Revolution Televised.pdf

2 Reading the Roots of Resistance
MacDonald in Blacks and White TV, a politically disputable survey
of African Americans in television, dismiss the era as “the New
Age of Minstrelsy,” suggesting a time of essentialized positive and
negative imagery. 2 Donald Bogle’s recent book, Prime Time Blues,
although more detailed in its analysis, still categorizes television
of the 1970s as “the Jokesters” and, as such, focuses on perceived
stereotypes reinscribed by television. 3
But 1970s black television cannot be reduced to such simplistic
analyses. Falling in the period of the Black Revolution within
the United States, this era of television goes further in helping us
understand how television operates as a cultural site. This historical
moment is of utmost importance, because the impact of African
Americans in the political arena expanded exponentially. It was
a never-before-seen uprising and demand for change, made more
public by the use of television. The incorporation of these images
of struggle inadvertently changed the face of the medium in both
fiction and nonfiction genres.
Television of this time period has been ignored because of the
shape of early African American cultural criticism, which considered
black cultural works under the rubric of positive and negative representations.
Media representations were often rejected as negative
for the black community. This certainly has been a primary concern
of African Americans, given awareness of the hegemonic influences
of media representation. However, as critic and filmmaker Marlon
Riggs notes in the response to his film Tongues Untied (1989), one
needs to consider the notion of “community standards” when analyzing
the appropriateness of a particular image. 4 In this case, who is
given the power to decide what media products meet the standards
for the black community? Is this process, indeed, a self-reinscription
of the notion of the monolithic black community in which every
black person reads a cultural product, gains pleasure or pain, in the
same way?
In my attempt to show the flaws in this way of thinking, one of
my key tasks is to rehistoricize, reconsider, and recuperate arenas of
black popular culture such as television. African American participants
in the television industry during the Black Revolution were
often accused of engaging in acts of black self-oppression. Those
who leveled such criticism ignored the history of black popular culture,
in which residual resistance exists in what may seem on the surface
to be antiprogressive texts. Those who assessed popular culture