African American roles in Prime Time TV

A couple of weeks ago I volunteered to do a coding assignment on prime time Television viewing for our Minorities and Communication class.  The goal of the assignment was to code incidents where an African-American character had the role of a supportive or primary character. 

For the purpose of this assignment, a primary character was described as someone with a speaking role of more than five lines in a given episode, appeared in more than one scene or had a recurring role on the series as determined based on episode credits, and performed actions important to the plot  or was a subject of significant amount of conversation. A supporting character had a speaking role of more than five lines in a given episode, appeared in more than one scene, or had a recurring role as determined by episode credits (Neuendorf, 2000). 

Each of the volunteers was assigned different prime time TV channels.  The channel that I was in charge of coding was CBS.  

In a way, these African-American characters all serve as the Magical Negro roles that we have discussed in  previous discussions.  Because although African-Americans are now more than the stereotypes of "mammies" or "coons" as Hughes (2009) discussed in his works,  they seem welcome only if they observe certain limits imposed upon them by mainstream (p. 544).  According to Hughes, the MN character is normally portrayed as a lower class, uneducated person, which did not fit the characteristics of the roles that I coded.  However, because the personal lives of these African-American characters were not showed, and because they served mainly in the purpose to help solve a crime, I can compare their roles to that of an MN.  The majority of  shows that I coded, were a criminal shows, where the one African-American that I was able to code was a cop or detectives, which I therefore associated with having an education and being of upper-middle class. (These shows included Criminal Minds, NCIS, and NCIS LA, Person of Interest.)

However,  I couldn't help but notice that for every "x"  amount of White characters with supporting or primary roles, there was only one African American character who had the same or lesser role.  Besides two comedies (We are the Millers) and How I met your Mother, most of the shows that actually allowed me to code black interaction in the show were all dramas, perhaps because of their upper class status in the show.  

Just like The Cosby Show, which didn't discuss racism, these TV shows never discussed racism, nor were they depicted as criminals.  In fact, I  noticed that all suspects or "unsubs" (unknown subjects) in these criminal shows were White.   While this may try to assure the viewers that racism is a thing of the past, it can also be seen as White supremacy or White privilege over minorities.   Not to mention that for the most part, the characters that I coded were African-American males who where portrayed as the stereotypical masculinity. This is due to the historical stereotype of the physically aggressive African-American male, which we have discussed in the past.

Do you believe that racism is a thing of the past?  Why do you believe that there is only one minority character for every several white characters?