A Country of Strangers by David K. Shipler

Author:David K. Shipler
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2016-04-20T04:00:00+00:00

Kingfish’s famous gift of gab is considerably more facile than his brain. “See, Andy,” he explains, “first, the atom splits into what they call the monocle. And the monocle breaks down into what they call neutrons, potrons, Fig Newtons, and morons.”

Whites were not the only fans of Amos ’n’ Andy; the show had a black audience as well. “We thought the show was marvelous, the best thing on television,” Colin Powell wrote in his memoir, My American Journey. “It was another age, and we did not know that we were not supposed to like Amos ’n’ Andy.” In recent years, certain black scholars have done some revisionist thinking about the show. True, it was full of stereotypes. But it was also a whole black culture, they point out, complete with black judges, black lawyers, black doctors—even a black doll, which Henry Louis Gates Jr., the author who heads Harvard’s African-American studies program, remembers as the first he ever saw as a child. One recent Christmas, Gates pulled out tapes of the program as a nostalgia trip to show his daughters, ages twelve and fourteen. “I found myself laughing so hard at Kingfish’s malapropisms and Andy’s gullibility,” he wrote, “that it took me a while to realize that I was laughing alone.” His children denounced the show as “garbage,” “stupid,” and “fake.”

James Baldwin once observed, “The country’s image of the Negro, which hasn’t very much to do with the Negro, has never failed to reflect, with a frightening accuracy, the state of mind of the country.” And so the black images in that most cautiously commercial of media, television, have been closely attuned to the nation’s attitudes of the time. The society bends and sways and shifts its standards and tastes on matters of race just as on the length of hemlines and the width of ties. The skirts and the ties of the fifties now look as awkward and unattractive as the black characters of the period’s films; that they were all once acceptable now seems unimaginable. Surely the white producers, writers, and viewers—and the black actors—did not consider themselves racists when they created and appreciated Beulah, Buckwheat, Amos, and Kingfish. The shock comes only in retrospect. Infallibly, our eye adjusts to the present.

After the civil rights movement, television passed appropriately through an integrationist phase, with such black characters as Alexander Scott, the bright, multilingual Rhodes scholar played by Bill Cosby in I Spy, beginning in 1965, and, from 1968 to 1971, the character of “Julia,” the slim, light-skinned black nurse who lived and worked in mostly white settings. Significantly, Julia was created by Hal Kanter, the white producer who had done Amos ’n’ Andy. That show had been produced only with an eye toward entertainment, he explained in “Color Adjustment,” a PBS documentary.

“I don’t think that the sponsors or the network, and certainly not the writers, ever considered the questions of race relations, of stereotyping, et cetera,” he said. “That was the farthest from our minds. What we were

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