Managing Media as Parental Race-Work: (RE)Mediating Children’s Black Identities

Purpose: This research explores parental management and use of media, as part of strategies to affirm children’s racial identities, as well as to assist such parenting efforts. It analyzes how parents construct Black children’s engagement with media, as being a counter-cultural coping mechanism, to temper the potential racial and diasporic discordance of their children’s identities. Methodology/approach: There is analysis of in-depth interviews about the media marketplace experiences of Black women in Britain. The analytic approach is informed by studies of identity and visual consumption, as well as race in the marketplace, which emphasize how identity intersects with consumer culture. Findings: Findings reveal that intra-racial, inter-racial, and inter-cultural relations influence how and why parents manage media that their Black children engage with, including when trying to reinforce their Black identities. Findings also indicate how online user-generated content enables parents to seek a sense of support as part of their inter-cultural and race-related parenting efforts. Social implications: Findings at the root of this research point to the need for media producers and marketers to be sensitized to parental concerns about the development of their children’s Black identities. Originality/value: This work foregrounds under-explored issues concerning parental race-work and processes of consumer biracialization in relation to media representation and spectatorship.