The Political Economy of Critical Race Theory and Media Literacy

• In Event: Marriott Roundtable Session 23
  In Roundtable Session: Temporality, Materialism, and Race: Marxian Analyses of Teaching and Learning

Abstract

This paper calls for a critical race theory approach to media literacy that looks at the commodification of representations of black people and blackness with critical attention to political economy. Using the concept of “black narrative commodities”, the paper suggests that black pain and/or black visibility become filters through which black lives are brought into a nationalist and capitalist framing. The paper focuses on popular media commodities, including: (1) the videotaped killing of Eric Garner, (2) the book The New Jim Crow and the film 13th: An Original Netflix Documentary, and (3) the movie Black Panther. The author concludes that media literacy, absent a cogent and principled interrogation of the interplay between race, class, and the nation-State is incomplete.

Author

• Brian Lozenski, Macalester College