Blacks on Television, Part 3

Authentically Black: Essays for the Black Silent Majority
by John McWhorter

(Page 3 of 3)

A far cry from Beulah in the Hendersons' kitchen. Yet amid it all, throughout most of the 1960s there was not a single "black show" proper on national television. This changed in 1968 with Julia, starring Diahann Carroll. The response to this show from black commentators signaled that a new era in black American ideology had arrived.

Julia portrayed a middle-class widow raising a young son while working as a nurse. With "assimilated" Diahann Carroll, with her chiseled features and crisp standard English, Julia wore the race issue lightly. The occasional episode had Julia encountering and handily defeating manifestations of what was then called "prejudice," but this was depicted as an occasional excrescence rather than as a deep-seated societal malaise. Largely, however, Julia was a sepia version of the concurrently running That Girl.

Quickly black writers, actors, and thinkers fiercely condemned this little show for neglecting the tragedies of blacks in the inner cities. The Black Power movement was just then forging a new sense of a "black identity" opposed to the mainstream one. This naturally recast the suffering poor blacks-those most unlike middle-class whites-as the "real" blacks, and middle-class blacks as having some explaining to do in deserting their "roots." The black literati's response to Julia was predicated upon this then new idea, now so deeply ensconced in much black thought as to no longer be processed as a "position" at all, that the very essence of blackness was suffering.

Obviously, then, a middle-class nurse living in a nice apartment and interacting easily with whites was "inauthentic." Objections to Amos 'n' Andy in the early 1950s were based in part on the fact that even if the show was undeniably amusing in itself, this was one of the only depictions of blacks on television. Good point-but by the time Julia aired, black misery and the new "black identity" were not exactly absent on other shows. It was not that Julia was the only view of blacks on television: the problem now was with this side of black life being shown at all.

The profoundness of the shift in consciousness is revealed in the realization that black commentators just fifteen years before would have eaten up Julia with a spoon. Amos 'n' Andy is again a case in point: early in the book Bogle presents a list of objections to the show by the NAACP. Crucially, in a full page of complaints, the fact that the show did not address black poverty is not even mentioned. Most black thinkers of the period would have had no more investment in seeing the unfortunate dutifully "explored" on television than white viewers had in seeing Appalachia or the poor rural South depicted, and would have applauded a portrait of members of their race doing well as an advance from the "Mammy" days. And yet we can hardly say that the NAACP of the period, sponsoring efforts that would soon result in Brown v. Board of Education, was uninterested in black poverty. The difference hinged on the contrast between an ideology focused on achievement despite acknowledged obstacles, versus one focused upon the treacherous idea that achievement is just lucky until all obstacles are removed. This idea automatically casts those blessed with only ordinary capabilities and not blessed with luck-i.e., the poor-as "real" black people.

This ideology remains with us today. It includes Bogle, and as such, it is at Julia that Primetime Blues takes a disappointing detour from intelligent survey into a narrow, almost numbingly circular litany. Namely, Bogle frames the thirty remaining years of black work on television as an almost unbroken procession of veiled injustice and exploitation. Bogle is hardly alone in this, and his enviable gifts as a chronicler remain unassailable. But this book remains important as an object lesson.

As of black television in the late 1960s, Bogle falls into the same trap that mars the second edition of his Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks. First appearing in 1973, this book, my first primer on blacks in film, aptly identified the eponymous five stereotypes as running throughout blacks' assignments in American movies. Bogle made the useful point that the "blaxploitation" genre, whatever its visceral thrill and the work it gave black actors, was recapitulating the very types on view as far back as Birth of a Nation. However, Bogle's update in 1989 revealed a man with a hammer to whom everything is a nail. What was a valid and penetrating thesis applied to blacks in film up to the early 1970s is reflexively applied to the next fifteen years, despite the stunning maturation of the black role on the silver screen that occurred during the period.

Eddie Murphy is a dynamic phenomenon playing lead roles in film after film, and often producing them as well? No-because he is sexually appetitive, he is merely a recapitulation of the oversexed black "Buck" that chases the Cameron's young daughter off a cliff in Birth of a Nation. Was Lonette McKee's performance in Sparkle a signature piece of acting? Not quite. Because she is light-skinned, her sad fate in the plot renders her a "tragic mulatto," despite her character not being of mixed race. ("One wonders if McKee's Sister must, like Dandridge's important characters, be disposed of, as perhaps a kind of warning to other sexual, aggressive black women," Bogle proposes, with nary an attempt to demonstrate that this was on the mind of the Jewish scriptwriter.) And so on. Predictably, Richard Pryor, speaking for the ghetto, gets one of Bogle's rare stamps of approval-but with the qualification that he may exemplify a new stereotype aborning, the "Crazy Nigger."

Bogle transfers this same frame of reference to the rest of Primetime Blues, deftly pigeonholing almost every black contribution to series television from 1970 to 2000 into one of several stereotype categories. The result is a kind of game one might call "Can You Find the Stereotype?" which has increasingly slighter relationship to its data set as the years pass, and eventually becomes a kind of idle exercise that one regrets seeing Bogle waste his abilities upon.

All large, nurturing black women, for example, are "Mammies," recapitulations of Hattie McDaniel and Beulah. This includes Della Reese's Tess on Touched by an Angel as well as our beloved Oprah, whose inspiring success is thereby rendered suspect. Meanwhile, a feisty black woman who speaks her mind to men is a "Sapphire," the idea being that the Kingfish's shrewish wife on Amos 'n' Andy set a "stereotype" about the black female now best avoided. Thus our pleasure in watching LaWanda Page's immortal Aunt Esther on Sanford and Son or Nell Carter's lead character on Gimme a Break! and elsewhere must by all rights be a guilty one.

Furthermore, even nurturing middle-aged black men are evidence of racism eternal. I will never forget a black drama professor, quite oriented toward the "Can You Find the Stereotype?" game that Bogle's film book helped to legitimize, speculating in 1991 that the rotund stature of the black television fathers James Avery (The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air) and Reginald VelJohnson (Family Matters) signaled the emergence of a new stereotype to replace the Mammy, the "Pappy." However, the similarity of these two actors' body shapes turned out to be a coincidence-there has arisen no trend in casting fat black men as fathers. Yet Bogle, too, seems primed to find a "Pappy" stereotype in the air, dutifully griping that Lou Meyers's wonderful portrait of a grumpy but loving cook on A Different World was "something of a fussy mammylike character."

The prickly black guy, in the meantime, is the "Angry Black Man," stigmatized by the writers as "other" (Eriq La Salle's Benton on E.R.). Yet the black man, or woman, who does not stick up for the race is deracialized, "tokenism at its worst" (Julia, Brian Stokes Mitchell's "Jackpot" Jackson on Trapper John, M.D.). To be fair, one assumes that Bogle would prefer to see a happy balance be struck. But then he comes up with a way to dissect and condemn almost every attempt even in this vein. When Blair Underwood's Rollins on L.A. Law begins one subplot avoiding taking a race-based stand on a case, then rises into the Politically Correct indignation, and finally withdraws into an ambiguous stance in the end-a pretty good depiction of how many successful blacks feel about race issues in our moment-Bogle chides the writers for taking the character "back to the mainstream shore." Avery Brooks's solemn, insular, culturally rooted Hawk character on Spenser: For Hire is fascinating, but ultimately neutralized in lending his services to his white partner rather than working against the mainstream.

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

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.