Blacks, The Media, and Television Sit-Coms

Written in 2005 — Revisited in 2025

Editor’s Note (2025)

This piece first ran in 2005. It was an attempt to describe what was on the screen and what it was teaching. The same industry that lectures the country about fairness kept presenting Black America through a narrow lens. The sermon was equality. The product was caricature. Read that contrast twice. The sermon and the product were not the same thing.

Soon after publication, a student at an HBCU reached out. She was writing her thesis on race and the media and wanted to interview me. We lived on opposite coasts, so we spoke by phone. Twenty minutes in, she paused and asked, very politely, if I was white. I had no photo online at the time. I said yes. I asked if that was a problem. She laughed and said no. She had simply assumed, from the writing, that I was Black. We both laughed and kept talking for another hour. She used parts of our conversation in her paper and graduated with honors. The lesson was simple. When you describe reality instead of managing optics, people hear experience, not a party line. They do not need to check the color of the speaker to decide whether a fact is true.

Television still set the tone when that article appeared. Cable news filled every hour. Social media had not yet turned every opinion into a spectacle. In that world, portrayals of Black Americans improved in some ways but regressed in others. The Cosby Show had modeled an intact family, discipline, education, and mutual respect. Later programs returned to what rated easily. Louder characters. Broken homes. Plots built on dysfunction. Malice was not needed for bad outcomes. Ratings were enough.

The politics behind the industry told the same story. Studios and newsrooms leaned left and claimed moral authority on race. The same institutions argued for quotas elsewhere while keeping most decisions in the same hands. You cannot preach equality while practicing exclusion. That was true then. It is true now.

Today the slogans are different. DEI sits in the mission statement. There are more faces on screen. The gatekeepers behind the camera look much the same. Symbolic change is easy. Structural change is hard. When incentives do not move, outcomes do not move much either. Coverage patterns tell the story as clearly as hiring sheets. Missing white women still command national attention. Missing Black children often vanish without notice. The industry speaks in the language of equity, then acts in the habits of inertia. Between invisibility and exaggeration lies very little that looks like ordinary life.

This does not require a conspiracy. Institutions defend themselves with stories that justify their budgets and prestige. Division drives engagement. Clarity does not. That has less to do with race than with business models. If you want evidence that the pattern continues, you can find it on the screen today. The faces and causes have changed. The method has not.

In many ad campaigns and entertainment lineups, Black faces now appear more often than their share of the population. The issue is not visibility. It is motive. The point is signaling, not truth. And as one identity became the approved proof of virtue, another stepped into the same slot. LGBTQ characters are now a fixture across scripted TV. The role often defaults to a single, highly legible archetype, usually the flamboyant side presence that signals virtue quickly. Surveys of self identification put the broader LGBTQ umbrella somewhere in the single digits. The screen narrows that umbrella to one familiar type because it reads fast. That is branding, not realism.

The original piece captured a moment worth revisiting. The early 2000s were the bridge between broadcast and digital. The industry faced a choice. Fix the house or polish the image. It chose the image. It often still does. This is not nostalgia. It is record keeping. Names and slogans change. Foundations hold. Selective compassion. Managed guilt. Self congratulation marketed as reform. When a pattern repeats over decades, the only serious question is who benefits.

That student understood it at once. She did not hear an outsider attacking her community. She heard a plain description of what the camera kept showing. That is what intellectual honesty looks like. Follow the evidence. Let the facts speak in full sentences. Equality does not rest on pity, permission, or branding. It rests on truth. If truth still surprises people, that does not indict the truth. It indicts the age.

Note: The original 2005 essay did not include an image.

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Blacks, The Media, and Television Sit-Coms

Over the past 40 years, black support for Democrats has been unwavering but is that support deserved? Although Democrats claim to be “Champions of Civil Rights,” it has been Republicans that have submitted and helped pass most of the early important Civil Rights legislation. In today’s world, Republicans view African Americans as equals and do not believe blacks should be pitied or brainwashed into thinking they cannot succeed without help from others. That is the true meaning of equal rights. The media portrays Republicans as Neanderthal Closet Klansmen yet they do not implement the same policies for diversity in their own newsrooms even though predominately liberal minded individuals run those newsrooms. Television has seemingly made it a policy to portray blacks as uneducated ghetto comics, sport stars, or criminals. If African Americans are wondering why some whites have a false image of blacks, they should look no further than their own TVs.

For the most part, the portrayal of blacks on television has been stereotypical. Blacks were portrayed, during the early days of television programming, as idiots on shows like Amos N’ Andy or dimwitted but loving servants on The Beulah Show. CBS refused to cancel Amos n’ Andy ignoring critics that felt the show portrayed blacks in a derogatory manner. The Nat King Cole Show aired on NBC from 1956-1957. Due to pressure from the network to play to a more white audience, Cole canceled the show prematurely. Julia, a sitcom that ran from 1968-1971 on NBC featured a widowed mother, trying to raise a son while working as a nurse. One element of the show would become a serious and frequent problem in the black community: the lack of a father as a role model and integral part of the black family. This trend continued throughout the 1970’s with What’s Happening, Good Times, and That’s My Mama all without a strong African American male influence in the form of a father. Good Times initially had John Amos as the father but eventually killed him off.

The Jeffersons had the angry, bigoted, George Jefferson spewing hateful one-liners without offering much of anything with substance. Diff’rent Strokes had Willis and Arnold, orphaned by the premature death of their housekeeper mother. Again, it is the fatherless black kid, mom works as a (fill in your favorite domestic service) theme for that show. Sanford and Son portrayed blacks as often dishonest and lazy. Fred and Grady always seemed to be looking for the path of least resistance or at least, the path of least effort. Lamont would dream of better days ahead, never quite making it, and always looking for that next get rich quick scheme that would finally make him a big shot. Webster was another example of the orphaned black kid, adopted by a rich white family concept. In 1981, television produced Gimme A Break! which gave us another black woman as a housekeeper. Remember, this show debuted in 1981, 17 years after the passage of The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and yet all the sitcom producers could come up with was another servant role. Why doesn’t Hollywood give portraying blacks as ghetto idiots a break?

In 1984, The Cosby Show was a breakout sitcom for African Americans, showing a black nuclear family with manners, class, and dignity. While initially hesitant about the viability of the show, NBC eventually agreed to make six episodes. The show was third in the ratings during its first season and easily took first place the next four. The Cosby Show was beloved by blacks and whites, yet it and other programs like it, were not generally the types of shows that TV Executives green-lighted for production. Other shows from the 80’s with a positive image included A Different World, a Cosby spin-off about life at a historically all black university and Tim Reid’s Frank’s Place, a show that explored topics that focused on real world issues that affected blacks.

Throughout the nineties, black television regressed to the stereotypical fool roles. There were a few quality shows like ROC but many of the black stereotypes from past generations made unfortunate comebacks. In 2001, The Bernie Mac Show won over audiences with humor and common sense parenting. Unafraid to go against politically correct parenting standards imposed by people who probably shouldn’t be having kids, Bernie Mac delivered and still delivers the goods.It is interesting to note that the same people that think smoking on screen is an absolute sin and a bad influence seem to have no problem with blacks acting like complete fools on television as long as the foolishness produces high ratings.

The media, which is predominately liberal, has been no friend to Black Americans. When was the last time any of the cable news outlets or ABC, NBC, CBS covered a story on a missing black child? Why is it always, with some exceptions, a blond haired, blue eyed, white girl? If the liberals in the media are so concerned with blacks, why don’t they start covering blacks the same way they cover whites? Newsrooms across the country could show the good, the bad, and the ugly side of Black America not just black athletes, rappers, and criminals. What is also a concern is the bigoted portrayal of blacks and Affirmative Action. One might get the idea that blacks are completely stupid and just cannot make it without whitey even though there are highly intelligent black professionals in every industry. The media along with their partners in The Democrat Party seem to be more concerned with keeping blacks down and maintaining a voting block then allowing blacks to prosper and possibly vote for someone other than a Democrat. Consider some of these facts. According to the book, The Black Image in the White Mind: Media and Race in America reported that black criminals are four times as likely to have their mug shot shown on TV than white criminals are. Black defendants are shown being restrained twice as many times as white defendants.

According to sampled newscasts in the previously mentioned book, the number of sound bites on foreign affairs by whites was 99 while only 1 was by an African American. The number of sound bites on economics by whites was 86 and while only 1 was by an African American. The number of sound bites on electoral politics by whites was 79 while African Americans had none. The number of sound bites on sports and entertainment by whites was 35 and 11 by African Americans. The number of sound bites on crime by whites was 149 while 24 were by African Americans. It is obvious from these statistics that blacks are considered more qualified to report on entertainment and/or crime and not as qualified to speak about foreign affairs, economics, and politics.

The hiring practices of the media are suspect as well. According to the 2003 RTNDA/Ball State University Annual Survey, in the Broadcast News Workforce, Caucasians represented 81.9% and African Americans represented 8.4% down from 10.1% in 1994. The same study also noted that the overall minority workforce in broadcasting had dropped 18% in 9 years with only women making strong gains. Black Broadcast News Directors also showed a decline in 2003 and made up less than 1% of overall Broadcast News Directors. Minority General Managers for all television stations with news departments came in at a miniscule 3.6%. Minority News Directors for Local Television represented a meager 6.6%. Compare that to 18.1% of minorities in the Broadcast News Workforce. Apparently, the media feels it is OK to chastise corporations about diversity but does not hold itself to the same philosophy.

I challenge television and the mainstream media to stop stereotyping blacks and to make their newsrooms colorblind. There is no reason why one of the most liberal industries on the planet should have such a lousy record of accomplishment. With the pathetic state of television and journalism, adding qualified minorities to key positions can only improve things. If these ideas are not seriously addressed, Hollywood, TV, and Network News will continue to see their ratings slide.

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