Where Did the Black Family Go?

I happened upon the film Coming to America as I was zapping away just now, and something occurred to me while watching the last 30 minutes of the movie. This was an international B.O. hit back in the day, a film I remember very well from my youth. And it features a wide array of black people, not just caricatures or one-note emblems of The Struggle.

This phenomenon was, if not prevalent, at least more on display in the 80s and early 90s. What, to me, is most striking is the disappearance of the black family from representations on TV and movies.

In the 80s we had The Cosby Show (which many people have objections to with regard to issues of ethnicity, class, etc. but I won't dwell on them here), The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and Cosby spin-off A Different World on TV, and films such as Coming to America and Spike Lee's School Daze, which is admittedly more layered and problematic with reference to what I'm proposing here.

Nowadays, we do see black characters on TV and movies, but they usually represent a very narrow slice of black life: on TV procedurals they are almost invariably depicted as thugs and victims, although there is usually one token black guy among the detectives as well; in sitcoms they are virtually non-existent (bar the Crab Man in My Name is Earl, who is as much of a good-natured stereotype as the rest of the characters), and in the modern genre-bending serials, such as Desperate Housewives, they again are not there.

When black people appear on the screen, there is usually something fishy about them. To wit: the black family on DP featured 1) a murderer, 2) a retarded person and 3) a near-bonkers mother hiding the murderer. The only other black family I can recall appearing on TV lately is the one in the superb Weeds, and they are, albeit quirky and benevolent drug dealers, drug dealers all the same.

Having studied representations of African-Americans in popular culture, I find this trend particularly troubling. Sometimes it seems we have taken leaps and bounds backwards in terms of the variety of representations. Nowadays the idea of a worldwide TV or cinema hit featuring a middle-class black family as if that's nothing special - which, of course, it isn't - seems almost far-fetched. We are so used to seeing African-Americans through certain stereotypes (the matron has to be big and yell a lot; black males are always oversexed etc. etc.) that have nothing to do with those kinds of attributes, that progress has effectively ground to a halt.

Now, I'm not suggesting that the very real issues, including racism, poverty and violence, facing African-Americans today should be glossed over in televisual and cinematic representations; that we should pretend everything is just one big post-Cosby lovefest, with birds singing and little black cherubs dancing in the streets. I'm only suggesting that, instead of gradually moving away from stereotypes in favour of a more varied palette of characters, we are firmly stuck in second gear (much like those merrily all-white Friends), with a few major black movie stars and a steady continuum of non-white faces on network TV, albeit not in such a wide spectrum of roles.


As much as The Cosby Show has caught flak for being an unrealistic or "whitewashed" depiction of black family life, it did have the virtue of showing black people in situations that are closest to most of us - the everyday, humdrum cycle of delightfully mundane things and occurrences. We got to know the characters as people, not just stereotypes or emblems representing something or other. Plus, they were likeable, which can't hurt.

I think it's paramount in the interest of parity that, in addition to deconstructing the social, political and cultural reasons behind typically African-American ailments (I hear The Wire is having a fair stab at this, though I haven't watched the show that much myself), TV and cinema offers a varied collection of non-stereotypical representations of people of all colours and creeds.