We’ve been talking to a lot of kids and some of the kids say one of the reasons why they choose to watch a show with a cast with a similar ethnic background as themselves is identity. I just wanted to talk about this issue of identity and how important it is for young people to relate to the people they see in a sitcom.
I think it is enormously important. For so long in America, minorities like Latinos, Native Americans, Asian Americans, and African Americans have been virtually invisible on television. Otherwise, they enjoyed negative visibility, appearing in the role of the maid, the immigrant, or the white person’s foil. When people look at television, they are looking for a reinforcement of who and what they are. They are looking for some sense of possibility represented on the small screen. I don’t think that we can deny the importance of young people identifying with a character who is literally a role model, who through his or her portrayal opens up the imagination, or closes it down, of the people who watch. Believe it or not, a television character grappling with thorny issues can help young viewers think about similar problems they may confront. So I think it’s a matter of identifying with the character and then working through identity issues that may be evoked, however clumsily, on television. I think it’s very important for young people to identify with a cast of characters who are friendly, insightful, acerbic, humorous, thoughtful, and serious, and to see in their characterizations ways to think about the world.
But isn’t it possible for there to be exceptions to this, that if you are black and, you know, you could relate to characters on a show, like Seinfeld or Friends, that just because the skin color is different you are going to automatically say, “Well I can’t relate,” and vice versa?
Right.
You know, do you think that just by trying to identify who you are through the color of your skin, isn’t that dangerous?
It’s dangerous and limiting in some ways, perhaps, but that’s American culture. First, there’s not a functional equivalency between whites and minorities, since many minority viewers look beyond race and identify with white characters. But white viewers do not identify with minority characters nearly as frequently. There are exceptions—Bill Cosby, Oprah Winfrey, and to a lesser degree, Arsenio Hall—but they are the exceptions that prove the rule. Blacks, Latinos, Asians, and other minorities have no choice (given the racial situation in America and the powers that fund the images on the small screen) but to see through pigment and identify with the universal features the white characters embody. The more difficult trick is for whites to see themselves implicated in the goings on, the moral dilemmas, and the quotidian aspirations of black characters. To examine the silver screen for a moment, it would be interesting to witness whites going to see The Preacher’s Wife, the black remake of the The Bishop’s Wife, which featured Cary Grant and Loretta Young. The Preacher’s Wife stars Denzel Washington, Whitney Houston, and Courtney Vance. Can whites go see that film, not because they see Denzel and Whitney as black icons, but because they spot in the film universal romantic frustrations and marital problems that befall every group, all human beings?
Going back to the small screen, I think that the best black sitcoms and situational dramas offer a keen peek into the themes that occupy all human beings, and yet such shows are for the most part rigidly segregated in both the viewing audience and the ways they are marketed to racially targeted groups. The Cosby Show phenomenon in the 1980s proved that the concerns of black folk are the concerns of the nation: work, home, children, play, school, love, and so on. The Cosby Show was a huge hit across all demographics. Unfortunately, that’s a rare occurrence. Many black shows may not have the same quality as Cosby, but then it’s also true that many of the white shows that are popular across race don’t come anywhere near Cosby’s quality either. So the pattern is set: minorities identify across barriers of race, ethnicity, or region with at least some white characters on the small screen, but that’s not the case with large numbers of white viewers. As a result, we are not often the person or character being admired or identified with on television, which has a significant impact on how minorities are perceived in the real world.
Well, what’s interesting about Cosby is that one of the kids we interviewed said that at first The Cosby Show wasn’t “real” and that he felt that Cosby was a white man in a black man’s body.
The raison d’être of The Cosby Show, to a large degree, was to break down some of the stereotypical images of blacks on the small screen. Bill Cosby was waging war against a bitter history of stereotypical representation of black people, so he self-consciously attempted to explode these recalcitrant attitudes toward blacks, some of which, unsurprisingly, were held by other blacks! As studies suggest, if black folk watch more television than most other populations, it stands to reason that we’d imbibe and internalize some of the imagistic detritus and backward assumptions that gorge ethnic niche television programming and marketing. So it’s not hard to believe that some blacks thought Cosby was a white man trapped in a black body, that he was “faking the funk,” that he wasn’t really dealing with the nittygritty realities of black culture.
What Bill Cosby brought to America in an ingenious fashion is the notion that black people are a diverse community. We can’t talk about the black community in the singular; we’ve got to speak about black communities in the plural. Black communities are united around and divided by class, gender, sexual orientation, and regional differences. Some black communities are constituted around the vicious persistence of colorism, where the shade of your skin determines your social standing and racial appeal. The gay/lesbian/bisexual nexus is quite controversial in black communities, as it is in the nation at large, which is why it receives such patently stereotypical and crude treatment in many black sitcoms. The Cosby Show showed us by its sheer existence that there is a black universe that is largely ignored, one that is complex, heterogeneous, and robustly diverse. Cosby sought to challenge rigid beliefs about black folk in an implicit, indirect manner, allowing the show’s richly drawn characters to refute the half-baked ideas of blackness that pass for common sense in the public domain.
The unfortunate aspect of the Cosbyization of American television is that it didn’t show—and until the end of its hugely successful run, wasn’t necessarily interested in showing—the class diversity in black America. Of course, no one show can be expected to carry the water for the whole of black culture, which is one of the unfair expectations attached to any black cultural product, whether a book or a film, that gains visibility and acceptance in our nation. That demand exists in large part because of the dearth of decent representations of black folk in so many fields of intellectual and cultural interest. Having said that, I think The Cosby Show might have tried a bit harder to deconstruct some of the uninformed perceptions about working-class people with little threat to its successful formula. Too often on the small screen, it’s an either/or world: Either one gets ridiculous stereotypes through comedic shenanigans or, less likely, one gets a view of the upper echelon of black life devoid of consciousness or concern for the average Tameka or Tyrone. That was part of the trade-off we got with The Cosby Show, which nonetheless managed to be quite a refreshing break from the buffoonery and minstrelsy that often won out.
At the same time, I don’t think Mr. Cosby identifies with his “children” on television, including the best of what UPN or the WB networks have to offer. A lot of people are out of sorts because they think that black folk have hijacked these networks, that our presence betokens the blackening of American television. Well, that’s a stretch, to be sure, but it is an interesting development, made possible in part by Cosby’s success, even if these shows don’t necessarily look like their parent. We don’t talk about the whitening of American television when most sitcoms represent white America. Instead, we talk about universality, or at the least, racial neutrality, a code word for the wan, pallid, almost lifeless, certainly lowbrow, lowest common denominator that rules television.
What’s interesting about TV is that it reinforces an idea in the culture that we haven’t adequately grappled with: whiteness is invisible because it is seen as a sign of universality. Blackness, browness, and yellowness are almost always seen as particular, as part of a niche market, and therefore limited in their appeal. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t challenge the narrow visions of blackness that are portrayed on UPN or WB. But I don’t think that we should be narrowly obsessed, as some blacks are, with representing the authentic black experience because there’s no such animal. Blacks are a diverse group of people. Some people speak the so-called king’s English to the queen’s taste, while others are hooked on Ebonics, while still others are past masters at both, happily code switching their way from the margins to the mainstream. I think the ebonicist and the so-called standard English–speaking people should be represented because that’s what the diversity and complexity of black culture is about.
Do you think that UPN and the WB network show that, or do they really just kind of cash in on that one stereotype that seems to get over?
They have a huge affinity for comedy and stereotypes. It’s also true that WB and UPN are opening up a range of opportunities for young black comics. Now they need to explode the narrow boundaries that keep black people and other minorities ghettoized in a specific kind of racial and ethnic humor. I suppose, in a limited, narrow sense, these networks represent racial progress of a sort. For instance, most black characters on television used to be locked into what we might term emotional instrumentalism: they were catalysts for a white character’s dramatic or comedic resolution of their problems. Hence they were largely disposable in terms of story lines and character development.
On that level, WB and UPN represent a measured progress, since black characters are central to many of its shows, even though they are virtually Johnny-one-noting blackness, viewing black culture through a small prism of comedy and rehashed, if updated, stereotypes. The expansiveness of black culture is not seen. Television has not evolved to capture black complexity. Cosby valiantly fought stereotype but slighted the full range of black reality in the effort to combat negative representations of black culture. So we’re caught between stereotypes and archetypes of blackness that necessarily block the difficult-to-portray breadth of black identity and culture.
What do you make of the Wayans Brothers Show?
I think the Wayans are unquestionably America’s first family of black comedy. They have tremendous talent, skill, and comedic ability. Of course, like any of us, they don’t always measure up to their ideals or gifts. As for Marlon and Shawn, the youngest members of the family, and their series, the Wayans Brothers Show, some of it is inane, some of it is silly, and some of it is funny. While it’s probably unfair to make such a comparison, I don’t think that the two younger Wayans brothers have yet measured up to either their comedic talent or that of their brothers Keenan or Damon. They certainly have the potential to do so, but I think they are hampered by the sorts of scripts they routinely receive, and by their limited notion of what black comedy at its best is all about. I think once they begin to deal with a more complex understanding of comedy and of black life, then their own show will either be overhauled, but more likely canceled, or they’ll move on to new projects. Among their peers, their comedy is not as engaging as, say, the Steve Harvey Show or the Jamie Foxx Show. Although they are extremely talented, they’ve got their work cut out for them.
What do you make of the fact that they [the Wayans brothers] were under fire by the local Hollywood chapter of the NAACP for the type of comedy that they do? I talked to them about it and they said, “Look, we’re just employing our brothers.” Otherwise they would be out on the street committing crimes.
Right, right.
You know, I am kind of like, well, I don’t know if that really works in this world today. What do you make of that kind of . . .
I think both sides are missing the point. On one hand, the local branch of the NAACP has a right, perhaps even an obligation, to say stereotypes are offensive and need to be addressed. But we don’t want to practice or support censorship. That sort of thing is already happening with regard to rap music, where sometimes well-meaning black adults attempt to police the boundaries of cultural expression for our youth. Such adults think that they are going to tell these youth what’s right and what’s really black. But you can’t do that anymore (if you ever could) because these youth have an understanding of what they think is black, even if we severely disagree with much of what they believe and feel obligated to argue with them, which I think is just fine. But we can’t determine proprietary blackness for them through dictatorial or censorial methods; we’ve got to make our case and win the day with persuasive arguments. On the other hand, I think that Shawn and Marlon should certainly be made aware of critics’ perception of their aesthetic drawbacks, weaknesses, flaws, and failures.
True enough, we want to employ brothers who otherwise might be out robbing us, as many a rapper has reminded us, from the late great Tupac Shakur to Treach from the group Naughty by Nature, who, on the documentary Rhyme & Reason, I believe, says that if he wasn’t rapping, he’d be in our houses pilfering our earthly goods. We’re thankful at a base level, I suppose, that many of these youth are rapping and not ripping us off, but that’s surely no reason to give them a pass on social, aesthetic, and moral judgment. We can’t willy-nilly dismiss our critical instincts because of our gratitude for their deferred or redirected criminal careers. What balderdash! No artist or intellectual is or should be immune to criticism. We have to be pushed, criticized, judged, and examined, though not from a narrow ledge of reflexive prudishness, moral squeamishness, racial correctness, or proprietary blackness. Art, after all, does not exist simply to calm and soothe us, but to transgress and subvert and challenge our most cherished ideals and beliefs. We can’t have a priori cultural determinations of “good” art.
Instead, we must have ongoing debates about what constitutes productive, if irreverent, art or in this case television. But it’s got to be art and not dreck. Still, we’ve got to get rid of the racial and aesthetic police and bring in the true critics.
How do you think white America perceives them and their show?
It depends on what part of white America you are talking about. White Americans who are sensitive to the complexity of black identity, which, as you know, may be a relatively small number of folk, would understand that the Wayans brothers are comedians with talent and problems
. . . . . . I’m speaking of our viewers, who are eighteen to twenty-four . . .
In that case, it may be that the Wayans Brothers Show provides their primary understanding of black culture, which I’m sure to many blacks is a truly scary thought. But I don’t think that’s as much a criticism of Marlon and Shawn as it is of a culture that relies on young adults barely past adolescence to educate white folk about black culture on commercial television. How unfair is that? It’s not that Marlon and Shawn don’t have their responsibilities, as I’ve outlined above, but it is patently unjust to expect them to bear the burden of giving white youth a complex view of black culture and identity, when they’ve got teachers and parents with more than enough material available to help do the job. We can’t collapse the racial pedagogical obligations of the society at large on the heads of two black sitcom actors. That argument might have made sense forty years ago when there were hardly any blacks or minorities on television. Now we have a range of outlets, although not as wide as it needs to be, to understand and explore and to get a vision of what black life, black love, black hope, black aspiration, black existence is about.
So the burden of representation, as James Baldwin termed it, shouldn’t be placed so heavily on the shoulders of young people who are often barely literate about critical historical and racial issues. We tend to forget that Shawn and Marlon are in their early twenties. They are growing up themselves, although with much greater influence, and unavoidably, with greater responsibility than their peers, since they’re growing up on camera. That means that their mistakes, growing pains, and foibles make headlines, or are literally caught on camera, and that they have influence beyond their expertise or wisdom.
We sometimes forget that artists change their minds and images as they mature. Think of Eddie Murphy and his earlier comedy routines, say, the one at Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C., that included his infamous routine on the “bush bitch” that stigmatized female African identity. I’m sure he looks back at it now and shudders in disbelief at his unvarnished malevolence toward women. Now he’s a changed man, one supposes, and is, as they say, “married with children.” I’m sure he doesn’t want some cad similarly thinking about his daughter, much less treating her in a fashion that suggests she’s a “bush bitch.” When you are growing up in public like that, the stupid things you do, the mistakes you make, are captured for posterity and unfortunately may be forever fixed in the collective imagination. I think the younger Wayans brothers are going through their own growing pains.
I’m sure some young whites see them as talented, funny artists, others see them as harmless and silly, others still see them as perhaps detrimental because they traffic in stereotypes, while some may deem them banal where others may believe they’re insufferable. I don’t think there’s a monolithic white response to the Wayans brothers, and besides, what whites think of Shawn and Marlon may say as much about themselves as it does about the two actors. Making them the representatives of black youth is wholly misled because there are so many other ways to think about black youth culture, from hip-hop to basketball to cutting-edge academic theory put forth by engaging young black intellectuals, which gets nowhere near the publicity that sports or entertainment receives. Of course, speaking of hoops and rap as a way to understand black youth culture ain’t improving things in the minds of many critics. But the Wayans brothers shouldn’t take the heat by themselves, even as we push them to critically reflect on their roles and responsibilities, given their influence and privilege.
Well, you know what’s interesting, one of the kids said that each race has different things they find funny, that it’s a different type of humor, which is why the kid didn’t watch the UPN or WB sitcom. I wanted to find out what you think is behind that, with kids thinking there is a different kind of humor that distinguishes the races. Is that possible for a race to have a different type of humor?
That’s a loaded question. I think immediately of, say, Jewish comedy in the ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s, which really set an incredibly high standard that continues to define how we understand what’s funny in America today. What’s remarkable, of course, is that an ethnic group that was being mistreated and oppressed in the larger society seized this medium of cultural expression and expanded the boundaries of Jewish identity even as they translated their experience into universal terms that were appreciated by the masses. Their success is summed up in that old Jewish saying in entertainment, especially in comedy, that goes something like “think Yiddish and write goyim.” The insecurities, idiosyncrasies, and ingenuities of Jewish identity were brilliantly compressed into comedic practices built on sharp social observation, edifying self-deprecation, and relentless signifying. From Jack Benny to Milton Berle, from Shecky Greene to Alan King, from Jerry Lewis to Jerry Seinfeld, from Lenny Bruce to Robert Klein, from Gracie Allen to Penny Marshall, from George Burns to Billy Crystal, and from the Borscht Belt to Broadway, Jewish comedians have injected profound moral, aesthetic, and spiritual qualities into American comedy, transforming it with their own views of human identity and existence.
They’ve given us a vocabulary of witticisms, interpretations, philosophies, and character types—think of Penny Marshall and Cindy Williams hopscotching during the opening credits of Laverne and Shirley, chanting in unison, “schlemiel, schlimazel.” Or for that matter, think of all the Yiddish terms deployed by acerbic Jewish comedians, from schmuck or schmo, to terms we now take for granted, such as schmaltz, schmear, schmooze, or schlock. And consider all the Yiddish words injected into the American language that derive from that wonderfully hyperactive prefix schm, that, when replacing a word’s initial consonant or used before the first vowel, gives a sense of gentle, rhyming derision, like fancy, schmancy, or dirt, schmirt, or money, schmoney, and so on, a practice largely popularized by Jewish comedians. So there is some legitimacy to speaking about race, ethnicity, or humor as giving a genealogy of influences, but that’s different from saying there’s some kind of genetic makeup to racial humor, that there’s a comedy gene peculiar to each race. That’s an essentialist argument, I believe, that would be hard to sustain. Historical accents that constitute racial or ethnic humor, for sure. But race or ethnicity as the biological template of a comedic sensibility, I don’t think so. Having said that, I don’t think we can deny that some things may be funny to certain races and ethnicities because of the codes and internal significations that may be evoked through comedic material. For instance, if you go to a film that is geared toward black youth with all of their slang, or a film that treats black ’70s themes, say, with references to the styles and aesthetics of the time, there’s bound to be a lot of “inside discourse” that will be picked up on by folk inside the culture. That happens with every group, racial or otherwise. For example, it happens among gays, lesbians, the transgendered, and bisexuals too. Inside language, for instance, referring to “gaydar” or the most recent neologisms driven by queer culture or homoerotic life, establishes a common framework of reference. That doesn’t mean that folk outside the given culture of signification cannot appreciate a book, film, play, or comedic routine pitched to a particular audience. It simply means that the nuances of a particular art form or practice or aesthetic expression are best appreciated by those who stand within its symbolic and representational universe. There are dialects and vernaculars within comedy, but in the end, humor is a universal language that can be understood by everyone. Black folk can watch and enjoy Seinfeld with its inside ethnic humor and its accessible jokes, and whites can watch The Cosby Show and appreciate both its racial accents and its universal themes.
That’s interesting. Yeah. There is another comment [that we’ve been hearing] . . . “It’s not for me . . . they have a different type of humor, you know. Black shows are for blacks.”
That’s sad but predictable. Some of us naively expect television to rise above the racial politics of our society, but our television watching habits are of a piece with our nation’s prides and prejudices. The critic George Lipsitz has some interesting things to say about the relationship between culture and politics. He says that some of us believe that culture, and hence in this case, television, is a substitute for politics, that instead of engaging racial divisions and social forces in the outside world, we retreat to television and the big screen. Lipsitz also says that culture could be a rehearsal for politics, so that things we can’t do in the real world we try to do on television or in film, for example. And to a certain degree that’s true. We can imagine, or keeping with televisual and cinematic genres, we can literally picture a black president because we know it ain’t happening any time soon in the real world. But, as Lipsitz says, it is more likely that television and culture become a form of politics.
As a result, we can’t expect television or the big screen or any other cultural product to somehow be immune to the racial politics of the larger world in which they exist. The same world that was divided about O.J. is the same world watching television. The same world that was caught up with believing Rodney King was, or was not, innocent is the same world watching television. The same folk trapped in racial malaise and ethnic conflict are the same ones who turn to television to see their own reflection or to reinforce their beliefs about how the world operates. People are drawn to what they can identify with. Sometimes, if it sharply departs from what they believe, they will turn it off. Because they live in a society that tells them you can’t learn anything from a black show because that’s for black people, such pernicious beliefs are subconsciously passed on from one generation to another. So I think television often indexes the racial blindness of the broader society.
People every day sit down and watch TV without thinking they are making some big political statement by what they are choosing to watch. They are watching TV.
That’s right, yeah.
So people are choosing whatever they choose, Seinfeld and so forth, because that’s what they want to watch. They probably aren’t thinking, “Wow, I’m making a real statement about my attitudes towards race.”
Sure, right.
But what are you supposed to say when somebody truly believes that a show that has all black characters is only for black Americans to watch?
Let me try to answer that by addressing the role of television in our culture, thus placing the discussion about the belief you’ve mentioned in an analytical context that allows us to make sense of it. There are a whole lot of folk who don’t have the opportunity to pursue higher learning, who can’t extend their formal education beyond high school. They don’t have the chance to hash out conflicting social, intellectual, and ideological differences in the context of a university or college classroom where, at least ostensibly, critical debate and scholarly research are encouraged. These folk often turn to television as a source of information about the world in which they live. I’m not suggesting that college-educated folk don’t do the same, but they are supposed to have a level of skepticism about what they watch, hear, and read that is a benchmark of critical thinking. Millions without the benefit of college education do that, while many who have been to college blindly follow some ideological or party line with little question. So there’s no elitist vision operating here. The bottom line is that there are millions of viewers who buy hook, line, and sinker what they see on the tube. And one of the messages they get is that the world is aesthetically, socially, and racially segregated in niches of color, class, and caste. White folk are dominant and thus dominate the small screen and the silver screen as well. Their opinions and beliefs are often reinforced as normative, even if they express a depressingly narrow range of the complex lives of the majority culture.
Needless to say, minorities are shunted to the periphery of television, existing in an extremely isolated aesthetic and intellectual ghetto. To a degree, that reflects the ways of the world, although other parts of the same world don’t operate that way at all, say, in New York or San Francisco, where racial interactions are far more frequent than in Boise, Idaho, or Butte, Montana, or, for that matter, in Chicago, one of the most persistently and rigidly segregated cities in the nation. Television obviously has choices to make in regard to race, and often it is rather lazy, reflecting stereotypical thinking more often than fresh engagement, something it probably does with the dominant culture as well, just not with the same disastrous consequences, since there are far fatter pickings in the majority than among the minority. For every ridiculous, inane, mindless show about whites, there’s a thoughtful, innovative one. The same is hardly true for minorities. All of which means that it’s no surprise that many, if not most, whites believe that black shows are for black people; that, after all, comports with the world they narrowly observe and see even more narrowly reflected to them on television, the token minority on some shows notwithstanding.
In a sense, television has some obligation to combat the forces of racial and social segregation, which ignores the complexities of minority and poor communities. Part of the problem has to do with the executives in charge of programming, producing, and marketing television. Many of them are young, white, and inexperienced with true diversity. Even when they’re older, they may have lived in a world where they had little idea of the existential and moral realities of most minorities. The multicultural makeup of contemporary society has only slightly helped younger white executives get the message of complexity, since they often fall into the extant television mix instead of pushing for change. The aesthetic and racial inertia is simply too overpowering. One answer must include hiring executives from underrepresented minority populations. That’s no guarantee of complexity, but you stand a far greater chance of it occurring on their watch than with the status quo. It couldn’t get too much worse. In other words, by expanding the range of opportunities for black, Latino, Native American, and Asian directors, producers, marketers, and writers, we might see a big difference in television, a difference that might actually influence the majority culture that turns to television for entertainment to believe that black shows might be for them too.
Existing shows might more successfully incorporate complex, accomplished, or even fully human characters into the mix, as a few have done. For instance, if Homicide or NYPD Blue deals with issues of racial animosity or true differences in black, Latino, or white views of social inequality, that’s a powerful tool to inspire critical self-reflection in viewers without being condescending or didactic. And without making minorities, as television so often does, necessary saints, morally unblemished figures who embody virtue without possessing complex character traits that make such virtue believable, perhaps even compelling. If we had an expanded pool of minority talent behind the scene, shaping what we see on television, we’d stand a better chance of entertaining the nation while educating it at the same time. We might also have a clearer shot at getting folk to understand that what they do, the choices they make, what shows they will or will not watch, are not only matters of personal taste but, more broadly, matters of politics as well. We might have more space to make the point that politics is not simply what we do when we elect a congresswoman or president, but when we choose to challenge or reinforce social beliefs through the things we read, write, watch, and transmit to our children.
What turns us on, and what we turn on, is not altogether isolated from what we hold important in both the personal and social realm. Television can, with little effort, allow us to educate society about what scholars term the “social construction of reality and desire.” That means, for instance, that one is not born with a desire to have a pair of Air Jordans on one’s feet. Such a desire must be deposited into one’s consciousness and field of pursuit by marketing and the media, including television and print advertising, creating a culture of consumption and a culture of admiration and glamour around a pair of $125 gym shoes. Television can be a powerful tool for good, despite the fact that many intellectuals and scholars universally pan it without making distinctions among the programs. It has a huge influence on the culture, and it is the media, other than the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, that supplies the most powerful fiction of citizenship. So it’s not simply the boob tube; it’s a tube that glares at us, that gloats over us, that gloms onto us, that invites us to confront ourselves; it can either challenge or reinforce our prejudices and perspectives.
What’s interesting was we were just doing our own surveys, and on the list of top ten shows, when divided by race, Seinfeld was number one in America. But it is very low on the list for black households, which we are finding a little odd because in New York, everybody that we interviewed so far who is black watches Seinfeld and loves it. Maybe the numbers aren’t wrong; maybe it’s the region that we are in. But it seems that what you said earlier is true: black Americans can definitely relate to a Seinfeld and find that show funny. I wonder if the reverse could happen, that if a cast was all black, similar to The Cosby Show, and doing niche humor, as opposed to trying to appeal to everybody, it could be successful.
I’m quite skeptical about that. Listen, we can’t even have a black actor playing Jesus without controversy, and that is a real-life example. Some whites responded by saying, “You can’t be God” because they couldn’t even conceive of a black Jesus. What’s revealing is that the black actor playing Jesus said he got no objections at all when he played the devil or Judas. But when a black person dares to portray what Hegel termed a “world historical” figure, a larger than life character, such a prospect appears, as Mike Tyson might say, ludicrous. Conversely, it might be equally problematic for the mainstream to catch on, at least in television, with the niche humor, the inside jokes, of black culture. Of course, part of the ingenuity of hip-hop is that many of its brightest artists understood that it didn’t have to cross over to white folk but could seduce whites to cross over to their perspectives and styles and to literally buy into their idiosyncratic views of life.
But the same success has not for the most part tracked black television or film, for that matter. Black styles, sensibilities, and worldviews have not, with notable exceptions, translated well. That’s because many whites conclude in advance of screening a black show that “this isn’t for me, there’s nothing relevant here, so I’ll just keep channel surfing.” And yet Robert Townsend and Suzanne Douglas, the black stars of the sitcom Parenthood, are dealing with universal issues that everybody in America can understand and identity with: kids, drug usage, peer pressure, coexisting peacefully with your parents, and the like. Those are problems everybody confronts, every family faces, and yet such shows are often overlooked by the mainstream. Subtle niche humor—not the stereotypical sort—and niche drama are even less likely to cross over to the mainstream, even though they sometimes find enough support among blacks to stay on television for a few seasons.
Similar problems prevail on the silver screen. For instance, when Whitney Houston was filming The Preacher’s Wife, she admitted that she grew tired of people asking her if white Americans would come to see her film. As it turns out, her first two films were far more successful than The Preacher’s Wife. Of course, the success of her second film, Waiting to Exhale, was driven by the enormous interest of black women in the film, which drove its box office take above $75 million through repeated viewings and peripatetic pajama parties, so to speak, to screen and discuss the film. It was truly a niche market that proved to be hugely profitable. Houston’s first film, The Bodyguard, costarring Kevin Costner, was pitched to the mainstream and made over $300 million domestically. The Preacher’s Wife was likewise a film that addressed mainstream issues, even though it featured an all-black cast, but was nowhere near as successful as The Bodyguard or Waiting to Exhale, for that matter. One can only conclude that whether on the small or big screen, it’s extremely difficult to get the mainstream to identify with complex black representations of reality, niche or otherwise.
There is no deficit, however, of white attraction to black stereotypes, hence the proliferation of drastically flat character types on black situation comedies. I think we’ve got to figure out a way to slip in some subversive messages about the diversity and complexity of black life. We should also encourage more thoroughly mixed casts that feature role reversals of the usual fare. Take film again, for example, and think of the movie Jerry Maguire, starring Tom Cruise and Cuba Gooding Jr., who won a best supporting Oscar for his role as a football star client to Cruise’s sports agent. Gooding was, yes, the athlete, perhaps a stereotypical part, yet his performance was anything but hackneyed. He displayed the almost archetypal bravado and machismo of the black male athlete, but he twisted it into something more substantial. Sure, “show me the money,” was one of Gooding’s character’s lines and bled into the pop cultural consciousness to become, for a time, an unavoidable, ubiquitous phrase.
Even more fascinating was the role reversing that occurred: Gooding’s football player, despite his flash, was a profoundly dedicated family man who warned Cruise’s single character not to romantically and sexually exploit his girlfriend, played by Renee Zellwegger, or, in Gooding’s character’s more colorful phrase, he warned his agent not to “hijack the pootie.” He urged his agent to be responsible and faithful. Cuba Gooding Jr. got a chance to teach the nation, indeed the world, about a healthy, ethically upright, morally sensitive side of black America that is not often featured in film. We ought to aim for the same goal on television, without being hokey, romantic, or condescending. We want to avoid the necessary saint while highlighting the beauty of black complexity.
Do you think when it comes to sitcoms—because most of the shows that we’re talking about are sitcoms—that it’s possible in the future to have an All in the Family type of show where you are honest about people’s racial views? Why don’t the characters on Friends have any black friends?
Exactly.
Do you think that we can actually have an integrated cast and have it be a top ten sitcom in America?
I think we certainly need such a show. More specifically, I believe we need the kind of humor popularized through Archie Bunker, the irascible but irresistible bigot who was brilliantly played by Carroll O’Connor from the mid ’70s to the early ’80s. The power of All in the Family and O’Connor’s portrayal rested in showing just how ignorant and self-defeating was Archie’s bunker mentality, to coin a phrase. Still, a lot of people were put off by Bunker’s character and missed the point of the show. It wasn’t exalting Bunker; it was exposing him. A lot of black people, and a goodly number of whites, thought it was a literal representation, and therefore an endorsement, of white racism. Like some rap music after it, what All in the Family and its creator Norman Lear were trying to do through the artistic exploration of politically incorrect territory was to highlight the idiocy and insanity of Bunker’s bigotries. Lear used television and a sophisticated comedic forum to probe the ethnic tensions and racial conflicts of a newly emerging post–civil rights society.
All in the Family showed us that Archie Bunker was the real dupe because of his bigotry. Archie’s wife, Edith (played by Jean Stapleton), was superficially daffy but evinced humanity and wisdom beneath her character’s loopiness. George Jefferson was the equally cantankerous black neighbor with prejudices of his own, played most famously by Sherman Hemsley, who later starred in The Jeffersons, a black-themed sitcom that in the ’70s spun off from All in the Family. To an extent, The Jeffersons explored the black side of things in the bigot’s universe. George Jefferson was both an upwardly mobile entrepreneur who escaped his old Queens digs to live with his family in a tony apartment on New York’s East Side and a honky-baiting character who was often made to face his shortcomings by his wife and his sassy maid. We could certainly use another black sitcom that was updated to honestly confront social issues today.
On the other hand, I think we need an integrated cast where black, white, Latino, Asian, and Native American friends, colleagues, and neighbors interact. Not in a stew of melted ethnicities and races, but a universe where race, class, ethnicity, sexuality, and the like, spice up the world we see on television, as it does in some real quarters in the world. Otherwise we end up believing that we live in these tightly compartmentalized, segregated worlds, and the real world is often more interesting. Or even the way the compartmentalization, segregation, and ghettoization gets represented on television, largely through avoidance, can be more usefully and interestingly explored in sitcoms and dramas, or some hybrid of the two.
Despite the persistence of rigid de facto segregation in our culture, there are enough interactions and intersections of races, genders, and sexes to see that reflected on the small screen. What we usually get are shows with minority tokens, such as the teen sitcom Saved by the Bell, which featured in its first incarnation the lovely and talented Lark Vorhees, and in its later installment, with a new cast, a lone black teen male. Integration in such cases usually means assimilation, where the trace of racial or ethnic specificity, however broadly that may be conceived, is washed away. As a result, there’s really no genuine exchange or real tension between the races or characters, as there was in All in the Family and The Jeffersons.
It would be interesting to find some of the tension and conflict that we see in the real world reflected on the screen. That’s not to say that it doesn’t occasionally happen, but it’s rare enough to want a lot more. What we usually end up with is staged conflicts between archetypal representatives of, just to take the black-white divide, The Bewildered And Defensive White Man, The Liberal White Woman, The Angry Black Man, and The Aggressive Black Woman, which do little to enlighten the nuanced interactions between blacks and whites in the real world. Of course, television plays to the least common denominator of human experience, so it’s seldom going to deal with the bruising truths of the given world. But there’s enough space for us to broach difficult subjects on television with much more subtlety and sophistication than we do now.
When you talk about reality, isn’t the reality of our society that we’re divided? We stay in the neighborhood that reflects our ethnic background. Outside of the workplace, most Americans choose basically to stay with their own.
What you say is largely true, as I spoke of it earlier. And you’ve put your finger on the pulse of social contradiction in America. We have the ideal of democracy and citizenship where everybody comes from different races, ethnic origins, genders, religious beliefs, and sexual orientations to form the nation. E Pluribus Unum: out of many, one. And in some cases that’s true, but only in some. By and large, we certainly endure the persistence of de facto segregation. As you say, we may work together but we don’t often play or live together. Many people do choose to stay among their own kind because it’s easier, it’s more comfortable. Even if you don’t like them, it’s a familiar dislike, since you know what you don’t like about them, and you know how to avoid them. But when you are in a new situation with people you don’t know that well or people who are different from you, you can’t predict what you don’t like. As a result of that unpredictability, folk tend to shy away from such uncomfortable interactions. On the other hand, American culture is just bleeding hybridity as it produces interesting aesthetic, racial, and social fusions.
For instance, a lot of white kids are buying rap music and hip-hop culture, and perhaps vicariously they are consuming black culture. In the fashion industry, there’s already a lot of mixing and merging going on in ways to which we don’t always pay attention. There’s quite a bit of intermarrying going on, but you couldn’t tell by television. We don’t see many serious interracial relationships on the tube. What would happen if we ever saw a white woman coming home to her black husband, reporting to him the heat she’s getting, verbally and through harsh looks, from black women? Wouldn’t it be great to see a Latino brother married to a black woman, or an Asian woman married to a black man, and so forth? Or television could produce real drama around a biracial child who’s being forced to settle the issue of her identity by being asked to choose one or the other racial identities. But most of the racial dynamics of the real world are being ignored by television.
But to make it a sitcom though?
Of course. For instance, there’s all kinds of funny stuff that could happen to biracial children or interracially married couples. Black folk found ways to make the tragic funny and to transform the negative into something productive and healthy. We’ve got to move beyond the narrowly scoped racial and ethnic humor demanded by the mainstream.
Do you think though that Hollywood is willing to take that risk knowing that such narrow visions of minorities work?
Right.
Separating people and giving them what they can identify with is what works, no?
There’s no question that Hollywood’s big and small screens are steeped in the copycat phenomenon. If something works, we’ll work it to death. We’re not daring at all, and when we are, it’s usually to tease sexual boundaries. We’re not daring in terms of thinking beyond the given racial, gender, and class limits. In one sense, I know I’m hungering for an ideal world. At the same time I don’t think it would take much to ease us into an ecumenical worldview. Think about comedienne Ellen Degeneres having her television character coming out, which is a hugely controversial topic. Not too many years ago we couldn’t even begin to broach the subject on television.
Now the shows that “go there” like Ellen are signing up big stars to make guest appearances at the coming out party, so to speak. That’s certainly a move in the right direction. Perhaps that’s because there are so many closeted and openly gay people in Hollywood. So the climate is right to explore controversial social issues like sexuality, race, and class. What we need is a critical mass of executives, producers, directors, and actors who are willing to duplicate these efforts on all fronts. To my mind, that’s a compelling argument to open the doors of opportunity to as many minorities as possible, both behind the scenes and in front of the camera. Only then will television begin to maximize its potential to make imaginative art and to embody the breadth of identities and social realities in our nation.
Interview by Abby Lynn Kearse
New York, New York, 1994