TELEVISION AND THE STRUGGLE FOR BLACKNESS a naa.Watching Race Television and the Struggle for Blackness Herman Gray With a New Introduction University of Minnesota Press Minneapolis » LondonChapter 7 was originally published, in slighty diferent form, as “Recodings: Pos: sibilities and Limitations in Commercial Television Representations of African American Culture," Quarterly Review of Film and Video 13, nos, 1-3 (Fall 1991) 117-30. Reprinted with peemission of Harwood Academic Publishers. Copyright 1995 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota Introduction copyright 2004 by the Regents ofthe University of Minnesota Al rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechani cal, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Published by the University of Minnesota Press 111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290 Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520 berpswweupeesssumnedu ISBN 0-8166-4510-8 A Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the Library ‘of Congress Printed in the United Staes of America on acid-free paper ‘The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer. 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 0s 04 10987654321 In memory of Lucille Dudly, my grandmother, who passed away while was writing this book, and for Maya, my nieceContents Acknowledgments Introduction 1. 2 es: 10. Black Cultural Politics and Commercial Culture Reaganism and the Sign of Blackness ‘African American Discourses and the Sign of Blackness ‘The Transformation of the Television Industry and the Social Production of Blackness The Politics of Representation in Network Television It’s a Different World Where You Come From Frank’s Place: Possibilities, Limitations, and Legacies Spectacles, Sideshows, and Irreveren: In Living Color Jammin’ on the One! Some Reflections ‘on the Politics of Black Popular Culture Margin (in)to Future: From a Racial Past toa “Different” Future xiii 14 35 57 70 93 113 130 147 162Notes References Index 177 187 199 Acknowledgments Dish Clarence Thoms conficmation earings and again after ‘a PBS broadcast featuring Cornel West and Sister Souljah, a very dear friend and colleague, Hardy Frye, would often invite me out for a drink in order to discuss these (and other) media events that focused so squarely on blacks. Hardy would invariably begin our conversation with, “Gray, you are the media expert, explain this shit to me.” Now, I should explain that Hardy is a professor of sociology with a long and respected history asa scholar, teacher, writer, and, most important, po- litical activist. Frye cut his political teeth in SNCC’s Mississippi voter registration campaigns during the “freedom summers” in the 1960s. But something about the new conditions of black political discourse— the facts that television figured so prominently, that cultural matters ‘occupied such a central place, and that litle of it seemed to have a di- rect and measurable impact on the material lives and circumstances of large numbers of poor and disenfranchised blacks—scemed deeply puzzling and troubling to him. ‘My conversations with Hardy (and other friends as well) about these matters seemed to accelerate as more and more debates, contro- versies, and spectacles appeared in the media in the form of controver-x ACKNOWLEDGMENTS sies about gansta rap, the Los Angeles riots, and the Whoopi Goldberg Friars Club roast, the humor on HBO's Russel! Simmons' Def Comedy Jam, and the antics of comedian Martin Lawrence on network televi- sion. Hardy's rich political history and the practical organizational and political concerns that underwrite them did not help him make sense of increasingly troubling representations of and claims on black- ness in commercial media and popular culture. Hardy's impatience with the disturbing spectacles and frustrating (often naive) cultural politics is emblematic, for he is certainly not alone in his frustration and impatience with the turn toward media and culture and what seems like an increasing disconnection from the immediacy, urgency, and materiality of social transformation. This frustration stems not so much from a desire to return to the direct o- ‘ganizing campaigns of the 1960s as, perhaps, from the fact that the politics of media and culture and the struggles over representation that occur there seem to take up so much space, transforming everything into matters of spin, image, and discourse. The preoccupation with cultural politics appears to displace and gloss over any connection to the material circumstances and conditions of people’s everyday lives, translating the difficult and messy work of political organization and struggle for social transformation and social justice into an endless analysis of consumer commodities, role models, and images. Along with Hardy, I've had countless conversations and provoca- tive exchanges with friends, colleagues, and students about media and cultural politics. This book is an extension of many of these conversa- tions. In thinking through the issues explored here, I have had a great deal of help. I am grateful to the many colleagues and friends whose support, encouragement, and community made the completion of this book possible. Towe a special debt of gratitude to Rosa Linda Fregoso, my com- panion, confidante, and intellectual partner. A fine film scholar in het ‘own right, Rosa Linda has a critical understanding of culeural politics, representation, and feminism that helped me to make sense of both the power and the subtleties of the influence of media and popular culture in everyday life. In return I, along with her son Sergio, have tried to impress upon her the power and fun of the small screen, My thanks also to Xochitl for help with all the names, titles, and plot lines of vari- ‘ous television episodes and to Sergio for turning me on to those amaz- ing commercials for Sega Genesis. (Hey Serge, Sega!) Thanks to my parents, Lillie and Frank; to my sisters, Anne and Shirley; and to my niece, Maya, for being there for me. In the course of writing this book I have formed many new friend- ships and deepened old ones. Clyde Taylor, Tommy Lott, and I talked ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xi about black cultural politics many a Sunday afternoon in Boston Melvin Oliver was an especially gracious host and earnest sponsor during my year at UCLA. George Lipsitz has been an important sup porter and intellectual influence over the years, and never more so than in the writing ofthis book. Robin D. G. Kelley, Horace Newcomb, and Lawrence Grossberg provided careful readings and critical comments on the manuscript. My editor, Janaki Balchle, at the University of Min- nesota Press was patient, encouraging, and determined in shepherding is project through to the end. Nites Crechawn Valerie Smith, Teshome Gabriel, Richard Yarbrough, Ella Taylor, and Arthe Anthony provided a welcoming and stimulating community during a year’s stay in Los Angeles. Sharon Baker and Earl Williams opened their home to me and were enor- mously helpful while I was establishing contacts within the television industry. My thanks also to those who have studied and created forms of television and popular culture, and were willing to talk with me about that: Marlon Riggs, Vivian Kleiman, Patricia Turner, Clark White, Kobena Mercer, Sally Steenland, Stanley Robertson, Susan Fales, Do- lores Morris, Kellie Goode, Phyllis Vinson-Tucker, Harvey Lehman, Marla Gibbs, Frank Dawson, Elliot Butler Evans, David Scott, Hamid Naficy, John’ Brown Childs, Richard Allen, Cynthia Martin, Kristal Brent Zook, Jimmie Reeves, Richard Campbell, Manthia Diawara, William Bielby, Hardy T. Frye, Tricia Rose, David Wellman, Sandra Ball-Rokeach, B. Ruby Rich, Lourdes Portillo, Saidya Hartman, Gil- bert McCauley, Marti Taylor, Edward Guerrero, and Alvina Quin- tana. I learned a lot from watching a lot of television with Jeffrey Mitchell, Travis Dixon, and Kim Richards, all students at UCLA. ‘The University of California Office of the President provided the U.C. President's Postdoctoral Fellowship that enabled me to take a year’ leave from teaching. A Faculty Research Grant from the Univer- sity of California, Santa Cruz, Division of Social Science, also enabled me to complete the research and writing of this book. Special thanks {go to Claudia Mitchell Kernan and Patricia, Jan, and Sandra at the Center for African American Studies at UCLA as well as the adminis- trative staff in the UCLA Department of Sociology. The staff at the In- structional Media Lab at Powell Library, UCLA, went beyond the call of duty to record and make available episodes from the 1990 televi- sion season ‘My thanks also to friends and colleagues at the following campuses for the opportunity to present various stages of this work: Center for African American Studies, UCLA; Department of Sociology, Univer- sity of California, Santa Barbara; Ethnic Studies Department, Univer-xii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS sity of California, San Diego; Ethnic Studies Department, University of California, Berkeleys Center for Cultural Studies, University of Cali fornia, Santa Cruz; Humanities Research Institute, University of Cali- fornia, Irvine; Department of Communication, University of Michi- gan; Department of Communication, University of Texas; Annenberg School for Communication, University of Southern California. Introduction ike the parade of new shows trotted out at the beginning of each fall season, television is perpetually on the move, defined by the cult of the “new”—new shows, new seasons, new players, new faces, new hits, new mergers, and new brands. Shows come and go, char- acters move on or disappear, and manufactured preoccupations with a given show or episode quickly become dated. How then to write about television representations of blackness so that both the small details of the representation of black life in America and the more general structures and productive logic of television as a representa- tional system are interrogated? In other words, how do we approach the “persistence” of television, as Lynn Spigel might put it (Spigel 2003)? How do we approach television's role in the representation of blackness, in the production of a racial common sense, or what Darnell Hunt calls “raced ways of seeing,” and do so in a way that enables us to actually “see” television (Hunt 1997, 1999)? Television and the Struggle over Meaning In the first edition of Watching Race, I framed television and the representations of black people that circulate there as a discursive sitexiv INTRODUCTION where contests over the meaning(s) of blackness are waged (Watkins 1998). In the decade of the 1980s, the historical context of the book's concerns, contests in media and image cultures over the representa- tion and meaning of blackness (including the position of black people in the nation) were often mean-spirited. The cultural meaning and social terms of the nation—concerning social policies, citizenship, morality, rights and entitlements, and access to resources—were the objects of symbolic struggles over meaning on television, in news- papers, in policy circles, and in the academy. Conceiving of television as a dense site or place of struggle over the symbolic meanings (and uses) of blackness in the production of the nation admittedly gives television a central role in cultural politics. Thinking about television in this way also emphasizes television's multiple logics, locating it contextually as a representational system, and weakening the conceptual grip of viewing television as over. determined by other effects, such as its industrial system or economic structure, Approaching television in terms of its multiple logics, social contexts, and contradictions is a way of keeping black people in the ‘game as agents of our image construction. At the level of cultural Production, for example, Spike Lee's critical riff on television's (and Marlon Riggs's) representation of blacks (and black complicity in the Production of those representations) in Bamboozled and Lee’s use of cinema and television as a means of productively intervening in the television representation of blacks (with The King of Comedy and his planned HBO television series) show the importance of black cultural interventions in these “struggles” over meanings. As a matter of cultural politics, regarding television as a contested terrain rather than as a finished effect of powerful external determi- nants makes struggles over the meanings and uses of representations of blacks productive points of engagement. In creative hands like those of Spike Lee or Marlon Riggs, critical thinking about media and tele- vision enables cultural analysts and cultural producers to rethink, cti- tique, even play around with representations of blacks across a range of media and image cultures, histories, genres, geographies, and tech~ nologies. Some of the most imaginative engagements with television images of blacks are taking place in music videos, novels, Web pages, cinematic parodies, and theater, and not just academic critique, One effect of some of these creative engagements is, as Stuart Hall puts it, to get stereotyped representations moving again, to dislodge their Powerful grip on social meanings and cultural imagination. Since representations of blackness travel across different discursive geographies and technologies, there is some analytic and political INTRODUCTION xv benefit to be gained from thinking about black representations, es- pecially those generated by black people, in tclatonship to theater cinema, literature, music video, television programming, academic discourse, and popular practices. Considering images and their trav- cls in this way conceives of this representational field as a complex unit of analysis that makes possible critical examinations of compet- ing claims on blackness. These competing claims can be made from various quarters (discursive, material, empirical) and their political significance can be measured in terms of television as a constitutive practice where brands, markets, demographics, polls, lifestyles, con- sumption, and consumers stand in for identities, communities, sub- jects, and agents. Such a formulation encourages thinking about the relationship of discursive claims and representations to actual struc- tural positions, social practices, cultural meanings, and the complex constellations of power in which black people are enmeshed, Privileging any one of these registers—say the empirical over the representational or the discursive over the material—risks reducing studies of television representations of black culture and black people to preoccupations wit sie or identity, tar discourse or instil logic. Such a myopic approach preserves the realm of the empirica and the material for the more consequential determinants of social life ‘while ignoring the constitutive aspect of culture and representation, an aspect that is central if black people are to be regarded as players in the struggle over the meanings and uses of blackness. Remaking the Nation In the years since Watching Race initially appeared, there has been a significant acceleration and, in some quarters, a consolidation in the convergence of new technologies and the pace of change in trans- national ownership, global circulation, and relations of production in telecommunication media (Caldwell 2002, McChesney 1999). These changes ushered in different forms of content and service delivery (in the ease of slevision ches inchde everything fom digital signal 0 TiVo®); technological capabilities like digitization and miniaturiza- tion, which have generated new forms and practices of networking bility, and privatization; and the production of new publics, new notions of identity, and legal debetes over authorship, copyright, and property (Caldwell 2002, 2003a; Everett and Caldwell 2003; McCarthy 2001). Tn American commercial media and popular image culture the pres- ence of black images in the national imagination has certainly becomexvi INTRODUCTION ‘more visible, though not without trouble. In the case of popular music, sports, and fashion, black style and youth culture are at the center of representations of American popular culture. Video images, advertis- ing, and cinematic images of black hip-hop artists, athletes, and youth dominate commercial culture. These same images also travel widely around the world representing and selling American culture. As cul~ tural signifiers of urban lifestyles and identities, representations of black youth culture are major conduits through which the commodi- fication of multiculturalism—sexuality, youth, race, and gender— Proceeds. For example, with United Paramount's (UPN) Monday night black block programming, the mini-television network con- tinues to perfect the logic of the market niche, effectively marketing black youth culture in selected television markets (Haggins 2001). In the United States this branding and marketing of blackness takes place against the backdrop of expanding state authority and federal bureaucracy, the increasing scrutiny and regulation of citizenship, and the normalization of a war economy. In the wake of the events of September 11, 2001, the actual discursive work of producing the nation and citizenship is expressed most dramatically in the Patriot Act, the announced but legally undeclared “war on terror,” and the consolidation of the national security state, Meanwhile, the salience of race remains central to this discursive production (Brown ct al. 2003, Haney-Lopez 2003). Thus, for example, the illegal disenfran- chisement of black voters in Florida was pivotal in the presidential election of 2000, and, despite the visibility and mobility of blacks in television representations and popular culture, racial disparities on a host of social and economic indicators, from prison incarceration to ‘unemployment, remain significant (Davis 2003, Brown et al. 2003). In the first edition of Watching Race, | assigned a central role to television, its representation of blackness, and the multiple meanings that blackness evoked in dramatizing the political and cultural shifts, alliances, and circumstances that occurred in the Reagan 1980s. I sought to gauge its influence on the construction of the dominant idea of nation (in terms of whiteness, morality, and citizenship). 1 did 50 by examining the logic of television as a system of production and representation and by highlighting the multiple discourses through which meanings and claims on blackness were produced and circu- lated (including those by black people). Indeed my aim was to center competing claims on blackness from different quarters inside and outside black discourses—nationalist, neoconservative, neoliberal, feminist, gay and lesbian, social science—in order to detail how and where these claims and the meanings they produced entered ot failed INTRODUCTION xvii enter cultural cieculation (including television). (One of my reasons dor cophatishig tangled onto ot con bt the calmal csecl- tion of claims was to emphasize the power that constructions take on atthe level of everyday life and common sence, “the black welfare queen” —despite the empirical and historical evidence, whic! suggests otherwise) (Kelley 1997). Inthe aftermath of 9/11, thinking about cultural politics as, among other things, contests over the meanings and uses of representations of blacks in media is still useful, With the emerging technological ca- pacities for the storage, circulation, and manipulation of information, struggles over the meaning of blackness bear directly, for example, on the marketing of blackness as a “lifestyle niche.” The perfection of the new digital storage, retrieval, and networking technologies used by global media and entertainment firms to market their products has, for example, hastened the distinction between blackness as a dis- cursive category of representation (what I called, at the time, hyper- blackness) and a contested or unstable constellation of meanings, and blackness as representing black people as the historical agents of their social world. The instability of these meanings and representations need not always result in a decided disadvantage for black people. Indeed, the word “struggle,” which appears in this book’s title, points to the long history of black struggle from a disadvantaged position to shift the terms of power. believe that television remains a decisive arena in which struggles for representation, or more significantly, struggles over the meanings of representation, continue to be waged at various levels of national politics, expressive culture, and moral authority. As I have argued, in the Reagan years the conservative claim on American national identity depended on the production and circulation of specific representations of blackness (e.g., welfare cheats, unwed mothers, violent gang mem. bers) that could function as the centerpiece of manufactured resent- ments, moral panics, and fears. These deeply emotional racialized fears appealed directly to white working and middle-class insecurity, uncertainty, and unsafety (Bauman 1999). Powerfully rendered in television pictures and news narratives but rarely named explicitly, television representations of these threats to safety, security, and cer- tainty were located in, and then naturalized in, the bodies of poor blacks and immigrants (and even more ironically, in poor whites) (Haney-Lopez 2003). Constituted in the very televisual representa~ tion that establishes and then repeats the implied link between in- security and blackness (and by extension, the link between whiteness, order, and security), it was easy for neoconservatives to claim that, ifxviii INTRODUCTION left unchecked, blacks and the poor posed threats to the stability of the civic and moral order. Framed by the 2000 presidential election (in which the disenfran- chisement of the black vote in Florida figured so prominently), the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and the subsequent war, the debate and subse quent 2003 Supreme Court ruling on the University of Michigan's use of affirmative action in its admissions process, the social production and cultural meanings of blackness, atleast as they bear on politics in the United States, inherit some of the features, admittedly with a twist, of the 1980s and 1990s. With the arrival in 2000 of George W. Bush ‘on the national political scene, there were renewed attacks on and at~ tempts to discredit the domestic policies, structures, and organizations intended to respond to persistent forms of racial, gender, and sexual discrimination, inequality, and injustice. The politically conservative administration of George W. Bush has consistently attacked the war- rant and systematically weakened the role of the state in civil rights protections on a host of issues, including racial discrimination, civil liberties, and abortion. At the same time the Bush government has seared up and sustained a war economy and transferred wealth to the top of the class structure through a series of strategic tax cuts With the discourse of diversity, the marketing of blackness as an urban lifestyle, and the continued visibility of black images of middle~ class success, one begins to sense the terms of a conservative bid for a Post-civil rights color-blind America, where at least two of the most visible and powerful guardians of American security and safety, Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, are African American. If high-profile appointments of African Americans by Bush are any indication, and if the representations of black lifestyle success in commercial popular Culture are to be believed, this neoconservative color-blind version of the nation is beyond race and racism (Brown et al. 2003) is ltele wonder, too. Instead of focusing on the sorts of television images of black and immigrant criminals (gang members, illegal border erossers, welfare mothers, crack babies, and drug smugglers) that we saw during some of the moral panics of the Reagan years, it is easy for conservatives to conclude from the presence of blacks in music videos, in sports, on television, and on the big screen that we have arrived at that idealized American landscape of racial equality and color-blindness. Moreover, in 2002 and 2003, it was white male CEOs who were paraded in front of the news cameras in handcuffs with their faces covered, rather than black or Latino gang members. How ironic ironic because, despite the changes in the race and class of television’s INTRODUCTION xix newest subjects of public degradation and humiliation, the cultural loge of race continues ro do powerfl work. That i 0 say, the dis cursive operations and historical memories that mark, locate, ani then naturalize threats to the social order in black or brown bodies do not seem to work to the same degree or in the same way through the bodies of white males. Again the seductions of these television representations demand a way of bringing more readings to bear on the meaning of these images of white criminality relative to the racalized meaning ofthe nation. In the idealized desir for national unity served up nightly on evening cable and network newscasts, new ee ee quickly become the bodies and cultures that the logic of race marks as different and therefore potentially threatening to the national order. Television's role in this process is absolutely central, for itis television that makes these images and representations of difference meaning- ful, legible, and familiar. Niche Identities social, technological, and Among the most significant changes in the social, tec cultural field of television that bear directly on the images and tele- vison mpreaatations of blacks are developmenes fn the indo technological, and marketing structure of the television system that influence the actual placement of black shows in the broadcast sched- ule, Described variously as the neo-network era, the period of con- vergence, and the post-network era, this shift represents a logic or way of organizing television production and marketing in order to more efficiently reach desired audiences, maximizing the articulation of brand identities to network content and doing so without damag- ing other parts of the media empire, product line, or brand identity. ‘These strategies bear on black representations in a very curious way (Caldwell 2002, 2003a). ; For an example of how these developments influence television rep- resentations of blacks, consider the case of mini-networks like UPN and Warner Brothers (Haggins 2001, 2003). The structuring logic of television in the neo-network era creates, cultivates, and then, by tai- loring and targeting specific program content, simultaneously exploits diferent matker segments. Like repurpored program content these market segments can be quickly recombined, abandoned, or further divided for the benefit of the broadcaster. Central to this structuring logic of product diversification and market differentiation is the niche market, global organizational reach, new technologies of monitoringxx INTRODUCTION and delivery, and the mobility of the corporate brand identity. Niche markets enable mini-networks and cable broadcasters to target audi. fences according to an endless array of possibilities—party affiliation, race, gender, sexual orientation, class, region, or simply taste—and to supply these markets with programs and content that advertisers can relentlessly dis-ageregate and re-aggregate through whatever cate, Bories they so desire, Moreover, program content can be scheduled, aired, tied together, branded, and distributed across different markets and forms of media, each tailored to specific demographics and con- sumer identities (Caldwell 2002, 2003a, 2003b). This strategy has served traditional networks, newer netlets, cable operations, and related Internet Web sites well. It accounts for where black programming shows up in the schedule, especially what one might see as either the proliferation or the confinement of black representations to specific evenings, time slots, and blocks, Network Programmers have begun to counterprogram black-themed television shows—scheduling black shows head to head in the same time slot on the same evening. The flexibility of this new logic enables program. ‘mers and advertisers to construct audience identifications with black Programming across an evening’s programming strip within urban ‘markets with sizable black populations, like Los Angeles, Atlanta, Chi- ago, and New York, while forgoing (for their purposes) less desirable markets. In 2002 in the Los Angeles market, for instance, on Monday evenings from 8:00 p.m. through the 10:00 p.m. newscasts, the UPN affiliate constructs what I call a black viewing space in its use of ad- vertising, news teasers, and programming content (Haggins 2001), In short, this logic works to construct niche identifications (and identities) in different geographical locations, forming a kind of (black) imagined community of urban dwellers. Most significantly using the “brand” as a common signifier and following the kind of imagined “identity” of the sort celebrated in hip-hop discourse, this logic works to construct blackness as a point of identification that cuts across racial positions and histories. This programming strategy is not con. fined to blackness, but as the recent upsurge of interest in gay aesthet- ics and lifestyle indicates, it includes taste, culture, gender, age, and sexuality, On other evenings, for example, the UPN affiliate in Los Angeles uses similar strategies, advertising, and content to construct positions of identification for adolescent girls and, on a different evening, for adolescent boys (Haggins 2001). This way of using pro= {gramming to hail an audience is used most often on local low-power specialty cable outlets. What is new is its use by corporate commercial broadcasters in major markets. Whereas small specialty broadcasters INTRODUCTION xxi could never hope to reach a “broad” audience and thus settle for the niche as a matter of necessity, corporate commercial broadcasters, like cable operators and mini-networks, adopt this strategy and thus abandon the concept of a broad audience as their most desirable mar- ket. It is in these spaces of shifting industrial logics, technological convergences, and marketing strategies that some interesting claims on blackness are being made by varied sites of production within the commercial landscape. Such claims are being made in a variety of television venues and forms, including drama from HBO Productions, documentary, and sketch comedy and variety. Television Representations of Blackness If, at the level of programming content, one looks purely for “changes” in the distribution of black actors and characters across genres and at the relative concentration of blacks in certain genres (sports, music, situation comedy) as compared to others (news, magazines, Sunday morning punditry), things are getting worse, not better, for African Americans on American television (Ryan 2002}. Indeed, recent stud~ ies by the NAACP that have regularly monitored the distribution of roles, character development, and “positive” portrayals of blacks, Latinos, and Asians on television continue to give the television in- dustry poor marks and express continuing concern about what they see as the dismal state of minority representation on commercial net- work television (Elber 2003, NAACP 2003). At the level of interrogation that emphasizes cultural frameworks, social context, and the relationship of black representation to other sites and forms of cultural production, a cursory sampling of specific television seasons between 2000 and 2003 shows little appreciable change in the representations of blackness on television. Television images of blackness do include a token number of blacks in authority 2s judges, lawyers, department heads and detectives, and as vitins and perpetrators of crime, with a requisite number of black and multi- src havonhips and friendships collected on the periphery of the action. Unless they appear on what is otherwise marketed as a black show, television representations of blackness seem to be in a steady state, one that is sometimes more insulting, sometimes less, occasion- ally celebratory, but no more or less substantial than during any other season (Haggins 2001). The family sition comedy a al he primary smn of lack vi lity and intimacy, and about the only place for access to the interiori- yor Mack i on American stare tlorson, Thanks wo Tha byvex INTRODUCTION ‘Show, black upper-middle-class families became as safe, banal, and routine a staple of television fare as white families. Every television season since the show first appeared in the mid-1980s has included & family that black folk (and more recently Latino and black working- class families) could cal their own. Each new installment-—My Wife and Kids, The Hugelys, Bernie Mac, One on One, The Tracy Morgan Show, The Parkers—updates black family life, offering new variations and confirming in the process the narrative ofthe family (comedy) a5 the universal place of familiarity and similarity for all viewers Middle-class mobility is also important to this story of black representations of family since the narrative of class arrival brought with i all the attendant problems and challenges that were once the province of middle-class whites. Blacks, too, were normal-—-meaning just like middle-class whites. Now that the black middle class eas periodically stand in as a normative ideal and some of the burdens of representation have eased a bit, television representations of black. families, relationships (Soul Food), and friendships (Girlfriends) have been liberated discursively to move more decidedly into other zones, of specialization—caring for the self and the family. Black parents worry over children’s performances in school, high school graduates search for colleges and universities to attend, and chil cre, even \erapy and divorce, occasionally find theit way into the plot lines snd narratives ofteeison’s ie cme sygoing and attractive, these familiar tropes of the - vision family are the perfect barometers of Back visbilty a Cognition in television's national imagination. Against the insecurity of an increasingly dangerous global world and amidst the cluttex of conflit and insults, the anxieties of reality television that these shows portray serve as a calming diversion and a normative poin reference. Inthe political and cultural landscape of» post rigs common sense committed to color-blindness on the question of rece these epeentatios of Blackness (like Condoleezza Rice and Colin "owell), function for many as incontrovertible evidence : tion of the American deans ube evidence ofthevealia Black Cultural Pol ics Despite this stubborn and powerful common sense about color- blindness, I want to stress the continued necessity of thinking Show struggles for representation in terms of the cultural production of black difference, including generational challenges and critical dis- courses that question the nation and identity as the central basis of —, INTRODUCTION xi black belonging and identification. In particular I want to foreground forms and strategies of media and political activism that continue to center the traditional television networks as the dominant cultural and media space most salient for the production of black recognition, visibility, and belonging. In other words, beyond the dominant cultural spaces organized (and reproduced) by the commercial television networks, there are ‘emerging and vibrant black public spheres whose cultural transac- tions unsettle and challenge traditional representations and meanings of blackness and forms of association; these art and culture worlds express instead new articulations and possibilities for being black (Gray 2004, forthcoming). As cultural critics, producers, scholars, and theorists like Anna Everett, Beth Coleman, Paul Miller, Alongra Nelson, George Lewis, Steve Coleman, Pamela Z., OutKast, Herbie Hancock, Mathew Ship, and others show by their examples, these are spaces and practices where black artists and cultural workers use the new digitally based technologies, old forms of representation, the articu- lation of markets, the brand, and the logo to construct different no- tions of blackness and black cultural practice (Everett 2002, Nelson 2002). These forms of cultural production and cultural practice have ‘encouraged me to rethink the question of representation, the place of television in the struggle for representation, and the politics of culture that it underwrites. Such struggles for representation and the periodic victories they secure also pressure our notion of cultural politics and our commitments beforchand to what suitable representations might look like in the end. One must seriously ask, is the family ideal I describe above, for instance, the only one desired for television rep- resentations of blackness? In terms of program content, is it simply more of this (middle-class) version or that (hip-hop nation) version of blackness that is at the heart of what media activists desire? In light of new strategies of production and circulation, how should we think about media politics and the most desirable spaces and imaginations from which to construct and circulate notions of blackness? Is this the space of the commercial television network? T chink that it is in the productive spaces of convergences that new combinations of music, technology, information, imagination, poli- tics, and networks are being made, and that the struggle for blackness is moving off the exclusive preserve of the television screen, while still remaining dependent on and connected to it. These places and cultural spaces of possibility are some of the most interesting and vital spaces where black claims on representation and blackness are being expressed (Everett and Caldwell 2003, Everett 2002, Nelsonxxiv INTRODUCTION 2002). Perhaps they will make their way to large and small screens of all sorts in the near future, and in so doing they will help to install a different common sense and imagination about blackness, race, and the nation, University of California, Santa Cruz ‘March 2004 References Bauman, Zygmunt. 1999. In Search of Politics. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press. Brown, Michael K., Martin Carnoy, Eliot Currie, Troy Duster, David B, Oppen- heimes, Marjorie M. Shules, and David Wellman, eds. 2003. Whitewushing Race: The Myth of a Color-Blind Society. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, Caldwell, John T. 2001. “Global Conglomeration and the Performance of Local ‘dentiy.” Introduction to Emergences 11 (2): 189-98, special issue, part 2 ed Joho 7. Caldwell and Bambi Haggins —— 2002, “The Business of New Media: Technological Revolution/Institutional Evolution." In The New Media Book, ed. Dan Harris. London: BEI Press, 2003a, "Convergence Television: Aggregating Form and Re-purposing Content in the Culture of Conglomeration.” In The Persistence of Televisions ed, Lynn Spigel. Dushams Duke University Press 2003b, “Second-shift Media Aesthetics: Programming, Interactivity, and User Flows.” In New Media: Theories and Practices of Digitextuality ed Anna Everett and John Caldwell, New York: Routledge Davis, Angela ¥. 2003. Are Prisons Obsolete? New York: Seven Stories Press Elber, Lynn. 2003, “TV Coverage of Latinos Rife with Stereotypes, tady Says." San Francisco Chronicle, Decembet 12,111 Everett, Anna, 2002. “The Revolution Will Be Digitized: Afrocenticity and the Digital Public Sphere.” Social Text 20 (2); 125-46. Everett, Anna, and John T. Caldwell, eds. 2003, “Issues inthe Theory and Practice of Media Convergence.” In New Media: Theories and Practice of Digitextual 'y, 125-46, New York: Routledge Gray, Herman. 2004 (forthcoming). Cultural Moves. Berkeley and Los Angeles University of California Press Haggins, Bambi, 2001, “Why ‘Beulah and ‘Andy’ Still Play Todays Minstrelsy in the New Millenniuss." Emergences 11 (2): 249-67, 2003 (forthcoming). “United Paramount Network (UPN)." In The Ency «lopedia of Television, ed. Howard Newcomb, Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn Haney-Lopez, [an F. 2003. Racism on Trial: The Chicano Fight for Justice. Cam: bridge: Harvard University Press, Hunt, Darnel, 1997. Screening the Los Angeles “Riots": Race, Seeing, and Resis- tance, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press ~ 1999, 0. J: Fact and Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Johnson, Vieworia. 2000, *Welcome Home? CBS, Pax-TV, and ‘Heartlend’ Values in a Neo-Network Era.” The Velvet Light Trap 46 (Fall): 40-Sé Kelley, Robin D, G. 1997, Yo Mama's Disfunktional. New Yorks Beacon Pres. INTRODUCTION xxv MeCarthy, Anna. 2001. Ambient Television: Visual Culture and Public Sp1 Black Cultural Politics and Commercial Culture Jit comemporse polities of blac popular culture much etical attention has been given to identity and expressive culture. These critical discourses and the popular attention they have generated play a strategic role in the maintenance of and challenge to various systems of domination. My aim in this book is to extend these critical dis- courses and cultural strategies, particularly as they bear on comme: cial electronic mass-media forms, especially television, I examine crit cal debates about black expressive culture and black cultural productions within television as a means of exploring processes by which questions about the American racial order—and, within it, blackness—are constructed, reproduced, and challenged. Let me say early and directly that my focus on commercial network television and the struggles over the meanings and representations of blackness ex- pressed and enacted there quite deliberately shifts attention to com- mercial media as a site of cultural polities. ‘The chapters that follow are guided by many of the theoretical ad- vances and suggestions developed under the rubric of cultural studies, especially as these have been developed and applied by feminists and scholars of color. Most generally, I am concerned with trying to clarify2 BLACK CULTURAL POLITICS AND COMMERCIAL CULTURE jnst how we might talk about, theorize, and understand the represen- tations of “blackness” presented in commercial culture, especially net. work television and the political projects in which these representa. tions are deployed. The decade of the 1980s constitutes the social and historical staging ground for this examination, I have elected to situate the discussion in the 1980s because itis a period rich with struggles, debates, and trans. formations in race relations, electronic media, cultural politics, and economic life. As such, it constitutes a period in which itis possible to chart the various ways in which the sign of blackness was constructed, Produced, claimed, performed, and struggled over in different social arenas. I want to take seriously commercial culture (especially commercial television) and the kinds of representations that are produced and cir- culated there asthe subject of critical reflection and analysis. [contend that it is possible—indeed, very often necessary—to approach com- ‘mercial culture as a place for theorizing about black cultural politics and the struggles over meaning that are played out there. Hence, 1 want to suggest that commercial culture serves as both a resource and a site in which blackness as a cultural sign is produced, circulated, and enacted. Tuse the notions of popular and culture in terms of the wide-rang- ing but concrete and specific social practices, histories, desires, and commonsense understandings of the world that are expressed, per- formed, and enacted within television texts, discourse, and material life (Hall 1981a). Lapproach popular and commercial culture, then, in terms of its power to organize, articulate, and disarticulate feelings and understandings that move people, enlisting and positioning them in differene political and social configurations. To talk about popular culture this way is to talk about the social, economic, and political struggles operating in society as well as about cultural sites such as commercial network television, film, and popular music in which those struggles are made representable and rake place. This chapter details specifically how I use the model of cultural studies to situate questions about the representation of and struggle for the sign of blackness within the context of commercial television entertainment, especially as they concern the issues of race, gender, class, power, and inequality. This strategy of location, then, is neces. sarily about commercial television and the specific ways in which it produces and represents the racial order, black Americans, and the sign of blackness within that order through its complex strategies of organization (both industrial and representational), narration, citcu~ lation, and exhibition. The issue remains just how American society, BLACK CULTURAL POLITICS AND COMMERCIAL CULTURE 3 hits dominant commercial institutions of representation, con- true organi, and reposts lacknes inthe Gominnnt popular imagination. n ther words, how do our central inttions of repre sentation (produced through rejection, appropriation, and marginal- ization) generally reconcile the presence of blackness with the Ameri- can political, social, and cultural experience? "The field of cultural studies isa useful point of departure because is conceptual focus helps us think about the relationship between the representational practices produced “in” television and their relation- ship to the material experiences and locations of people who use, make meaning of, offer critiques on, and derive pleasure from their en- counters with television Cultural Studies, Cultural Theory, and Black Cultural Politics in thinking about cultural politics and commercial culture, I insist on fesing eqeenn wth eaten pny Parga denny anal difference at the forefront of analysis. I also aim to avoid the ahistori- cal and pessimistic tendencies of excessive structraliam as wel unr critical celebrations of the practices of collective and individual sub- jects (the working class, women, people of color) as resistance. These injunctions simply involve recognising the cena role of subjective discriminations, choices, and pleasures even while acknowledging the limits and constraints imposed on these experiences by the conditions, circumstances, and structures of cultural and material life in which we ive and make meanings. Sof the moa foetal critiques articulated by theorists and crit- ics working within this framework has concerned the question of dif- ference. The critiques and deconstructions of fixed and unified subject positions, identities, and historical forces have opened important new theoretical spaces. These conceptual openings have been especially im- portant for studies of marginalized and subordinated peoples con- ducted by intellectuals and theorists of color. Such openings have been especially fru for stules of television and other popular media, because they have allowed for more complex understandings of tele- visual and cinematic practices, especially in terms of the relationships among race, class, and gender. No longer can our analyses be bur- dened unnecessarily by the weight of an eternal search for either “au- thentic” media representations of “blackness” or accurate reflections of African American social and cultural life. Nor are all of the repre- sentations operating at various sites of commercial culture simply and easily reduced to co-opted and weak approximations of African ‘American life and culture. Our theoretical and critical readings are4 BLACK CULTURAL POLITICS AND COMMERCIAL CULTURE ‘now open to the discoveries and identifications of a much broader and more complex range of representations. Moreover, these kinds of theoretical openings force us to take seriously the contradictory read- ings and interpretive strategies deployed by various segments of the audience, market, community, and so on. These openings have also forced a kind of deconstruction and critical interrogation of sites and ‘conjunctions of domination and the exercise of power in liberal de- mocracies such as the United States (Hall 1988). ‘These critiques have led to more complex and nuanced readings of television representations as well as the pleasures that various sectors of the audience derive from their encounters with television. Prompted by feminist as well as gay and lesbian scholars, these critical interven- tions have helped to destabilize and decenter simple and easy condem- nations of media images and representations as evidence of secure and unified ideologies. Through such openings we have been forced to un- derstand the complex, dynamic, and contradictory character of com- ‘mercial forms such as television and the pleasures they produce. This has served to make scholars of popular culture and media, particularly those of us of color, take seriously the various locations and experi ences of viewers and not reduce them to unified passive blocs on whom ideas are imposed. Similarly, cultural critiques of essentialism and the recognition of the fluid and hybrid nature of identity and subjectivity in both the dis- cursive and the nondiscursive have forced us to think in more complex ways about structures of power, sites of domination and contestation, and points of overlap and intersection, as well as to examine how and under what conditions we think about them (Collins 1990; Crenshaw 1989; Lorde 1990; Mercer 1992; Riggs 1991; White 1990). These in- sights have placed at the center of theorizing the idea that practices, representations, and meanings, at the sites of the popular, are very much the subjects and objects of struggles across and within differ- ence. Commercial culture is increasingly the central place where vari- ous memories, myths, histories, traditions, and practices circulate. At the site of commercial culture these practices and identifications are constantly assembled, torn apart, reassembled, and torn apart yet again by crities, viewers, and television makers such that they find di cursive order resonance in everyday life (Fiske 1987) Pethaps more important, on questions of identity, mass media, and popular culture these critical interventions have opened the way for critical intellectuals of colot and students of popular and commercial culture to theorize how African Americans continually appropriate images and representations from commercial culture in order to recon stitute themselves and therefore transgress the cultural and social lo- — va —£L2£2&@& BLACK CULTURAL POLITICS AND COMMERCIAL CULTURES cations that constantly attempt to contain and police them. As I sug- gest in chapters 8, 9, and 10, advertising, rap music, sports, music Videos, and television all provide materials (and cura spaces) that cople can appropriate, circulate, and recombine for their own mean: Fe a wes beyond just those intended by the industrial commercial system, As Ialso show throughout this book, popular and commercial representations and cultural practices of blacks and blackness can also be used in racist, sexist, and homophobic ways; hence, they are not inherently resistant or automatically progressive. : To reiterate, then, the central thread of my argument is that com- mercial culture operates as both a site of and a resource for black cul- tural politics. Certainly the most difficult and challenging obstacle to the demonstration of such a claim is the construction of a theory in- corporating the relationship between the representations and their productive practices in commercial culture (in this case, television) and the relationship of these representations to other discursive (and non- discursive) sites and practices (e.., legal, theoretical, and material). My hope is that, additionally, this book makes a convincing case that these cultural matters are also about politics and power, about struggle and transformation. George Lipsitz (1990b) goes quite a way in helping to clarify the complexities of this relationship: Salurl forms create conditions of possi, they expand the preset by forming with mena ofthe ps ead hopes for he tt thy egerasmmoon wi preva ove Cates noms an vues as necesay nd ner. Plc and culture maintain a paradoscalrltionshp in which only effective politcal action can win breathing room fora nature, but only revolution in culture can make people capable of political action. Culture can seem like a substitute for pole a ao of posing only imaginary solutions to real problems, but under oe crcmstances Crltare cn become a reheat for pois, tying out values and Sebts permissible in art bt forbidden in soca fe, Most oe, howevey elle exists as form of politics, as «meant of reshaping individual an collective pace for specified interes, and a long ts individuals perceive thee interest a unfled uta eae an Sppostonal potential. (p16 empbatis added) Je ems co me tht tbo much ofthe unceical elebration of com, ‘mercial culture, or its easy condemnation by intellectuals and cultural critics, has missed the critical point directly addressed here by Lipsitz and elsewhere by Stuart Hall (1992a), Shortsighted and contemptuous dismissals of commercial culture often fail to appreciate the seminal6 BLACK CULTURAL POLITICS AND COMMERCIAL CULTURE importance of the constant articulations or linkages at play in the re- lation between representational practices and social locations, dynam- ics, and relationships (Grossberg 1992), In order to establish the complexity and importance of the social and discursive field in which social claims circulate I devote chapters 2 and 3 to a mapping of various social, moral, and political claims on blackness in the 1980s and the political projects, such as “Reagan- ism,” to which these claims were put. More specifically, chaprers 2 and 3 concentrate on the period of the 1980s. Chapters 2 and 3 appear in the order that they do, not because I want to argue that black cultural discourses are reactive, but because T aim to foreground Reaganism’s claims on blackness and at the same time to place these discourses on blackness in dialogue with each other. [ begin, then, with the discourse of Reaganism because it constitutes the dominant discourse of the pe- riod. And although the subject of this book, television, may seem to some largely secondary in these chapters, itis very present, for televi- sion constitutes part of the discursive field (and a major resource) in which and over which these competing claims and struggles took place. As chapters 2 and 3 show, these multiple claims on blackness came from white liberal democrats, white Reagan conservatives, black na, tionalists, critical black progressives, and black neoconservatives, Tar. ‘gue, too, that these claims and the discourses that structured them and made their meanings readable and representable were staged primarily through mass media, especially television. As Lipsitz (1990b) notes, culture and the struggles over representation that take place there are not just substitutes for some “real” politics that they inevitably replace ot at best delays they simply represent a different, but no less impor. fant, site inthe contemporary technological and postindustral society where political struggles take place. And it is the constant articulation of representations to material circumstances, social formations, and alliances of power that make a critical analysis and politics of culture so very consequential, Chapters 2 and 3, then, function in this book as a staging ground from which I will show just how competing produc. tions and claims on blackness in the 1980s involved very real and very consequential struggles that can be understood culturally. Although cultural practices and traditions, including those on the margins of the culture industry, remain important, their power to dis. rupt and destabilize, to generate alternative (even resistant) readings and possibilities, is neither politically given nor text bound, Cultural Practices and the potential they hold are significant only in relation to the political power, economic positions, social conditions, and lived experiences of people. These practices, therefore, must he theorized _ @#8=—L BLACK CULTURAL POLITICS AND COMMERCIAL CULTURE 7 m inside the commodity form and inside market relations, where waar is waged against the constant attempts to reconstitute and le cate us as consumers in the cultural market (Willis 1991). To my mind, such struggles are significant because it is within the realm of commer- ial culture and representation that we are constantly being cons tuted and positioned, as well as reconstituting ourselves collectively contingent and open to struggle, precisely because what things mean and how they register rest ultimately with their production at cour swell asthe momen of encoun ad Fake 1985 Hl ipsitz 1990b). The meanings of things rest with what people down them, how hey se them, and under what ceumstances ples sures and significance are produced (Fiske 1989). Thinking shone I. ture as deeply contradictory and about culture’s use by people sharp- ens our focus on its hegemonic as well as its counter hrerootie potentials. This strategy helps us to attend to the enormously complex. and dynamic ways that people take from, identify with, reject, are duped by, and sometimes resist regimes of domination. Black Cultural Politics and Commercial Television in which representa- ‘The social, institutional, and historical contexts 7 tons of blacknesin television have been framed and located are the f chapters 4 and 5, Hence, this book is as much about “bl: nes ast iv aboutlevison Tat to sy, iene aboot hw ont vision; rather, i television represents blackness or how blacks use television; irabout the complex play berween'the sites of mas comercial media and black cultural politics. Ceara illustrate, in. somewhat preliminary way, these complex 7 ind relationships by examining the cultural politics operat- Ing in commercial television. Atone les these police operate within the discursive confines of television as an industial and aesthetic ap- . At another level, they operate in relation to discourses, mate- Pat eeamstanc an sx configurations within he bras ety, The meaning, significance, and resonance of the representations o Blackness on commercial nesvork television cannot be understood at any one of these levels without taking account of their complex rela- tionships to one another. ‘At one level, fr instance, one might read television treatments of blacks in terms of how these treatments stand up against “reality” or the experiences of black folk as we know them empirically or from ‘commonsense understandings. Although frames operating in such rep-8 BLACK CULTURAL POLITICS AND COMMERCIAL CULTURE resentations confirm some notions of how blacks are and how we live, they are also frames of containment that constitute and reproduce many of the class, gender, and racial discourses of American society. The debate over the construction and representation of black women and the black family is but one example. At another level, we might read television treatments of blacks not just in terms of how they measure up to the empirical world beyond the small sereen, but in terms of the aesthetic and formal strategies that challenge or reproduce historical treatments of blacks by the ap- Paratus of television. Such readings, too, can be and often are evalu. ated according to the degree to which they correspond, as it were, to black experiences beyond the screen; their resonance and appeal may also be judged in terms of the degree to which they offer improvements and, even more, new possibilities for imagining blacks in America, The diving logic of television and black adjustment to historic stereotypes found in Marlon Riggs’s (199'1a) award-winning documentary Color Adjustment come to mind here. Because television representations of blacks and people of color op- crate within structured material and discursive relations of power, at least in the realm of the popular imagination expressed by television {and other realms of popular culture, including film and popular mu- sich, subversive and alternative possibilities are constantly displaced, shut off, or occasionally appropriated and folded into the center. And yet, as deeply contradictory and conflicted a medium as television i, it must nevertheless appeal to utopian possibilities (Gray 1989; Jameson. 1979), Thus, although my general focus is on the ways in which the hegemonic racial order is continually contested, renewed, and re. aligned in commercial popular culture, I also believe that television it. Self constitutes and expresses contradictions of and contestations to that order (Fiske 1987). In chapter 4, 1 maintain that television has produced not just a tex- tual or representational notion of blackness, but one defined and or. Banized by the institutional and industrial character of television. In other words, Targue, though not exclusively, for an appreciation of the institutional and industrial production of blackness as a market cat. egory that emerged from the dramatic and far-reaching transforma tions of the television industry in the 1980s. I then lay out these insti. tutional and aesthetic imperatives, particularly as they work to construct black viewers and to represent blackness, This discussion in turn leads to an analysis of the institutional character of television that accounts for the proliferation of television shows about blacks in the 1986s. BLACK CULTURAL POLITICS AND COMMERCIAL CULTURE 9 nporary television Just what are the organizing structures of contemporary television representations of blackness, and how do these structures con: specifies of representations nd hy engage a age ae tiation over the representation of blacks? In chapter 51 eotin the angle of inquiry taken up in chapter 4, but shift the focus a bie from industrial organization and machinations to consider discursive strategies and operations. I identify cree discoures chat strucare commercial network representations of blackness: assimilationist, plu- rast and multicultural discourss, How any one o a combination of these discourses is privileged or operates in dominance i. deter mined not so much by the television text alone, but in terms of its re- lationship to a broader set of discourses and social configurations at Chapter andthe beatae ofthe pack eiantomed nesting to the debates, discourses, and strugles over blackness detaled in chapters 2 and 3. The police at workin all ofthese possibilities are indeterminate rather than fixed. The resonance and artical es levision may register depend not just on the careful readit tear of faa peg, Kat cat aes elon te terms of discursive struggle and intertextuality operating in television and othe: cultaral sits ofthe society, a well as the social locations and cond tions in which people live and how they make meanings from tle sion. The progressive reactionary and contradictory character o program, representation, and image is historically and socially deter- ‘ined rather than politically guaranteed by the text. ‘The Social Production of Television Discourses of Blackness felevisic extremely complex and contradictory medium, owing tb is commerialimperetives formal characte, text onganiaionl and industrial structre, technological apparatus and relationship to everyday life. In order for television to achieve its work—that is, to snake tang and produce pleasure—it has to draw upon and oper- ate on the basis of a kind of generalized societal common sense about the terms of the society and people’s social location in it. The social ound and the cultural terms on which it works depend on assump- fions about experience, knowledge, familiarity and the accessibility of viewers to these assumptions. itis my contention that television representations of blackness op- crate squarely within the boundaries of middle-class patriarchal dis- s about “whiteness” as well as the historic racialization of the Social order. These dominant social and cultural discourses maintain normative universes within which all other representations and mar-10 BLACK CULTURAL POLITICS AND COMMERCIAL CULTURE Binalization of dfference—race, class, ethnic, ender, sexual—are con- sted and pesoned. That tos ack cents hc mercial network television are situated within the existing nag in the existing. material and instuional hierarchies of privilege and. power hased om lass (middle clas), race (whiteness), gender (patriarchal, and sexwal (hee exosexual) differences. On the matter of race and ethnicity this hee Pecially important, because the very presence of African Arnerietas television discourses appeals to this normative “common seme” che working knowledge of the history, codes, struggles, and memories af "ac eatons in the United Sates ° reigning wisclom in critical television studies of race is still 0 studies of race is still that television representations of blackness work largely to legitimate avd Secure the terms of the dominant cultural and social ordes by circalae jing within and remaining stuctored by them (Gray 1993, 1993) 1 largely agree with this assessment, Just as often, however, there ane gl fetmatve (and occasional oppositional) moments in American com mercial television representations of race, especially merci ce, especially in its fragmented and contradictory character In some eases, television representations of blackness explode and reveal the deeply rooted terms ofthis hier archy. eis this strugele and polities of representation tha highlight in the chapters on Frank's Place, A Different World, and In Living Colon Notes, Markers, and Warnings: A Reader Advisory Discussions and analysis of certain kinds of programs, genres, and rep: resentations do not appear in the chapters that follows T de nev cand to those shows that feature one or two continuing black characters in otherwise all-white settings (e.g. Designing Women) or those shows with black casts that, for all practical purposes, are just like white shows (e.g., Family Matters). Nor do I deal in geeat detail with the genre of nighttime drama, especially such relevant and often powerful. shows as In the Heat of the Night, Equal Justice, L.A, Law Til Fly = ae Rie Thave elected to focus on entertainment, va- riety, situation comedy, music television, and advertising because I ne, gard these as the sites most completely saturated ees ee Shows in these genres are widely available in reruns and collectively they still generate wide attention from the press, scholars, and viewers. In short, I try to focus on the kinds of popular shows thac a merce, in particular, watch with the expectation of find. Thave also framed this analysis largely within a timespas sins with the election of Ronald Reagan as president (1980) se ee with the airing of the last episode of The Cosby Show, which took Co __—_— lS” BLACK CULTURAL POLITICS AND COMMERCIAL CULTURE 11 place during the Los Angeles riots on April 30, 1992. Hence, few shows beyond the 1992 season are included here. This decision makes theoretical and practical sense. Given television’s voracious appetite and ability to replace new shows with still newer ones, a book like this has to end somewhere, lest it go on and on. The election of Bill Clin- ton, the end of Cosby’s reign, and the riots in Los Angeles together ‘mark a significant shift in public discourses about race. Framing a book about television and race within such a period may seem curious, but I do so in order that I may engage questions of text and context simultaneously. In this sense the book is located within the project of cultural studies; that i, it deliberately combines and appre- ciates the insights of social history, institutional analysis, textual read- ings, and the social locations of audiences. By using a concept such as discourse, rather than ideology, [also want to foreground questions of agency, agents, common sense, and the socially constructed nature of ideas and meanings. Hence, Lam very much committed to acknowl- edging meanings organized in and produced by discourse. By the same token, the readings I offer are intended to engage the social positions, histories, shifts, and transformation within which people live and ex- perience television representations of blackness. ‘The social positions that I bring into relief are multiple, shifting, and intersecting. I have tried to be especially alert to foregrounding possibilities, interpretations, and claims on blackness by multiply situ- ated and complexly organized African American reading positions. ‘The readings and analyses offered, therefore, are porous and especially attentive to the social conditions, patterns, and relationships that or- ganize, structure, and enable them. My position should not be unde: stood as relativist or pluralist, but as one that recognizes and appreci ates the fact that different reading positions and readers continue to be structured and organized by racial, gender, and class relations of power (Gray 1993b}. The political possibilities and transformative ef- fects of such readings, although always present, are nevertheless con- tingent and open to the competing claims and enlistments of different political projects. also want to be clear on my view of culture and its specific app! cation to African American experiences. What I intend is some spet fication of the ways in which the impulses, tones, and consciousness of contemporary black life in the United States—especially as these are lived, practiced, and understood by blacks—are expressed, framed, and organized in and by mass-mediated commercial culture in general and television in particular. 1 am especially interested in the ways in which the practices, traditions, and perspectives of people in margin- alized and subordinated social positions, vis-a-vis dominant cultures,12, BLACK CULTURAL POLITICS AND COMMERCIAL CULTURE are expressed in the realm of mass-mediated popular culture, My aim, then, is to identify, specify, and make sense of the ways in which these Specifically black “structures of feeling’”—sensibilities, perspectives, and traditions —get claimed, expressed, articulated, mediated. and ap. Propriated in contemporary mass-produced and -distributed commen. cial culture, This analysis is also limited to progeamming found on the four ‘major commercial television networks—ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox. Cable, syndication, and pay-per-view and other services are no doubt increasingly important to television representations of race and black, ness, but commercial network television is still the predominant form of service delivery for most black viewers, Henee, it is on the net, works’ construction and representation of blackness in the 1980s that Thave elected to focus. In this respect, readers will no doubt note the absence of any de- tailed and sustained analysis of the Black Entertainment Television (BET) cable network. The reasons for this absence are both practical and theoretical. Not all municipalities are wired for cable; hence, ae- ess to BET's programming schedule remains limited in some areas, Because BET's viewership is strongest in metropolitan areas in the East, South, Midwest, and parts of the West, the circulation and im. Pact ofthe network's programming require carefully situated readings. Until quite recently, much of BET's programming, especially series and ‘movies, was made up of reruns of syndicated programs, Network-pro- duced entertainment and public affairs programming was confined Primarily to music videos, news, talk and public affairs, and sports shows. To be sure the organization of BET as a network, especially its Specific and self-conscious structure, guiding philosophy, and identity, deserves careful analysis. For the moment I will offer, somewhat sug, sestively and tentatively, an observation developed in chapter $, namely, that (in its formative period at leat) BET fits within a sepa. rate-but-equal discourse. I offer this categorization not in some strict paninatrow sense, but for purposes of qualification, as a way of seeing BET representations and constructions, as well asthe cultural poli. tics they organize and perform. Finally, an explanatory note on my use of the terms blackness, black, and African American. By using the word blackness | mean to focus attention on the operation of blackness as a cultural signifier that, although operating on the basis of specific histories, dynamics, and relations of power, nevertheless remains open to multiple and competing claims. More specifically, I use to refer to the constellation of productions, histories, images, representations, and ‘meanings associated with black presence in the United States. In chap- BLACK CULTURAL POLITICS AND COMMERCIAL CULTURE. 13 rs 1 and 2, I use contemporary examples to show how blackness is repeaters represenred, and positioned by social forma: tons o achieve diferent political objectives Although [recognize that treating blackness this way places me in the choppy (and contested) seas of essentialist and antiessentialist debates, I nonetheless want to calaention to he constructed natu of acknes andthe deursve ‘worlk it does in mass media and popular culture as well asin the social, political, and cultural debates in which itis situated. : T purponly resin the tem black to incate spec commune, people, and agents who live and struggle in and gains (histori an contemporary) racialized discourses and oppressive social conditions in the United States. Although I also use the term African American interchangeably with black, I specifically use it to signal broader and ‘more inclusive dimensions of black social life and culture; in some spe- ce insances I deliberately use Aficon American to mark he recent ft from a discourse of race to one of ethnicity. oT do wane to avoid any presumption that my varying use of black- ness, black, and African American privileges some implicit claim to authenticity or essence about black life. Although I argue chat African ‘American claims on blackness suggest different social positions, histo- ries, and distinct ways of seeing, I do not mean this to obscure or stand 8 a totalizing conception of black life in the United States. Rather, 1 ‘mean to point to and accent diversity, especially in class, sexuality, genes generation, and region, within Blackness, Hence Ie the no- ickness as a sign quite deliberately as a way to examine vari- om atone and claims on it both fom wihin che African American community and from outside of it. [begin, then, with an examination, of claims on blackness by conservatives and the new right in the 1980s.