Imaging Blackness: Representation of the Black Experience in TV

The first sitcom aired that on American television was Mary Kay and Johnny in 1947.

The first all-Black cast sitcom emerged as a spin-off from a minstrel radio show with a White casted duo. It was Amos ‘n’ Andy. Deemed a show of racial stereotypes by some and a pivotal point in history for Black actors in lead roles by others, this show aired in 1951.

The first time an African American starred in a non-stereotypical role on television was in 1968, in Julia – she was a mother, a widow, and professional nurse, living with her son in a nice suburban home. In the same instance, the show was a presentation of what was described as a White Negro – being produced, written, and directed by White people.

The first Black-sitcom to portray the Black experience without enforcing common stereotypes and keeping a realistic view of Black life was Sanford and Son in 1972.

The lack of representation of people of color within the media has been up for debate. And although the amount of shows has continued to dwindle more within the past decade, the resurgence seems to be on the rise. Shows like Atlanta and Insecure are being praised because of the accuracy of their storytelling, mirroring the audience’s everyday lives. It has taken a while to perfect that formula of narrative, especially in the genre of the Black sitcom. Some of our favorite shows were criticized, mainly by the race for which they were intended, due to differing ideas of what the Black experience was in the US.

Movin’ on Up!: 1970’s Television

The Black sitcoms of the 70’s set the genre in motion. These first sitcoms garnered respect on the small screen. In 1974-1975 Good Times, The Jeffersons, and Sanford and Son all ended that season being one of the top 10 highest rated shows on television. Whether it was the relatability of Florida and James Evans’ lives, or the comedic genius of Redd Fox as Fred Sanford, these shows were able to pull in viewers in record numbers while showing the experiences of average African American families.

Good Times chose to deal with serious topics in a comedic way while providing positive characters for viewers to identify with. It was The Jeffersons use of confrontational humor and candid commentary that helped ease the discussion of topics like race and class on American television. It also referenced issues such as alcoholism, racism, suicide, gun control and adult illiteracy. Sanford and Son’s premise was simple enough on the surface – a dad, eager to keep his son at home no matter the cost. But it also depicted a different type of family dynamic – father and son – and their fierce loyalty to one another. Although these shows possess their own positive attributes towards the progression of Black actors on TV, they were met with some opposition.

According to Dr. Alvin Poussaint, American psychiatrist, “These sitcoms have been criticized as fostering an image of segregation and helping to perpetuate a belief that Black and White cultures are so different that integration is undesirable and unworkable.” With Fred Sanford being the culturally insensitive answer to White bigot Archie Bunker and George Jefferson’s display of distrust of white people alongside his outspoken and honest opinions of race relations, the notion that two races being able to work alongside each other seemed grim. Although this is what the people of the time were feeling and the shows’ content helped to open discussions about certain topics, it also helped create barriers around race relations.

Moments of humor have always eased an audience into uncomfortable ideas and tense moments. Good Times comedic relief came from Jimmie “J.J.” Walker and his catch phrase “Dy-no-mite!” The phrase gained popularity for J.J.’s character, and as a result, the writers focused more on J.J.’s comedic antics instead of serious issues. Ester Rolle, casted as J.J.’s mother, was very vocal about her hate for his character in the show,

“He's 18 and he doesn't work. He can't read or write. He doesn't think. The show didn't start out to be that...Little by little—with the help of the artist, I suppose, because they couldn't do that to me—they have made J.J. more stupid and enlarged the role. Negative images have been slipped in on us through the character of the oldest child.”

The concern of slipping back into minstrel-based television was always in the back of the mind of the Black actors of that time. The stereotypes that Black actors in the industry worked so hard to fight were always humorous and added an air of lightheartedness to uncomfortable situations, but were a step in the opposite direction for the progression of the times.

Many now argue that the variance between the classes in each Black sitcom is what made them less successful, especially against their White predecessors of TV at the time. Fred and Lamont Sanford were junk men and the Evans lived in the projects. George and Weezy had moved on up, and the show's humor came from the family's adjustment to its newfound wealth. To have the economically poor Black folk on air alongside the new upper class Black people showed a differing world, but made the class distinction that much wider. Some saw Fred Sanford’s job as demeaning while George Jefferson was getting able to live the good life.

The Jeffersons gave the most well-rounded view of what a Black family could achieve realistically, and it was prematurely cancelled, with no explanation. Could it have been because of the positive light being shed was too bright? If so, the effects of the show lasted longer and made more of an impact than the cancellation ever could have.

The Huxtable Era: 1980’s Television

One of my favorite scenes from recently cancelled sitcom, The Carmichael Show, was when the family's matriarch,Cynthia Carmichael, described the allure and enchantment that she felt when watching the type of family that The Cosby Show portrayed,

"Well, that's why Black people like The Cosby Show so much. It was just mystical seeing all those people reading and being doctors. It took me to a fantastical place I'd never been before. The Cosby Show was my Star Wars."

The Cosby Show was a shining exemplar of upward mobility, dignity, and a functioning Black family. The show was a response to a White popular imagination that largely saw Black and brown Americans as poor, as members of the underclass, as criminal, or beaten down by racism. And as a direct rebuttal to Good Times, Sanford and Son, and The Jeffersons -- where the humanity and travails of Black folks living in poverty (and escaping such conditions) were the dominant themes.

Bill Cosby originally suggested that the couple should both have blue collar jobs – the father as a limo driver who owned his own car and the mother an electrician. Camille Cosby, his wife, felt that the show should be based off a family that was well-off financially – with the mother as a lawyer and the father a doctor. The show's portrayal of a successful, stable Black family was praised by some for breaking racial stereotypes and showing another part of the African-American experience.

A Different World was the spin-off of The Cosby Show that followed Denise Huxtable in her first year at Hillman College – a fictional historically Black college. It was inspired by student life at HBCUs. 

After the first season, it came to Cosby's and the producers' attentions that the series was not accurately portraying a historically Black college and life on campus. Cosby then hired on Debbie Allen to help with the authenticity of the show. With Allen’s help, A Different World taught America of the culture, care and traditions of Black colleges and showcased the experiences of Black youth in an unprecedented way. 

The show typically addressed issues that were avoided by The Cosby Show writers, such as race and class relations, or the Equal Rights Amendment. They also tackled situations that anyone – regardless of skin color – could encounter in life, such as sexual assault, discrimination and more. The show was appealing because it is also an intergenerational portrayal of Blackness that is also inclusive of a variety of Black identities.

A Different World also helped Black colleges reach a degree of prominence and visibility in the media that would, in turn, fuel rapid growth. Most college students who attended an HBCU admit to learning of HBCUs from watching A Different World. From the debut of The Cosby Show in 1984 until the end of A Different World in 1993, American higher education grew by 16.8 percent. During the same period, historically Black colleges and universities grew by 24.3 percent — 44 percent better than all higher education.

The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air worked to deconstruct traditional notions of Black stereotypes. The Banks were not moving up like The Jeffersons or affluent like the Huxtables, they were wealthy – unfamiliar for Blacks on television. The show conception came from a Times article that rubbed one of the creators – Susan Borowitz – the wrong way,

… and there was this one article that really disturbed me about how being successful in some corners of the American Black experience was akin to selling out. It was a really upsetting story because it was like, how do you get out of the poverty, the more violent neighborhoods, if succeeding is considered tantamount to turning your back and becoming white? […] Why don’t we make it about how there are all these different ways of being Black?

Twenty five years ago, there was a sense of this monolith of a Black experience, that there was one kind of Black American, and they all think alike and do the same thing. We liked the idea of challenging that.

While bestowing stereotypes onto this Black family that were typical to a White family, this series turned TV on its head. It made 90’s families, both White and Black, sit down and have a level of comfort with a polite rapper on TV. “At the time, the media were freaking out about controversial rappers like 2 Live Crew, and even though Will’s rapping had zero in common with theirs, NBC was irrationally nervous about how the network’s audience would respond to a show starring a rapper. As it turned out, the show was the highest-rated new sitcom in its first season.” These shows did not flourish without their fair share of criticism throughout the years.

The Cosby Show was unusual in that issues of race were rarely mentioned when compared to other situation comedies of the time, such as The Jeffersons.  Henry Louis Gates criticized the show for allowing White audiences to think that racism and poverty were problems of the past. It offered a harmless type of “diversity,” where Blackness and the “Black experience” were watered down into a casual mention of the March on Washington and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., or simple guest appearances for accomplished Black musicians, artists, and actors. None of the Cosby kids were portrayed to deal with the actual social issues of the time in New York – such as the protest activity, anxieties about the Black super predators, and the racist murders and assaults on Black youth. The Cosby Show existed inside a bubble that was outside of the day-to-day lived experiences of the vast majority of Black Americans. The events in bubble were White fantasies of Black people’s lives.

While the Huxtables shied away from social Black issues of the time, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air illustrated that socioeconomic status meant the absence of Blackness completely. Uncle Phil and his stuck-up family presented an experience that no other Black family resembled. The show, in a way, cast a tragic view on upward social mobility of Blacks. They lived in a mansion, spoke a refined version of the English language, and had a Black, British, live-in butler. While Uncle Phil could speak of the Black experience when it was demanded of him – mainly when reprimanding Will – he didn’t connect often enough. For Uncle Phil, the Black experience was associated with class status and often translated into stories of being very poor in the ghetto.

Who’s left to represent what the Black culture looked like in the show? Will Smith, an inner-city teen from Philly. Will became the overall metaphor for what Black looked like, a complete deviant from the Banks’s kids with the perception of gangs, absentee fathers, and criminals. And while the show’s creators were trying to kill off the monolith of the Black experience, it has been called a reversal of stereotypes,

Usually Black dialect is used negatively to describe Black male characters, but in this sitcom, the Fresh Prince is accepted and the television viewer is made to question the other characters who have education, status, and money. The “dumb blonde stereotype” usually reserved for white females in white mainstream sitcoms is manifested in the Fresh Prince’s cousin Hilary. The common storyline of rich white families with butlers is overturned, also because the Prince’s relatives not only have butler, but a Black British-speaking one!

The series killed the notion of seeing Blackness dealing with Blackness on its own terms while moving away from comparisons using a scale based on White norms. In Robin R. Means Coleman’s opinion, “… the series was the equivalent of Blacks in Blackface – traditional White stereotypes of Blacks enacted by Blacks. Rather than move away from Black stereotypes, the series relied upon stereotypy and hyper-racial behaviors for its ridiculing humor.”

The conception of A Different World itself was a fluke. The show did not begin as a representation of a Black college campus and the lives of Black students. The original premise was to have a Black student in a Black college with a White friend to show the dynamic of a white girl in predominantly-Black surroundings. The show gained its support and funding from NBC and its sponsors from attempting to show that there could be a connection between the two races and their two worlds. And while that was a positive notion, it makes you wonder if the original premise of the show helped keep it on air just long enough for Bill Cosby to be able to switch up the idea and save the program.

For all extensive purposes, A Different World was the ideal Black sitcom for the time. “It had what no other comedy thus far had: social relevancy, uncompromising construction of Blackness (Whiteness was not the normative yardstick), and the ability to use situation comedy as a vehicle to highlight (not hide or delete) the Black experience in America.” But it was the comfort in comedy that helped set the Black sitcom and its legacy back 30 years.

Neo-Minstrelsy: 1990’s Television

My favorite decade is obviously the one that shaped my views on the world then and now. The 90’s stood as what I considered to be the last great decade, especially when it came to Black entertainment. Growing up, all I remember was watching The WB and UPN to get my fill of urban comedies, complete with jokes that I understood and relatable situations. I saw myself represented in Moesha Mitchell, main character from The UPN’s Moesha, more than any other teenage depiction at that time or since then. But with all being considered, Black sitcoms remained in a revolving door cycle. Shows like Friends and Married… with Children remained on broadcast television for a decade, while many Black sitcoms barely made it past 5 years. But was it the lack of quality of the sitcoms that made them cycle out, or was it the popularity of Black folk that kept the industry cranking the too many domestic comedies out? With so many portrayals of the Black experience being shown to the world, which was most accurate? And which, with its comedy, continued to make us look like fools?

Family Matters remains a pillar in Black television through the 90’s although it started the year prior, and its regarded as one of the longest running Black sitcoms to date. It told the story of the Winslow family, a middle-class Chicago-based family – Carl and Harriette (the parents), and Eddie, Laura, and Judy (the children). The true star of the show was born with the introduction of Steven Q. Urkel, the pestering neighbor whose unrequited love for Laura charmed audiences. Family Matters taught responsibility, loyalty, abstinence, honesty, and the value of family and education.

The series received criticism mainly because of the focus being shifted from valuable lessons to Urkel’s antics and his foolish look alike characters – Myrtle Urkel, Bruce Lee Urkel, and Stefan Urquelle. The target audience’s attraction to comedy overall throughout the years have kept actors and critics on alert for situations that risked being prejudice or stereotypical. And a six-foot tall, adult Jaleel White running around playing a child-like mad scientists is not necessarily stereotypical as much as it is demeaning.

After the 80s, the major broadcast networks appeared to lose interest in Black sitcoms, due in part to the success of predominantly White cast shows. Newer networks, like The WB and UPN, began to feature Black sitcoms in the 90’s and were profitable, even with limited White viewership.

FOX was the first of the networks to try and fill the void of Black sitcoms, building most of its primetime programming around series of color. Even in the late 80’s, companies looked to Black people to determine popularity. “What demographics do sponsors most prize? Young, urban and White. Whom does that crowd look to for its what’s hip-next clues? Young, urban and Black,” Coleman explains the strategy of FOX Entertainment. Shows such as South Central, Sinbad, and Roc all stood as positive programs showing the lives of people of color. They were also short-lived – each lasting 1- 3 years respectively. Instead, cultural mainstay, Martin, was born and thrived on the network.

Martin’s premise was simple. Martin would cause disequilibrium with each episode as he, childishly, would feel the need to prove himself “a man, Gina, a man.” Martin had a selfish and free-spirited nature, one that he learns to calm as his relationship with Gina grows. Episodes often center on Martin's inappropriate behaviors and incessant smart mouth towards his friends, neighbors, and whoever else finds themselves in his presence. But when all is said and done, Martin loves his family 

and friends – it just takes dire situations for him to show it.

Martin was so antagonistic to women; the series was largely misogynistic. Martin belittled not only Black women, but cultural signifiers at times attributed to Black females. Pam was continuously heckled by Martin for “donning horse hair,” was called “beady bead” when her relaxed hair reverted to its naturally curly state, and was thus disparaged for her “nappy, ergo, unfavorable hair.”

Although laughter was the most efficient way for Black people to deal with their struggle, Black people were not the only ones watching. White viewers were the series’ primary audience. The comedic stereotype of Hustle Man, selling goods he somehow acquired for exorbitant prices, the old, loudmouthed,somehow well-funded ex pimp – Jerome, and the lazy Bruh Man who breaks into apartments and steals from others were all exemplified as a lower class than Martin, but funny enough to deserve ridicule.

Sheneneh Jenkins was one of Martin’s self-portrayed supporting character. She represented the erasure of the Black woman by actively personifying every negative stereotype possible. Sheneneh “wore outrageous outfits that were always skimpy and often in bright colors and satiny material. She was busty and too possessed an enormous behind thanks to considerable padding. Her earrings were huge, her acrylic nails inches long, and her hair weave was plentiful. She was quite promiscuous. She drank 40 ounces of beer straight from the bottle… She was female, yet a brutal buck; an embodiment of the razor-toting Nat stereotype, as she was always ready to fight” (Coleman). The Angry Black Woman stigma is a frustrating stereotype that is provoked everyday with every Black woman in the country. We can’t feel free to express ourselves with our frustrations, whether it be with injustices in the world or in the workplace, without fear of being labeled as angry, aggressive, or combative. I should know. I’ve worn those labels before.

In the end, Martin presented a series that provided not a single liberating Black image. It drew on one-dimensional, limited character types that added up to little more than street-smart buffoons. That became the new formula for Black sitcoms: stereotypical characters of us, portrayed by us – before anyone else could – with underlying tropes of the Black life. And after a while, it seemed that this formula was used in every new show that commenced.

With so many shows of the decade to consider, in my opinion, the most relatable shows to exemplify the Black experience were: The Parent ‘Hood – a middle-upper class nuclear family, living in Harlem with four children; Moesha – the episodes of teenage life through the eyes and journal of a Black girl; and Living Single – the story of six friends, living in the same Brooklyn brownstone, sharing personal and professional experiences. Each depict the diversity of life experiences for Black people. Although none of the shows share a single premise, they all handle issues of Black people while utilizing comedy, in ways that were not demeaning.

Where Have We Gone?: 2000’s Television and Beyond

From 1997-2001, the number of Black sitcoms declined from 15 to 6, and continued its descent. By the early 2010s, Black sitcoms faded away on network television such as ABC, NBC, CBS, and FOX. There is a return of reruns of popular sitcoms on BET, Centric, Bounce, MTV2, and TV One.

In the past seventeen years, there have been less than 20 new Black sitcoms to grace broadcast television.

Now, there is a resurgence of our representation in shows such as FX’s Atlanta, HBO’s Insecure, STARZ’s Survivor’s Remorse, OWN’s Queen Sugar, and ABC’s Black-ish but is that nearly enough when shows like The Carmichael Show on NBC was never given a fair chance? Is it fair that broadcast television won’t take an opportunity to showcase our talents in media, thus forcing all the shows that represent us to be shown on cable television channels?

And through the past 40 years, has anyone captured the Black Experience that any man, woman, or child must endure daily? Although it’s purely subjective and the idea of a true Black Experience rests in the time, age, gender, and class of a person – have any of these shows been able to show the forward progression of the Black race without erasing it and/or the struggles born from it? Have they done it without the embarrassing costs of using actors as jesters and furthering stereotypes? Did the shows that truly fit all that criteria stick around for long?

UPDATE: STARZ’s Survivor’s Remorse is cancelled upon completion of this, its fourth, season.

Another one bites the dust…

Means Coleman, Robin R. (1998). African American Viewers and the Black Situation Comedy: Situating Racial Humor. Retrieved from https://books.google.com/