David Core Response #4

 Banet-Weiser argues that the post-racial nature of advertisements, TV shows, and music videos leverage diversity in a commodified way that perpetuates an inequitable status quo. "When a media audience is 'empowered' by images of race and gender", she writes, "there is no linear connection to empowering communities." (217). In particular, she describes how the challenges to dominant stereotypes in Dora the Explorer poses are “framed within normative social conventions so that the challenge is contained and made palatable for a media audience” (222). As a writer of color, I’ve been thinking a lot about the ways in which representation is best achieved in the scripts that I write. While a part of me wonders whether a more critical and nuanced engagement with something like the Flava campaign wouldn’t then be commodified in turn, I fundamentally agree with Banet-Weiser in her suggestion of a seeming moral imperative for writers, copywriters, executives to engage critically and thoughtfully with race and diversity. 

On the other hand, many diverse writers I know feel limited by such moral imperatives. Sometimes, it’s like we’re expected to write about trauma or our experience as a marginalized group to get a foot in the door, because those are the stories we’re expected to tell. A part of this is the undercurrent of resentment we sometimes feel about telling such stories – there’s an article I really like about the difficulties of writing about trauma, that says how “the stigma of victimhood is a timeworn tool of oppressive powers to gaslight the people they subjugate into believing that by naming their disempowerment they are being dramatic, whining, attention-grabbing, or beating a dead horse” (https://www.pw.org/content/the_heartwork_writing_about_trauma_as_a_subversive_act). But another part of it is that it’s a heavy burden to bear for us to have to make every ad, script, or work of art featuring POC/diversity to be this nuanced and complex take on what it means to be diverse.

Maybe I’m reading beyond Banet-Weiser’s claim – which is perhaps just an observation about how “consumer citizenship, postfeminist and post-racial culture is profoundly, indeed necessarily ambivalent” (224) – which I don’t disagree with at all. But I feel like there’s an underlying moral judgment being made that might not account for certain structural limitations – for example, ads are meant to be reductive and don’t allow for nuance – as well as personal considerations – for example, should the writers of Dora the Explorer be expected to critically engage with race or gender?