Book Review: Black Celebrity, Racial Politics, and the Press: Framing Dissent by Sarah J. Jackson

Abstract

Black Celebrity, Racial Politics, and the Press: Framing Dissent. Sarah J. Jackson. New York: Routledge, 2014. 206 pp. $145.00 hbk. $49.96 ebk.In this engaging study, Jackson examines how mainstream and Black media outlets have covered key moments of political dissent by prominent African American celebrities from the late 1940s to the mid-2000s. Three key research questions underpin the text. First, whatunique agency available to African American celebrities in their attempts to present critiques of American culture and society? Secondly, how have the mainstream and black press helped to both limit and facilitate this agency? And finally, how have media representations of politically outspoken black celebrities shifted from the mid-twentieth century to the twenty-first century? In contrast to neoliberal narratives which champion black celebrity culture as evidence for racial equality, the author posits that the presence of black celebrities within the American mainstream is neither new nor inherently progressive (p. 1).Rather, she argues that media coverage of Black celebrities continues to reflect specific anxieties about the role and position of African Americans within political and popular culture.Jackson's text adopts a case study approach, with each chapter focusing on an individual and a key moment of political dissent. In Chapter 1, Jackson examines Paul Robeson's response to the Peekskill riots in 1949, which helped to solidify his position as a political activist. The author provides an insightful commentary on the riot's framing by mainstream and Black press outlets, which carried both anticommunist and anti-Black overtones. However, given her emphasis on the Chicago Defender's coverage of Robeson's communist affiliations, it surprising that she does not engage with Bill Mullen's 1999 study Popular Fronts, which sheds light on the Defender's ambiguous relationship to the Communist Party during the 1930s and 1940s. Jackson's second chapter focuses on Eartha Kitt's criticism of the Vietnam War at a January 1968 White House luncheon, demonstrating how the performer's stance was mediated by the intersections of race, class, gender, and respectability politics. Just as Robeson's response to the Peekskill Riots carried significant personal consequences, Jackson demonstrates how Kitt's public rejection of the war in Vietnam contributed to her political and cultural alienation. In doing so, the author eloquently situates Kitt's position within a broader shift in mainstream media framing of civil rights activism-a shift which would be formalized less than three months later by the death of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.Chapter 3, which focuses on Tommie Smith and John Carlos' Black Power salute at the 1968 Mexico Olympics, perhaps the weakest section of the study. This partially due to chronological overlap with events discussed in the previous chapter. Jackson also relies heavily on studies such as Douglass Hartmann's Race, Culture, and the Revolt of the Black Athlete: The 1968 Olympic Protests and Their Aftermath, which limits the potential for new scholarly interventions here. …