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July 10, 2007

Subliminal Segregation

Media, pop culture, TV viewers still separate by race

Story by: Anthony Williams

The Shorthorn editor in chief

Click to enlarge

The Shorthorn: John Henderson

Over the past few years, I have been reminded every June that segregation still exists. Usually right after celebrating Juneteenth with a diverse crowd, I find out there’s still a lot to work on.

The reminder: the BET Awards, the annual cable broadcast on the Black Entertainment Television channel.

With every other television event, I find myself running into conversations about it the day after, like with the MTV Video Music Awards. But I have a difficult time finding non-black friends or co-workers to discuss the BET Awards with.

This is nothing new. What makes it interesting to me is that the Supreme Court shot down voluntary integration in public schools a few days after.

I went to a predominantly black high school, although I was in International Baccalaureate classes where over the years I became the only black male.

I remember when a friend and I were discussing the latest episode of “Moesha,” a network show with a black cast. The girl sitting next to me, who was white, had never heard of the show.

“Is it a black show?” she asked.

“Yeah, I guess,” I said.

“Oh,” she replied, “I don’t watch black shows.”

It floored me.

How could someone ignore television shows just because the actors aren’t of his or her race? Especially when it seems the various genres of music, once themselves defined as just black and white, are converging quickly?

In the court’s 5-4 decision, Chief Justice John Roberts said, “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”

While that may sound nice, you can’t integrate without incorporating race in some way. And if we don’t show our youth the value in learning from other cultures at an early age, how can we expect them to do as mundane a thing as watch TV shows featuring other cultures?

Today, there are several hit shows with diverse casts, but there hasn’t been a top-10 show with a completely non-white cast since “The Cosby Show” and “A Different World” aired on NBC in the late ’80s and early ’90s.

One could attribute the shows’ high ratings to the ruling in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, and how schools were mandated to integrate in the ’70s. Maybe white students were beginning to see that blacks were just like them.

Communities have been resegregating for years now in another version of white flight, and the most recent black show I can discuss with white friends is “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air,” and that’s probably due to syndication.

Justice Clarence Thomas, the only black justice on the Supreme Court, voted with the majority and said, “racial imbalance is not segregation.”

True, school districts aren’t labeling schools white or black, but communities have done so. In my hometown, anyone would tell you John Tyler was the black high school while Robert E. Lee was the white one.

When I think about it, there have been numerous “black” shows that have been critically acclaimed and popular in the community. But most of my non-black friends haven’t watched “Girlfriends,” “Everybody Hates Chris,” “Martin” or “Living Single.” In fact, “Martin” became known as the black “Seinfeld,” as the two shows came on the same night on different networks.

Today we seem to be regressing. All the black shows on BET are just variations of the successful white ones. “Baldwin Hills” is a black “Laguna Beach,” “106 & Park” is the black “Total Request Live,” and “College Hill” is the black “The Real World.”

But recently, MTV began re-airing “College Hill,” (thanks to corporate synergy – MTV and BET are both owned by Viacom) to what can only be assumed is a much larger audience.

So at least white people will finally see that black people can get just as drunk and crazy as them.

— Anthony Williams is a broadcast journalism senior and editor in chief of The Shorthorn