Media literacy is often taught as fact checking. This book argues that fact checking alone cannot protect communities from harm when the harm is built into media systems themselves.

Building Critical Race Media Literacy Through Storytelling introduces Critical Race Media Literacy as a framework for understanding how media has long maligned racially marginalized groups across platforms and over decades. It shows how racial narratives are produced, reinforced, and protected through ownership, representation, historical framing, algorithms, and policy.

Race is not an incidental factor in media. It is a central organizing logic. From textbooks to headlines, from film to digital feeds, racial meaning is constructed in ways that privilege dominant groups while criminalizing, erasing, or disciplining others. These patterns persist not because of isolated mistakes, but because the structure rewards them.

This book maps that structure.

What Readers Walk Away With

• How to identify racial master narratives across news, entertainment, education, and digital media
• How to recognize when “neutral” or “objective” framing is doing ideological work
• How racialized mis, dis, and malinformation operates differently than simple error
• How history is shaped through media rather than simply recorded
• How counternarratives function as tools for interruption, clarity, and resistance

Who This Book Is For

• Educators expected to teach “objectively” while racial harm is treated as controversy
• Journalists and media workers operating inside institutions that claim neutrality while reproducing inequality
• Students of any age who want to understand how media shapes race, power, and public truth
• Community leaders and organizers confronting narrative harm in policy, funding, and public discourse
• Anyone trying to make sense of why racial injustice persists even when the facts seem clear

No prior background in media studies is required.