About Linsay Cramer, Ph.D. : Linsay Cramer is Associate Professor and Graduate Coordinator of the Department of Communication, Media, & Culture at Coastal Carolina University (CCU). Dr. Cramer’s research explores representations of race and whiteness in sports media and popular culture, bringing together the concerns of sports communication, rhetorical criticism, cultural studies, and intercultural communication. Dr. Cramer’s publications appear in leading journals, including Critical Studies in Media Communication, the Howard Journal of Communication, and Rhetoric Society Quarterly, as well as chapters in several edited collections.
In 2021, Dr. Cramer earned an Emerging Scholar Award from the Communication and Sport Division of the National Communication Association (NCA) for her critical sports communication scholarship. Her scholarship on popular media has been recognized with a Top Faculty Paper Award from the NCA. Dr. Cramer has also published pieces on communication pedagogy and was honored with the Chair Award for Teaching from CCU’s Department of Communication, Media, & Culture for her own teaching practice.
Dr. Cramer received her Ph.D. in Media & Communication from Bowling Green State University, her M.A. in Communication Studies from Western Michigan University, and her B.A. in Organizational Communication and Comparative Religion from Western Michigan University.
Interview Questions
[MastersinCommunications.com] May we begin with an overview of your academic and professional background? How did you become interested in rhetorical criticism and critical intercultural communication, and, more specifically, come to focus your attention on the racial rhetorics of sports media, film and television, and popular culture?
[Dr. Linsay Cramer] I came to my interest in sports through my interest in culture, unlike many sports communication scholars who I think start out knowing they want to study sports. I have always been interested in understanding diversity, difference, and cultures that are unique from my own. I have a Bachelor of Arts degree in Organizational Communication and Comparative Religion with a certification in nonprofit leadership from Western Michigan University. I went right into my master’s degree there, where I had a great opportunity to learn from the faculty, including Mark Orbe, who helped plant the seeds for my scholarly interest in intercultural communication, rhetoric, and race. [You can read our exclusive interview with Dr. Orbe here.]
I do have a background of being interested in sports. As a kid, I grew up playing sports, and I also happened to marry someone who played professional basketball in Europe. After I completed my master’s degree, I took a break from graduate school and taught in Germany while he played there. That experience gave me a great deal of understanding about sports at the global level.
When I came back, I taught as an adjunct instructor at Delta College in Saginaw, Michigan, which was a great experience. I also worked at a nonprofit, the YWCA, which is an advocacy organization for eliminating racism and empowering women. I decided I wanted to go get my Ph.D. because I loved teaching and what we were advocating for. That led me to Bowling Green State University (BGSU), where I got my Ph.D. and had the great opportunity to learn from a number of faculty who developed my understanding of intercultural communication, rhetoric, and ways that we can study race and discrimination using different methodological perspectives.
I began my Ph.D. in 2013, when a number of events made engaging with sports unavoidable if you were interested in race and rhetoric. In 2014, Adam Silver, the commissioner of the NBA, was dealing with Donald Sterling and his racist comments, including those he made about Magic Johnson. The Ray Rice domestic violence video had been leaked to the public, and the NFL was dealing with that. I decided to write about those two things for my dissertation, and, as I was working on that, Colin Kaepernick started kneeling. As someone who was studying public discourse, I was naturally drawn to these events and exploring what they meant about the relationship between sports, race, and rhetoric.
[MastersinCommunications.com] Are there important ways in which sports media is unique from other forms of media you study with respect to its representations of race and gender or how you approach critical analysis?
[Dr. Linsay Cramer] I think sport and popular culture are similar in that, as a society, we enjoy them, we consume them, and we often see them as a space of escape. That gives them a great deal of power and influence over us. I think that is foundational. Sport, in particular, continues to prove itself to be foundational to society. It informs how we as a society understand what race is or what it is not, and how racism is enacted in ways that can be very subtle.
I just worked on a project in which I looked at Jeremy Lin and his activism work within a global context [“Jeremy Lin and the Global Rhetorical Economy of Whiteness”]. I think work like that is important because it helps us understand how the things happening within sport influence our understanding of democracy. It influences actual global politics and global economies. We can never just excuse sport as something we do for fun because what happens in sports has profound impacts. Sports are a global industry, and when things happen in sports around the world, whether it is at the Olympic level or in the NBA, that has far-reaching implications that we cannot ignore as scholars.
What I am primarily interested in is sports media discourse. A lot of what we know about sport, we get second hand, whether that is through commentary on ESPN, podcasts, or social media content. The way that people talk about sport is extremely powerful. What language choices are they making? What stories are they choosing to tell? What are they choosing not to tell? I think all of that is extremely important because it guides our understanding of both issues happening in sport and our cultural ideology more broadly.
[MastersinCommunications.com] You have two publications that explore racial rhetoric of sports media in relation to NBA player Russell Westbrook: “Cam Newton and Russell Westbrook’s Symbolic Resistance to Whiteness in the NFL and NBA,” and “Threatening Whiteness: ‘Angry Russell’ and the Rhetoricity of Race.” Would you put these pieces in dialogue to explore how sports media functions both as a space where Black masculinity is surveilled and disciplined, and as a potential site of resistance?
[Dr. Linsay Cramer] Russell Westbrook provides endless opportunities to discuss the possibility for resistance within sport, as well as the ways that whiteness attempts to control and discipline Black athletes when it comes to their actions, discourse, and even their style. Russell Westbrook was one of the first individuals to push back on the NBA dress code. Since then, he has both questioned league policy and directly confronted racist fan behavior. I think he is a remarkable example of activism in sports.
In an article with my co-author, Andrew Donofrio, we looked at a case where a fan allegedly yelled racist taunts at him. That opened up an opportunity for us to look at how the media would treat this dynamic. It was immediately apparent that their discourse positioned Russell Westbrook as threatening. Even though it was the fan who was yelling the racist taunts at him, the media attacked Westbrook and framed the fan as this neutral individual. This exemplifies how race is often discursively constructed through sports media discourse. The power of those headlines and news reports lies in their racial rhetoric, which guides audiences to understand Russell Westbrook as a Black man in comparison to the white fan taunting him. The news was participating in a discursive construction of Black masculinity as monstrous, violent, and threatening.
In contrast, I think there is a great deal to say about athletes like Russell Westbrook and others who continue to assert their humanity. I think that is also the really powerful thing about sports: even through control and surveillance, we continue to see athletes asserting their humanity in both symbolic gestures and direct acts of protest.
[MastersinCommunications.com] Another important focus of your work is on the rhetorical construction of postracism, which you interrogate in pieces including, “Whiteness and the Postracial Imaginary in Disney’s Zootopia,” and “Postracism Mythology: NBA Commissioner Adam Silver’s ‘Heroic’ Banishment of Racism from the NBA.” Would you introduce our readers who may be unfamiliar to the concept of postracism, and discuss the political work that the myth of postracism does to support or recuperate whiteness in these very different media contexts?
[Dr. Linsay Cramer] I first became familiar with the concept of postracism from Kent A. Ono, who wrote about postracism through an analysis of the television show Mad Men. This also led me to Eduardo Bonilla-Silva’s work on colorblind racism. Both concepts work together to describe strategies that situate racism as a thing of the past and an individual, rather than systemic, problem. I came to apply these concepts to my own work when I was in my Ph.D. program and writing about Grey’s Anatomy. I love Grey’s Anatomy, but something did not quite sit right with me about the way it proclaimed itself to be this great space of racial equality. There were interracial relationships, but I observed many dynamics that felt like they worked to maintain whiteness.
Postracism situates racism in the pre-Civil Rights Era and denies that it continues to exist at a structural level or systemic level. It says we all should just move on and stop talking about it. It is similar to postfeminism, which makes similar claims about gender equity. Postracial ideology gained popularity after the election of Barack Obama. There was a great deal of commentary claiming we must be living in a postracial space if a Black man could be elected president. We also see a lot of postracism discourse in sports media. Sports is often represented as the great equalizer: once you are out on the court or the field, it is just you against your opponent, and race does not matter.
The work of scholars is to identify these myths and pinpoint how they are misleading and politically harmful. When we ignore the problems of systemic racism, when we continue to ignore that whiteness exists, we maintain a racial hierarchy in society that actually benefits no one. Whiteness is tricky because it evolves and changes with the cultural conditions that we live in, and one way in which white supremacy has sustained itself is through this postracial myth. The aim of critical rhetoric is to name whiteness and identify how it is working as it adapts and changes over time to maintain its power.
Zootopia is a great example of how Disney continues, every few years, to release a film that speaks to their own vision of postracial diversity. Zootopia was released in 2016 in the middle of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton running for president and at the beginning of the Black Lives Matter movement. It told a story about animals, predator and prey, who come together in Zootopia and live in a “postracial” space where anybody can be anything. It communicates, both to children and the adults who watch these films too, that racial equality has been achieved. We live together in harmony.
When we look more closely, we see that, if Zootopia is an allegory for diversity, Blackness is positioned as monstrous in Zootopia. Black people are predators and white people, symbolically, are the prey. This parallels another Disney series, the Zombies trilogy, which constructs a similar metaphor for equity where the racial other is still monstrous; white people are people and Black people are zombies. Both stories are told from the perspective of white women or their proxies: in Zootopia, for instance, Judy Hopps is the representation of white women. At its core, whiteness in these films is always innocent and humane. Whiteness is always the hero.
Even these feel-good stories that present themselves as championing diversity ultimately serve whiteness. We have to develop the critical tools within our students to be able to identify that. That is part of the challenge. The work of scholars is to continue to unearth and identify how those stories are problematic so we can move forward as a society.
[MastersinCommunications.com] How do you see the myth of postracism as interacting with the rhetorical strategy of “victimhood appropriation” detailed in your piece “Perpetual and Pleasurable Marginality: White Masculine Victimhood Appropriation and Black Masculine Sacrifice in Marvel’s Netflix series The Punisher”? Do you view victimhood appropriation as complementary, or perhaps in tension with, the strategic construction of a postracial imaginary?
[Dr. Linsay Cramer] When we study media, we always have to look at the cultural context in which that media was produced and released. The Punisher premiered in the same cultural context that saw the rise of Donald Trump and the January 6th Insurrection. The immediate thing that stood out about the show was the real enjoyment that audiences were invited to have in the brutal violence through which The Punisher enacts vengeance on individuals whom he perceives to have wronged him. We found there was a symbolic connection between whiteness and claims to victimhood and then an associated logic where, if someone claimed white masculine victimhood, they were justified in inflicting violence on their perceived enemy.
In our culture, the perceived enemy of whiteness tends to be individuals who have historically been marginalized. There is an excellent body of research that has influenced me, and which I have tried to contribute to, that explores how media rhetorics forward claims of a white masculine victimhood caused by historically marginalized others. This body of research also examines how media narratives justify violent retribution toward those others.
It is crucial to understand how these media are situated alongside the rhetoric of Donald Trump, his supporters, and digital and social media discourses that perpetually frame Trump supporters as victims of historically marginalized peoples like immigrants, the Black Lives Matter movement, women who are fighting for reproductive rights, and more. That victimhood is then used to justify violent behavior. This is done in fictional media like The Punisher, and it is done through political rhetoric as well.
[MastersinCommunications.com] You have also made contributions to the study of communication pedagogy in publications like “Dialogue and Intercultural Communication Pedagogy” and “Teaching the Foundations of Media Literacy in the Basic Communication Course.” Would you tell us a bit about your perspective on the critical role of communication pedagogy, and perhaps more specifically reflect on how mechanisms like intercultural dialogue and media literacy might help disrupt the rhetorics of race and gender we have been discussing?
[Dr. Linsay Cramer] As a student and an educator, I have seen the ways education can be a transformative and empowering experience. But it is important to understand that is not the case for everyone because of the systemic inequities and biases of our educational system. I center intercultural dialogue in my teaching philosophy in a way that is grounded in critical pedagogy. Critical pedagogy attempts to understand power dynamics in the classroom and to make the classroom a space of possibility and mutual listening rooted in empathy and care, rather than the oppressive space of silencing and oppression it has so often been for historically marginalized groups. It attempts to create a space where we can talk about the possibility of what scholarship and theory can do for society.
Media literacy is a guiding force in my pedagogy. I love talking about media in the classroom. I was first introduced to the concept of media literacy in my master’s program. It was eye-opening for me to think about critical media literacy education and the possibilities it can offer students, from K-12 through college and graduate school.
In my pedagogy, I am always thinking of ways that we can talk about popular culture and sports media as a window into important issues in society. We look at what is happening in the news that day, or talk about Taylor Swift, or discuss what our favorite team’s football coach said in a press conference. Working from these everyday examples, how can we analyze what is represented in the media and take control of its influence over our lives? How can we move forward as a classroom community with this knowledge and positively impact our own communities?
Incorporating all of that into the classroom is a process. As college educators, we face many challenges, but we have just as many opportunities to continually grow and to understand our students. That, for me, is a lifelong journey.
[MastersinCommunications.com] In addition to your role as Associate Professor, you are Graduate Coordinator of the Communication, Media, & Culture Department at Coastal Carolina University. Are there ways in which your critical background and work on communication pedagogy inform your approach to or goals for the Graduate Coordinator position?
[Dr. Linsay Cramer] I am very fortunate to be in a department that values media literacy. That is a key part of the pedagogy for many of our faculty members. Media literacy is also central to our graduate program curriculum as a whole. We are always talking about how to critically analyze media.
My background studying intercultural communication, culture, and race from a critical perspective has greatly informed my view of this role. For example, it guides how I approach the applications of prospective graduate students. I try to engage with the unique backgrounds, experiences, and challenges that have shaped their path to graduate school. I am a first-generation college student. I grew up in rural Michigan on a farm. My personal history contributes to my sense that a student’s cultural background should not determine their scholarly opportunities.
As a coordinator for a program, a lot of your job is paperwork, but the most important role you play is meeting with students, listening, and helping them get through the program. Critical pedagogy is so important to teaching us how to listen, how to understand the challenges our students face, and how to direct our knowledge and resources to facilitating their success.
[MastersinCommunications.com] Based on your experience and expertise, do you have advice you would give to students interested in critical and racial rhetorical criticism, sports media, or media and popular culture more generally, who may be considering pursuing a graduate degree in communication?
[Dr. Linsay Cramer] I think the number one quality that graduate students need is curiosity: the willingness to ask questions about the world around them and pursue answers. I think students should tap into their curiosity. Do not be afraid to ask why things are happening.
It is also important not to be afraid to study the things you love. In a million years, I never would have guessed that I would have written about Zootopia, The Big Bang Theory, Grey’s Anatomy, or sports in general. We are supposed to think those things are silly and fun. But the things we love are actually very serious. I always tell my students to focus on what excites them. Seek out faculty who have studied similar things, and let their work help you find a way to study it.
The best thing you can do as a student is learn from faculty who are excited to work with you. I had the great fortune at BGSU to find great mentors like Alberto Gonzalez and Lisa Hanasono who invested so much time and energy into me and taught me how to study these things in ways that feel productive and meaningful. As you are looking for a program and once you get there, find the faculty who want to invest in you. Go to their office hours, talk to them, and learn from them. You cannot do it on your own. You need faculty around you to support you and guide you through the very interesting space of academia.
Thank you, Dr. Cramer, for sharing your insight on race and whiteness in sports media and popular culture, discussing your commitments to media literacy and communication pedagogy, and more!
Please note: Our interview series aims to represent the diverse research being pursued by scholars in the field of communication, which is often socially and politically engaged. As a result, all readers may not agree with the views and opinions expressed in this interview, which are independent of the views of MastersinCommunications.com, its parent company, partners, and affiliates.
