What Movies Teach about Race provides a comprehensive and insightful analysis of how racial stereotypes and images are conveyed in one of the most influential forces of socialization in our culture, the popular movie. Satchel’s work is significant not only for its contribution to critical scholarship, but also, for what it brings to contemporary conversations about race in America.

Gary S. Selby, Pepperdine University

This book provides a piercing critique of the racial binaries at the heart of the most influential movies in history. As Satchel deftly reveals, American film industry monopolies have, for the past four decades, rhetorically assailed global audiences with films that have collaterally championed white supremacy and American exceptionalism. This very timely investigation, which is really about the relationship between the power of film and democracy, ends with a call to researchers, educators, students, activists and audiences, but most of all to the American movie industry, to break free from the divisive formulas of racialised film, and aspire to a cinematic literacy that upholds social justice as the frame through which we see ourselves in the movies we watch.

David C. Holmes, Monash University

In her novel approach of examining the top ten financial grossing films of all time, Dr. Roslyn Satchel invites both media producers and audiences critically to think about the intersections of film, race and history. How is race constructed; why certain images used and others are are not; and why filmmakers and audiences are seemly comfortable with these representations are questions posed by Satchel in this fascinating study. This book will soon be a must-read for those in media, rhetorical, and critical race studies.

Andre E. Johnson, University of Memphis

Combining insider knowledge of the Hollywood film industry in which she worked, with academic knowledge of issues of framing, ideology, image, and message, with critical knowledge of contemporary film, Roslyn M. Satchel’s What Movies Teach about Race provides an important intervention in contemporary discussions of film and race. The manner in which Dr. Satchel describes and employs complex concepts and theories to illuminate popular Hollywood films is highly impressive. Her cinema studies display a breadth of knowledge, as well as exhibit exceptional writing talents, that make her work of interest and accessible to students, academics, and to the general public.

Douglas Kellner, UCLA; author of Media Culture and Media Spectacle and the Crisis of Democracy