In the first two sections of Black Guy Corner, we covered the 2009-2010 prime time drama promotional photos and showed how frequently people of color were put off to the side in them, and we demonstrated our process. In this section of Black Guy Corner, we consider fears of miscegenation and some reactions to the casting for the 2009-2010 season. We also look at some of the 2010-2011 photos and significant changes that occurred this season.

Semiotically, the photos are extremely important to this discussion. The position of the actors in the photos appears be a clear indicator, for the most part, of the actors’ places in the pecking order. As far as we can tell, television casts are more hierarchical than the military, with each performer fully aware who is the “first lead” or the “third female lead.” One might assume that whoever is in front of the photo is the first lead. The first lead makes more money; the top four to six regulars may have contracts that require their appearance in every episode, while others may only be in some episodes. If we were to only look at the photos including Asian American women, Asian men, Latina women, and African American women, it would appear that things have improved from even a decade ago. However, when we pay attention to the mysteriously nearly absent Latino men, and the marginal positioning of the African American men in the photos, it begs the question of whether things have really changed.

Fox’s Ride Along (which changed its name to The Chicago Code prior to airing) includes Jennifer Beals, who not everyone recognizes as “of color” a bit behind her white male co-star, Jason Clarke, Caribbean, Delroy Lindo, second from right, and African American, Todd Williams in left corner. ABC’s Detroit 187 includes nearly an entire cast of color, yet white Michael Imperioli is in the front of the photo. NBC’s Harry’s Law includes Aml Ameen in the corner. NBC’s action shot for Chase features Puerto Rican Amaury Nolasco and African American Rose Rollins all in the back. ABC’s Body of Proof features African American Windell Middlebrooks, second from left, and half African American half Korean Sonia Sohn, second from right.

One of the major reasons network television shows consider casting actors of color as risky is because of the discomfort many viewers still feel about mixed-race couples. It is not, however, an equal discomfort with all types of coupling. By now many Americans do not appear to have a problem with an Asian kissing a Caucasian character, and they are getting used to Latina/white mixing. On the other hand, Latino/white or African American/white is still very controversial. Networks are not as likely to try these combinations if they are being more conservative, and if a show has an African American man or Latino man, that means the producers have to add a woman of the same race or ethnicity, which tips the balance of the show’s cast and threatens the viewer base. A young woman of any race can have a variety of types of relationships with relatively little controversy, but an African American man getting involved with a white woman will get complaints from a variety of sources including white racists and women of color who dislike the idea of African American men dating or marrying white women. Another observation is that most of the African American men in those photographs seemed to be portrayed as older “chief” types who look like sage advisors and less involved in romantic and sexual adventures. If they have a love interest at all, it most likely would be an African American wife of long standing, not a hot young thing.

Often the non-inclusive portrayals seemed to be unclear to even the network executives, as evidenced by NBC’s advertising campaign for the 2009-2010 season (and still in use in 2010-2011) which had the slogan “More Colorful,” meant to play off the peacock logo, but perhaps unintentionally hilarious or insulting. A writer at the website theTVAddict.com developed a very real-looking collage showing lead actors from NBC’s shows, some male, some female, but all white. Although it is a parody, they had only the real leads from which to choose. They would have had to go down to supporting characters from NBC’s shows, such as Mindy Kaling or Leslie David Baker from The Office, or Joshua Gomez on Chuck, no more than third leads or below on their respective shows, to have any characters of color to show in such a campaign. To be fair, Heroes, a series NBC continued in 2009-2010, but canceled at the end of the season, had three Asians in lead roles. Its failure to retain the African American and Latino men and women did not give it points.

For every step forward actors from marginalized groups take, they take two steps back. Every few years, the networks try African American (male) leads. These shows do not work for a variety of reasons, including poor writing or directing. For example, we simply could not sit through ABC’s confusing and boring Daybreak, but it wasn’t Taye Diggs’ fault, as evidenced by his success as a supporting character in the white-led series Private Practice (ABC).1 However, the networks seem loath to try it again, and may assume it is because of the draw of the lead actors.

For the 2010-2011 season, the networks did a few surprising things. One of the things they did was, in large part, for several of the networks to follow CBS’s lead and do away with the “family photo” type pictures we showcased in our first installment, replacing them with action shots from the pilot (linked to video clips, which we chose not to consider in our study), or photos including only one or two members of the cast. This meant that our plan to analyze that season’s photos for comparison had to change somewhat. Frequently we only saw the lead actors, and not the supporting players who so often made up the back and sides of the first set of photos we examined. Those that did use the traditional photos often had a few more actors of color in them than previously, and they were not always at the far ends, yet, for the most part, those at the center were still white actors, or, as in the case of Jennifer Beals, mixed race but considered white by many.

NBC’s Undercovers starred Gugu Mbatha-Raw, whose father is South African, and Boris Kodjoe, whose mother is German and whose father is from Ghana. Latino Jimmy Smits was the lead on NBC’s Outlaw. Biracial Maggie Q is the lead on the CW’s Nikita. NBC’s The Event was publicized with action shots, and individual photos of the three stars, but most initial reviews were accompanied by still photos of the white Jason Ritter.

Another thing is that a few networks, primarily NBC and The CW, actually did have shows starring people of color in the primary roles. NBC’s slate included Undercovers, starring two African actors; Outlaw, with Latino Jimmy Smits in the lead; and The Event, with African American Blair Underwood as one of three co-leads (along with the white Laura Inness and Jason Ritter). We did not watch any of these, but from what we read, it is not that the leads were of color that caused the first two to be canceled early in the season and The Event to be on most critic’s “likely to be canceled” at the end of the season lists. The CW featured only half white half Asian Maggie Q in the photos for Nikita. The most likely problem there seems to be poor writing causing audiences to tune out, or long hiatuses for mythology driven shows like The Event, but networks are very likely to use these show’s failures as rationale for not casting many leads of color in the future. While The CW’s new shows Nikita and Hellcats feature actors of color and are likely to be renewed (according to website tvbythenumbers.com), the ratings are poor; it is more due to the CW not having the budget to replace them than that they are well loved by audiences.

We are keenly aware that no network’s primary mission is to raise viewers’ racial or social consciousness. Networks want to earn money by selling ad space, attract high-income viewers, and incidentally entertain audiences in the process. However, as a result of the known power of television, shouldn’t there be a more accurate reflection of the diversity of the nation? Having the African American man be the judge or the chief of police may appear to show that people of color can attain great heights, but when they are very thin characters with no back story and less interesting personal lives than the white characters, then they aren’t showing true possibilities. They are props. These photographs prove the old saying “a picture speaks a thousand words.”

Image Credits:
1. Black Is Online
2. Zap2it.com
3. The TV Addict
4. Zap2it.com and TV Squad

1. Internet rumor suggests that African American women refused to watch Daybreak because Diggs’ love interest was played by Moon Bloodgood, who is of color, (half Korean, half white) but not African American.

In Part 1 of this series of articles, we considered the positioning of characters of color in the television network promotional photos for the 2009-2010 television season. In this installment, we discuss some of the challenges we experienced conducting this research and some questions that came to mind while doing it. In Part 3, we will consider the 2010-2011 season’s photos (including Undercovers and Outlaw).

Our first challenge for this series was to determine exactly who “counted” as an actor of color, a surprisingly difficult task. Although the photos were accompanied by an alphabetical list of actors’ names, there was no key for us to determine who was who. We recognized many of the actors. Some have been regulars or recurring guest stars on other shows. By eliminating them, we could determine who the lesser-known ones were.

Identifying who is considered an actor of color is nonetheless a dicey proposition. While not wanting to invoke a “one drop” sort of policy, actors were identified as “of color” if they looked “other” or were identified someplace on the Internet (mostly on IMDB or Wikipedia) as having at least one parent or ancestor from the identified ethnic group. However, the labels are quite malleable. For example, words like Latina/Latino, as opposed to Hispanic, and what those words connote, are contested. The fact that people that form these cultures have complexions varying from very light to very dark can make this complicated. Does Brazilian Morena Baccarin, who is ethnically “white” and doesn’t “look Hispanic” (we only found out she was “other” when doing research) label herself as “of color”? How do we identify the many mixed-race actors in the group?

One thing that made this more intriguing is that names were usually not something that indicated the character’s ethnicity. For instance, John Cho would have been easy to identify as having Asian ancestry just from his name, even if he weren’t well known already. On the other hand, when we didn’t recognize Asian-American looking Stephanie Jacobsen of Melrose Place and Jenna Ushkowitz of Glee, we couldn’t identify them in their photographs based only on their names.

In addition, for women in particular, it is obvious that Hollywood gravitates toward a beauty standard that favors “whiter” features, such as lighter skin, smaller noses, long straight hair, or eyes that aren’t too “slanted.” Many women of color chosen for television roles, therefore, appear to be mixed race. As Mary Beltran and Camilla Fojas state in the introduction to their book Mixed Race in Hollywood, “Recent roles are part of the overall boom in the casting of mixed race actors in contemporary film and television . . . It cannot be determined how audiences ‘read’ these actors and models with respect to notions of race and ethnicity, however, particularly if they portray characters coded as white ” (11). More often than not, these mixed-race female actors are likely often read as fully African-American or Asian-American or Latina by viewers and are chosen instead of female actors with darker skin or other easily identifiable markers of race.

Mixed-race actors may also be increasingly popular because they give the appearance of reflecting the “new America,” one full of comfortably mixed marriages, happily blended workplaces, and bully-free schools. In Beltran’s chapter in her edited volume, she writes that someone like Jessica Alba, who reads “white,” is likely to have a very different, and more “bankable” career than someone like Rosario Dawson, who reads as “of color,” even though both have Latino ancestry (264). Alba herself told Entertainment Weekly that “the actresses with darker features usually end up playing villains or foreigners or the girl the guy cheats on his girlfriend with.” Therefore, a “heroine” needs to be closer to white on the beauty spectrum.

Keeping all these issues in mind, out of 119 actors shown in the collection of photos of the casts of 17 dramas or dramedies 2009-2010, we counted (assuming that any of these may be mixed-race) one Latino man, two Latina/Hispanic women, three Asian-American men, four Asian-American women (one technically a girl), seven African-American men, and six African-American women, plus one actor who is Maori. In other words, 24 out of 119 actors (or approximately 20%) are, or may be, “of color” and 95 are white, compared to 41.92% of people of color in the actual US population.1 Three photos, those for Vampire Diaries, Parental Discretion Advised (aka Life Unexpected, which includes only the lead actress), and Parenthood, whose photo included 13 people (including small children), had no actors who appeared to be of color. South Asian faces were not part of such lineups on US television until extremely recently and now there are quite a few (most on comedies or cable). Native Americans are still entirely invisible.

The photos demonstrate that racism is still in force at the television networks. No character of color is central except for half-Asian half-Caucasian Lindsay Price of Eastwick. As bell hooks explained, “For the most part television and movies depict a world where African Americans and whites co-exist in harmony although the subtext is clear; this harmony is maintained because no one really moves from the location white supremacy allocates them on the race-sex hierarchy” (hooks 1996, 113) as these photos obviously show. The sexism that hooks mentions is also a factor. White men are in the front in dramas a lot more than they are not. ABC was the worst offender. In every ABC photo except for Eastwick, a white person is in front, with a second white person slightly behind and anyone of color towards the ends of the photos. NBC and Fox were slightly more inclusive, including characters of color towards the center of some photos, while CW employed a very small number of actors of color.

By including actors of color at all, although they are marginalized, the networks can tell groups such as the NAACP that they are adding representation from non-white groups, without making any real social strides in terms of actual race-blind casting. Perhaps publicists and photographers are following guidelines that say there artistic reasons for the placements of characters of color in photographs that have to do with balancing light and dark, or rules of formal composition, or perhaps because all the black men are the tallest actors in the shot they should be in the back. Even so, it would seem to make sense for the networks to violate such compositional rules to avoid reinforcing negative stereotypes that have been in force for so long.

Many Americans proudly think of themselves as tolerant and may consider the country post-racial, so blatant prejudice is rarely displayed in the mainstream. However, the fact is that many white people are unaware of the frequent and subtle racism that many people of color still experience. This, coupled with marginalization, lack of representation, or negative stereotyping of people of color in the media can result in viewers having a narrow and inaccurate view of an entire group.

Image Credits:
1. NYMag.com
2. Zap2it.com
3. Zap2it.com
4. Zap2it.com
5. Zap2it.com
6. Zap2it.com

Works Cited/Consulted:

2006 American Community Survey. United States Census Bureau. http://factfinder.census.gov/

hooks, bell. 1996. Reel To Real: Race, Sex, and Class at the Movies. New York, NY: Routledge.

“Jessica Alba is our Must Girl of the Summer : The 25-year-old starlet is on the brink of Hollywood domination”. Entertainment Weekly. June 30, 2006

Please feel free to comment.

1. As a note, CBS did not issue these “family photos.” Potential viewers are expected to watch video on the CBS website and other outlets (including zap2it.com the day of the upfronts), and the photos that were put up a few weeks later on zap2it appear to be video stills. So, this analysis deals only with ABC, NBC, Fox and The CW.

Each year, television networks distribute photos to promote new shows for the upcoming season at conventions commonly known as the “Upfronts.” The five major television networks provide these photos to critics, advertisers, and websites that promote the industry. This article, part of a three-part series on race and television, examines the photographs used to promote hour-long television shows for the 2009-2010 season and their cultural significance, particularly pertaining to race. The season is ended, and many, in fact most, of the shows have canceled, turned into short-run miniseries, or never aired at all. Some actors were replaced before the pilots aired. This series deals only with what the photos themselves mean, and not with the programs’ content, successes, or failures. In future installments, we plan to consider substantial differences in 2010-2011 season’s promotions, how we determined who “counted” and issues involved with the contested notions of beauty and race, class and target audiences, and what increasing numbers of mixed-race and South Asian actors might mean to American (and globalized) culture.

People of color, particularly African American men in the promotional photographs are frequently off to the sides in what we dub “Black Guy Corner.” We noticed their marginalization by accident, and this changed our research focus. As cultural studies critics, “counting” is not something we generally do, but counting seemed to be the best way to start to answer our original question, which was simply, “How many characters of color are in the upcoming shows?” We wanted to know because there had been a fair amount of casting actors of color on big ensemble shows like Lost (NBC) and Heroes (NBC) in earlier seasons; however, as these shows progressed, African American men seemed to have short shelf lives.1 We saw two alternatives. It seemed as if that the networks might be fairly conservative in the 2009-2010 season, trying desperately not to alienate upscale audiences despite economic meltdown and the threat to broadcast television from online viewing. Conversely, the Obama election might have made them more open to casting more characters of color, particularly African-American men, in important roles. However, once we started looking at the photos as a group, we realized something problematic was happening.2

We had questions about what these pictures said about race relations in the United States. Does the television industry promote an agenda through imagery that maintains positions of power, or does it covertly use images to give primacy, or not, to a particular group of people? We questioned whether the photographs demonstrate racism, whether conscious or not, premeditated or not, beyond that systematically practiced by Hollywood for decades. Without reading beyond the short descriptions of the shows, or knowing who the “stars” are (since cast names were not “keyed” to the photos), what would a potential viewer of prime time television dramas think about the status of African American, Latina/Latino, and Asian American characters and actors on television today? Why and how should it matter?

Photos, clockwise from left: ABC’s Happy Town, featuring Robert Wisdom at far left; NBC’s Mercy, featuring Delroy Lindo, back center, Guillermo Diaz, third from right, Jaime Lee Kirchner, far right; ABC’s V including Lourdes Benedicto, second from left, and Morena Baccarin, third from right; Fox’s Human Target, Chi McBride at right; and CW’s A Beautiful Life, featuring Corbin Bleu at far left.

From these photographs, it is obvious that African American men were strategically placed to the back and/or side of the cast photos, even, as with Derek Luke of Trauma, when they were among the stars of their shows, or when they were arguably among the most famous people on their programs, like Corbin Bleu (of the High School Musical movies) on The Beautiful Life. Even when, as in the case of Mercy, an African American man is not at the far edges of the photo, he is still standing behind other characters.

Our theory is the networks believe African American men might not appeal to advertisers, critics, and potential viewers they want to attract, and found it advantageous to keep them in the background. A significant number of the African American men in these photos (including Robert Wisdom of Happy Town and Chi McBride of Human Target) also appear to be the oldest in the casts, seeming like friendly advisors to the mainly younger lighter-skinned cast, neither sex objects or threatening.

There was only one Latino man in the photos (in Mercy). One actor (Cliff Curtis of Trauma) is Maori. African American and Latina women could be close to center but not at center. Asians, including an increasing number of South Asians, could be either at center, close to center, or at the extreme ends of the photos. Most photos had a white man or woman, at the center.

Clockwise from left: ABC’s The Deep End, Sherri Saum, second from left; ABC’s The Forgotten, Reiko Aylesworth, second from left, Rochelle Aytes, third from right; Fox’s Past Life, Ravi Patel far right; NBC’s Trauma, Cliff Curtis, third from left, Aimee Garcia, third from right, Derek Luke, far right; CW’s Melrose Place, Stephanie Jacobson, far left, Jessica Lucas, far right.

It appears that these photos suggest a semiotic hierarchy of characters, with whites at the forefront, Asian Americans making strides toward the center, Latinas/Latinos still somewhat suspect, particularly men, and African Americans getting a few seats at the table, with African American men mostly relegated to the sidelines. These pictures might give the impression that “others” are less important or desirable in the dominant culture. If, despite the purported great strides made by people of color in real life, they are still marginalized in these photos, and presumably on these shows, it matters because networks and advertisers make choices based on what they think viewers will like and tolerate. We hypothesize the positioning is based on perceived “threat level,” with Asians and women being considered more attractive and less frightening than African American men to the networks’ more coveted audiences.

Critical race theory says that “racism is an ingrained feature of our landscape, it looks ordinary and natural to persons in the culture. . . . that invariably renders black and minorities one-down,” and that “a culture constructs its own social reality in ways that promote its own self interest” (Delgado and Stefancic xvii). Each of these promotional devices is more than just a photograph, and more than just an advertisement. Rather, reflects societal norms and the members of the dominant culture’s positioning themselves in relation to others. Although the photos are in plain sight, what they imply is not. The underlying message is blatant, latent, and subliminal.

Clockwise from upper left: ABC’s Eastwick, Lindsay Price, center; ABC’s Flash Forward, Courtney B. Vance, third from right, John Cho, fourth from right; NBC’s Day One as we originally saw it on zap2it.com; NBC’s Day One (replaced the next time we looked), April Grace, third from left, Derek Mio, far right.

Things have not changed as much as it might appear they have in the last decades, despite a marked increase in the sheer numbers of characters of color on screen. In 1999, after what a Slate article called “1999’s infamously ‘whitewashed’ primetime season, in which not a single freshman show had a leading minority character” (Rastogi), the NAACP issued a report critical of the lack of people of color both in front of and behind the camera, challenging the networks to increase representation, which they attempted to do. The networks added more characters of color to shows during the next decade and there have been many more than before the report, in terms of sheer numbers, but they are not necessarily given as much screen time or prestige as white characters. Current NAACP president Benjamin Todd Jealous asserted the most recent update to that report in 2008, Out of Focus, Out of Sync, Take Four, that the state of representation of people of color on TV was still not where it needs to be, stating, “At a time when the country is excited about the election of the first African-American president in US history, it is unthinkable that minorities would be so grossly underrepresented on US television” (Jealous, 2008). Yet, it is clear there is not really equality at the networks.

When we originally saw the photos of Day One and Past Life on zap2it.com, Asians Derek Mio and Ravi Patel were cut out of their shows’ photos while white characters remained. We wondered who was vulnerable to such treatment. The fact that the actors of color could be easily cut out is one of the reasons this series is important.

The first photo we saw promoting Fox’s Glee, on zap2it showed a little bit of everyone, with a character in a wheelchair, albeit a white male in the center. In the second photo, which we saw on other media outlets the next day, the teachers, who are all white, and some white students were central in that photo.

Image Credits and Works Cited/Consulted:

Images found on Phiscal Matters, The Futon Critic and zap2it.com

Braxton, Greg. “The Greater Reality of Minorities on TV.” Los Angeles Times. February 7, 2009. Entertainment.

Delgado, Richard and Jean Stefancic. Critical Race Theory: The Cutting Edge. Philadelphia, Temple University Press. 2000.
hooks, bell. 1996. Reel To Real: Race, Sex, and Class at the Movies. New York, NY: Routledge.

National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Out of Focus–Out of Sync: A Report on the Television Industry. 1999.

National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Out of Focus–Out of Sync Take 4: A Report on the Television Industry. 2008.

Wyatt, Edward. “No Smooth Ride on TV Networks’ Road to Diversity.” The New York Times. March 17, 2009.

Please feel free to comment.

1. For example, out of three regularly appearing black males on Lost in its six season, two died early on, and the other was written off the after season one, although Asian, Latino, and Middle Eastern characters lasted longer. Heroes had a similar track record.
2. The initial photos were found on websites The Futon Critic and zap2it.com, decent sources for news about television, particularly of castings and firings on television pilots. We concentrated on ABC, Fox, NBC, and WB, since CBS did not provide these “family photos” and only had links to video clips or action shots. This means that we are intentionally leaving out NCIS: Los Angeles, a show starring an African American man, LL Cool J. It also made an analysis of the 2010-2011 season more difficult, as other networks followed this trend. We decided to limit our study to hour-long dramas and dramedies only, since comedy and reality show photos were posed quite differently. Cable channels have separate promotion systems.