Just a short phrase, but that one observation of The Cosby Show reminded me of a contemporary cultural impulse that ethnographers must recognize in their research:
Humans have a deep desire for everything to be the same.
At first glance, this makes no sense. But according to David Silverman's book Qualitative Research, this phenomenon is visible in every part of our world.
Take, well, tv as an example. There are as many different shows as there are ideas and flipping channels would be an exhausting exercise if everything wasn't digitized. But everything on tv is still characterized in some way. There's reality tv, news, comedy for half-an-hour and drama for 60 minutes with commercial breaks. There're sitcoms, soap operas documentaries, game and talk shows, telenovelas...the list goes on.
Everything is genre-d.
And with categorization comes expectation; the expectation that the show, plot and characters will behave exactly as they should. There will be a conflict, a misunderstanding or a secret not meant to be heard on national tv which will then be resolved, sorted out and aired on television anyway. The happy ending may be stretched out over many, many (many) seasons, but eventually things will reach a satisfactory conclusion.
My point is, the one short phrase "The Cosby Show caters to a need for familiarity" can be seen not just as a comfort level for racial elements in media but also a simple observation of how humans in general categorize their world.
And of course, because of several theories on how we develop and group schemata, one could say that both the categories and the reactions to schema-resistant ideas are indications of color-blind racism in its most basic form.
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