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Introduction
As you will recognize, Module 4 continues to examine race and popular culture with a particular
emphasis on Black popular culture. As Module 3 explored, rap music and hip hop culture is often
examined and celebrated as fundamentally altering the direction of mainstream popular culture and have
proven to be incredibly influential in its ascent from a relatively new and not widely known and accepted
music genre and culture in early 1980s New York City to a now deeply influential and powerful dominant
culture that is truly global in nature. Additionally, New Black Cinema and the hood film have also proved
terrifically influential and a neat hybridity is noted in recognizing the various examples of crossover
between all of rap music, hip hop, New Black Cinema and the hood film. More specifically, this module
both expands and narrows its focus in centring the Black sitcoms of the 1980s and early 1990s; these
sitcoms make up an influential tradition that rose in prominence and in numbers on the heels of the
terrific success The Cosby Show enjoyed quickly after debuting on NBC in 1984. Additionally, given the
access to the past streaming sites have offered subscribers, this module’s primary focus on a handful of
terrifically influential Black sitcoms is specific in recognizing that for many viewers they are watching
these shows for the first time and as a result come to the shows with “fresh eyes” on what is for them a
new show.

Topics and Learning Objectives

Topics
This module will include the following topics:

Television sitcoms
1980s and 90s Black sitcoms
Whiteness: Seinfeld and Friends
The Cosby Show and the Fresh Prince of Bel Air
Black sitcoms and gender: women, power and change
The spin-off: A Different World, Blackness and authenticity

Learning Objectives
By the end of this module, you will be able to:

Recognize the structured nature of the television sitcom

Apply social conflict theory in recognizing the ideological and representational limitations of the
television sitcom
Analyze sitcoms, race and whiteness via Seinfeld and Friends as well as The Cosby Show and
Living Single

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Recognize Black popular culture as a culture of contestation, resistance and activism

Apply the central arguments of this module’s reserved reading when watching A Different World

Readings

Required Readings

Coleman, R. & Cavalcante, A. (2013). 2. Two different worlds: Television as a producer’s

medium. In B. Smith-Shomade (Ed.), Watching While Black (pp. 33–48). Rutgers
University Press.

An Introduction to Television Sitcoms

Sitcoms (situational comedies) have often been subjected to criticisms ranging from being simplistic,
repetitive and mundane to uncritical and empty of “any real meaning,” a series of denigrations not only
delegitimizing television itself, but also suggesting it as a format best suited to the less educated, the
unintelligent and the philistine – those without a vested and meaningful interest in the value and
intellectual pursuit of high cultural art forms. Horace Newcomb sees the sitcom as “providing a simple
and reassuring problem/solution formula.” He believes that as the most basic of television genres, it is
most distant from real problems, creating a reality gap, even as it promulgates dominant social
ideologies (Shaded Lives, 26).

For example, as Module 2 examined, HBO’s consciously oppositional marketing distancing itself from
standard network television is revisited here, but now your focus will not be on HBO, The Sopranos or
Here Comes Honey Boo Boo, but rather you will examine the rich history of the Black sitcoms of the
1990s as they are positioned as active texts, occupying a role wherein they not only address Black
audiences, although not exclusively, but also reveal the decidedly limited scope and range of a typical
mainstream sitcom.

That is, the generally lighthearted and quickly-paced nature of a 30-minute sitcom typically results in less
complex narratives and a reliance on humour to navigate any problematic or troubling experiences. For
example, as the playwright George Bernard Shaw once warned, “When a thing is funny, search it
carefully for a hidden truth” (Coleman, 2016, 279). For example, television comedy endures as a
recognized dramatic form that uses humour and ends happily. Despite perpetual berating for its racist,
sexist, homophobic, and inane articulations and presumed influences, the sitcom maintains financial and
cultural viability nationwide.

In Shaded Lives: African American Women and Television, it’s argued that “television, as an integral
part of society, drives the cultural milieu it seeks to emulate and receive profit from. Because of its
inability (or rather lack of desire) to extricate itself from this environment, television emits and constructs
racialized, gendered, sexualized, and generational tropes. One of the ways it has done this most
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successfully is through genre, and the most successful genre has been the situation comedy” (40), and
one of the most successful, long-running and influential sitcoms is The Cosby Show (1984–92, NBC)

The Cosby Show, and Its Discontents

The 1980s were an interesting time for sitcoms, in particular as to their relation to the world outside the
television screen, the real world. For example “just as sitcoms were declared dying, if not dead, a
conventional family sitcom burst onto the scene to become the most highly rated in history. The Cosby
Show revitalized the genre by taking a traditional approach with one noticeable change: this family is
Black” (Dalton and Linder, 320).

In Enlightened Racism: The Cosby Show, Audiences, and the Myth of the American Dream, Sut
Jhally and Justin Lewis preface their study of arguably the most important, influential, popular, as well as
conflicting, polarizing, debated upon, and scrutinized sitcoms in American television history by reminding
readers that the late 20th century mythology declaring racial harmony, tolerance and colour blindness
was just that: a myth. While a seductive and convenient (for some) myth, the authors contend that as a
result of an inability to think clearly about class, thinking clearly about race is impossible, for the two are
inextricably linked in America.

In contextualizing what they consider the show’s central contradiction, Jhally and Lewis state:

“The United States is a country that is still emerging from a deeply racist history, a society in
which many white people have treated (and continue to treat) black people with contempt,
suspicion, and a profoundly ignorant sense of superiority. Yet the most popular U.S. TV show,
among black and white people alike, is not only about a black family but a family portrayed
without any of the demeaning stereotypical images of black people common in mainstream
popular culture. Commentators have been provoked to try to resolve this apparent paradox
and, in so doing, to ask themselves about the show’s social significance” (Jhally and Lewis,
2).

The pair contextualize the contradiction above and note that profoundly successful popular culture tends
to spark a backlash, its popularity inevitably questioned in terms of its quality and originality and its fans
questioned in terms of their critical and/or intellectual rigour despite all of these concerns being deeply
subjective and personal ones; after all, you do not necessarily consume and enjoy the same popular
culture as all those you know, nor do you have to, obviously.

As such, Jhally and Lewis note that as The Cosby Show’s popularity rapidly grew, critics began “to
accuse the show of presenting a misleadingly cozy picture, a sugar candy world unfettered by racism,
crime, and economic deprivation. Some have argued that the Huxtables’ charmed life is so alien to the
experience of most Black people that they are no longer 'Black' at all but, as Henry Louis Gates (1989:
40) puts it, 'in most respects, just like white people'” (Jhally and Lewis, 3). In reflecting Gates’ criticism,
but also opening up the show to varied spectator interpretations, a primary motive of The Cosby
Show was to “recode blackness” in effort to challenge the persistent, normalized and recurring
stereotypes all rooted in the common premise of Black social and economic marginalization.

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Example

For example, the family-focused Black sitcoms of the 1960s and 1970s, such as Sanford and
Son, Good Times, and The Jeffersons typically represented the Black family as an
economically struggling family, a relatable struggle to many viewers and families, but in its
persistence, a representation that was prone to taking on a universalizing meaning. That is,
if this representation is the only representation, then a risk exists in which a singular, popular
cultural representation of Blackness potentially becomes the only social meaning of Blackness
considered by those viewers who otherwise have little real-world interaction or understanding of
the world outside their own.

For example, it is argued in “The Hidden Truths in Black Sitcoms” that the everyday lives of these three
families (on Sanford and Son, Good Times, and The Jeffersons) “were largely distracted by their own
poverty and disenfranchisement, thereby making their Blackness inaccessible, and presenting Black
circumstances as those to be pitied” (Coleman and McIllwain, 128). In the case of family patriarch
George Jefferson of The Jeffersons, “Black was represented as sassy and rude, barely tolerable, and
hardly useful” (128), and thus The Cosby Show, despite its limitations and restrictive representations, is
nevertheless also recognized as seeking to challenge and alter these negative representations and
stereotypes of Blackness into more positive ones.

Jhally and Lewis, however, note that while this effort at “recoding Blackness” may be a positive one, they
also note that Gates’ concern “is not simply about whether The Cosby Show is ‘realistic’; he is also
concerned about the show’s effect on its enormous viewing audience. The crux of his case is that these
‘positive images’ can actually be counterproductive because they reinforce the myth of the American
dream, a just world where anyone can make it and racial barriers no longer exist” (Jhally and Lewis, 3).

For Gates then, The Cosby Show is most damaging in its foregrounding mythology rather than spurring
on critical thinking. That is, Gates' emphasis is not solely on the Black viewer, that viewer is acutely
aware of the show’s limitations, but rather on the non-Black viewer who may interpret the show, and the
Huxtable family’s success, as it would any other family’s similar success. For Gates, “as long as blacks
were represented in demeaning or peripheral roles, it was possible to believe that American racism was,
as it were, indiscriminate. The social vision of ‘Cosby,’ however, reflecting the miniscule integration of
blacks into the upper middle class, reassuringly throws the blame for black poverty back onto the
impoverished” (Gates, 1989, 40).

Herman Gray supports Gates in his perspective, and adds that while The Cosby Show may have
“constructed and enabled new ways of representing African Americans’ lives… [but] within black cultural
politics of difference… [it confined] black diversity [to] the limited sphere of domesticity and upper-
middle-class affluence.” (Gray, 49).

The Sitcom as Potential Site of Critical Analysis

As this module has explored to this point, television sitcoms have long been subjected to clear, decisive
and compelling criticisms; however, the sitcom is also explored here as a genre that can include and
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communicate to viewers both legitimate and critical commentary, as well as having the capacity to also
neatly penetrate hegemonic structures and subsequently offer from the inside of Hollywood out to
mainstream viewers a cogent deconstruction of the very dominant culture of which it is also a part.

For example, posing the ostensibly-titled “white” and “Black” sitcoms of the 1990s next to each other
offers opportunities to examine how whiteness and Blackness were constructed through them. As
Herman Gray states, “television is a system of production and representation through which [racialized]
meanings…are produced” (Gray, 1995, xvi). For Gray then, the characters on television influence the
ways in which issues of race and racial identities are understood, consumed and normalized. For
example, many areas of Black popular culture are recognized as representing its non-Black consumers’
first foray into non-mainstream (white dominant) popular culture – the white suburban teenager of the
1990s discovering rap music, for example.

In Racist Ideologies and the Media, Stuart Hall instructs that sitcoms provide a neatly obscured
exercise in allowing viewers to consume racialized meanings, but while under the guise of comedy. For
example, whereas news media addresses “real life” issues, sitcoms are purportedly light viewing fare,
couched in humour, not seriousness, and resultantly then for Hall, sitcoms are able to produce a
viewer’s participation in these discussions on race in ways that may not seem obvious in that moment
(Hall, 2000, 278).

Much like many other genres, the Black sitcom is a tradition rich in history, including 1970s mainstream
hits Good Times and Diff’rent Strokes, What’s Happening! and Webster in the 1980s, and of
course, the premiere of The Cosby Show in 1984, which is arguably the most successful and influential
Black sitcom, if, importantly, you were to poll a largely non-Black audience. That is, while The Cosby
Show proved a breakthrough hit that fundamentally altered the landscape of mainstream sitcoms into
the 1990s, its reception is not universal. More specifically, The Cosby Show’s mainstream success and
appeal does not mean that it was consumed in a universal manner by all viewers, as while the show’s
unprecedented success and accessibility positioned the show as many non-Black viewers’ first
consistent foray into Black popular culture, its reception by Black viewers and Black scholars varies
greatly, and in particular, in terms of the show’s construction and representation of not only Black life and
culture, but what many saw as the show’s whitewashing away from real-world social issues so as to not
create discomfort for non-Black viewers or so as to appear too political.

Seinfeld and Friends: The Unbearable Whiteness

of Being
The prioritizing of white audiences addressed immediately above is an understandably contentious issue
that Black popular culture ostensibly began to negotiate formally as it gained and continued to gain
popularity outside the Black community – that is, popularity with mainstream non-Black consumers –
beginning in the 1980s; but this surging popularity was especially evident into the first half of the 1990s,
a point you will recall examining in Module 3.

As Stuart Hall maintains, Black popular culture is a site of contestation, a contradictory space bound up
in characteristics such as power, access and privilege, and as such resistant to typical binary oppositions
such as high and low culture, resistance and incorporation, and authentic and inauthentic. Instead, Hall
claims that “there are always positions to be won in popular culture” (Hall, 1993, 108). Further, Hall
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articulates the roles of power, ideology and hegemony within Black popular culture and contends that as
result of its relationship to dominant industries, Black popular culture is unable to be pure or truly
authentic. Instead, he argues that it is best described as “adaptations – molded to the mixed,
contradictory, hybrid spaces of popular culture” (Hall, 1993, 108).

Pause and Reflect

In summation of this line of thought, Hall reminds readers that “popular culture, commodified and
stereotyped as it often is, is not at all, as we sometimes think of it, the arena where we find out
who we really are, the truth of our experience. It is an arena that is profoundly mythic” (Hall,
1993, 113).

Whiteness
Additionally, in Shaded Lives, Beretta Smith-Shomade contends that “whiteness, television, and
representation connect intimately. Whiteness frames television, thus impacting representation” (Smith-
Shomade, 2002, 46). Moreover, “the term whiteness itself takes shape and form through overlapping
and sometimes contentious definitions of its presence and normality” (Smith-Shomade, 2002, 46). While
Ruth Frankenberg additionally insists that “the term ‘whiteness’ signals the production and reproduction
of dominance rather than subordination, normativity rather than marginality, and privilege rather than
disadvantage” (Smith-Shomade, 2002, 102).

Moreover, “whiteness reigns as a controlling, dominating, patriarchal, standard-bearing ideology that

regulates visual production, influences viewer consumption, and exists without notice or name. In its
invisibility whiteness, along with blackness, supplies an overarching context and meaning to television
representation-especially comedy” (Smith-Shomade, 2002, 46).

In other words, whiteness is ideological, it is made up of the accumulation of various social elements and
policies that together form a broad and wide ranging meaning system producing “common sense
norms.” For example, whiteness is both bodily and socially articulated; that is categories of race are
dependent on the assignment of meaning to specific bodies through the physical identifying of race or
“colour.” Race itself exists only in our capacity to identify and categorize someone racially. More directly,
the social world is littered with racial descriptive devices that may function simply as “neutral descriptive
tools,” yet simultaneously ensure the maintenance of racial categories, as well as, and arguably most
importantly, the socialized meanings attached to them. For example, casual language use may include
such turns of phrase as “you know Emil, my Asian friend” or “Tori, the white girl, she is working with us
on the project now” or “my friend Kareem, the Black guy from down the hall, he helped me bring up my
new couch.” While on the surface, each of these may be socially interpreted as an economy of
language, the physical recognition of race is potentially someone’s first level of recognition of another.

At the same time, and again, as you recall from Module 3, racial categories operate not only as a set of
bodily distinctions, but also within a larger system of privileges and power. For example, race operates
socially as a form of power – or lack of power – that is defined, deployed, performed and maintained
through a host of structural and policy practices.
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While both Seinfeld and Friends are typically referenced as canonical 1990s mainstream sitcoms, they
are also just as quickly referenced as typical of a lack, namely a lack of a world outside its own as both
shows while set in New York City, a wildly diverse city, are mostly bereft of any Black characters, save
for those temporarily occupying a role within a narrative path. For example, in an episode of Seinfeld,
central character George finds himself under charges of racism after remarking to his boss, Mr. Morgan,
that he bears a striking resemblance to a legendary boxer, Sugar Ray Leonard. This sets off a series of
events in which George desperately tries to demonstrate to his boss that he is not racist.

Race and Racial Capitalism

In the Harvard Law Review, Wendy Leong structures George’s conflict as a characteristic of racial
capitalism. For Leong, George’s conflict with Mr. Morgan provides an opportunity for understanding how
race is valued and the way racial value can be harnessed and exchanged, and a “useful lens for
understanding the value assigned to non-whiteness is that of capital” (Leong, 2013, 2173). Leong further
states that relating race and capital reveals how “conceptions of social capital further illustrate the
reasons that non-whiteness has value to white people and predominantly white institutions” (Leong,
2013, 2173).

For George, rehabilitating his relationship with his boss is dependent on his capacity to prove he is not
racist. As George demonstrates, a white person being labeled as a racist is disastrous, “the only true
equivalent to a racial epithet for white people” (Leong, 2013, 2180), and he concludes in a conversation
about the conflict with his best friend, Jerry, that it would be helpful “if he could see me with some of my
black friends” (Seinfeld, “The Diplomat’s Club,” 1995). After Jerry points out that he doesn’t “really have
any black friends,” George resorts to hiring his pest exterminator to pose as his friend in the presence of
Mr. Morgan.

For Leong, George’s actions reveal a central social mechanism within both the social and the popular
cultural worlds. In referencing former President George W. Bush, Leong explains that after Kanye West
(in)famously declared that “George Bush doesn’t care about black people” in response to what West
considered an underwhelming response to Hurricane Katrina victims in predominantly Black
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communities in 2005, Bush engaged in acts of racial capitalism in efforts to discredit West’s claim. For
example, Leong notes that Bush began referencing friendships, harmonious business relationships and
political partnerships with various prominent Black figures “as a strategic attempt to leverage his status
to rebut allegations of racism” (Leong, 2013, 81).

This act of placing Black bodies within a narrative whose motive is actually to benefit Bush also tasks
those bodies with negotiating the meaning and value attached to them, a racial capitalism to Bush’s
benefit but on the shoulders of those individuals leveraged. That is then, in capitalizing on the diversity of
those with whom he has personal relationships, Bush’s social status is enhanced while also generating a
presumed “cross cultural credibility” in the process (Leong, 2013, 2181).

What Leong has provided for you is a framework through which to understand how representations of
race, as well as the meanings, value, expectations and labour, do not communicate to everyone in a
universal or singular manner, as Hall has explained. More specifically, Leong’s use of the fictional
(George) and the non-fictional (President Bush) is instructive in demonstrating to you how each of those
dominant white bodies attempt to construct an identity beneficial to them, but saddle Black bodies with
the task of aiding them, and entering those bodies into the racial capitalism Leong explains in the
process.

The Golden Age: Black sitcoms of the 1990s

The many Black sitcoms of the 1990s constituted television with the potential to be forms and forums of
resistance, agency and resilience. Their generational proximity to the sitcoms of the 1970s and ’80s that
also explored Blackness in America, as well the rapidly developing role of rap music within popular
culture, neatly positioned the Black sitcom of the 1990s as retrospectively helping to “break it all open” in
terms of race, Blackness, representation and popular culture.

To be sure, this is not to claim that these sitcoms were revolutionary per se, but it is to say these shows
did establish a legacy in which many have come to be examined in terms of their role in helping situate
and substantiate Black voices in contemporary popular culture. For example, in Black Sitcoms: A
Black Perspective, Miriam Chitiga contends that “although black family members in black sitcoms differ
widely in the ways that they interact with each other, depending on the environmental circumstances
influencing them at any given time, their social experiences are generally shaped in significantly similar
ways, by their groups status in the power hierarchy in the U.S” (Chitiga, 48).

For Chitiga then, Black families are varied, dynamic and complex multifaceted units that resist a
generalizing classification as a singular, essentialized familial group, yet given these families' shared
experience(s) as a minority racial category, Black families are nevertheless bound to present many
similarities (Chitiga, 49).

In addressing additional social issues such as socioeconomics, gender, employment and politics, Black
sitcoms take on a pedagogical tone in their capacity to address everyday social injustices in ways that
other sitcoms are unable. In particular, the early to mid 1990s was a racially charged time, with
numerous high-profile racially charged events stoking tension throughout America, in particular, in its
major cities such as New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. These events included the beating of Rodney
King in March 1991 and the subsequent acquittal of the officers involved. Additionally, the incredibly

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high-profile soap opera-esque O.J. Simpson murder trial, was couched in various issues, hyperbole and
stereotypes surrounding race, violence, privilege and masculinity.

As Herman Gray explains, television history is primarily rooted in drawing a mass audience, and as a
result, it was of little benefit for networks to produce programs that were ostensibly drawn along racial
lines, for example, a show appealing only to Black viewers. That said, Gray continues and explains that
shows with a Black-dominant cast were tasked with not only generating high viewership but were also
compelled to have a significant crossover appeal, drawing viewers that were not solely Black viewers.
Gray summarizes the issue in revealing that networks sought a work-around of sorts in which the Black
characters that did make it onto the screen were also those “deemed safe for white consumption” (Gray,
1995, 77–9).

A central characteristic of the narrative structure of the sitcom is providing a simple and reassuring
problem and then finding a solution to that problem quickly and with little real lingering issues or lasting
effects. That is, typically, the sitcom is a self-contained episode in which the story begins and ends within
its 30-minute time slot. As such, however, in what is considered a basic or simplistic genre, the sitcom is
most often distanced from “real world” problems and this gap between fiction and non-fiction, alongside
the maintaining of dominant ideologies, also sees the sitcom as being prone to causing discomfort or
frustration on behalf of some viewers.

As Darrell Hamamoto states, “the study of the television situation comedy is an exercise in examining
the relationship of popular art to its historically specific setting” (Hamamoto, 1991, 15). For example, and
illustrative of a “historically specific setting,” is what has been examined as a sort of “only the strongest
shall survive” opposition in which Friends and Living Single were ostensibly pitted against each other
on opposing networks – NBC and Fox – and were also produced by the same larger company, Warner
Bros.

In a concise and salient essay entitled, “In (A Lot Less) Living Color: What Happened to All the Black TV
Shows?,” Ruby Leftwich draws an interesting and critically accessible parallel between the
aforementioned Friends and Living Single, a show with a nearly interchangeable premise as Friends,
but debuting a year earlier. As Leftwich explains, the two sitcoms were remarkably similar in their focus
on a group of six twenty somethings making their way through New York City amidst the ensuing drama
and comedy of life, love, work and adulthood.

Leftwich notes, that while unsubstantiated, “Living Single’s executive producer Yvette Lee Bowser and
stars of the show have been saying since the ’90s that ​Friends ​was made in an attempt to undermine ​
Living Single​and make the premise of the show more palatable to white audiences” (Leftwich, 2021).
Pitting the two shows against each other permits a critical examination centred on the possibility that
Friends and Living Single, while ostensibly independent of each other, also overlap in significant ways
that indicate they interact with each other and thus also contribute to the other’s meaning, and their
meaning-making process.

For example, Leftwich contends “that Warner Bros. lack of promotion for Bowser’s show once
Friends hit the air, as well as their decision to move ​Living Single’s​time slot to the same time as ​
Friends​, leading to little chance for the Black sitcom to thrive. ​Living Single’s​story is nothing new; in
many industries, especially entertainment, Black artists and content are often unfairly phased out in
favour of what's popular for white audiences” (Leftwich, 2021).

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The cast of Friends.

Source: Friends on IMDB

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Safe Blackness
In the Harvard Law Review, Wendy Leong introduces racial capitalism, a concept examining race as it
can be used or mobilized as a commodity resulting in a particular perceived social achievement for the
dominant racialized body within the equation. More specifically, for Leong, “problems with racial
capitalism arise when white individuals and predominantly white institutions seek and achieve racial
diversity without examining their motives and practices” (Leong, 2013, 2155). Additionally, and in
examining dominant cultural institutions – mainstream television networks, for example – Leong argues
that representations of diversity are prone to “result in awareness of non-whiteness only in its thinnest
formThe
— ascast of Living
a bare Single
marker of difference
. and a signal of presence. This superficial view of diversity
consequently leads white individuals and predominantly white institutions to treat non-whiteness as a
prized commodity rather than as a cherished and personal manifestation of identity” (Leong, 2013,
Source: LIving Single on IMDB
2155).

In Watching Race, Herman Gray maintains that while The Cosby Show’s unprecedented success was
not due solely to its safe and unchallenging representation of Black success in mainstream America in
the late 1980s and early 1990s, it success was in part resultant of this same safe and unchallenging
representation.

Central to Gray’s critique of The Cosby Show is what he sees as the show’s assimilationist approach to
race and Blackness. For example, downplaying Blackness as a defining characteristic of a Huxtable
family member’s identity, and instead emphasizing more universalist personal characteristics such as
hard work, respect, patience and perseverance. While each of these are indeed compelling and
important personal characteristics, Gray argues that the show represents a character’s success or
failure as attributable solely to that character’s positive attributes or personal shortcomings (Gray, 21).

For Gray, among others, the troubling element here is not positioning the success and/or failure on the
shoulders of the character, but it’s the show’s downplaying to the point of ignoring entirely the various

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structural and institutional challenges that Black people negotiated in “real life” everyday living while
working towards arriving at a point at which success or failure in an accomplishment is experienced.

While Gray’s consternation towards The Cosby Show is articulated in clear and convincing terms, the
show is also lauded in many respects. For example, while it is argued that the show ultimately does “let
racism off the hook” (Downing, 1988, 61), it is also a pronounced step forward in terms of Black
representation in mainstream popular culture. Additionally, it is also argued that there is, despite the
previously articulated shortcomings, also “an abundance of black culture presented in the series,
expressed without fanfare, but with constant dignity” (Downing, 1988, 61). For example, “the show
celebrates black artists, from Ellis Wilson to Stevie Wonder, and political figures like Martin Luther King,
Jr., and events like the Civil Rights march on Washington have been interwoven, albeit ever so gently,
into the story line” (Jhally and Lewis, 4).

Lastly, Jhally and Lewis provide another example of what they see as a sort of “quiet” acknowledging
and referencing to Black culture and history and explain that “the naming of the Huxtables’ first
grandchildren is a typical example of The Cosby Show's quiet style. Their eldest daughter, Sondra,
decides to call her twins Nelson and Winnie. The episode that deals with this decision highlights the
issue of naming but makes no comment on the chosen names’ overt political connotations. The
reference to the Mandelas is made quietly and unobtrusively, relying upon the audience’s ability to catch
the political ramifications of the statement” (Jhally and Lewis, 4). The reference here is to Nelson
Mandela and his wife, Winnie. Mandela, the former President of South Africa and anti-apartheid
revolutionary and activist had, in advance of his winning the Presidency in 1994, also spent over 25
years as a political prisoner.

Black Popular Culture and Gender

In his incisive examination of Boyz N The Hood, and in drawing a further connection to your work on
the film in Module 3, Eric Michael Dyson examines the film as both maintaining and revising what he
sees as recurring representations of racialized gender dynamics in popular cinema. In setting up his
analysis, Dyson locates the institutional and structural racism and its policies at the centre of Black
communities in America and states, “the conditions of extreme social neglect that besiege urban black
communities – in every realm from health care to education to poverty and joblessness – make the black
male's passage into adulthood treacherous at best” (Dyson, 124).

Central to Dyson’s examination of the film is his scrutinizing of director John Singleton’s
characterizations of men and women, particularly as they pertain to the well-being and life chances of
young Black men growing-up in communities blighted by the effects of the institutional and structural
racism addressed above in terms of masculinity, violence and the criminal justice system. As such, the
film’s representation of the family, and the domestic space, is a complicated one; it is not driven by
individuals and individual families, but rather by social circumstances within the “real world” outside the
film and the transferring of that non-fiction reality into the film’s fictional reality.

As Dyson explains, and as you will recall from Module 4, the film is centred on two families: Tre, his
mother, Reva, and Furious, his father, with whom he lives. Second is Doughboy, his brother Ricky and
their mother, Brenda, a single mother struggling to see two sons through to adulthood despite an
environment that takes many young men like them far too early.

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It’s evident that Ricky is the favoured son, a studious young man and star football player on his way to
university on a football scholarship. Doughboy, however, has been socialized into a cycle of Los Angeles
gang life, a life that proves ominous. For Dyson, while Singleton’s vision of women and parenting is
articulated skillfully, carefully avoiding many of the degrading and abject stereotypes applied to single
Black mothers in popular culture, it is still a vision that potentially undervalues mothers such as Brenda.

For example, Dyson states that “in Singleton's cinematic worldview both Ricky and Doughboy seem
doomed to violent deaths because – unlike Tre – they have no male role models to guide them” (Dyson,
126 ), in a sense proving true as Ricky is murdered while walking with Tre, and the film’s conclusion
includes a note indicating that Doughboy will die soon after the viewers leave the film -- the story, of
course, continuing on, only without the viewers looking in.

For Dyson, this premise “embodies one of the film’s central tensions – and one of its central limitations.
For even as he assigns black men a pivotal role of responsibility for the fate of black boys, Singleton also
gives rather uncritical ‘precedence’ to the impact of black men, even in their absence, over the efforts of
present and loyal black women who more often prove to be at the head of strong black families” (Dyson,
126).

Women in 1990s Black Sitcoms

Emerging in 1990, two years before The Cosby Show concluded its long-term run of success, The
Fresh Prince of Bel-Air had by 1992 become the de-facto official successor to The Cosby Show, only
rather than a Brooklyn brownstone, the Banks family resided in a Bel-Air mansion in Los Angeles.

In returning you to her Shaded Lives, Beretta Smith-Shomade examines what she describes as “the
binary and contradictory cultural notions of Black women as economically potent consumers against
their positioning as ‘welfare queens’” (Smith-Shomade, 2002, 27). More specifically, she explains that
television sitcoms, alongside its significant economic potency by way of ratings, advertising and living on
in syndication, “have always coexisted with problematic notions of race, sex, and the American ideal.” A
concise, illustrative and informative claim, Smith-Shamode introduces you to a central and critical area of
analysis: representations of Black women in the sitcoms of the 1990s, a decade in which these sitcoms
exploded onto television screens.

In reference to the oft-mentioned and canonical sitcom, The Cosby Show, Shamade explains the
show’s Claire Huxtable as representational of the Black women who “emerged in 1980s television
comedy as upper and middle class. They embodied the Black bourgeoisie. Women play material-driven
individualists who possess the education, ability, and means to achieve goals, all through their own
efforts” (Smith-Shomade, 2002, 37).

“Theorizing television through a feminized frame of reference became popular in the 1980s largely
because of the role television played in the suburban household of the 1950s and 1960s. As we know,
home occupies a special, desired, and safe place in the public imagination-like its dominant element,
mother” (Smith-Shomade, 2002, 41).

Male televisual positioning prefigured women’s representations. More specifically, either through
vehicles created for Black male stars – for example, The Cosby Show (1984–1992), Fresh Prince of

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Bel-Air (1990–1996), Martin (1992–1997), and Hangin' with Mr. Cooper (1992–1997), among many
others (Smith-Shomade, 2002, 42).

Smith-Shomade contends that “very few Black women hold lead roles in television comedy or in all of
television, and women in general serve primarily as supporting characters. They wear roles – mothers,
wives, harlots. Their biological sex confines and defines their activities, their thoughts, their movement,
their world” (28). The argument here is not that Claire Huxtable or Vivian Banks – or their daughters, for
example – do not have primary, fully conceived of roles, but rather that their roles – on the show and in
the home – remain ultimately subordinate to the defining patriarch: Cliff Huxtable or Philip Banks.

Video

Watch Elvin’s outdated ideas about men and women’s roles [4:21], a video montage from The
Cosby Show that highlights complications in gender and dominant masculinity.

In this short montage, gender roles are addressed and played around with: Claire and Cliff both set Elvin
and the other guy straight in contextualizing how the two see marriage as a partnership not as an
agreement with set roles and rules. At the same time, while Claire is centred, Cliff remains the focus, the
camera continually panning over to him as he feigns exasperation or exhaustion, eliciting humour from
the audience, while also ultimately taking a serious issue, the role of gender, in particular, women, in the
home, and turning it into comedy.

This is a safe approach; it doesn’t confront the viewer so much as entertain and humour the viewer, but
as the introduction to this module explains, the sitcom is understood as maintaining dominant and
existent social ideologies, and thus when a sitcom steps outside that role, even momentarily, and in
order to transmit genuine social commentary, its place within a hegemonic system is privileged and its
commentary has the hardened edge rounded off, made more palatable and unaggressive to the viewer
in shifting quickly back into humour as the scene concludes.

Video

Watch Uncle Phil gets Will and Carlton out of jail [1:31], a scene from The Fresh Prince of Bel-
Air where Philip saves the day (eye roll).

Here Vivian is afforded the first opportunity in exonerating her son, Carlton, and nephew, Will; however,
she also quickly shifts into a stock characterization, as the “out of control” Black woman, who, in
removing her earrings, sees her language shift into a so-called “aggressive” style and becomes
threatening, in a way. She is quickly obscured into the background of the scene as Philip, physically
imposing, with booming voice and stern tone, takes over and, in effect, rights the wrong.

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Black Activism in 1990s Popular Culture

While The Cosby Show and The Fresh Prince may not be categorized formally as activist, the less
popular, but certainly impactful, Cosby Show spin-off A Different World has been critically lauded as
being “ahead of its time,” so to speak, in particular in addressing various social issues that conventional
mainstream sitcoms steered clear of. For example, “not only did A Different World show historically
black fraternities and sororities at work on Hillman’s campus, it also dared to talk about date rape, skin
tone, class struggle, the Persian Gulf War, domestic violence, and the L.A. riots. It was one of the first
television shows—black or otherwise—to address HIV and AIDS” (Julian Lewis and Alyson Lewis,
November, 2020).

As the essay “Two Different Worlds: Television as a Producer’s Medium” explains, “although discourses
regarding 1980s representations of Blackness on television heavily focus on The Cosby Show, its NBC
spin-off series, A Different World, depicting student life at a historically Black college, was equally
groundbreaking and deserving of critical attention” (Coleman and Cavalcante, 2013, 33). As Coleman
and Cavalcante explain, “one of the most compelling aspects of A Different World is how audiences
were presented with two distinctly disparate versions of the series, the first under the direction of Anne
Beatts, a white woman, and the second under the guidance of Debbie Allen, a Black woman. Each
woman had her own distinct vision for and approach to the show informed by subjective tastes, personal
history, cultural literacy, and experience in the entertainment industry” (Coleman and Cavalcante, 2013,
33).

Under the direction of Beatts the show underperformed and was underwhelming in terms of viewer
engagement. More specifically, “although the setting of A Different World was a college, and a
predominately Black one at that, students were rarely seen in the classroom. Education was an absent
topic of discussion, and the historically Black college setting was incidental to the overall plot” (Coleman
and Cavalcante, 2013, 35). After replacing Beatts, “and operating from within Blackness, Allen’s show
was worlds apart from Beatts’ as she gave the series a much-needed insider perspective on Black
college life that spoke intimately to both Black and non-Black audiences” (Coleman and Cavalcante,
2013, 37).

Key to this statement is the italicizing of within, emphasizing the importance of a voice from inside, so
to speak. Allen’s own experience of HBCU was paramount in shifting the tone and perspective of the
show to more accurately and authentically represent the college experience it purported to present to
viewers. Reworking the tone and direction of A Different World was not only a creative endeavour, it
was also a socio-political action.

For example, Coleman and Cavalcante ask how Allen was “able to create new counter narratives that
focused on and cast Blackness as sociopolitically provocative and relevant given the historically poor
treatments of African Americans in media, the confines of the situation comedy genre, and the strictures
of commercial network television?” (Coleman and Cavalcante, 2013, 37). More specifically, and again in
recalling Hall, Allen’s new direction with a focus on Blackness reflects a negotiation between network
(NBC) and producer of show’s “voice.” That is, under Allen, A Different World was encoded with new
representations and meaning systems and each in term offer opportunities for viewers to decode and
engage with those representations and meanings.

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Social Issues and A Different World

As is introduced above, A Different World is recognized as having presented and negotiated various
social issues and concerns at a time in which the sitcom, and mainstream television itself in many
respects, typically avoided potential controversies, and under Allen, the show broadened its viewpoints
and “became a complex and dynamic show reflecting a diverse set of characters and a broad range of
often competing viewpoints concerning pressing social issues and struggles” (Coleman and Cavalcante,
2013, 39).

As you should recall from earlier modules, a popular cultural text, here a sitcom, is not closed. That is,
what is consumed by the viewer is open to interpretation, so long as that interpretation is able to be
defended through evidence and argumentation. For example, Module 2 introduced you to polysemy, a
concept contending that words, word use and turns of phrase are open to multiple meanings.

As Stuart Hall and John Fiske have both explained, popular cultural texts are often polysemic, and A
Different World reconfirms that. For example, “as a polysemic text, A Different World invited its
audience members to decode and appreciate its narrative and imagery on multiple levels. The program
was able to strike a difficult yet successful balance between displaying material encoded primarily for
African Americans and content identifiable and palatable to a larger audience” (Coleman and
Cavalcante, 2013, 40).

This is a key element contributing to the show’s ultimate success. More specifically, this quote explains
the show as active, alive and communicative; visual elements – a hat, t-shirt, hair style or manner in
which an article of clothing was worn – may have been encoded to address its Black viewers; however,
non-Black viewers were able to recognize meaning within any given visual element, made note of it, and
become aware of its appearances thereafter, potentially using that visual element as an avenue to
understanding the role and meaning of something as seemingly inconsequential as a t-shirt, yet only to
realize after that the t-shirt was in fact very meaningful.

On other occasions, however, specific “in-jokes," references to history or icons were “left undefined for
the unschooled…the series resisted the impulse to be the ‘Blackness tour guide’” and ultimately, the
show’s “successful representations of Blackness are intimately connected to the ability to tap into a
Black structure of feeling. Any cultural production must originate from the willingness and courage to
engage with the complexity of Black life and subjectivity” (Coleman and Cavalcante, 2013, 46).

In summary then, “A Different World was about more than offering up a unique experience for viewers,
it was about inviting her audience to understand and experience Blackness. She exploited the
knowledge function of television by presenting forms of cultural knowledge and political struggle in new
ways, accessible to both Black and non-Black audiences. Allen’s approach to the series was marked by
a Reithian ‘edutainment’ quality, presenting situational comedy infused with relevant social topicality and
political commentary” (Coleman and Cavalcante, 2013, 39).

Activity

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Summary
This module has examined Black popular culture in the 1980s and 1990s specifically, and has done so in
order to investigate the conventions and politics of popular culture itself. That is, your examinations of
Seinfeld, Friends, The Cosby Show and A Different World illustrate the manner in which
representations of race have been negotiated in popular culture, but also encourage the use of Stuart
Hall’s strategies on spectatorship in examining those representations. Additionally, this module has also
emphasized the critical importance of allowing Black voices to represent Blackness in popular culture;
for example, in A Different World. Specifically, A Different World’s difficult, yet vital, addressing of
sexual assault in a manner that rejects “victim blaming” illustrates the critical success of Debbie Allen’s
tenure with the show, and again centres the value of Hall’s spectatorship strategies in encouraging
viewers' critical engagement with the show, but also the issue of sexual assault itself.

Assignments
Module 4 entry due by Friday at 11:59 p.m.

References
Coleman, R. & Cavalcante, A. (2013). 2. Two different worlds: Television as a producer’s medium.
In B. Smith-Shomade (Ed.), Watching While Black (pp. 33–48). Rutgers University Press.
Coleman, R. R. & Mcllwain, C. D. (2005). The hidden truths in black sitcoms. In M. M. Dalton & L.
R. Linder (Eds.),The Sitcom Reader: America Viewed and Skewed (pp. 125–138). SUNY
Press.
Dyson, M. E. (1992). Between apocalypse and redemption. Cultural Critique, 21, 121–141.

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Frankenberg, R. (1993). White women, race matters. University of Minnesota Press.

Fuller, J. (2010). Branding Blackness on US cable television. Media, Culture & Society, 32(2),
285–305.
Gray, H. (1995). Watching race: Television and the struggle for “blackness”. University of
Minnesota Press
Hall, S. (1993). What is this "Black" in Black popular culture? Social Justice: A Journal of
Crime, Conflict and World Order, 20(1).
Hamamoto, D. (1991). Nervous laughter: Television situational comedy and liberal
democratic ideology. Praeger.
Jhally, S. & Lewis, J. (1992). Enlightened racism: The Cosby show, audiences and the myth of
the American dream. Routledge.
Leong, N. (2013). Racial capitalism. The Harvard Law Review, 126(8), 2151-2226.

Leftwich, R. In (A Lot Less) Living Color: What Happened to All the Black TV Shows?
Kimble, J. & Lewis, A (2020). The 30 Best Black Sitcoms of All Time.
Smith-Shomade, B (2002). Shaded lives: African-American women and television. Rutgers
University Press.

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