18.4: Problem Space 2 – Difference and Power

In their critical assessment of studies of race and ethnicity in media and communication studies, David Hesmondhalgh and Anamik Saha observe that production studies has given woefully little attention to questions of race and ethnicity.¹⁷ The lacuna they signal is as much the result of the analytic confinement and discursive linkages of race to people of color (and not the operation of whiteness) as it is to not appreciating the logic of creative practices, especially media, as a site of making race and practices of inequality. It follows too that inattention to race-making rather than racial representation in media studies assumes that the source of inequality and racism rests with individual preferences and dispositions of showrunners and directors, network executives, and advertising executives. Concerns with diversity and race as a practice of knowledge/power (what John Caldwell calls the deep texts of production cultures) are not endemic to the organization of media industries or research approaches to their study.¹⁸ Designing studies of media and race in the current conjuncture at the least suggests foregrounding an analytic of governmentality, televisuality, neoliberalism, and the role of diversity in making race.¹⁹

To these I would add the need for systematic attention to media production and the operation of racial knowledge as a repetition of inequality (and knowledge about differences in race, gender, and sexuality) embedded in the routine habits, assumptions, practices, rituals, and organization of cultural work. Media industry and television studies might productively address some of the concerns identified by Hesmondhalgh and Saha by engaging with creative industry and production studies research agendas to identify sites, discourses, and practices of producing difference and to study race-making practices as power/knowledge that operates as a logic of production.