THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, August 13, 1994 TAG: 9408130252
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Column
SOURCE: Marc Tibbs
LENGTH: Medium: 61 lines
If prime-time television were the only prism through which we view American cultures other than our own, what would we see?
Would blacks be the shuffling, grinning, dancing domestics portrayed in ``Amos and Andy'' or ``The Beulah Show'' of television's early days? Would all whites live in the peaceful, tranquil environments of ``Ozzie and Harriet'' or ``Leave It to Beaver'' - devoid of black neighbors?
In his 90-minute documentary ``Color Adjustment,'' which airs at 9 tonight on WHRO-TV, Channel 15, the late scholar, writer and Emmy award-winning filmmaker Marlon T. Riggs analyzes the power of television to shape perceptions of race.
Through interviews with sociologists, producers and entertainers, Riggs looks at the role television has played throughout its history. Riggs, who died this year, was the youngest tenured professor at the University of California at Berkeley. His 1989 film ``Tongues Untied,'' a semi-autobiographical documentary about black gay men, caused a furor when PBS aired it.
In ``Color Adjustment,'' Riggs shows television in its infancy taking its images of blacks from the golden age of radio. The buffoonery of ``Amos and Andy,'' portrayed by white actors on radio, came to television as the first show to feature an all-black cast. But the show depicted a narrow view of black life.
Conversely, shows like ``Julia,'' starring Diahann Carroll as a nurse and single mother, showed an integrated lifestyle that few Americans knew in the racially turbulent 1960s.
Riggs shows the loving, caring families in the all-white worlds of the Cleavers and the Nelsons, then channel-surfs to a one-room black schoolhouse and ``colored only'' signs in the Jim Crow South.
These images are scored with the music of Nat King Cole, whose television show was widely accepted by white viewers in the early 1960s but canceled after one season because sponsors feared a Southern backlash.
But Riggs also credits television with bolstering the civil rights movement. Images of nonviolent demonstrators being attacked by dogs and assaulted with high-pressure fire hoses left white Americans uncomfortable and created what Riggs calls ``nobility of spirit'' for black Americans.
In the decades that followed, ``Roots'' became the most widespread viewing of black lives by whites in the history of television. ``The Cosby Show'' replaced the so-called ``ghetto sitcoms'' like ``Good Times'' and ``That's My Mama.'' Cosby showed a successful black family but, like ``Julia,'' was criticized for not showing complete black reality.
Riggs makes the television viewer think more seriously about the images derived from prime time. ``Color Adjustment'' is sprinkled with quotes from James Baldwin's book ``The Price of the Ticket,'' which perhaps best sums up Riggs' view of the medium.
``The country's view of the Negro, which hasn't very much to do with the Negro,'' Baldwin said, ``has never failed to reflect with a kind of frightening accuracy the state of mind of the country.'' by CNB