Introduction

I am writing this introduction as the world grapples with the growing threat of COVID-19. And as angry and uncertain as the virus has made many of us, I want to use it productively to illuminate the urgency and utility of this In Focus section on race and media industry and production studies. On March 16, President Trump tweeted calling COVID-19 the "Chinese Virus," igniting a tweetstorm and a news cycle in which the content of the tweet was admonished and rightly called out for its blatant racism.¹ Trump's tweet also recalled "yellow peril" discourses in which, so the stereotype goes, Asian-descended people were hell-bent on destroying white civilization.² At the same time, in calling out and admonishing the tweet, there was little room for a discussion of why these discourses about the alleged "yellow peril" persist. In other words, the stereotype and discourse were acknowledged, but there was no space for interrogating why the discourse is so readily available and culturally (re)produced. By focusing on the image or, in this case, the language Trump used, it is easy to "correct" the offensive behavior and representation. An apology or a vow to do better in the future works to make the offense go away but never interrogates the systems that have produced such discourses. This In Focus turns its attention to those systems.

Often, when an image is deemed offensive or representation fails to mirror the demographic realities of American culture, it is easy to remove the offending representation (if the right amount of pressure from the "right" people has been applied) or to increase representation. As Kristen Warner suggests, simply moving the goalposts of representational expectations ultimately only makes the goalposts more attainable "for those in power who can make those changes."³ "More representation" is a relatively easy target to hit. Recall that after Empire (2015–2020) premiered on Fox and became a ratings boon for the network, other networks rushed to "brown" their lineups with Black-cast series including an adaptation of Uncle Buck (ABC, 2016) starring Nia Long and Mike Epps and Marlon (NBC, 2017–2018) starring Marlon Wayans. As Uncle Buck demonstrated, sometimes these representations result in what Warner calls "plastic representation" because they take a white-cast film and substitute Black bodies without adjusting for the cultural specificities of Blackness. In answering the call for more representations of Black folks, Black-cast series like Uncle Buck use "the wonder that comes from seeing characters on screen who serve as visual identifiers for specific demographics in order to flatten the expectation to desire anything more . . . Plastic representation operates as a system that reifies Blackness into an empirical system of 'box checking.' "⁴ The rush to quantifiably increase representation with series like Uncle Buck resulted in what Herman Gray calls a "hypervisibility" of the once-abject object.⁵

However, even as networks, channels, and platforms "browned" their content offerings, delivering what activists asked, many of those shows disappeared as quickly as they appeared. For example, although Uncle Buck's season finale "averaged 3.8 million total viewers . . . an 81% lift from ABC's performance in the same time period over the course of the same four weeks a year ago" and "averaged a 1.2 rating in the 18–49 demo, more than double ABC's average from a year earlier," the show was canceled after its inaugural season.⁶ Put simply, more representation of people of color is often fleeting because of the precariousness of television generally and, as some scholars have noted, the precariousness of Black-cast television specifically.⁷ Focusing on the image alone would not interrogate the systems that create and engender a platform's, channel's, and network's momentary engagement with race in their programming.

In this way, this In Focus calls for a sustained engagement with race and "representation plus"—because studying representation alone is no longer enough (if it ever was). In the plus-ness of representation, the call is for an examination of the systems that produce images and not "just" bringing theoretical toolboxes and one's personal affect...