This book considers the ways in which Black directors, screenwriters, and showrunners contend with the figure of the would-be White ally in contemporary film and television.

White Lies and Allies in Contemporary Black Media examines the ways in which prominent figures such as Issa Rae, Spike Lee, Justin Simien, Jordan Peele, and Donald Glover centralize complex Black protagonists in their work while also training a Black gaze on would-be White allies. Emily R. Rutter highlights how these Black creators represent both performative White allyship and the potential for true White antiracist allyship, while also examining the reasons why Black creators utilize the white ally trope in the wider context of the film and television industries. During an era in which concerns with White liberal complicity in anti-Black racism are of paramount importance, Rutter explores how these films and televisions shows, and their creators, contribute to the wider project of dismantling internal, interpersonal, ideological, and institutional White hegemony.

This book will be of interest to students and scholars of Film and Media Studies, Television Studies, American Studies, African American Studies, and Popular Culture.

Emily Ruth Rutter is Associate Dean of the Honors College and Associate Professor of English at Ball State University. She is author of Invisible Ball of Dreams: Literary Representations of Baseball behind the Color Line, The Blues Muse: Race, Gender, and Musical Celebrity in American Poetry, and Black Celebrity: Contemporary Representations of Postbellum Athletes and Artists. She is co-editor of Revisiting the Elegy in the Black Lives Matter Era. Her scholarship appears in African American Review, MELUS, and Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, among other journals and edited collections.