Reel Racism

Book excerpt: This study looks beyond reflection theories of the media to examine cinema's active participation in the operations of racism - a complex process rooted in the dynamics of representation. Written for undergraduates and graduate students of film studies and philosophy, this work focuses on methods and frameworks that analyze films for their production of meaning and how those meanings participate in a broader process of justifying, naturalizing, or legitimizing difference, privilege, and violence based on race. In addition to analyzing how the process of racism is articulated in specific films, it examines how specific meanings can resist their function of ideological containment, and instead, offer a perspective of a more collective, egalitarian social system - one that transcends the discourse of race.