“Yet our best trained, best educated, best equipped, best prepared troops refuse to fight! Matter of fact, it’s safe to say that they would rather switch than fight!”
– Civil Rights Activist Thomas “TNT” Todd, as sampled by Public Enemy in Fight the Power
American pop culture and media has long been, and continues to be, saturated with grossly narrow representations of people of color. Mainstream media is perpetually controlled by the dominant culture within the United States, which has always been straight, white, and male. It is up to this group of people to produce content, which usually reinforces their values and creates images for consumption by mass audiences that shape a hegemony based on this one groups experiences and ideals. Because dominant groups tend to produce this content that so closely reflects themselves, when it comes to producing content representing people outside of the hegemony, there is an overwhelming failure to represent non-dominant-group people as anything other than stereotypes or underdeveloped characters whose purpose is to somehow reinforce the supremacy of the dominant hegemony. However, dominant hegemony will always produce the need for counter hegemonic culture, that attempts to undermine or challenge the values and the problematic image produced in the mainstream. These counter hegemonic images are usually on the fringes of the mainstream, being consumed by limited audiences, and discussing specific issues and problems that are seen largely in the mainstream as only relevant to those specific groups of people as opposed to issues facing us all. Rarely are counter hegemonic productions and creators allowed access into the mainstream, voicing opinions of marginalized groups to large audiences. The most current case of counter-hegemonic media being given mainstream distribution is the ABC show “Black-Ish”, which will soon be followed by “Fresh Off The Boat”, also on ABC, focusing on Asian Americans. The issue I want to raise here by analyzing “Black-Ish” is that what is happening with these shows is the illusion of truly giving voices to marginalized groups. Instead of allowing for truly subversive content, the heads of production over at Disney/ABC are tapping into a need for counter-hegemonic media, which includes voicing some of the common struggles and problems faced by people of color as tools for comedic effect, while maintaining dominant values in the shows underlying themes and messages, thus continuing to silence the voices of the marginalized groups as serious concerns.
Black-Ish follows a trend started by the Cosby show of representing African Americans, and more specifically African American families, as intelligent, successful, and loving, as opposed to poor, or violent, or buffoons, in order to counter these images that saturated the media. When the Cosby show aired, the black families seen on TV were either in the Ghetto and needed white aid to get out, or had made it out of poverty but the fact they now co-mingled with rich or middle class white people was a punchline. Many images of African Americans still portrayed them as comedic buffoons on TV, re-presenting old images of minstrels or “Coons.” Cosby understood how harmful these images were and saw a necessity to provide images that suggested the opposite about African Americans to mainstream white audiences. The Cosby show was born out of the need for counter images, and was successful in that it created a legacy of shows that followed which shifted representations of blacks more toward Cosby-ish types instead of overtly racist stereotypes, at least until the mid to late 90’s where buffoonish characters started to reappear. The Cosby show also had the negative effect however, of creating the trend of what Sut Jhally calls “enlightened racism.” The images that the Cosby show and its successors produced started to turn into those of the “exceptional” blacks, who were nice and familiar, and most importantly non-threatening to whites. The images also started to form sentiments, to be internalized by both whites and some African Americans as well, that blacks who didn’t make it only had themselves to blame, despite the race and class issues that existed during the times. Heavy focus on the Huxtables’ (Cosby’s family) as the ideal black family framed any Black family who didn’t fit into their high class way of life as failures. During a time where the Reagan conservative political atmosphere and philosophy of “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” was hitting its peak, the Cosby show justified individualistic sentiments, ignoring societal inequalities. What was created by the Cosby show was a Catch-22 where positive representations of African Americans were needed, however they came at the cost of blaming non Cosby-ish African Americans for their own struggle, and ignoring the need for an overhaul of widespread institutional racism.
Fast forward a few decades and the need for positive images to fight the negative ones has become the need for diverse images to provide a full spectrum of representations of marginalized groups who are still reduced to certain stereotypes in the media. ABC has decided to return to the form that the Cosby show initiated using the backdrop of an upper/middle class familiar Black family to pose the question “What does it mean to be Black in America today?” However, they do not present a wide variety of Black characters from diverse backgrounds and cultures, the way that someone like Spike Lee did in Do the Right Thing when posing the same question in the 1989, and they do not address hard contemporary issues of racism, while instead framing the concerns of a father trying to preserve African American history and culture within his family as a comedic lost cause. The pilot of Black-Ish, while attempting to ask the question of what it means to be black, instead asks “What are you willing to give up to be American?”
So much of the pilot episode focused on being American and living the American dream, while simultaneously having almost every family member be an antagonist in the Dad’s mission to preserve black culture in his family. Outside of the domestic setting, the Dad had to put up with racism in the workplace (which was of comedic value for the show, of course), culminating in his conditional promotion that only got him advanced because he was black, which he was angry about but eventually accepted. The entire resolution of every issue in the episode was that even though he couldn’t change or preserve anything he set out to, it was just better to accept the racism and loss of black culture in the next generation, because really, we’re just all Americans. The end goal of “Black-Ish” was to latch on to the need for positive and diverse representations, and use the Cosby upper-class familiar black family platform to deliver a message of assimilation as a key to success. Interesting fun fact, this is similar to the way that Cosby, along with Sydney Poitier, latched on at the tail end of the trend of Blaxploitation films with “A Piece of the Action” in order to sneak in the message of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps and to just stop blaming everyone else for your troubles.
What makes Black-Ish most significant though, is that opposed to a show being produced by members of dominant white culture, it seems to be in the hands of Black writers and producers, two of which are stars on the show. Anthony Anderson and Laurence Fishburne both hold leading roles and are credited as producers. This means that they have the rare opportunity to give black voices that may not share dominant culture’s ideals a chance to be heard in the mainstream. The barrier that still exists here though is that the show must be marketable to mainstream audiences, which may create compromises between dealing with hard issues of inequality and racism, and keeping things light as to not offend viewers who just want to sit down and have a 30 minute laugh. So the questions that arise for me is how much are the creators able to fight the power within Black-ish, and should they even be expected to when white creators aren’t held to the same standards? White people aren’t expected to make “white” shows, so why should black creators be expected to make “black” shows?
I don’t believe I have an answer.
If a content producer of color has been granted the privilege of a voice on mainstream television, they should not have to be forced to use their voice to fight at risk of being labeled as someone who has betrayed their people, or made a switch. The primary goal of anyone in mainstream media is to make money for whatever company is allowing their production to exist. This isn’t going to change, and it’s unrealistic to believe that every content producer should be producing something that deals with hard issues or attempts to shift the dominant ideology. However, if a show like Black-Ish is going to directly address issues of race in the dialogue and plot, which is something that Cosby Show tended to gloss over or avoid completely, they are taking a responsibility upon themselves to use their story to make substantial shifts, as opposed to saying things that people want to hear, only to reach an endpoint that repeats the same old assimilation messages that negate any of the struggles that had been voiced before. So possibly the answer to my question, is that creators should be held to a higher standard when they make it a point to explicitly address race in their mainstream program, otherwise I believe that they are just co-opting social issues and current progressive mindsets in order to hide their compromising messages of assimilation. If a show is going to fight the power of dominant culture, they need to fight the power. Not play around with the idea of fighting the power, only to decide that life is easier when you just give in to the power. “Black-Ish” doesn’t end up fighting any mainstream ideals despite bringing up issues of race and inequality, and decides that in the end, despite all of these past struggles that have shaped current social/political/economic statuses and are maybe probably definitely worth talking about, we’re all just American’s trying to live the American dream, and that’s what matters.
The Pictures Make My Head Hurt 