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.

More like Amos 'n' Candy

The pink-haired diva pictured here is the controversial Shirley Q. Liquor, a caricature of a poor black woman played by a gay white man raking in the dough with his racist shtick. Shirley Q. is a figure not so different from those of Amos 'n' Andy. And yet it is. Not only does Shirley's blackface still smile, but underneath her made-up skin, she is a man, a gay man.

Jasmyne Cannick writes on "Ban Shirley Q. Liquor" that the difference between a black man (such as Tyler Perry) donning the character of a black woman and a white man donning that mask is the difference between ignorance and racism. But is it? Newman's and Ely's articles both seem to point to empowerment even within a potentially limited, and stereotypically racist, sphere. The radio shows of the 1940s and 50s might have been limited in scope and have reinforced stereotypes, they made way for public power. Amos 'n' Andy, the TV show, offered roles to black actors and showed the world black characters, albeit minor characters, with positive characteristics.

I'm not a proponent of Shirley Q. Liquor or any other blackface (e.g. Tropic Thunder). And I'm sometimes even squeamish of movies like Madea, which Cannick considers less troubling than Shirley Q, because it's a black man mocking black women, instead of a white man mocking them. I do wonder, though, why it is popular among gay men (I first learned of Shirley through my gay friends). And I wonder whether Charles Knipp (Shirley's daytime ego) is allowed his racism because he's a gay man and is already disenfranchised. Does it become like a form of "in-language" that's tolerated because it's one minority to another? Or are there other social issues at play? Black Americans and gay Americans have certainly had their issues. They follow the path of many instances of minority against minority. Down-low culture is looked on with both criticism and a sort of exotic Otherness by white gays. Black christianity often embraces the homophobia of the most extreme corners of the religion.

Like the hostility between Irish immigrants and black citizens seen a hundred years ago (and perhaps still), there is usually only room for one minority at the top. To gain majority support, one minority joins with the majority in demoting the other minority. Pro-minority support is like energy: it cannot be created, only transfered. To some extent the progressive election results on November 4 was retrograde: black Americans win and gay Americans lose. As Kathy suggested in class on Thursday (and I would agree), this was likely no coincidence. And while the "Yes" votes on Prop 8 (the only really feasibly-fought of similar measures on 11/4) was not won solely by the black vote, it probably received more "yes"s than "no"s from that sector.

So what do we do with that? I'm guessing Shirley Q. is a way for some gay men to "win," if only by making black women "lose." Is there anything to be gained by black women? Within the awful stereotypes of working the welfare system, promiscuity, and ignorance and poor English, I certainly can't find it. So what makes Amos 'n' Andy different? Regardless of the groups, can there ever be a win when there's such a loss?

Reading the Election through Football

Michael Oriard spends a lot of time discussing the ways in which various newspapers presented football games to their intended readers in the last decades of the nineteenth century. His meticulously researched history of football in the media is interesting, but I repeatedly found myself wanting to find modern day instances of sports writing targeted to a specific demographic. Curiosity drove me to this Tuesday's National Edition of New York Times where, unsurprisingly, I found a story on the Steelers-Redskins game played the night before. What proved arresting about the story, however, was its utter lack of football. There isn't even a mention of the final score. The whole of the article is dedicated to the three-minute interviews of Barack Obama and John McCain featured in ESPN's "Monday Night" coverage of the game, and it says a lot about the implied readership of the Times.

Oriard, I think, would have had a field day with this article, because it seems to fit harmoniously with his emphasis on audiences in media coverage of sporting events. In discussing the role of football in the explosion of newspapers in the late 1800s, he bases his argument largely on the assertion that football had a broad appeal, from the New England gentility of Harvard, Yale, and Princeton to the hordes of working-class crowded along the fences. Since football was tremendously popular, including it in the newspaper was a way of marketing to a larger audience. The candidates' appearances on ESPN is striking because, on the eve of one of the most important elections in history, when campaigning and media coverage was at a frenzied pitch, the largest available television audience was watching football. Both candidates agreed to do the interviews because it gave them an opportunity to piggyback on the 12 million viewers tuned in to ESPN. I would offer as a comparison the second presidential debate, in which the network with the highest ratings, ABC, managed to wrangle 13.2 million viewers.

This unprecedented (never before has a candidate for president appeared on "Monday Night," let alone two) and somewhat uneasy blend of politics and sport was conceived in a spirit of pragmatism. The success of the program would suggest that, though the combination of the two is unusual, more unusual is the fact that "Monday Night" had not done it before, considering it has been on the air for 10 previous elections. If one measures the success of these interviews by the size of the audience they reached, then it is not hard to assume this will mark the beginning of a trend in eleventh-hour campaigning in the elections to come. And if Oriard can read the Civil War into newspaper coverage of a Harvard and Princeton game, it is no stretch of the imagination to see the epic struggle for the White House as analogous to the clash of the Steelers and the Redskins. But if Princeton is the South, unable to break the adamant defensive line of the North, it seems moot to assign a candidate to a particular team (and hopefully one would cringe at the possibility of the Redskins as representing Obama). Neither Washington nor Pennsylvania went McCain, so no matter who wins the game, Obama's team comes out on top.

The Savagery of Sport

"Football, during years when relatively few readers of the daily newspapers actually saw any games, was invested with the meanings and resonance of heroic myth" (109). Or so goes Michael Oriard's general argument in Reading Football. Certainly his account of the popular's press role in shaping a national fascination -- if not obsession -- lends logic to these observations, but I think what is often even more interesting in his work is the way football, and sport in general, becomes a site of cultural assimilation and national allegory.

Here's an example: 190 miles or east of our fair city of Pittsburgh lies the city of Carlisle, PA, currently home of the United States Army War College, but formerly the site of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, an all-native boarding school used between 1879-1918. Carlisle I.I.S. was the United States government's (infamously failed) attempt to provide an institution that might take charge in assimilating and "Americanizing" American indians during this time period by means of its mantra, "Kill the indian and save the man." Its students were, of course, not brought to Carlisle willingly, but forcibly removed from homes on reservations. There were disastrous results at Carlisle: hundreds of native students died, either from malnutrition, diseases formerly unknown to native populations, or extreme physical and sexual abuse. Many were killed for trying to escape.

But, in addition to a record of death and disaster, Carlisle is famous for another reason: its football team. Glenn Scobey "Pop" Warner, a legendary coach, headed up the Carlisle Indians (aptly named) and their rise to glory: to this day, they have the best winning percentage (.647) of any defunct college football team. Lending even more credit to football at Carlisle, however, was Jim Thorpe, now a major name in the sport. The Thorpe-Warner relationship caused Sally Jenkins, writing in 2007 for Sports Illustrated, to name Carlisle "The team that invented football." What's interesting, and very troubling, here is, of course, that football was for Carlisle likewise the sport that invented America in the bodies of these young American indians. Lars Anderson's 2007 book Carlisle vs. Army: Jim Thorpe, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Pop Warner, and the Forgotton Story of Football's Greatest Battle casts the three characters mentioned in its titled into a narrative of nationhood, popular culture, and the development of American media. The historic 1912 scuffle, in which Eisenhower was playing for Army, ended with Carlisle trouncing the army 27-6 thanks to Eisenhower's hurt knee (the result of wrangling with Thorpe on the field) and Thorpe's famous 97-yard touchdown.

I thought this was interesting valence to add to the narrative constructed by Oriard, and an apparently oft "forgotten" one. The relationship between the popular press and football has likewise always been a relationship between individual and nation: sport is too often an allegory for the "battles" of nationhood, and too often an excuse for similarly constructed false loyalties at home.

Healthy Body, Healthy Mind

While searching for a show and tell object, I came across some stuff that makes for an interesting addition to the strains of discourse outlined by Oriard. Apparently, as college football was becoming mass entertainment in the 1890's, the phenomenon was met with less enthusiasm by some. In the Atlantic in 189?, a long article laments the signs that "the standard of sport has fallen...professionalism has crept in" (64). College athletics, formerly an elite tradition of mind/body refinement brought over from England, was in danger of moving away from what Bourdieu calls "disinterestedness" - the privilege of forming one's habits and practices independently of any kind of need for financial or cultural capital. Even more, an article in the Christian Observer in 1900 laments the decline in the intellectual quality of subsidized football players: "Let us have athletics in colleges, by all means. But tuition in football, which turns out blockheads, comes quite too high for the cost" (22). These lines of argument seem to be worth paying attention to, seeing as they have a significant place in contemporary discourse. In the aughts of this century and the last alike, outcry against overpaid and underintellectualized college atheletes, whose labor on the field, diamond, court, rink, etc. has become one of the more significant entertainment commodities out there, but whose wages are paid in cultural capital, is worth thinking about - not only because it is one of the more bizarre relations of labor power and compensation out there, but also because of its power as a discourse on race, class, and gender.

From Patent Medicines to Branded Pharmaceuticals

When reading the Ohmann, I got distracted by a comment that he makes when he’s discussing the rise of magazines. He explains that, increasingly, magazines like Ladies’ Home Journal refused to run ads for the old “patent medicines” that used to be a regular part of advertisers’ bread and butter. Part of the reason, Ohmann suggests, is that the magazines were trying to be respectable and thus wanted to distance themselves from products whose validity was questionable. He also says that ads for “[. . .] medicines fell out of favor mainly because they did not fit into the new domesticity that was emerging”(93). Basically, Ohmann says that advertising for patent medicines experienced a huge drop just as the magazine industry was growing.

Today, on the other hand, advertising for prescription medications is absolutely colossal. In other words, there’s been a big switch. Think about all the clever, sexy prescription brands you know. I came up with a whole list in just a few minutes: Zoloft, Viagra, Celebrex, Mirapex, Priolsec, Nexium, Detrol, Lipitor. Think about the sad little Zoloft eggs that mope around as a result of their depression. Consider the people made out of copper pipes who leak because of their overactive bladders. Then there are the cheerful middle-aged men dancing around because they (apparently no longer) suffer from impotence.

What I’m getting at is this: these branded prescriptions are marketed so aggressively that not only are we aware of their existence, they have actually become a part of our culture and mass consciousness. I mean, think about how many awful Viagra jokes we’ve all heard over the years? Half of the spam email I get has the word “Viagra” in the subject line. This is a particularly vivid illustration of what Ohmann calls the “infusion of muted commercial purposes into our repertory of meanings” (102). He mentions famous old ad slogans like “The Beer that made Milwaukee famous” and explains that “[. . .] it means something for a culture when so many of the formulaic epithets and verses that stand ready for use in any conversation were put on the tips of our tongues by ad men” (102).

But prescription drug marketing is different from beer marketing in a crucial way. Beer ads, thankfully, don’t make pretentions to educate the public. Prescription drug marketing, on the other hand, contributes—or at least purports to contribute—to public information regarding medical conditions and diseases. For instance, had you ever heard of restless legs syndrome before the makers of Mirapex started advertising? Before Prilosec (“the purple pill”) came along, did you know there was a difference between common heartburn and a condition known as acid reflux disease?

Now, there’s good and there’s bad here. I do believe that it’s good for the public to have access to medical and health information. But we need to acknowledge that drug manufacturers are not in the information business; they’re in the selling-stuff business, and drugs are their stuff. Are you depressed or impotent? Do your legs keep you awake? The drug companies want you to know, but they want you to know only because they want to treat it for you. So drug ads are sort of like those Dove “real beauty” ads: the information you get from them sounds nice, but the source of the information is problematic. One of the quotations about advertising that Ohmann uses is “Advertising aims to teach people that they have wants, which they did not realize before [. . .]” In the mode of drug marketing, we can alter this slightly to say that the drug marketing aims to teach people that they have medical conditions that they did not realize before.

Don’t get me wrong: I am not one of those people who tries to argue that people’s medical conditions aren’t real or are just “in their heads,” and I do believe that we should pursue medication and other treatment for our health issues. But it’s important to acknowledge that, in the medical information game, the stakes are greatly unequal when it’s you and me on one side and a big drug corporation on the other.

In closing, take Pfizer. Wikipedia told me that their marketing budget is three billion dollars, making them the 4th largest company in the United States in terms of marketing. Since it’s election day and politics are in the air, I’ll mention that Pfizer is also one of the 53 entities that contributed the maximum $250,000 to President Bush’s second inauguration in 2005. And this is the same company that tries to provide medical information to us, ostensibly for our benefit.

Brand recognition

Ohmann's chapters provide the sort of case-specific analyses that I've really been wanting to see done with Smythe's model, and by looking at particular advertisements from the dawn of the creation of the "audience commodity" I think he does a pretty good job of providing us with some nuances we can add to the "Smythian" model, if we're so inclined.

Particularly, I think he gives an interesting analysis on what the consumer "gets" from buying branded merchandise, even if the comfort gained from brand recognition is a need that is "historically specific and generated by the new system" (150). I like this particularly because it comes at the audience commodity from a bit of a different angle and implies that not only are we suckered into working for mass media sources by participating in audiences strictly by the lure of the editorial content, we gain something from absorbing the advertising as well.

I see this as directly tied into Chapter 10's discussion of the link between branding's repetition of logos and our mnemonic associations with them (hence the pictures). Advertising, according to Ohmann, is a "discourse of repetition whose instances are unimportant as against their cumulative weight" (153), creating such a network that "image overrides verbal text claiming a residual place in memory even if the reader skips the text entirely" (153). I think the ubiquitousness of Coca-Cola merchandise in different languages (even an army/navy surplus store with definite Zionist sympathies near where I lived in Philadelphia stocked t-shirts with the Hebrew version) proves this point--as does the artwork Courtney pointed out a few posts ago--we're so tuned into this indexical network of colors and shapes that we don't even need text to evoke the familiar feelings of our favorite soft drink or candy bar or oatmeal.

But as a closing aside--man, can you guys believe people used to eat stuff called "fried mush?"