Extract
The Dream Is Gone.
Hollywood's executives found themselves scrambling last summer - scrambling to find some blacks. The networks' fall 1999 lineup was as white as the roster of a professional hockey team. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People declared itself outraged and threatened to sue. Ultimately, the show business powers-that-be managed to write a few minority roles into their otherwise white-centered shows. One can be sure that TV tokenism won't soon be neglected again.
But this is a step in the wrong direction, if one accepts the argument of By the Color of Our Skin: The Illusion of Integration and the Reality of Race, a compelling book by two American University communications professors. In fact, this book suggests the original network lineup revealed the real America: a society with virtually no black-white integration. Leonard Steinhorn (who is white) and Barbara Diggs-Brown (who is black) argue that the fantasy of representational diversity hinders actual racial progress, which they define as black and white integration. "What television has done is to give white Americans the sensation of having meaningful, repeated contact with blacks without actually having it," write Steinhorn and Diggs-Brown. "We call this phenomenon virtual integration, a...See the full content of this document
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