Some theorists argue that political and social change is preceded by shifts in popular culture. So it’s not surprising that the debate has heated up over who, or what, in arts and entertainment presaged Barack Obama’s election as president.

Many ideas have ricocheted around academia and the blogosphere — from Oprah Winfrey to Tiger Woods to Will Smith to “The West Wing,” to the many actors who have played black presidents, among them Morgan Freeman and Chris Rock (although not that many people actually saw Mr. Rock’s film “Head of State”).

But one idea seems to be gaining traction, and improbably it has Bill Cosby and Karl Rove in agreement:

“The Cosby Show,” which began on NBC in 1984 and depicted the Huxtables, an upwardly mobile black family — a departure from the dysfunction and bickering that had characterized some previous shows about black families — had succeeded in changing racial attitudes enough to make an Obama candidacy possible.

On election night Mr. Rove, the former Bush strategist, said on Fox News: “We’ve had an African-American first family for many years in different forms. When ‘The Cosby Show’ was on, that was America’s family. It wasn’t a black family. It was America’s family.”

THE COSBY SHOW had to represent race in a way that enabled audience members to feel good enough about themselves, sometimes for different and contradictory reasons, that they reliably returned every week, ready to attend to the ads of the corporations that paid hundreds of thousands of dollars a minute for access.

By the time the show finished its first season on NBC in 1985, it deftly had won admission into millions of segregated European American homes.

Cosby's popularity and skill was surely crucial to its success, but significant too was a critical aspect of his persona-he never raged or despaired.

No doubt for many the show's goodwill carried with it some acceptance for African Americans, a GUESS WHO'S COMING TO DINNER? for the Reagan years. Yet as several critics have noted, the price paid by the makers of TFIE COSBY SHOW for its jumbo audience was clear: silence on racism.

"To have confronted the audience" about racism "would have been commercial suicide," says Justin Lewis, who has studied viewer responses to the program.

An active supporter of progressive politics, Cosby acknowledges that COSSY did not mention racism for fear of alienating white viewers (Graham). "I agree with critics who say it doesn't do enough," he says. "But the people who're viewing it are having a ball with it'.

Yet in what seems both cause and effect of cultural productions such as THE COSBY SHOW, polls show that most U.S. whites "no longer feel blacks are discriminated against in the schools, the job market and the courts"

As co-creator and executive producer of the show, Cosby insisted that it never highlight racial conflict. He says if it had done so even once, every white viewer would have felt "this was set up to make you feel like you're the villain".

The success of THE COSBY SHOW with mass audiences of whites in the United States (and South Africa!) seems to have been dependent upon its refusal to include racism among its representations.

Accordingly, to whatever extent the program constituted a gain in the control at least one African American had over black images on television, it remained bound by the racism its backers feared in its potential audience and by a commercial system governed by such fears.

The "class position of the Huxtable family is likely to convey a positive message about black aspirations" — especially since the level of consumption and occupation represented on the show would easily put the Huxtable family income in the nation's top 1 percent.

Many African American viewers seem to enjoy the show because, like members of any group, they take pleasure in seeing favorable representations of themselves on television.

While the show's compromises hardly please everyone, for large numbers of both blacks and whites, then, COSBY's image of painless racial harmony seems to have utopian appeal.

For many white viewers, however, this "positive message" may fortify racism at least as much as it dilutes it.

As economic conditions worsen for most blacks in the United States even more than for most whites, more prosperous Americans no doubt fmd it comforting to imagine the Huxtables as viable role-models for the poor.

Who wants responsibility for others' suffering? More than a few of our Anglo students and coworkers have told us they consider the show vital to U.S. politics because it provides constructive role models for blacks.

For them, THE COSBY SHOW seems to confirm the belief that racial inequality in the United States remains a function of the inadequate aspirations of its victims.

More surely, the prevalence of the role-model discourse is a measure of THE COSBY SHOW's power as mystification: Cosby and his costar, Phylicia Rashad, are models of success in show business comedy, not, as are their characters, in medicine or law.

Thinking otherwise misses the show's status as representation. The evident popularity of this discourse about the show-that the details of its fiction are evidence about the world-is symptomatic of its success as a realist text, one that ruthlessly disallows the presence of any references or forms that might break audience identification with its idealized world. As Henry Louis Gates Jr. says,

"There is very little connection between the social status of black Americans and the fabricated images of black people that Americans consume each day".

Yet European Americans seem all too willing to take THE COSBY SHOW and its wealthy characters as one sign among many that racism has declined.

A March 1988 NEWSWEEK poll found 80 percent of whites seeing no need for affirmative action policies to redress racial discrimination, and in May 1991 the magazine found only 35 percent believing that Congress should do anything new at all to help blacks.

Perhaps that is why, as Gates says, critics of the show fear that "it suggests that blacks are solely responsible for their social conditions, with no acknowledgment of the severely constricted life opportunities that most black people face."

Referring to the "minuscule integration of blacks into the upper middle class," Gates concludes that at this time "blacks are doing much better on TV than they are in real life".

This is of course true of nearly all groups represented on commercial television. The more affluent the fictional space of the show, the better showroom it makes for the ads.

the program's popularity might have something to do with the perception that its characters "have finally become, in most respects, just like white people".

Lewis's findings indicate that many whites claim to "forget" that the COSBY performers are black when they watch the show. "They're upper middle-class, not black," said one (177).

Lewis found that African-American viewers find whites' denial of the show's ethnicity "faintly ludicrous," in part because they see its marks of black culture vividly.

Significantly, whites who claim "colorblind" viewings tend also not to see any need for affirmative action, which whites who value the show's African American ethnicity tend to support.

Reading formations contain such contradictions as celebration versus denial of difference, are often constituted by them.

THE COSBY SHOW may be a commercial success but its political failure is that it does not confront modern racism, and could even confirm or legitimate it.

It may temper emotional hostility toward African Americans, but only toward those who smile on cue and act properly assimilationist and middle-class.

It reliably does not raise political demands and it does not argue for the persistence of racism.

In this framework, the remark of whites that the show provides good role models for blacks signifies its unwitting complicity with modem racism.

Robert Entman has analyzed a similar trend in local television news programs in Chicago. Superficially, representations of African Americans on the news might seem contradictory:

The increasing presence of black newspeople and bureaucrats clashes with the unfavorable figuring of black criminals and of politicians arguing for African American interests.

Yet, as Entman points out, blacks he observed in authoritative roles spoke the language of middle-class whites and "did not talk in angry tones".

While surveys show blacks more than whites tend to see such issues as crime and discrimination as inseparable, black journalists covered the news according to the same frames as their white colleagues who see the issues as discrete.

Contradictions are resolved in the realm of reinforcement and pleasure: Modem racists may feel good about themselves for tolerating blacks who (to keep their jobs must) make no issue of their ethnicity; meanwhile, these racists can despise blacks who, in "high proportion" in television news, appear "angry or demanding".

As racism has changed, so must its critique. Modem racism's denial of its own existence inoculates it against empirical challenge.

Consequently, racist discourses must now be disinterred in contemporary texts and practices that pride themselves on being "colorblind"; analyzing absence becomes more crucial than ever.

Week after week (in syndication, day after day, hour after hour), an African American man appears in tens of millions of homes as an attractive choice for everywoman's obstetrician.

Yet simultaneously absent from view are the preventable ways the United States lets its African American infants die, at double the rate of whites (Scott). For infants who grow into adulthood, the carnage of neglect multiplies.

African American men under 45 are ten times more likely to die of hypertension than those of European descent.

"I don't think either of the races could take it," says Cosby, "if we began to lay it out and tell the truth". More...

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