Different but not too different: the discursive construction of racism and diversity in popular culture after 2020

  • Flo Bremner

Student thesis: Doctoral ThesisPhD

Abstract

The aim of this research is to analyse racial discourse in film and television in the early 2020s.

I will take the core assumptions of Bonilla-Silva’s theorisation of colour-blind racial ideologies (which are based on the premise that systemic racism is no longer a significant factor in society) and explore the ways that colour-blindness has adapted in the years following the police killing of George Floyd in May 2020, the resulting Black Lives Matter protests and the shift in popular discourse to a wider acknowledgement of systemic racism.

The primary methodological framework is based on the discourse-historical approach (a subset of critical discourse analysis), which has been adapted to account for visual features on screen. This thesis focuses on the following research questions:

1.How does racial discourse manifest in popular culture?
2.How can existing discourse analytic methods be expanded to account for racial discourse which manifests visually?
3.How has racial discourse adapted in response to the increased focus on systemic racism in popular discourse after the police killing of George Floyd in May 2020 and the subsequent Black Lives Matters uprisings?

These questions will be answered in a series of case studies. The first focuses on the reality TV show The Bachelor, the second on stand-up comedy specials released on Netflix, and the third on the fantasy comedy film Barbie. Each of the papers expands on a different aspect of colour-blindness, showing how colour-blindness has transformed through on-screen diversity, the depoliticization of comedy, and incorporation into white feminist discourse.

This thesis represents an important contribution to literature at the intersection of racism, discourse, and popular culture. It makes a methodological contribution in the presentation of a novel multimodal approach to the discourse-historical approach and a demonstration of its strengths for analysing racial discourse on television. More broadly, I show how popular culture texts continue to express colour-blind logic even while denouncing it by drawing attention to race, racism, and other forms of inequality.

This attempted concealment of colour-blind discourse is important because, as long as colour-blindness persists, opportunities to address systemic racism are limited by the belief that racism is not a significant enough problem to warrant radical action.
Date of Award26 Jun 2024
Original languageEnglish
Awarding Institution
  • University of Bath
SupervisorAurelien Mondon (Supervisor) & Sophia Hatzisavvidou (Supervisor)

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