Television and Children: Issues in Black and White

Sacred Heart University Review Volume 15 Issue 1 Sacred Heart University Review, Volume XV, Numbers 1 & 2, Fall 1994/ Spring 1995 Article 8 1998 Television and Children: Issues in Black and White Rebecca L. Abbott Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.sacredheart.edu/shureview Recommended Citation Abbott, Rebecca L. (1998) "Television and Children: Issues in Black and White," Sacred Heart University Review: Vol. 15 : Iss. 1 , Article 8. Available at: https://digitalcommons.sacredheart.edu/shureview/vol15/iss1/8 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the SHU Press Publications at DigitalCommons@SHU. It has been accepted for inclusion in Sacred Heart University Review by an authorized editor of DigitalCommons@SHU. For more information, please contact , . Television and Children: Issues in Black and White Cover Page Footnote Rebecca Abbott is Associate Professor of Media Studies at Sacred Heart University. This article is available in Sacred Heart University Review: https://digitalcommons.sacredheart.edu/shureview/vol15/iss1/8 Abbott: Television and Children: Issues in Black and White REBECCA ABBOTT Television and Children: Issues of Black and White Among the experiences of childhood in America are the almost unavoidable, typically lengthy encounters with television. Given the fact that an average American school-aged child watches around thirty hours of television every week,1 filling over 30% of his or her waking hours, it is impossible to conclude that this experience is benign. Sociologists and psychologists clearly don't. But apart from their many studies identifying the generally negative effects television has on children's cognitive development, a more fundamental cause for alarm lies in the relationship between television and its insidious effects on individual and cultural identity. Television is a thoroughly commercial industry which has been chronically impaired by racial bias. Its representations of people who are not white has been extremely problematic. How do the experiences of television affect children's developing perceptions of themselves, especially children who are not white? And how do the modes of television production contribute to these perceptions? The structures of commercial television within the American culture industry confirm, not surprisingly, the domination of existing white power interests. Applying this perspective after a half-century of TV broadcasting in America, and considering the extent that these power interests no longer speak to the historical process in America, we should expect to hear voices of opposition. Because television has traditionally embraced the solipsistic world view of white men, it offers a xenomorphic experience of American culture for viewers who are different, pushing them either to accommodate or to resist. The experience itself must be like W.E.B. Du Bois' articulation of African Americans' perceptions of themselves in this country, which he describes as a ``double _______________ Rebecca Abbott is Associate Professor of Media Studies at Sacred Heart University. consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that Published by DigitalCommons@SHU, 1995 1 Sacred Heart University Review, Vol. 15 [1995], Iss. 1, Art. 8 TELEVISION AND CHILDREN 61 looks on in amused contempt and pity.''2 It is tempting to read Du Bois' ``tape'' as videotape. For Stuart Hall, the formation of identity is a `` `production,' which is never complete, always in process, and always constituted within, not outside, representation.'' In his essay ``Cultural Identity and Diaspora,'' Hall echoes Du Bois as he explores Caribbean cultural identity and ``the traumatic character of `the colonial experience' . . . They had the power to make us see and experience ourselves as `Other' . . . This inner expropriation of cultural identity cripples and deforms. If its silences are not resisted, they produce, in Fanon's vivid phrase, `individuals without an anchor.' ''3 In this call for resistance, the imagery of anchors anticipates Paul Gilroy's metaphor of ships on the Black Atlantic which was ``continually crisscrossed by the movements of black people ─ not only as commodities but engaged in various struggles towards emancipation, autonomy and citizenship.'' In The Black Atlantic Gilroy also evokes Du Bois and asks: ``How has this doubleness, what Richard Wright calls the dreadful objectivity which follows from being both inside and outside the West, affected the conduct of political movements against racial oppression and towards black autonomy?''4 This is also the question to ask of cultural production. Doubleness, the sense of being other, split, and adrift, is the dominant image that television has reflected to viewers who are not part of the white mainstream. Some forms of resistance have emerged, but the strength of their opposition and their unique impact on children is open to question. Because of the varied roles that television plays in American culture and the countless number of experiences it provides for children, it seems useful to take the advice of Ien Ang, who argues in an essay on the political nature of television observation ``that an analysis of a text must be combined with an analysis of its social conditions of existence'' by employing both semiotic and sociological methods.5 Sociologists have been attempting to measure television's effects on viewers since the 1950s, and while many of these studies suffer from ``an over-simplistic idea of communication as the transmission of transparent messages from and to fully autonomous subjects,''6 they can provide a grounded context in which to locate the meanings of television's representations. https://digitalcommons.sacredheart.edu/shureview/vol15/iss1/8 2 Abbott: Television and Children: Issues in Black and White 62 REBECCA ABBOTT Television's Effects on Children from a Sociological Perspective All efforts to distinguish children's programs from the rest of TV fare are confounded by the fact that children generally watch everything. The Children's Television Act of 1990 was a belated and seriously compromised effort to encourage broadcasters to acknowledge this fact and regulate themselves. Its twin prescriptions for general audience programs with educational value for children and for programs tailored especially for children's educational and informational needs were legislated with no guidelines on how much to air, when to air it, and how broadcasters should report their compliance.7 Saturday morning viewers have seen incremental changes ─ less product-oriented programming, a little less violence (Mighty Morphin Power Rangers notwithstanding), a few new shows with quasi-educational content, more ethnically and racially diverse casting ─ and for the past several years networks made the 8 to 9 P.M. prime-time slot into ``fami (...truncated)