all the questions of race relations, and of stereotyping. That was the farthest from minds. Again, what we were trying to do was to present an amusing set of characters in as amusing a background as we possibly could, doing amusing things, to entice that audience to come back next week. (Turner, 1994)
Henry Gates expressed in documentary, Color Adjustment,” When we think of this group of people whose historical experience had been transformed by the war (World War II), poised for full integration into the American society, and then we think about, what they were greeted with, as television made its debut. They were greeted with images of fully autonomous, segregated, separate black communities, which was the community in which Amos ‘n’ Andy …show more content…
The network thought, if we could get a Beulah, to run our house, this house would be much better off than it was! But in this idealized dream of the American family, what of Beulah herself? Would she be better off (Riggs, 1992)? A program like The Beulah Show reinforced the notion of an African American woman comfortable working in a domestic environment, comfortable working in a white family’s home with no family, no network of her own. And indifferent to the need for that (Riggs, 1992)! What is ironic about the domestic work, in that time in our country, is while white women could get a job, as a clerk, cashier or many other typical positions for a sizable amount in a week, no matter how limited her education was, that same woman could employ a black domestic to clean her home, cook the food, wash and iron clothes, and nurse the baby for as little as twenty dollars per week. With all that money saved, the household could enjoy the fruits of their labor. The real life situation debunks the accepted truism that only the wealthy white women hired full-time domestic workers. Applying the law of supply and demand, it was easy to pay the black domestic lower income and the middle-class white woman could easily afford domestic help. Images shared on film and television, clearly played with …show more content…
Precisely in this period, the images of black people dominated the news! And it was –they were images of, on the one hand, black men and women being tortured and beaten and abused, and whose rights were being systematically violated. On the other hand, there was a certain mobility of spirit and no one knew what to do with black people in terms of representing them in a TV series. There was so much possible, there was civil rights, and there was so much at the same time, fear and so much violence. Out of this pressure that was brought to bear by the Civil Rights movement on the structures of the South, there was the potential for a new day and everybody knew it…because it was on television (Riggs, 1992)! Those images brought home to America, what was actually going on around the country. And seeing them on television, was much different from reading about it in the newspaper. America saw African Americans as full blooded, total human beings for the first time in our history, in this country, in a mass way (Riggs,
Henry Gates expressed in documentary, Color Adjustment,” When we think of this group of people whose historical experience had been transformed by the war (World War II), poised for full integration into the American society, and then we think about, what they were greeted with, as television made its debut. They were greeted with images of fully autonomous, segregated, separate black communities, which was the community in which Amos ‘n’ Andy …show more content…
The network thought, if we could get a Beulah, to run our house, this house would be much better off than it was! But in this idealized dream of the American family, what of Beulah herself? Would she be better off (Riggs, 1992)? A program like The Beulah Show reinforced the notion of an African American woman comfortable working in a domestic environment, comfortable working in a white family’s home with no family, no network of her own. And indifferent to the need for that (Riggs, 1992)! What is ironic about the domestic work, in that time in our country, is while white women could get a job, as a clerk, cashier or many other typical positions for a sizable amount in a week, no matter how limited her education was, that same woman could employ a black domestic to clean her home, cook the food, wash and iron clothes, and nurse the baby for as little as twenty dollars per week. With all that money saved, the household could enjoy the fruits of their labor. The real life situation debunks the accepted truism that only the wealthy white women hired full-time domestic workers. Applying the law of supply and demand, it was easy to pay the black domestic lower income and the middle-class white woman could easily afford domestic help. Images shared on film and television, clearly played with …show more content…
Precisely in this period, the images of black people dominated the news! And it was –they were images of, on the one hand, black men and women being tortured and beaten and abused, and whose rights were being systematically violated. On the other hand, there was a certain mobility of spirit and no one knew what to do with black people in terms of representing them in a TV series. There was so much possible, there was civil rights, and there was so much at the same time, fear and so much violence. Out of this pressure that was brought to bear by the Civil Rights movement on the structures of the South, there was the potential for a new day and everybody knew it…because it was on television (Riggs, 1992)! Those images brought home to America, what was actually going on around the country. And seeing them on television, was much different from reading about it in the newspaper. America saw African Americans as full blooded, total human beings for the first time in our history, in this country, in a mass way (Riggs,