"Lucid and accessible in both argument and style, this book offers perhaps the most theoretically sophisticated
treatment to date of the historical relationship between the civil rights movement and network television, as well
as of the complexities of representations of race in contemporary television. It embraces a wide academic audience,
opening a conversation across disciplines that too often fail to take each other's accomplishments into account."
--Sharon Willis, University of Rochester
"This book is distinguished by a rare combination of critical acumen and historical insight. Torres is characteristically
incisive, presenting an argument that appears both incontrovertibly correct and wholly original."
--Phillip Brian Harper, New York University
Publisher Web Site, December, 2003
This book examines the representation of blackness on television at the height of the southern civil rights
movement and again in the aftermath of the Reagan-Bush years. In the process, it looks carefully at how television's
ideological projects with respect to race have supported or conflicted with the industry's incentive to maximize
profits or consolidate power.
Sasha Torres examines the complex relations between the television industry and the civil rights movement as a
knot of overlapping interests. She argues that television coverage of the civil rights movement during 1955-1965
encouraged viewers to identify with black protestors and against white police, including such infamous villains
as Birmingham's Bull Connor and Selma's Jim Clark. Torres then argues that television of the 1990s encouraged viewers
to identify with police against putatively criminal blacks, even in its dramatizations of police brutality.
Torres's pioneering analysis makes distinctive contributions to its fields. It challenges television scholars to
consider the historical centrality of race to the constitution of the medium's genres, visual conventions, and
industrial structures. And it displaces the analytical focus on stereotypes that has hamstrung assessments of television's
depiction of African Americans, concentrating instead on the ways in which African Americans and their political
collectives have actively shaped that depiction to advance civil rights causes. This book also challenges African
American studies to pay closer and better attention to television's ongoing role in the organization and disorganization
of U.S. racial politics.
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
INTRODUCTION
The Vicissitudes of the Stereotype
Issues and Some Answers
Television and Conservative Racial Projects after the '60s
CHAPTER ONE
"In a crisis we must have a sense of drama": Civil Rights and Televisual Information
The Burden of Liveness
"Pictures are the point of television news"
"We have shut ourselves off from the rest of the world"
"That cycle of violence and publicity"
"The vehemence of a dream"
CHAPTER TWO
The Double Life of "Sit-In"
"Sit-In"'s Industrial Context
"Sit-In" Flashes Back
"Sit-In" as a Movement Text
"Sit-In" and Black Idiom
CHAPTER THREE
King TV
Rodney King Live
Liveness: An Ideology of Television and Race
L.A. Law and Televisual Justice
Doogie Howser, M.D., and Televisual Instruction
Rodney King Dead
CHAPTER FOUR
Giuliani Time: Urban Policing and Brooklyn South
Cops and Cop Shows
Giuliani Time
How to Identify with the Cops
Good Cop, Bad Cop
CHAPTER FIVE
Civil Rights, Done and Undone
"A virtual whitewash in programming"
Malcom X on TV
The Nick Styles Show
Video Surveillance and Counterspectatorship
NOTES
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
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