Peer-Reviewed Articles
PEER-REVIEWED ARTICLE
Co-authored scholarly publication (equal contribution)
Teaching Critical Race Media Literacy Through Black Historical Narratives
Journal: Journal of Media Literacy Education, 15(3), 1–13 (2023)
This article advances the field of media literacy by doing what much of the existing scholarship avoids: placing race, and specifically Black history, at the center of media literacy instruction. Rather than treating Black historical content as a supplementary or thematic unit, we argue that these narratives are essential building blocks for any meaningful understanding of media, power, and representation.
We build a direct bridge between Critical Race Theory (CRT), media literacy, and culturally grounded pedagogy. While each of these traditions has developed its own theoretical and practical pathways, this work insists on their integration. Media literacy that does not engage race is incomplete. Racial literacy that ignores media is under-equipped for the current moment. This article brings them together through a pedagogical framework called Critical Race Media Literacy (CRML).
Black historical narratives,whether ignored, sanitized, or distorted,have long been subject to media systems that prioritize dominant perspectives. In the classroom, this often plays out as either erasure or oversimplification: race is discussed in a single unit, or Black history is reduced to a handful of recognizable figures. This article intervenes in that pattern. It argues that Black histories should not be add-ons. They are structural correctives to the gaps and distortions media often produce.
This article expands the CRML framework by rooting it in narrative pedagogy and demonstrating how it can function in real classrooms. We model instructional strategies that move beyond superficial “representation checks” and guide students through deeper interrogations of framing, authorship, and omission. It contributes to justice-centered education by showing how racial literacy and media literacy can—and must—be taught together.
In short, this article reframes Black history not as a sidebar to media education, but as its spine. It’s a call to reimagine what media literacy looks like when it begins with the lives, stories, and resistance of those historically excluded from the frame.
PEER-REVIEWED ARTICLE
Sole-authored scholarly publication
Power, Prejudice, and Portrayals in News: Teaching Representation from a Critical News Literacy Perspective
Journal: Kentucky Journal of Communication, 40(1), 63–72 (2021)
Read it here
This piece challenges a foundational assumption in most news literacy instruction: that the core problem with news is inaccuracy or misinformation. While fact-checking and source evaluation are essential, they are not enough. In this article, I argue that representation, power, and racialized framing are just as central to understanding how news functions and who it serves. Teaching news literacy without engaging these issues leaves students with a partial and misleading understanding of media’s role in society.
Most media literacy curricula address representation through entertainment: students critique stereotypes in film, dissect race and gender dynamics in advertisements, or examine the tropes embedded in reality TV. But when it comes to news, instruction often shifts into a “neutral” gear—asking students to judge whether a source is reliable, but rarely inviting them to ask deeper questions about who is centered in a story, how they are portrayed, and what systemic patterns those portrayals reflect. This article takes aim at that gap.
The assumption of neutrality in news has always been a myth. In a so-called “post-racial” media environment, that myth becomes especially dangerous. From crime coverage to protest reporting, news narratives continue to shape how the public sees marginalized communities—often through frameworks of suspicion, pity, or pathology. These portrayals affect everything from public opinion to policy outcomes. Teaching students to recognize this is essential.
This article makes the case that critical news literacy must also be racial literacy. It introduces a teaching activity designed to bring that lens into the classroom in a clear, structured, and reproducible way. Using real-world story comparisons across outlets, formats, and political orientations, students analyze differences in tone, framing, source selection, word choice, and visual cues. They are asked not just to spot bias, but to name patterns, interrogate systems, and connect news portrayals to broader cultural narratives.
The article bridges two often-separated traditions: critical media literacy and news literacy. Drawing on Cultural Studies, Critical Race Theory, and foundational CML work, it pushes back against the notion that news literacy should be “objective” in its approach. It reframes news literacy as an opportunity for students to understand power, not just accuracy.
Since publication, this article has been shared in educator networks and presented at NAMLE as part of broader conversations about curriculum design and teacher training. It contributes a concrete model for integrating racial analysis into news literacy instruction and supports educators working to align classroom practice with equity-centered frameworks.
Even as legacy newsrooms begin to acknowledge issues of underrepresentation and framing bias, the dominant frameworks for evaluating journalism still rely on outdated notions of balance and neutrality. This article offers a concrete pedagogical intervention. It helps students see not only what the news says, but how it constructs meaning, whose voices are validated, and whose are sidelined.
In an era of misinformation, students are often taught to “trust credible sources.” But credibility doesn’t guarantee equity. Many of the most well-respected outlets in American journalism have long histories of misrepresenting Black, Indigenous, immigrant, and other marginalized communities. If students don’t learn to see that, they will continue to assume that credibility equals fairness.
This article gives educators a practical way to teach the politics of news representation without sacrificing rigor or clarity. It equips students to ask better questions, read more critically, and connect what they see in the news to the systems that shape it.
PEER-REVIEWED ARTICLE
Sole-authored scholarly publication
VB Strong: How Local News Stations Created a Platform for a Community to Mourn Victims of a Mass Shooting
Journal: Atlantic Journal of Communication, 29(4), 1–14.
This article examines local television news coverage of the 2019 mass shooting in Virginia Beach, focusing on how regional news stations created a mediated space for mourning. At its core, the piece argues that local broadcast news—often dismissed as shallow or formulaic—can, under certain conditions, function as a site of public pedagogy and emotional repair. It contends that local journalists, embedded in and accountable to the communities they serve, are capable of framing coverage not just around facts or political fallout, but around shared grief and human dignity.
This piece is needed for several reasons.
First, it fills a critical gap in media studies scholarship, which often focuses on national news or online media ecosystems. National narratives tend to flatten community trauma into numbers, policy debates, or partisan arguments. This article challenges that by focusing on how local journalists told the story differently—foregrounding the lives of victims, centering local voices, and constructing a narrative that was less about the shooter and more about those left behind. In doing so, it pushes back against dominant coverage practices that routinely dehumanize or sensationalize communities in crisis.
Second, the article offers a counterpoint to dominant assumptions about the media's role in crisis. The prevailing critique—often deserved—is that media coverage of mass shootings is voyeuristic, exploitative, or numbing. This study shows that when journalists know the streets they’re reporting on, and when they take seriously their relationship to the community, their work can take on a different tone and purpose. The coverage of “VB Strong” was not perfect, but it served as a collective mirror, reflecting not only tragedy, but also love, grief, and solidarity.
Third, from a justice and equity perspective, the piece highlights what it means for media to be accountable to its audience—not as consumers, but as neighbors. Local journalism, particularly when it avoids the trap of “neutrality as detachment,” can amplify communal needs in the aftermath of tragedy. In this case, it offered space for mourning, memory, and even critique. It is a reminder that the absence of community perspective in national media isn't an inevitability; it’s a choice. And local news, when done well, offers an alternative.
Finally, this work is pedagogically important. For those teaching journalism or media studies, it provides a clear example of what ethical, community-centered reporting can look like. It invites students and scholars alike to consider: What does it mean for media to care for its public? What is the journalist’s responsibility when reporting on grief? How might we measure success in media not just by reach or ratings, but by resonance?
This piece reflects a core throughline in my work: the belief that media is never neutral. It can function as a source of harm or as a site of care, and that distinction often comes down to whose stories are centered and how they are told. While this article does not focus explicitly on race, it advances my broader project of interrogating media’s social role, especially in moments of collective trauma. It asks what it means for journalism to be accountable not just to facts, but to people. That same question guides my work on racialized media systems, narrative repair, and community-based communication. The article offers one answer: media can hold space for dignity, grief, and connection when it resists spectacle and prioritizes care.
PEER-REVIEWED ARTICLE
Sole-authored scholarly publication
Black Hair in the Media: Racial Portrayals Are More Than Skin Deep
Journal: Communication Teacher, 2020, Vol. 35(1), pp. 1–6
This article has reached more than 2,775 views and has become one of my most cited and discussed works, leading to multiple interviews and invitations to speak. That reach reflects the deep need for work that addresses how media narratives about beauty—and specifically about Black hair—are not just cosmetic. They are cultural, institutional, and political.
This article reflects a core thread of my scholarship: naming how media systems uphold racial hierarchies through seemingly everyday narratives—in this case, through beauty norms tied to Black hair.
At a time when conversations about beauty norms, professionalism, and racial equity are intersecting in more public ways, this piece gives students, educators, and media scholars the tools to talk about how deeply embedded these norms are and how they show up through something as personal and public as hair.
This is about survival. Media portrayals of Black hair shape the way people are perceived, hired, disciplined, and treated. They influence how Black students feel walking into a classroom and how Black professionals navigate job interviews. Straight hair is still viewed by many as “neat,” “professional,” and “appropriate,” while natural styles are coded as defiant, political, or unkempt—even when carefully maintained. That perception isn't neutral. It’s the result of years of media conditioning rooted in white supremacist aesthetics.
The article situates those harmful portrayals within longstanding media effects research (Cultivation Theory, Social Learning Theory), offering a direct, teachable framework that connects theory to lived experience. But its real impact lies in the classroom-tested activity that comes with it—one that helps students from all racial backgrounds confront how their own ideas about beauty and professionalism have been shaped. And critically, how those ideas can cause harm.
The lesson pushes students to analyze Instagram images, engage with mainstream and niche media, and discuss discriminatory policies like hair bans in schools, sports, and the military. The result is a space where theory, identity, and lived reality meet—a kind of applied critical media literacy that few academic articles achieve so effectively.
From a justice perspective, this piece offers a gateway to policy and structural critique. It helps explain why New York needed to pass the CROWN Act, why students across the country are still suspended over their hair, and why media literacy can’t stop at skin tone. It must also ask what kinds of bodies, styles, and expressions are allowed to be seen as “normal” or “beautiful,” and who pays the price when they’re not.
In the context of education, this article exemplifies how media literacy can move beyond the abstract. It shows students how the media they consume connects directly to real-world discrimination and self-perception. And it gives them a roadmap for pushing back—through critical analysis, through awareness, and through the creation of counternarratives that affirm textured hair as beautiful, worthy, and professional.
“Black hair in the media” is a critical window into how racial bias operates subtly but powerfully in everyday life. This article not only makes that case—it gives educators and students the language to name it, confront it, and begin to unlearn it.
PEER-REVIEWED ARTICLE
Co-authored scholarly publication (equal contribution)
Black Music is American Music
Journal: International Journal of Multicultural Education, 2020, Vol. 22(2), pp. 145–162
Read it here
In this article, I argue what should be obvious and yet remains contested: Black music is American music. From jazz, rock, and country to hip hop, the sounds that define American culture come from Black creativity, pain, and resistance. Most classrooms, curricula, and media coverage either erase or marginalize these contributions. Black music is often treated as background or influence rather than being centered as foundational. That absence reflects deeper systemic patterns in how the United States teaches, values, and remembers culture.
This article fits within my broader effort to develop Critical Race Media Literacy as both a framework and a tool. I treat media as a force that shapes cultural memory, educational norms, and structural inequality, and not only as content to critique. This work connects representation to power and shows how ignoring Black music in media and education reproduces the same racial hierarchies that my scholarship seeks to name and challenge.
In a collaborative study with co-author Tiffany Mitchell-Patterson, I used the 1619 Project’s popular culture materials, specifically Wesley Morris’s podcast and essay on Black music, as the foundation for a mixed-methods classroom study at a predominantly white institution and a Historically Black College and University. Guided by Critical Race Media Literacy, we examined what students learned and how they responded emotionally after engaging with this fuller account of Black musical history.
The project came at a time when many universities were promoting diversity while making few meaningful changes to what or how they teach. Black music may be present in popular culture, yet it remains largely absent from classrooms. When it does appear, it is often presented without historical depth or political context.
This work offers a different approach. It treats Black music as serious cultural history and as material that belongs in the classroom. Students at both institutions gained knowledge from the materials, and their emotional responses revealed how race, identity, and institutional context influence the way students understand cultural truth.
From a scholarly standpoint, the article shows how Critical Race Media Literacy can operate as a full pedagogical model. When framed critically, popular media deepens students’ understanding of structural racism and resistance. Media can serve as a powerful entry point for learning, especially for students who live and learn in media-saturated environments.
The research also complicates assumptions about students at HBCUs. Attending an institution that centers Black identity does not guarantee exposure to the full scope of Black cultural contributions. That insight matters for educators who might overlook the structural gaps that persist even in Black educational spaces.
The piece engages directly with Morris’s framing in the 1619 Project: “No wonder everybody is stealing it.” Media industries have long profited from repackaging and profiting off Black culture. This article shows how educators can use media literacy to address those dynamics. It also demonstrates how students respond with both academic insight and emotional recognition, using media to process cultural truths that may have been hidden or distorted.
When this article was published, schools across the country were debating whether the 1619 Project should be taught. That debate has only intensified. At stake is more than curriculum policy. What’s being contested is whose history counts, who is seen as a cultural originator, and how American culture itself is defined.
This article offers a replicable model for educators who want to teach cultural and historical truth in classrooms shaped by media saturation and racial hierarchy. It reflects my commitment to justice-centered teaching and to media literacy that accounts for power, emotion, and structure. It invites students to see history not only as information but as a force that shapes how they understand themselves and their place in the world.
Black music built American culture. This article helps students learn that truth and understand the weight of what it means.