Branding blackness on US cable television

Abstract

In October 1999, US sketch comedy show Mad TV parodied comedian Chris Rock's song 'No Sex in the Champagne Room' in order to skewer racism in the television industry. 1 In the sketch 'No Blacks on the TV Screen', Chris Rock (Phil LaMarr) advised black writers and actors of the current television season's bleak outlook with the following refrain: 'Now some of the shows this season may offend you, and most of the shows may not apply to you. But no matter what the networks tell you, there are no blacks on the TV screen'. The song took jabs at recent television practices such as black-interest programming blocks ('Why do they put all the "black" shows on the same night? Like black folks are only home on Thursdays!') and the whiteness of primetime shows ('If a network tells you your show needs to be more "diverse", that means they're hiring more white people!'). The sketch ended with another actor reworking R&B singer Gerald Levert's lyrics in 'No Sex', asserting that there 'ain't no blacks on the TV screen, except Chris, HBO, y'all'. To the ad-libbing of 'HBO y'all, HBO y'all', Rock nodded and smiled broadly as the HBO logo filled the screen.As is common in sketch comedy, 'No Blacks' was inspired by current events. In July of that year, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) had begun a protest against NBC, CBS, ABC and Fox, decrying what they called a 'whitewash' of the upcoming television season, in which none of the Big Four's 26 new prime-time programs had a nonwhite lead character (Farhi, 1999). The NAACP campaign underscored what many observers had noted for years, that broadcasters' highly ranked sitcoms, such as NBC 's Seinfeld (1990-8) and Friends (1994, had casts that were not only exclusively white, but seemed to live in urban spaces bereft of people of color. And smaller networks, which had previously relied on black

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Negotiating new racism: ‘It’s not racist or sexist. It’s just the way it is’

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Beyond Branding: The Value of Intersectionality on Streaming TV Channels

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