Abstract
Shifts in public and political discourses around race and gender globally provide opportunities for scholars and journalists alike to further societies’ understanding of themselves and their social values. In the United States, race and politics are imbued with the country’s history of slavery, colonization, and immigration, with its newer narrative myth of post-race ideology that insists that the nation has transcended its racial past despite evidence to the contrary. While changes in the American national conversation brought some explicit media discussion of race and gender in the 2016 US election cycle, the coverage lacked nuance, thus missing a prime opportunity for the public to reckon with the country’s racist and sexist legacy.
This chapter will focus on such a turn in the campaign approach and media discourse of Mia Love, a then rising star in the Republican Party and the first Black Republican woman elected to US Congress. In her first campaign she resisted coverage that identified her as a Black woman and as Haitian, with Love identifying her parents as such and not herself. Love lost her 2018 reelection bid and was mocked by the current president who said that she showed “no love.” She claimed then that she was targeted by the opposing because of her race and gender, despite previously insisting that race and gender were not factors in her being supported by her party. This chapter considers media coverage of Love during the end of her last campaign to discuss how that media dealt with conversations around race and to some extent around gender. How did coverage of Love, race, and gender mark the current US political environment where candidates used openly racist and sexist rhetoric?
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Notes
- 1.
Celeste, Race, Gender, and Citizenship in the African Diaspora.
- 2.
Joseph, Transcending Blackness; Squires, The Post-Racial Mystique.
- 3.
Ralina L. Joseph, Postracial Resistance.
- 4.
Esposito, “What Does Race Have to Do with Ugly Betty,” 521.
- 5.
Bell, “This Is Not Who We Are: Progressive Media and Post-Race in the New Era of Overt Racism,” 2.
- 6.
Joseph, Postracial Resistance, 7.
- 7.
Hall, “The Whites of Their Eyes,” 106.
- 8.
Hall, “The Whites of their Eyes,” 106.
- 9.
Celeste, Race, Gender, and Citizenship in the African Diaspora, 109.
- 10.
Kandiyoti, “Bargaining with Patriarchy,” 275.
- 11.
Kandiyoti, “Bargaining with Patriarchy,” 286.
- 12.
I omit the specific language of this campaign slogan, which has evolved into a presidential/administration slogan.
- 13.
Hook, “The Burden of a 40-year Career.”
- 14.
Celeste, Race, Gender, and Citizenship in the African Diaspora, 107–109.
- 15.
Vitali, H, Thorp V, “Trump Referred to Haiti and African Nations as ‘Shithole’ Countries.”
- 16.
- 17.
Anecdotally, social media did invoke this memory, with “Haitian Twitter,” or some Twitter users of Haitian-descent, responding swiftly to point out the irony of an anti-immigration politician responding to anti-immigrant sentiments and the policy that followed.
- 18.
Yahoo Entertainment, “Mia Love says she was ‘targeted by Democrats’ because she is ‘a Black female Republican’,” December 7, 2018. https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/mia-love-says-she-targeted-202858236.html
- 19.
Mia Love, Facebook post, November 20, 2014, https://www.facebook.com/miablove/posts/811456168895661
- 20.
Mia Love, Facebook post, last modified November 20, 2014, https://www.facebook.com/miablove/posts/811456168895661
- 21.
Love uses “us” here.
- 22.
Love does not use the inclusive “we,” but the distancing third person to speak about a group of which she is a member.
- 23.
Mia Love Concession Speech, published November 26, 2018, by CNN, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9Mx0QH79FQ
Transcribed: https://lybio.net/mia-love-full-complete-concession-speech/speeches/
- 24.
US Census Bureau, Quick Facts, retrieved July 1, 2019. https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/UT/PST045218
- 25.
Rigueur, The Loneliness of the Black Republican.
- 26.
Alcindor, Yamiche, Don’t Make Housing for the Poor Too Cozy, Carson Warns.
- 27.
Farred, What’s My Name?; Dionne Warwick, “A House is Not a Home;” Make Way for Dionne Warwick, Screpter Records, 1964; Luther Vandross, “A House Is Not a Home,” Never Too Much, Epic Records,” 1981.
- 28.
Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow.
- 29.
Alexander, The New Jim Crow.
- 30.
Davis and Shaylor, “Race, Gender, and the Prison Industrial Complex.”
- 31.
Alexis, “Fighting Shirley Chisholm: Discourses of Race and Gender in US Politics.”
- 32.
Shirley Chisholm, “Facing the Abortion Question,” 395.
- 33.
Celeste, Race, Gender, and Citizenship in the African DiasporaTravelling Blackness, 117.
- 34.
Collins, “Black Feminist Thought,” 69.
- 35.
Joseph, Transcending Blackness.
- 36.
Valdivia, “bell hooks: Ethics from the Margins.”
- 37.
Hooks, Writing Beyond Race.
- 38.
Joseph, Postracial Resistance.
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Celeste, M. (2021). “No Love”: What Becomes of Post-Racial Figures in a New Political Era?. In: Ward, S.J.A. (eds) Handbook of Global Media Ethics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-32103-5_56
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