Revolution Televised.pdf

Notes to Chapter 1 197
tradition of oral culture in the black community. Overall he indicates that
middle-class images or uplifting images of the urban underclass are the
only ones acceptable for mainstream television. Considering his analysis of
1990s television, one should question the validity of the assessment of the
history of black TV that he presents.
3. Similar to his book on African American film, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes,
Mammies & Bucks, Bogle’s Prime Time Blues, while useful as a historical
framework, focuses on biographical information about the actors
during various historical decades. The book also tends to focus on the
positive or negative aspects of black television shows.
4. Marlon Riggs, “Tongues Retied,” in Resolutions: Contemporary Video
Practices, 185–88. This chapter was written in response to the negative
and homophobic feedback to his film about black gay men in the United
States, Tongues Untied (1989). In the article Riggs responds to the arguments
that his film should not have been supported with public funds or
shown on public television because it does not comply with community
standards. Riggs questions this idea of community standards and censorship
by asking the questions, whose standards and whose community? He
argues that the term community standards suggests one central community.
This community is patriarchal, heterosexual, and white. Compliance
with these standards will determine that any cultural product not within
the majority will not be able to find a place in public television. If we use
this idea of community standards within African American society, the
community can be described as black, middle-class, and heterosexual.
Thus, cultural products that do not meet this particular set of standards are
similarly rejected.
5. I refer to the term vast wasteland as used by Newton Minow. Then
chairman of the FCC, Minow responded to issues such as the quiz show
scandals by describing television as a vast wasteland. Although television
in the 1970s was often heralded as producing more socially progressive
programming, black television programs were often considered as reveling
in “regressive images.”
6. Cops also reinforces ideas about the criminality of other minority
groups and the white underclass as well. It is interesting to note that Cops
thus far has not appeared on Wall Street to deal with the upper-class criminality
such as the Enron, WorldCom, or Martha Stewart scandals of 2002.
7. A racial project, as defined by Michael Omi and Howard Winant, is
“simultaneously an interpretation, representation, or explanation of racial
dynamics, and an effort to reorganize and redistribute resources along particular
racial lines.” Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation
in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s, 56.
8. Bogle, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies & Bucks; Ed Guerrero,
Framing Blackness: The African American Image in Film. Both Bogle and