[Review of] Herman Gray, Watching Race: Television and the Struggle for "Blackness (original) (raw)

Professor Herman Gray offers a fascinating, highly analytical, and well-researched account of race (and gender) mirrored in the prism of televised images. Focusing mostly on the decade of the 1980s, in an almost razzle-dazzle and didactic fashion he explores the deep socio logical and political manifestations of televised racial imagery and its effects on the well-being of American society. Gray's book is a "televisual" combination of To ni Morrison's dis course on race imagery in Playing in the Dark (Harvard, 1992) and Cor nel West's socio-political treatise in Race Matters (Vintage, 1994). His 10 chapters don't always seamlessly flow, as if initially written for differ ent audiences, but each is bridged with an overall rationale brilliantly stated in the Introduction. Framed "largely within the time-span that begins with the election of Ronald Reagan as President (1 980) and end ing with the airing of the last episode of The Cosby Show, which took place during the Los Angeles riots on April 30, 1992," the author inter prets the televised images of race in the aftermath of the Civil Rights Movement, which led up to the Republican backlash against The Great Society. Wa tching Race thankfully includes gay/lesbian concerns. But this needed perspective in ethnic studies falls glaringly short in Chapter 8 regarding A Different World, the author's favorite TV show (along with Fra nk's Place and Roc, with In Living Color his least favorite.) For all its so-called "imaginatively use(d) (of) the dominant conventions of the genre to saturate its televisual world with blackness ... " (p1 03), Gray fails to point out how A Different World overlooked opportunities to address black gay/lesbian issues. Perhaps understandable from the show's creators' viewpoint given the recent demise of Ellen, still, Gray's critical analysis is glaringly omitted. So were controversies about black student-athletes visa -vis the athletic enterprise, which sociologist Harry Edwards has long made a national issue. Gray does address black athlete recruit ment in Fra nk's Place, and black homosexuality in Roc and In Living Color, but won't the milieu of the Historically Black Colleges make inter