Profile of a Blog: Racialicious

The subject of representation in the entertainment industry, or really pop culture in general, is a massive beast to handle. This is no black and white issue – it has many crevices of opinion, discourse, and factual evidence.

So when I found Racialicious, a blog described as “the intersection of race and pop culture” in its headliner, I was incredibly impressed at the sheer quantity of meticulous, in-depth analysis of not only race in popular culture, but how race gives a lens into gender, LGBTQ, and class issues as well.

The crew members at Racialicious are no slouches. Latoya Peterson, who is the current Owner and Editor, has had her work featured in a number of publications including Spin, Vibe, The American Prospect, The Atlantic Blog, Bitch Magazine, Clutch Magazine, Slate’s Double X, and the Guardian. Her background lies in digital media consulting, working for esteemed clients like NPR, Wikipedia, and Al-Jazeera.  Other members of the team are graduates from the likes of NYU, Occidental College, and the Rhode Island School for Design, and have had their work featured in Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, USA Today, Newsweek, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times and MSNBC. They are based out of cities all across the United States, and seem to work through the Internet to collaborate their many thoughts, opinions, and experiences.

The blog posts multiple times a month, varying from movie and television recaps, to re-blogs, to short posts on what they found on the Internet that day. The site has not been updated since February, but otherwise is completely up to date with the happenings in the industry and around the world.

The blog seems to have a fairly small, but strongly vocal group of supporters. On a purely technical side, here are the blog’s popularity statistics according to blog search engine Technorati:

Technorati Authority: 523 (Rank: 1388)

Entertainment Authority: 85 (Rank: 4885)

Politics Authority: 83 (3324)

The blog is filled with great, detailed posts about all things pop culture. Two posts, of incredibly different length, that I found the most interesting were both about the world of television, since that is a main factor of what I cover in my blog.

The first one I stumbled across was a recap of a Season 6 episode of Mad Men. The show, under the backdrop of the 1960s, tackles a number of political issues that polarized the nation at the time, but has been infamously prudish about race. In this recap, contributors bemoan the lack of developed characters of color, but also talk about how the racism outlined in the show shapes the show’s unrelenting takes on feminism, and how developed, supporting minority characters (like the closeted homosexual Sal, who was a employee of the firm in the show’s first seasons) can work in the show. It’s a fascinating discourse about race, feminism, and sexuality, and, though they all have similar opinions, no one has the exact same response.

In a post that’s about three times shorter, contributor Tamara Harris blogs about a web series on YouTube called The United States of Amani, which documents multiracial actress Amani  Starnes on how she navigates being “ethnically ambiguous” in Hollywood. The episode is only three minutes long, but reveals a lot about how Hollywood perceives race and how it is marketable.

Blog posts like these, and many more on the website, are why I know this blog will be incredibly helpful for me in my work. The blog does encapsulate all facets of pop culture, while my work is mainly focused on Hollywood and commercial theatre, and, obviously, mainly focuses on race, while I try to include all types of minorities. However, the articulation of the well-spoken and educated contributors has allowed the posts to be flourishing discussions on a very complex subject matter. The blog is catered to young, hip intellectuals with a love of pop culture, so even though many of the posts could be short, scholarly essays, the voice always stays colloquial and relatable.

Because of the sheer number of posts, I think that I will be able to delve into the more detailed aspects of the subject matter, and perhaps study things that I wouldn’t have caught when first breaching this topic. No matter whether you’re studying it or not, you should head on over to Racialicious for a great discussion about representation in our constant, 24/7 media market.