In love and war: racial disharmony and America's discordant racial articulations in the wake of the Jeremiah Wright media spectacle

Abstract

Utilizing articulation theory, critical race theory and discourse analysis, this study examines the socio-racial discourses mobilized in response to the Jeremiah Wright media spectacle during the 2008 US presidential election. Two perspectives pervaded the social climate: one advancing racial transcendence and the other color consciousness in the name of addressing ongoing racial oppression. To explore the legitimacy of these claims, an analysis of online posts on YouTube and the Huffington Post revealed three socio-racial discourses: (1) the racial scaffolding of US society must be exposed by ''speaking truth to power''; (2) the US has transcended race and oppositional opinions are unpatriotic, antiAmerica profanity; and (3) claims of enduring racial oppression by African Americans are ungrateful, anti-progress ''babble.'' This study contends that the simultaneous articulation of multiple socio-racial discourses reflecting divergent commitments calls into question the very foundation of the discourse of racial transcendence.

Critical questions

“…As to the claim that race consciousness contradicts the goals of community and delimits the possibilities for transcending the material conditions that racial hierarchies produce, Asante (2006) argues for disavowing racism rather than race consciousness (Asante, 2006; see Oliha, 2011). He argues that silencing race consciousness is an erasure of African American positionality and agency.…”

“…Such action is tantamount to dispensing a charge of 'guilty' in a court of law without sufficient evidence, yet through silence or limited exposure, we amber-light certain types of knowledge in intercultural communication scholarship, teaching, and practice, limiting the engagement of historically underrepresented perspectives in theorizing and knowledge generation. As scholars continue to grapple with the challenges of fostering healthy intercultural communities through the field of intercultural communication, I believe there is an urgency like never before to expand the epistemic foundations of the field -especially in this historical moment as different social groups and identities struggle to assert local and contextualized agendas, in globalized and volatile social spaces (see Holladay and Smith, 2009;Oliha, 2011;Oliha and Collier, 2010).…”

The Impact of Social Media Advertisement on Goods Sales Level in Nigeria: University of Nigeria Business Education Students` Perspective

“…With over 1 billion users, local versions in more than 88 countries, and 76 distinct languages, YouTube stands out as a comprehensive platform for providing outstanding customer experiences (YouTube, 2019). YouTube, a sizable platform for sharing videos, emotes viewers by fusing motion and sound in videos that may be posted by users and enabling ratings and comments on the substance and caliber of the corresponding videos (Oliha, 2011). In a study conducted by Duffett, Edu, Negricea and Zaharia (2020), YouTube access, length of usage, log-on frequency, number of advertisements viewed, and age were found to have an influence on behavioural responses.…”