Blacks on TV: A Disturbing Image

By LANCE MORROW

Here we have George Jefferson: entrepreneur, black bigot, a splenetic little whip of a man who bullies like a demented overseer, seldom speaks below a shriek and worships at the church of ostentation. Would you like to live next door to The Jeffersons? Or consider the character J.J. on TV's Good Times: a bug-eyed young comic of the ghetto with spasms of supercool blowing through his nervous system, a kind of ElectraGlide strut. "Dy-no-mite!" goes J.J., to convulse the audience in the way that something like "Feets, do your stuff!" got to them three decades ago. Then there is the character Ray Ellis in Baby, I'm Back: a feckless black creep who deserted his wife and two children seven years ago, one step ahead of his bookie's enforcers, and has now reappeared to make excuses and bed room eyes at the wife. Ellis and the show's writers make much merriment at the expense of the sober, straight career Army officer courting the wife; obviously, he is a turkey.

A generation ago, NBC had to cancel The Nat King Cole Show because sponsors would not pay for blacks on TV. Now anyone who watches, say, the Monday night prime-time line up on CBS (Good Times; Baby, I'm Back) and tunes in other sit coms like The Jeffersons and What's Happening!! would think he was witnessing the greatest accumulation of blacks on TV since the March on Washington.

But the high visibility of blacks on television is no reason for anyone except the producers and sponsors to rejoice. Al though Good Times and The Jeffersons are long-running pro grams with large audiences, some of the shows, notably Baby, I'm Back (new, and also with good ratings), are drawing out raged reactions from black parents, teachers, leaders and psychologists. A reasonably attentive white also has reason to be disturbed. Why are there no strong, intelligent black father figures on TV? Why do the mothers (in Good Times and the defunct That's My Mama, for example) always seem to be fat? (The famous black matriarchy? Some residual white image of Mammy? Of Aunt Jemima?) Why are black families so often shown to be in screaming turmoil, the air bruised with insults? Why are there not black images of success through education and accomplishment, instead of the old Amos 'n' Andy routines of chicanery or the newer, grittier pimp-flash and hustle?

One answer, of course, is that earnest dignity and accomplishment are not very funny, unless they are mocked. TV humor, whether the players are black or white, now turns mostly on chaotic exaggeration, a great deal of it emanating from the workshop and social conscience of Producer Norman Lear. His Archie Bunker, after all, is a kind of blue-collar, honky George Jefferson, his whooping racial slurs rendered cute by being malapropped.

Television, some argue, is in the business of being dimwitted. It often presents just as distorted a picture of whites as of blacks. Does it make sense to complain about the unreality of black characters when whites on TV have for years been implicated in such efforts as The Flying Nun and The Love Boat?

But the effect of distorting black realities has greater consequences. That is the subtle but important difference. Whites, for one thing, are seen in the widest possible variety of shows on TV--dramatic programs, adventures, news specials, sitcoms and so on. (The quality of comedies about whites is occasionally better too: witness The Mary Tyler Moore Show.) Blacks, on the other hand, inhabit a restricted range of TV formats; apart from their roles as local newspersons and a peppering of parts on integrated shows (a smart detective on Police Woman, for example), they are mostly seen in situation comedies.

The black sitcoms can have excellent intentions, but something about them is troubling. As seen by Topper Carew. who produced children's programs like Rebop, most of the shows are merely projections of what whites think black life is like: "I wouldn't call them black shows. They have a with very black heavy people black appearing presence. on That's them." all. They are white shows As matter of equilibrium, perhaps there ought to be some dif ferences between the standards that are applied to TV about whites and TV about blacks. Is that an unfairness doctrine, a kind of reverse discrimination? Should shows about blacks be held to a higher standard of relevance, sensitivity and accuracy than those about whites? Though any hard and fast rules would be foolish, an effort to do just that might help correct some deep-seated racial misunderstanding. Whites know about whites, and possess a built-in reality adjuster that makes all the necessary corrections and allowances for exaggeration and stupidity when whites are being portrayed. Blacks know something about whites too. But whites in the U.S. still do not know all that much about blacks; most whites pos sess no automatic focus mechanism to tell them what is nonsense and what is not. Whites receiving a brutalized, stupid or stereotyped image of blacks through TV are liable to tell them selves, "Why, yes. that's the way blacks are."

An even more urgent problem involves the kind of image that young blacks, who are among the most addicted TV watchers, receive of their own race. It was a strange and destructive message that Good Times sent out when its producers eliminated not only the family's strong, if frustrated, father (John Amos) but also, later, its mother (Esther Rolle), who abandoned her three children in their Chicago housing project to move to Arizona to be with her new man. Says Rolle, who quit the show because of her differences with the producers over the way the characters were portrayed: "It was an outrage, an insult." The Rev. Jesse Jackson may have the most useful idea, which he offers to high school students in speeches: Just turn the damned thing off and study.

No one wants TV shows about blacks to turn into the stolidly heroic tableaux of socialist realism. The problem, says Michael Dann, a TV consultant and former head of programming at CBS, lies partly in the nature of drama and comedy. In dramatic series, good, responsible characters can be developed and portrayed by blacks, intermixing them with whites; in comedies, the producers are highly tempted merely to satirize black family life, exaggerating and distorting it. Every harassed, desiccated TV writer knows how to get a laugh with a bellowed insult or ostentatiously jivy dialect.

One better approach might be for the networks to develop black versions of, say, The Waltons or The Little House on the Prairie. As Alex Haley and the producers of Roots discovered, the black American past has a deep texture and drama that could be profitably explored. Another answer is to get many more blacks involved in conceiving, writing and producing programs about blacks. Until that happens, the networks will continue to turn out shows about blacks that inevitably fail to reflect the di versity of black American lives.

It was not so long ago that blacks were all but invisible on American television, except for those playing servants, like Jack Benny's valet Rochester or Ethel Walers in Beulah. As recently as 1968, a sponsor became apoplectic when Singer Petula Clark touched Harry Belafonte on the arm during a show. Some TV producers are apt to congratulate themselves for displaying so many blacks on TV now; even though mostly bad, the shows come weighed down with all kinds of pretensions to relevance.

On balance, Washington Post Columnist William Raspberry may be correct when he says, "If the question is whether to have blacks portrayed on TV as they are today (as stereotypes), or have them invisible, then obviously you go with what is--and hope for something better."

The ultimate meaning of color resides in the nation's mind in the images that whites and blacks have of one another, and that blacks have of themselves. The young, black and white, absorb too much of their social "reality" from television. The people who create TV's fantasies are, God help us, molding minds.

That is why they should be more careful.

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