There were a lot of interesting segments to pull from this week's reading. The first one I was struck by was a respondent's explanation for why The Cosby Show was so popular and how they were able to subtly bring their race into the picture:
"It's just to put a little blacker face on what was until then just happened to be very good comedy, about realistic people who were played by black people.(Jhally, 1992: 105)"
'A little blacker face'. I can't tell if this was a deliberate reference, but it made an impact nonetheless. It's impossible to miss. As we saw in Bamboozled, the strains of racism and white superiority are just too deeply rooted in our culture to be either ignored or made light of.
This is made even more evident by the fact that Jhally goes on to note the unease with which white tv audiences approach black-oriented shows. If they are too black or remind people too much of uncomfortable, unsolvable issues, the show will lose its white audience.
And here comes the irony, for despite Cosby's laudable attempts to introduce a non-threatening, accent-less, upper-middle class black family to white tv audiences, he created a standard for all working-class African-Americans who aren't quite as successful to be judged by.
So instead of 'black' being celebrated as a diverse culture with its own class structure, there's still the underlying malicious comparison between those who are 'just like us' and those with 'a little blacker face'.
No comments:
Post a Comment