Who We Be : The Colorization of America (9781466854659)

by Chang, Jeff; Herc, D. j. Kool

  If the state couldn’t legislate tolerance, Gibson seemed to be saying, perhaps the market could at least respect difference. But how much difference would the market be able to take?

  DIVERSITY VERSUS NARROWCASTING

  Market segmentation had been born of the information age and it would find its broadest expression with the rise of cable television. For decades, under pressure from the Big Three broadcast networks and movie theaters, the FCC resisted attempts to expand and commercialize cable. Instead cable thrived largely in rural areas, mountainous areas, and small towns where over-the-air signals didn’t reach.

  By 1970, both media activists and big business were pushing for the development of cable. Progressive visionary Ralph Lee Smith called for a “Wired Nation” connected by an “electronic highway,” in which all necessary and desired information would immediately be accessible, and democracy’s foundations would thereby be strengthened. Smith believed cable TV could diversify the media to better reflect the needs of invisible populations.12 It was potentially a medium with a “global village” message—a counterbalance to mind-dulling mass media, a space for increased minority ownership, a potential wonderland of arts, educational, and local programming. Cable could liberate a diversity of communities and identities. One civil rights leader called it “the last communications frontier for the oppressed.”13

  People of color remained among the most invisible of all. One study of the twelve most popular magazines in the country from the years 1946, 1956, and 1965 found that Blacks appeared in fewer than four ads for every thousand pages.14 On television, Blacks made up less than 1 percent of speaking roles in commercials. On TV programs, they fared little better—3 percent in speaking roles and 8 percent in nonspeaking roles.15 By 1970, fewer than thirty Blacks were employed in the entire advertising industry, and most of those were in what scholar Dorothy Cohen called “show positions”—public relations, special markets, community outreach.16 Other racial groups did not even register.

  For its part, big business had become enamored of the potential of “narrowcasting.” Being able to reach a collection of market segments could be a much more efficient way of exploiting unserved or underserved populations, instead of always having to appeal to mass markets. One adman celebrated the possibilities of this “new media” in a speech at the American Enterprise Institute: “For the past three decades, we have oriented ourselves to communicating to the most mass; we now possess the capability to concentrate on the least waste, to speak to smaller segments of our population, one group at a time.”17

  Beginning in 1972, the FCC began to remove many of its cable television regulations, but in the process, they obliterated Smith’s vision of a system rooted in the decentralized sweat equity of local communities. A different kind of revolution had begun. Ted Turner became the first cable television mogul, transforming a tiny UHF station in Atlanta—so rundown it could only broadcast in black-and-white—into the first cable “superstation,” WTBS. He told advertisers he would deliver them quality viewers from the suburbs and exurbs, bragging, “We’re not wired to the ghettos.”18

  COLORIZING TELEVISION

  In 1976, Robert Johnson was a young congressional staffer handling communications for Walter Fauntroy, the leader of the Congressional Black Caucus. Johnson was excited about the potential of cable television. He recalled, “[I]t became clear to me that programming could be segmented and targeted to different audiences, and so it didn’t take a big leap from that to say, ‘Wow, wait a minute, that’s what we’re already doing in the Black community with print.’”19

  He told Fauntroy about the possibilities of a Black television network. Fauntroy understood Johnson to be describing a channel that would increase Black education and civic engagement. So he gave his blessing to Johnson to hit the revolving door and become a lobbyist for the National Cable Television Association (whose original name had been the National Community Television Council). “There was this idea that cable would create the kind of diversity that the broadcast networks never had. Someone was going to do it,” Johnson said. “Why not me?”20

  At the NCTA, Johnson’s task was to push Congress to further loosen restrictions on cable and support business opportunities for his clients. In 1979 he took one of them, Ken Silverman, to secure Congressman Claude Pepper’s backing for a movie channel for senior citizens. On the cab ride over, Silverman read Johnson his business plan—the demographics of the elderly, their buying habits, their viewing patterns. Johnson told Silverman of his idea about a network for Blacks. He asked if he could adapt Silverman’s business plan. Silverman handed it to him. Soon after, Johnson secured a $15,000 bank loan and quit his job. On August 8, 1979, he announced the creation of Black Entertainment Television.

  In return for a small stake, Johnson secured $500,000 in startup capital from a conservative named John Malone, a NCTA board member building a cable empire called Tele-Communications, Inc. Malone controlled the physical wires that operators needed to plug into. But he realized that cable’s future was in creating content niche markets. In time, through his Liberty Media company and other companies, Malone held stakes in a broad array of media properties. Johnson’s Black Entertainment Television was his first bet, the first in the building of a media empire.

  At their peak at the end of the 1970s, the three major networks together reached more than 90 percent of all American households, half the entire population.21 But things were changing. Johnson made two arguments to advertisers: Blacks watched much more television than Whites; and the Black population was growing at twice the rate of whites. They largely fell on deaf ears. “I remember walking out of some advertising agency almost in tears trying to sell this product,” he said.22 Yet he was still able to launch on January 25, 1980 with two hours of Friday night programming and ads from Anheuser-Busch, Time, Champale, Pepsi, Sears, and Kellogg. By 1986, he had turned his first profit.

  Johnson had been very late to the game of developing the Black market. In the late 1960s, after civil rights legislation had passed and policies such as affirmative action had begun to create a new Black bourgeoisie, a number of Black-owned boutique ad agencies had sprung up to try to fill the expected business of corporate clients who wanted to reach new customers of color. But by 1975, most of these agencies had disappeared.

  Forget Gary Becker’s Nobel Prize–winning argument on the supposed inefficiencies of discrimination. Forget even Robert Downey Sr.’s outrageous film Putney Swope about a Black nationalist who takes over a white ad agency and brings down the wrath of the U.S. government. Black agencies would never be considered for general-market—read: “white”—accounts. So mainstream agencies stepped in to poach the talent and the accounts the Black agencies had nurtured; it was capitalist realism’s answer to integration. One agency head told advertising historian Jason Chambers, “You can’t survive on ethnic business, and yet they won’t accept you on your merits as an advertising agency.”23 The ad industry would enter into the twenty-first century one of the least racially integrated industries in America.24

  With cable’s rise, advertisers finally began to adapt to media fragmentation. In 1990, the University of Georgia’s Selig Center estimated the combined buying power of nonwhites at $455 billion.25 The same demographic shifts that had unleashed the culture wars were also huge business opportunities. By being a decade behind the visionaries of Black advertising, Johnson was right on time.

  JUST PAINT IT BLACK

  Johnson would never become known as an innovative programmer. “I didn’t see the connection between huge expenses in programming and advertisers stepping up their ad rates,” he admitted.26 Instead the network launched on a mix of music videos it received for free, coverage of Black collegiate football games for which it paid as little as $1000 to the competing schools, and old movies and television series it had purchased.27

  It was not until 1988 that Johnson made his first significant investment in original programming. But during the 1990s, as the hip-hop ind
ustry expanded, Johnson moved back to the cheaper content. In 1991, 42 percent of programming was music videos. In 2000, 70 percent of it was. Music programming accounted for 80 percent of BET’s annual cash flow.28 “We don’t need to reinvent the wheel,” he told his staffers, “we just need to paint it black.”29

  Johnson’s indifference to content sparked rounds of protest from the Black community. They bemoaned the network as, at best, a squandered opportunity to uplift the race and, at worst, a 24–7 minstrel show. In 1997, Lydia Cole, BET’s vice president for programming, famously told a music industry conference audience that she did not let her own daughters watch the channel. By the turn of the millennium, Aaron McGruder’s frontal attack on Johnson and the network in his strip The Boondocks was finding broad agreement. “BET is the only thing that black people have on television and it’s gotten to the point that you don’t want to come home and turn it on,” radio host Tom Joyner told Pulley. “I’ve been inside Bob’s office and he doesn’t even have it on in there.”30

  “We were the only Black network,” protested Johnson. “So we became the burden carrier for the Black community, with all of its desires about what we should do.” At once he dismissed cable operators who wanted quality, Black intellectuals and middle-class viewers who wanted social redemption, and Black artists who wanted a more open door. “So, what we basically said is, ‘We can’t solve everybody’s desires for BET. We have to run the business according to what we believe.’ And for me that was rooted in having to be focused on running this as a business, a profit maximization business.”31

  Johnson had secured his niche, controlled his market segment. That was all that needed doing. Globalization’s dream of multiculturalism was about absorbing all previously underserved markets into itself. It could be agnostic or naive about questions of content and representation. It simply believed that nothing—no expression, movement, or identity—should exist outside of it. When, just after the turn of the millennium, Viacom was completing its butterfly collection of narrowcasted networks—Nickelodeon for kids, MTV for youths, the History Channel for retirees, Spike for straight young men, Logo for LGBTs—they bought BET from Johnson for $3 billion.

  From the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1954, African Americans had harnessed their power as consumers as a means to win broader rights as citizens. A half century later, many wondered if consumerism marked the actual end of the movement. Given African Americans’ “distinctive history of propertylessness and material deprivation,” the Black British thinker Paul Gilroy worried that the energies once devoted to winning status as free subjects were now mainly being directed to the collection of status objects. He wrote that African Americans may have begun to “conceive culture itself as a form of property which is held as compensation for low status and heavily restricted access to both rights and wealth,” a tragic move that accommodated “the diminution of citizenship” and “the privatisation of their culture.”32

  FINALLY READY FOR PRIMETIME

  As for corporations, the demographer Peter Francese wrote, “The trick is to find a faster-growing segment before everyone else does or build market share faster than anyone else.”33 This is exactly what Fox TV tried to do in mobilizing new audiences. Launched in 1986 as “the fourth network,” Fox hit its stride at the end of the decade by concluding, just as Pepsi and Nike once had, that the future lay in the market segments populated by youth and communities of color. Their early programming hits were The Simpsons, Married with Children, and 21 Jump Street. When in 1990 Fox added In Living Color to its lineup, it was poised to make a run at changing broadcast TV. Keenen Ivory Wayans, the star and creator of In Living Color, said, “They wanted to be the rebel network.”34

  Wayans had a hip-hop attitude about the show: he didn’t want just a Black audience, he wanted it all. When network head Barry Diller insisted Wayans get the approval of the NAACP and Urban League before airing it, Wayans refused, asking if Jackie Mason had ever had to clear his sitcoms with B’Nai B’rith. Instead In Living Color advance tapes gained such a buzz among industry insiders that, when no organization protested, Diller put it on the air.

  It became a blockbuster hit, bringing characters like Ugly Wanda, Oswald Bates, Men on Film, Vera DeMilo, and Homey D. Clown into family rooms across the country. In “Ted Turner’s Very Colorized Classics,” the cast clowned Turner’s controversial appetite for adding color to black-and-white films on his cable movie networks. Here the films stayed in black-and-white but the characters were of color. Tommy Davidson’s Stevie Wonder stole the scene in “Casablanca” with a melismatic version of “As Time Goes By.” Wayans and Davidson mocked Nixon/Reagan racial stereotypes in a version of Charlie Chaplin’s The Kid, the classic silent that had featured Chaplin and Jackie Coogan eking out a living through low-level street scams. In the colorized version, Wayans and Davidson played welfare cheats, fleecing the government for AFDC checks, walking a fine line between stereotype and satire.

  In Living Color introduced the Wayans family, Jamie Foxx, and David Alan Grier to mass audiences. “The Fly Girls” included Jennifer Lopez from the Bronx, Carrie Ann Inaba from Honolulu, and Rosie Perez from Brooklyn. Jim Carrey was one of only two whites in the cast. Fox had one other wildly popular show featuring a disproportionately high number of people of color on-screen—a ride-along reality show called COPS. Stumbling forward, staggering back.

  Still, the first half of the 1990s looked to many like a golden age for Black television. In 1993, Fox’s lineup boasted no fewer than six shows starring predominantly Black casts: In Living Color, Martin, Roc, Living Single, Sinbad, and Townsend Television. Media scholar George Gerbner found that a Fox show was twice as likely to feature an African American as any other network’s show.35 Perhaps invisibility itself was fading to Black, especially for Black men.

  Here was recognition, identification, and invitation. And audiences of color responded, in a way that assimilation-minded sociologists and general-market-focused broadcasters never would have predicted. Nielsen had been tracking Black household watching preferences against all households and found there was no crossover between the two. Blacks’ favorites were The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Roc, In Living Color, and Martin. Whites watched Roseanne, 60 Minutes, Murphy Brown, and Coach.36 Rather than program its own Black shows against NBC’s A Different World and Fresh Prince, Fox counterprogrammed its Thursday night against NBC’s “Must-See TV” of the famous Friends and Seinfeld sitcoms, and the barely integrated ensemble drama E.R.

  Fox didn’t care about total numbers. They cared about what their shares were for 18-to-34s and Blacks. Network vice president of research Andrew Fessel said, “We have meetings and don’t even look at the household figures. Demos are really the key to us.”37 One station in Augusta, Georgia, reportedly drew a stunning 52 rating for Martin—more than half of all households with TVs in the town.38 Thursday night was beginning to look like Sunday morning—the most segregated hours of the week.

  Then in 1994 Fox suddenly canceled four of its Black-produced shows: In Living Color, Roc, South Central, and Sinbad. Jesse Jackson and the Congressional Black Caucus threatened boycotts. Congressman Ed Towns accused Fox of “disrespect and apparent contempt.”39 What had changed? Rupert Murdoch had just purchased NFL rights for $1.6 billion. Fox had grown big enough, media critic and scholar Kristal Brent Zook argued, to stop playing in the niches and move back to the Big White Middle. “Fox cited poor ratings in canceling the shows, but it wasn’t Black faces or producers that did the programs in,” Zook wrote, “it was Black complexity.”40

  Black-produced shows did not immediately disappear from broadcast TV. In 1996, WB and UPN launched with former Fox programming execs at the helm, and offered shows such as The Jamie Foxx Show and Moesha. Fox still had the number-one Black show, Living Single, as well as Martin and New York Undercover. But its main focus shifted to shows like Ally McBeal, in which the feminism was in regression and the women of color played the Black-You-Go-Girlfriend and the New-Class Dra
gon Lady.

  When the 1999 season was introduced, none of the twenty-six new sitcoms from the top four networks featured a person of color lead. TV scholar Darnell Hunt found that people of color were most underrepresented at NBC and Fox, the two networks that had for a decade been the most-watched among Black audiences. “They build themselves up with Black audiences,” Judith McCreary, the former producer of New York Undercover, told Zook. “Then once they’re established, they dump us.”41

  The decade had begun with such color-consciousness, with such celebration at exposing racialized codes, with such gleeful crashing of barriers to representation. And now it was ending like this.

  WHAT GOOD WERE EYES TO ME?

  By the early 1990s, affirmative action had transformed the complexion of colleges and universities across the country. Yet it remained a dividing line. Blacks, Chicanos, Latinos, Filipinos, Southeast Asians, and American Indians remained underrepresented. But polls showed that up to 80 percent of whites opposed preferences for minorities.42

  In 1993, conservative governor Pete Wilson appointed his old friend, Ward Connerly—a government consultant of Black, white, and American Indian descent who had grown up in the largely Black Del Paso Heights section of Sacramento—to a seat on the University of California Board of Regents. Connerly would help set policy for the most racially diverse public university system in the nation.

  “I know I would not be on the Board of Regents were it not for the fact that Pete Wilson wanted to, quote, ‘diversify’ that board,” Connerly admitted in an interview years later. “That is affirmative action.”43

  But Connerly was happy to become the spokesperson for the new colorblindness, using his appointment to lead a push for the elimination of affirmative action. A quarter-century before, Richard Nixon called for an end to white guilt and “the veil of hypocrisy.” Now here was a Black man who called his work to undo civil rights–era programs an “equal rights movement,” while saying he intended to “advance civil rights” and “equal opportunity.”