Too White Too Black Term Paper

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Race in early television programming [...] black women and the roles they played in early television. Two female characters illustrate the great differences in how blacks have been portrayed on television. In "Beulah," the lead character was a bossy, unattractive black woman stereotypical of the ideas of black females in the 1950s. By 1968, ideas had changed, but the character "Julia" was the opposite of Beulah, and she did not seem black at all, but more like a white black woman active in a white society that accepted her because she was almost one of them. These stereotypical characters represent what was acceptable to a mostly white audience, and indicate the distance between reality and television personas.

Beulah" had been a successful radio program before in debuted on television in 1950. It was the first show with a female African-American as the lead character. Beulah was a maid in a middle class white household, and the stereotypes continued from there. A history of the show notes, "Storylines tended to involve Beulah coming to the rescue of her employers, by providing a great spread of Southern cuisine to impress Mr. Henderson's business client, teaching the awkward Donnie how to dance jive and impress the girls, or saving the Henderson's stale marriage" (Bodroghkozy). Beulah was everything a post-war America expected of a black female on television. She was overweight, subservient, comical, devoted to the "white folks," and desperate for her boyfriend Bill to marry her. Many critics, black and white alike found the show simply perpetuated black stereotypes, and used blacks simply to make whites laugh. Their antics were perfect for the situation comedy format, because "they" were so different and so laughable to a largely white audience.

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In fact, many of the actors on the show changed several times, and some because of their anger at the black stereotypes they were forced to create. The "Beulah" history continues, "Actor Bud Harris, who had been contracted to play the role of Bill, quit the series a few months into its run, complaining that the show's writers were forcing him to play the character as an 'Uncle Tom' and engage in comic activity he found degrading to his race" (Bodroghkozy). For blacks, Beulah was simply "too" black. She epitomized everything blacks were straining to leave behind them, from menial employment opportunities to a black woman's main accomplishment coming in the kitchen. Beulah and her feather-brained friend Oriole were ridiculous and unbelievable characters who had little to do with real blacks and real life. Beulah was over the top in blackness, and because of this, she was silly, which made white people laugh, and that was her only purpose. This has continued to be a common use of black actors, as this critic writes, "The genre of preference for portraying Blacks has been the situation comedy. With its laugh track and problems solved within a 30-minute time frame, situation comedies have built on the tradition of Blacks being America's comic relief" (Jeter et al. 245). Even the direction illustrated this division between black and white on the set and in the home. One critic notes,

Her [Beulah's] lines were shot at different times, with clear mismatches in visual and aural continuity. The effect was a kind of textual segregation that mirrored the racial-occupational segregation….....

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