Despite Adolph Reed's accurate remarks that ‘the race/ class debate has vexed American intellectual life […] for more than a century’ (2002, 265), the relationship between race, class and modernity tends to be relatively neglected in American communication theory. This neglect persists despite the consolidation of critical race theory in the 1980s and its subsequent impact in the wider academy. Race does not emerge as a topic in James Carey's Communication as Culture. In Speaking Into the Air, John Durham Peters includes a chapter about communication with animals, but nothing on race. Nor does it appear in Robert Craig's wellcited disciplinary-defining essay, ‘Communication Theory As a Field’.

From the critical wing of the discipline, in One Dimensional Man Herbert Marcuse puts considerable emphasis on the emerging New Left as an agent of social change. But in retrospect he misses the significance of the civil rights movement, the most powerful postwar American social movement. It would be a mistake to attribute this oversight to the movement's pragmatic reformist tendencies eclipsing its more radical elements, a compromise that saw Malcolm X and the black Panthers break cause, but this revisionist concession masks a broader politics intending to domesticate the radical impulse found within the movement. Herbert Schiller does better. His Mass Communications and American Empire covers racial disparities, primarily through the lens of third-world marginalization.

But these kinds of topics have disappeared from Dan Schiller's Digital Capitalism, published when racial disparities in computer ownership and use presented a 15 percentage point gap in the US, a divide that remains the same nearly 20 years later in 2015 (Fairlie, 2017). Racial hierarchy is implicit in Christian Fuchs’ analysis of commodity chains and the international division of digital labour. Here he connects slave work in mineral extraction in Africa, electronic manufacturing in China and socially reproductive software labour in India with work undertaken in Silicon Valley (Fuchs, 2014). That said, when he and Nick Dyer-Witheford isolated 11 core concepts Marxists had contributed to communication studies none specifically related to race (Fuchs and Dyer-Witheford, 2013).