Core Response #2-Tiana Williams

    I’d like to use this blog post as an opportunity to first state my appreciation for George Lipsitz’s discussion of race, gender, and class in relation to television’s legitimization of social values. Most notably, Lipsitz’s discussion of the 1950s television sitcom Amos ‘n’ Andy as an example of old and new American values legitimized through tv, helped bring together a long string of observations I have had over the years in regard to Afro-American media representation. Lipsitz’s states that in the 1950s “television’s most important economic function came from its role as an instrument of legitimation for transformations in values initiated by the new economic imperatives of postwar America. For Americans to accept the new world of 1950s’ consumerism, they had to make a break with the past” (75). Although not directly emphasized (but in some ways implied throughout the article) this “break with the past” in relation to Afro-American representation was not so much economic driven as it was political. This is evident with sudden changes in Afro-American fictional tv representations in the decade to follow, such as Diahann Carroll’s role in the sitcom Julia (1968-71); the first weekly series to feature an Afro-American woman in a non-stereotypical role. Placing a series like Julia in juxtaposition to the very public struggles for equality with the Civil Rights Movement, brings up really interesting comparisons and points to consider. Reading the show in dialogue with news coverage of Black Americans at the time, it can be argued that the particular mode of address that shows like Julia attempted, sought to dilute the Black experience and locate the presence of non-stereotypical Black characters on television as evidence of pushes against past and present treatment of Black Americans. 

    Lynn Spigel and Michael Curtin write in "The Revolution Wasn’t Televised: Sixties Television and Social Conflict" that “television was used as a tool to construct our sense of the historical pasts, immediate present, and possible futures” (7), and in many ways Lipsitz’s alludes to this with his discussion of Amos ‘n’ Andy. Lipsitz argues that the demeaning portrayal of the Afro-American characters in the show served as a source of justification of the subjugation of Black Americans by white Americans. In reading Lipsitz’s analysis against a show like Julia within its context, it appears that the shift to non-stereotypical portrayals of Afro-Americans served to represent a break with the past as well as the present—in order to impact future realities for Afro-Americans, rather than accurately reflecting the present.