Individualism, Group Recognition and the Social Construction of Race on Reality TV

Abstract

This paper is about the reality TV show ‘Black.White’ and the dialogue of some of its characters, viewers and producers.  The central premise is that there are structural inequalities inherent in US society and that race, while being a social construction, contributes to these inequalities through material affects and effects, which we can trace and disclose through an analysis of discourse, text and voice connected to the show.  Using a framework suggested by James Paul Gee (2005) and other academics, in particular Rudolf Gaudio and Steve Bialostok (2005), my analysis of various texts connected with the show (1) unpacks evidence of ‘language in use’, and how it disguises structural privilege and inequalities; (2) ‘discloses the related D/discourses’ used to reinforce and construct such meaning; and (3) ‘retrieves the political work’, or rather the social goods – power, status, valued knowledge – being thought about, argued over and distributed in society, ‘as instantiated within text-making’.