The documentary empathetically and, I think, accurately proposes that Houston was a consummate victim of racial expectation.
Coming out as a "dom", she reversed racial and gendered expectations of meekness that never fit her.
Given Mr. Lemon's exploration of racial stereotypes and expectations, it was hard not to think of black American artists who have performed facing away from the audience, refusing the role of entertainer even as they entertained.
Over and over again, the pop singer has played the victim, tapping into racial anxieties and expectations around black men and young white women.
The optics of looking fresh to death are clearly not lost on Obama, whose memoir Becoming uses the lens of fashion to comment on the racial and gendered expectations that constricted her self-expression during her time in the White House.
In the 70s when US schools were ordered to desegregate, sociologists found that, contrary to expectation, racial attitudes actually hardened among white people who were aggrieved at the loss of places in their preferred schools.
The idiocy of imagining that either adults or children could take in their stride the altered emotional dynamics created by such a situation – could simply absorb the contrasts of wealth and poverty, of the experiences of different racial groups, of expectation and acceptance, freedom and stultification.
A year from now, Barack Obama will leave office, and with him will go a particular set of expectations of racial rapprochement.
When the Dunbars married in 1898, they joined a number of high-visibility couples who made public attempts to balance racial, gender and marital expectations with the changing roles of women.
This insulated environment of racial protection builds white expectations for racial comfort while at the same time lowering the ability to tolerate racial stress, leading to what I refer to as White Fragility.
