VIII Congreso Internacional de Estudios sobre Medios de Comunicaci?n

Abstract

Throughout the 20th Century, various groups and individuals have been re-racialized within the United States, often in ways that do not match group self-definitions. Both Asian and Latino immigrants encountering the racial regime of the US as well as white-passing groups such as those pejoratively called “Redbones,” “Melungeons,” and “Jackson Whites” have all experienced the profound destabilization that occurs alongside the redefinition of racial identity as Black, “ethnic,” or ambiguously “non-white.” This re-racialization is distinct from assimilation into already existing categories; it is rather a conscious attempt to assign meaning to populations on behalf of a variety of actors including corporations, media networks, and governmental agencies. This paper stems from my doctoral research into the selective and coercive nature of race as a technology of categorization and control. I consider the particular circumstances that lead to the redefinition of group racial categories, and the ways that groups and individuals have resisted and adapted to these attempts at re-categorization. In particular, the groups that form the bulk of my research have been marked as racially distinct in relation to strike violence, environmental pollution, and opposition to capitalist expansion. Implicated in this process are the contingent meanings of race across national and local contexts and the need to consider race as a process of categorization rather than a stable category across time and space.