Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, February 21, 1993 TAG: 9302190226
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 2 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: RICK KOGAN KNIGHT-RIDDER/TRIBUNE
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
BLACKS STILL ARE `TOKENS' IN TV ROLES
Has it really been less than a decade since Bill Cosby entered the NBC prime-time lineup with a show that Coretta Scott King called "the most positive portrayal of black family life that has ever been broadcast"?One might have assumed that the success of "The Cosby Show" - it almost single-handedly made NBC the top-rated network - might have had a positive impact not only on increasing the number of African-Americans working in the industry but also on the way they were portrayed on the tube.
Sadly, it didn't.
Today, network TV remains, like much of white America, fearful of examining the black experience in its totality.
What other reason is there for the ongoing parade of African-Americans represented on TV as dope dealers or criminals?
As disturbing as that is, perhaps more alarming is the subtle racism operating when network TV gives us happy-go-lucky, comfortable black families and button-down blacks in white worlds because they reassure white America by being more like white America.
They fit, sometimes uneasily to be sure, into familiar costumes - safe and sanitized.
That's hardly the worst of it. Historically, television's relationship with black America has been filled with controversy, conflict and frustration, from the first flickerings of "Amos 'n' Andy" in 1951.
It wasn't until 1965 that a black was given a starring role in a dramatic series, when Cosby starred opposite Robert Culp in "I Spy." But the 1970s - for all the ratings success of such shows as "Good Times" or "The Jeffersons" - continued to feature what Donald Bogle, in his book "Blacks in American Films and Television," called "families or friends hootin' and carryin' on as much as had Old Kingfish and his friends from the Mystic Knights of the Sea in `Amos 'n' Andy."'
There was much made last fall about the number of premieres featuring primarily African-American casts. But upon closer inspection, one could find these to be little more than hoary TV concepts and formulas dressed in - OK, let's say it - blackface.
"Out All Night," starring Patti LaBelle as the owner of a dance club and an apartment building who must deal with a group of younger, pretty underlings, was a standard sitcom with "Soul Train" underpinnings.
"Hangin' With Mr. Cooper," starring the talented Mark Curry, was little more than a variation of the insipid "Three's Company," with a dose of "Welcome Back, Kotter."
"Here and Now" was a great disappointment, at least symbolically, because it starred "Cosby" kid Malcolm Jamal-Warner and placed him awkwardly in the role of a college student working in a youth center filled with cute cutups.
The sitcom continues to be the most common place to find African-Americans, even though that clime contains such excellent shows as Fox's "Roc" and such amusing ones as NBC's "The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air."
Dramas? Still a sad story. In TV history, only a handful of serious dramatic shows focused on blacks: "Palmerstown, U.S.A.," "Harris and Company" and Oprah Winfrey's "The Women of Brewster Place" were quick failures.
Most dramas that feature black actors and actresses place them conspicuously in otherwise white TV worlds, making them - OK, let's say it - tokens. We've got, among others, Blair Underwood of "L.A. Law" and Richard Brooks of "Law & Order."
But they are at best sidekicks in the tradition of Philip Michael Thomas on "Miami Vice." (One encouraging recent note: Avery Brooks of the syndicated "Deep Space Nine" is the first black in some time to star in a dramatic series).
The networks must realize, or be bold enough to accept, that African-Americans must no longer be treated as hired hands. Until they are allowed to express their lives - with the diversity of emotions, failings, dreams, passions and pains that human beings share - TV will continue to fill its black entertainment shelf with things closer to minstrel shows than to things that matter.
This failing was perhaps most succinctly addressed by Rosemary Bray, an editor of The New York Times Book Review, who wrote in that paper's Arts & Leisure section a couple of years ago: "I wish there was a television schedule that reflected the world I live in, with black people doing all kinds of things every day of the year."
Bray is black and I am not, but I couldn't agree with her more.