Watching While Black: Centering the Television of Black Audiences

Introduction: I See Black People

1 Introduction i see black people beretta e. smith-shomade This project has been engaging my thoughts for nearly a decade. I was forced to actually address it while sitting in our temporary home in Ile-Ife, Nigeria, watching world satellite TV with virtually no Blacks on it. In Nigeria, I became acquainted with Paris-based Fashion TV, U.S.-based Style Network, and the Australian production McLeod’s Daughters. Outside of M-Net’s Africa Magic, a network dedicated to showing Nollywood productions primarily, television was anything but Black. This whitening of the televisual frame, even in Black Africa, made me begin to consider the dearth of knowledge circulating about Black television programming, even when abundance exists—of how this lack of knowledge could contribute to programming selections. Closer to home, I thought about how that same “whiteout” existed in U.S. scholarship on television production and viewership and their cultural flows. I realized that I needed to move from reflections to response. Discussions about the transforming reception/audience/user landscapes pervade every mediated outlet—whether scholarly engagement within Media Studies or Communications, journalistic pieces from technology sectors and from new media theorists and practitioners, or within business, public-sphere, and institutional spaces. Evidence of the divergent and fragmented deluge of media consumption and production demands attention but is often invoked as if a coherency exists. Moreover, acknowledgment that certain aspects of this media landscape have always been fractured, minimized, and ignored rarely surfaces. In 1990–1991, Nielsen Media began to demarcate the viewing patterns of African American audiences from other American demographics. Nielsen’s ability and desire to bring into focus taste and cultural preferences according to discrete identity categories (race, gender, age, class, and sociopolitical orientation), all for the benefit of corporate advertising, remains a source of consternation and fascination. Yet differences between what Black viewers watch and what “all others” watch has not received much critical examination beyond parenthetical variations of “oh yeah, they watch different stuff.” This dearth of incisive examination points to a critical gap and negation in discourse—both past and present. More poignantly, the discrepancy suggests a glaring disjuncture between the discourses of postracialism and the media taken up by identifiable “Other” audiences. Watching While Black aims to address this omission by centering the viewing choices of Black audiences and the programs directed at a Black viewership. While Black Entertainment Television (BET) celebrated its thirty-first year (and its very first season of original series production) in 2011, and TV One and others (intermittently) dot the U.S. television landscape, most Black representation comes from mainstream (read white) cable and broadcast networks that primarily target different, non-Black audiences. This national phenomenon is examined in two sweeping histories: Blacks and White TV: African Americans in Television Since 1948 (1992) and Prime Time Blues: African Americans on Network Television (2001). Television scholarship in general, however, continues to ignore programming aimed at Black audiences—both at large and in the margins, at home and abroad. An easily countable number of academic texts give evidence to Blackwatched , Black-targeted television narratives. Ironically, these are essentially the same studies mentioned in the introduction of my last book—Pimpin’ Ain’t Easy—even as our televisual choices and opportunities continue to explode. The now canonical works by Herman S. Gray, Watching Race and Cultural Moves, established the parameters by which we can approach Black television narratives through both their sophistication and their centering of Black narratives as theoretical objects of study. Watching Race: Television and the Struggle for Blackness (1995) troubles the ground of Black cultural politics and representation. It examines early 1980s and 1990s television programs such as Frank’s Place (1987–1988) and In Living Color (1990–1994). Cultural Moves: African Americans and the Politics of Representation (2005), while much more about the deployment of Blackness through a variety of cultural production practices, signs, referents, and strategic political maneuvers, still privileges Black viewing space as a site for critical interrogation. My own works, Shaded Lives: African-American Women and Television (2002) and Pimpin’ Ain’t Easy: Selling Black Entertainment Television (2007), center Black narratives as sites for explicit examination. Through the lens of gendered and racialized confluence, Shaded Lives attempts to rethink the pulls of progressive and regressive representations of Black women throughout various television genres. Utilizing macro/structural/industrial lenses, Pimpin’ Ain’t Easy explicitly interrogates the strategic deployment of Black televisual processes. Pimpin’ Ain’t Easy engages with the...