This chapter uses examples from media to examine how ‘race’ and ethnicity have been defined and debated in the study of culture, and how they remain shifting and slippery categories. It first presents a brief history of the racial imagination and the development and elaboration of ‘race’ as a socially constructed concept. This is followed by a discussion of critical race scholars who debate the purpose of maintaining such essentialised categories of ‘race’ in capitalist society; chief among them is Edward Said’s notion of an ‘othering’ of ethnic minorities to maintain a Western, white privilege which promotes the continuance of an ideology of inferiority on other groups. This idea, in turn, is taken up by Bell Hooks, who argues that African-Americans continue to be ‘exotified’ by capitalist society so as to sell a form of ‘commodified blackness’ (through, for example, basketball and American football, video games, and hip-hop and R&B music) to white Americans. This discussion is aided by examples of the dominant images of Asians, African-Americans, and Hispanics portrayed in forms of popular culture such as television and film. The potential to resist dominant stereotypes through subversion and minority cultural production is considered with reference to the use of social media and by social movements, including #Black Lives Matter, as well as music subcultural formations.