Core Post #2 Week 7 - The Politics of Respectability and Profitability

Reading Gray and Esposito’s essays against each other brings out some obvious differences. While Esposito stresses the importance of narrative or content to popular discourse on affirmative action and diversity, Gray’s industrial analysis forgoes attaching any significance to the content of black-oriented TV programming, except to say that celebrities like Oprah and Bill Cosby modelled a profitable, urbane blackness that could be widely marketed t American audiences. Esposito also mentions Oprah, a TV star even I grew up knowing and admiring from India as an example of the pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps narrative that she seemed to be not only embedded in but also to promote. Gray’s analysis is critical of an over-reliance on textual analysis to explain a sudden rise in the popularity of certain shows, arguing instead that the 80s boom was driven by dwindling advertising profits and a realisation that “African-American audiences were a ready-made, already-organized and exploitable market niche” (67). However, he also credits a symbiosis between industrial arms of the TV and mass media market – radio, films, talent agencies, etc, that necessitated a fresh outlook.

However, this argument skips over the structural inequalities and explicit racism of these “symbiotic” associations. Why should competition force American TV to be more racially diverse when competition has always existed? Perhaps a link needs to be drawn between these capitalistic pressures and the kind of black respectability modelled by Oprah and Bill Cosby. Cosby, especially, has been strident and admonitory about black youth, saying at an event in 2004 ““These people marched and were hit in the face with rocks to get an education, and now we have these knuckleheads running around,” he said of what he perceived as young people disrespecting the legacy of civil rights activists. “I can’t even talk the way these people talk: ‘Why you ain’t,’ ‘Where you is’ ... and I blamed the kid until I heard the mother talk. And then I heard the father talk. ... Everybody knows it’s important to speak English except these knuckleheads. You can’t be a doctor with that kind of crap coming out of your mouth…Are you not paying attention, people with their hat on backwards, pants down the crack?” He attacks AAVE, hip-hop culture, black fashion, everything that he perceives as ruining black respectability.

Oprah’s rags-to-riches story creates the same affective imperative – black people, and other POC are responsible for their failure to achieve the American dream. I think I wouldn’t say Gray is incorrect in looking at industry practices, but one also needs to focus on the qualitative aspects of blackness on TV, and its mainstream acceptability in America. Esposito’s Ugly Betty analysis is on point, but Betty and Marc’s dynamic needs to be seen against a backdrop of highly-publicised black success stories that are celebrated by stressing their lack of reliance on the state, their cultural white-washing and overall assimilation into white meritocracy.