Revolution Televised.pdf

174 Conclusion
Indeed, contemporary struggles over media representations are a
microcosm of society’s contestation over the changing American
racial landscape.
While these challenges to the rights of minority groups are now
coded into politically correct language—the end of “preferences”—
this indeed makes the current political situation, although more
veiled, as threatening to African Americans as the racial dictatorship
was prior to the Civil Rights era. This situation indicates that
perhaps now more than ever African Americans need to use all possible
means, including the significant power of television, to challenge
the mainstream constructions of black life and to instigate
change. Using cable television and specifically Chris Rock’s comedy
specials Bring the Pain (1996), Bigger and Blacker (1999), and
The Chris Rock Show (1997–2000), I explore the possibilities and
problems of contemporary television as a black site of resistance
and a forum for community.
Network Television: Hyperblackness Ghettoes and Invisibility
In his book Watching Race: Television and the Struggle for “Blackness,”
Herman Gray describes the representation of African Americans
in the 1990s as follows:
[G]iven the level of saturation of the media with representations of
blackness, the mediascape can no longer be characterized accurately
by using terms such as invisibility. Rather, we might well describe
ours as a moment of “hyperblackness.” 10
For the first time since the 1970s, many African American–cast
programs appeared on television, although primarily within the
genre of the situation comedy. Hyperblackness on television describes
what was happening on the fledgling stations more than on
the three major networks. Unlike the majority of television programs
analyzed in this book, which appeared on mainstream U.S.
television (Soul Train being the exception), these 1990s black-cast
shows were primarily concentrated on the new networks. Warner
Brothers (WB) and the United Paramount Network (UPN) followed
in the footsteps of the Fox Network, whose strategy targeted
the black audience with such shows as In Living Color (1990–93).
By the 1990s this seemed to create a type of television network
ghetto, in which one could locate the majority of black representations.
By the fall of 1995, when it was difficult to find one weekly