This is definitely worth reading, sharing and discussing. It's from a short yet provocatively clear essay on the Museum of Broadcast Communications website.
""Until the late 1980s whiteness was consistently naturalized in U.S. television--social whiteness, that is, not the "pinko-grayishness" that British novelist E.M. Forster correctly identified as the standard skin-hue of Europeans... We come to the most complex question of all, namely how viewers process televisual content related to race and ethnicity. It has already been argued that decades of daily programs have mostly underwritten the perception of the United States as at core a white nation with a white culture, rather than a pluricultural nation beset by entrenched problems of ethnic inequity. ... it was ever harder to muster a coherent and forward-looking public debate about race, whiteness and the nation's future, given TV's continuing refusal, in the main, to step up to the plate. It was not the only agency with that responsibility, nor the unique forum available. But TV was and is crucial to any solution. ... (John D.H. Downing, Racism, Ethnicity and Television)
... The detailed analysis of audience reception of particular shows or series is a delicate business, linking as it will into the many filaments of social and cultural life for white audiences and for audiences of color. It is, though, a sour comment on audience researchers that so little has been done to date to explore how TV is appropriated by various ethnic minority audiences, or how majority audiences handle ethnic themes. Commercial research has been content simply to register viewer levels by ethnicity; academic research, with a scatter of exceptions has rarely troubled to explore ethnic diversity in processing TV, despite the outpouring of ethnographic audience studies in the 1980s and 1990s. Truly, as DuBois forecast in 1903, the color line has been the problem of the twentieth century. -John D.H. Downing, Racism, Ethnicity and Television.
I would love for you to partake in the conversation I am sparking on my blog regarding my bell hooks posting.
Posted by: Brandon | Mar 15, 2006 at 07:17 PM