Semiotics and psychoanalysis also demonstrate, however, that meanings
are incomplete and unstable. Whatever meanings are assigned to race for
the purpose of maintaining privilege and domination are not only incom-
plete, but unable to contain more egalitarian discourses about race. The
purpose of analysis, therefore, is not simply to expose the process of
racism as it conducts itself through representation, but to uncover the im-
ages and discourses that resist or escape that process -- images and dis-
courses that allow us to glimpse, however briefly, more egalitarian soci-
eties and collective transformations of social structures. The necessity of
such a dual approach lies in the goal of transforming a society of inequity.
Until we can expose and confront the operations of inequality, they will
persist unabated, and until we can imagine a more just and egalitarian so-
ciety, we cannot build one. As bell hooks argues, "Opposition is not
enough. In that vacant space after one has resisted there is still the neces-
sity to become -- to make oneself anew." ³¹ The purpose of studying racism
and representation, then, is no less than playing a part in a process of lib-
eration, a process that the mass media has been very effective in contain-
ing. It is time to confront their effectiveness.

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