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rights movement. No U.S. politician mastered this better than did Reagan, who always appeared optimistic and carefully color-blind in his use of language, which appealed on the surface to the best of people’s ideals. Yet within his post-racial speeches, he also managed to include coded terms like “welfare queens,” which demonized minorities as lazy and undeserving, and stoked the anger of white voters who resented African American progress. Because the color of one’s skin shouldn’t matter, Reagan and his followers argued, there is no reason to help blacks or any other minority group, even though they continue to suffer the brunt of institutional, legal, and economic inequality.
    This cuts to the core of the problem in any cultural defense of
Song of the South
that insists on seeing the movie as a color-blind celebration of a (rich) white boy’s seemingly positive friendship with a (poor) black man. Aside from being a patronizing white fantasy of racial relationships in the United States, this reading also avoids—and even reinforces through its evasion of the subject—a deep ignorance about the larger cultural, economic, and racial hierarchies being unquestionably perpetuated by a film with no grounding in historical fact. These post-racial attitudes support the hegemonic position of whiteness precisely by denying that racial differences exist. Just because Johnny doesn’t see Uncle Remus as a black person doesn’t mean that the latter ceases to live on a plantation, or ceases to be subservient to whites and their needs, or ceases to have no identity or opportunity outside white culture. At best, it represents what I have elsewhere called “evasive whiteness.” 32 What are perhaps well-intended attempts at avoiding the often-incendiary topic of race nonetheless produce the side effect of maintaining the existing state of racial affairs. If society does not have to recognize the rights of minorities, then it also does not have to acknowledge the presence (and power) of the white majority.
    STRATEGIC REMEDIATION AND TRANSMEDIA DISSIPATION
    Such complicated racial climates play a key role in informing how a controversial text is historically received. The resiliency of such racist imagery is also dependent on the complex relationship between industry producers, paratexts, and media audiences. Hollywood’s racist past haunts the cultural politics of modern convergence media. “Convergence,” Henry Jenkins defined in
Convergence Culture
, refers broadly to “the flow of content across multiple media platforms, the cooperationbetween multiple media industries, and the migratory behavior of media audiences who will go almost anywhere in search of the kinds of entertainment experiences they want.” 33 As a conceptual model, convergence emphasizes two historically interlocking influences regarding the analysis of media—the industry that produced the text(s) and the audiences who consume, interpret, resist, or casually notice them. Studies in convergence today see both sites of meaning production as increasingly intertwined and even interdependent. Thus studies in convergence have focused largely on contemporary issues, since technological developments in new media have both expanded, and streamlined, the ways that consumers and media institutions can directly interact. “Everything about the structure of the modern entertainment industry,” Jenkins writes, “was designed with this single idea in mind—the construction and enhancement of entertainment franchises” across multiple media platforms and ancillary markets. 34
    I see the various meanings attached to
Song of the South
and its para-texts through the years as grounded in a longer history of convergence. My research works through two interrelated concepts:
strategic remediation
and
transmedia dissipation
. As I will show, both offer theoretical frameworks for convergence that are more ambivalent. The former, strategic remediation, focuses on how