Racial Spectacles

<p><em>Racial Spectacles: Explorations in Media Race and Justice</em> examines the crucial role the media has played in circulating and shaping national dialogues about race through representations of crime and racialized violence. Jonathan Markovitz argues that mass media racial spectacles often work to shore up racist stereotypes but that they also provide opportunities to challenge prevalent conceptions of race and can be seized upon as vehicles for social protest. This book explores a series of mass media spectacles revolving around the news prime-time television Hollywood cinema and the internet that have either relied upon reconfigured or helped to construct collective memories of race crime and (in)justice. The case studies explored include the Scottsboro interracial rape case of the 1930s the Kobe Bryant rape case the Los Angeles Police Department's Rampart scandal the Abu Ghraib photographs and a series of racist incidents at the University of California.　 </p> <p>This book will prove to be important not only for courses on race and media but also for any reader interested in issues of the media's role in social justice. </p>