In chapters 4, 5 and 6, I explored in some detail how study groups found meaning in the KTTV text – their “ways of seeing.” These groups, you will recall, were categorized by race-as-representation in order to facilitate an analysis of raced differences in this meaning-making process. But how valid were these a priori raced groupings? That is, with what degree of confidence can one attribute differences in decoding to differences in raced identification rather than some other variable or variables? After all, I did observe decoding differences within the raced groupings. Were these within-“race” differences sufficiently overshadowed by the between-“race” differences so that one might meaningfully speak of raced differences?

To proceed as if “race”-per-se explains differences in the television experience essentializes “race” and explains nothing. The real question, the one left unanswered by this type of approach, is as follows: What is it about race-as-representation in the US context that results in the decoding differences we encounter? To put it another way, how does raced subjectivity influence the television decoding process, and how does this process, in turn, influence the construction and reproduction of raced subjectivities?