Race, Class, and Power in Media Diversity

Review by

  W. F. Santiago-Valles, Ph. D.

Africana Studies, Western Michigan University

Vibert C. Cambridge. Immigration, diversity, and broadcasting in the United States, 1990-2001. Athens: Ohio University Press. 2005. 309 pages. $ 28.00 (paper)

When a work comes out by a black scholar, then we take it and make it the focus of our attention when it says something about our place in world around us. --Walter Rodney (1990)

This book by the Chair of African American Studies at Ohio University is about immigration to the US, and contributions to diversifying discourse about race and ethnicity made through broadcast media during the 1990s. Stuart Hall (1994) defines discourse as a group of statements produced to work together and provide a way of representing what we know about a specific subject. In this case the contributions produced and broadcast during the 1990s that helped diversify groups of practices and ideas about race and ethnicity in the US.

To use Cambridge’s own words, “this book is a contribution to our understanding of this web of relationships at the intersection of immigration, race, and broadcasting.” (3) These relations are important both to commercial broadcasters seeking a larger share of the advertising market, to community stations committed to serving the new immigrants, and to the so called public service stations funded by [either wing of the employer’s] single political party controlling the federal budget.

First, the author explains how US broadcasters have responded to the country’s changing racial/ethnic composition, the conclusions derived from such responses, the goals served by the responses as broadcasting changes, and the causes of those changes. In second place the author evaluates the compliance of broadcasters with the performance expectations of an inclusive republic against both theoretical and historical markers. Thirdly, the author considers whether the broadcaster’s contributions to the improvement of race and ethnic relations in the US can be applied in other countries.

The points of reference for the author’s study of race relations in the US are African American activist intellectual W. E. B. DuBois, propaganda scholar Walter Lippman, and Booker T. Washington’s ghost writer, Robert Park from the University of Chicago. To do this study Cambridge examines the role of broadcasting both in generating racial harmony and in framing the allocation of economic resources between socially constructed groups with conflicting versions of cooperation and progress. On the one hand, an evaluation of the global impact from US commercial programming content pulls prospective migrants to North America is an additional feature of this book. On the other hand, as the displaced have moved to the US, commercial broadcasting has linked migration and the diversity discourse in ways that allow the author not only to consider the ways in which Diasporas work but also to look at the construction of transnational identities. To put this process in context the author combines a history of migration to the US in Chapter Two with a survey of the US broadcast industry in Chapter Four that also includes the conceptual framework for the whole book.

The major concept identified in that theoretical vocabulary chapter is [political and cultural] representation. Using Jeffrey Escoffier’s work in Socialist Review (1991), Cambridge refers to representation as the role of speaking for a community, and to the ways such communities are portrayed in mass culture. To account for the latter version, cultural representations can be treated as objective realities transmitted to influence the receivers’ practices. The assumption here is that facts about this process can be produced combining quantitative research techniques with participant observation. What historical explanation is there for the contexts in which the transmission of information [some media scholars call mass communication] takes place? The author proposes that efforts to explain mass society be broken down into periods that emphasize more direct or limited effects, greater responsibility of media to support diverse views, until the 1980s when British/Canadian cultural studies re-discovered receivers who can reassemble the messages against the logic of the media.

Given the production costs, radio [especially public owned, community and pirate radio] is particularly placed to connect daily practices in migrant communities, and help the researcher access these communities through the uses made of radio programming. In this regard the use of interviews with members of the migrant communities is a most fortunate choice

The book’s findings are in chapter 10 which maps out the intersections between immigration, diversity and broadcasting in the US during the 1990s. Broadcasting has responded to the browning of the country in ways consistent with the economic interest of the owners, their legal charge, and the organized pressures from the racialized nationalities. An evaluation of the broadcasters’ responses was done with criteria from prevailing expectations about media’s role in the promotion and maintenance of hegemonic social values. Free access to a variety of versions unhindered by economic and political pressures is questionable (p. 246). Equality of opportunities for opposing political views [either in locally produced or in content imported from other countries] is restricted under national security rules, as is the same prices for all advertisers (p. 247). But before getting into the issue of diversity Cambridge adds “it is clear that freedom and equality inform the state of broadcasting diversity” in the US (p. 248). Then he states that efforts being made to ensure proportional representation in the content and production staffs had not only fallen short, but that efforts to diversify through employment are showing declining results, and that the content which could diversify the offer is marginalized, With regard to the accuracy and neutrality of the US media, the problems are generalized and according to the author extend from the commercial to the independent producers (p. 249). The expectation that the media will be used to promote reciprocal solidarities has been found to be at odds with the practices of those who use free speech to cause injury among others presently living/working in the country. Thus, the author turns to the matter of using the media for cultural domination and subordination and an optimistic forecast (p. 252) that deserves more evidence to support the hopes of those who wish to stay inside the walled continent. The author has produced a text that can help the reader determine whether the practices of US broadcasters can serve as an example to other multicultural societies, which like the US will see an increasing flow of migrants and dramatic changes in their demographic maps.

Triangulated research as is done in this volume combines quantitative with qualitative techniques such as surveys with interviews, focus groups with cultural circles, as well as the analysis of official documents, on-line resources and museum collections.

Other scholarship on claims/findings and methods

In relation to the Chapter Three discussion about the languages used in the migrant press, this reviewer recommends that the reader of Cambridge’s text also consider Paul Buhle, Marxism in the USA, from 1870 to the present day (1987) which discusses the progressive migrant press in the US from the time of West Indian Daniel De Leon to that of fellow islander Cyril Briggs. About transnational identities as mentioned in Chapter Two the reader can consult Reuben Gowricharn’s anthology Caribbean Transnationalism to be published by Lexington/Rowman & Littlefield in early 2006.

To understand the racial regime there is more than the race relations work of Robert Park mentioned above. There is also the work of Cedric Robinson (2000) which follows the path of a West Indian economist trained in Chicago, named Oliver C. Cox (1948). To put the current US racial formation in the context of globalization reader can turn to Cha-Jua & Lang (1999). For the latter, the racialization of class is a representation of unequal power relations.

Canadian communication scholar Harold Innis (1984) or Herb Schiller (1989) would provide another perspective to that presented in Chapter Two on the choices empires make to transmit information, and Benedict Anderson (1990) does the same about the role of print media in connecting the cultural forces opposing colonialism in the imperial periphery. Cambridge’s text would have benefited from considering the critical analysis of current imperial propaganda done to manipulate creativity and imagination both in the colonies and inside the metropolis.

Competing points of view

More inclusive media representations of the migrant communities that arrive in the US do much to support the redefinition of identities both for the host and arrivants. Nevertheless, on their own, shared ethnic and racial identities do not transform the unequal power relations in the new host country. The cultural representations in the mass culture can stand in the way of a politics of alliances that requires communication practices outside the circuits policed by the commercial media. Such self-emancipating practices also challenge the illusions of inclusion and social mobility presented by the media as freedom. Winston James covers what the Caribbean migration has brought to the US in Holding aloft the banner of Ethiopia (1998) and in his 2001 critique of Thomas Sowell’s writings on migrants.

A. Sivanandan is the director of the Race Relations Institute in London, England. With regard to the representation of race and ethnic relations, A. Sivanandan (1990) has written that the color line [mentioned by Cambridge in his conclusions] is now the poverty and power line. According to Sivanandan that which establishes the connection between them is capitalism, and that which perpetuates this line is imperialism. In the final instance still according to Sivanandan, the fight against oppression is at the same time a fight against exploitation.

Strengths and shortcomings

Reflection about the context of globalization not only explains migration but also the forces imposing economic, cultural, and military limits on what broadcasting can do to reproduce colonialism and enslavement. The historic conditions that have fueled the fourth wave of migration have been discussed in a chapter about globalization and culture within On communalism and globalization (2002) by Aijaz Ahmad. It is precisely the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization and especially the World Bank (mentioned on page 16 by Cambridge as the facilitator of joint ventures between migrants and US investors) that have created the mechanisms used to impose unequal conditions of exchange on the global South and to concentrate the extracted wealth in the new axis of a world market. Those mechanisms of structural adjustments include eliminating tariff walls, deregulating prices, eliminating subsidies on foodstuff, devaluating the currency, privatizing public utilities, and reducing public spending in health, agriculture, education, and housing.

A different point of view

I am not a mass media scholar but one interested in the history of communication processes outside the logic and premises of mass culture constructed to fence in the popular movements. My interest is how the receivers transform the media representations of their daily lives back into use value against the premises of the broadcast industry. It is for that reason that I consider the racialization of class central to a discussion about power inequities that is represented as race relations. Such a point of departure would help the reader understand that colonial subjects who migrate [from occupied territories like Puerto Rico] are citizens but not nationals.

These migration-diversity-broadcasting relations are important both to commercial broadcasters seeking a larger share of the advertising market, to community stations committed to serving the new immigrants, and to the so called public service stations funded by the political party controlling the federal budget. Reflecting on them is useful to media scholars, as well as to students approaching the field of communication from the political economy and public policy side of the house.

As a reader I look forward to reading more of Cambridge and hope that his conceptual framework and interest in broadcasting moves to explore the content of migrant media on alternative visions of the future, American foreign/domestic policy, the state of unequal power relations inside the new metropolis.

References

Ahmad, A. (2002). On communalism and globalization. Offensives of the far right. New Delhi: Three Essays Press.

Anderson, P. (1990). Imagined communities. Reflections on the origins and spread of nationalism. London: Verso.

Cha-Jua, S. K. & Lang, C. (1999). Strategies for Black liberation in the era of globalism. The Black Scholar 29 (4): 25-47.

Cox, O.C. (1970). Caste, class and race. A study in social dynamics. NY: Monthly Review Press.

Escoffier, J. (1991). The limits of multiculturalism. Socialist Review91 (1): 61-73.

Hall, S. (1994). The West and the rest: discourse and power. In S.Hall & B. Gieben (eds.), Formation of Modernity (pp. 275-332). Cambridge , UK : Polity.

Innis, H. (1984). Bias of communication. Toronto : University of Toronto Press.

James, W. (1998). Holding aloft the banner of Ethiopia . Caribbean radicalism in the early Twentieth Century. London : Verso.

James, W. (2001). New Light on Afro-Caribbean social mobility in New York City : A critique of the Sowell thesis. In B. Meekes & F. Lindhal (eds.), New Caribbean thought: A reader. Kingston : University of the West Indies Press.

Robinson, C. (2000). Black Marxism. The making of a black radical tradition. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Rodney, W. (1990). Walter Rodney speaks. The making of an African intellectual. Trenton , NJ : Africa World Press.

Schiller, H. (1989). Culture, Inc. New York : Oxford University Press.

Sivanandan, A. (1990). The enigma of the colonized: reflections on Naipul’s arrival. Race & Class32 (1): 33-44.