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In the summer of 2020, Walt Disney Theme Parks announced plans to reimagine the popular attraction "Splash Mountain" in the theme of the 2009 feature-length animated film The Princess and the Frog. As only the third Disney feature-length animated film to showcase Black characters prominently, The Princess and the Frog seems perfectly poised to replace the Song of the South—critiqued for its romanticization of race relations after the American Civil War—in the Disney parks. In this adaptation of "Der Froschkönig oder der eiserne Heinrich" ("The Frog King or Iron Henry"), Walt Disney Animation Studios introduces its first Black princess. While a hardworking, self-starter princess of color is a step towards representation, the film's portrayal of non-white characters reinforces a hierarchy of race and class which privileges the wealthy white characters while relegating characters of color to the bottom rungs of human society and into non-human bodies. This essay explores the intersection of gender, race, and class in Disney's adaptations of the classic fairy tale "Der Froschkönig" from the Grimms' 1812 variation and the plans to reimagine it for Disney theme parks. In conversation with adaptation studies, narrative theory, and feminist theories, this contribution interrogates the underlying messages of prejudice and -isms in The Princess and the Frog that reinforce twentieth- and twenty-first-century prejudices against people of color, women, and the working class, rendering the proposed update of the "Splash Mountain" attraction into a modernization of the problems already recognized in the current ride. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars have previously conceptualized the Black press as print publications that are owned and managed by African Americans, targeting a Black audience and advocating for the Black community. This study investigates how online producers of Black news are troubling previous definitions of the Black press. Websites that target African American readers but are owned by White media companies and Black-targeted websites that primarily produce entertainment news create ambiguity. I conclude that African American ownership and advocacy are no longer requirements for the Black press and that entertainment content is often a relevant and important component of the digital Black press. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is well documented that news media's coverage of social unrest is sensationalized; however, our knowledge is limited in understanding how the intersection of race with depictions of social unrest influences emotional responses to this content. By applying assumptions from the protest paradigm and intergroup emotions theory, the current set of studies experimentally examines this relationship. Results indicate that racialized news images of dramatized social unrest provoke heightened, complex group-based affective responses that vary based on aspects of psychological group identification among audiences. These outcomes suggest that journalistic practices, whether or not intentionally, may exacerbate race relations regarding social change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In everything from the policies that regulate media industries to the practices of the organizations that produce the messages to the usage patterns of the consumers that choose them, mass media are implicated in real-world interracial/ethnic dynamics. Yet, despite the obvious associations between media and issues of race and ethnicity, a comprehensive effort aimed at documenting and addressing these links has not been undertaken. The current issue, Media Representations of Race and Ethnicity: Implications for Identity, Intergroup Relations, and Public Policy, endeavors to do just that. The merits of such an effort are articulated in this introduction to the volume alongside a review of the current state of the research in this domain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides a review of the research record on the potential for media literacy education to intervene in the media's influence on racial and ethnic stereotypes, and explores the theoretical concepts that underlie these efforts. It situates media literacy theory and practice within particular emphases in the field and synthesizes qualitative and quantitative studies. Quantitative research on the effect of media literacy training and mediated counterstereotypes on reducing racial/ethnic prejudice is described. In addition, we report qualitative data from an ongoing study of early adolescents who took part in a media literacy curriculum on stereotypes. The research record reveals that although the topic is severely understudied, media literacy education holds great promise for its ability to shape media-related knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors and encourage an active and critical stance toward media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On June 17, 2012, journalists reported the death of Rodney King, the black motorist whose 1991 beating by several white Los Angeles police officers was captured on video by citizen journalist George Holliday. This essay argues that journalistic mythologizing of Rodney King as a victim of circumstance and journalism as simultaneous hero echoed existing narratives of civil rights history that largely strip black people of agency. In so doing, journalists proffered a larger cultural narrative of racial reconciliation and progress, while recoding King’s life in accordance with other pre-existing, racialized scripts. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This study examines how men of different races are displayed in terms of masculinity types and product types by analyzing the content of 636 ads collected from the three most popular men’s lifestyle magazines in Taiwan, China, and the United States between 2008 and 2010. Western models were found more frequently portrayed as Tough, Macho, and Androgynous, but less frequently than Asian models as Vigorous and Sunny. Global marketers use more Asian models when targeting Asian markets than when targeting American markets. Racial difference was also revealed in types of advertised products. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The social presence of African-American boxing champion Jack Johnson reflects one of the most controversial social and media issues of the early twentieth century. Accordingly, the journalistic taglines "white hope" and "great white hope" stand out among the most socially significant legacies of the Johnson controversy. This study traces the genesis and use of these idioms from 1908 through today. Its findings illustrate how these historical phrases have become clouded with misunderstanding, and contemporary usage often is inaccurate, incomplete, and misleading. Most significant, white-hope phraseology predates the Johnson controversy by more than a century. Moreover, the boxing moniker "Great White Hope" was not emphasized during Johnson's era; rather, it reflects 1960s phraseology that journalists interposed onto a historical artifact. The study's archaeological orientation offers historians a more complex understanding of how, for more than a century, news and commercial interests have exploited these phrases to advance troublesome agendas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the trend in contemporary vampire media to highlight racially-charged issues, demonstrating a consciousness of the way the vampire has been used in conjunction with racial stigmatisation. While the traditional figure of the vampire spoke strongly to late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century white American fears of miscegenation, I argue that some contemporary vampire narratives, such as Blade (1998), Underworld (2003), and True Blood (2008-, rewrite the figure in order to question and/or undo the link between 'monstrosity' and racial otherness. Central to this task is not only the repositioning and characterisation of the vampire, but also -- considering that the female body was once perceived as the locus for racial purity -- that of the heroine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, as the apartheid system was falling apart, white South Africa was gripped by a powerful moral panic that played out, often hysterically, in the newspapers and magazines of the time. This Satanism scare revolved around fears of a large-scale conspiracy of evil that mostly involved white youth, and that threatened the spiritual health and even the continued existence of white South Africa. Rape, murder, cannibalism and all manner of atrocities involving virgins, animals and babies were commonly said to be part of Satanist rituals occurring across the country. Satanists, South Africans were told, were everywhere, and were as great a threat to their nation as communists. This article uses contemporary press material to examine three isolated yet related incidents within the scare: the Orso murder trial in 1992, when a teenager and her boyfriend claimed satanic possession as the motivation for the murder of her mother; the case of the ‘Rietfontein slasher’, also in 1992, when a group of white schoolgirls was apparently tormented by a supernatural force; and a single article about the alleged possession of a large number of black students in a school in the Atteridgeville township in 1989. It uses these three episodes to reveal how the Satanism scare was violently racialised, how the possibility of magic was both legally and culturally reserved for whites and how many white South Africans' literal fear of the devil fed into recurrent discursive narratives about black pathology and white responsibility. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This case study examines the 1982 protest of a blackface performance by a white singer--a Baltimore police officer who fought and won a First Amendment battle with the police department over his right to perform Al Jolson tunes in black makeup. How did newspapers treat this episode of blackface performance, and how does this coverage illuminate the dynamics of class, race, and the media in Baltimore in the late twentieth century? This study examines the pages of the Baltimore Afro- American, the city's primary black newspaper, and the Baltimore Sun, the city's mainstream newspaper of record. Whereas the Afro more directly addressed the NAACP's protest of racial representation, both newspapers refrained from commenting editorially on the case until the issue was resolved in the courts. Most notably, Sun coverage evolved from nostalgic profiles of the act before the protest to denouncements of blackface by columnists after the court cases were settled, evidence of the beginning of a broader shift in the representation of race spurred by protests against the newspaper itself. Additionally, this study considers the cultural functions of nostalgia and privilege in alleviating economic anxieties of the white working class during discrete time periods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholarship on media representations of Asian minority identity has established that historic constructions of the Other perpetuate a conflation of ethnic with foreign. Previous studies of Seung-Hui Cho and the 2007 Virginia Tech shootings concluded that though Cho was a South Korean national, news media overemphasized his foreign identity, despite his living in the United States most of his life. This study examines newspaper coverage of the 2009 mass shooting at an immigrant-services center in Binghamton, New York, and of perpetrator Jiverly Wong, who immigrated from Vietnam, had lived in the United States for two decades, and was a naturalized U.S. citizen. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines racial discourse evident in gospel music, a predominantly African American genre and contemporary Christian music (CCM), a predominantly White American genre. Analyzing 45 songs on the Billboard year-end charts for 2007 and 2008, the study reveals differences in messages predicated on sociocultural influences. Whereas gospel songs, possessing roots in blues, emphasize opposition and overcoming, CCM songs, establishing its root in the aftermath of the Hippie movement, emphasizes devotion and inspiration. This comparative study lays a foundation for future thematic analysis of Christian music and holds implications for the intersection between social and spiritual identity, the influence of industry practices on cultural production and offers a contributing explanation for issues of race relations even among Christians. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the Jena Six incident as a catalyst, this auto-ethnographic performance uses Foucault's Discipline and Punish to assert that the theatrical performance of lynching bleeds into our conceptual understanding of race. Consequently, blackness is understood in terms of what Watts and Orbe term 'spectacular consumption,' the pleasurable consumption of the other. Each of the four characters struggle to define their black male identity outside the limits of the spectacular, ultimately forcing the audience to reconsider America's racial past, present, and future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study analyzed local and national newspapers to determine how each framed the Jena Six controversy and to determine if either broke from traditional episodic coverage in framing crime and African Americans. Local papers more frequently put a human face on the issue, while national papers more frequently framed it as a moral wrong. However, unlike previous studies, this analysis found that both local and national papers used more thematic than episodic coverage, suggesting that sometimes the circumstances surrounding a crime can be so egregious that societal factors must be included in coverage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 1955 killing of fourteen-year-old African-American Emmett Till in Mississippi continues to haunt historians, academicians, and students of pop culture with at least four books recently retelling the story of his murder. Much of today's retrospective discussion of the case is based on two underlying assumptions: his murder received extensive national coverage in 1955, and most Americans were disgusted by the murder and the acquittal of the two confessed killers. This article questions both assumptions by examining the response to the Till murder in ten national magazines and concludes that their coverage was more like a firefly illuminating a small patch of ground brilliantly but only for a second. In the brief afterglow, one could wonder if there was any light at all or just a trick of the mind. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents an examination into the intellectual and social history of the African American community in the United States since the civil rights movement of the 1960s and the ongoing influence of the book "Black Awakening in Capitalist America," by Robert L. Allen. Details are given highlighting the major socio-political concepts asserted in the book, particularly that of the internal colonialism theory of race relations in the state and the roles and responsibilities of mass media. Discussion is then applied to the continuing socio-political conditions of African Americans up to the early 21st-century.

The present study examines the portrayal of Black men and women in the images and texts of advertisements featured in Black-oriented magazines. A comparative content analysis is conducted on ads featured in Essence and Jet magazines for 2003 and 2004. Quantitative and qualitative data analyses reveal that Black people are portrayed both positively and negatively. Ideologies of racism and White supremacy continue to pervade advertisements featured in Black magazines, and this is problematic because new images and texts concerning Black people will be based on such negative attitudes. It is not enough to increase the number of positive portrayals of Black people; negative portrayals must also decrease and eventually be eliminated altogether. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the celebration of 25 years of multiracial scholarship of the "Journal of American Ethnic History." Multiracial openness in both review essays and shorter reviews became the journal's hallmark. Its very first issue featured the multiracial study "Beyond the Melting Point," by Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan. The first contribution by a writer of color was the 1984 essay "The Emergence of Independent Capitalism and Puerto Rican Expansion, 1879-1901," by Robert A. Martinez.

This study is one of a few, if not the only one, to examine empirically the portrayal of race and interracial relationships available in television commercials in children's television programming. The study attempts to describe not only the proportions of racial portrayals, but also the settings, activities, interactions, and products advertised in commercials in which White children and AHANA (African American, Hispanic, Asian and Native American) children were portrayed together compared to when White children were alone. There appear to be positive portrayals in many areas, including the presence of racial diversity and the portrayal of White and AHANA children interacting and communicating together in positive, constructive ways. However, while commercials featuring only White children were plentiful, commercials featuring only AHANA children were rare. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]