Authenticating Whiteness: Karens, Selfies, and Pop Stars

In Authenticating Whiteness: Karens, Selfies, and Pop
Stars, Rachel E. Dubrofsky explores the idea that popular
media implicitly portrays whiteness as credible, trustworthy,
familiar, and honest, and that this portrayal is normalized and
ubiquitous. Whether on television, film, social media, or in the
news, white people are constructed as believable and unrehearsed, from the way they talk to how they look and act. Dubrofsky argues that this way of making white people appear authentic is a strategy of whiteness, requiring attentiveness to the context of white
supremacy in which the presentations unfold. The volume details how ideas about what is natural, good, and wholesome are reified in
media, showing how these values are implicitly racialized.
Additionally, the project details how white women are presented as particularly authentic when they seem to lose agency by expressing affect through emotional and bodily displays. The chapters examine a range of popular media-newspaper articles about Donald J. Trump, a selfie taken at Auschwitz, music videos by Miley Cyrus, the
television series UnREAL , the infamous video of Amy Cooper calling the police on an innocent Black man, and the documentary
Miss Americana -pinpointing patterns that cut across media to explore the implications for the larger culture in which they
exist. At its heart, the book asks: Who gets to be authentic? And what are the implications?