Revolution Televised.pdf

Introduction xv
in black television. Herman Gray’s Watching Race: Television and
the Struggle for Blackness examines television shows of the 1980s
and 1990s and provides another helpful framework for understanding
television texts. Gray avoids the positive/negative dichotomy and
instead considers how technologies, industrial organization, and political
economy influence commercial culture and the representation
of blackness. His work reveals that television is not black and white
but a medium of slippage and contradictory meanings. 4 Critics such
as Michael Dyson, Michelle Wallace, and bell hooks also present
valuable methods of critique as they look at black images within
popular culture. Each views popular culture and black media images
through his or her own political position and with an understanding
of the historical implications of such representations. 5
For cultural critics and members of the African American population
to ignore television’s potential as a forum of resistance is
to misread levels of vernacular meaning inherent in many African
American television texts. What follows here is not intended to be
a comprehensive social history of African Americans in television
in the late 1960s and 1970s, but rather a new interpretation of key
shows in a reassessment of black television history. For black society,
improvisation has traditionally been essential for survival, and
Revolution Televised illustrates how black television artists and
producers have often used this skill to challenge the television industry
and to locate effective resistance in an effort to control black
images. This commitment to community and social change played
out over television screens across the nation during this significant
historical moment.