Books, Chapters, and Entries
BOOK
Sole-authored scholarly monograph
Critical Race Media Literacy: Countering the Narrative
Publisher: Routledge, 2025
Book Title: Critical Race Media Literacy: Countering the Narrative
Routledge, 2025
This book is the most important and ambitious work of my career to date. It positions Critical Race Media Literacy (CRML) as a necessary and urgent framework for understanding how systemic racism operates through media—historically, structurally, and digitally. It does not simply extend existing work in media literacy or critical race theory—it reorients the conversation by naming race as foundational to media education, and media as foundational to racial justice.
By insisting that media literacy must account for race, and that racial justice work must take media systems seriously, the book positions CRML as a timely intervention. It offers a cohesive framework that scholars, educators, and communities can use to interrogate power, representation, and the evolving architectures of media. In doing so, it reframes media literacy as more than a toolkit. It becomes a method of resistance, a site of agency, and a practice of liberation.
What distinguishes this book is how thoroughly it tracks the evolution of racism in media. Racism is not a relic of the past, but it is something that adapts to each technological shift. It follows the progression from mass broadcast media, to the fragmented media of cable and early digital spaces, to today's algorithm-governed platforms. At every stage, I show how racism morphs to fit the medium and how counternarratives, resistance strategies, and visibility struggles evolve in response.
This book is academically rigorous but intentionally accessible. Educators will find frameworks they can teach. Students will find language for the media they already live inside. Activists and creators will find validation of what they have long known: that media is both the battleground and the battlement.
In terms of scholarly contribution, Critical Race Media Literacy: Countering the Narrative fills a longstanding gap. It is the first full-length articulation of CRML as a framework in its own right. It draws from, but moves beyond, existing work in media studies and critical pedagogy, connecting them through the lens of racial structure, media technology, and public discourse. In the broader arc of my career, this book is the foundation. It draws together everything I’ve been building through research, through teaching, and through public scholarship and names it clearly.
BOOK CHAPTER
In edited volume on narrative medicine
Beyond COVID-19: Black Media’s Insights into Health Messaging for Black Audiences
Appears in: Innovative Approaches to the Use of Narrative Medicine in Health Communication, Vernon Press, 2024
https://vernonpress.com/book/2319
This chapter extends the central thread of my scholarship: interrogating how systems of power operate through media. It applies that analysis to a life-or-death issue—public health communication during a global pandemic. It asks a critical question that too few scholars or institutions were prepared to confront: how do Black communities, long failed by both the healthcare system and the mainstream press, navigate a crisis where trust is as essential as information?
I argue that the answer lies not in top-down mandates or generalized outreach, but in the longstanding infrastructure of Black media. During the early months of the COVID-19 vaccine rollout, while mainstream outlets often framed vaccine hesitancy among Black audiences as a failure of understanding or a problem of behavior, Black media treated the audience as a community to be respected, understood, and engaged on its own terms.
Using Critical Race Media Literacy as a framework, this chapter positions Black media as an informal but essential component of public health infrastructure. I analyze 26 video panels across outlets including The Grio, Roland Martin’s Daily Digital Show, Black Enterprise, and Tyler Perry Studios. These panels featured journalists, clergy, and health professionals working together to provide trusted, community-rooted messaging. Their efforts reframed vaccine discourse as care work grounded in relationship and historical context.
The chapter challenges the pathologizing of vaccine hesitancy and reframes mistrust as a historically earned response. It expands conversations in narrative medicine, public health communication, and racialized media practice by showing how counternarratives can function as acts of healing and resistance.
This chapter makes several contributions. First, it is among the earliest scholarly works to document how Black media participated in public health messaging during the pandemic—not as amplifiers of institutional messages, but as originators of culturally grounded communication strategies. Second, it broadens the scope of narrative medicine by showing how community-based messages from trusted messengers reframe risk, foster solidarity, and support decision-making rooted in self-preservation. Third, it bridges media studies, racial equity, and public health, offering an analysis that positions Black media as central to how health knowledge circulates in communities excluded from institutional trust.
In the broader arc of my scholarship, this chapter reflects my commitment to identifying how media power functions—and how marginalized communities respond, repair, and resist. It underscores my belief that media can be both a source of harm and a site of care, and that naming both is necessary to understand what’s at stake. By documenting the labor of Black media during one of the most fraught periods in recent history, this chapter affirms their role as more than storytellers. It presents them as life-sustaining institutions and calls us to rethink who gets to shape public health discourse—and whose knowledge counts when lives are on the line.
ENCYCLOPEDIA ENTRY
In reference work on political communication
Agenda Melding
Appears in: Elgar Encyclopedia of Political Communication, Edward Elgar Publishing, 2024
https://www.e-elgar.com/shop/usd/elgar-encyclopedia-of-political-communication-9781035301430.html
In this encyclopedia entry, I introduce Agenda Melding as a way to understand how people shape their own media agendas through group interaction and digital engagement. Building on Agenda Setting Theory, I argue that public opinion today isn’t simply molded from the top down by legacy media—it’s actively constructed across social networks, online communities, and identity-based groups. I trace how this process allows people to feel empowered, connected, and informed, but also how it can lead to polarization, echo chambers, and the spread of harmful ideologies.
I see this contribution as part of my broader effort to update foundational media theories to better reflect the current media landscape. In the entry, I position Agenda Melding as a useful lens for thinking about how individuals participate in meaning-making, especially in environments where information is abundant, but trust is fractured. I also gesture toward the racial dynamics often missing from mainstream applications of this theory—raising questions about how power, identity, and belonging shape the agendas we build and the communities we seek out.
This work aligns closely with my larger research agenda in Critical Race Media Literacy. Like much of my writing, it asks what it means to be a media participant in a system structured by inequality. And it reflects my commitment to making theory usable—for researchers, for educators, and for the people navigating these systems every day.