It Was (Is?) A White, White World

            When I first encountered television, the “people” who populated it were surprisingly diverse (kinda).  Yes, they were stereotypes, but at least characters from different races, ethnicities and classes were present.  Amos and Andy made a brief transition from radio (and demonstrated that blatant stereotypes that had been relatively inoffensive on radio couldn’t survive the visibility of television), and Eddie “Rochester” Anderson was the comic foil to Jack Benny (again, using a time-worn vaudeville stereotype, but at least visible.)  The Cisco Kid chased outlaws in the Old West.  Ricky Ricardo spoke English with a Cuban accent and even, as her on-air pregnancy made apparent, slept with red-haired Lucy.  The Lone Ranger had Tonto to back him up, even if Tonto did speak an invented “Indian” language.  I Remember Mama celebrated an immigrant Norwegian family, and, of course, The Honeymooners honored the work of a bus driver and a sewer maintenance worker.  The characters were exaggerated and unredeemably offensive to modern-day audiences—but they at least gave an impression of an America that was composed of many streams.     

  

            Then it virtually disappeared.  The screen went white.  It matched the rest of my world.

            Seattle in the 1950s was a segregated city, not by law but by bank policy and social practice. Before the war the population had been overwhelmingly Nordic.  While wartime airplane production at Boeing had brought an influx of African-American workers, primarily from the South, bank redlining and restrictive covenants had created the “CD” (Central District); the Lake Washington Ship Canal created a northern boundary as effective as a moat.  The Lake City neighborhood I grew up in remained entirely white—with new homes for white Boeing workers entering the middle class. 

            Radio had been relatively cheap and accessible to all segments of American culture.  But television was expensive, and advertisers wanted to attract those with the money.  So the dramatic and comedic world of television quickly came to look like my community—not the one south of the Ship Canal.  And, symbiotically, my mental universe came to look increasingly like the world of television.

            Starting in the late 1960’s, a Hungarian immigrant named Dr. George Gerbner began formulating a theory of media influence called cultivation.  I think it explains a lot.

            Gerbner started with an observation.  We have historically learned about ourselves through stories.  Who are the good people?  Who are the bad?  How’d we come to be here?  What’s expected of us?  What happens if we make bad decisions?  How, in short, are we supposed to behave as decent, civilized human beings?  Yes, we can observe those around us, and we do—but our personal experience is limited, often extremely limited, and distorted.  Storytellers supplement our experience.  They shape our view of the world, both within and without our village.

            Storytellers captivated us around the campfires and the Homeric halls.  They told the tales of prophets and the exploits of gods.  They wrote the scripts that were acted out on the Elizabethan stages.  And they, in the guise of scholars, wrote our histories.

            Gerbner realized that, in America in the 1960s, the storytellers were on television, and they were promoting the myths and values of the corporate titans who fed and sustained them. 

            The measure of a story’s value was the number of people (or, more precisely, the number of the “right kind” of people) who listened to it, and to maximize that, the storytellers told stories that comforted rather than challenged.  They created a televised world of stability, predictability, and familiarity—a mirror that showed viewers not who and what they are, but rather who and what they thought they are. 

            It was a world of befuddled white men who conversed with palomino horses.  White patriarchs ran households of sons from My Three Sons to Bonanza.  White men tamed the frontiers, caught the criminals and solved the crimes, and lived with sexy witches and genies.

            The problem with this world wasn’t just that it told patriarchal stories; it was that those stories were ubiquitous, across every genre, available at all hours.  In Nazi Germany, Joseph Goebbels had demonstrated, with his “big lie” theory, that even the most preposterous tales could be accepted as truth if they were repeated often enough and allowed to go unchallenged by conflicting stories.  Something of the sort happened with American television.

            Gerbner called the phenomenon “cultivation.”  An individual stereotype here or there, he discovered, was unlikely to change most peoples’ perceptions.  But a relentless barrage of such stereotypes, day after day, could eventually come to be more “real” than reality.  Especially for heavy television viewers, the television world could become the real world, especially the more it reinforced (or “cultivated”) pre-existing attitudes.

            So, for a child growing up in an all-white, middle-class suburb populated by commuting dads and stay-at-home moms, a televised world of white, middle-class commuting dads and stay-at-home moms became the norm, the default.  In the world of television, those who conformed to this norm succeeded; those who did not either failed or, if their racial or ethnic sexual characteristics made it clear that they could never fit in, simply disappeared.

            For over three decades, Gerbner and his research assistants did massive studies of the characters who populated the television world, watching hundreds of hours of entertainment programs and methodically cataloguing the demographics of the casts.  The numbers alone were startling enough, and they remained remarkably stable over the years.  For every woman character, there were three men.  And women didn’t age as well as men, either; as they got older, they became evil—or they disappeared altogether.  Poor people disappeared, too, appearing only about one percent of the time, and then most likely as criminals.  African-Americans appeared in roughly the same proportion as their actual number in the “real” America—but almost always as secondary characters, seldom as leaders or successful professionals.  Asian-Americans and Native Americans were virtually invisible.

            Professor Gerbner died in 2005, and his studies would seem to be out of date.  Our television screens seem to be full, now, of successful people of color and women, even characters who are identifiably gay.  Mad Men has revealed to millions how artificial and stilted that image was.  We even have a black President.  The “default” has surely changed, hasn’t it?  

            It’s a work in progress.  Two years ago, Cheerios produced a commercial featuring an unbelievably cute little girl asking her mom if it were true that Cheerios were good for the heart.  Assured that they were, she then covered her sleeping dad with them.  It was a warm and funny family moment.

            The mom is white.  The dad is black.  The reaction, from some quarters, was vicious.  Little Gracie’s family may be reality, but for many, it still hasn’t displaced 50 years of television “reality.”