Black Shows By Non Blacks

Jenji Kohan is the creator of the Showtime comedy Weeds.  She was also the executive producer for such shows as My Wonderful Life, Gilmore Girls, Tracey Takes On featuring Tracey Ullman, and the hit comedy Mad About You.  Ms. Kohan was also a writer for such notables as Sex And The City, Boston Common, and The Stones.  But what really caught my attention is that Ms. Kohan added an episode of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air to her list of writing credits.  Ms. Kohan grew up in Los Angeles, California and went to Beverly Hills High School.  From what I’ve been able to tell, Ms. Kohan is not one who has spent a lot of time in the black community.  So I found it rather interesting that she would be writing for a show about a black teenager from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania living with his well to do relatives in Bel-Air, California.

I remember trying to watch a few episodes of the Fresh Prince and I really found it difficult to enjoy the program.  Will was obsessed with the opposite sex and refused to take much of anything seriously.  I can’t remember any of the episodes with one notable exception where Will Smith’s character unimaginatively named Will Smith and the cousin Carlton Banks played by Alfonso Ribeiro, were riding in Carlton’s father’s expensive German automobile in a posh Bel-Air neighborhood at night when they were arrested for being suspicious.  The character Will Smith was familiar with being pulled over and so without waiting to be told he jumped out of the car and assumed the position with his arms splayed across the hood of the car and his legs spread apart ready for the police search.  The two were taken to jail where Carlton’s father, the honorable judge Phil Banks, played by James Avery, quotes law to the police and gets the charges dismissed.

In the final scene Will and Carlton are discussing what happened.  Carlton’s faith in the system is reinforced because he did nothing wrong and he was released without difficulty.  Will’s character doesn’t believe his naïve cousin and tries to school him.  Why were they pulled over in the first place?  Why did they have to go to jail for driving a car that was rightfully theirs?  Would they have been so quickly released if they weren’t related to a judge?  Carlton simply refused to believe, could not even comprehend, that there was a problem with the justice system.

Wow, I thought.  I may have been wrong about this show.  I watched the next episode that aired and was reminded of the oversexed behavior of Will Smith’s character.  Cousin Hillary Banks, played by Karyn Parsons, was an out of touch, status conscious, product of materialism in an almost life like, no hint of parody reenactment of the infamous Paris Hilton.  The butler Geoffrey, played by Joseph Marcell, was borderline belligerent with a quick wit that would not have been tolerated by anyone paying his salary.  And I found the show, with the exception of the one fore mentioned episode, out of touch with black people or any part of the general pool of black experiences.

The brief biography of Ms. Kohan’s work reminded me of my disappointment with television programs aimed at the general black audience.  It wasn’t necessarily from a black perspective.  White people were dictating how black people were being depicted.  With few exceptions, the main black characters of television shows are usually flawed with seriously exaggerated stereotypes of black people’s behavior.  As example, Will Smith’s character Will Smith was made to be so overly focused on sex that he made Rudolph Valentino look like a shy pubescent.

But before there was the character Will Smith there was the materialistic and wealth obsessed George Jefferson, played by Sherman Hemsley on the Jeffersons, who was made to be the epitome of a black man lifting himself up by his own bootstrap and not relying on any assistance.  There was the gold digger Sandra Clark played in such expertly buffoonish fashion by Jackee Harry in 227.  There is the belligerent maid Florence Johnston on The Jeffersons played by Marla Gibb.  There is the clownish, flamboyant, and always wise cracking James “J.J.” Evans, Jr. of Good Times.  And then there’s the infamously well known junkyard entrepreneur Fred G. Sanford of Sanford and Son played by Redd Foxx.  The only thing the characters on this show lacked was the blackface makeup.  Otherwise it would make a fine updated example of the villainously racially maligning minstrel show.

These characters, and plenty more just like them, have laid the foundation for many white people’s understanding of the black community.  White people like Ms. Kohan know how to write television shows that appeal to the majority of the racially generic mainstream American culture who are predominantly white.  Generally speaking members of the dominant community watching television must have really enjoyed seeing black people acting exactly the way people think black people act.

Intelligent black characters fully embracing their ethnicity and created in a way that is sensitive to the black experience are not regularly depicted on television shows.  And it is funny because when an effort is made to bring attention to this issue, black people defend the current system that gives us such notable buffoons as Martin Lawrence, the Wayans family, Keenen and Kal, Monique, Wanda, and the like.  People pop out of the woodwork to keep the current system as is.

The dominant culture is depicted in shows like Friends, Everybody Loves Raymond, and Mad About You.  These are shows featuring white people developed by white people for white people.  Black culture is depicted in shows like Martin, Everybody Hates Chris, and My Wife And Kids.  These are shows featuring black people developed by white people for white people.  If you don’t recognize the difference between the two sets then people like Ms. Kohan have really done their job well.  The idea of black people freely depicting the black experience without the influence of having to adhere to other’s idea of what the black experience entails is not the common way of producing shows.  In fact, it’s pretty rare.