BLACK IMAGE: ‘WE’RE NOT THERE YET’

“I grew up watching ‘The Brady Bunch’ and ‘Leave It to Beaver’ reruns, and I wanted to be a part of that family,” said 17-year-old Malcolm-Jamal Warner, who plays Theo Huxtable on NBC-TV’s “The Cosby Show.”

“Aside from the fact that they were white families, they were a family. They made family life, Wow!” said Warner, who grew up in Baldwin Hills and whose parents divorced when he was 6. “And yet I would turn on another television show and I would see gang members, all black or all Hispanic, or see a black dude in a pink suit driving a big Cadillac. . . . I was wondering, ‘How come I couldn’t see a black family?’

“My mother used to tell me when I was younger that if aliens from another planet watched television, they would think there were only white people in America. I think every black person who watches television gets the same feeling. It’s changed a little bit, but we are still not there yet.”

What images and messages do black and other minority children get from television and movies? Can television and movies play a role in enhancing or detracting from a child’s self-image? Is that a role for television and movies?

These questions were raised anew at the recent American Psychological Assn. convention in New York. Researchers reported that when they repeated a landmark study of young black children--asking them to choose a Cabbage Patch doll, black or white--they found the same indices of racial inferiority that psychologist Kenneth Clark found 40 years ago: Two out of three preschool-age black children chose the white doll. (In 1954 the U.S. Supreme Court cited the findings of Clark and his late wife, Mamie, as evidence that segregation damages black children.)

“The media could have a powerful influence in helping black children to form a positive racial self-image,” said Darlene Powell-Hopson, a psychological consultant in Connecticut and a member of the new research team.

How much has changed for today’s generation?

Robert Townsend, who produced, directed, co-wrote and starred in “Hollywood Shuffle,” a tiny-budgeted, semiautobiographical movie about the perils of a young black actor trying to make it, said he “knew something was wrong” when he was a kid. He said he wanted to be “The Thin Man” and “then I looked again and the black man was the butler.

“Now I see my nephew,” Townsend said, “he’s 7 or 8, and he’s very smart. He’s talking about a Halloween costume. I ask him, ‘You want to be Superman?’ And he says, ‘I could never be Superman, because Superman’s white.’ If you don’t see yourself on screen, it does something to your self-esteem.”

At NBC, vice president for children and family programs Phyllis Tucker Vinson, a 39-year-old black woman--or African-American, which she prefers--also worries about esteem.

“Everybody likes to see themselves on television,” Vinson said. “I’ve heard it from my own children. . . . I’ve even heard my own daughter--she’s 5--express self-doubt, that was about two years ago, and I remember thinking, ‘Oh no! I’m doing all this work. I failed! ‘ “

Vinson said she believes that her daughter Amani’s hurt may have stemmed from Princess Calla on “The Gummi Bears,” an NBC Saturday morning Disney adventure. Calla is white. “Amani loves the ‘Gummi Bears,’ ” Vinson said. “ Amani , that’s peaceful and confident in Swahili. In our creative discussions we asked Disney, ‘Why did she (Calla) have to be blond?’ ”

Vinson said she was told: “ ‘She’s a Disney character.’ And most of the Disney characters are blond.”

A decade after “Roots,” with “The Cosby Show” the highest-rated show on television, with Eddie Murphy the nation’s biggest box-office star, why is there still a problem?

“The greatest disappointment in this post-’Roots’ decade,” said Stan Margulies, producer of the multigenerational “Roots” saga, “is that there have not been enough serious dramas with blacks. There have been any number of situation comedies, the best of which is obviously ‘Cosby.’ There have been occasional attempts--to do Martin Luther King Jr. as a miniseries, and last year’s ‘A Gathering of Old Men’--but they have been so rare you can probably put them on the fingers of both hands.

“I remember a couple of years after ‘Roots,’ Lou Gossett did a hospital series and James Earl Jones did a detective series,” Margulies said, “and neither were successful. And (people said), ‘You can’t do a bad weekly series with a black star.’ I said, ‘You can’t do a bad weekly series with anybody’s star.’ The industry’s feeling is that black actors didn’t have appeal to conquer those shows.”

However, Margulies noted, compared to programming and the news, commercials are doing the best job on television of portraying blacks in everyday situations. “They show middle-class families, playing together, doing the laundry together, doing exactly the same things white families do. . . .”

From his dressing room on Broadway where he is starring in “Fences,” James Earl Jones said: “There are some very heavy dramas going on out there, and the prototypes of those dramas are not the drug dealers. (They are) garbage men, real people--people confronting life, not avoiding life.”

However, Jones challenged the concept of self-image coming solely from movies or television. “If it doesn’t start in the home, it won’t get off anywhere. I don’t think the artist should ever be obliged to sugarcoat what he has to say for a damaged self-image. Challenge that child, kick his butt with his art, make him think. . . . “

“Television can do much more,” said Dr. Alvin Pouissaint, a psychiatrist in Boston who is a consultant on “The Cosby Show.” “Even in children’s shows, He-Man and She-Ra, he’s a big blond. She is white. They see Superman. All of these fantasy fairy tales--Cinderella, Gold ilocks, Snow White. Where are the African fairy tales?

“Television has to start using black models who look more black,” Pouissaint said. “. . . Part of it is (kids) recognize who’s got the power. . . . Probably if you did a study with Mexican-American kids, it be the same way.”

“The big problem is that for the most part blacks aren’t portrayed,” said Peggy Charren, president of Action for Children’s Television, a public-interest group. Stereotypes may be kept off the screen, “but they won’t find the black fairy tales, the ethnic tales of blacks, ‘Anansi, the Spider,’ for example. Where are those images on TV?

“The fact is that most of the shows are snow-white programming,” Charren said, “and if there are minorities, they’re in the background. Except when we have a basketball team. . . . “

James A. Snead, associate professor of literature and film at the University of Pittsburgh and author of a forthcoming book on the history of black film stereotypes, said that about the only blacks on television or in movies are “entertainers, athletes or criminals/cops. Eddie Murphy, from all appearances, could be confused with a fast-talking criminal, but in fact happens to be on the side of right and justice.”

The three major television networks insisted they are doing a much better job than people may realize, suggesting that the reality is better than the perception.

Alan Wurtzel, vice president of broadcast standards and practices for ABC-TV, said TV does have “a responsibility to show the diversity of individuals (and) to be particularly sensitive to avoidance of stereotypes, not just with black kids but with Arab-Americans, Italian-Americans and Latino-Americans who have the same concerns.”

Asked about the lack of black dramas, he said, “It’s tough to top ‘Roots.’ ”

Wurtzel added that even more important is the choice of an actor when the color of the actor does not matter to the drama. “On ‘Trauma Center,’ we had a black actor playing a doctor--he didn’t play an actor from the ghetto, he didn’t play an angry doctor, he played a doctor . . . . Actually television tries,” he said. “We’ve had after-school specials. We did one last year on suicide with Malcolm-Jamal Warner.”

At CBS-TV, Judy Price, vice president of children’s programming, said she and her colleagues at the other networks have been aware for the past seven or eight years that “minority role models had not been as prevalent as they should be” and have sought to correct that. “On new shows or on human (non-animal) shows, we do make sure that we have a balanced perspective. When we have crowd scenes, we make sure the crowd consists of an ethnic mix.”

Price said she aired an Asian version of Cinderella, called “Yeh-Shen,” on a “CBS Storybreak.” On Saturday morning’s “Dungeons and Dragons,” she said “we made sure one of the kids was a little black girl. We do that routinely. . . .”

Asked about portraying black fairy tales, Price said: “I have a couple of books I’m looking through. I haven’t found one yet to adapt. Do you have any suggestions?”

“The purpose of television is primarily to entertain and to educate,” said NBC’s Phyllis Tucker Vinson, “and I understand its importance as applied to minority children. It’s very difficult because you’re dealing with a creative community that’s not filled with many minorities. When you have non-minority human beings trying to write from a minority perspective, it rings very false.”

Still Vinson said she too is trying, not just for blacks but for Asian and Latino children as well. In “The Littlest Detective” animation, a sidekick who is Asian was added. In “The New Archies” there are now Eugene and Amani, an African-American boy and girl. Naming the girl after her daughter, Vinson said, laughing, was the production company’s idea.

In development, she said, is “The Black Snowman” with a happy ending. It’s about an “African-American boy with low self-esteem, who doesn’t like being black and then discovers a little bit about his heritage which makes him feel better about himself.”

There was no rush to comment by movie studios. Paramount, through a spokesman, said it would “pass.” A spokesman for Disney said no one there would “talk to these issues. We don’t have anyone presumptuous enough to talk about complex social problems.” Columbia Pictures, in Hollywood, referred to its corporate public relations spokesman in New York, who could not be reached. MGM/UA had no comment either.