In other words, to pivot the debate on race and television purely on whether and how people of color have figured, on or behind the screen or in the audience, is already to miss the point. What was consistently projected, without public fanfare, but in teeming myriads of programs, news priorities, sportscasts, movies, and ads, was the naturalness and normalcy of social whiteness. Television visually accumulated the heritage of representation in mainstream U.S. science, religion, education, theater, art, literature, cinema, radio, and the press. According to television representation, the United States was a white nation, with some marginal “ethnic” accretions that were at their best when they could simply be ignored, like well-trained and deferential maids and doormen. This was even beyond being thought a good thing. It was axiomatic, and self-evident.

Thus, American television in its first two generations inherited and diffused, on an hourly and daily basis, a mythology of whiteness that framed and sustained a racist national self-understanding. U.S. television was not alone in this respect. Nations as different as Australia, Brazil, Britain, France, and Mexico shared in common a television representation of people of color that rather systematically excluded them or was content to stereotype them, and a set of news values that privileged whiteness as normal. Joel Zito Araújo has provided an absorbing account of the painful struggle to represent Afro-Brazilians (50 percent of the population) in Brazil’s hugely popular telenovelas. Nonetheless, none of these television systems had anything like the global reach of American TV. The implications of American TV for helping cement racially prejudicial attitudes elsewhere in the world, for normalizing certain levels of white racism, would make a fitting topic for international communication research.

There is a second issue in American television, which has become increasingly significant at the beginning of the 21st century. Insofar as the televisual hegemony of social whiteness has been critiqued, either on television itself, or on video, or in print, it has most often tended to focus on African-American issues. Yet, in reviewing racism and ethnicity in U.S. television, we need not downplay four centuries of African-American experience and contribution in order to recognize as well the importance of Native American nations, Latinos, and Asian Americans in all their variety. Thus, in this essay, attention will be paid, so far as research permits, to each one of these four groupings, although there will not be space to treat the important subgroupings (Haitians, Vietnamese, etc.) within each. The discussion will commence with representation, main-stream and alternative, and then move on to employment patterns in the TV industry, broadcast and cable. The conclusion will introduce the so far underresearched question of racism, ethnicity, and TV audiences. Before doing so, however, a more exact definition is needed of racism in the U.S. context.

First, racism is expressed along a connected spectrum, from the casual patronizing remark to the sadism of the prison guard, from avoidance of skin contact to the starving of public education in inner cities and reservations, or to death rates among infants of color higher than in some Third World countries. Racism does not have to take the form of lynching, extermination camps, or slavery to be systemic and virulent—yet simultaneously dismissed as of minor importance or even as irrelevant by the white majority.

Second, racism may stereotype groups differently. Class is often pivotal here. Claimed success among Asian Americans and Jews is attacked just as is the alleged inability to make good among Latinos and African Americans. Multiple Native American nations with greatly differing languages and cultures are lumped together in a generic “Indian” category. Gender plays a role too: white stomachs will contract at supposedly truculent and violence-prone men of color, but ethnic minority women get attributed with pliancy—even, for white males, to presuming their special eagerness for sexual dalliance.

Third, racism in the United States is binary. People of mixed descent are not permitted to confuse the issue but belong automatically to a minority group of color; witness the public debate around the appropriateness of a “multiple” category for racial/ethnic self-identification in the 2000 census. Ethnic minority individuals whose personal cultural style may be read as emblematic of the ethnic majority’s are quite often responded to as traitors, and thus they are either warmly regarded as the “good exception” by the white majority or derisively labeled as “self-hating” by the minority.

Lastly, as Robert Entman and Andrew Rojecki have argued, racist belief has changed to being more supple, and “modern” racism has shed its biological absolutism. In the “modern” version, the civil rights movement won, racial hatred is past, and talented individuals now make it. Therefore, continuing ethnic minority poverty is solely the minority’s overall cultural/attitudinal fault.

Mainstream Representation

In discussing mainstream representation, it is vital to note three issues. One is the importance of historical shifts in the representation of these issues, especially since the mid-1980s, but also at certain critical junctures before then. The second is the importance of taking into account the entire spectrum of what television provides, including ads (perhaps 20 percent of U.S. TV content), weathercasting, sitcoms, documentaries, sports, MTV, non-English-language programming, religious channels, old films, breaking news, reality programs, and talk shows. Too many studies have zeroed in on one or another format and then taken it as representative of the whole. Here we will try to engage with the spectrum, although space and available research will put most of the focus on whites and blacks in mainstream television news and entertainment. The third is the strong concentration of African Americans in comedy and crime scenarios. Quality of representation is as important as quantity.

Historically, as J. Fred MacDonald has shown, U.S. television perpetuated patterns established in U.S. cinema, radio, theater, and other forms of public communication and announced people of color overwhelmingly by their absence. It was not that these people were malevolently stereotyped or denounced. They simply did not appear to exist. If they surfaced, it was almost always as wraiths, silent black butlers smiling deferentially, Latino field hands laboring sweatily, or Indian braves whooping wildly against the march of history. Speaking parts were rare, heavily circumscribed, and typically an abusive distortion of actual modes of speech. But the essence of the problem was virtual nonexistence.

Thus, the TV industry collaborated to a marked degree with the segregation that has marked the U.S. nation, once legally and residentially, now residentially. Programs and advertisements that might have inflamed white opinion in the South were strenuously avoided, partly in accurate recognition of the militancy of some opinions that might lead to boycotts of advertisers, but partly yielding simply to inertia in defining that potential as a fact of life beyond useful reflection.

The programs shunned were rarely in the slightest degree confrontational, or even suggestive of interracial romance. The classic case was The Nat “King” Cole Show, which premiered on NBC in November 1956, and which was eventually taken off for good in December of the following year. A Who’s Who of distinguished black as well as white artists and performers virtually gave their services to the show, and NBC strove to keep it alive. But the program could not find a national sponsor, at one point having to rely on no less than 30 sponsors in order to be seen nationwide. Cole himself explicitly blamed the advertising agencies’ readiness to be intimidated by the White Citizens Councils, the spearhead of resistance to desegregation in southern states.

This was not the only occasion that African Americans were seen on the TV screen in that era. A number of shows, notably The Ed Sullivan Show, made a point of inviting black performers on to the screen. Yet entertainment was only one thin slice of the spectrum. Articulate black individuals, such as Paul Robeson, with a clear critique of the racialization of the United States, were systematically excluded from expressing their opinions on air (in his case, on the pretext he was a communist).

This generalized absence, and univocal whiteness, was first punctured by TV news coverage of the savage handling of civil rights demonstrators in the latter 1950s and early 1960s. Images of police dogs, fire hoses, and billy clubs being unleashed against unarmed black demonstrators in Montgomery, Alabama, and white parents—with their children standing by their side—spewing obscenities and hurling rocks at Martin Luther King, Jr.’s march through Cicero, Illinois, may still have portrayed African Americans as largely voiceless victims, but the coverage was nonetheless able to communicate the activists’ dignity under fire, whereas their white persecutors communicated their own monstrous inhumanity. The same story repeated itself in the school desegregation riots in New Orleans in 1964 and Boston in 1974.

U.S. television since then has made sporadic attempts to address these particular white-black issues, with such shows as Roots, The Cosby Show, and Eyes on the Prize, and through a proliferation of black newscasters at the local level, but all the while cleaving steadfastly to three traditions. First, there is the continuing virtual invisibility of Latinos, Native Americans, and Asian Americans. Indeed, some studies indicate that for decades Latinos have hovered around 1 to 2 percent of characters in TV drama, very substantially less than their percentage of the population. Darrell Hamamoto similarly charges that, “By and large, TV Asians are inserted in programs chiefly as semantic markers that reflect upon and reveal telling aspects of the Euro-American characters.” Second, the tradition of color-segregating entertainment has changed but little. Even though black shows began to multiply considerably from the latter 1980s, casts have generally been white or black (and never Latino, Native, or Asian). Third, the few minority roles in dramatic TV have frequently been of criminals and drug addicts. This pattern has intensively reinforced, and seemingly been reinforced by, the similar racial stereotyping common in “reality TV” police shows and local TV news programs. The standard alternative role for African Americans has been comic actor (or stand-up comic in comedy shows). Commenting upon the wider cinematic tradition of Latino portrayals, Charles Ramírez-Berg has identified the bandit/greaser, the mixed-race slut, the buffoon (male and female), the Latin lover, and the alluring Dark Lady, as five hackneyed and offensive tropes.

Roots (1977) and Roots: The Next Generations (1979) confounded the TV industry’s prior expectations, with up to 140 million viewers for all or part of the first miniseries, and over 100 million for The Next Generations. For the first time on U.S. television, some of the realities of slavery—brutality, rape, enforced deculturation—were con fronted over a protracted period, and through individual characters with whom, as they fought to escape or survive, the audience could identify. Against this historic first was the individualistic focus on screenwriter Alex Haley’s determined family, presented as “immigrants-times-ten” fighting an exceptionally painful way over its generations toward the American Dream myth of all U.S. immigrants. Against it, too, was the emphasis on the centuries and decades before the 1970s, which the ahistorical vector in U.S. culture easily cushions from application to the often devastating here and now. Nonetheless, it was a signal achievement.

The Cosby Show (1984–92) was the next milestone. Defeating industry expectations just as Roots had, the series scored exceptionally high continuing ratings right across the nation. The show attracted a certain volume of hostile comment, some of it smugly supercilious. The fact it was popular with white audiences in the South, and in South Africa, was a favorite quick shot to try to debunk it. Some critics claimed it fed the mirage that racial injustice could be overcome through individual economic advance; others posited that it primly fostered Reaganite conservative family values. Both of the analyses were indeed easily possible readings of the show within contemporary U.S. culture.

Herman Gray, one of the few critics to acknowledge the role of the show in opening the gate to a large number of black television shows and to new professional experience and openings for many black media artists, is also correct in characterizing The Cosby Show as assimilationist. It hardly ever directly raised issues of social equity, except in interpersonal gender relations. Nonetheless, in the context of the nation’s and the industry’s history, the show could have been exquisitely correct—and never once have hit the screen.

Eyes on the Prize (1987; 1990) allows a much more straightforward discussion. A documentary series on the American civil rights movements from 1954 to 1985, it too marked a huge watershed in U.S. television history. Partly, its achievement was to bring together historical footage with movement participants, some very elderly, who could supply living oral history. Partly, too, its achievement was that producer-director Henry Hampton consistently included in the narrative the voices of segregationist foes of the move-ent, on the ground that the story was theirs, too. This gave the opportunity for self-reflection within the white audience, rather than easy self-distancing.

However, the series was on PBS and thus never drew the kind of audience Roots did. In the United States the public appetite for documentaries was also at something of a low toward the end of the century, as opposed to Europe and Russia, where the documentary form was much more popular. Eyes’ influence would be slower than Roots or Cosby achieved, though significant through video rentals and college courses. Its primary significance for present purposes is its demonstration of what could be done televisually, but what was never contemplated to be undertaken by the commercial TV companies.

In 1996, PBS screened a similar four-part series, Chicano!, by documentarist Héctor Galán on the Chicano social movements in the southwest, a story much less known even than the civil rights movements.

These then were turning points, not in the sense of an instantaneous switch, but in terms of setting a high-water mark that expanded the definition of the possible in U.S. TV. The other turning point was the proliferation, mostly locally, of black and other ethnic minority group individuals as newscasters. Although newscasters rarely had the clout to write their own bulletin scripts, let alone decide on news priorities for reporting or investigation, they had the cachet of a very public, trusted role. To that extent, this development did carry considerable symbolic prestige for the individuals concerned. As of 2001, the Radio-Television News Directors Association found 10 percent of general managers and 14 percent of TV news directors were people of color. This was a move in the right direction but still left minorities vastly underrepresented in these key authority positions.

Only as time went on and racial news values and priorities remained the same or similar despite the change in faces, did the limits of this development begin to become more apparent. At about the same time, most news bulletins, especially local ones, were deteriorating into “infotainment,” with lengthy weather and sports reports incorporated into the half hour. The latter trend continues in the early 2000s. With news audiences highly concentrated in the over-50 age group, programmers expend much effort to make news still more entertaining to younger audiences.

Alternative Representations

Alternative representation became somewhat more frequent after The Cosby Show’s success. In part, this change was also due to the steadily declining price of video cameras and editing equipment, to support from federal and state arts commissions, and to developments in cable TV, especially public access, which opened up more scope for independent video makers to develop their own work, some of which could be screened locally and even nationally.

From the mid-1990s, first FOX and then imitators WB and UPN sought to challenge the dominance of the “Big Three” networks (ABC, CBS, and NBC) by offering fresh programming, including a series of shows with African-American content. Kristal Brent Zook suggests that while this was a rare and exciting moment in a number of instances, the fundamental impetus was competitive rather than inclusive, and that once the new networks began to establish themselves with advertisers their innovative programming began to tail off, especially with regard to shows featuring African Americans. On cable, Nickelodeon and the expensive premium channels (HBO, Showtime) also offered some innovation, such as the children’s series The Brothers Garcia (Nickelodeon), the Latino-themed Resurrection Boulevard (Showtime), and some strong documentaries and docudramas with African-American themes (HBO). Quite often too, HBO’s casting and scripting met the “quality” test by having minority-ethnic characters in nonstereotypical roles, such as the Puerto Rican mortician and the gay black cop played by Freddy Rodriguez and Mathew St. Patrick, respectively, in Six Feet Under.

A further development was the emergence of black and Latino cable and UHF channels such as Black Entertainment Television (BET), Univision, and Telemundo, together with leased ethnic-group program slots in metropolitan areas. With respect to the latter, Hamid Naficy has explored the world of expatriate Iranian programming in Los Angeles and thereby opened up a whole new perspective on migration, ethnicity, and “American-ness” as they play out in television. These new developments were often contradictory. The often cheap-shot satirization of racial issues on In Living Color; the question Gray and others raise concerning BET programming as often simply a black reproduction of white televisual tropes; the role of black sitcoms and stand-up comics as a new version of an older tradition in which blackness is acceptable as farce—each of these highlights in some way the tensions in television’s representations of race.

Another contradictory example is Univision, effectively dominated by Mexico’s near-monopoly TV giant, Televisa. Its entertainment programs are mostly a secondary market for Televisa’s products, and while they are certainly popular, they have had little direct echo of Chicano or other Latino life in the United States. At the same time, as América Rodríguez has shown, Univision’s news program has cultivated, for commercial reasons of mass appeal, pan-ethnic Spanish that over time may arguably contribute to a pan-Latino U.S. cultural identity, rather than the Chicano, Caribbean, Central and South American fragments that constitute the Latino minority.

MacDonald goes so far as to forecast cable TV’s multiple channels as an almost automatic technical solution to the heritage of unequal access for African Americans. However, the “technological fix” he envisages would not of itself address the urgent national need for dialogue on race and whiteness in television’s public forum, because a multichannel environment may resemble a Babel of voices mutually insulated from each other rather than engaged with each other. Nor does his proposal seem to bargain with the huge costs of generating mostly new product for even a single cable channel.

Scattered as they are over multiple tiny distributors or self-distributed, it is difficult to generalize about the profusion of single features and documentaries generated by video artists of color and/or on ethnic themes. Suffice it to say that distribution—cable channels notwithstanding—is the largest single problem that such work encounters. (Sources of information on these videos include Asian-American CineVision and the Black Filmmakers Foundation, both in New York City, and Facets Video in Chicago.)

In examining alternatives, finally, we need to take stock of some of the mainstream alternatives to segregated casts, such as one of the earliest, Hawaii Five-O, and the later Miami Vice and NYPD Blue. The first was definitely still within the “Tonto” tradition insofar as the ethnic minority cops were concerned (“Yes, boss” seemed to be the limit of their vocabulary). Miami Vice’s tri-ethnic leads were less anchored in that tradition, although Edward James Olmos as the police captain often approximated Captain Dobey in Starsky and Hutch, apparently only nominally in charge. NYPD Blue carried over some of that tradition as regarded the African-American Lieutenant Fancy’s role, but it actually starred Latinos in key police roles.

A central issue on NYPD Blue, however, raised once more the question of “modern” racism. A repetitive feature of the show was the skill of the police detectives in pressuring people they considered guilty to sign confessions and not to avail themselves of their legal rights. Two comments are in order here. One is that a police team is shown at work, undeflected by racial animosity, strenuously task-driven. It is a theme with its roots in many World War II movies, although in those films, ethnicity was generally the focus rather than race. The inference plainly to be drawn was that atavistic biases should be laid aside in the face of clear and present danger, with the contemporary “war” being against the constant tide of crime.

Second, it is a fact that the number of U.S. prisoners who are African Americans and Latinos is vastly disproportionate to the size of these subpopulations relative to the U.S. population as a whole. On NYPD Blue we see firm unity among white, black, and Latino police professionals in defining aggressive detection and charge practices as legitimate and essential, even though it is procedures like those that, along with racially differential sentencing and parole procedures, have often helped create that huge racial imbalance in U.S. prisons.

The Television Industry and Race Relations

Except for a clutch of public figures led by Bill Cosby, CNN’s political analyst Bernard Shaw (who retired in 2001), talk show hosts Oprah Winfrey and Geraldo Rivera; moderately in fluential behind-the-camera individuals such as Susan Fales, Charles Floyd Johnson, Ralph Farquhar, Thomas Carter, and Suzanne de Passe; and local newscasters, the racial casting of television organizations has been distinctly leisurely in changing. Cable television has the strongest ratio of minority personnel, but this should be read in connection with its lower pay scales and its minimal original production schedules. Especially in positions of senior authority, television is still largely a white enterprise.

The Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) statistics are often less than helpful in determining the true picture and represent a classic instance of bureaucratic response to the demand to collect evidence by refusing to focus with any precision on the matter in hand. In the National Association of Minorities in Communication survey of cable TV, the same phenomenon was evident, with a number of multiple system operators (MSOs) including not only executives with direct influence over programming (e.g., marketing) in their minority/ethnic headcount but also human resources personnel. Given the undoubted intelligence of those who communicate these statistics, it is hard to see other than a pattern of deliberate obfuscation at work. The FCC’s two top cable and broadcast employment categories, for example (Officials and Managers, and Professionals), are extremely broad and render completely foggy the degree of real authority entailed over the process. Drawing meaningful conclusions from minority/ethnic percentages within those categories is consequently impossible. Unless and until cable and broadcast organizations see fit to reveal clearly the holders of significant executive power and their ethnic status, it is logical to assume that television boardrooms are as white as U.S. corporate boardrooms in general, and yet those boardrooms are, to belabor the obvious, where the fundamental television decisions are made. Whether or not this exclusion of racial minorities from the corridors makes immediate market sense, the implications of the television industry’s decision-making process for the immediate future of American life and culture are very disturbing ones.

Data from 2001 indicated 47 TV stations, 75 percent of which were UHF, had minority/ethnic owners. Eight of these stations were in California; seven in Puerto Rico; seven in Texas; two each in Connecticut, Illinois, Indiana, Mississippi, New Jersey, New York, and Wisconsin; and one each in Arizona, Colorado, Hawaii, Louisiana, Michigan, Vermont, Virginia, and Washington, D.C. This was a higher number than five years previously, but still a pathetic coda when 30 percent of the U.S. population is identified as minority/ethnic. As of early 2001, a Federal Appeals Court, responding to a case brought by three broadcast associations, actually struck down FCC rules promoting the hiring of people of color and women in the broadcast industry. A CBS spokeswoman announced that CBS’s “commitment to diversity is as strong as ever,” which was hardly reassuring.

The question then at issue is to what degree this absence of minorities from positions of TV authority determines the mainstream representation patterns surveyed above. One might argue that if no customary formats or tropes were changed, and if none of the legal, financial, and competitive vectors vanished, then a television executive stratum composed entirely of ethnic minority individuals would likely proceed to reproduce precisely the same patterns of representation.

However, this position is an abstract one and only helps to shed light on the pressures to conform faced by the few ethnic minority individuals scattered through the TV hierarchy. Sociologically, were the percentage of executive positions held by minorities to increase to within even hailing distance of their percentage of the national population, a much wider internal dialogue would be feasible concerning the very limits of the possible in television. We come back, in a sense, to Cosby.

At the time that program aired, the proportion of blacks and Latinos who watched TV was higher than the national average, and these two minority groups accounted in 1995 for at least $300 billion in consumer spending a year. Therefore, by the mid-1990s, the economic logic of advertising seemed to point toward increasing inclusiveness on TV. How this clash between economic logic and inherited culture would work out remained to be seen. The efforts of advocacy groups, such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the National Council of La Raza, Children Now, and others, became more intensive from 1993 onward, and in 2000 many joined the Multi-Ethnic Coalition, monitoring and publicly critiquing failures of representation.

Audience and Spectatorship

The most complex issue centers on how viewers process televisual content related to race and ethnicity. It has already been argued that decades of daily programs have mostly underwritten the perception of the United States as, at its core, a white nation with a white culture, rather than a multicultural nation beset by entrenched problems of ethnic inequity. Television fare has obviously not been a lone voice in this regard, nor has it been anything resembling a steady opposition voice. This judgment clearly transcends interpretations of particular programs or even genres. It is sufficiently loose in formulation to leave its plausible practical consequences open to extended discussion. However, given the ever greater dominance of television in U.S. culture, TV’s basic vision of the world can hardly be dismissed as impotent.

Historically, it has been a vision likely to reassure the white majority that it has little to learn or benefit from people of color. Rather, TV coverage of immigration and crime has made it much easier to be afraid of ethnic and racial minorities. George H.W. Bush’s manipulation of the Willie Horton case for a 1988 campaign commercial (with Horton representing the specter of the vicious black rapist aided and abetted by a liberal Democrat— Bush’s opponent, Michael Dukakis) had even the nation’s vice president (and president-to-be) drawing on, and thus endorsing, the standard tropes of local TV news. Particularly following the September 11, 2001, terrorist assaults on New York and Washington, D.C., but also for some 20 years before that, television coverage of Arabs and Muslims, while often maintaining an abstract theme of tolerance and civil rights, did much at the same time to encourage many members of the U.S. public to distrust as potential terrorists and enemies anyone who answered to (or appeared to answer to) those identities. The suspicious reaction and backlash was reminiscent of the anti-Asian culture that formed the backdrop for hostility toward Japanese Americans following the Pearl Harbor attack 60 years previously.

Naturally, not all of the white majority have endorsed or believed that vision. However, it has been difficult to muster a coherent and forward-looking public debate about race, whiteness, and the nation’s future, given TV’s continuing refusal, in the main, to squarely face the issue. This medium was not the only institution with that responsibility, nor the unique forum available. But TV was and is crucial to any solution.

The detailed analysis of audience reception of particular shows or series is a delicate business, linking as it will into the many filaments of social and cultural life for white audiences and for audiences of color. It is, however, a sour comment on audience researchers that so little has been done to date to explore how TV has been appropriated by various ethnic minority audiences, or how majority audiences handle ethnic themes. Commercial research has been content simply to register viewer levels by ethnicity, whereas academic research, with a scattering of exceptions, has rarely troubled to explore ethnic diversity in processing TV, despite the outpouring of ethnographic audience studies in the 1980s and 1990s.