Abstract
This chapter looks at earlier imagery of black youth in US visual culture, discussing the post-civil rights era television situation comedy as a commentary on the racial politics of kinship. It takes Bernie Kukoff and Jeff Harris’s Diff’rent Strokes (1978–1986) and Stu Silver’s Webster (1983–1989) as prime examples. It traces black man-child characters of 1970s and 1980s primetime programming to Buckwheat of the Our Gang film series (1922–1944) and to Topsy of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852). These characters betray forms of indiscernible difference linked to a general crisis of categories. The ongoing struggle to politicize black family preservation against attempts by state and civil society to shatter bonds between black parents and children returns symptomatically in the sitcom’s performance and reception.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
The black man-child trope persists up to the moment. Consider subsequent black sitcoms like, most notably, William Bickley and Michael Warren’s Family Matters (1989–1998), starring the nerdy Steve Urkel (Jaleel White); and, more recently, Kenya Barris’s Black-ish (2014–), where the negligible difference in maturity between the protagonist Andre Johnson (Anthony Anderson) and his sons, teenaged Junior (Marcus Scribner) and eight-year-old Jack (Miles Brown), are a constant theme. One could consult as well the many episodes of Ellen Degeneres and Steve Harvey’s children’s variety show, Little Big Shots (2016–), where, among the guests, young black boys are regularly featured in comic exchanges with Harvey to emphasize their premature badness, boldness, and boastfulness.
- 2.
See, for instance, the online film review clearinghouse, Rotten Tomatoes, where it was rated “100% Fresh.” Leading critics writing for the Chicago Sun-Times, Salon, Variety and the Village Voice all offered positive reviews.
- 3.
Roberts (2002) speaks directly to this association: “White families…benefit from the presumption of parental fitness and valuable family ties. […] [Holding] up white families as the superior standard against which all other families fail is entrenched in American culture” (67). Throughout the text, however, she speaks to the ongoing denigration of black parental fitness in general and black maternal fitness in particular.
- 4.
Thanks to Professor Jennifer Reich for bringing this article to my attention.
- 5.
All citations for Harriett Beecher Stowe’s text are from the Project Gutenberg online copy of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Or Life Among the Lowly (1852, 2006, 2011).
- 6.
There are, needless to say, generative possibilities inherent in the political terror of deracination.
- 7.
Stowe’s novel argues that Christianity is anathema not only to slavery and its “outrages of feelings and affections” but also to racism and “the feeling of personal prejudice” it entails, even among abolitionists. Indeed, the convergence of slavery and racism is represented in the character of Simon Legree, a northern racist turned slaveholder, the quintessential godless man. In Chapter XXXIX, she writes of Legree: “No one is so thoroughly superstitious as the godless man. The Christian is composed by the belief of a wise, all-ruling Father, whose presence fills the void unknown with light and order; but to the man who has dethroned God, the spirit-land is, indeed, in the words of the Hebrew poet, ‘a land of darkness and the shadow of death,’ without any order, where the light is as darkness. Life and death to him are haunted grounds, filled with goblin forms of vague and shadowy dread.” The “goblin forms” that Legree sees in Tom and the other slaves on his plantation surely recall the “goblin-like” countenance that Miss Ophelia observes on Topsy’s face up until the point of her late conversion, just prior to Eva’s untimely death. The question remains, obviously, about how the author, as she is wont to do, ensures her own distance toward the very racist discourse her text invariably reproduces.
- 8.
Bernstein (2011) concludes: “Pain divided tender white children from insensate pickaninnies. At stake in this split was fitness for citizenship and inclusion in the category of the child and, ultimately, the human” (36).
- 9.
“The unfeeling, un-childlike pickaninny is the mirror image of both the always-already pained African American adult and the ‘childlike Negro’” (Bernstein 2011, 35).
- 10.
For further reading on the history of the situation comedy in American television, see Dalton and Lindner (2005), Moore et al. (2006), Morreale (2003), and Taylor (1989). For treatments of the African American presence in television in particular, see Acham (2004), Fearn-Banks (2006), and Squires (2009).
- 11.
For a discussion of this return to normalcy and its relation to internal developments in the corporate structure of the television industry, see Ozersky (2003), especially Chap. 6.
- 12.
See Part Three of Roberts (2002) for a theory of African American group-based harm in relation to the child welfare system.
- 13.
Roberts reports that “the economic fortunes of white and Black children are just the opposite: the percentage of Black children who ever lived in poverty while growing up is about the same as the percentage of white children who never did” (Roberts 2002, 46). See Part One of Roberts (2002) for more on the intersections of race and class in child welfare.
- 14.
The sharp statistical disproportion between white and black families that Roberts cites in her research has eased slightly in the last 15 years or so, but the structural dynamics remain firmly intact. Black families remain far more likely than their white counterparts to face forced separation, black children remain vastly overrepresented among children in child protective services and foster care, and they remain the least like to find adoptive homes, especially black male children. See, generally, Child Welfare Information Gateway (2017).
- 15.
Some might rightly hear a resonance between Bennett’s comments and those offered more recently by Congressman Steve King (R-Iowa). King shared on social media that he concurred with the public positions of far-right Dutch politician Geert Wilders , then leader of the racist, xenophobic Party of Freedom (Partij voor de Vrijheid). Wilders was convicted in 2016 by a Dutch court of inciting racial and religious discrimination against North Africans in the Netherlands. King, who had already made past public statements extolling the superiority of the civilization of the white Christian West, wrote in March 2017: “Wilders understands that culture and demographics are our destiny. We can't restore our civilization with somebody else's babies.” When asked to clarify in an interview with CNN later that week, King doubled down by saying, “Of course I meant exactly what I said,” and then concluded: “If you go down the road a few generations or maybe centuries with the intermarriage, I’d like to see an America that’s just so homogenous that we look a lot the same, from that perspective” (Gupta 2017). From the present discussion, we see that King’s fears of a demographic threat posed by immigration from Asia, Latin America and the Middle East is rooted in a deeper, more long-standing tradition of antiblack sexual regulation, segregation and population control endemic to the racialization of modern slavery from at least the fifteenth century onward.
- 16.
For an overview of the debate, including the mischaracterization of Steve Levitt’s Freakonomics, see Saletan (2005). The phrase “condemnation of blackness” is from Muhammad (2010), who tracks the development of the social, economic and political conflation of blackness and crime in the post-Reconstruction-era USA.
- 17.
For reflection on the Moynihan Report on the 50th anniversary of its publication, see Geary (2015).
- 18.
Rothman explains further: “Adoption is the result of some very bad things going on upstream, policies that push women into having babies that they then cannot raise. Racism is of course the other feeder stream: More women of color find themselves placed just there, placed willingly or very much against their will. Some make adoption plans and place their babies in waiting arms; some have their children wrenched away by a deeply neglectful state, which then finds neglect. A lot of what adoption is about is poverty; a lack of access to contraception and abortions; a lack of access to the resources to raise children. In addition, a lot of what poverty is about in America is racism. Moreover, as much as the black community stands there with open arms, absorbing as many of those babies and children as it can, the same poverty that pushes all those babies and children into the adoption stream ensures that there won’t be enough black homes to take them all” (Rothman 2004, 197–198).
- 19.
Although this isn’t entirely true. Mr. D, in the same episode, quips that he’s had a good day because he walked all the way home from the office through Central Park without being mugged. He also jokes, in the first episode, when bragging to Arnold and Willis about the obscene wealth they will now enjoy as his new charges, that on a clear day one can see from his balcony all the way across the Hudson River to New Jersey—likely the multiracial, multiethnic working-class neighborhoods of Jersey City—“not that anyone would want to.”
- 20.
On Arnold’s role as comic relief, see Heffernan (2006). There the author writes that Diff’rent Strokes “is the representative document of the surreal race politics of 30 years ago, which made gods of limousine liberals and allowed minstrelsy to inform black roles for children. If the 60s had radical chic, the 70s and 80s had radical cuteness. The face of this ideology in primetime was Arnold Jackson… At the time Arnold struck audiences as an endlessly endearing trickster figure, whose Harlem-bred sensitivity to being hustled had been reduced to a sweetie-pie affectation: ‘What you talkin’ about, Willis?’ Arnold was supposed to be shrewd and nobody’s fool, but also misguided; after learning his lessons, he was easily tamed and cuddled.”
- 21.
Given the history of American film and television, one would think that Diff’rent Strokes would generate controversy for placing under the same roof a pubescent black boy (Willis) and a pubescent white girl (Kimberly), both ages thirteen. In a sense, the too obvious objection to that doubly taboo interracial, incestuous sexuality was repressed, only to return in a fascination with the perversion attributed to the cast off-screen. All three of the former child stars—Gary Coleman, Todd Bridges, and Dana Plato—struggled with substance abuse and various legal problems that led to financial ruin. Plato additionally gained some notoriety when she posed nude for Playboy magazine and later starred in several soft-core pornographic films. A similar aura of perversion would attach itself to Emmanuel Lewis, star of Webster, with the emergence of his close and public friendship with Michael Jackson, especially as the latter faced allegations of sexual crimes against children.
- 22.
This dynamic has been noted regarding questions of identity for black characters broadly in contemporary American television. See, for instance, Ibelema (1990), who summarizes as follows: “There is a definite pattern in all the episodes on African or racial identity. First, concern with African identity results from a personal crisis. The African American character does not project his African cultural identity in normal times. Overt awareness and projection are triggered by an event or in moments of self-doubt. Secondly, the character begins to engage in uncharacteristic behavior, rejects most social norms, and acts in exaggeratedly strange ways. In other words, overt awareness and expression of African identity is portrayed as a form of personal revolution and social rebellion. Thirdly, the character is confronted with ‘evidence’ that convinces him that assertion of African identity is not necessary. Fourthly and finally, the character reverts to his old ways, and the identity crisis is over” (Ibelema 1990, 122–123).
- 23.
Wiegman (2002) makes a related argument is made with respect to Richard Benjamin’s Made in America (1993). She writes about how “the absence of interracial sexuality… is critically important to the presence of white multiracial desire” in narratives of liberal whiteness for the post-segregationist era” (Wiegman 2002, 861).
References
Acham, Christine. 2004. Revolution Televised: Prime Time and the Struggle for Black Power. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Bernstein, Robin. 2011. Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights. New York: New York University Press.
Child Welfare Information Gateway. 2017. Foster Care Statistics 2015. Children’s Bureau, Numbers and Trends, March. Accessed May 28, 2017. https://www.childwelfare.gov/pubs/factsheets/foster/.
Dalton, Mary, and Laura Linder (eds.). 2005. The Sitcom Reader: American Viewed and Skewed. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.
Fanon, Frantz. 2006. Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press.
Fearn-Banks, Kathleen. 2006. The A to Z of African-American Television. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press.
Geary, Daniel. 2015. Beyond Civil Rights: The Moynihan Report and Its Legacy. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Gupta, Prachi. 2017. GOP Rep. Steve King Would Like to See an America That’s ‘So Homogenous That We Look a Lot the Same’. The Slot, March 13. Accessed May 28, 2017. http://theslot.jezebel.com/gop-rep-steve-king-would-like-to-see-an-america-thats-1793212880.
Hamamoto, Darrell. 1991. Nervous Laughter: Television Situation Comedy and Liberal Democratic Ideology. New York: Praeger Publishers.
Hartman, Saidiya. 2007. Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Heffernan, Virginia. 2006. Revealing the Wages of Young Sitcom Fame. New York Times, September 4. Accessed May 28, 2017. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/04/arts/television/04stro.html.
Hoberman, James. 2007. The Slums of Park Slope. Village Voice, September 11. Accessed May 28, 2017. https://www.villagevoice.com/2007/09/11/the-slums-of-park-slope/.
Hunter-Lattany, Kristin. 1984. Why Buckwheat Was Shot. MELUS 11: 79–85.
Ibelema, Minabere. 1990. Identity Crisis: The African Connection in African American Sitcom Characters. In Sexual Politics & Popular Culture, edited by Diane Raymond, 121–130. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press.
Jewison, Norman. 1970. The Landlord. DVD. Directed by Hal Foster. Santa Monica, CA: MGM/United Artists.
Marrati, Paula. 2005. Genesis and Trace: Derrida Reading Husserl and Heidegger. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press.
Miller, James Andrew, and Tom Shales. 2014. Live From New York: The Complete, Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live as Told by Its Stars, Writers, and Guests. New York: Little, Brown and Company.
Moore, Barbara, Marvin Bensman, and Jim Van Dyke. 2006. Prime-Time Television: A Concise History. Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers.
Moran, Rachel. 2001. Interracial Intimacy: The Regulation of Race and Romance. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Morreale, Joanne (ed.). 2003. Critiquing the Sitcom: A Reader. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press.
Muhummad, Khalil Gibran. 2010. The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
National Association of Black Social Workers. 2003. Preserving Families of African Ancestry. Accessed May 28, 2017. http://nabsw.org/?page=PositionPapers.
Nyong’o, Tavia. 2002. Racial Kitsch and Black Performance. Yale Journal of Criticism 15: 371–391.
Ozersky, Josh. 2003. Archie Bunker’s America: TV in an Era of Change, 1968–1978. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press.
Roberts, Dorothy. 2002. Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare. New York: Basic Books.
Rothman, Barbara Katz. 2004. Transracial Adoption: Refocusing Upstream. In The Politics of Multiracialism: Challenging Racial Thinking, ed. Heather Dalmage, 193–202. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.
Saletan, William. 2005. Natural Unborn Killers: The Bigotry of Bill Bennett’s Low Expectations. Slate, October 4. Accessed May 28, 2017. http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/human_nature/2005/10/natural_unborn_killers.html.
Seifter, Andrew. 2005. “Media Matters Exposes Bennett.” Media Matters For America, September 28. Accessed May 28, 2017. https://www.mediamatters.org/video/2005/09/28/media-matters-exposes-bennett-you-could-aborte/133904.
Spillers, Hortense. 2003. Black, White, and In Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Squires, Catherine. 2009. African Americans and the Media. Malden, MA: Polity.
Stowe, Harriett Beecher. 1852. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Or Life Among the Lowly. Salt Lake City, UT: Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation. Accessed May 28, 2017. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/203/203-h/203-h.htm.
Taylor, Ella. 1989. Prime Time Families: Television Culture in Postwar America. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Wiegman, Robyn. 2002. Intimate Publics: Race, Property, and Personhood. American Literature 74: 859–885.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2017 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Sexton, J. (2017). Comedy and Romance: On Diff’rent Strokes and Webster . In: Black Masculinity and the Cinema of Policing. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66170-4_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66170-4_5
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-66169-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-66170-4
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)