Alan Nadel's provocative new book reminds us that most of the
images on early TV were decidedly Caucasian and directed at
predominantly white audiences. Television did not invent whiteness
for America, but it did reinforce it as the norm--particularly
during the Cold War years. Nadel now shows just how instrumental it
was in constructing a narrow, conservative, and very white vision
of America.
Nadel depicts a time when television effectively hijacked and
monopolized the nation's vision of itself to create a virtual but
severely distorted civic space. On Cold War TV's three channels
there were no double beds, no liberated housewives, no social
criticism, and no homosexuality. And the few available black faces
overwhelmingly belonged to athletes, musical entertainers, and
actors playing menial roles. Even America's beloved Walt Disney
promoted his highly popular TV and theme-park versions of society
as utterly homogeneous representations of reality.
During this era, prime-time TV was dominated by "adult
westerns," with heroes like "The Rebel"'s Johnny Yuma reincarnating
southern values and "Bonanza"'s Cartwright family reinforcing the
notion of white patriarchy--programs that, Nadel shows, bristled
with Cold War messages even as they spoke to the nation's
mythology. America had become visually reconfigured as a vast
Ponderosa, crisscrossed by concrete highways designed to carry
suburban white drivers beyond the moral challenge of racism and
racial poverty and increasingly vocal civil rights demands.
"Television in Black-and-White America" revisits a time and
space that some might miss for its simplicity and relative
innocence. Nadel, however, entreats us to look beyond such
nostalgia to see how, even in its earliest days, television had
already become a powerful mediator of social norms that both
controlled and warped our sense of reality.
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