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Racism in the United States is complex given the cultural logics that uphold notions of “post-race” or “colorblindness” as a means for understanding racialized events. The various forces at play within media institutions create paradoxes in the power that the media wields in society. Utilizing the concept of “media spectacle” and putting it into dialogue with colorblind racism, the author looks at local coverage of the 2009 arrest of Henry Louis Gates. The author’s primary concern is to identify not only the narratives that uphold or challenge colorblind racism during racialized events, but also the dynamic in which racialized events are mediated in contemporary society. Through a critical discourse analysis of two Boston newspapers, the author demonstrates the way colorblind racism adapts during a racialized event. This study demonstrates the contested nature of the media and nuance to the ways we understand colorblind racism in an increasingly mediated society.

Over 600,000 people are released from federal and state prisons each year, up from about 160,000 in 1980. As such, the reentry literature is framed around these individuals and the personal barriers to reintegration they face. Less work, however, explicitly investigates the role reentry professionals and organizations play in actively shaping the reentry terrain. Using ethnographic observations, document analysis, and interviews with both criminal justice professionals and ex-prisoners, this chapter examines how an organizational field constructs reentry as a racially colorblind process. Although race and racism shape criminal justice, labor market, and other institutional experiences, I find that the positioning of reentry as meritocracy operates to both explain and justify the inequalities experienced by ex-prisoners.

This chapter connects colorblind ideology to organizational processes. Despite advances in our thinking about colorblindness as the current dominant racial ideology, scholars are reluctant to tie this ideology to organizational processes – creating the impression that colorblindness is an individual attribute rather than a structural phenomenon. Because the frames of colorblindness are usually interpreted through interviews – as opposed to organizational practices – focusing on the frames reinforces the sense that ideologies are free-floating prejudices unconnected to social structures. In this theoretical piece, we draw on the organizational literature, to tie Bonilla-Silva’s colorblind frames – abstract liberalism, cultural racism, the minimization of racism, and naturalization – to organizational processes, showing how mundane organizational procedures reinforce structural inequality. We argue that organizational policies and practices rely on normative Whiteness, devaluing the cultural norms of nonwhites, and passing those practices to successive administrations. Ostensibly nonracial procedures such as hiring, promotion, and performance reviews are rife with racialized meanings.

Racialization is an important concept when looking at structural mechanisms that perpetuate racial inequalities. The State, and its various organizational spaces of action, is often seen as a site for race to be enacted. Policy sectors such as housing, education, taxation, and immigration have been ripe areas of research that reflect this. However, media policy research has not effectively engaged with this critical conception. Media policy research has been driven by political economy perspectives within the field of Mass Communication and Media Studies, and can benefit from an approach that analyzes it in relation to social science perspectives that focus on processes which constitute, or are constituted by, actors, groups, and organizations. Our hope is that future researchers will find this volume useful in further developing critical studies of media policy that take into account race as a social force.

In late 2020, a group of librarians at the University of Colorado Boulder (CU Boulder) came together to pursue the design of a diversity audit for monograph collections. After initial research and reflection, the authors realized that evaluating their existing collection on its racial or ethnic representation would not only be problematic, but also unnecessary, because it was clear to the authors that their collections are dominated by white voices and perspectives. How could they be otherwise? They were built for a primarily white audience as part of a system of knowledge production dominated by whiteness. The authors questioned whether the framework of a “diversity audit” really addressed their goal of a systematic anti-racist approach to collections management. This chapter details the authors’ process of rejecting the diversity audit framework for a large-scale review of monographs in a large academic library collection in the United States. It reviews the literature regarding diversity audits, as well as background on whiteness studies, as it leads to the authors’ rationale for instead developing a workbook for collection selectors. This workbook will position collection management practices within the white institutional presence (WIP) conceptual framework developed by scholar Diane Gusa (2010).

David Punter and Glennis Byron note how the Gothic novel has been divided into two categories: the ‘Male’ and ‘Female’ Gothic. Where the former emphasizes violence and ghosts, the latter focuses on female representation and the disavowal of the supernatural. The Hollywood Gothic films of the 1940s can be said to translate this aspect of the Female Gothic onto the cinema screen: Rebecca (1940), Gaslight (1944) and Secret Beyond the Door (1947) all feature narratives stressing the haunting nature of domestic spaces but there are no actual ghosts present. Robert Zemeckis’s What Lies Beneath (2000) breaks this convention. The film clearly draws on the Female Gothic lineage, situating Claire as a Gothic heroine, and yet there is an important difference: the supernatural is now an integral – and acknowledged – part of the story. This chapter explores this twenty-first century change, arguing that whilst the inclusion of the supernatural can be said to break with previous definitions of the Female Gothic, What Lies Beneath’s depiction of a ghost actually re-imagines and re-emphasizes the concerns at the centre of this tradition: the dramatization of marital and domestic experiences; an interrogation of feminine perception; and the reality of male violence against women.

In class action antitrust litigation, the standards for acceptable economic analysis at class certification have continued to evolve. The most recent event in this evolution is the United States Supreme Court’s decision in Comcast Corp. v. Behrend, 133 S. Ct. 1435 (2013). The evolution of pre-Comcast law on this topic is presented, the Comcast decision is thoroughly assessed, as are the standards for developing reliable economic analysis. This article explains how economic evidence of both antitrust liability and damages ought to be developed in light of the teachings of Comcast, and how liability evidence can be used by economists to support a finding of common impact for certification purposes. In addition, the article addresses how statistical techniques such as averaging, price-dispersion analysis, and multiple regressions have and should be employed to establish common proof of damages.

The figure of the femme fatale is attached to a range of contested meanings around femininity, sexuality and violence. Despite its ambiguity and its origins in art, myth and fiction, the term has proven popular in giving a name to violent articulations of female power in non-fictional settings by journalists. In this chapter, I outline the figure of the femme fatale as an archetype of women's violence that appears throughout Western popular culture, and provide an overview of the term's definitions and cultural meanings. In doing so, I trace the figure's movement across different forms and genres of popular culture. I identify a number of themes in the existing scholarship around the figure: feminist criticism of the figure; the value that feminist film scholars have found in the figure as a symbol of power and sexual transgression; the relationship between the femme fatale, race and the colonial imagination; and the way the idea of the femme fatale has been used in reporting of real-life women's violence.