Technicolored

Front matter

a echħnic reflections on race in the time of tv

TECHNICOLORED

A Camera Obscura book

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

As the following pages reveal, TV viewing began for me in the early 1950s as a shared activity. In some ways, it remains so, even though I am often physically alone when I sit down in front of the television set these days. I have the great gift of counting among my current televisual companions and critical interlocutors a virtual army of family, friends, colleagues, neighbors, and associates, from Nancy and Rhonda, the hairstylists at Sebastian's, to the strangers I have met on trains and planes, in doctors’ waiting rooms, and even in the produce aisle at the grocery store. (I won't out the physician who kept other patients waiting while he and I dished about Shonda Rhimes and Scandal.) To recognize all my confederates—to thank each deserving partner in crime for the many conversations and critiques, dialogues and debates that have helped call these reflections into being—would mean a list of acknowledgments nearly as long as the book. I offer, therefore, my general but no less sincere gratitude to the many with whom I have talked Tv.

Since the early days of watching soaps in the Graduate Center dorms with Gayl Jones and Audrey DuPuy, laughing ourselves silly when Walter Curtain (who had let his pregnant wife stand trial for a murder he committed) drove his car off a cliff in the middle of downtown Bay City, I have enjoyed the good company and intellectual camaraderie of colleagues, friends, and students at institutions ranging from Brown to Wesleyan to the University of California at San Diego and back again. Here, too, it is impossible to name names in a way that would do justice to the many, so I will settle for singling out a few who have been particular champions of this project, including Laura Wexler, who was the first to say I should write about TV, and Indira Karamcheti, who long ago encouraged me to write a memoir.

Elizabeth Weed, Lynne Joyrich, Gina Ulysse, Bill Stowe, Stephanie and Mark Weiner, Marie Rock, and Demetrius Eudell have been the book’s loudest cheerleaders. Demetrius, Ellen Rooney, Oneka LaBennett, Elana Bauer, Leah Wright Rigueur, Cecil Thompson, and Richard Slotkin read various parts of the manuscript and offered insightful comments and encouragement. I am particularly indebted to Richie Slotkin for the model of his work as well as for his friendship and support and to Iris Slotkin for the good humor that kept me laughing even in the dark days of the 2016 election. Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg may never forgive me for sending her off into ShondaLand; I am grateful to her and to the Pembroke Center at Brown University for the support that facilitated the book’s finishing touches, especially the truly invaluable research assistance, technical know-how, and kind, careful attention of the amazing Arlen Austin. Others whose comments and encouragement helped bring this book along include Pat Sloss, Tricia Rose, Matthew Delmont, David Liao, and especially Jean Tye, who directed me to Norman Lear’s new autobiography and kept me well supplied with homemade soups.

My good friend Rebecca Flewelling in Vermont threw me under the bus and gave me up to her son as the reason she was watching so much lame TV. I thank her just the same for all the good times, long talks, and Say Yes to the Dress critiques. The same is true for other old friends who have stayed tuned in with me for everything from the imagined communities of Star Trek’s several generations to the breaking news of MSNBC and the broken hearts of Married at First Sight: Janice Allen, Josephine Bernard, Alfrieta Parks Monagan, Krystal and Az Ndukwu, and John Simmons, with special thanks to the Honorable Julie Bernard for her advice and counsel and to Nathan and Erness Brody for their enduring faith in my work.

Whether we are arguing about How to Get Away with Murder or commiserating about politics, Ellen Rooney always inspires me to climb higher and dig deeper. I am grateful to her and to Khachig Tölölyan for the warm and loving friendship that has stretched across decades and continents. I am likewise thankful for and indebted to new friends who feed body, mind, and soul and make my world turn, especially my neighbors at Number 77 who make our building the best place to live in Providence.

This book could not and would not be without the support and encouragement of my editors at Duke University Press, Ken Wissoker and Elizabeth Ault, who believed in the project even when I did not, and Liz Smith, who carried the book through to completion. I am grateful to them and to the production, design, and marketing teams, especially Christine Dahlin, Heather

X ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Hensley, and Chad Royal, with special thanks to Paula Durbin-Westby. My grateful thanks are also extended to the press’s anonymous readers, whose careful attention and pointed feedback helped make Technicolored a better book. I am indebted as well to Lynne Joyrich for recommending the book to her fellow editors at Camera Obscura and to the co Collective for including Technicolored in their series.

My final thanks go to my family who live in these pages with me, especially my younger brother, Danny, my oldest friend and favorite person, and his partner, Linda Pumphrey; my nephew Adrian III, who with his siblings has made “Auntie Ann” my favorite title; and my cousins Oliver duCille and Cecil and Beth Thompson, who remind me of my Jamaican roots, and Neal and Clarence “Sonny” Hogan, who remind me of my childhood and crazy good times with kin.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Xi

Introduction

Black and White and Technicolored CHANNELING THE TV LIFE

Certainly it comes as news to no one that television has been a mainstay of modern home life since its arrival in the living rooms of American families in the 1950s. The media theorist Lynn Spigel, one of the foremost authorities on mass culture at midcentury, points out that while only 9 percent of American homes had a television set in 1950, postwar consumers purchased the new technology at such record rates that by the end of the decade the number of households with at least one receiver had risen tenfold to nearly 90 percent. Writing with considerable prescience about the new medium in 1956, the sociologist and cultural critic Leo Bogart predicted not only that every household was destined to have a TV but also that as the technology improved and the sets themselves became lighter and less cumbersome, televisions would be spread out through individual homes, with a set installed in nearly every room.’

Like most Americans of the baby boom generation, I had lived comfortably with the technological marvel of television ever in the background of my everyday life. It wasn’t until I retired in 2011 after more than forty years teaching in and around the university and sixty years with television as a more or less constant home companion that I began to assess the impact of the instrument and the industry on my life growing up as a black viewer in the white suburbs of Boston during the second half of the twentieth century. As a newly unminted English professor, I had expected to do with my newfound leisure what other retired academics have done before me—attend to and indulge in all those pleasures for which there had never been time or space. I would travel to far-off, out-of-the-way places. I would return to the piano and recoup the benefit of years of lessons my parents couldn't afford but somehow paid for nonetheless. I would knit scarves and sweaters and afghans, though I wasnt certain how well I would fare without my late mother the master knitter on hand to fix my mistakes. And more than anything, I would read madly, but nothing in my own field for at least a year—nothing in African American literature or history or culture. But definitely the hot, hip, happening books everyone was talking about—the books that were winning prizes.

My first few attempts at reading on the cutting edge of bestseller glory fell flat. All that glistens is not necessarily my kind of good reading. Soon an assortment of false starts and deflated finishes topped a pile of best-laid plans that went, if not completely awry, not as I had imagined or hoped. Thus it was that through a long and winding road of half-read books, arthritic fingers that insulted the piano, and travel plans that somehow never went beyond the brochures, I wound up spending out the first year of retirement in front of the ubiquitous Tv sets (which as predicted presented themselves in nearly every room), endlessly watching fifty-year-old reruns of Perry Mason, Bachelor Father, Make Room for Daddy, and numerous other series and sitcoms from my misspent youth, while also catching up on some of the hot twenty-first-century shows pitched as products of the new postracialism.

As much as a tidal wave of intellectual exhaustion enticed me to think of the Bachelor Father daily double or a Perry Mason weekend marathon as a mindless escape into the fictions of the 1950s, I know the work of Susan Smulyan and other media theorists too well to take any TV programming for granted or any act of TV viewing as innocent. The opening sentence of Smulyan’s essential study Popular Ideologies: Mass Culture at Mid-century (2007) was all too apropos and instructive, even as I wanted to wallow in useless abandon: “Complex ideas of race, class, gender, nationhood, and consumption were created, expressed, and worked out in popular culture forms in the middle of the twentieth century”? Nowhere were these complex ideas more dramatically on display than in the very shows of yesteryear that I was revisiting daily. All the old familiar stereotypes are as they always were in these classic shows of my youth, but the longer I tracked TV programming across the half century, the harder I was hit by that old adage, “the more things change, the more they stay the same.” The old racism I knew so well had been replaced, it seemed to me, by a new racism perhaps even more

» e D insidious for its many masquerades as “civility, “reality; “authenticity; and, almost everywhere I turned the metaphorical dial, as eruptions of cultural funk and outcroppings of a buffoonish black performativity, on the one hand, or a depraved indifference to ethics, on the other—what I define in chapter 2 as “stigmatic blackness”—celebrated as the new normal and the new human.

Making a similar point about old racism versus new, Paula Groves Price, a cultural theorist from Washington State University, argues that 1950s televisual images of African Americans as “mammies, Sambos, hoodlums, and Jezebels;’ among other similarly demeaning representations, “have been instrumental in (re)inscribing ideologies of inequality and white supremacy.” But “while many of the same images can readily be seen on television today,’ she adds, “they often appear under the guise of reality television, black popular culture, or postracial ensemble shows.” Television and other forms of mass media appropriate aspects of the black community’s responses to a long history of racism, discrimination, and oppression and repackage these cultural modalities as a decontextualized black experience, devoid of any attention to what Price rightly points to as “the sociopolitical conditions that instigate [such] responses.” As I address in chapter 10, drawing on the work of the cultural theorist Tricia Rose, gangsta rap, for example, which was born in the inner city as the response of urban youth to the harsh, often hopeless conditions of ghetto life, not only becomes decontextualized by mass culture and commercialized as a celebration of thugs, pimps, and hoes but also becomes what black culture is in the popular imagination. In other words, the history and being of the whole are reduced to the behavior of the few— often presented as the most outrageous or the most countercultural—made to stand in for all black experience. Thus it is that television, as a form of mass communication, Price concludes, works to “reinscribe racist ideologies of blackness by framing it as black culture to the world”?

Any black is every black, as I describe this regnant racial metonymy in chapter 1, drawing on my mother’s wisdom.

But it isn’t only what the old folks call “book learning”—the critiques of media theorists like Price and Smulyan—that makes me question how mass media have used “entertainment and consumption to construct and reinforce hierarchies of gender, class, and race.”° I am a colored child of the 1950s, reared on resisting the racist images that television habitually inscribes as the ways of black folk. Long before I picked up a book on the subject, home training made me a suspicious, even resistant viewer, who early on learned to perceive every detail of television programming through the lens of race. I'm not sure whether to thank or blame my mother for this tinted, if not tainted, view of mass culture, but I do largely credit her as the source of my suspicion.

She was born in 1921, long before the advent of television as a form of home entertainment, but, next to books, cinema was the favorite cheap amusement of her youth. Perhaps because, as a young moviegoer in the 1930s and ’4os, she was both shaped and shaken by the demeaning portrayals of blacks she witnessed in Shirley Temple films and elsewhere on-screen, my mother recognized early on the tremendous representational power of the new medium that brought moving images into the homes of everyday Americans. Even when it was very, very white, television was still somehow all about black, with the ability to make or break us as a race. It was in watching TV through my mother’s resistant eyes that I first became captivated by and suspicious of a ubiquitous black presence that haunts American television and film, even in seeming absentia, in much the same way that American literature is shadowed by what the Nobel laureate Toni Morrison identifies in Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992) as a “dark and abiding presence”—a “mediating force” at once both visible and invisible. “Even, and especially, when American texts are not ‘about’ Africanist presences or characters or narratives or idioms,’ Morrison writes, “the shadow hovers in implication, in sign, in line of demarcation.”

Technicolored: Reflections on Race in the Time of TV was born of a year of living dangerously in front of the television set, but it also looks back over more than half a century of Tv viewing through the prism of race. Neither a conventional memoir nor a traditional media study, Technicolored uses my own family history and postwar experiences—from the polio epidemic that drove us from the city and ultimately brought us our first TV set, to the propriety concerns that governed what and how we watched—as the framework for a personal narrative of growing up black with the new medium of television, which shaped my childhood. It examines the changing face of racial representation from the early 1950s, when people of color were at once nowhere and everywhere on TV, to the present, when we are everywhere but, perhaps, still nowhere, with many of the same stereotypes of blacks as villains, vixens, victims, and first-to-die disposable minorities still in play, even as new, equally limited and limiting images of blacks and blackness crowd the airwaves. Reflecting on and critiquing the role of race in televisual genres from black sitcoms like The Beulah Show, Amos w Andy, Julia, and The Cosby Show; to the Shirley Temple films and Charlie Chan movies I watched on TV as a child; to a spate of TV game shows now hosted by black comedians and prime-time dramas headlined by black actors in shows such as Scandal and How to Get Away with Murder, Technicolored poses critical questions about the roads television has traveled and continues to traverse in its depictions of African Americans, in particular, and what part those depictions play in fixing notions of the racially “othered” in the American imagination.

This last issue—the role that representation plays in stigmatizing black men, women, and children as dangerous and expendable—is a guiding concern of the book and one of the most critical questions of our time. In accepting the Humanitarian Award at the 2016 Black Entertainment Television (BET) award ceremony, the African American actor and activist Jesse Williams delivered a blistering Black Lives Matter manifesto in which he pointed out that data show that “police somehow managed to deescalate, disarm, and not kill white people every day?’ How is it, then, that black men, women, and children—including most infamously twelve-year-old Tamir Rice fatally shot by police in a Cleveland park while playing with a replica of an air gun—are so often instantaneously killed by law enforcement officers who claim they feared for their lives? Is it because Caucasians are not quintessentially cast on Tv and elsewhere in popular culture and political discourse as a dark and deadly menace to society? In perhaps its most important move, Technicolored examines the relationship between popular portrayals of African Americans as criminals and thugs and the deaths of scores of unarmed black men, women, and children, among whom the names of Amadou Diallo, Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Walter Scott, Freddie Gray, and Sandra Bland are merely some of the best known in an increasingly long list. At the same time, the less well-remembered names of Eulia May Love from 1979 and Margaret LaVerne Mitchell from 1999—both shot and killed by Los Angeles police (LAPD) officers, infamously in Love’s case over a $22 gas bill and over a shopping cart in the case of Margaret Mitchell, who was mentally ill and homeless—should remind us that such shootings are not a new phenomenon.’ Ultimately Technicolored looks to television as an accessory before and after the fact whose color-coded news coverage, stigmatizing storytelling, and clichéd typecasting make Tv a potentially deadly form of racial profiling.

These reflections are propelled and made personal by the fact that Tv and I have traveled along parallel tracks since our respective births at midcentury. I came into the world in Brooklyn in 1949, just as Jackie Robinson was breaking the color line in Major League Baseball and the new medium of television was beginning to appear in American homes, although it had not yet made its way into my family’s second-floor flat in Bedford-Stuyvesant. Radio still ruled the roost. The voice of Edward R. Murrow kept us informed about world events. Heard-but-not-seen characters like Beulah, Amos and Andy, Jack Benny and Rochester, and the Lone Ranger and Tonto kept us entertained. The radio was such a constant companion that Pm told I was nicknamed “Buzzy” because as a baby I made a buzzing sound to the theme music of The FBI in Peace and War (cBs Radio, 1944-1958) whenever the show aired. Since the “FBI March” was from Prokofiev's opera The Love for Three Oranges, my buzzing along to classical music from the cradle was the first of several false notes that led my mother and father to believe I was musically gifted.

Like most Brooklynites—even transplanted ones—my parents were devoted Dodgers fans; listening to baseball games on the radio was a favorite pastime, second only to watching the Dodgers play in person at Ebbets Field, as my family did regularly. I take some pride in being able to say that from my father’s lap, I have watched Jackie Robinson steal home. I don't actually remember any of this, unfortunately, because we left New York for Boston when I was two years old. The fond memories I have of the Dodgers and of the Clifton Place neighborhood that was my first home are from family lore and from the trips we made back to Brooklyn throughout the 1950s to visit my mother’s sister, Auntie Bert, and her family and to see close friends and former neighbors we called Aunt Lena and Uncle Troy, who lived in the twin apartment to ours on the other side of the same brownstone row house in Bed-Stuy where we had lived as a young family of four. My mother was originally from Cambridge, Massachusetts, so Boston was close to home for her, but we—that is, my parents, Pearl Louise (Hogan) and Adrian Everard duCille; my older brother, Adrian Jr., and I—didntt linger long in the City on the Hill due to the call of the wild, the white picket-fence dream (more my mother’s than my father’s, I think) of raising a family in the wide open spaces and fresh air of the suburbs.

Thinking about it now, I suspect there was a motive to my mother’s mad rush to leave the city that was larger, more personal, and more profound than midcentury America’s generic middle-class fantasy of suburban living. My older brother—her firstborn—had had polio when he was four. He was one of the luckier victims of the polio epidemics that kept the country on edge during the first half of the twentieth century, before the advent of the Salk vaccine in 1954. My brother, Little Adrian, as he was sometimes called, was spared the respiratory problems and paralysis often associated with the

FIGS. 1.1 AND 1.2

| thought we were going up over the roof to visit Aunt Lena in the adjoining brownstone and wasn’t happy at being waylaid for picture taking, but then Aunt Lena appeared on her way to our flat, and | was all smiles, circa 1950.

disease. By some miracle, he made an almost complete recovery and was left with only slightly diminished muscle strength and slower reflexes on one side of his body.

I was a baby at the time and have no firsthand memory of what my brother and my parents went through, but my mother often spoke of the trauma of seeing her little boy suffer, of hearing him wail and cry out for her at the hospital when the doctors were trying to tap fluid from the base of his spine for serological testing in order to confirm the polio diagnosis. She talked of the added anguish of not being allowed to go to her child and comfort and reassure him, because well-meaning medical minds knew better than mere parents. “They whisked him away without letting us explain why he had to go with them,” my mother would say. “He would have been all right if they had just let us talk to him, but he probably thought we had abandoned him and his little heart was broken” I would weep whenever my mother told this part of the story. It was a sad, heartrending early chapter in our family history, and even though I knew the story had a happy ending, I felt a kind of grief that lingers still.

But the story did have a happy ending (or so it seemed) and not just because my brother grew to be a straight, strapping 6'3” and to father four children, but because at some point in the midst of the misery that awful night in the summer of 1950, Little Adrian gave up on wailing for Mummy and Daddy and started yelling at the doctor: “Shut up, Doctor! Shut up! Shut up, I say, Doctor! Shut up!” The funny thing was that, as my mother would tell the tale, the doctor wasn’t saying a word and no doubt wondered why this little colored boy he was trying to help was telling him to shut up. Here, my mother would pause for effect and then take great maternal pleasure in informing whoever was listening that she had understood instantly why Adrian kept telling the doctor to shut up. It was his way of cussing out the doctor, of telling him off—a four-year-old’s “f-you,” as it were. He didn't know any real swear words—nobody ever dared curse around my mother or her children—and “shut up” was the worst thing he knew to say.

For all that my mother talked about my brother’s bout with polio, for all that she praised the doctors and the nurses who treated him and the March of Dimes who she said comforted and supported the family through the crisis, what she didn’t say—but what I in later years surmised or maybe just wanted to believe, since I thought my mother was Wonder Woman—is that she may have saved my brother from permanent paralysis, deformity, perhaps even death. She decided that something was wrong with her son, based on remarkably little evidence: a sudden lethargy one morning, his not acting quite

FIG. 1.3 Little Adrian in Brooklyn at two years and three months, early 1948.

like himself, especially his not wanting to play with me, the baby sister he had first wished for, then demanded, at one point telling my mother’s doctor that if he would “stop squeezing those ladies’ arms” (taking blood pressures), he could hurry up and get his baby sister ready. No older brother ever wanted a baby sister more than mine wanted me, or so my mother often told me. For such a little boy, he took being a big brother very seriously and thought it was his personal responsibility to make sure I was properly bathed, fed, swaddled, and cuddled. It was the first, and perhaps only, time I have been unconditionally adored. So when Little Adrian suddenly didn't have the energy to tend to his beloved baby sister’s every whimper, my mother knew something was very wrong and insisted on taking him to the hospital. There was no cure for polio then or now and paralytic poliomyelitis has more than one type. My brother’s, I believe, was spinal. I’m not sure of the medical facts, but I like to think that early intervention made a difference.

In any case, this must be what it was that drove the move to the country at any cost, the thing that possessed near lifelong city dwellers to light out for territories unknown: polio panic. Rightly or wrongly, polio was seen as the scourge of the long, hot summers in the city, and I suspect that, with one son already stricken, my mother believed her children would be safer as far from the madding crowd as she could get them. So sometime in the fall of 1952—shortly before my baby brother, Danny, was born—we moved to a virgin piece of free land in East Bridgewater, a small town about twenty-five miles southeast of Boston, and began the arduous and unending task of building a house in the country. We began, rather unglamorously, by living in the basement with an outhouse and then, over the course of the next forty years, built up the house around us, block by block.

I don’t recall that my father ever talked about the polio event or how close he came to losing his firstborn, namesake son to the disease that paralyzed a president and crippled and killed so many children before the saving grace of Jonas Salk’s elixir. I so wish now that I had asked my father about it, about his take on the near tragedy of those Brooklyn days. I think now, though, that this thing that happened on the other side of my memory must be why he—a Jamaican immigrant from the capital of Kingston, yet so much at home among family and friends in New York City and so much more the urbanite—gave in to my mother’s family plan for country life.

If the specter of polio—of disease, of hospitals, of a small child necessarily surrendered to the care of strangers—is what drove our family from the city, it also is the thing that brought television into our country sanctuary. At some point in what must have been 1953, when I was four, Little Adrian and I had our tonsils taken out together, I suppose so we would be company for each other. In those days, tonsillectomies weren't the same-day outpatient procedures they are now. They required a hospital stay of two or three days, with at least two nights away from home. I think it must have been hard on our parents, because when they came to pick us up from the hospital, baby brother in tow, they regaled us with tales of how much we had been missed and told us they had a surprise for us, a welcome-home present. I thought it might be a puppy, but it wasn’t. It was a new, floor-model console TV set, which I remember as a Motorola.

I loved listening to the radio, but I knew nothing about television. I had seen moving pictures on the big screen at the drive-in to which we went regularly throughout the 1950s, but now the big people of the distant screen were very small and living inside the mahogany box in our den. I loved it, but it also confused me. I thought the people were real and could see me the same way I could see them. I felt connected to them, a part of their lives, and I would lie awake in bed at night, playing out the next chapter of their narratives in my head. It’s a sense of television—a mistake almost literally about ghosts in the machine—I have never quite gotten over, which is a dangerous thing for a critic, this difficulty with fact and fiction.

So it is, then, that television and I have grown up together, from our shared infancy in black and white at midcentury, when I thought the people onscreen lived inside the magic box that Tv was for me, to a high-technicolored maturity in a new millennium, when I still think the characters on-screen are somehow of and about me as a racialized, gendered subject. Technicolored traces our joint coming of age, from those early days in the 1950s to the present, attending in particular to issues of representation and spectatorship that are both historically specific and transgenerational, personal and profoundly racial. It tells the tale of what we watched and how we watched Tv against the backdrop not only of my own changing family dynamic but also of the changing times that carried the country through the civil rights and women's movements, the Vietnam War, the Reagan years, the culture clashes of the 19908, the first black presidency, and the current Black Lives Matter campaign for social justice.