Revolution Televised.pdf

xii Introduction
tries to be the center of attention and comes up with numerous silly
suggestions to help Michael.
At the time I did not comprehend the mixed politics of the show.
Michael argues for the incorporation of black history into the curriculum
and refuses to accept the textbook’s simplified explanations
of the founding fathers of this nation. He opens James’s eyes to the
fact that he, too, was miseducated. These are important statements
about the education system and its exclusion of African Americans,
but at the end of the episode James asks Michael to compromise his
values and apologize to his teacher so that he can return to school.
Also, as clearly illustrated in Marlon Riggs’s film Color Adjustment
(1991), in both his dress and demeanor J.J. replicates the old coon
images from early cartoons and minstrel shows.
Watching these shows decades later I understand why critics
responded to many of them with such negativity. Indeed, some of
these late 1960s and 1970s black-cast shows used historical stereotypes
modernized to the new decades. Academic studies of the
black television programs of the era usually see them simply as
negative representations; the shows are reduced to merely kitsch or
viewed with a level of disdain. Although these shows aired during
the Black Revolution, a period of much turmoil and political protest,
the few scholarly analyses of them have generally been limited
and reductive, dwelling primarily on perceived stereotypes in what
are considered antiprogressive television texts. 1
I could not so easily dismiss the pleasure gained by myself and
numerous African Americans who not only watched the shows at
that time but also do currently in reruns and with newly released
DVDs. Staying within this positive/negative binary prevents a
deeper understanding of these texts. When I began to research the
black-cast television shows of this period to find an alternative story,
I discovered numerous instances of black agency. African American
actors and producers disrupted television’s traditional narratives
about blackness and employed television as a tool of resistance
against mainstream constructions of African American life. Actors
challenged the development of the story lines and their characters,
found ways of covertly speaking to a black audience within typical
television genres, opened up television for the inclusion of more African
Americans, and used other media outlets such as mainstream
magazines to question the motives of television producers.
Of the many 1970s television shows rooted in blackness, certain