From Oprah Winfrey, Michelle Obama and Shonda Rhimes to their audiences and the industry workers behind the scenes, Ralina L. Joseph considers the way that Black women are required to walk a tightrope between calling out racism only to face accusations of being called “racists” and responding to racism in code only to face accusations of selling out. Postracial Resistance explores how African American women celebrities, cultural producers, and audiences use the tools of post-racial discourse — the notion that race and race-based discrimination is over and no longer affect people’s everyday lives — to refute its very tenets. In a world where they are often written off as stereotypical “angry Black women,” Joseph offers that some Black women in media opt into a phenomenon of “strategic ambiguity,” using the failures of post-racial discourse to name racism in order to resist it.

Ralina L. Joseph is an Associate Professor at the University of Washington’s School of Communication. She is the author of Transcending Blackness: From the New Millennium Mulatta to the Exceptional Multiracial (Duke University Press, 2012) and Postracial Resistance: Black Women, Media, and the Uses of Strategic Ambiguity (NYU Press, 2018).

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