African Americans In Television Essays Examples

In America, for people of color, especially African Americans, the path to progress and success has been a long and tiresome road. Taken from their homeland, they were stripped of not just their possessions but their dignity and pride. If they survived the over-crowded voyage across the Atlantic, once on American colonial soil, they were separated from their families and made slaves for white American settlers. This is where it all began for blacks in America. 250 years later, the scars of this impetus, though fading, are still quite visible. The scabs of inequality, stereotyping, prejudice, and segregation is what’s left from the vestiges of slavery. From Jim Crow to Affirmative Action to today, we see progress, but nothing reminds us more that the effects of this difficult road are still with us than the segregation, inequality, stereotyping of blacks we see on Television. Racism is alive and well.
It took some years before networks where comfortable with having blacks on screen. For years blacks used to be played by whites with “black-face” make-up on. This caricature black person was stereotypically portrayed as a doormat-servant of a white household, and was there primarily for comic relief. Once blacks were allowed to be cast, they were stuck playing the same black-faced caricature. More than half a century later, the image of the black-faced negro servant is long gone. Shows like the Jeffersons, The Cosby Show and Stanford and Son have given blacks a new face on screen. Yet this face was still overshadowed by a similar caricature. These and similar shows like, Martin, Family Matters, and Sister Sister are all sitcoms. In his article on “Why is TV so Segregated”, M.D. Alvin Poussiant , elaborates on this idea, “historically, black actors have been grouped stereotypically and assigned to comedy and buffoonery. Black TV dramas, for instance, have rarely attracted a large white audience, with the exception of the Roots mini-series (first broadcast in 1977)”. It seems the networks cannot take blacks serious enough for TV dramas. The list of black sitcoms is impressive and encouraging, seeing that blacks are given some airtime, but why only in one genre? But this stereotyping and segregation in Hollywood goes deeper.
Poussaint continues in his article pointing out how “the all-black sitcom - and so-called "authentic" black humor - fosters the idea that blacks and whites are so different culturally that integration is undesirable and unworkable From the viewpoint of the networks and their advertisers, there is more profit to be made by attracting white viewers, since they represent the significant majority of our population. These practices have led civil rights organizations to accuse the networks of denying minorities equal opportunity as well as denying them a broader participation in general television programming.” Thus, we see segregation still at work in society demonstrated in weekly TV programming. However, in his blog, Single Black Man, blogger, WisdomIsMisery, offers a different perspective, “let me state this simply, black people do not have to be everywhere. Yet, some people truly believe that the absence of black people from mainstream TV shows (or movies) is always indicative of racism or racial insensitivity by the creators, producers, and in some cases, the very viewers of the shows”. So depending how you look at the situation, one can understand that maybe not in all cases are blacks being kept out of certain shows because of the social context the show is portraying. For example, a show about Norwegian farmer wouldn’t be anti-American just because it doesn’t have any Americans in it. However, there are other problems with network TV.
One would think that with black sitcoms becoming more a staple of TV programming, one of them might actually get some critical acclaim. In 2010, Actress and contributor of the Huffington Post, Regina King, wrote about the lack of recognition non-white actors and actresses, “It is impossible for me to ignore the published statistics regarding the number of people of color mentioned, celebrated or honored in the history of the televised Emmys. Up to and including this year, there have been only 53 non-white actors nominated for Emmys out of nearly 1,000 possible nominations in the top four acting categories for drama and comedy”. This is a very troubling statistic. It may not prove without a shadow of a doubt that the networks are bias towards white actors and actresses, but it sure is a strong argument against them even noticing black actors.
Yet this type of inequality for blacks in not unique to the US, but also in England. In a recent public meeting regarding, British Labor Parliamentary member, Chuka Umunna, stated that “our broadcast and film media have a tendency to stereotype black people: to present an image of black British people that suggests we can succeed in sport, entertainment and music, but not necessarily in other fields”. He demonstrates how this stereotypical portrayal of blacks in British TV and film, keeps the younger generation from aspiring to anything beyond the stereotype. He also goes on to point out that the lack of opportunity for black actors and actresses in Britain causes them to come here and that, “It’s often only after they’ve made it big in the States that black British actors get more - and more varied - roles here. That is unacceptable and has got to change. As a society, we cannot allow people to default to lazy stereotypes".
In conclusion, we see how difficult it is for blacks to climb the upward ladder in television. If they do succeed, as only a few have, they must persevere through a long gauntlet of stereotypical roles as comic relief, sitcom side-kicks or comedians, and or the replaceable black person on the show to provide that element of diversity, but no more than that. Maybe one day the networks will take blacks serious and develop more black dramas, as well as black in unique roles (there is one on primetime, with Blake Underwood in Ironside as the lead). But there should be more.