Television in Black-and-white America: Race and National Identity
- ISBN-10
- 0700613986
- ISBN-13
- 9780700613984
- Category
- Social Science / Discrimination
- Pages
- 224
- Language
- English
- Published
- 2005
- Publisher
- University Press of Kansas
- Author
- Alan Nadel
Description
Alan Nadel's provocative new book reminds us that most of the images on early TV were decidedly Caucasian and directed at predominantly white audiences. Television did not invent whiteness for America, but it did reinforce it as the norm—particularly during the Cold War years. Nadel now shows just how instrumental it was in constructing a narrow, conservative, and very white vision of America.
Nadel depicts a time when television effectively hijacked and monopolized the nation's vision of itself to create a virtual but severely distorted civic space. On Cold War TV's three channels there were no double beds, no liberated housewives, no social criticism, and no homosexuality. And the few available black faces overwhelmingly belonged to athletes, musical entertainers, and actors playing menial roles. Even America's beloved Walt Disney promoted his highly popular TV and theme-park versions of society as utterly homogeneous representations of reality.
During this era, prime-time TV was dominated by "adult westerns," with heroes like The Rebel's Johnny Yuma reincarnating southern values and Bonanza's Cartwright family reinforcing the notion of white patriarchy—programs that, Nadel shows, bristled with Cold War messages even as they spoke to the nation's mythology. America had become visually reconfigured as a vast Ponderosa, crisscrossed by concrete highways designed to carry suburban white drivers beyond the moral challenge of racism and racial poverty and increasingly vocal civil rights demands.
Television in Black-and-White America revisits a time and space that some might miss for its simplicity and relative innocence. Nadel, however, entreats us to look beyond such nostalgia to see how, even in its earliest days, television had already become a powerful mediator of social norms that both controlled and warped our sense of reality.
Get the book
Similar books
-
Slavery, Race, and American History: Historical Conflict, Trends, and Method, 1866-1953
By John David SmithSee George D. Terry , “ A Study of the Impact of the French Revolution and the Insurrections in Saint - Domingue ... iiin , 65n , 66n ; John D. Duncan , “ Servitude and Slavery in Colonial South Carolina , 1670–1776 " ( Ph.D. diss .
-
Transcending Boundaries: Multi-disciplinary Approaches to the Study of Gender
By John M. Coggeshall, Pamela R. FreseThe essays are arranged so that disciplines and themes interralate--each essay enhances the previous work and introduces the next. Overall, the book is arranged into three systematic approaches to gender studies.
-
Divided We Fall: A History of Ethnic, Religious, and Racial Prejudice in America
By Philip PerlmutterBen J. Wattenberg , “ Black Progress , ” Transcript of Boston WGBH TV production ( 17 May 1977 ) , 3 ; Black Enterprise ( March 1987 ) ... Vine Deloria , Jr. , We Talk , You Listen ( New York : Macmillan Co. , 1970 ) , 152 ; Oscar Uribe ...
-
Managing White Supremacy: Race, Politics, and Citizenship in Jim Crow Virginia
By J. Douglas Smith35 ) segregation on common carriers , 282 Funders , 20-21 , 132 Fairclough , Adam , 109 , 272 , 297 Falls , Nathan , 141 Falls Church , Va . , 140 , 243 Fauquier County , Va . , 180-85 Fellowship Forum , 191 Ferguson , Homer , 47 , 113 ...
-
Religion and State in the American Jewish Experience
By Jonathan D. Sarna, David G. DalinThis text focuses on what it means to be Jewish in America and the different positions held within the Jewish community on past and present church-state issues - whether Orthodox Jews in the military should wear yarmulkes while in uniform - ...
-
Race and Reconciliation in America
By Anne & Emmett LLCIt's an affirmation of what Noel Ignatiev just said. Those from different ethnic groups can integrate and assimilate into white society, and that has not been allowed for the black community. DR. RON WALTERS: Well, yes.
-
The Civil Rights Movement
By Peter B. LevyClark personally pinned Annie Lee Cooper to the ground and pummeled her with his fists in front of a cameraman . On February 1 , King , Abernathy , and over seven hundred demonstrators , many of them schoolchildren , staged a mass ...
-
Prejudice
By Thomas F. PettigrewDefines and describes the nature of prejudice, provides an overview of discrimination in America, and evaluates the efforts to end racial discrimination.
-
Social Crisis and Social Demoralization: The Dynamics of Status in American Race Relations
By Ronald KuykendallAs pointed out by Judge A. Leon Higginbotham (1978), “Not all blacks in Virginia by the 1650s were slaves, but . . . the white colonists by that early date were already beginning to establish a process of debasement and cruelty reserved ...
-
Race After Sartre: Antiracism, Africana Existentialism, Postcolonialism
By Jonathan JudakenRace after Sartre is the first book to systematically interrogate Jean-Paul Sartre’s antiracist politics and his largely unrecognized contributions to critical race theories, postcolonialism, and Africana existentialism. The contributors offer...