A Boycott Is Avoided, but What’s Next?

For the past few months, the NAACP and Hollywood’s television industry have gone eyeball-to-eyeball over the issue of minority representation in television’s ethnically sterile wasteland; on Wednesday, Hollywood blinked.

NBC president Robert Wright announced that, rather than risk a threatened boycott of his network by minority viewers--something the NAACP’s president, Kweisi Mfume, had threatened--the network that made “must-see TV” a household phrase, would diversify. It wasn’t an ethical epiphany; just a prescient business realization that minorities comprise a valuable chunk of the shrinking network market, and diversification made sense to improving the corporation’s bottom line.

Pursuant to the agreement, NBC will add a minority writer to each of its second-season shows, has promised to double its purchasing from minority vendors and vows to increase minority presence across the board, from pages and interns to the higher reaches of the executive suites.

Sounds good on paper, doesn’t it? But an old saw pops, unwillingly into mind, the one about leading a horse to water only to find it refusing to wet his muzzle.

Adding minority writers to the staffs of existing shows is a logical remedy to the cultural insularity of many of the current series but, as former CBS executive Anita Addison pointed out in Thursday’s Times, if the new writers aren’t seriously considered part of the team, if they’re merely tolerated and paid, it’s not enough. That is, to resurrect a term that was popular in the one-ethnic-to-an-organization ‘60s, window-dressing.

To make a difference, Wright will have to instruct his underlings to not only include the new writers, but to listen with both ears--and to remember that part of the purpose of NBC’s agreement is to bring a richer, more textured perspective to what is often a creative product that is forged in a monoethnic crucible. (Already some executives are expressing--anonymously, of course--their resistance to this plan. They’re assuming the writers they’ll be receiving aren’t good--just minority. As if the two terms are mutually exclusive.)

And while it’s laudable that Wright has pledged not to ghettoize minority writers on minority shows (something many writers, producers and directors of color complain of, to no avail), we have to remember that, at the moment, there aren’t any to which these colored (with a small “c”) folks can be consigned. Which was part of the problem in the first place.

As for minority vendors, from what I hear, there weren’t a whole bunch of those, either, so doubling their numbers, while good, will probably result in numbers that are, comparatively speaking, still small.

The NBC-NAACP pact is not perfect, but it’s a start. And NBC’s competitors have indicated they will follow suit soon, some more willingly than others.

From here, two things have to happen in order for the agreement to mean anything:

*NBC president Wright must give clear instructions to those below him that he means what he says, and that consequences--reduced bonuses? parking spaces in less-favored areas of the studio lot? restrictions on expense accounts?--will accrue if the spirit as well as the letter of the agreement are not honored.

*NAACP’s Mfume must remind his people that while this particular battle for diversity has been won, the war is ongoing. If the NAACP doesn’t continue to fight for inclusion of other minorities, it will lose the moral high ground. It’s true that the ethnically anemic television industry desperately needs a transfusion of African Americans, but it won’t do for some minorities to squeeze through the door only to have it shut firmly as others wait to get in.