Representation, Visibility, and Their Detractors

A topic that keeps coming up in Ely’s book about A&A is the problems that people—e.g., the NAACP—had with the representations of blackness that came across in the program. I’d like to consider this issue in closer detail.

I feel like most of the complaints regarding the representations in A&A are founded on the assumption that white viewers would listen to/watch the programs and either have their preexisting beliefs about African Americans confirmed or else “learn” about blackness via A&A. That’s not an unreasonable assumption for two reasons. First, American culture then was (and often still is) so segregated that whites and blacks might not have the opportunity to interact on an everyday basis. A show like A&A might genuinely represent the biggest “contact” with black culture that some white Americans experienced (in other words, interracial contact was mediated). Second, studies have shown that media is most powerful in shaping the perceptions of its audience when the audience hasn’t had firsthand experience with the subject or issue being depicted; clearly this dovetails with the segregation point.

Still, these complaints about A&A’s depictions rest of the belief that white listeners/viewers will see fictional characters and believe that they are “representative” or “typical” of African Americans. Ely quotes an entertainment columnist named Billy Rowe, for instance, as saying that the A&A TV program was worrisome because “to many children across the nation this show will be their idea of how Negroes behave” (217). This sounds almost ridiculous, doesn’t it? It assumes a great deal of naïveté on the part of audiences, and one of my biggest pet peeves is when people underestimate media audiences. Then again, I’m reminded of hip-hop and rap studies that suggest that these musics “can be a way for Whites to vicariously learn about African Americans” and “may allow White adolescents to satisfy their curiosities without ever having face-to-face contact or interpersonal relationships with any African Americans” (Sullivan “Rap and Race” 247). How do we get past this dilemma?

The way that Ely gets past this dilemma is to privilege the value of visibility over the responsibility of representation. Ely asserts that Gosden and Correll “kept their characters from becoming absolute sterotypes” and suggests that the characters eluded predictability and “possessed both virtue and intelligence” (86, 85). But he also emphasizes that A&A did have black fans, that TV show was the first with an all-black cast, and that—at its best—the show presented black professionals and depicted black success. Ely implicitly suggests that, despite some troublesome stereotypes, the visibility of African American culture that A&A provided to the public was a productive thing—much in the same way that Kathy’s “Forgotten Fifteen Million” responds to criticisms that black radio was a “form of segregation” (128) by pointing out the ways in which black radio “helped create a sense of black community identification” (126). Ely also takes on the idea that the show’s black characters could be taken as “typical” African Americans by pointing out that the show figured a “fairly complex black society” (73). Thus, even if some audiences take A&A as a “realistic” portrait of black culture, it might not be such bad thing since they’re (he suggests) getting a fairly diverse impression.

In a way this reminds me of the old debate about the TV show Will and Grace. Is it terrible because its gay characters reinforce the stereotypes of fussiness, effeminacy, style obsession, and so on, or is it wonderful because finally we get to see some gay characters on primetime TV? Both points carry weight, I think we’ll agree.

In closing, I want to mention that something Ely doesn’t seem to consider: the representations of whiteness and white Americans that come through in A&A. Black Americans could be understandably worried that the audience was seeing a picture of blacks as lazy, unintelligent, and poor. In retrospect, though, shouldn’t white Americans—in laughing about black laziness, unintelligence, and poverty—have been worried about how they were coming across? Compare the above photo with the one below.