Obama Brings New Vision of Family to TV
I’ve been reading a lot about how Obama’s presidency will not just challenge the political landscape, but will also shift the way society (aka TV) views the black family.
[During the inauguration] Obama didn’t shout at his wife, Michelle, to shut up. The first lady didn’t roll her eyes and tell Obama to act like a man. No laugh track kicked in, no one danced, and no police sirens wailed in the background.
“They are not here to entertain us,” says Young, a New York Press columnist. “Michelle Obama is not sitting around with her girlfriends saying, ‘My man ain’t no good.’ You’re not seeing this over -sexualized, crazy black family that, every time a Marvin Gaye song comes on, someone stands up and says, ‘Oh girl, that’s my jam.’”
America has often viewed the black family through the prism of its pathologies: single-family homes, absentee fathers, out of wedlock children, they say. Or they’ve turned to the black family for comic relief in television shows such as “Good Times” in the ’70s or today’s “House of Payne.”
But a black first family changes that script, some say. A global audience will now be fed images of a highly educated, loving and photogenic black family living in the White House for the next four years — and it can’t be taken off the air like “The Cosby Show.”
Black families on TV or in movies were never anything like my friends’ or my mom’s friends’ families. That’s why it’s great that, instead of the stereotypes, the Obamas allow whites and blacks to see an image of a strong, intelligent black man who is completely loving of his equally strong and intelligent wife. But this new image of family, to me, also goes beyond race to show that any man can be sensitive, intimate and romantic with his partner and still be strong.
What other stereotypes do the Obamas break? Do you think Hollywood will catch up?
