Core post #2

As previous posters have noted, this week’s readings each examine television’s ways of “representing” race in terms of broader industrial, cultural, and ideological contexts. Acham contextualizes The Cosby Show’s assimilationist narratives within Bill Cosby’s larger career and refusal to engage with the social realities of race, as well as within larger Reaganite policies of social program cutbacks and discourses of bootstrapping, and the show’ valorization by proponents of such policies and discourses. Gray, meanwhile, trains his lens on the broader proliferation of black-oriented sitcoms in the 1980s which The Cosby Show helped to catalyze. While underwritten to some extent by cultural shifts, Gray argues that this proliferation was fueled largely by economic incentives. In an era of increased market competition, black audiences became a key demographic for the big three networks—not just because “narrowcasting” was on the rise, but also because black households were less likely to have access to the networks’ competitors: cable and VCRs.

Finally, Esposito demonstrates how even when seeming to foreground race, a show like Ugly Betty might favor of an ideology of meritocracy and colorblindness which occludes the fact of white privilege and systemic racism. And this brings me to Fresh off the Boat.

I enjoy Fresh off the Boat. I’ve only seen a handful of episodes, but the writing is clever and the joke execution is often genuinely funny. And like Black-ish, the show deserves recognition for the ways in which it, unlike, for example, The Cosby Show, foregrounds issues of race and class, constructing a family of characters with distinct points of view through whom we get to see larger social and cultural discourses rehearsed. There are, I think, myriad reasons to take issue with Newcomb and Hirsch’s model of television as a cultural forum, but Fresh of the Boat does model a kind of forum action that, with the show’s very title and the sort of narrative content we see in an episode like “So Chineez,” might seem to refute the kinds of colorblind discourses Esposito unpacks in her analysis of Ugly Betty.

Yet, I worry that this (or other) series’ discursive problematization of race and class might also be accompanied by affirmations of meritocratic or colorblind ideological positions. Again, I’ve only seen a few episodes, so I’m not going on much. But already, “So Chineez” points to potential lines of critique. The episode opens with voiceover narration from adult Eddie making a series of assertions about the family’s success in “settling into Orlando”: Eddie has become his school’s “first black president” (this rather jarring joke plays off of the series’ broader mode of making Eddie’s appropriation of black popular culture central to his character); his dad, Louis, has “put the restaurant on the map”; and his mom, Jessica, is “assimilating like a fiend.” The A-plot goes on to coalesce around Jessica’s identity crisis in response to a white couple’s remark that they view the Huang family as “regular old Americans.” While there’s more to unpack in how this crisis plays out, the opening voiceover has already made clear the social mechanisms that might “merit” such a remark: Eddie has assimilated by becoming an expert in the dominant culture’s own modes of appropriation; Louis’s entrepreneurial success has earned the family a slice of the bourgeois pie (and, by extension, access to some of the affordances of white privilege); and Jessica’s proficiency in gabbing about Melrose Place further buys them purchase into the “colorblind” meritocracy.

As with Esposito’s discussion of implicit forms of "nepotism" in the Ugly Betty episode she analyzes, we can say that “So Chineez” represents mechanisms of white privilege—grandiosely emplaced in the narrative site of the country club, for example—but it doesn’t articulate the structural mechanisms that make this privilege inaccessible to “othered” bodies and social groups at the level of broader reality. Rather, it narrativizes assimilation as a fraught choice, but a choice nonetheless. Jessica can embrace Melrose Place, or she can forsake it and send her children to Chinese school, or, preferably, she can, by the end of the episode, strike a position of negotiation or “hybridity,” reaffirming her love of the ease of preparing mac ‘n cheese while also rewarding Eddie for his affirmation of his Chinese heritage. In an era in which “identity politics” are buzzy on various ends of the ideological spectrum, perhaps we’ll continue to get ever more sophisticated shows that attempt to navigate terrains of “difference.” My concern is that because the economic and narrative imperatives of television demand resolution, these shows will develop ever more sophisticated terms for evading issues of structural power and oppression.