Something’s Missing at Emmy Awards

America’s longstanding contempt for African American humanity was candidly reflected on the 46th annual nighttime Emmy Awards. As I tuned in to the sea of white faces, I was reminded of the sad fact that the Rainbow Coalition is not “alive and well” in television land.

In the middle of the program a montage of the year was shown. It had such an insidious racist overtone that I was shocked. Dozens of clips from white shows were represented to celebrate the diversity of white America--from the intellectual wit of “Frasier” and “Seinfeld,” to the poignant home life of “Roseanne,” to the grit-and-grime drama of “NYPD Blue,” to several other examples that portrayed whites as having a multifaceted existence.

There were only three black images shown during this montage, unless I missed one or two when I closed my eyes in shame, as my heart sank from rage and embarrassment at the demeaning stereotypes I saw depicted. The three black images that the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences saw fit to show were Sinbad with his butt to the camera doing a version of the “hoochie-coochie,” Martin Lawrence doing a “coon shuffle” in his underwear and--the most insidious of the three--a clip from a “reality-based” cop show where a black man was pinned to the ground by two white, uniformed officers as the black man strained his neck to almost bite off one officer’s hand like a deranged, mangy, rabid dog.

African Americans have been vehemently maligned and stereotyped for centuries. When will it ever stop? Did the academy choose these clips with good intentions ?

As Shakespeare says in “Hamlet” (Act III, Scene 2), “. . . The purpose of playing (acting) . . . is to hold . . . the mirror up to nature; . . . O, there be players that I have seen play . . . have so strutted and bellowed . . . they imitated humanity so abominably.”

The “mirror” that the Emmy Awards held up to the contribution of African Americans for this last year on television suggested a “nature” so abominable, with no humanity, and helped to reinforce these distorted stereotypes firmly in the minds of millions of Americans, as well as those watching around the world.

Those whites who are constantly being fed a diet of subtle and overt racism from every facet of the media and those blacks who live with these vile images daily cannot continue to sit passively as this flagrant racist behavior is practiced on such a grand scale.

IRENE WILEY

Los Angeles