This chapter comprises two sections which examine race, identity and subjection. One is the failure of the FBJ to relaunch. The other considers the firing of a Sunday Times columnist, David Bullard, for writing a racist column. Each event shows subjection to past norms of racial identity which oppressed. In the case of the FBJ, however, the majority of black journalists ignored the interpellating (or hailing) to be loyal to blackness, and so the revival of the forum failed. The theoretical point is one that Butler developed from Foucault's theory on power to explain the paradoxical nature of subjection: one is familiar with the idea of power being external to the self, but it is pressed upon one from the outside, and one is also dependent on that power for one's very existence (1997: 2-20). Power forms the subject and also forms reflexivity: the figure of the psyche turns against itself (‘turns’ is used in this sense in this chapter). In other words, when one faces subjection through interpellation, does one heed the call and turn towards the voice of authority, or does one exercise some agency and turn against the attempted subjection?

The media is not monolithic. Just as Lacan argued that we are hundreds of people in one, so the media is also diverse and fluid in composition in terms of race and in characterisation of different political vents. This chapter shows that race is not simplistically embraced as a Master-Signifier for all black journalists or for the public. But for some it is. The theoretical starting point for ‘race’ here is its unessential nature, and that it is a social and cultural construct. I argue, as many others have, that it is a marker of identity, where identity is fluid, multiple and contingent.