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Since its invention, television has been one of the biggest influences on American culture. Through this medium, multiple visions and disparate voices have attempted to stake a place in viewer consumption. Yet even as this programming supposedly reflects characteristics of the general American populace, television-generated images are manipulated and contradictory, predicated by the various economic, political, and cultural forces placed upon it. In Shaded Lives, Beretta Smith-Shomade sets out to dissect images of the African American woman in television from the 1980s. She calls their depiction "binaristic," or split. African American women, although an essential part of television programming today, are still presented as distorted and deviant. By closely examining the television texts of African-American women in comedy, music video, television news and talk shows (Oprah Winfrey is highlighted), Smith-Shomade shows how these voices are represented, what forces may be at work in influencing these images, and what alternate ways of viewing might be available. Smith-Shomade offers critical examples of where the sexist and racist legacy of this country collide with the cultural strength of Black women in visual and real-lived culture. As the nation's climate of heightened racial divisiveness continues to relegate the representation of Black women to depravity and display, her study is not only useful, it is critical.
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Picture this: a comedy about an overweight Black woman who lives with and takes care of a white family. Joking all the way, she cooks, cleans, helps the father of the family, and comforts the children. Then at one point, we see the father holding his gun and pointing toward the door. The Black woman enters and jumps up and down, screaming, “Massa! Massa! Massa! Please don’t shoot!” It is easy to imagine these scenes in a 1930s film about the antebellum South. But they are actually from the first episode of a 1980s sitcom.
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Why is it important that a Black woman created, wrote for, and co-produced¹ two highly-regarded television situation comedies that engaged a variety of Black women’s health issues while at the same time these issues were being reduced, simplified, or altogether ignored in mainstream American hip hop? Mara Brock Akil tacitly responded to this question when asked why four episodes of the third season of Girlfriends (2000–2008), the situation comedy she created and co-produced for UPN, addressed the HIV/AIDS crisis among Black women in America. “I have things I want to say,” explained Brock Akil, “about bridging television’s gap between
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At best, our knowledge about the lives and experiences of Black gay men is limited to a series of stereotypes, snap judgments, and ridicule. In terms of television media product, this aforementioned knowledge has been packaged mostly within the framework of comedy: a red-leather-clad Eddie Murphy talking about the most effective ways to shield his ass from the gay male gaze in the 1983 HBO stand-up performance Delirious ; Damon Wayans and David Alan Grier’s effeminate film critics Blaine Edwards and Antoine Merriweather on the 1990s television variety show In Living Color ; fashionista panel members Miss J and Andre Leon Talley
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Aaron McGruder’s “The Return of the King” (2006) is one of many of the artist’s controversial episodes, yet it stands out because of the criticism it received among mainstream media outlets and civil rights leaders. It was the ninth episode to air from his series The Boondocks, which is an anime show that airs on the Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim cable channel. McGruder presents the following scenario in “The Return of the King”: What if Martin Luther King Jr. (MLK) did not die after his April 4, 1968, shooting and instead awoke after being in a coma for thirty-two years?
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