Struggles for Equal Voice: The History of African American Media Democracy

Chapter 1: The Black Image in the White Pathology

Chapter 1 The Black Image in the White Pathology Visual culture has been a locus of both reflection and production. It is reflective because it is formed within its social, political, economic, cultural , and other environments. Visual culture showcases both what is and what has been. It also is productive because it has the power to influence our consciousness and even push us to a new direction. Cable television, a major source of visual culture in the 1970s and 1980s, also reflected its social milieu while offering agency to its users. Analyzing cable television , therefore, calls for a multifaceted approach, at minimum, studying the images produced prior to the popularization of cable television, examining the expected contribution cable television was going to make, and understanding how consumers and producers introduced cable television to their locality. In relation to African Americans whose image had long been erased and distorted by white-dominated mainstream media, the promise of African American–oriented cable television was significant. How were African Americans represented in mainstream visual culture, especially during the few decades immediately leading up to the 1970s? What else did they do to produce their own media content? What were their objectives? Answering these questions reveals that African American participation in the development of cable television since the 1970s was a response to the century-old history of the erasure and distortion of Black images in the white-dominated society and media. It will also attest that despite the progress African Americans had made in the United States since slavery, the nadir, or even the civil rights era, there still was much to be done to achieve a fair representation. Boston and Detroit were no exceptions. African American Bostonians and Detroiters needed more than a decade to fully deploy cable television as their tool. This chapter also reminds readers that the struggles for media affirmative action in the 1960s and 1970s by African Americans were not unprec17 18 Struggles for Equal Voice edented. Similar struggles have existed, and many African Americans have won those battles. There is a century-long history of Black endeavor to generate fair televisual representations. African American involvement and their significant roles in cable television, therefore, should not be considered independently from a broader racial discourse on their identity politics, particularly through the use of visual popular culture. Furthermore, African American experiences that may seem to be relatively distanced from the experience of white Bostonians and Detroiters in the 1970s, such as the broken promise of the second Reconstruction, minstrel-like stereotypes, and other phenomena, are connected to their experiences in the post-Civil Rights era. The issues concerning access and representation in cable television are integral parts of a larger racial, political, sociological, and historical discourse in African American studies and history. African Americans and the Film Industry The history of Hollywood and the film industry in general is one of visual prejudice against African Americans. A founding father of motion pictures, Thomas Alva Edison, is responsible for the racist image of African Americans eating watermelon for his The Watermelon Patch. Donald Bogle also showed in his study on Black Hollywood during the first five decades of its history, that the film industry capitalized on racial stereotypes and grew at the expense of African Americans. Despite some African Americans who worked in the industry, early films repeatedly distributed racist images in theaters. In particular, The Birth of a Nation (1915) by D. W. Griffith pioneered in providing the nation with “the shocking and degrading stereotypes that were to plague African American movie images throughout the twentieth century.”1 Linda Williams explained that the film essentially “turned the nation to southern sympathy.”2 It was no coincidence that less than a year after the premier of Griffith’s movie, the second Ku Klux Klan was founded. Additionally, ten years after Edison’s infamous rendering of African Americans, the cinematic production of Thomas F. Dixon Jr.’s literary work from 1905, The Clansman, epitomized and anticipated Hollywood’s upcoming trend to perpetuate negative images of Blacks.3 The first several decades of American film industry were filled with racist images. Although some exceptions, commonly known as “race films,” existed in the 1930s and 1940s, African American characters on the movie screen played subservient roles that entertained white audiences but did not threaten their dominance in society. Gertude Howard, Libby Taylor, and 19 The Black Image in the White Pathology...