This book examines the representation of blackness on television
at the height of the southern civil rights movement and again in
the aftermath of the Reagan-Bush years. In the process, it looks
carefully at how television's ideological projects with respect to
race have supported or conflicted with the industry's incentive to
maximize profits or consolidate power.
Sasha Torres examines the complex relations between the
television industry and the civil rights movement as a knot of
overlapping interests. She argues that television coverage of the
civil rights movement during 1955-1965 encouraged viewers to
identify "with" black protestors and "against" white police,
including such infamous villains as Birmingham's Bull Connor and
Selma's Jim Clark. Torres then argues that television of the 1990s
encouraged viewers to identify "with" police "against" putatively
criminal blacks, even in its dramatizations of police
brutality.
Torres's pioneering analysis makes distinctive contributions to
its fields. It challenges television scholars to consider the
historical centrality of race to the constitution of the medium's
genres, visual conventions, and industrial structures. And it
displaces the analytical focus on stereotypes that has hamstrung
assessments of television's depiction of African Americans,
concentrating instead on the ways in which African Americans and
their political collectives have actively shaped that depiction to
advance civil rights causes. This book also challenges African
American studies to pay closer and better attention to television's
ongoing role in the organization and disorganization of U.S. racial
politics.
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