Writing
Through books and articles, Ralina L. Joseph explores the complex intersections of race, media, culture, and everyday life.
Books that shape the conversation
Transcending Blackness examines how multiracial Americans are often portrayed as either caught between racial identities or symbols of a postracial future. Ralina L. Joseph challenges both narratives, arguing that they remain rooted in the racist idea that blackness is something to overcome.
Postracial Resistance explores how African American women celebrities, cultural producers, and audiences employ postracial discourse—the notion that race and race-based discrimination are over and no longer affect people’s everyday lives—to refute postracialism itself.
Generation Mixed Goes to School radically listens to and weaves together stories of mixed-race children and youth, teachers, and caregivers with perspectives and research from social and developmental psychology, Critical Mixed Race Studies, and education.
Racial Exhaustion challenges us to recognize and address the fatigue that racial discourse brings while offering practical strategies to foster more equitable and productive conversations. This book guides readers in transforming everyday interactions into opportunities for anti-racist change.
Articles
Essays and articles exploring race and the moments where conversations take shape.
Radical Listening for Racial Exhaustion
International Journal of Listening
As a critical communication of race strategy, radical listening hears racialized power differentials, listening to personal story alongside history, structures, and institutions.
'What Makes You Think I’m African American?’
Critical Studies in Media Communication
This Article explores concepts surrounding identity performance, code switching, and the Strong Black Woman (SBW) schema, which demands that Black women exhibit independence, resilience, and strength.
‘You’re the Whitest Black Person I Know’
Women’s Studies in Communication
Through the creative retelling of a conversation that leads up to and follows the microaggression “You’re the whitest Black person I know,” we demonstrate how the poetics of interruption holds interlocutors accountable to structural and interpersonal power imbalances through purposeful dialogue.
Prying Open the Doors of Communication
Communication, Culture, and Critique Vol 14
The discipline of Communication has begun to place more emphasis on mentoring. Yet, some populations, specifically women of color and other minoritized people, do not always have access to networks or programs and are left on their own to navigate institutions and processes.