Revolution Televised.pdf

Respect Yourself! 127
I have to watch closely to see the show doesn’t stray too far from the
ideals in which it was conceived. Sometimes people go for a quickie—
a cheap laugh. I don’t mind not getting every laugh if we stick to the
spine of what we started with. A good gutsy laugh comes out of a real
situation, not from the surface. A laugh out of nothing is soon forgotten,
but a laugh with a twist you remember for a long time.
Esther Rolle, in John Riley, “Esther Rolle the Fishin’ Pole”
There was a level of intertextuality to the women’s performances,
a realization that each image was building on, or in conversation
with, one from the past. While Carroll attempted to broaden the
image of black women in the arena of film with Claudine, Esther
Rolle stepped into television with Good Times. As the dialogue and
quotation above indicate, Rolle and the writers were aware of televisual
history and sought to create an oppositional dialogue.
Along with the individual performers, black organizations focused
on television as a tool to raise the consciousness of the nation.
There was an immense amount of public pressure placed on the industry
for discriminatory practices within hiring and programming.
In 1972, the Black Caucus, an organization of African American
Democrats in the U.S. Congress, organized hearings entitled “The
Mass Media and the Black Community.” The caucus charged the
white media organizations with racist news coverage and hiring
practices. The chairman of the caucus, William L. Clay, stated,
The fact that the black community, black community workers, black
organizations and the black movement are variously excluded, distorted,
mishandled, and exploited by the white-controlled mass
media [is obvious] to the most casual observer. . . . [The media] have
not communicated to whites a feeling for the difficulties and frustrations
of being a Negro in the United States . . . [or] indicate[d] the
black perspective on national and local issues. 21
Waymon Wright of the Black Caucus’s staff also indicated that
“[t]he media, because of racism, see all blacks as interchangeable,
undifferentiated. . . . This is the deepest kind of racism, that denies
all individual differences.” 22 The importance placed on the role the
media play in conveying black life to a white audience again ties
into the underlying dilemma of uplift, the concern with how the
white world views the black world. This is expressed in the desire
to see a positive black identity on national television. However,