Strategic Whiteness as Cinematic Racial Politics

Abstract

Explores the functions of whiteness in late-20th-century movies to argue that films explicitly placing whiteness in relation to blackness use various strategies to recenter whiteness & block the positions of Others. It is contended that many films touted as antiracist actually reinforce the power of whiteness through subtle discursive adjustments that reconstitute a space for white dominance. Movies of the 1990s are compared to Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967), which served as an assimilationist model for those that followed. It is shown that texts emphasizing universal similarity use strategies to avoid addressing racial tensions resulting from material inequities. The various strategies, eg, the masculinized family in Smoke (1995), bear a strong resemblance to the "maternal femininity that transcends white hypocrisy" strategy used 30 years earlier in Guess Who's Coming to Dinner. How messages of whiteness in popular culture illuminate & impact the dynamics of contemporary racial politics are discussed. 4 Photographs, 36 References. J. Lindroth