ABSTRACT
Racialized images in popular culture and public history influence how we see ourselves and how we view racial/ethnic others. This chapter explores race in the cultural imagination, specifically racialized images in film, television, video games, and new media, the ways history is recorded on the landscape in memorials, monuments, and the potential effects of these on both dominant and subordinate groups. Most Americans live in racially homogeneous communities, our images of racial/ethnic others emerge disproportionately from popular culture rather than from personal experiences and interracial interactions. The chapter explores key racial imagery in public history and popular culture, specifically within film, television, music, new media, and video games. It argues that cultures inevitably engage in the practice of cultural diffusion, where they borrow ideas from one another. However, sometimes more than simple cultural diffusion is going on and the practice can become racist appropriation, where nonwhite groups are denied the profits from their cultural creations.
