take away from the strides made by the show because those are important as well. Unfortunately, stereotypes and representation issues have been woven into the fabric of entertainment and media for decades. Shows like Kim’s Convenience are proof that the work is being done, but it’s far from over. There is an incredible amount of work needed to ensure that the complex notion of representation is included in the reviews and the acceptance of shows like Kim’s Convenience. In the reviews and conversations surrounding the show, it seems the media missed the opportunity to discuss the problems with the stereotypes in the show and how the problems in the writer’s room, once they were unearthed, added to the problematic nature of the show. It’s not that the show doesn’t deserve any celebration; it does, but instead of concluding that the show required unequivocal celebration or cause for concern, the answer, it seems, is that Kim’s Convenience should serve as a cautionary tale—one in which future writers and producers, as well as viewers, should learn from to avoid the same fate and have an honest conversation about where they got it right and where they fell short.

REFERENCES Campbell, R., Jensen, J., Gomery, D., Fabos, B., & Frechette, J. (2013). Media in Society: A Brief Introduction (Illustrated). Bedford/St. Martin’s. Carras, C. (2021, June 11). Simu Liu clarifies his scathing “Kim’s Convenience” remarks. Los Angeles Times. https://www​.latimes​.com​/entertainment​-arts​/tv​/story​ /2021​-06​-10​/simu​-liu​-kims​-convenience​-interview​-shang​-chi Cheung, K. (2021, June 9). How “Kim’s Convenience” went from a beacon of representation to a lesson in racist storytelling. Salon. https://www​.salon​.com​/2021​/06​ /09​/kims​-convenience​-racism​-representation​-simu​-liu/ Chow, A. R. (2021, June 8). As the final season of Kim’s Convenience arrives on Netflix, its legacy is dampened by claims of a racist work environment. Time. https:// time​.com​/6072074​/kims​-convenience​-racism/ Fitzmaurice, L. (2021, June 7). Jean Yoon said working wn “Kim’s Convenience” was “painful” and that some of the original Season 5 storylines were “overtly racist.” BuzzFeed. https://www​.buzzfeed​.com​/larryfitzmaurice​/kims​-convenience​ -jean​-yoon​-painful​-experience Gardner, C. (2021, June 6). ‘Kim’s Convenience’ stars Simu Liu and Jean Yoon open up on “painful” lack of diversity, “overtly racist” storylines. Hollywood Report. Retrieved December 18, 2022, from https://www​ .hollywoodreporter​ .com​ /tv​ /tv​ -news​/kims​-convenience​-netflix​-cancelation​-1234963806/

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Gay Discount (season 1, episode 1). (2016). [Television]. Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), Soulpepper Theatre Company, Strada Films. Hall, S. (1973). Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Hall, S., Lowe, A., Willis, P., & Hobson, D. (1980). Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies, 1972-79 (Cultural Studies Birmingham) (1st ed.). New York: Routledge. Hariharan, A. (2020, July 24). Kim’s Convenience: a charming, wholesome and understated corner-store comedy. The Guardian. https://www​.theguardian​.com​ /culture​/2020​/jul​/24​/kims​-convenience​-a​-charming​-wholesome​-and​-understated ​ -corner​-store​-comedy Houpt, S. (2021, March 21). The abrupt end of Kim’s Convenience: Why did CBC let its beloved sitcom close up shop? The Globe and Mail. Retrieved December 18, 2022, from https://www​.theglobeandmail​.com​/arts​/article​-the​-abrupt​-end​-of​-kims​ -convenience​-why​-did​-cbc​-cancel​-its​-beloved/ Hsu, H. (2019, August 29). “Kim’s Convenience,” the genial Canadian witcom that feels like watching another time line. The New Yorker. https://www​.newyorker​ .com​/recommends​/watch​/kims​-convenience​-the​-genial​-canadian​-sitcom​-that​-feels​ -like​-watching​-another​-time​-line Kim’s Convenience. (2016). [Television]. Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) Soulpepper Theatre Company, Strada Films. Krishna, P. (2021, June 21). Why ‘Kim’s Convenience’ is ‘quietly revolutionary.’ The New York Times. https://www​.nytimes​.com​/2021​/06​/01​/dining​/kims​-convenience​.html LaMay, R. (2022, March 30). Fresh Off the Boat’s battle with stereotypes and sitcoms. Medium. https://red​summ​itpr​oductions​.medium​.com​/fresh​-off​-the​-boats​ -battle​-with​-stereotypes​-and​-sitcoms​-9b4299dfc29 Liu, M. (2021, July 5). An inconvenient truth: How ‘Kim’s Convenience’ became a cautionary tale for Asian representation. The Chronicle. https://www​.dukechronicle​.com​/article​/2021​/07​/kims​-convenience​-asian​-representation​-korean​-controversy​-cbc​-netflix Moreau. (2021, March 8). ‘Kim’s Convenience’ to end with Season 5 on CBC. Variety. https://variety​.com​/2021​/tv​/news​/kims​-convenience​-ending​-season​-5​-canceled 1234925006/ Ng, B. (2021, June 2). Why ‘Kim’s Convenience’ matters. Vanity Fair. https://www​ .vanityfair​.com​/hollywood​/2021​/06​/kims​-convenience​-season​-5​-netflix Paek, H. J., & Shah, H. (2003). Racial ideology, model minorities, and the “not-sosilent partner:” Stereotyping of Asian Americans in U.S. magazine advertising. Howard Journal of Communications, 14(4), 225–243. https://doi​.org​/10​.1080​ /716100430 Ramos. (2020, May 12). New study finds underrepresented writers continue to face bias and discrimination in TV writers rooms. Deadline. https://deadline​.com​/2020​ /05​/new​-study​-underrepresented​-writers​-continue​-to​-face​-bias​-discrimination​-tv​ -writers​-rooms​-diversity​-inclusion​-representation​-1202932567/

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Sugihara, M. K. & Ju, J. (2023, January 28). Asian American Policy Review. https:// aapr​.hkspublications​.org​/2022​/05​/16​/media​-matters​-why​-asian​-american​-representation​-in​-media​-is​-a​-social​-justice​-issue/ Sun, Liberman, R., Butler, A., Lee, S. Y., & Webb, R. (2015). Shifting receptions: Asian American stereotypes and the exploration of comprehensive media literacy. The Communication Review (Yverdon, Switzerland), 18(4), 294–314. https://doi​ .org​/10​.1080​/10714421​.2015​.1085778 Volmers, E. (2021, March 19). ‘It died from within’: Two actors lament the untimely demise of Kim’s Convenience. Calgaryherald. https://calgaryherald​.com​ /entertainment​/television​/calgary​-raised​-actors​-paul​-sun​-hyung​-lee​-andrew​-phung​ -reflect​-on​-heartbreaking​-end​-to​-kims​-convenience Yu, E. (2021, September 9). The complicated relationship between Hollywood, Asian representation, and Marvel’s “Shang Chi.” Vice.Com. https://www​.vice​.com​/en​/ article​/5db88k​/the​-complicated​-relationship​-between​-hollywood​-asian​-representation​-and​-marvel​-movie​-shang​-chi​-legend​-ten​-rings Zhang. (2010). Asian Americans beyond the model minority stereotype: The nerdy and the left out. Journal of International and Intercultural Communication, 3(1), 20–37. https://doi​.org​/10​.1080​/17513050903428109 Zhu, Y. (2016, November 24). Kim’s Convenience wins fame for local store. The Toronto Observer. https://torontoobserver​.ca​/2016​/11​/24​/kims​-convenience​-wins​ -fame​-for​-local​-store/

Chapter 12

Missed Opportunities Discursively Dismantling the HyperWokeness of the Sitcom Community Gina M. Masullo

Season 1, episode 6 of Community, a sitcom that aired on NBC from 2009 to 2014 and remains popular in syndication and via streaming, begins with a declaration from the dean of students—a key character in the sitcom set at a community college: “Look at this group having some kind of meeting and being so diverse,” he exclaims, referring to a study group of students who form the ensemble cast for the show. “There is just—boy—there is just one of every kind of you.” The subtext in his declaration is that the study group is trying too hard to be diverse, that it is enacting some utopian neoliberal fantasy of what the college experience should resemble. In reality, while the study group is more diverse than the casts of many sitcoms, it is hardly as diverse as he implies. It includes four White students, two Black students, and a Middle Eastern student, and the students of color in the program operate mainly in narrow stereotypes. The dean’s declaration is emblematic of the tension palpable throughout the show: An attempt to be woke that ends up being more reductive than illuminative. The show struggles to overcome stereotypical representations of race, gender, and sexual orientation but ends up with “fetishization, objectification, and negative figuration,” as cultural critic Stuart Hall once described such a text (1988, p. 223). It raises questions about how art, and particularly satire and comedy, can and should do race and representation. What depictions are useful and fruitful, and which ones “erase the importance of race” (Esposito, 2009, p. 533) and representation more broadly by rendering them one-dimensional. As Hall argues, cultural products, like sitcoms, are “not necessarily ‘right-on’ by virtue of the fact that they deal with Black (or other minoritized groups’) experience” (1988, p. 225). Indeed, these cultural products must actually affect change to have power. 217

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In this chapter, I discursively dismantle what I call Community’s hyperwoke approach to race and representation that attempts, often too overtly, to critique stereotypes in a way that ends up reinforcing them. I begin by contextualizing what is meant by wokeness and hyper-wokeness, which provide the theoretical underpinnings of the analysis. Then I provide an overview of the show, and why I chose it for this analysis. Next, I discuss three episodes that exemplify the hyper-woke approach and critique them through the framework of wokeness. I conclude with key takeaways of what representation around race for shows like Community tell us about society and the role of race, racism, and representation more broadly within it.

WOKENESS AND HYPER-WOKENESS The term woke originated in Black grassroots activism but has been co-opted in the digital age “to become broadly synonymous with statements on social media that are assumed to indicate an investment in tackling social injustices,” as Sobande et al. observed (2022, p. 1576). It has become a vague and divisive term that has moved beyond its “resistant roots in African American culture in ‘staying woke’” (Sobande et al., 2022, p. 1579) to encompass a variety of left-leaning political causes from feminism to anti-capitalism. To be woke is “not just a political ideology, it is an unretractable existence” argues Ashlee and colleagues (2017, p. 89). In the United States, the concept of wokeness became a target of conservative aggression, and their antipathy has become a galvanizing tool in the culture wars between the right and the left (Nagle, 2017). Ron DeSantis, the Republican governor of Florida, provides a high-profile example of how wokeness is at the center of the culture war. After DeSantis won re-election, he proclaimed in 2022: “We fight the woke in the legislature. We fight the woke in schools. We fight the woke in the corporations. We will never, ever surrender to the woke mob” (Harriot, 2022). Sobande and colleagues (2022) document four ways to explicate wokeness. First, they explain, wokeness operates as an “ongoing ridicule of ‘snowflake’ millennial and Gen Z culture” (Sobande et al., 2022, p. 1579) by the right—the so-called “preachy, performatively ‘woke’” (Nagle, 2017, p. 51). Second, wokeness in some cases can become a form of slacktivism (Chen et al., 2018; Lee & Hsieh, 2013), low-cost online activism that seldom results in substantial change (Sobande et al., 2022). Third, wokeness has become associated with marketing (Sobande et al., 2022), where corporations or celebrities align themselves with progressive causes (such as the rampant merchandising that goes on during Pride month) for financial gain without having real commitment to these causes. The fourth explication sees wokeness as a personal response to injustice and a way to make visible meaningful

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action (Sobande et al., 2022). Wokeness in this sense still retains some of its original power as a term to inspire acceptance of racial and other differences. Indeed, aspiring to be woke still seems admirable, as I will demonstrate in the case of Community, where the series takes a seemingly deliberate stance to be on the woke side of the culture war over wokeness. Yet, the series also flounders into what I call hyper-wokeness, which is when efforts to be woke become so performative and so shallow that they cease to connect to the larger movement of righting the oppression that wokeness was originally conceived to do.

COMMUNITY AS A CASE STUDY Community, the television show that is the focus of this chapter, is an American sitcom created by Dan Harmon that aired for 110 episodes over six seasons from 2009 to 2015, mainly on NBC. I watched it on the streaming platform Hulu, where it continues to air. The show is set in fictional Greendale Community College in Colorado. The underlying premise of the show is that lawyer Jeff Winger (played by Joel McHale) has to return to college because he has been suspended from practicing law for lying about having a bachelor’s degree from Columbia University. Winger, a White narcissistic lothario, meets a motley collection of students, who form a study group that serves as the main narrative devise of the program. Despite the dean’s declaration of the study group’s diversity described above, its members are predominantly White. The White members consist of Britta Perry (Gillian Jacobs), Winger’s primary but unrequited love interest who tries almost too hard to portray herself as a feminist; Annie Edison (Alison Brie), a sexually inexperienced over-achiever; and Pierce Hawthorne (Chevy Chase), a sometimes racist and sexist millionaire and CEO who enrolled in Greendale out of boredom. The three students of color in the study group are both outnumbered by White students in early seasons and also often operate in stereotypical fashion. Divorcee Shirley Brown (Yvette Nicole Brown) reinforces the stereotype of Black women being hyper-religious. Troy Barnes (Donald Glover) depicts the stereotypical trope of a young Black man who excels at sport (football in this case; Guo & Harlow, 2014). The most complex character may be Abed Nadir (Danny Pudi), a film student of Palestinian and Polish descent, who interprets the study group’s activities through film and television cliches, adding a layer of contextualization to the stereotypical depictions. Recurring characters include Dean Craig Pelton (Jim Rash) whose character hints at being gay throughout the series before coming out in season 6 in a confusing way, and Ben Chang (Ken Jeong), a Chinese character who teaches Spanish for much of the series in a seeming attempt

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to upset stereotypes. Notably, Pudi’s ethnicity is actually Indian and Polish, and Jeong’s ethnicity is really Korean, not Chinese. While representation of minoritized groups in art is important, it is problematic that actors of one ethnicity or race are used as a fill in for other non-White characters (Lim, 2018) because it blurs the lines between their own identity and that of the character they are playing as if all non-White characters are the same, in contrast to the dominance of Whiteness. I chose this show for analysis because it offered a fruitful venue through which to unpack the very tension I want to discursively analyze—this tension between the White do-gooder attempt at wokeness that ends up in exaggerated and more harmful hyper-wokeness. Secondly, “racial discourse is especially powerful … within the institution of popular culture” (Esposito, 2009, p. 522), and comedy, in particular, reinforces learning because it is enjoyable to watch (e.g., Baek et al., 2009; Cao, 2008). Also, while this show is no longer airing on network TV, it has an established cult following (EWstaff, 2021), cementing it in the public zeitgeist. Thus, it offers entry into the public consciousness through the lens of popular culture. I selected three episodes for analysis after repeated close watching of all the show’s six seasons. The first, “Football, Feminism, and You,” was referenced in the introduction to this chapter. I selected it because it overtly deals with the issue of diversity, and it took place during the first season, when the show was establishing its footing. The second episode that I analyze, “Intro to Political Science,” is the 17th episode in season 2. I selected it because it deals with intersectionality between race and gender expression in a way that is relevant to the chapter, and it shows a progression of the characters from the first season. The third episode that I examine, “Queer Studies & Advanced Waxing,” is the fourth episode of the final season, 6. I chose it because it illustrates how the show has evolved in its wokeness to take a more nuanced approach to race, and it also displays hyper-wokeness in its treatment of queerness. Notably, it includes the character of Chang in a substantial way. “Football, Feminism and You” This episode, as described in the introduction, begins with the dean praising the study group for being diverse, and then it shifts to the main plotline about the dean’s efforts to get Barnes, the Black former student athlete, to play football on the community college’s team. Barnes had played football in high school, but he got injured and never moved onto collegiate ball. The dean’s efforts to get Barnes to play are framed around the idea that as a former athlete who is Black, he must be naturally gifted at athletics. This stereotype is reinforced throughout the early minutes of the show, as the dean attempts to blackmail Winger, so he will persuade Barnes to join the team. In a later

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scene, as Winger tries to persuade Barnes, they grapple directly with hyperwokeness, as Barnes calls Winger out for stereotyping Barnes, but also dips into some heterosexism, which prioritizes straightness and denigrates queerness (Hunter, 2009). Thus, the show is challenging racism by critiquing the stereotyping, yet also reinforcing it through using it as a dominant storyline. Heterosexism is treated as more acceptable than racism, and the dialogue implies that Black people are heterosexist, reinforcing another stereotype. The fact that Winger, a White man, calls Barnes, a Black man, racist for perpetuating a stereotype that Black people are heterosexist further complicates the narrative. The following dialogue illustrates this point: Winger:  “I’m saying you’re a football player. It’s in your blood.” Barnes:  “That’s racist.” Winger:  “Your soul.” Barnes:  “That’s racist.” Winger:  “Your eyes.” Barnes:  “That’s gay.” Winger:  “That’s homophobic.” Barnes:  “That’s Black.” Winger:  “That’s racist.” (Russo, 2009)

A separate plotline interrogates and perpetuates hyper-wokeness even more directly. Hawthorne is attempting to design a mascot for the college’s sports team. In a display of his own frequent racism, he suggests a mascot that looks just like him, a White man. The dean points out that a White male mascot would not reflect the whole campus body. “Our symbol needs to reflect the diversity of our school,” explains the dean in a statement that exemplifies the intentionality of wokeness to wake people up to the need for a more just world. As the show continues, the dean stresses that the mascot should have no identifiers of any racial group, thereby mocking diversity in a sense by taking it to its most absurd extreme. The mascot the school ends up with has a totally light-gray body with a drawn-on face that conveys no culture or gender. It barely looks human and instead looks freakish, subtly suggesting that an attempt to be inclusive will ultimately end up with an uncanny mascot that actually reflects no one. As Hawthorne introduces the mascot, he quips, “We solved racism. What’s next.” The mascot profoundly captures the idea of hyper-wokeness, wokeness taken to such an apex that it ceases to empower and instead constrains. The mascot looks almost diabolical in its departure from typical human features, as if only a robot-like creature can achieve the racial parity that wokeness seeks. The creature is funny. It is clear the audience is meant to laugh at the mascot, and, in so doing, ridicule the larger idea of trying to be woke by

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creating this monstrous mascot. The subtext is that attempts at wokeness are ill-placed and unfounded and will result in exaggerated, unrealistic depictions. In other words, the show’s use of this mascot suggests that if people are too woke, the result will not be equity, but absurdity. This hints that wokeness itself is merely mockery because it always will turn into the hyper-wokeness that takes a valuable goal and turns it into hyperbole. This understanding is amplified by Winger’s closing statement of this scene: “I think not being racist is the new racism.” Later in the episode, the show again pokes fun at stereotypes in a manner that at first seems humorous, but really underscores the departure from wokeness to hyper-wokeness. The dean orders a coffee by asking for a Desmond Tutu with just enough cream to make it a Lou Diamond Phillips. The late Tutu, of course, was South Africa’s Black archbishop emeritus who worked against racism and apartheid, and Phillips is a lighter-skinned, Filipino American actor and director who made his breakthrough performance playing Ritchie Valens in La Bamba. The dean’s comment seems an ill-cast attempt at wokeness because he is demonstrating knowledge of contemporary figures of color and incorporating them into his discourse. But by casting Tutu and Phillips as colors of coffee, the show undercuts its attempts at wokeness and dips into clear racist dialogue and hyper-wokeness. It invokes colorism, which highlights White supremacy by privileging Whiteness and by extension castigating darker skin as being less than (Mudambi, 2022). So by invoking a Tutu coffee as requiring (white) milk to become palatable as Phillips, the scene perpetuates and reinforces colorism and casts Black people as other. It emphasizes hyper-wokeness because the dialogue initially appears to be an attempt to be inclusive, but it actually does the opposite. In summary, this episode from the program’s first season is exemplary of hyper-wokeness. The story lines and characterizations on the surface attempt to be woke by simply depicting race, rather than providing the audience with a more nuanced representation that might actually reflect the complicated ways that racism functions (and where exists plenty of fodder for thoughtful racial satire). There is a focus on diversity, clearly a woke issue, and on ensuring depictions of the community college are as diverse as the student body. However, for comic effect the narrative gravitates to the absurd, suggesting it is not enough to be woke and funny. The characters end up mocking these attempts at wokeness as too extreme or too calculated, and the result undermines the very egalitarian values the show’s story line seems initially to endorse. In the end, the episode comes across as mocking attempts at wokeness similar to the rhetoric that demonizes wokeness as being perpetuated by liberal snowflakes in what Sobande and colleagues (2022) call “performative wokeness” (p. 1579). Hyper-wokeness builds on performative wokeness,

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wokeness that attempts to make a display for others, by amplifying its effects and exaggerating the performative nature of wokeness. “Intro to Political Science” The main premise of this second-season episode that first aired in 2010 is that Vice President Joe Biden is visiting the college, and the dean wants the students to elect a class president, whom they lack, to show off for Biden. Nadir, the student of Palestinian and Polish descent, notes that he has noticed people surveilling the campus. Shortly afterward, a Black man dressed as a janitor overhears this, and surreptitiously speaks into a transmitter on his wrist: “We’ve been made.” It becomes apparent that this janitor is actually doing preliminary investigatory work before Biden’s visit. As the dean begins interviewing potential class presidents, two U.S. Secret Service agents approach Nadir and ask to search him. As they search, the White woman agent says: “If I may ask, how did you know the campus was being observed?” Nadir explains that he is used to being the only observer at the college, and the agent replies: “Well, we’re not used to being noticed.” Nadir seems to almost attempt to flirt with the agent, by replying: “That seems a little sad.” The scene is notable for several reasons. First, it plays with the notion of ethnic and racial profiling (Pampel, 2004), Nadir being the only student who is searched, making an attempt at wokeness. But the storyline makes clear that Nadir is being searched not because of his ethnicity as Middle Eastern but because of his observational skills, which seems to attempt to flout stereotypical profiling. This scene does not quite rise to the level of hyper-wokeness, but it skirts around wokeness by raising issues about race and ethnicity yet dismissing them as irrelevant. It is almost as if the scene wants viewers to perceive Nadir as being profiled and then realize their own mistake at being such snowflakes to make that false assumption in the first place. This subtly reinforces the idea that profiling itself may be imaginary or in the eye of the beholder, not the harmful racialized act that it is. The next scene shows a debate of the eight contestants for student president and is more overt with its treatment of race and ethnicity. Winger, one of eight contestants, dodges a question from the dean about what he will do if elected by recasting the question as important to various subpopulations in the campus community. “It’s an important question to Maria, who’s a beautiful Latina born in Nicaragua, working in the cafeteria,” Winger says, using Spanish pronunciations for Maria, Latina, Nicaragua, and even cafeteria to emphasize his wokeness, which drifts into hyper-wokeness because it clearly mocks attempts to pronounce Spanish words correctly. The only Black candidate running for student government president, Magnitude (Luke Youngblood), says only “Pop, pop” when he gets a chance to explain his platform,

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diminishing any chance students or viewers will see a Black man as a viable candidate. Later in the debate, one of the woman candidates, Edison, at first appears to be losing the debate to Winger who employs a hyperbole of political doublespeak by making statements that actually say nothing. For example, when asked during the debate what he will do as student government president, Winger responds: “These people don’t want me to say what I’ll do. They want me to do what I say.” The students watching the debate respond with enthusiastic applause. But then Edison rallies by focusing on one issue, mold in a college stairwell, and using a rhyming sound bite, “No matter what you’re told; we have to clean the mold.” The whole campus community joins her in the chant, and two of the students of color, Barnes and Nadir, who are airing a college-based TV broadcast about the debate, remark that her effort has turned the contest into a “real horse race” between Winger and Edison. The scene demonstrates the show’s effort to be woke by showing the woman candidate offering a convincing challenge to the White man who is running, but it is notable that at this point none of the diverse members of the cast are even in the running. Later, a new character who appears to be Latino and adopts an exaggerated Mexican accent rushes up to Nadir and says: “Those guys in the suits are trashing your dorm room real bad, bro,” referring to the Secret Service agents. The use of hyper-stereotypical depiction of the Latino character makes a nod to wokeness by adding to the diversity of the cast, but it descends into hyperwokeness because it is such a caricature. It turns out Nadir’s dorm room had been randomly selected for a search by the Secret Service, revisiting the earlier plotline that suggested he was being racially profiled. Nadir returns to his dorm room, where the woman agent who Nadir previously seemed to be flirting with dismisses the other agent, a Black man. Nadir asks what she is looking for. “Fertilizer, car battery, PVC piping, anything suspicious,” the woman agent replies. Her word choice suggests that they are concerned Nadir may have bomb-making materials, a clear nod to portraying Middle Eastern people as terrorists, offering a degree of wokeness by seeming to expose police as relying on stereotypes for profiling. However, Nadir’s response shifts the narrative. He says: “Because you think I’m suspicious? Or because you wish I was suspicious, so that you would have an excuse to see more of me?” The agent insists the search was random, but Nadir persists, asking “Do you like me?” and moves closer to the agent, creating the appearance of sexual tension. “That’s close enough,” she says, putting up her hand to stop Nadir from coming closer, but she demurs by admitting “you smell like nice soap.” Overall, the scene attempts to be woke by critiquing racial and ethnic profiling as a problematic strategy for policing and offers and inserts the sexual tension into the scene almost as a form of repudiation of profiling. It

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is particularly informative because it casts Nadir as a romantic interest for an attractive White woman even throughout most of the show he is depicted as socially awkward and uninterested in romantic encounters. Yet it also offers a performative form of hyper-wokeness because it relies so heavily on a particularly virulent stereotype—that Middle Eastern people are terrorists (Zheng & Tahat, 2012)—and while attempting to repudiate it, really does little more than reinforce it. The viewer is left with the idea that it was somehow logical that Nadir was selected for a random search. Further, because his character is seldom a romantic lead and is indeed characterized as not desiring a sexual partner, the whole idea of him being the object of the agent’s sexual desire almost seems implausible. The episode attempts to make a wink at flouting a stereotype but does not succeed because the whole premise, while humorous, hardly makes sense. The scene ends with Nadir and the agent leaving their romantic tension unrealized and the agent parting with the words: “I’m sorry you weren’t a more obvious potential threat to the country.” By wrapping the scene in this manner, it almost seems as if the show is poking fun at the prospect of Nadir as a romantic lead, again failing to repudiate the stereotype of a Middle Eastern character as a terrorist. Essentially, Nadir fails at being both a terrorist and a potential suitor for the agent. At the end of the episode, Edison out-maneuvers Winger, her male competitor in the election, by showing an embarrassing video from his past, when he auditioned for MTV: Seattle by pretending to be singer George Michael. At first, this seems an attempt to topple patriarchy by letting the woman candidate win, although because it occurs by her being under-handed, this undercuts her success. The attempt to flout sexism is again diminished when in the closing scene Edison apologizes to Winger, and they both drop out of the race for student president, leaving two remaining candidates: an older White man Leonard Rodriguez (Richard Erdman), whom we are told changed his surname to court the Hispanic vote in a nod to critiquing wokeness, and Magnitude, the Black candidate. They “debate” with the White man making raspberries at the audience, and Magnitude repeating apparently the only words he can say: “Pop pop.” Both are shown as clearly undesirable candidates, and, indeed, only 11 students vote in the election. The “winner” is the Comedy Central series South Park with seven votes. As Barnes and Nadir conclude their TV show coverage of the election, Nadir oddly notes, “Did you know you could make napalm out of common dish soap and cat food?” in a thinly veiled attempt to be perceived as a terrorist in hopes of eliciting attention from the woman Secret Service agent. While it is a humorous ending to be sure, it again reinforces the stereotype of Middle Easterners as terrorists, a stereotype so entrenched that Nadir knows his short statement will warrant inquiry. Thus, while the episode seems to aspire to wokeness, it falls short and instead enacts the type of performativity that constitutes hyper-wokeness.

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“Queer Studies and Advanced Waxing” In the 6th season, the program moved from NBC to the Yahoo! Screen streaming service and introduced some new characters, Elroy Patashnik (Keith David) who flouts stereotypes as a retired Black scientist (Guo & Harlow, 2014) who is reinventing himself, and Francesca “Frankie” Dart (Paget Brewster), a consultant to help improve the community college (Goldberg, 2014). Also, Chang is now a student, not the stereotype-breaking Spanish teacher. In the opening scene, Chang is rehearsing with Edison to audition for the role of Daniel LaRusso—the “karate kid”—in a stage adaption of the Karate Kid. LaRusso’s character (played by Ralph Macchio in the film) is supposed to be a street-smart Italian American who is mentored by the Japanese Mr. Miyagi (portrayed by Pat Morita in the film). The fact that Chang is not trying out for the Asian character is notable. It appears to be a woke nod to the fact that Asian actors should not be limited to playing only Asian characters, and that a person with Asian ethnicity should not be a stand-in for an Asian with different ethnicity. This is further complicated, of course, by the fact that Chang’s character on the show is Chinese, while the actor who plays him is of Korean ethnicity, and Mr. Miyagi is Japanese. This appears at first to be an attempt to thwart the trend in entertainment to blur the lines between Asian ethnic groups and to challenge stereotypes. Indeed, when Nadir enters the room, Chang notes that he is auditioning for LaRusso’s part and says to Nadir: “You got a problem with that, racist?” The overtness of this statement, despite the fact that Nadir has not indicated in any way that he has a problem with an Asian man auditioning for an Italian American character, highlights the show’s effort to confront racism, at least in this narrow sense. Nadir responds with a simple “No,” indicating he has no problem with Chang auditioning for the role outside his race. This scene suggests a more nuanced, although still comedic, interrogation of race than was apparent in earlier seasons. This nuanced portrayal, however, is undercut in a display of hyper-wokeness at the audition when the director for Karate Kid, seemingly attracted to Edison, casts Chang in the stereotypical role of Mr. Miyagi and gives LaRusso’s part to the female Edison. But to the show’s credit, the dialogue after this role-reversal critiques this shift, as Chang and Edison explain what happened to the other students: A downcast Chang says: “Well, yeah, Annie got my part, and I got the Asian part.” Edison rebuffs this: “Chang, stop! We were cast as Mr. Miyagi and the Karate Kid because we’re a good team.” Chang: “We’re a team because one of us is so talented, she got cast outside her gender, and the other one got cast because of eye shape.” (Faxon & Rash, 2015)

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Edison, showing the privilege of being a White woman, dismisses Chang’s concerns. Ultimately, the director persistently criticizes Chang’s portrayal of Mr. Miyagi so vehemently that Edison, who thinks she is the director’s favorite, threatens to quit if the director does not let up on Chang. The director fires her, explaining he only cast her because she was the right size to fit in the costume he had for the role, and that he is berating Chang because Chang has real talent to play Mr. Miyagi. A subplot is developed in the next scene: The study group is grappling with the Wi-Fi being broken, and the narrative appears to attempt to counter stereotypes, again displaying what I have described as wokeness. The consultant cannot find the school’s information technology (IT) specialist to fix the Wi-Fi, and she notes that her emails to the specialist keep getting bounced back to her in Aramaic, a Semitic language, suggesting that the “IT lady” may be Middle Eastern. The fact that the IT specialist is a woman and perhaps from the Middle East seems an attempt to flout the stereotype that men, especially from Asia, are good at technology (Guo & Harlow, 2014). Patashnik, played by a Black actor, suggests that he can help, which is notable because the easy stereotypical shortcut would have been to have Chang fix the computers, so this plot decision also seems to challenge a stereotype. But then resulting dialogue suggests that Patashnik’s knowledge of the internet is far exceeded by Nadir, the Middle Eastern character who is actually played by an Asian actor, reinforcing the stereotype that Asian men have more knowledge of computers (Guo & Harlow, 2014) than other groups in a flagrant example of hyper-wokeness. The dean hires Patasnik as the new IT specialist, and demurs when Nadir asks to assist, against suggesting an attempt to thwart a stereotype. Yet, later in the episode, it becomes clear that Nadir needs to guide Patasnik when a bird’s nest built on the internet router is revealed as the reason for the Wi-Fi problem. Nadir insists that Patasnik delay fixing the Wi-Fi until the birds have flown the nest on their own because moving the nest could lead the mother bird to abandon her offspring. Patasnik initially resists but ultimately acquiesces, later telling the dean it will take some time to fix the problem without explaining that he is trying to save the baby birds. This reinforces a stereotype to the dean of the Black character being unintelligent (Guo & Harlow, 2014) because he is unable to fix the Wi-Fi, but it also suggests to the viewer that Patasnik could not reach the moral conclusion of protecting the birds without Nadir’s help, displaying hyper-wokeness. The next scene introduces a more nuanced display of queerness when two White male school board members suggest to Dean Pelton that he could join them on the school board if he is willing to be “openly gay.” Pelton accuses the board members of essentially trying to redeem themselves after an uproar ensued when they had canceled the college’s Pride Parade. One of the school

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board members seems to admit this is the case, muttering, “Those guys get to dress fancy all year! We have one day,” invoking a common conservative critique of events, like Black History Month and Pride, that celebrate minoritized groups. But then the two board members pivot, explaining they want to add a new face—Pelton’s—to the board in a show of “tolerance” for gay people. One of the board members tells Pelton: “The question you have to ask is: Am I openly gay?” The other board member jumps in and continues: “Because if you are, that gayness could be a rocket thrusting you to new gay heights.” The scene ends with the board members singing “Gay dean, Gay dean” (to the tune of Dolly Parton’s song “Jolene”) to Pelton: “I’m begging you to be a gay dean of the school board.” On the one hand, this plotline allows Pelton’s character to come out as gay, a revelation that has been foreshadowed throughout the series with hyper-stereotypical depictions of Pelton as flamboyant. That suggests some degree of wokeness, to advance a gay character as dean. Yet, it descends quite quickly into hyper-wokeness because it negates Pelton’s agency to decide whether and when he wants to come out. Also, by using the term “openly gay” as if Pelton being gay does not count unless he reveals his sexual orientation undermines any value of him being a gay character. Further, the fact that the two board members clearly are suggesting this as a means to display their own tolerance for queerness, not because they actually celebrate diversity, eliminates any real value to the wokeness of this plotline. Thus, it becomes a parody of diversity that attempts to poke fun at efforts to make governing bodies, like the school board, less hegemonic. Even the language the board members use, about a rocket “thrusting you to new gay heights,” is gratuitously phallic. The storyline later seems to attempt to redeem its wokeness when the dean explains that he has been asked to be on the school board, but there’s a “catch.” In a private meeting with Winger and consultant Dart, Pelton apparently explains that the “catch” is he must come out as gay, to which Dart asks: “They want you to be a token homosexual?” To which Winger interjects, “It’s a form of progress.” I appreciate the nuance of this scene because it exposes the audacity of what the school board members are trying to do, using Pelton’s queerness as a political tool. However, the use of the pejorative term “homosexual” (Peters, 2014) is concerning. The situation becomes more complicated when Pelton explains that he considers gay only part of his identity, intimating that he is open to a range of sexual expressions that are not disclosed, although this is confusing because it seems this would still fit the definition of gayness. Winger assures him this does not really matter. “The sad truth, (Pelton),” he says, “anything other than straight, is plenty gay for a school board.” Dart makes one of the most woke points of the episode by noting that by coming out, Pelton may gain “symbolic power” for gay people, but ultimately lose his

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own “individual power” by becoming a symbol of queerness. The observation is astute and again seems to critique the school board members’ ham-handed efforts at diversity in a positive way. The way she explains this hints that she also may be queer, adding more richness to the representation. Pelton is empowered. “I could change the system from the inside out, and all I have to do is pare down my sexuality to simple gayness, which is heavily in the mix.” Ultimately, Pelton joins the school board, introducing his mock “partner” Domingo to show that he is gay, but the plotline again interrogates the tokenism of the act when a reporter asks Pelton if he thinks he was only asked to be on the board “because of your sexual preferences”? The other school board members shut down this line of questioning, but afterward, a student thanks Pelton for coming out, saying it’s helpful “to a lot of us.” The scene closes with a montage of headlines from local media proclaiming Pelton the “gay dean.” The use of “sexual preferences,” rather than orientation is problematic, but the scene does attempt to interrogate hyper-wokeness itself by illuminating the board members’ lip service to diversity. The plotline about the campus Wi-Fi then converges with the narrative about the dean being gay when the school board criticizes him for refusing to have the bird nest moved so the Wi-Fi can be fixed. “That’s a little too gay,” one board member complains, undermining much of the beneficial depiction of queerness in the episode by reducing gayness to liberal-minded oversensitivity. Then Pelton explains that he is not gay, and the board members get upset, noting that conservatives are now complaining that he is doing a bad job as dean because the Wi-Fi does not work, and the “gays aren’t coming to your side.” “Because the whole point,” one board member explains, “is to get a job by being gay, and then to do as good a job as the normals. That’s what the gays want. They don’t want a gay dean who acts like a weird gay monster.” Pelton again insists he is not gay, but he does not explain what that means, though the audience recognizes that he considers his gayness only a part of his sexual identity. The episode does not take advantage of the opportunity to challenge the use of the term “normals” to apply to straight people, which, of course, casts gay people as “not normal.” In the next scene, Pelton, flanked by two security guards, responds to what the school board members have told him by insisting to Nadir and Patasnik that the nest must be moved. Nadir and Patasnik rebuff this, and Nadir begins videotaping the scene. “This is two White security guards versus one unarmed Black man and two baby birds,” Patasnik says, as the recording continues, invoking the decades of rampant attacks on unarmed Black men by police in the United States (Davis, 2017). This leads Pelton to call off the security guards, saying: “Just one unarmed Black man versus one unarmed openly gay dean.” The nest is moved, and Nadir and Patasnik try to raise the baby birds on their own, although all but one bird ends up dying.

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In a scene toward the end of the episode, the dean “comes out” at a news conference, explaining he is part of one of the most marginalized and “least openly honest” groups—politicians. “It means nothing I say and very few of the things I think can be trusted,” Pelton says. He is kicked off the school board, although the question of his sexual orientation is not resolved. The scene seems to be designed to make us feel touched by the dean’s honesty, although it undercuts any benefit of adding a queer storyline to the show because he does not really own his gayness in any sense, and the effort to add him to the school board is revealed to be a fraudulent attempt at diversity that is never resolved. The episode ends with Chang pulling off a stellar performance as Mr. Miyagi and an Asian actor (Irene Choi) being recast to portray the Karate Kid character in what appears to be an explicit attempt to challenge media representations that leave out minoritized groups. The surviving baby bird is released to freedom in the final seconds of the show, suggesting a metaphor of freedom. The episode stands out because the characters of color are the focus throughout, not the White characters, as was typical for much of the series.

PERFORMATIVITY, SUPERFICIALITY, AND MISSED OPPORTUNITIES This chapter sought to discursively analyze race and representation more broadly in the sitcom Community with an aim to dismantle the show’s wokeness and demonstrate how it slips into performative (Sobande et al., 2022) hyper-wokeness, through the analysis of three episodes. This analysis shows that the sitcom exemplifies wokeness by including a relatively diverse cast and confronting racism, sexism, and heterosexism head-on through plotlines that deal directly with these issues and by attempting to challenge stereotypes, although it rarely succeeds. Because it is a sitcom that usually runs about 22 minutes per episode, it is unsurprising that it relies on stereotypes so vigorously because stereotypes are useful for a quick laugh even if they are problematic. But notably the treatment of race in particular seems to grow more nuanced as the series unfolds with more complex depictions in the laterseason episodes I analyzed. It is impossible to know through this analysis whether this is a deliberate progression of becoming more woke and shedding the hyper-wokeness of the early episode or just an artifact of the different topics each episode considers. But the fact that characters of color played a more prominent role in the episode analyzed from the final season of the series is important. It illustrates at the very least a development of characters that make an over-reliance on stereotypical depictions of race less of a knee-jerk comedic device. Indeed, the treatment of Chang’s character in the season 6

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episode that was analyzed shows a more authentic understanding of the harm of stereotyping, and it offered the more successful effort to flout stereotypes without reifying them in a hyper-woke manner than in the earlier episodes. Yet, in sum, the analyzed episodes demonstrate missed opportunities to challenge stereotypes even while making people laugh. The viewer still leaves the series seeing Blacks as unintelligent athletes, Latinos as caricatures with exaggerated accents, and Asians from different countries as interchangeable with one another. This offers missed opportunities to offer comedic plotlines that fully challenge these stereotypes. The series should be applauded for offering a possibly gay character, considering that representation of queer people on television is scant but growing (Mitovich, 2022), but the gay plotline in the final episode I analyzed did little more than amplify stereotypes by using pejorative terms and a narrative that falls short of truly contesting heterosexism. The episode where the dean is told to come out as gay could have been used to push back against the overt tokenism the school board was exerting by wanting an “openly gay” board member for political reasons. It failed to do that because the denouement oddly depicted the character as losing his spot on the board because he “came out” as a politician, leaving his sexual orientation unresolved and confusing. This may have been an attempt to critique the board members’ own political machinations, but, if so, it fell short. Like the depictions of race, the way the sitcom interrogates sexual orientation could have been more in-depth, yet still comedic. Overall, this analysis shows that race, as well as gender and sexual orientation, is not completely erased but still largely one-dimensional (Esposito, 2009), except for brief, more nuanced depictions. The move toward wokeness in Community merits an advance in representation, but the performativity and superficiality of its hyper-wokeness attenuate much of this value. REFERENCES Ashlee, A.A., Zamora, B., & Karikari, S.N. (2017). We are woke: A collaborative autoethnography of three “womxn” of color graduate students in higher education. International Journal of Multicultural Education, 19(1), 89–104. Baek, Y.M., & Wojcieszak, M.E. (2009). Don’t expect too much! Learning from late-night comedy and knowledge item difficult. Communication Research, 36(6), 783–809. https://doi​.org​/10​.1177​/0093650209346805 Cao, X. (2008). Political comedy shows and knowledge about primary campaigns: The moderating effect of age and education. Mass Communication and Society, 11(1), 43–61. https://doi​.org​/10​.1080​/15205430701585028 Chen, G.M., Pain, P., & Barner, B. (2018). “Hashtag feminism”: Activism or slacktivism? In D. Harp, J. Loke, & I. Bachmann (Eds.), Feminist approaches to media theory and research (4th ed., pp. 197–218). Palgrave Macmillan.

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Davis, A.J. (2017). Policing the Black man: Arrest, prosecution, and imprisonment. Pantheon. https://doi​.org​/10​.1093​/police​/pax072 Esposito, J. (2009). What does race have to do with Ugly Betty? An analysis of privilege and postracial(?) representations on a television sitcom. Television & New Media, 10(6), 521–535. https://doi-org.10.1177/152747640934090 EWstaff. (2021, June 1). 26 best cult TV shows ever. Entertainment Weekly. https:// ew​.com​/gallery​/26​-best​-cult​-tv​-shows​-ever/​?slide​=380643​#380643 Faxon, N., & Rash, J. (Directors). (2015). Queer studies and advanced waxing. Season 6, episode 4. Community. https://www​.imdb​.com​/title​/tt4242872/ Goldberg, L. (2014, November 10). “Community” add Paget Brewster, Keith David to season 6 cast. The Hollywood Reporter. https://www​.hollywoodreporter​.com​/tv​ /tv​-news​/community​-adds​-paget​-brewster​-keith​-747827/ Guo, L., & Harlow, S. (2014). User-generated racism: An analysis of stereotypes of African Americans, Latinos, and Asians in YouTube videos. Howard Journal of Communications, 25(3), 281–302. https://doi​.org​/10​.1080​/10646175​.2014​.925413 Hall, S. (1988). New ethnicities. In E. Carter, K. Mercer, & L Appingnanesi (Eds.), Black film/British cinema. ICA documents (7th ed, pp. 27–30). Institute of Contemporary Arts. Harriot, M. (2022, December 21). War on wokeness: The year the right rallied around a made-up menace. The Guardian. https://www​.theguardian​.com​/us​-news​/2022​/ dec​/20​/anti​-woke​-race​-america​-history Hunter, S. (2009). Coming out and disclosures: LGBT persons across the life span. Routledge. Lee, Y., & Hsieh, G. (2013). Does slacktivism hurt activism? The effect of moral balancing and consistency on online activism. Proceedings of the CHI 2013: Changing Perspectives, April 27 to May 2, Paris, France. Lim, A. (2018, August 22). How “Crazy Rich Asians” highlights Hollywood’s ethnic casting problem. StyleCaster​.com​. https://stylecaster​.com​/cast​-asians​-as​-wrong​-ethnicities/ Pampel, F.C. (2004). Racial profiling. Facts on File. Peters, J.W. (2014, March 21). The decline and fall of the “H” word. The New York Times. https://www​.nytimes​.com​/2014​/03​/23​/fashion​/gays​-lesbians​-the​-term​-homosexual​.html Mitovich, M.W. (2022, February 17). TV’s LGBTQ inclusion is at all-time high, GLADD reports—lesbian and transgender representation rising. TV Line​.co​m. https://tvline​.com​/2022​/02​/17​/glaad​-report​-tv​-lgbtq​-representation/ Mudambi, A. (2022). South Asian Americans and anti-Black racism: Critically reflexive racialization as an anti-racist vernacular discourse. Communication, Culture and Critique. Advance online publication. https://doi​.org​/10​.1093​/ccc​/tcac045 Nagle, A. (2017). Kill all normies: Online culture wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right. Hampshire: Zero Books. Russo, J. (2009). “Football, feminism and you.” Season 1, episode 6. Community. https://www​.imdb​.com​/title​/tt1515325/ Sobande, F., Kanai, A., & Zhen, N. (2022). The hypervisibility and discourses of “wokeness” in digital culture. Media, Culture & Society, 44(8), 1576–1587. https:// doi-org.10.1177/01634437221117490 Zheng, L., & That, K. (2012). Picturing terrorism through Arabic lenses: A comparative analysis of Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya. Asian Journal of Communication, 22(5), 433–448.

Chapter 13

“Polo, Small but Tough” Arab and Muslim Representations in a Volkswagen “Commercial” Meshari Thamer Alotaibi

We live in a world full of advertisements surrounding us wherever we go. Advertisements have become common in many global cultures, and in some cases, they are one of the central components of culture. Advertisements cost vast amounts of money. According to Jhally et al. (2017), “Globally, the total amount spent on advertising is $570 billion a year.” These extraordinary sums are not only spent on advertising but, in fact, “the amount spent on producing ads are dwarfed by the billions of dollars corporations spend on making sure they get seen” (Jhally et al., 2017). Given the amount of money spent on advertising, which is often ten times more than the cost of producing television programs, it may make one wonder about the power of advertising to influence individuals and societies. Advertising has a long history and has quickly adapted to the dramatic changes brought on by technological developments. The internet has helped make advertising an extraordinarily potent weapon. According to Jhally et al. (2017), “The internet has become the primary delivery vehicle for corporate advertising. In fact, you could say it’s the greatest mechanism for marketing commodities ever invented.” The internet has changed our concept of advertisements, and as we are exposed to more and more ads, we may not feel like they have an impact. Many people think that they can ignore ads, but with the plethora of advertising we are witnessing today, it is impossible that an individual who uses the internet can avoid them. Scholars have argued that advertising has many different effects, such as increasing the demand for products and consumption in general. I believe in the validity of these effects, but in this chapter, I am interested in investigating the impact of advertising on our view of cultures and individuals who are generally underrepresented in Western media. Many advertisements 233

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contain scenes and representations of different cultures that could lead to or enhance racist attitudes. Usually, ads about a specific product are produced with the approval of the product’s company, but that was apparently not the case for a controversial Volkswagen ad called “Polo, Small but Tough” that has been viewed by millions of viewers since it was posted on YouTube in 2005. This paper will analyze the advertisement by using Stuart Hall’s (1980) “encoding/decoding” theory, which calls for analyzing meanings in media artifacts from multiple layers. First, I will cover some points about the commercial; then, I will analyze it at the denotative level (what Hall would call the “preferred” level) and connotative levels (what Hall would call the “negotiated” or “oppositional” levels). I will do this more than once, because the commercial’s meanings are complicated by the fact that the “commercial” was apparently a parody, calling for an analysis of the advertisement as satire. The “Polo, Small but Tough” commercial is about a car model from Volkswagen called “Polo” and boasts that the car has a superior insulation system that renders it nearly indestructible. The controversy about the viral “ad” revolved around how its message was conveyed to the public, showing how tough the car was by showing an Arab suicide bomber blowing himself up inside the car, with the car withstanding the blast. Several articles about the “Polo, Small but Tough” ad have pointed out that the commercial was not approved by Volkswagen and was made without the company’s knowledge, though it appears that most viewers believed that it was an actual commercial produced by the world’s largest car manufacturer and not by a rogue agency that created the ad as satire. This commercial caused a significant uproar. Volkswagen issued a statement saying, “Neither Volkswagen nor any agency acting on behalf of Volkswagen was involved in any way with the creation, production or distribution of this material. Volkswagen is reviewing legal steps against the initiators of this material” (Halkin, 2005). Although the commercial has been around for more than a decade, it is still regularly viewed and discussed on media platforms like YouTube and Twitter into the 2020s. Most of the articles about the ad focused on whether it was Volkswagen that made this advertisement, directly or indirectly through an agency, and on the company’s response. Either way, this advertisement was not often analyzed from the perspective of the impact of the racist imagery in the ad, which is my purpose in this essay. I will analyze this commercial differently from what is found in the social media buzz, much of which focused on who produced the commercial. I will analyze the commercial/parody and examine its potential readings, including an examination of comments on social media platforms about the ad.

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REPRESENTATION, ENCODING, AND DECODING Stories build our knowledge. History is about the stories we read, hear, and how we understand the past. Cultural critic Sut Jhally (2017) has argued that “advertising is the dominant storytelling force of our time,” but what if these stories are inaccurate? The advertisements we see in the media have an impact on individuals and societies and, according to Jhally, advertising has the potential to “shape our sense of our values as a society the consumer mindset that advertising celebrates feeding an endlessly accelerating cycle of consumption” (Jhally et al., 2017). There are many ways to send messages to the audience about an advertisement’s content, such as narrative, humor, production techniques, and visual elements, but an essential element that affects the audience is the notion of representation. According to Stuart Hall, nearly everything we see or hear in the media is representation. Representation comes in many forms, such as radiocasts, newspaper articles, photographs, films, and television programs, meaning we are immersed in these representations daily. Whether or not what is presented accurately describes reality, what we see in the media is someone else’s interpretation of reality. Hall argues that representation is created through the process of selection, omission, and construction (Hall et al., 1980). These processes help determine the intended meaning and how the audience will interpret the representation. Communication scholars have argued that media have a variety of effects on individuals and societies and have suggested more than one way to understand and analyze media and its content. One of the most important methods for understanding media content is Hall’s Encoding and Decoding Theory, which covers all aspects of the communication process, such as “production, circulation, distribution, consumption, and reproduction” (Hall, 1980, p. 117). This theory revolves around the roles of the two main components: producers and receivers. In the first component, the producers do the encoding. The word coding refers to any scientific system that is used to communicate meaning, including things like body language, clothing, music, etc. These symbols are usually cues that have culturally agreed-upon meanings. According to Hall, these meanings may be either denotative—the literal meaning— or the connotative—the more complicated meaning. Theories that examine representation and cultural codes help in understanding how ideas about events and people are represented, misrepresented, or stereotyped and help in deconstructing media texts for a deeper understanding of how meaning is generated through mass media. Hall (1980) argues that after senders encode messages, recipients decode through three different readings. The “preferred” or denotative reading happens when the

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receiver understands the message in the way the sender intended. The second reading is the “negotiated” reading, in which the recipient understands the message but questions the preferred reading of the text. The third reading is the “oppositional” reading, in which the recipient rejects or understands messages in a way that contradicts the sender’s goals. This chapter will examine those levels of meaning in the viral Polo ad. MEDIA REPRESENTATIONS OF ARABS Jack Shaheen is among the preeminent scholars who have examined the representations of Arabs in the American media. In his analysis of Arab representations in more than 1,100 Hollywood films, he consistently found stereotypes that were wildly inaccurate. According to Shaheen (2009), “The power to depict certain ‘others’ as innately strange and dangerous—as foul creatures not like the rest of us—is surely as devastating as the physical force of the weaponry.” Shaheen argued that stereotypes about Arabs have become pervasive in American culture and across the world. He observes, “Constantly repeated, these stereotypes manipulate viewers’ thoughts and feelings, conditioning them to ratchet up the forces of rage and unreason. And even persecution” (Shaheen, 2009). Shaheen argued that the problematic representations of Arabs and Muslims had a long history even before the events of September 11, 2001; those stereotypes denigrated Islam by portraying Arabs as evil and stupid “desert thieves.” After the events of 9/11, stereotypes about Arabs worsened, and the perception of Muslims and Arabs came to a more “violent level, employing a whole new toolkit of disparaging images laced with hatred of Arabs and Islam” (Shaheen, 2009). According to Shaheen, after 9/11, stereotypes about Arabs became much more bombastic, brutal, and belligerent, much more rich, ruthless, and raunchy. They are portrayed as the civilized world’s enemy, fanatic demons threatening people across the planet: Oily sheikhs finance nuclear wars; Islamic radicals kill innocent civilians; bearded, scruffy “terrorists,” men and women, toss their American captives inside caves and filthy, dark rooms and torture them. (Shaheen, 2009)

Evelyn Alsultany has also argued that Arab and Muslim representations and stereotypes have an ancient history and that after 9/11 different representations about Arabs and Muslims increased in the fervor of anti-terrorism. According to Alsultany (2016), “Many authors note a more ambivalent portrayal of Arabs and Muslims post 9/11” (p. 4). During this period, some representations were created that aimed to improve the image of Muslims

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and Arabs and tp create sympathy for them, such as “good Arab/Muslim Americans” who are seen as heroic and eager to “counteract the bad or terrorist Arab/Muslim.” However, these strategies were not of high value because of their relevance in the context of the dominant media representation of terrorism. To illustrate, Alsultany states that in the period in which these sympathetic representations were presented, Arabs and Muslims continued to face discrimination, detention, deportation and torture. Alsultany notes, “Hate crimes against Arabs and Muslims multiplied by 1600 percent” after 9/11 (Alsultany, 2016, p. 4). In contrast to the sympathetic representations of Arabs and Muslims that Alsultany found, Wilkins found that Arabs continued to be portrayed in American cinemas after 9/11 as threats to the U.S, and “Arab characters are posed as devastatingly evil villains, such that in contrast, American heroes can radiate, vanquishing threats to American culture” (Wilkins, 2009, p. 60). Wilkins also argued that Islam is more associated in American cinema with villains than heroes and that the nationality of heroes is overwhelmingly American. Many actions and adventure films portray Arabs as a threat to the United States national security, which undoubtedly has dire consequences for viewers by creating racist perceptions of Arabs and Muslims. Stereotypes of Arabs and Muslims were not only shown in entertainment but also spread in the Western news media. According to Alsultany, “The news media after 9/11 was responsible at times for promoting stereotypes and discriminatory policies” (Alsultany, 2016, p. 245). McQueeney also emphasized that in the period after the 9/11 attacks, many Arabs and Muslims in the United States were threatened. McQueeney agreed with many scholars, such as Said (1997), Shaheen (2009) and Jackson (2010), that Arabs and Muslims are portrayed in the Western media as “terrorists and racial,” contributing to “negative and stereotypical attitudes toward Islam” (Mcqueeney, 2014, p. 299). She also argues that with the development of the internet and digital media, stereotypes about Arabs have spread to many platforms such as YouTube and others, whose impact is undoubtedly no less harmful than the traditional media because so many individuals nowadays turn to “the Internet as their only source of news and political awareness. Thus, today’s [individuals] represent a fertile audience for an alternative and independent media” (2014, p. 306). Shaheen observed that in the 1980s that Arabs and Muslims were represented in Western media in particular, television, in the context of “terrorism, hijack, intractability, sullen-nous, perverseness, cruelty, oil, sand, cruel embargo, boycott, greed, bungling, comedic disunity, primitive torture, family feuds, and white slavery” (Shaheen, 1980). The representation of Arabs and Muslims in the 2000s is not much different from what Shaheen described. According to Sutkute, Western media continues to show Muslims “terrorists/

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Islamists that are against West, their values and any possibility of integration in Western societies” (Sutkutė, 2019, p. 59). Also, Guarinos and BercianoGarrido argue that Arabs and Muslims “are systematically portrayed in newspapers, movies or television programs as strange and dangerous beings” (Guarinos & Berciano-Garrido, 2022, p. 130). Jackson, who focused on representations of Arabs and Muslims after the events of 9/11, found that in the Western media “emerges a common, normalized associating of Islam and Muslims with terrorism and/or conflict, violence, irrationality, and vengefulness” (2010, p. 21). This teaches the viewers to associate Muslims with terrorism and makes them believe that this association is “reasonable or acceptable, rather than as harmful to Muslims” (p. 22).

“POLO, SMALL BUT TOUGH” The “Polo, Small but Tough” ad is about a Volkswagen Polo, a small hatchback. The narrative depicts a man wearing sunglasses and a keffiyeh, a traditional Palestinian headscarf, as he walks from an English house to a Volkswagen Polo. The advertisement shows the driver stop his car in front of a cafe near many people and then blow himself up through an explosive belt that was wrapped around his waist. The effect of the explosion was limited because the Polo car was strong enough to absorb the explosion and protect those nearby. The commercial was produced by Lee and Dan, an agency that “specializes in irreverent viral ads, which are sent out over the Internet and circulated by e-mail,” but when Lee and Dan’s Polo ad went viral on the internet, it caused a stir (Halkin, 2005). Volkswagen issued a statement explaining that the company was not involved in the production of the commercial. Mystery surrounds the actual production of the ad, but one report said that Volkswagen was “preparing to take legal action against the two creatives, Lee Ford and Dan Brooks, who sent out a spoof VW viral that shows a suicide bomber blowing himself up in a Polo” (Hotline, 2005). Another report said that “Volkswagen has filed a legal complaint against” the advertising producers (Staged Suicide Bombing Clip “an Attack on Volkswagen’s Good Reputation,” 2005). Another said that after the uproar over the viral ad, the British graphic designers, Brooks and Ford, were “signed with the London production company Quad and with Czar in New York and Los Angeles” (Bannister, 2005). Volkswagen has in the past produced controversial ads, and the Polo commercial would be consistent with the marketing of a company that has a history of being edgy. In 2009, nearly four Volkswagen advertisements were banned due to inappropriate, violent content (Sweney, 2009). In 2013,

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Volkswagen put out a Superbowl ad that included a White Minnesotan using a Jamaican accent that created an uproar (Espiner, 2020). In 2019, a Volkswagen commercial was banned in the UK due to gender stereotyping (“Philadelphia and VW Ads Banned for Gender Stereotyping,” 2019). In addition, in 2020, Volkswagen launched an ad series on social media that created controversy on Twitter about racism used in advertising, leading to its withdrawal by Volkswagen (Coggan, 2020). So there is no doubt that the advertising history of the car company Volkswagen is controversial and edgy, and there is little question that many viewers of the Polo ad believed the ad had been produced by the car maker. Several articles reported on the “Polo, Small but Tough” commercial in 2005, and some claimed that “Volkswagen had secretly paid for it” (Halkin, 2005). There was conflicting information about the ad in the articles on this topic. Some said that Volkswagen did not file a case but only accepted the producers’ apology. The producers stated that the ad was “meant to reach a small professional audience” (Halkin, 2005). In contrast, the producers told another newspaper that their commercial was only made to be shared with other with advertising agencies. After an extended reading about who and why the advertisement was produced, it became clear that the sources did not agree on one scenario; instead, there were many stories, but I am interested in the continued presence of this advertisement on many social media platforms. ANALYZING THE COMMERCIAL AS IF THE PRODUCER IS VOLKSWAGEN The Preferred Reading The “preferred” reading of the “Polo, Small but Tough” commercial is to demonstrate the toughness of the Volkswagen Polo car through the “humorous” use of stereotypes of Arabs. In the first scene, a man wearing sunglasses and a keffiyeh leaves an English house and heads to his car. The scene shows that the man is wearing an explosive belt and gives the idea that the man is an Arab because of the keffiyeh that depicts the “same style of checked scarf made famous by the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat” (VW Threatens Legal Action over Fake Ad Seen on Web, 2005). The scene capitalizes on the stereotype of the Arab person in a keffiyeh as a threat and danger. The producers exploited the historic misrepresentations of Arabs to make the advertisement more shocking and humorous. In the second scene, the man gets into his Polo, turns it on, and drives. This scene continues the stereotyped messages about Arabs, as he carefully pursues his plan to commit a violent and criminal act. A close-up depicts the man’s face in a way that gives the idea that the Arab person bears no feelings

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of hesitation and fear about what he intends to do. The third scene depicts the details of the Volkswagen Polo while it is being driven, highlighting the aesthetics and features of the car. Next comes a scene of two Western men sitting in a cafe and talking to each other, typical Westerners enjoying their time, unaware that an Arab terrorist plans to kill them. The fifth scene depicts a group of women sitting and enjoying their time in the café and two women walking by, including a smiling woman carrying her child. Next comes a scene of the Arab man parking his Polo in front of the cafe. The production is designed to emphasize the idea that the Arab person does not have mercy in his heart for women, children, humanity. Also, these scenes present Western society as a good and diverse society that loves to relax and exercise and care for children. In contrast, the evil Arab does not care about these elements but rather about spreading evil and violence. After that, a scene depicts the Arab man pressing a button to detonate the explosive belt. The scene shows the car from the outside while the man blows himself up inside it. It shows that the damage was limited to inside the vehicle only. The public was not affected and did not notice that there was someone who blew himself up—because of the apparent high quality of the sturdy structure of the Volkswagen Polo. In the last scene, the Volkswagen logo appears; under it, the message reads, “Polo. Small but Tough.” This scene seems to show that the Volkswagen company is simply demonstrating the capabilities of their vehicles, modern and robust. As for the preferred reading, the message that the public receives is to encourage the viewers to buy Volkswagen Polos by satirizing Arabs and Muslims, and that Volkswagen has issued an especially sturdy car. Of course, the advertisement also sends messages that Volkswagen is willing to ridicule Arabs and reinforce stereotypes that associate them with terrorism, in line with the old propaganda campaigns designed to build support in Western society for anti-Arab social and political policies. On YouTube, I found many comments about the “Polo, Small but Tough” ad. Many viewers applauded the ad despite its racism. Some commenters believed the ad was entertaining; as one said, “I wish more places made commercials like this, love the humor in it, and it is just memorable.” Some also suggested that companies “be real” and have the courage to produce advertisements similar to this commercial. One commented, “Aaaahh, I remember this sort of commercial as a kid, it’s a shame every company has been castrated from making this sort of humor anymore.” Additionally, there were a large number of comments from Muslim people responding positively to the ad, such as “I’m Muslim and this is funny” and “I am an Arab Muslim, I think it’s hilarious.” So many people accepted the preferred reading of the advertisement because they classified it as an entertaining and appropriately satirical.

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The Negotiated Reading A “negotiated” reading occurs when the audience accepts some of the preferred meanings in a media artifact like an advertisement but navigates some of the meaning as well. According to Hall, “Decoding within the negotiated version contains a mixture of adaptive and oppositional elements” (Hall, 1980, p. 127). A negotiated reading of this commercial—for viewers who believed the ad to have been produced by VW—calls for consideration of the approach the company had taken to selling its product. The commercial demonstrates the tough qualities of the vehicle, but the humor is based on racist stereotypes that are recognized by many viewers. While the preferred reading may be to simply laugh at the humorous approach, a negotiated reading acknowledges the preferred reading but points out that the company was trying to sell a product through dark, stereotypical humor about Arabs and Muslims. The ad is read as negotiated if viewers do not accept that dark humor, and scenes containing an Arab suicide bomber would be seen as an inappropriate way for Volkswagen to display the advantages of the car. While audiences may accept satire in general, when the satirical message contains racism beyond the humor, it may lead many to question Volkswagen’s approach and be unlikely to purchase a car from a company trafficking in bigotry. The Oppositional Reading An “oppositional” reading is a complete rejection of the preferred meanings of a media product, which leads to the dismantling of the producers’ messages in a contrary way. According to Hall, oppositional reading occurs when the audience understands “both the literal and the connotative inflection given by a discourse,” but they “decode the message in a globally contrary way” (Hall, 1980, p. 127). This happens when audiences recognize the hegemonic function of the commercial, the “politics of signification” (p. 138), in a way that recognizes the political, economic and social connotations beneath that message. Volkswagen is one of the world’s largest companies, so it was not surprising that the “Polo. Small but Tough” advertisement could generate a major social media buzz, which happened in 2005 when the advertisement was published on the internet. But even as late as 2022, many people continued to circulate this advertisement on Twitter. Often the social media reaction reflects the viewers who read the commercial oppositionally. In this case, audience members identified the problematic, satirical representations of Arabs and Muslims. In the first scenes, the use of the keffiyeh was linked to terrorism, which is not uncommon, as scholars like Shaheen and Alsultany have illustrated. Many Arabs have started to avoid wearing the headscarf because of

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the common media representation that it is used by terrorists (not unlike such representation as long beards). The identification of these misrepresentations about Arabs and Muslims constitutes an oppositional reading. The second element that could lead to reading the commercial oppositionally is the representation of Arab life juxtaposed with Western life. In scenes five and six, the daily life of the West is depicted as idyllic, while the life of an Arab is depicted pathologically. Such a juxtaposition is, again, not uncommon in Western media images of Arabs and Muslims, so when such a reality is represented, some viewers will respond with abhorrence and resist the preferred meaning. For instance, one person who commented on the YouTube video said, “this commercial should be banned! It’s so terrible! Its dehumanizing middle easterners!” Exaggerating the advantages of a Volkswagen that could absorb explosives may make many viewers consider it ridiculous, and portraying the advertisement in a Western environment, such as Britain, will result in the identification and rejection of VW and Western stereotypes that categorize Arabs as terrorists or criminals. The racism in the advertisement and the misrepresentation of Arabs are essential elements that led many viewers to read the commercial oppositionally. But what if the “commercial” was identified by viewers as a parody and not as an official VW ad? The next section of this chapter considers the audience reaction of those who may have recognized it as satire. ANALYZING THE “COMMERCIAL” AS SATIRE The Preferred Reading I previously explained the possible readings of the “Polo, Small but Tough” commercial if the audience read it as an actual ad produced by VW, but the actual producers of the ad said it was only “meant to reach a small professional audience” (Halkin, 2005). So, if the producers are a viral marketing company and the audience was supposed to be advertising professionals and insiders, would the meanings change? For the preferred reading, was the Arab person wearing the explosive belt and a keffiyeh in the first scene used to satirize VW and distort consumers’ view of the beliefs and ideas of the company? The satire in the Lee and Dan “commercial” seems to be aimed at VW’s history of making edgy advertising; in this case, it would seem to lampoon the notion that Volkswagen is willing to disparage Arabs and Muslims for the sake of a humorous commercial that will sell automobiles. Because a viral marketing company produced the advertisement to demonstrate its satirical prowess to fellow professionals, the message appears to be that Volkswagen is willing to use racist images to sell its products.

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The scenes that juxtapose the beauty of Western culture compared to the evil Arab and Muslim cultures imply that Volkswagen is willing to reinforce the notion that the West is targeted by Arabs and Muslims who do not care about children and women. In the last scene, when the Arab man blows himself up but the Polo limits the explosion and protects the public, it sends the message that VW is willing to represent Arabs and Muslims as inept, evil terrorists as a way to sell a vehicle with powerful features and insulators. The preferred meaning of the spoof appears to ridicule Volkswagen as a company that is willing to traffic in racism in a humorous approach to its edgy marketing, thereby also ridiculing racist notions about Arabs and Muslims. The Negotiated Reading The negotiated reading on the basis that the producers intended to ridicule VW is actually not much different than if VW had actually produced the ad, only in this case it would be to identify the racism that is at the basis of the satire, which relies on the notion that Arabs and Muslims are terrorists and their cultures are evil; in this case, though, it is Lee and Dan, the producers, who are reproducing these images rather than Volkswagen. In a negotiated reading, messages are perceived differently from the producers’ intent. For example, the commercial may be read as negotiated reading if the satirical ad is perceived not to ridicule Volkswagen but instead to ridicule Arabs and Muslims. For instance, several comments on social media specifically mocked Arabs and Muslims: “Allah gonna say he would have needed a larger car.” “Anti jihadi car.” “Only if he would’ve said Allah ho Akbar before the blast, it would’ve completed the ad.” Many viewers ignored the producers’ possible messages aimed to ridicule Volkswagen; instead, they mocked Arabs and Muslims. The Oppositional Reading The oppositional reading occurs when the audience’s understanding directly conflicts with the goals of a message’s producers. As for the “Polo, Small but Tough” ad, several elements can lead to such a reading. First, because of the widespread stereotypes about Arabs and Muslims (which the ad may be designed to satirize), some viewers may agree with the stereotype that Arabs or Muslims are terrorists, which would conflict with the goals and ideas of viral advertising producers, who may have been trying to satirize such racist attitudes. For example, some believe that Polo’s ad reflects reality, and some have written comments about it, such as, “Inspired by true events. . . . lol one

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of the best ads I have ever seen.” Also, some believe that Western society needs media like this for protection from Arabs and Muslims, and some commented on the prevalence of Muslims in the West. As one observed, Muslims are “everywhere. I think they are 1.8 or 1.7 billion now, and they are everywhere.” People who hold a racist ideology about Muslims and Arabs may accept messages that go against Lee and Dan’s possible goal of ridiculing this kind of thinking. I found several YouTube comments reflecting the belief that the representations of Muslims and Arabs in the ad were appropriate, such as, “He forgot to say Allah Hu Akbar. . . . But it’s okay . . . still works” and “the best commercial ever . . . shows the world terrorism that we have to face every day in Israel.” Accepting racism and the stereotypical representations of Muslims and Arabs may make many viewers reject the goals of Lee and Dan if those goals were to both deride VW advertising and racist ideology. That is, if Lee and Dan intended to ridicule racism but its satire was deemed racist, then the oppositional reading is similar to that of those who read the parody as an actual VW commercial: Lee and Dan are willing to traffic in racism as a humorous approach to highlight their marketing tactics.

REJECTING RACIST MEDIA MESSAGES In the past, advertisements were limited to appearing in newspapers, television, and other traditional media, but with the development of technology and in the age of the internet, advertisements have become very widespread, so regulating them is difficult, especially if users are the ones who share them. Although the “Polo, Small but Tough” advertisement was issued in 2005, it is still very much available decades later. On YouTube only, it has been uploaded more than 20 times, with total views of about 700,000 viewers, and this is not to mention its appearance on other platforms, such as TikTok, Facebook, and Twitter. In the Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma, McDavid (2020) mentions that the development of technology and the internet have made the truth difficult to reach. Among internet users, he says, fake things spread six times faster than the truth. This is disturbing because what is seen on the internet constitutes what we know about the rest of the world. Campbell et al. (2013) and other authors have argued that one of the main problems of the decentralized nature of the internet is the spread of fake news and rumors because the internet differs from traditional media in which there are gatekeepers to information. Similarly, Barbara F. Walter, a political scientist, notes “that what people like the most is fear over calm, falsehood over truth, outrage over empathy” (quoted in Boot, 2022). Boot argues that

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the internet contains a lot of true information, but “what most users really respond to is fear, falsehood, and flakiness” (2022). Drowning in fake news and misinformation may have dire consequences for individuals, societies, democracy, and freedom. The internet, according to one analysis, “has become a tool that allows the immediate spread of information,” which leads “to the emergence of ‘viral marketing’” (MRF363, 2014). In this analysis, I attempt to describe the differences between (1) viewers who believe the ad was actually produced by Volkswagen (or that the company wanted this advertisement and produced it unofficially), and (2) viewers who believe that the Polo advertisement was satirical and viral, who then have to determine the intentions of Lee and Dan, its producers. In both cases, despite the different goals of the producers, the viral advertisement is still influential and reinforces stereotypes about Arabs and Muslims. In addition, the satirical commercial “reinforces the racial stereotype that groups all Arabs as Muslims and all Muslims as Arabs that originated during the Gulf War” (MRF363, 2014). Although the ad is dated, with the emergence of any new terrorist incident, it is uploaded and posted again; for instance, many social media commenters observed, “Who is watching this ad in 2020 after France attack?” “The [2021] Liverpool bomb attack made me think of this commercial,” and “I came here after the [2021] fall of Afghanistan.” Ultimately, this viral ad is consistent with the abhorrent representations that have dominated Western media for decades and has the potential to contribute to continued conflicts between different cultures. Said observed that these representations divide the world into “pro- and anti-American, an unwillingness to report political processes, an imposition of patterns and values that are ethnocentric or irrelevant or both, pure misinformation, repetition, and avoidance of detail, an absence of genuine perspective” (1997, p. 99). Consequently, these representations of Arabs and Muslims reinforce, build, and encourage the development of hostility and racism between Muslims, Arabs, and Western society. In the end, it doesn’t matter who produced this commercial as much as the representations it contains. Whether the producers are the world’s largest card company or satirists Lee and Dan, the shallow representation of Arabs and Muslims as terrorists contributes to racism, hatred, and division in the world. Racist representations of Arabs and Muslims must be rejected because of the repercussions and dangers they have for all the world’s people. I agree with one of the viral comments about this ad that, whether the producers were Volkswagen or Lee and Dan, “They shouldn’t even go there. Car bombings aren’t a joke, people lose their lives, people of all races and creeds. I can’t believe Volkswagen or whoever made this commercial is making fun of such a horrific subject” (MRF363, 2014).

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REFERENCES Alsultany, E. (2016). Arabs, Muslims, and Arab Americans. In The Routledge Companion to Media and Race. New York: Routledge. https://doi​.org​/10​.4324​ /9781315778228​.ch22 Campbell, R., Jensen, J., Gomery, D., Fabos, B., & Frechette, J. (2013). Media in Society. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s. Coggan, G. C. (2020, May 26). Was Volkswagen’s racist ad a deliberate act of sabotage? Creative Bloq. https://www​.creativebloq​.com​/news​/vw​-racist​-ad​-sabotage Espiner, T. (2020, May 20). VW pulls Instagram ads after racism row. BBC News. https://www​.bbc​.com​/news​/business​-52733444 Halkin, T. (2005). VW threatens suit over bogus suicide bomber Polo ad. The Jerusalem Post. Hall, S. (1980). Encoding/decoding. In S. Hall, D. Hobson, A. Lowe, & P. Willis (Eds.), Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies, 1972–79. http://www​.vlebooks​.com​/vleweb​/product​/openreader​?id​=none​&isbn​ =9781134897155 Hall, S., Jhally, S., & Media Education Foundation. (2014). Representation & the Media. https://[institution]​.kanopy​.com​/node​/41581 Hotline: Volkswagen prepares to take legal action. (2005). Campaign. Jhally, S. (producer). (2017). Advertising at the Edge of the Apocalypse. http://nolalibrary​.kanopystreaming​.com​/node​/1156581 Max, B. (2022, February 14). Social media is destroying democracy. We need stronger online gatekeepers. Washington Post. https://www​.washingtonpost​.com​/ opinions​/2022​/02​/14​/social​-media​-destroying​-democracy/ McDavid, J. (2020, April). The Social Dilemma (review). Journal of Religion and Film, 24(1). https://link​.gale​.com​/apps​/doc​/A616580373​/AONE​?u​=googlescholar​ &sid​=bookmark​-AONE​&xid​=2ffcc915 MRF363. (2014, May 8). Media and Cultural Analysis. Spring 2014. http://www​ .karanovic​.org​/courses​/mca008​/archives​/author​/mrf363 Said, E. W. (1997). Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How we See the Rest of the World. New York: Vintage Books. https://search​.ebscohost​ .com​/login​.aspx​?direct​=true​&scope​=site​&db​=nlebk​&db​=nlabk​&AN​=1048013 Shaheen, J. G. (2009). Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People. Ithaca, NY: Olive Branch Press. Staged suicide bombing clip “an attack on Volkswagen’s good reputation”. (2005). National Post (Toronto). Sweney, M. (2009, April 1). Volkswagen ad banned before 9pm after complaints over violence. The Guardian. https://www​.theguardian​.com​/media​/2009​/apr​/01​/ volkswagen​-ad​-banned VW threatens legal action over fake ad seen on Web. (2005). Automotive News, 79(6132).

Index

24 (TV show), 183 60 Minutes (TV show), 148 106 and Park (TV show), 95 “1619 Project,” 10 880000 Won Generation, 108

Asian stereotypes, 121, 200–202, 227 Atlanta (TV show), 2, 7–22

Abbott Elementary (TV show), 2, 83–100 Abdilla, Jonathan, 185 Abdurraqib, Hanif, 8, 14, 19, 21 Adams, Evan, 58 adultification, 93 advertising, 234 African American Vernacular English, 169 African descendants of slavery (ADOS), 7, 10 Alexi, Sherman, 50 Alexis, Paulina, 53 All-American Muslim (TV show), 183 All in the Family (TV show), 86 Alsultany, Evelyn, 182, 236–37 alternative media, 3, 123–36 Alvarez-Dickinson, J., 164 Amin, Idi, 135 Amos & Andy (TV show), 87 antisemitism, 144, 149, 151, 154, 157– 58, 161 The Arab (film), 181

Bamboozled (film), 164 Bang, Andrea, 199 Barnaby, Jeff, 56–57 Barnett, Jude, 54 Bartha, Justin, 8 Basketball or Nothing (TV show), 46 Beach, Adam, 57–58 Beatty, Paul, 164 Bedard, Michael, 145 Bergen, Benjamin, 71 The Bernie Mac Show (TV show), 87 Beulah (TV show), 87 Biden, Joe, 223 The Big Bang Theory (TV show), 186 Black, Liza, 45 Blackface, 13 Black Feminist Thought, 83–84, 88–89 black girlhood, 93–94 Black Panthers, 133 Blake, Aaron, 151–52 Blood Quantum (film), 56 The Bob Newhart Show (TV show), 192 The Brady Bunch (TV show), 186 Brewster, Paget, 226 Brie, Alison, 219 Bring It On (film), 95

247

248

Brooklyn Nine-Nine (TV show), 83 Brown, James, 9 Brown, Yvette Nicole, 219 Brugos, Diana, 185 Brunson, Quinta, 83, 91, 100 Buffalo Dance (film), 45 Carlin, George, 143 Carlito’s Way (film), 166 Chappelle, Dave, 3, 7, 143–58, 164 Chappelle’s Show (TV show), 7–8, 86, 144–46, 148, 164; polysemy of, 146–47, 153 Charlamagne tha God, 11 Chase, Chevy, 219 Chavez, Tazbah, 52–55 Choi, Irene, 230 Chow, Andrew, 204 Citizen Khan (TV show), 78 Cleopatra (film), 181 The Closer (TV show), 3, 143–58 Coates, Ta-Nehisi, 2; “The Case for Reparations” (essay), 7, 16, 20 Cobb, Amanda J., 50 Cobb, Jelani, 145, 150 Collins, Patricia Hill, 84, 89 #ColoradoBorderWall, 25–40 colorism, 166 comedic revisionism, 175–76 Community (TV show), 4, 217–31 Complex (web site), 17, 19 connotative level of analysis, 235 Conyers, John, 7, 10 Cooper, Scott, 46 Corsbie-Massay, Charisse L’Pree, 163 The Cosby Show (TV show), 85 Costner, Kevin, 45 counter-hegemonic discourse, 97–99 Crazy Rich Asians (film), 203 Crenshaw, Kimberly, 155–56 Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), 90–91 critical rhetorical framework, 30 Cruz, Ted, 155

Index

DaBaby, 150 The Daily Show with Trevor Noah (TDS, TV show), 3, 123–36, 164 Dances with Wolves (film), 45–47 Dark Winds (TV show), 45 David, Keith, 226 DeGeneres, Ellen, 143 Deggans, Eric, 151 DeGette, Diana, 25 denotative level of analysis, 235 DeSantis, Ron, 218 Dickson, William, K., 45 Diff’rent Strokes (TV show), 85 “dirt spoon” generation, 108, 114 Dong-hyuk, Hwang, 105, 120 Doo-hwan, Chun, 106 Dragon Lady stereotype, 121 Dunbar-Ortiz, Roxanne, 47–48 Dyer, Richard, 15 Encoding and Decoding Theory, 235 Erdman, Richard, 225 Espinoza, Mauricio, 164 Everett, Percival, 164 Everybody Hates Chris (TV show), 88 Factor, Lane, 54 Family Guy (TV show), 164 Family Matters (TV show), 192 Feder, Samantha, 66 Fernandez-L’Hoeste, H.D., 164 Fey, Tina, 143 Flack, Roberta, 16 Floyd, George, 10 Freak (TV show), 166 Fresh Off the Boat (TV show), 201–2 Fresh Prince of Bel-Air (TV show), 87 Fuentes-Morgan, Danielle, 11, 15, 17, 163–64 Full House (TV show), 192 Fu-Manchu stereotype, 121 George, Dennis, 185 Get Out (film), 164

Index

Ghaddafi, Muammar, 135 Ghetto Clown (TV show), 166 Gilio-Whitaker, Dina, 48 Girlfriends (TV show), 85, 87 Glover, Donald, 8, 16, 219; aka Childish Gambino, 8 Goldtooth, Dallas, 57, 59 The Good Place (TV show), 203 Good Times (TV show), 86 Gray, Herman, 152–53 Grey’s Anatomy (TV show), 85 Gross, Terry, 51–52 Guerra, Elva, 53 Guerrero, Lisa A., 163–64 Guess Who’s Muslim, (GWM, TV show), 3, 178–97 Haley, Alex, 11 Hall, Stuart, 4, 129, 146–47, 179, 200, 206, 209–10, 217, 234–35 Hariharan, Annie, 199, 202–3 Harjo, Sterlin, 46, 51–52, 57–58 Harmon, Dan, 219 Hart, Kevin, 150 Hebrews to Negroes: Wake up Black America (film), 183 Hee, Park Chung, 106 Hernandez, Guillermo, 164–65 Homeland (TV show), 181–83, 186 homophobia, 144, 151–56, 174–75 Honor/honour killing, 69–70 hooks, bell, 2, 4, 65–66, 88–89, 156 Hostiles (film), 46–47 How I Met Your Mother (TV show), 186 How to Get Away with Murder (TV show), 85 Huang, Eddie, 202 humor as a rhetorical strategy, 37, 38 hyper-wokeness, 4, 217–31 Ice Cube, 1 Iftikhar, Arsalan, 188 “Indian Store” (online comedy skit), 59–60

249

In Living Color (TV show), 86, 87, 152–53, 156 intersectionality, 3, 153–54, 157–58 The Intolerance (film), 181 Irving, Kyrie, 157, 183 Islam, 3, 63–79 Islamophobia, 63, 179–80, 183–84; discursive frames of, 181, 185–97 Jacobs, Devery, 50, 56 Jacobs, Gilliam, 219 Jammeh, Yahya, 135 The Jeffersons (TV show), 86 Jenkins, Craig, 150 Jeong, Ken, 219 Jhally, Sut, 234–35 Joddi, Sten, 51 Jones, Leslie, 164 Julia (TV show), 87 Julie Newmar (film), 166 Jung-jae, Lee, 105 Karate Kid (film), 226 Katon, David, 183 Katz, Jon, 1, 4 Kearse, Steven, 155 Kennedy, Randall, 148 Kerner Commission, 131 Key and Peele (TV show), 21 Kilpatrick, Jacquelyn, 49 Kim’s Convenience (TV show), 3, 199–213 King, Jr., Martin Luther, 153 The Korean Wave, 106 Krishna, Priya, 203 La Bamba (film), 222 Latin History for Morons (TV show), 3, 163–76 Latinx: identity, 169–70; stereotypes, 171 Leahy, Patrick, 25 Lear, Norman, 87 Lee and Dan (agency), 238, 242–45 Lee, Paul Sun-Hyung, 199, 205

250

Index

Lee, Sheila Jackson, 10 Lee, Spike, 1, 164 Leguizamo, John, 3, 163–76 Lemmon, Don, 188 Letterman, Dave, 143 Lincoln, Abe, 10 Liu, Megan, 210–11 Liu, Simu, 199, 205 Living Single (TV show), 85 Mambo Mouth (TV show), 166, 175 Man like Mobeen (TV show), 78 Manning, Brandon, J., 163 Manzoor, Nida, 65, 70–79 Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, 143 Martin (TV show), 87 McHale, Joel, 219 McKerrow, Raimi, 26 McLuhan, Marshall, 31 memes, 25–40; humor and LOLitics, 28; mimetic discourse, 25; as political discourse, 39–40; as rhetorical text, 26 Miami Vice (TV show), 166 Michael, George, 225 Midthunder, Amber, 52 misogyny, 152, 154 Mo (TV show), 78 mockumentary, 86–87; Black mockumentaries, 97–98 Modern Family (TV show), 186 Moesha (TV show), 87 Morita, Pat, 226 MTV: Seattle (TV show), 225 Mugabi, Robert, 135 Multimodal Discourse Analysis (MCDA), 89–90 Munoz, Jose Esteban, 171 Murphy, Eddie, 10 Musk, Elon, 150 Muslim, 2–4, 63–79, 178–97, 233–45; sterotypes and representations of, 179, 181–85, 225–26, 233–45; terrorist stereotypes, 181–84, 188–96

My Big Fat Greek Wedding (film), 188 My Crazy Ex-Girlfriend (TV show), 203 My Next Guest Needs No Introduction (TV show), 145 “negotiated” reading, 152–57, 241, 243 neoliberal capitalism, 111–14 Netflix, 2, 3 Ng, Brian, 199 Noah, Trevor, 123–36 Obsession (film), 184 Occupy Wall Street, 27 The Office (TV show), 83 The Onion, 164 oppositional gaze, 88–89; as counterhegemonic practice, 2, 83–100 oppositional Muslim gaze, 2, 63–79 “oppositional” reading, 150–53, 241–44 Orientalism, 179–80 Pacitti, Michael, 185 Parks, Suzan-Lori, 164 Parks and Recreation (TV show), 83 Peele, Jordan, 19 Performative Indigeneity, 2, 57–60 performativity, 230–31 Perks, Lisa Glebatis, 145–47, 153 Pew Research Center, 11 Phillips, Lou Diamond, 222 Podemski, Sarah, 51 Polis, Jared, 25 post-racialism, 153–54 Powell, Richard J., 163 Powers, John, 50–51 Pratt, Elisha, 52 “preferred” reading, 147–50, 209, 239– 40, 242–43 Pryor, Richard, 143, 148–49, 167 Pudi, Danny, 219 Raheja, Michelle, 49–50 Ralph, Sheryl Lee, 83 Ramos, Dino-Ray, 211–12

Index

Ramy (TV show), 78 Rash, Jim, 219 Remembrance of Things Past, 9 reparations, 7, 8, 11, 12, 16 Reservation Dogs (TV show), 2, 45–61 Rhimes, Shonda, 85 rhizomatic alternative media, 128 Ripperton, Minnie, 19 Rock, Chris, 157 Rogan, Joe, 144, 150, 153 Rowling, J.K., 150 Rutherford Falls (TV show), 46–47, 59 Said, Edward, 4, 180 Sanford and Son (TV show), 86 Satire (failures and limitations of), 11 Saturday Night Live (TV show), 86, 144, 156–57, 164 Scandal (TV show), 85 Schmieding, Jana, 51 “separate but equal” doctrine, 131 Sexaholic… A Love Story (TV show), 166 Shaheen, Jack, 63, 236 The Sheik (film), 181 Sheridan, Taylor, 46 Singer, Beverly, 60 Sister, Sister (TV show), 87 Smoke Signals (film), 50, 57–68 The Smothers Brothers (TV show), 86 The Social Dilemma (film), 244 Spic-O-Rama (TV show), 166 Squid Game (TV show), 2, 3, 105–22 stepping, 91 Stevenson, Bryan, 17, 20 Stewart, Jon, 143 Sticks and Stones (TV show), 144 Succession (TV Show), 61 Super Mario Bros (film), 165 Teves, Stephanie “Lani,” 58–59 That Was the Week That Was (TV show), 86 Think Tank for Inclusion and Equity (TTIE), 211–12

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The Third Jihad (film), 184 This is Spinal Tap (film), 65 Too Wong Foo, Thanks for everything! (film), 165 transphobia, 151–52 Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo, 36–37 Tremblay, Erica, 52–55 Treuer, David, 51 Trump, Donald, 2, 25–40, 133–34, 144, 156–57, 167, 176 Truth, Sojourner, 153 Tutu, Desmond, 222 Tyrant (TV show), 183 Valens, Richie, 222 visual sovereignty, 2, 49–57 Voldemort, 2, 63, 66 Volkswagen, 233–45 Waititi, Taika, 46 Walter, Barbara, 244–45 Walter, Lisa Ann, 92 We Are Lady Parts (WALP, TV show), 2, 63–79 West, Kanye, 157 What’s in a Name (TV show), 147 Whiteness, 8, 15, 18, 220; curse of, 21; White fragility, 8–9, 11, 152–57 White Savior, 45 William, Tyler James, 96 Wilson, Bobby, 59 Wind River (film), 46 Winfrey, Oprah, 25 wokeness, 218–19 Woon-A-Tai, D’Pharaoh, 55, 57 xenophobia, 63–64, 66, 73 Yeong-su, O, 105 Yoo-mi, Lee, 105 Yoon, Jean, 199, 204–5 Young, Dannagal Gldthwaite, 149 Youngblood, Luke, 223 Zhang, Qin, 201

About the Contributors

Tawfiq O. Abdullah is a doctoral student in mass communication at the University of Southern Mississippi. He is a cross-methodologist whose research interests include media psychology, media sociology, political communication, political psychology, political sociology, and minorities in media. Meshari Thamer Alotaibi is a doctoral student in mass communication at the University of Southern Mississippi. One of his primary research areas centers on the portrayal and representation of Arabs in Western media. Through his studies, Meshari aims to uncover the nuances and biases that may exist, striving to promote a balanced and informed perspective. Manuel G. Avilés-Santiago is associate professor of communication and culture and associate dean for academic programs and curricular innovation at the College of Integrative Sciences and Arts at Arizona State University. His research focuses on Spanish-Language and bilingual media, Latinx representations, and streaming media. He has been published in journals such as Communication Culture and Critique, Journal of Latin American Communication Research, and Flow. He is the author of Puerto Rican Soldiers and Second-Class Citizenship: Representations in Media. He is also an editorial columnist for El Nuevo Día, Puerto Rico’s leading newspaper. Reham Bohama is the head of the academic accreditation office at the College for Business Studies in Kuwait, where she also teaches undergraduate courses in communication management and marketing. She earned her MA in media and cultural studies from the University of Sussex, UK, and her doctorate in communication from the University of Southern Mississippi. Her research interests include Muslim women’s representation in Western 253

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About the Contributors

media, immigration, xenophobic policies, race, gender, and critical cultural media studies. Christopher P. Campbell retired in 2023 after a 46-year career as an educator, author, and editor. He served as a professor and administrator in mass communication and journalism programs at Xavier University in New Orleans, the University of Idaho, Hampton University, Ithaca College, and the University of Southern Mississippi. He is the author of Race, Myth and the News, the editor of the Routledge Companion to Media and Race, and the co-editor of Race and News: Critical Perspectives and Media, Myth and Millennials: Critical Perspectives on Race and Culture. Symone Campbell is a postdoctoral fellow at Howard University in the Center for Applied Data Science and Analytics. She earned her PhD from Howard’s Department of Communication, Culture, and Media Studies. Her research centers on the critical and cultural approach to analyzing digital media and technology. Loren Saxton Coleman is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication, Culture, and Media Studies at Howard University. Her research critically examines how Black people engage various forms of media practices, including community media, social media, television, and the Black press. She is the co-editor of Media, Myth and Millennials: Critical Perspectives on Race and Culture. Keli Dailey, after years as a culture journalist, found comedy. She’s the creator of the News Hangover webseries and produces live comedy shows under the handle “Surviving San Francisco.” She teaches at the University of San Francisco, Mills College at Northeastern University, and Saint Mary’s College of California—including a class called “Can Comedy Save Democracy? Understanding and Making Comedy News.” Tamar Gregorian is a professor of practice and coordinator of public relations and digital media and marketing in the Tulane University School of Professional Advancement’s Media + Design Program. An award-winning strategic communicator, she has more than a decade of experience in education and the strategic communications industry. Omar Hammad is a doctoral lecturer and full-time faculty member in the Film & Media Studies Department of Hunter College, part of the City University of New York. His research examines the intersections of Islam, racial identity, gender, and civic engagement on social media. In 2021, he was

About the Contributors

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selected as one of the Charlotte Newcombe Fellows from the Institute for Citizens and Scholars. He is also a recipient of the 2020 Jack G. and Bernice M. Shaheen Endowed Media Scholarship for Excellence in Media Studies. He has served as the Chair of the Professional Freedom & Responsibility committee of the Religion and Media Interest Group (RMIG) of the Association for Education and Mass Communication. Bo-Kyung Kim Kirby is an instructor at Northern Kentucky University, teaching computer science and the Korean language. She is an essayist, translator, and author of the book Migugedaehae Algedoin Du Se Gaji Geotdeul (One or Two Things to Know About America). She worked as a columnist for the U.S. Edition of Hanguk Ilbo for 15 years. Yasue Kuwahara is a professor of media and communication, director of popular culture studies, and faculty diversity fellow at Northern Kentucky University, where she created and teaches a variety of courses on American culture, international popular culture, and diversity, equity, inclusion, and access. Her scholarly interest has expanded in recent years from the U.S. influence on postwar Japan to the popular culture of East Asia. She is the author/editor of The Korean Wave: Korean Popular Culture in Global Context and is the editor of the East Asian Popular Culture series by Palgrave. Gina M. Masullo is associate director of the Center for Media Engagement and an associate professor in the School of Journalism and Media at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research focuses on how the digital space both connects and divides people and how that influences society, individuals, and journalism. She is the author of Online Incivility and Public Debate: Nasty Talk and The New Town Hall: Why We Engage Personally with Politicians and co-editor of Scandal in a Digital Age. She spent 20 years as a newspaper journalist before becoming a professor. Danny Méndez is an associate professor of Spanish in the Department of Romance and Classical Studies at Michigan State University. His research focuses on contemporary narrative and audiovisual representations of Dominican migrations to the United States and Puerto Rico, analyzing the ways in which these representations challenge conceptions of Latin American literature and Latinx Studies. Some of his publications have appeared in Studies in Latin American Popular Culture, Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism, and Journal of Latin American Communication Research. He is the author of Narratives of Migration and Displacement in Dominican Literature.

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About the Contributors

Maika Moulite is a doctoral student at Howard University studying in the Department of Communication, Culture and Media Studies. She is a Miami native and the daughter of Haitian immigrants. Her research focuses on media representation and the ways marginalized groups subvert stereotypical depictions through culture. Her acclaimed young adult novels Dear Haiti, Love Alaine, One of the Good Ones and the forthcoming The Summer I Ate the Rich have been featured on NPR, in Essence magazine, and more. Daleana Phillips is the director of the McNair Scholars Program at the University of Southern Mississippi, where she completed her dissertation, A Critical Analysis of Political and Media Discourse on Immigration during the Trump Era, in 2023. Her research interests include critical cultural media studies, immigration, race, LGBTQIA+, environmental, political communication, and rhetoric. Haley Rains, an enrolled member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, is a doctoral candidate in Native American studies at UC Davis, where she teaches in the Department of Cinema and Digital Media and the Department of Native American Studies. She holds a BA in Indigenous & American Indian Studies from Haskell Indian Nations University (a former Indian boarding school) and an MA in Native American Studies from UC Davis. She is also a photographer and filmmaker and has presented her creative and scholarly work nationally and internationally.