Booty Purveyors and Blacks on TV

Will this man save black TV?

Via Angry Black Woman I found out that Master P is launching a new television network called Better Black Television (BBTV) next year.

The language for the network sounds promising -- "a family friendly network that will provide positive content for a black and brown culture that will appeal to all races with a goal to bring people of color a choice when turning on their television" -- but as ABW blogger Nora points out, Master P as a rapper was typically concerned with purveying booty.

We don't even need to talk about BET to wonder if an all people of color network is really going to get more characters of color into the mainstream view. After all, no matter what its content, an all-PoC network will most likely end up just as ... er ... "ghettoized" as hip-hop entertainment coverage. You might have noticed that, no matter how popular hip-hop is, its stars aren't covered in the mainstream entertainment press ... unless somebody gets arrested. (Chris Brown and Rihanna are two of the top pop singers on the charts right now, but I've seen nothing about their power coupledom in the mainstream celeb press. Why do you suppose that is?)

Ethnic-specific networks can be important as places where people of color actors, producers, writers, and crew can be trained and mentored and become professionals. Ethnically self-determining arts institutions have been building stables of ethnic entertainment professionals for decades, and, especially given the lack of positions for people of color in mainstream arts and entertainment, it's essential.

But ethnic-specific networks (and theaters, and galleries, and publishers, and ...) are easy for the mainstream to ignore. No, the arena for culture-changing diversity will definitely be in the mainstream, not in ethnic-specific networks. So, for anything to change, people of color will  have to stop being marginalized on must-see TV.

As this article on race representation in TV at Blackarazzi.com makes clear, most of the black characters and black-centered shows we've known since the Cosbys have been piloted on new networks: Fox, UPN, the WB, the CW. The upstart network fields a lot of black shows to get that audience, then, once it's established, it moves slowly into the center and drops the shows targeted to more marginalized audiences. Girlfriends, an eight-season hit, is a perfect example: it started on UPN, moved to the CW, and then was canceled when the CW's hit (rich, white) shows like Gossip Girl really started to take off.

The Blackarazzi article mentions the history of popular black shows in the decade after civil rights (Good Times, Sanford and Son, Chico and the Man, etc.) While acknowledging that these shows were full of stereotypes, why do we have no such popular poc shows today?

I think that, aside from the usual disinclination to represent people of color at all, there's now a self-consciousness among decision-makers regarding race that didn't exist in the seventies. They know they'll get it wrong and be attacked for it, but aren't motivated to figure out what they're doing wrong (or hire people of color to do it for them) so that they can do it right.

As a result, you get a lot of token characters of color sprinkled here and there who are completely deracinated--either they speak dialect or they don't, but beyond occasional bitter "I'm not white" statements, their entire existence is dedicated to the concerns of their all-white fellow characters. Not terribly realistic.

The optimistic view is that this is the eye of the storm and we're about to go into a new era of complex and rich representations of characters of color. And the pessimistic view is that we're back to square one.

What do you think?