Enlightened Racism

The Cosby Show, Audiences, and the Myth of the American Dream

Author: Sut Jhally
ISBN: 0813314194

The Cosby Show needs little introduction to most people familiar with American popular culture. It is a show with immense and universal appeal. Even so, most debates about the significance of the program have failed to take into account one of the more important elements of its success—its viewers. Through a major study of the audiences of The Cosby Show, the authors treat two issues of great social and political importance—how television, America’s most widespread cultural form, influences the way we think, and how our society in the post–Civil Rights era thinks about race, our most widespread cultural problem.This book offers a radical challenge to the conventional wisdom concerning racial stereotyping in the United States and demonstrates how apparently progressive programs like The Cosby Show, despite good intentions, actually help to construct “enlightened” forms of racism. The authors argue that, in the post–Civil Rights era, a new structure of racial beliefs, based

Publisher: Westview Press
Publish Date: 1992

Subjects: Performing Arts / Television / General, Social Science / Ethnic Studies / African American Studies

This book is available in the following Community Centers: Cross-Cultural Center (Location: Arts (ARTS))