“Race is the modality in which class is ‘lived’, the medium through which class relations are experienced.” — Stuart Hall, “Race, Articulation and Societies Structured in Dominance” (1980)
The Racial Image Is Never Innocent
In a world where images circulate faster than thought—viral videos, police footage, protest photography, fashion campaigns—the politics of representation can feel both obvious and impossible to pin down. We know race is constructed, that images stereotype or “other.” But how?
Stuart Hall spent much of his career answering this question—not with slogans, but with slow, careful theory. Hall didn’t just point out that media reproduces racial stereotypes. He analyzed how it happens, why it sticks, and what it makes possible.
His work remains essential for understanding how race is made visible in culture—not simply as a set of traits or identities, but as a dynamic system of meanings. And crucially, Hall showed that the image is never just an image. It’s a scene of power.
Stereotypes Aren’t Just False—They’re Functional
In his influential essay “The Spectacle of the ‘Other’” (1997), Hall explores how difference is visually constructed in mass media. Drawing on semiotics and psychoanalysis, he argues that racial stereotypes operate not by misrepresenting reality, but by fixing meaning—compressing complex human lives into simple, often contradictory signs.
Think of the familiar tropes: the hypersexual Black man, the submissive Asian woman, the violent Arab, the comedic South Asian sidekick. These are not random distortions. They are part of what Hall, citing Frantz Fanon and Lacan, describes as the “fantasies” of the dominant gaze: projections designed to stabilize white, Western identity by othering everyone else.
Stereotypes work by naturalizing these fantasies—making social constructions look like biological facts. They close off interpretation. They freeze difference.
Representation Is a Site of Struggle
For Hall, the point isn’t simply to demand better representation—though he believed that mattered—but to understand representation as a contested field. Who gets to represent whom? In what terms? And for what audience?
In his earlier work, particularly “Race, Articulation and Societies Structured in Dominance” (1980), Hall developed the concept of articulation to describe how racialized identities are not simply reflections of economic or political positions but are formed through cultural and ideological linkages. Race isn’t just “added on” to class—it organizes how class is lived and understood.
This helps explain why racial stereotypes persist even when disproven. They are embedded in structures of feeling and institutional power. They are rehearsed in everyday media—through humor, fear, desire. But they can also be disarticulated, reworked, and refused.
Visual Culture After Hall
Consider today’s media environment: bodycam footage of police killings, marketing campaigns with curated “diversity,” TikToks that go viral for racial caricature, or influencers monetizing cultural aesthetics they don’t belong to. Hall gives us a way to parse the layers.
When a racialized image circulates, what meanings are encoded within it? What histories are being evoked—or erased? Who is the imagined viewer? What reaction is being solicited: sympathy, fear, envy, shame?
But Hall also believed in the counter-hegemonic potential of media. He was interested in how racialized groups respond to and reclaim representation. Black British youth, for example, developing new styles, music, and speech as modes of resistance. Or diasporic filmmakers creating alternative archives of visibility.
Representation is never just domination. It’s also improvisation, refusal, subversion.
Why It Still Matters
In our algorithmically saturated culture, where images are curated to match the viewer’s profile and prejudice, Hall’s theories remain sharp tools. He reminds us that race is not just seen—it’s made visible. Through repetition, framing, contrast. Through the everyday spectacle of the “other.”
To engage critically with race and media isn’t just to ask for better stories. It’s to demand a different way of seeing.