Supplemental Response #2- Georgina Gonsalves- Race + Ethnicity

Response to Gray's The Transformation of the television Industry and the Social Production of Blackness

 I especially responded to this reading because I remember growing up watching The Cosby Show, Family Matters, Fresh Prince of BelAir, and other shows mentioned in this analysis. I found it interesting that the very things that made me love these shows for their honesty and speaking of hard topics such as racism and sexism are the same things that made them more successful and prominent in network programming, and that those that did not evolve were no longer profitable or popular. 

I remember watching these shows and episodes of these beloved characters facing racism, these shows helped me learn how to respond to racism and sexism, as a girl in a Mexican family, I always resonated with these episodes and I loved the content of shows like these. I always appreciated how real they were with the audience and that they talked about the things that people are afraid to talk about. In a way, shows like these helped raise me growing up. As Gray says, "most of these shows were set in domestic spaces- the home, and within the family, where they reinforced values of individualism, responsibility, and morality." These were the values that they taught me as a kid watching and it really helped give me a core sense of pride in my ethnicity and my moral values. These shows really helped shape me. Though this was the positive, multicultural content for many networks, many neoconservatives continued to negatively portray blacks and refused to include shows like these in their programming, ridding them of relevance and profits. 

I think that positive representations of blacks and other minorities is essential for the proliferation of programming networks, as proven in Gray's analysis.  It is not only essential for successful programming, but it also increases societal representation; representation without stereotype where we all can see ourselves as the hero.