What Can You Say?

John Hartigan Jr. is Director of the Americo Paredes Center for Cultural Studies and Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of Odd Tribes: Toward a Cultural Analysis of White People (2005) and Racial Situations: Class Predicaments of Whiteness in Detroit (1999).

"Before the next exasperated call for a 'national conversation on race,' which invariably follows each and every high-profile news headline with the slightest racial tinge, people should read John Hartigan Jr.'s careful yet provocative analysis of contemporary Americans' beliefs about race/racism and the usually unproductive ways in which they play themselves out on a mass-mediated public stage. Indeed, this book should be recommended reading not just for interested students of race-relations, but for anybody living in an unavoidably multi-racial world with seemingly post-racial aspirations. And that's all of us."—John L. Jackson Jr., author of Racial Paranoia: The Unintended Consequences of Political Correctness "John Hartigan uses a year's worth of news stories—from the Jena six to Obama—to ponder what makes them racial. He argues these stories are riddled with ambiguity because the interpretive frames of race are changing. What is racial and what are the motivations of actors is not a straightforward matter as in other moments in our history. A provocative investigation and analysis of racial matters in the USA!"—Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, author of Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States "How do Americans know when a remark or incident is racial? In this brilliant and engaging book about 'our national conversation about race,' John Hartigan shows us the cultural conventions that shape our assessment of whether and how race matters as he reads a year's worth of 'race stories' in the news. He also shows us how those conventions are changing, some of the new ways of thinking and talking about race that are emerging, and a good deal about what 'the news' is as a cultural practice."—Susan Harding, University of California, Santa Cruz