ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the significance of popular culture in reinforcing racial ideologies. It explores popular culture as an arena for increasing solidarity within groups. The chapter aims to understand the meaning of and the operation of cultural hegemony. It also explores race in the cultural imagination, specifically racialized images in film, television, video games, and new media, as well as the ways history is recorded on the landscape in memorials, monuments, and public history markers, and the potential effects of these on both dominant and subordinate groups. The chapter examines key racial imagery in popular culture specifically within film, television, music, new media, and video games. Cultural hegemony is achieved through control of the mass media and the transmission of ideologies that work to the benefit of the dominant group. In this view, the mass media is portrayed as equivalent to cultural and political propaganda.
