Whitewashing race: Blanquita and the transgenerational replication of blackness in mass media, from television to YouTube

Abstract

Interstitial analysis is a cross-disciplinary perspective that focuses on exploring identity on the basis of flexibility and complexity, living with the contradictions, intricacies, and folds generated by the overlap of discourse and experiences lived within bodies (Dotson, 2014; Zurcir, 2020). From there, we will try to show how advertising appropriates the discourse of resistance movements to bring about transgenerational “whitewashing” in mass media that solidifies the systemic division of labor roles on the basis of race and gender. This whitewashing is based on the reaffirmation of white superiority, using whiteness as a role model and ideal (Echeverría, 2010) standard in juxtaposition to which stereotypes of blackness can be built. By blackness, we mean a social identity generated through “promotional strategies that depend on people and other symbolic and material representations that have been socially and historically considered black (ways of speech of pronunciations, folklore, style, fashion, music, body usage or physical form)” (Crockett, 2008, 246).