Racial Naturalization, Advertising, and Model Consumers for a New Millennium

Abstract

In this article I introduce the term “racial naturalization” to address the ways in which contemporary advertisements depict Asian Americans as model citizens with distinct cultural and linguistic traditions. Through the analogy of naturalization, I draw attention to the capitalist processes of legitimization that make Asian Americans a vital part of multicultural advertising, and how Asian American ad executives contribute to mass-mediated representation. Presenting ethnographic data collected in Asian American ad agencies, I discuss how ad executives construct naturalized representations of race and perform naturalized racial identities, and explore the effects of these activities on Asian American racial formation.