Book Review: Stories Without Borders: the Berlin Wall and the Making of a Global Iconic Event by Julia Sonnevend

eyes” metaphorically represents the peculiar disposition of the eyes of Black journalists, who narrate a reality where they must orient their behaviors in the face of a professionalizing process that restricts Black subjectivity and mobility. Lewis’s interviewees hold nothing back in explaining how they negotiate, call out, resist, and even acquiesce to the racial, gendered, and heterosexual hierarchies of the professional newsroom culture. Some asserted that White media owners and upper level management conform to White supremacist standards of beauty, requiring Black on-air talent to use cosmetics that lighten their skin tone and to contour their noses, while appealing to White cultural norms of thinness. Some expressed outright anger with image consultants who asked them to straighten their hair because those in upper level management viewed African hairstyles and textures as unprofessional. Others openly lamented the impunity of autocratic news directors who verbally abuse female journalists. Still, some Black journalists believed that it is best to assimilate to White cultural norms of the newsrooms, and chose to “play their cards”—or emphasize difference—once they had achieved success in their careers. Lewis also provides readers with rare access to the inner workings of so-called weekend “ghetto shows,” and to the policing of gay and lesbian bodies. She points out, most importantly, the hypocrisy in television news media, where objectivity means reinforcing a White heteronormative male universality rather than simply reporting what is seen. Lewis views the Black body as an “empty canvas” where White media owners, managers, and producers inscribe their own professional standards with the dripping ink of Whiteness. Lewis concludes with a discussion on how the “Obama phenomenon” created a schism between the racialized experiences of Black journalists and the myth of postracialism circulating in the television newsroom. This phenomenon obscures oppressive conditions of working in society as postracial frames become universal appeals about all of us. Although there are many other examples and stories in this book attesting to how Blacks are heavily scrutinized as they overcome oppressive modalities operating in the television news industry, I was left pondering about the evolution of race-transcendent Black media icons who involuntarily become extensions of racial apathy. Black journalists from Jayne Kennedy, to Bryant Gumbel, to Gwen Ifill and Oprah Winfrey overcame obstacles and paved the way for their contemporaries such as Tamron Hall, Don Lemon, and Pam Oliver. Yet Lewis reminds us that the path to racial equality is always under construction as people of color must carry around the invisible weight of Whiteness.