John McWhorter is one of the most original and provocative thinkers on the issue of race in America today. In Authentically Black McWhorter argues that although African-Americans stress hard work and initiative in private, they have assumed the mantle of victimhood in the eyes of the public and have thereby created a distorted meaning of what it is to be "authentically black." McWhorter takes on this mentality and its debilitating implications in topics ranging from rap music to the reparations movement, to the portrayal of African-Americans on television to racial profiling injecting new ideas and a fresh approach into the nationwide debate on race. Authentically Black is a powerful and important book that will inform and influence the opinions of Americans across all racial and political spectra.

Chapter 4

The "Can You Find the Stereotype?" Game

I once appeared on a television talk show with a black professor, where as usual I was cast as the "conservative" voice in opposition to his "liberal" one. As we chatted during a commercial break, I asked him, "What kind of thing leads you to think that racism is really something you and I deal with on a daily basis? Really-I want to know." He said, "Well, for one thing, the depiction of black people in films." I asked him, as politely as I could, "If I may, since I know you have children and all, are you able to get out to the movies much these days?" "Yes," he nodded-but then we were back on the air.

At that time, over the past year there had been so many black movies depicting successful, thriving black people that even I, something of a film fan, had been unable to catch them all. Bamboozled, The Brothers, and Kingdom Come had just left the theaters. Meanwhile, vibrant black characters were a fixture in mainstream movies as often as not-not long after the taping I caught Swordfish, where Halle Berry romanced two white male leads (one of them John Travolta) with not a peep in the script or from the media about these being "interracial romances." And for years by this point, a veritable flood of black sitcoms had been playing night after night on television, with African-Americans gliding across middle-class suburban sets indistinguishable from the ones decorating Everybody Loves Raymond and Friends.

The professor's comment was typical of a reflexive observation often heard, based on a going wisdom among thinking blacks that the media paint a "misleading" picture of black life. That observation was valid twenty-five years ago. But things have changed vastly since then. Unfortunately the New Double Consciousness drives too many blacks to pretend that they haven't.

Few books demonstrated this better than Donald Bogle's Primetime Blues. This exploration of that book addresses the dangers in insisting that anything a black person does in front of a camera is a "stereotype." The role that blacks play on television today is cause for celebration and hope. As a strong people, we must learn to admit when battles have been won.

Donald Bogle and I share having grown up in Philadelphia watching the growing presence of black Americans on television. Bogle has some years on me, having been in attendance since the 1960s. My memories of television begin in the early 1970s, when my mother required that I sit by her side to watch the new flood of black shows like Good Times, Sanford and Son, and The Jeffersons, as well as shows attending to race such as All in the Family and Maude. And of course, watching the entire run of Roots was de rigueur, even though it meant staying up past my bedtime for several nights in a row.

Part of this was surely due to black Americans' cultural affection for television. As Bogle notes in his Primetime Blues, a 1990 Nielsen survey showed that blacks watched an average of seventy hours of television a week as opposed to non-whites' forty-seven, and television was definitely a more central ritual in my household than in my white friends'. Yet my mother, a professor of social work, also considered black television a part of my early education in racial consciousness. She saw the shows as one way to help inculcate me with the basics of black history, the message that the whole world was not white, and that black America included many people not as fortunate as we were.

As we passed into the 1980s and 1990s, the black presence on television increased so incrementally that had I been born later, it would have been impractical to try to catch everything blacks did on the tube. In the 1950s, a white racist could be content that he or she would only catch blacks on television in the very occasional series, a few supporting roles, scattered variety show appearances, and one-shot dramatic productions a racist could easily refrain from watching. Today, blacks are so numerous on television in all of its genres, and represented in such a wide sociological and psychological range, that the same racist would feel inundated by blacks every time he or she turned on the set, incensed at how sympathetically blacks are portrayed and how intimately they interact with whites.

I have always seen this as a clear sign that the color line is ever dissolving in America. Bogle's Primetime Blues, however, is devoted to an argument that while progress has been made in the sheer numerical sense, overall the black presence on television has been an endless recycling of a certain passel of injuriously stereotypical images. The book will surely be interpreted by many as Doing the Right Thing, revealing the eternal racism always lurking behind developments that give the appearance of black progress. However, in the end the very founding of this volume upon that premise is more a matter of ideology local to our moment. Its very title marks Primetime Blues as a product of the sadly distortional, if well-meant, frames of reference that have dominated black thinkers' work since the late 1960s.

The early chapters on the 1950s and 1960s, however, are masterful, displaying Bogle at his best. Bogle did the chronicling of black popular entertainment a service with his Brown Sugar (1980), a survey of black "divas" from Ma Rainey to Donna Summer, bringing to the light of day the work of many figures who had faded from consciousness (especially before video made vintage performances more available). His 1997 biography of Dorothy Dandridge was a long overdue chronicle of the life and work of this world-class beauty and gifted actress, who was denied the career she should have had by the naked racism of her era and died in despair at forty-two.

With the crisp prose and masterful eye for the telling detail evident in those books, in Primetime Blues Bogle takes us through black television of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, bringing to light performances hitherto barely recorded in accessible sources. We learn that the very first experimental television broadcast, by NBC in 1939, was not, say, a half hour with Jack Benny, but a variety show starring none other than Ethel Waters. Bogle later traces Waters's little-known but fascinating television career, which included a stint playing the maid Beulah. This show was more representative of the black presence on stone-age television than its more frequently discussed contemporary Amos 'n' Andy, which even by the early 1950s was a rather tatty, recidivist affair rooted in minstrel humor by then passé, living more on the familiarity of the radio show than on freshness.

Beulah is remembered for depicting a black woman who has nothing better to do than center her life around the white family she works for, otherwise waiting for her ne'er-do-well boyfriend Bill to propose. Of course, this is not an exclusively black trope: Shirley Booth's Hazel and Ann B. Davis's Alice on The Brady Bunch occupied similar spaces. But what makes Beulah so excruciating to watch today is that she is, in addition, none too bright. Only with the utmost fortification of historical perspective can one today endure the opening tags, where Beulah looks us dead in the eye and offers such aperçus as the fact that she is "the maid who's always in the kitchen-but never knows what's cookin'...! HYEH HYEH HYEH HYEH..."

Copyright © John McWhorter, 2003. All rights reserved. This excerpt, or any parts thereof, may not be reproduced without permission.

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About the Author

John McWhorter is the author of the bestseller Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America, The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language, and four other books. He is associate professor of linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and a contributing editor to The City Journal and The New Republic. He has been profiled in the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and has appeared on Dateline NBC, Politically Incorrect, and The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.