Revolution Televised.pdf

This Ain’t No Junk 107
There is nothing here that has traditionally motivated black humor—
no redemptive suffering, no strength, no tragedy behind the humor. . . .
So “Sanford and Son,” as far as I am concerned, is far from black. The
show reflects the culture of contemporary white America rather than
any intrinsic black values. And there is something extremely deceptive
about encasing whiteness in a black skin. . . . Fred Sanford and his
little boy Lamont, conceived by white minds and based upon a white
value system, are not strong black men capable of achieving—or even
understanding—liberation. . . . We—all of us—need to be surrounded
by positive—and true—images of blackness based upon black realities,
and not upon white aberrations. 29
Collier’s sentiment mirrors that of many critics of the show, as well
as the political climate of the times, in which every image had profound
meanings. The very language she employs suggests the importance
of the media in the construction of a public black self at a
critical moment in the Civil Rights and Black Power movements.
The crux of these critiques rests upon the aforementioned notions
of racial uplift evident in African American society since the
late nineteenth century. Collier judges the program on the basis
of this ideology. Sanford and Son, Collier argues, works against
the ideals of black liberation in the 1970s. The Sanfords are not
a patriarchal black family or black activists, nor do they promote
bourgeois values. These characters are contrary to the racial uplift
projects of the 1970s in their many forms.
Writers such as Ilunga Adell were well aware of the criticism of
the show by critics such as Eugenia Collier. Adell responded:
Nine out of ten blacks love Sanford. The tenth is critical because
Fred and Lamont aren’t . . . in what they call the mainstream of the
black revolution. In an answer to Ms. Collier, I said that in addition
to money, property, political awareness and motivation, black
people desperately need positive images of themselves. Because we’ve
really been bombarded with negative ones via television, movies, literature
and mass media in general. 30
The essentially class-based critiques are reminiscent of the flurry
of protests over Amos ’n’ Andy. Some thirty years later, the concerns
of significant black political organizations, such as integration
and purporting a Black Nationalist image, were still of utmost concern.
Fred Sanford, as a junkman with questionable morals, was an