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Image breakers, image makers: producing race, America, and television

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Image breakers, image makers: producing race, America, and television

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IMAGE BREAKERS, IMAGE MAKERS:

PRODUCING RACE, AMERICA, AND TELEVISION

by
Anthony Sparks

________________________________________________________________________

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(AMERICAN STUDIES AND ETHNICITY)

August 2012

Copyright 2012 Anthony Sparks
ii

Epigraph

This did not just happen… The white man has developed a myth of
superiority based on images which compare him symbolically with
the black man. The very fact of this interconnection is at once a
holdover from previous bondage and the most effective means of
perpetuating that bondage. We realize now that we are involved in a
black-white war over the control of image. For to manipulate an
image is to control a peoplehood…”
-- Carolyn F. Gerald, The Black Writer and His Role
The Negro Digest, January 1969, Vol. 18, No. 3, p. 45

iii

Dedication

This dissertation is dedicated to my children, who are indeed my blessings on Earth:
Olivia Sparks, Langston Sparks, and Dashiell Sparks. Love you.

iv

Acknowledgements

I give thanks to God, from whom all blessings flow…To Anita Dashiell-Sparks, my wife,
partner, love of my life, soul mate, actor and performing artist extraordinaire, believer in
me and in us… You are living proof that sometimes God blesses with both hands. I love
you. This work and our life together doesn’t exist without you… To my glorious mother,
my “Ma”, my eternal inspiration, and the best b.s. detector I have ever met, Pearlie M.
Sparks. I love you. From your childhood in the Mississippi cotton fields to my adulthood
in the “Ivory Tower” and the Hollywood Dream machine, you have shown me that it
ain’t easy, but it is all possible-- and that joy cometh in the morning.
To my first born, Olivia. My first-born child. You are already smarter, more talented, and
infinitely more beautiful than I could ever hope to be. My joy is watching you grow. My
burden is being worthy of having been blessed to be your father. I take it on gladly. I love
you… To my dynamic duo, Langston and Dashiell… Langston, my first-born son. You
are Love personified. Your intelligent curiosity about the world and how it works will
bless you. I am stunned that I am your father and I thank you for sharing me with this
work. I love you. Dashiell, my baby son by six minutes. You are dynamic and dramatic,
already a force to be reckoned with. I hope this work is an example to you one day of
what the power of focus and purpose can do to enrich and enhance your life and your
world. I am stunned I am your father and I love you.
To Dorinne Kondo. I simply wouldn’t be here without your rigorous insights and patient
support. I am beyond proud that you have been my teacher and scholarly mentor. I hope I
can now say we are friends and colleagues. I wasn’t an easy or typical trainee, and there
v

were moments where even I wondered why… but I hope this work was worth the
journey. A deep, heartfelt thank you… Velina Hasu Houston, awesomeness personified.
Your humanity and artistry mean so much to my family and me. Your support in my
artistic and personal life has been and continues to be indelible and cherished. Thank
you… Francille Rusan Wilson, who entered my intellectual life Right. On. Time. I’ve
rarely left any of our conversations without learning something new. You are a shining
example of many good things. Thank you… Sarah Banet-Weiser, I might have literally
left graduate school after my first disorienting semester were it not for your seminar.
Thank you for your rigorous and kind support from the very beginning and all along the
way… Tara McPherson, who met with me before I even applied to graduate school and
re-entered my scholastic life at a crucial juncture. Your humor is as rigorous as your
scholarship and both are always welcome in my life. Thank you. Thank you all. Best
committee ever.
To my awesome and patient professors, teachers, and academic friends, who knew I
didn’t fit inside the box but insisted numerous times that my work was worthy anyway:
Lanita Jacobs, Ruthie Wilson Gilmore, Fred Moten, Jane Iwamura, Janelle Wong, Laura
Pulido, Tom Hollihan, Herman Gray, Todd Boyd, Judith Jackson Fossett, and Roberto
Lint-Sagarena. Thank you all. And thanks to Darnell Cole, a brother scholar I met along
the way who celebrated my questions, became a friend, and helped me fill in the blanks
about the academic enterprise. Thanks to my awesome cohort at the University of
Southern California, Department of American Studies and Ethnicity: Wendy Cheng,
Emily Hobson, Michelle Commander, Jeb Middlebrook, Viet Le, and Laura Fugikawa.
Thanks to my unofficial ASE posse, those who were into my work or were kind to me
vi

and with whom I shared productive conversations: Tanachai Mark Padoongpaat,
Margaret Salazar-Porcio, Margarita Smith, Gretl Vera Rosas, Alvaro Marquez, Deb Al-
Najjar, Anton Smith, Imani Johnson, Sionne Neely, Todd Honma, Terrion Williamson,
Yushi Yamizuki, Luis Carlos, Carolyn Dunn, Anthony Rodriguez, Carolyn Dunn, Sharon
Luk, Perla Guerrero, and a big shout out to Nicole Hodges Persley. Also, a huge thanks to
Kitty Lai, Jujuana Preston, Sandra A. Hopwood, and Sonia Rodriguez. What awesome
people and an incredible support team. You all made ASE a brighter place in which to do
this work.
To my friends, near and far, who never questioned the worth of this venture, even if you
did not always understand it: Catrina Ganey, our dearly departed Dorcas, Ahmed Best,
Raquel Horsford, Wren T. Brown, Anne Haley Brown, Rosalyn “Mother Brown” Brown,
Taniesah Evans, Shawn Johnson, my brothers Pastor Richard Sparks, Rickey Sparks, and
to my big sister Rosetta Jones, all of whom made it clear just how proud of me they were
that I was doing this work and degree, thank you. A big shout out to all my siblings:
Rosetta, Richard, Rickey, Johnny, Levern, Theo, Julie, and Lisa.
Thank you all.

vii

Table of Contents

Epigraph ii
Dedication iii
Acknowledgments iv
List of Figures viii
Abstract ix
Chapter 1: Storming Racial and Disciplinary Barricades:
The NAACP, Black Representation, and Self-Reflexivity
In Television 1

Chapter 2: Access, Ambivalence, and “Opportunity”:
Television Writing Programs and the Pre-Production of Racial
Formation 58

Chapter 3: Authorship, Authenticity, and Anxiety in Making
(Black) Television: The Politics of WWB, “Writing While Black” 116

Chapter 4: “African-American. Not Black”: Negotiating
Identity and the Television Industry through Performance 180

Chapter 5: Emotional Activism & the Frustration of the First:
Kathleen McGhee-Anderson on Theatre, Performance, and
Producing African American Television 246

Chapter 6: Conclusion, or Notes on Artist-Scholarship and Moving
Towards a Critical and Performative Production Studies 286

Bibliography 305

viii

List of Figures

Figure 1 “Diversity Day” Photo, 2007-2008 WGA Strike 39
Figure 2 Michigan State History Marker at McGhee Home 261
Figure 3 Minnie and D. Orsel McGhee 271
Figure 4 The Historic McGhee House, Detroit, Michigan 274
Figure 5 State Court Restraining Order against the McGhee 276
Figure 6 The Historic McGhee House (View 2) 282

ix

Abstract

Image Breakers, Image Makers: Producing Race, America, and Television
foregrounds my positionalities as a scholar and as a creative artist/practitioner to conduct
an unprecedented, ethnographic, and longitudinal cultural study about television and the
select few writers and producers who actually “make” television. I examine the spaces
and processes of cultural production in order to investigate the hidden relationship
between racial formation, Black representation, and the production of television. More
specifically, I focus on the veiled process of script creation, and its culture of
production as a performative space with national and global implications for the images
that can make, break, construct, and/or disrupt our racialized common sense. Employing
an interdisciplinary framework that combines critical ethnography, cultural analysis, and
performance theory my dissertation posits television production as a crucial “pre-
performance” space and process where racial meaning enters into filmed texts, gains a
visual and discursive materiality, and becomes a contested but indelible part of what we
then call Black representation. Thus, I make a decisive shift in the scholarship on media
and Black representation that moves the critique from the hypervisible “artifact” of
popular culture to the difficult to access and often invisible “creation” of popular culture.
In a groundbreaking study, I focus on the discourse in and about television’s
“writing room,” and interrogate the discursive power of the writer’s so-called “blank
page” and its place as the creative foundation of television (and thus, of much of
American popular culture). In chronicling the journey from the blank page to television
programming’s final arrival in the American home, I attend to embodied performance
x

and map the practices of the television industry through a critical meditation on race and
performance, while also making an argument for the critical necessity of the scholar-artist
and artist-scholar to the project of knowledge production.
Taking the NAACP’s historical focus on Black representation in film and
television as a crucial but under examined prompt, Image Breakers, Image Makers also
situates the hiring practices of Black television writers within the larger labor practices of
the entertainment industry. It analyzes the elements of production that regulate if, when,
how, and what writers are allowed to create and how those elements (network and studio
input, casting, design, and the ever present reality in television of “not enough time” to
actually produce television) combine to become a process of racialization. Engaging with
scholars such as Herman Gray, Peggy Phelan, and Anne Cheng, Image Breakers, Image
Makers complicates what I call the frustration of Black representation and centers on the
day-to-day struggle for what I call a non-comic Blackness. I discuss the visibility of the
performer’s agency, but privilege the invisibility of television writer-producers and their
role in creating and resisting the materiality of racial performativity. Ultimately, this
project reveals how Blackness is contested by television practitioners, and suggests how
audiences are primed to ignore race yet make racial sense of images that have, to a large
degree, already been constructed and decoded for them.

1

Chapter 1
Storming Racial and Disciplinary Barricades:
The NAACP, Black Representation, and Self-Reflexivity in Television

“TV is on in America, and America is on TV”
-- J. Fred MacDonald
1

“Art may imitate life, but life imitates TV…”
-- “Superhero” lyrics by Ani DiFranco

“I don’t like this diplomacy shit. We should just bring out the
picket signs, bar the doors, get arrested, and make the 6 o'clock
news…”
-- NAACP President Kwesi Mfume
2

On July 12, 1999, only two months before the traditional start of the fall
primetime network television season, Kwesi Mfume and the NAACP used the symbolic
megaphone of its annual convention to call attention to its concerns over the business and
representational practices of the American entertainment industry. The association
expressed its particular dissatisfaction with the hiring practices of the major television
networks. Publicly describing and decrying what he called a “virtual whitewash” among
television broadcasting’s “Big Four” networks-- ABC, CBS, NBC, and FOX-- Mfume
and the NAACP grenade shocked Hollywood by using unmistakably strong rhetoric to
characterize the television industry as “the most segregated industry in America.”
3

1
MacDonald, J. Fred MacDonald. Blacks and White TV: Afro-Americans in television since 1948 (Nelson-
Hall Publishers: Chicago, 1983), IX.
2
Stodghill, Ron. “Ending Whitewash,” CNN.com (December 27, 1999). For more, this article can be found
at http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,992952-2,00.html. Accessed August 30, 2010.
Kwesi Mfume reportedly whispered the defiant words referred to in the above epigraph to an associate
while waiting to meet with Les Moonves, the president of the CBS television network in August 1999.
3
Braxton, Greg. “Is TV Diversity Drive Fading?” Los Angeles Times (November 5, 1999). Accessed
September 1, 2010 at http://articles.latimes.com/1999/nov/05/entertainment/ca-30075.
2

The most segregated industry in America? The charge by its very utterance was
an urgent demand to be taken seriously by the decision makers in network television. The
NAACP’s accusation was also a challenge to the artists who worked or sought to work in
the industry to realize more fully that a larger battle was at stake, one that was to be
waged through the perpetual struggle for employment that is considered the modus
operandi in the entertainment industry. In short, the NAACP’s 1999 criticisms of
television urged me to take a larger perspective on my own professional pursuits and, in
retrospect, their description of the television industry began to place a structure on the
feelings that were emerging for me as a result of my daily experiences as a Black actor
and writer. Thus, I began to take seriously what I had privately begun to know: that the
career of an actor and an aspiring writer was not frivolous, nor was it simply an
individual’s professional pursuit: it was an intellectual project with serious and deep
historic roots. In the fall of 1999 I began to chronicle the processes of being a cultural
worker who was also African American in the belief that those processes have something
to say to the world at large, something that was informed by but extended beyond the
specifics of the job I happened to hold in that moment.
Kwesi Mfume and the NAACP were specifically problematizing this fact:
twenty-six new television shows were scheduled to premiere that year and none included
a single African American or person of color in a leading or featured supporting role.
4
In
response to this statistic and in response to the lengthy history of the underrepresentation
and negative representation of African Americans in television and film, the NAACP

4
Hutchinson, Earl Ofari. “Activists Must See the Bigger Picture in NAACP-TV Agreement,”
agoodblackman.com (September 9, 2010). Accessed at
http://www.agoodblackman.com/hutch_activists.shtml. This is but one source to verify this information. It
is a widely known and accepted truth that the 1999 primetime television season initially resembled what
Hutchinson refers to as a television of an “ethnic cleansing”.
3

began an intense, focused, noisy, and prolonged campaign of protest. Mfume stated that
the NAACP intended to send “a strong, clear signal that the frontier of television must
reflect the multi-ethnic landscape of today’s modern society.”
5
He emphasized that the
NAACP expected this redress would take the form of both immediate actions and long
term plans to increase diversity within the television industry in front of and behind the
camera. This insistence on diversity behind the camera was an emerging agenda item for
civil rights advocates who monitored the entertainment industry; it signaled an important
shift in the NAACP’s historical thinking about representation. Representation does not
begin and end with the actor’s performance, the NAACP’s actions seemed to suggest, but
is directly connected to the processes (of production) that we, as consumers, do not see.
Image Breakers, Image Makers: Producing Race, America, and Television
focuses on the processes we do not see-- and so highlights the connections of cultural
production to racial formation and articulations of Blackness via an examination of the
relationship among Black representation, performance, and mass media.
6
Specifically, it
combines ethnography, cultural theory, media studies, and performance theory to center,
chronicle, and analyze the deeply veiled processes of cultural production in the space
known as the television “writing room.” I do this in order to highlight the ways in which
the processes of writing scripts and producing primetime dramatic television contributes
to, enables, reifies, highlights, privileges, or alternately debates, counters, constrains,
resists, or erases certain African American representations and images in a process of

5
Mfume, Kwesi. NAACP Presidential Address (New York City, NY, July 12, 1999).

4

racial formation.
7
I focus on television as a culture of production that centers “the
writing room” as a deeply performative space that is relatively under recognized for its
sheer power to shape television’s massive contribution to our popular culture and national
imaginary. Thus, as a hidden space, it remains untapped for its capacity to intervene in
the production of televisual images that carry national and global implications, images
that can simultaneously make and break our collective common sense about race.
In this chapter I define the job of the television writer and the central role that
“breaking stories” plays in the production of television. In so doing, I lay the foundation
for this project’s deployment of “image breaking” / “image making” as creative/political
processes and metaphorical concepts that both contribute to and disrupt racial formations.
I then analyze how a sense of my own self-reflexivity was central to this project’s
implementation, and I illustrate why the separation of theory and practice is, for me, a
futile and unproductive exercise. I then provide an overview of the NAACP’s history of
advocacy for racial representation in television to argue that their 1999 strategy-- which,
for the first time, included advocating for the employment and empowerment of African
American television writers-- was an important attempt to uncover the hidden, creative
discourses that regulate much of what we see on television.
Throughout the rest of this project, I follow in the tradition of interdisciplinary

7
I refer here to Omi and Winant’s notion of racial formation as “the process by which racial categories are
created, inhabited, transformed, and destroyed.” They theorize a social constructivist view of race that is
anti-essentialist and implicate both social structures and cultural representation as equally important to the
process of racial formation. Furthermore, they argue that “racial projects” do the ideological work of
linking structure to representation. They define a racial project as an “interpretation, representation, or
explanation of racial dynamics and an effort to reorganize and redistribute resources along particular racial
lines.” See Chapter 4 in Racial Formation in the United States, from the 1960s to the 1990s, 2
nd
edition,
(Routledge: New York, 1994).

5

media and performance studies scholars by moving performance out of the realm of the
traditional theatre. I explore the role of embodied performance within mass media
production while outlining a theory of television production as a laboratory for racial
performativity. I advance the artist-scholar as a necessary investigator of racial
performativity within popular culture and as a contributor to the theories and practices of
production studies, media studies, cultural studies, African American studies, theatre
studies, and, of course, performance studies. I further illustrate the institutional value of
the artist-scholar, as this formulation pushes against strict academic boundaries, in order
to make significant space for the crucial intellectual, artistic, and embodied knowledge
that can come specifically from an artist-scholar. In other words, if the consumer, as
Herman Gray posits, “watches race,” then the actor must first perform race. And before
that the writer must “author” race. I center the creative labor of television writers to
interrogate how the notion of agency by actors, and by extension, the audience is
constrained and already hegemonically encoded for them.
8
In short, if Gray wrote that
we are “watching race” from the subject position of the viewer, my work explores
“writing race”-- and the capacity to “right race”-- from the inside position of the cultural

8
My work here is an ethnographic elaboration and theoretical complication of what Stuart Hall argues in
his famous essay “Encoding, Decoding in the Television Discourse”. While Hall offers three primary
modes of audience interpretation of televisual texts: dominant readings, negotiated readings, and
oppositional readings, he makes clear that the audience’s ability to negotiate or oppose the dominant
meanings embedded by cultural producers has limitations, as people cannot be totally separated from the
their socio-cultural patterns and shared linguistic systems. Writers are people who bring their patterns and
linguistic systems to the production process, thus their work is a kind of encoding on top of encoding. This
“double encoding” ultimately serves to support (and make less permeable) the viewpoints of dominant
culture. This project illustrates how racial encoding is contested but happens anyway— and how
performance still manages to make space for intervention. I reveal throughout this project that the deep
level of encoding that occurs in the hidden process of the writer’s room almost ensures that Black
representation will produce critical frustration. In other words Black representation is fraught and embattled
because the production process is fraught and embattled. My aim is to show how and why it is difficult for
actors and audiences to ultimately resist the discursive frames presented through what we call “television
episodes”.
6

producer, specifically the television writer. Ultimately, this dissertation provides a critical
analysis by an artist-scholar endeavoring to reveal how television operates as an ever-
shifting racial project.
Image Breakers
The idea and act of “breaking”-- as in “breaking story”-- is central to the process
of producing television. It is, in its most simple form, the creative process that decides
what an episode of television will be about, what story it will tell, and how it will tell that
story. When a team of writers or sometimes, one very powerful writer–producer, has
decided on the major narrative arcs of a television episode’s story, that episode is then
said to be “broken.” So, on one level, breaking television is quite clearly, and without
much sense of irony, about “making” television. Television cannot be written, made, or
produced unless the story is broken. The writer’s ability to “break” a story (with a team
of writers or alone) is second only to the ability to write the script. In fact, some
television executive producers and showrunners
9
consider the ability to quickly break a
story as valuable and equal to the ability to write the script. Thus, much of the real work
in television and certainly much of the image making function of television occur before
actors receive a script and begin to perform. It even occurs before the writer writes the
script. It occurs in the “breaking” process-- and in the discourse about the breaking
process.

9
Showrunner is the industry term used and assigned to the chief writing, creative, and production position
on a television show. Showrunners tend to be writers who have risen through television writer ranks and
they are generally also executive producers. Basically, a showrunner is the industry term for the executive
producer. Executive producers, in terms of title, are the highest producer rank that a television writer or
show creator can hold. It is important to note, however, that not all executive producers are showrunners.
There are approximately 100 showrunners at any given time in all of American primetime television.
Separately and together, this elite group of writer-producers control much of the creative content of
American television. They are, culturally, an important group of people-- as they are ultimately responsible
for creating and delivering the great majority of our televised popular culture.
7

Breaking a story sounds violent because, in many ways, it is. Breaking a story is a
violent term for what can be or feel like an intellectually violent process: a group of
writers with mostly contrasting points of view wrestles with the challenge of choosing,
defining, and articulating a narrative that is deemed worthy of the show’s multimillion
dollar production budget. The narrative must please or be deemed as acceptable to fellow
writers, the executive producer, the studio, the network, and the audience (in that order).
The story must be a constructed narrative that can be told reasonably well in 42-45
minutes. It must make a satisfying stand-alone episode of television while also whetting
the appetite of the viewer to see the next episode. It must be a “producible” story that
stays on budget, on schedule, and is deliverable to the network within a tight and always
immovable deadline.
Focusing squarely on the point of mass media cultural production, Image
Breakers, Image Makers is concerned with how television writer-producers produce their
“content” and the images that result from their product. I examine the task of breaking
story as an improvisatory performance in order to decisively shift the discussion and
scholarship on media and Black representation. As an African American male television
writer I am, in most cases, an “other” in the room. As such, my presence undoubtedly
affects what happens in the room. Thus, my employment of critical performance
ethnography is especially productive in that it acknowledges Dwight Conquergood’s
insistence that ethnography is an embodied practice and that ethnographers are “co-
performers” (Conquergood, “Rethinking Ethnography,” 180, 187). I contend that my
identity as an artist and my methodologies as a scholar enable my research to access
deeply, analyze sharply, and conduct holistically an interdisciplinary, longitudinal study
8

about the hidden spaces within television and the select few who actually make
television.
Given ethnography’s privileging of the body as a site of knowing, I also, at times,
embrace a mode of performative writing in an attempt to collapse false critical/creative
boundaries, better harness my identities and positionalities as an artist-scholar, and to
allow the multiplicity of voices and bodies in this sphere of cultural production to
“speak.”
10
This gesture towards the performative in writing is especially necessary for a
project that centers the intense dialogic involved in writing television. Ultimately, this
project maps the landscape of television and delineates the creative processes of
television writers as a site of major importance within the highly contested realm of
cultural production. In so doing, Image Breakers, Image Makers addresses gaps left by
artifact centered critiques of representation
11
by highlighting and analyzing those
moments of creative work in mass media that contribute and attempt to disrupt the larger
processes of racial formation in American society. In my description of television writers
as “Image Breakers,” I not only name a central professional task that such writers

10
See Della Pollack’s essay “Performing Writing” in ed. Peggy Phelan and Jill Lane’s edited volume, The
Ends of Performance (New York: New York University Press), 73-103. I invoke performative writing, in
this context, as my attempt to allow the variety of performances I see as central to cultural production in the
television writers’ room to be heard in as unfiltered a manner as possible. Performative writing is an
important tool for the artist-scholar attempting to storm and bridge the racial and disciplinary barricades
that have been historically present in the academy and in the entertainment industry. It is an attempt to
speak to both sides of the hyphenated artist-scholar/scholar-artist-- while being dismissed or diminished by
neither. Given the post-structural interrogation on the instability of language, performative writing
acknowledges the difficulty of any one mode of literary expression to successfully capture interdisciplinary
scholarship of this nature and attempts to tie theoretical concepts and diction to material and embodied
realities by creating space for embodied knowledge to live as much as possible within this written text.
11
Seminal works such as Herman Gray’s Watching Race, Kristal Brent Zook’s Color by Fox, and Christine
Acham’s Revolution Televised are examples of scholarship on race and ethnicity in television and media
that necessarily take up the completed television program as the artifact or object of analysis. My work here
builds on their important work and makes an intervention by accessing the televisual artifact before it is
“created” in the first place.
9

perform, I also name the process, “breaking,” that has the capacity to disrupt, question,
and contest how Blackness is materialized through image into popular culture. Thus, in
locating the generative, progressive, and subversive potential of television writing in “the
break,” I am metaphorically indebted to Fred Moten’s scholarly work that locates the
radical, improvisatory aesthetic and potential of Blackness in performance and “in the
break.” While Moten takes Black music and auditory culture as his objects of analysis,
his description of “…the break, in the scene, in the music…” as a location that is “…at
once internal and interstitial…” works well as a description for the different kind of
breaking that happens in a writing room (Moten 2003, 85). “Breaking” in television
production is a deeply internal process that lives in a liminal, interstitial space. That
interstitial space lies between the real life experiences from which writers pull material,
and the performance of real life experiences as represented by television shows.
Breaking, in both senses of the word, is the process that takes place between the writer’s
“blank page” and the production work that materializes that no-longer-blank page. Thus,
in television production, “breaking story” is as necessary and as powerful as it is hidden.
My interest in researching television also emerges in conjunction with my
stubborn desire to situate my creative practice within an intellectual project that
exemplifies and is enhanced by the methodological rigor of the academy, but is not
entirely restricted by traditional notions of academic disciplines. Clearly, in one sense,
my interest in researching television is partly a self-reflexive consideration of my own
positionality and narrative. In another sense, my research has evolved from the difficulty
and complexity of self-reflexivity into an analysis of the importance of the quotidian to
the theoretical and of the importance of everyday performance in the machinery of
10

making mass media. Philip Auslander borrows from Jean Baudrillard’s conception of
simulacra and simulation when he speaks of contemporary live performance as a
“mediatized performance.” He posits that “live” performance is now perhaps, never just
“live.” It is a live performance that is partly constructed for mass distribution through
television and other media and is therefore, in actuality, based on technologies of
reproduction (4). I, in turn, borrow from Auslander’s critical skepticism regarding the
existence of the truly live performance within a thoroughly mediated 21
st
century cultural
sphere to interrogate whether the live “performances” that inform and structure the
writing processes in television production are themselves mediated by the very media that
the writers are in the process of creating?! Ultimately, I argue that this question of where
performances actually “begin,” “come alive,” or “materialize” is particularly relevant as
it relates to television writers, racial formation, and the struggle for Black representation.
Therefore, like the NAACP in 1999, I acknowledge the role Black actors play in
Black representation, but I focus primarily on Black writers and their impact on
representation. I analyze the discourse of the television writing room to make clear that
the creative battles (which largely determine what television viewers get to see in a one
hour timeframe) are largely battles over representation, battles that are waged through
individual and group performance. Through this examination, I question the origins of
this racialized programming and delineate possible interventions. I choose television and
a theatrically and theoretically inflected notion of performance as my site for this
intellectual work, because as Dorinne Kondo states “…as many people on the margins in
one way or another know from experience, the world of representation and of aesthetics
is a site of struggle, where identities are created, where subjects are interpellated, where
11

hegemonies are challenged. And taking seriously that pleasure, that life-giving capacity
of aesthetics, performance, bodies, and the sensuous is, within our regime of power and
truth, an indisputably political act” (1997, 4).
I argue, therefore, for the continuing significance of the NAACP’s renewed
interest in the television industry. The NAACP’s declaration should be viewed as a
performative tactic meant to address the quality of Black images and the inequality of
Hollywood industrial practices. Their declaration should also be seen as a political tactic
that began to address the question of its own relevance and effectiveness as a civil rights
organization in the 21
st
century. As a result of their 1999 clarion call, I argue for the
significance of the years 1999-2009 in the television industry as a theoretical, historical,
and practical framework in which to examine the reoccurrence of the Black
representation question-- that is, what is the political importance of Black representation
in popular culture to “everyday” Black people?
12
Taking the NAACP’s actions in 1999 as
a prompt for further investigation, it becomes clear that in order to produce or extract
more progressive images from the television industry, more images of what I am calling a
non-comic Blackness,
13
we must consider both the performance of politics-- as it occurs

12
Acclaimed sociologist and television scholar Herman Gray problematizes the continued focus of scholars
and media activists on the question or issue of Black representation as a means to political efficacy. Gray
even goes on to argue that in some respects, African Americans are over represented on television when
compared to their population percentages in the U.S. Gray makes clear that he is anxious to move beyond
simple questions of “representation.” For more see the Introduction in Cultural Moves: African Americans
and the Politics of Representation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005).
13
This term, non-comic Blackness, might reductively be referred to as the opposite of television’s comic
Black stereotypes. I am talking about the historic challenge in television of producing television dramas
that feature African Americans in lead roles about life and Black life. I don’t call this dramatic Blackness
because the connotations of the term are too imprecise and open to being misunderstood. Furthermore, I
refer to non-comic Blackness as a nod to Homi Bhabha’s articulation of the colonialist’s tendency towards
“comic turn” in the representation of those they have oppressed and colonized. See Homi K. Bhabha’s The
Location of Culture (London, New York: Routledge, 1994).
12

outside the industry-- and the improvised politics of performance as it occurs within the
industry.
Notes on Performance and Performativity
This project critically deploys performance and performativity in a number of
ways that highlight their theoretical utility in media and production studies. Performance
studies is a field whose language and concepts emerged from a fusion of anthropology
and theatre, traveled broadly within academe, and where disagreement about the exact
meaning of the field’s terminology is infamously a part of the field itself.
14
Schechner,
one of the founders of field, describes performance studies as a “sidewinder snake…
wherever this beautiful snake points, it’s not going there.”
15
Indeed, the fact that
performance proves resistant to being linguistically defined is precisely the point of
performance. It is an embodied way of knowing, researching, and embracing that which
the written word struggles to capture. Performance also acknowledges and creates social
space for the liminal and the marginalized. And it creates political space for the
marginalized, for those persons whom the written word does not privilege in society’s
knowledge-power formations. As such, a written definition of performance must
necessarily allow for the “slippages” that Judith Butler argues emerges “from the
enforced repetition and citation of social performance” (Butler, in Carlson, 172). I
contend in this dissertation that since these slippages are performative, they also do what

14
See Richard Schechner’s Performance Studies: An Introduction (New York: Routledge, 2002); Marvin
Carlson’s Performance: A Critical Introduction, 2
nd
Edition (New York: Routledge, 2004); and The
Performance Studies Reader, 2
nd
edition, ed. Henry Bial (New York: Routledge, 2007).
15
See Schechner’s essay “What is Performance Studies Anyway?” in Peggy Phelan and Jill Lane’s The
Ends of Performance (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 357.
13

performance can accomplish -- which is “to undermine tradition and to provide a site for
the exploration on fresh and alternative structures and patterns of behavior” (Carlson 15).
While I insist that the very slipperiness and elision of performance is what makes
it especially suitable to an intellectual project on the production of a slippery Blackness, I
have aimed for clarity and precision in how I deploy terms. Generally, I take seriously the
epigrammatic notion within performance studies that performance is not about “faking,”
but instead about “making” (Turner, 1982). But, to enumerate, I also use performance in
the following multiple ways:
1) For its more traditional meaning that evokes the theatre, “acting,” the theatricality
of the framed event, or as Schechner famously described, as “twice behaved
behavior” (2002, 22).

2) In relation to Schechner’s alternative description of performance as “restored
behavior.” This is especially the case in relation to the mass media production
process. The concept of “restored behavior” holds particular resonance for Image
Breakers, Image Makers. Restored behavior is behavior that is somehow stored,
archived, and therefore already in existence. To perform or to re-store a behavior
re-constructs that behavior or what is signified by that behavior into existence by
tapping into an already existing cultural and social storehouse. This project
identifies television production and the television writing room as a deeply
performative space that functions as a cultural archive that helps to structure
society in racially hegemonic ways. It is a cultural storehouse where performance
reigns supreme as the method by which discursive frames that restore common
sense notions of race and gender are built. Marvin Carlson writes:
“performance… like all restored behavior simultaneously reinscribes and resists
pre-existing models…” (173). This dissertation takes us inside television’s hidden
storehouse to see how this important cultural work is done and how its
racialization is contested, or not.

3) I also use performance for its relationship to Goffman’s notion of backstage
presentation and front stage presentation. If Black actors on television are the
front stage representation, then what I am mostly interested in here is the
backstage representations of writers, who script and attempt to make possible or
impossible what we experience “in front.” I also use performance for its
relationship to Goffman’s concept of impression management.
16
In some ways I

16
See Erving Goffman’s The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York: Anchor Books, 1959).
14

am illustrating that the discourse in television production and in television writing
rooms are hidden discourses and spaces that attempt, through stereotype, to
stereo-manage the impression of the minoritized subject through image and
narrative. Closely related to this use of performance is the notion that the media
mediate society. That is, television “performs an idea of society” to society in
such a way that society can continue to function in a hierarchical manner that is
fundamentally based on an impression of an abject Blackness.

4) I also use performance and performativity in a way that is closely related to Anne
Cheng’s deployment of the terms. That is, I read performance and performativity
with each other and against each other in order to nuance their relationship and
ask the important question of whether performance can ever disturb
performativity. In this usage, performativity refers to a type of racialized and
citable norm with which minoritized subjects are compelled to engage. I suggest
that how that engagement manifests in individuals is not wholly pre-determined,
only that the television writing process produces images and narratives that play a
major role in dictating that an engagement must take place with those narratives
and images.

With the above delineations of performance and with Cheng’s question in mind, the way
that I use performance in this project is unprecedented, in that I locate the television
writing room as a space that, through performance, actually builds or enables a
compulsory aspect of racial performativity.
It does so, I contend, because it builds and enables images. I am positing that a
compulsory racial performativity gains more power to compel through the construction,
distribution, and proliferation of televisual images of Blackness that reinforce social
norms. I locate the citational and reiterative nature of performativity in popular culture
and specifically, in the images and narratives that emanate from much of primetime
television. Therefore, the television writing room that constructs the narratives from
which racialized images emerge and are put on national and global display can also be
said to materialize the citationality of performativity. In short, during my research for this
project I eventually formulated a working definition of racial performativity that, for me,
equates performativity with the construction of citable norms through televisual images.
15

It is this notion of performativity that I have in mind when I reference the writing room as
an important embodiment of performativity.
This project argues that the performances within television production serve at
least two purposes: the performances create images that give what I call an imagistic
materiality, or a materiality that manifests through images, to our society’s floating
racialized tropes. Those same performances also contain the potential to subvert the
racialized tropes that television production makes visible. We see such tense, frictional
performances in the writers’ room and in the writer-to writer, producer-to-producer, and
producer-to-network battles around the practitioner’s attempt to produce a more
progressive version of blackness. This effort to produce a non-comic blackness was
fraught and at times ambiguously defined. Still, I formulated the term non-comic
blackness as a way to describe the efforts by the television practitioners I observed to
push against the overabundance of television’s comedic genres to represent and
circumscribe blackness. While I want to be careful not to dismiss the ability of comedy to
“speak truth to power,” I illustrate throughout this dissertation that the desire to create
and propagate a non-comic blackness was an important goal of many African American
television writers.
As a term, non-comic blackness also acknowledges Homi Bhabha’s work on the
historical mechanisms used to maintain colonial power. Bhabha theorizes the “comic
turn” of colonialism, in which he describes the tendency of the colonized to be
represented by their colonizers in primitive, deficient, exaggerated, and comic terms that
16

help secure the “nobility” of the colonial project.
17
While these efforts to create a non-
comic blackness might at first be seen as attempts to replace one problematic notion of
authentic blackness with another, they might also be nuanced and described as sincere
attempts by Black television writers to counteract the deeply unbalanced and comedic
circumscription of blackness. I do not consider the writers’ desire to create a non-comic
blackness as an attempt to posit one false claim to a “black authentic” with another.
18

Instead, this project makes clear that for practitioners the discursive production of
blackness in television and popular culture is not academically passé. For practitioners,
the question of black representation and the frustration of producing a progressive black
representation is alive and worth the fight.
Returning to the friction between performance and performativity and in an effort
to establish a clear critical arc upon which I build this work, I posit Black actors and their
attempts at agency as performance. In contrast, I see the writers’ room, the writer, and the
television script as a kind of performativity that coerces and constrains representation.
Inevitably, my “answers” to the question of racial performance and racial performativity
in television production produce more questions. In fact, the chapters that follow can be
read as a tug of war where the battle over blackness takes place in a field of cultural
production that is facilitated and saturated by performance. In many cases it will appear
that I am building towards the conclusion that performance cannot disturb performativity,
but that is not the case. Through ethnography, I index and nuance the complexity and

17
See Homi Bhabha’s chapter “Of Mimicry and Man” in The Location of Culture, 2
nd
edition (New York:
Routledge, 1994). Also see Rebecca Schneider’s essay in Acting Out: Feminist Performances, ed. by
Lynda Hart and Peggy Phelan (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993).
18
See John L. Jackson Jr.’s Real Black: Adventures in Racial Sincerity (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2005).
17

difficulty of breaking performativity’s formative hold on the capacity of (Black)
performance to speak in new ways that disrupt racial hegemony. But I also argue that it is
(Black) performance itself that contains both the power to construct performativity as
well as the power to help pierce performativity’s formative grasp on the national
imaginary and on our own sense of subject formation.
The NAACP has historically understood that the entertainment industry
represents an important nexus of confluences (performance, media, image, and
materiality) that have significant consequences for African Americans as a people and for
all Americans as a society. Thus, their 1999 advocacy for the employment of more Black
cultural producers (actors and writers specifically) resonated far beyond the industry
itself. Operating from a core belief that how a people are represented is how they are
treated, the NAACP’s attention to the role of the Black television writer caught my
attention-- and validated my instincts that in moving from acting to television writing I
had stepped into a hidden arena of meaning making. This arena was powerful because it
was hidden-- and because it was hidden, it had remained mostly unexamined.
My argument, at its core, is an artist-centered complication of Stuart Hall’s classic
description of television as an encoding/decoding process. I argue that television is
racially encoded in the television writing room during the work of “breaking” a story and
“materialized” for distribution in the TV production process to such a degree that much
of the decoding work that an audience will do upon reception (especially around racial
representations) has already been “performed” for them. Furthermore, the images that
television produces quite clearly aid in the ability for gendered and racialized tropes to be
“cited” by those subjects it names. In other words, in a mediated society the citationality
18

of televisual images assist in the construction of identity. Therefore, I am arguing that the
work (and performances) that takes place in television writing rooms -- which builds the
images that television eventually produces-- is a site that enables performativity. I argue
that the writing room functions performatively and enables performativity. It is a site that
cites. The discourse in that room establishes or at least attempts to establish the discursive
frame through which decoding eventually takes place. Therefore the degree of agency of
television’s cultural performers, producers, and consumers has often already been
compromised and attenuated because of the writing room’s hidden performance.
Framing an Ethnography on Television: Methods, Literature, Questions
My ethnographic fieldwork consisted of over three years of formal participant-
observation as a television writer in Los Angeles’ entertainment industry at various points
during the years 2005-2009. I have also attended and participated in many entertainment
industry events that help to situate the inner workings of television within its larger
industrial context. These include meetings about the 2007-2008 Writers Guild strike and
walking or prepping strike picket lines, attending industry seminars and networking
events, television arts academy presentations and panels, industry award shows, film and
television development meetings, and television writers of color support group gatherings
where masks of “political correctness” are abandoned.
While research data derived from outside of my years of “official” participant-
observation serves as a general background, my dissertation centers the longitudinal
study of the production of a television drama in 2005. But I delineate 1999 as pivotal in
my research, as it is the year the NAACP publicly renewed its commitment to media
advocacy. Not coincidentally, this was the year that I began searching for a way to
19

formalize my personal observations as a cultural worker and producer into an
interdisciplinary critical and scholarly project.
My performance studies research embraces performance and performativity as a
methodology and critical lens for the analysis of industry (as socio-politico spaces).
Performance studies also allows for the identification and analysis of the negotiation of
racial and gendered identities in television’s cultural production process. Employing
cultural and performance theory enhance my interrogation of the television making
process as a kind of powerful, “hidden in plain sight” performative space. It reveals the
stakes of individual and group performance as intensely high, because the results of
negotiated and embattled performances in these elite, veiled spaces are incorporated and
transformed into narrative and image and then globally disseminated. As such, the
performances within television production have global consequences for racial imagery
and set the stage for certain citations of norms (performativity) to find mass media
circulation. In highlighting the culture of production in television as a performance based
culture, I map an entry point onto the canvas of our popular culture in order to illustrate
how the television writing room and television production process are ways that race
“gets” into popular culture?
I frame the debates and critical conversations around race and television as a
project in critical television and media studies, African American studies-- and somewhat
more unusually-- as a project in performance studies. Of course, the scholarship within
African American Studies on Black popular culture is vast, as is that in Television
Studies (e.g., Barnouw 1990; Newcomb & Hirsch; Williams 1973; Spiegel 1992, 2001,
2004; V. Johnson 2008; Mittell 2009; Havens 2002; Gitlin 1979, 1994; Edgerton 2007;
20

Seiter 1999). The study of television and Blackness pulls from each of these arenas to
form its own field. There are a number of individual chapters and some dissertations on
television and race, but often they are focused on special events, news programs, or
public television (Classen 2004; Entman & Rojecki 2001; Dornfeld 1998; Torres 2003;
Hunt 1999; Brent Zook 2008). Though many scholars recognize the significance of the
intersections of television and race, the actual number of books of scholarship that deal
directly with its intersections via black representation in primetime television is
surprisingly finite (Torres 1998; Hunt 2005; Gray 1995, 2005; Acham 2005; Smith-
Shomade 2002, 2007; Means Coleman 2001, 2002; Haggins 2007, Carpio 2008; Brent
Zook 1999).
I have divided the current debates within these and other closely related works
into three broad areas. The first is the classification of the Black presence in television as
historically “positive” or “negative” and the issue of Black agency and resistance in
television as a response to the presumed “negativity” of the vast majority of images.
From trade presses the list is led by J. Fred MacDonald’s Blacks in White TV: Afro-
Americans in Television since 1948 (1983) and Donald Bogle’s Primetime Blues: African
Americans in Network Television (2001), which together do the descriptive work of
cataloguing the Black presence in American television from its experimental beginnings
to the “surge” in Black representations in the late twentieth century. MacDonald’s is an
important, foundational work in its initial framing of the discourse of blackness and
television, but it is also a limited frame in that he bookends his treatise with two chapters
that are largely dismissive of television’s Black images (especially in the 1970s) as
simply “negative.” He carves out a thirteen year period, 1957-1970, in a more positive
21

vein, in which he considers the important role that television and Black imagery plays
during the Civil Rights movement. MacDonald-- and to a somewhat lesser extent Bogle’s
biographical treatment of working Black actors in television history-- clearly filters the
analysis of Blackness in television through a racial dichotomy of positive/negative
imagery, engaging their critique through an unacknowledged lens of uplift ideology.
However, historian Kevin Gaines (1996) complicates the African–American notion of
racial uplift by challenging it as complicit with a white, patriarchal, upper middle class
view of the world that necessarily invokes culture as a litmus test, assigning large swaths
of African Americans to a lower class status that is deemed unsuitable for participating in
the advancement of “the race.” Gaines sees unchecked uplift ideology as a form of
“unconscious internalized racism” that blames the victim for the unconscious expression
of their conditions (3). Yet, as I illustrate throughout, the idea and practice of Black uplift
is very much alive in the production of television by many Black cultural producers. I
show, however, that it is a complicated notion of uplift, often imbued with a sense of the
writer-producers’ reflexive critique. In other words, uplift is not embraced by all African
American television-writer-producers in the uncritical (“all Black people are kings and
queens!”) manner that some academics occasionally generalize such efforts.
Since J. Fred MacDonald perhaps the most prominent contemporary scholar on
race and television is Herman Gray. Gray invokes fellow media scholar Darnell Hunt
when he asks in the tenth anniversary 2005 reissue of his Watching Race: Television and
the Struggle for Blackness (1995), “How do we approach television’s role in the
representation of blackness, in the production of a racial common sense, or what Darnell
Hunt calls ‘raced ways of seeing,’ and do so in a way that enables us to actually see
22

television (Hunt 1999, 2005)”? I ask what processes are we actually looking at when we
see blackness or watch race/d bodies on television. What can we learn about
representation and racial formation from a mapping and analysis of those processes?
Gray and Hunt have each written separately that in the late 1990s, Blackness was
actually overrepresented and that the number of Black television characters outpaced the
percentage of the nation’s African American population (Hunt 2005). While I question
the strict use of quantitative methods to produce this argument for overrepresentation-- it
ignores Black audience percentages in the composition of the total television audience
and the corresponding economic impact of those percentages on television’s advertiser-
driven business model-- I embrace Gray’s question in his more recent Cultural Moves:
African Americans and the Politics of Representation. He asks why tensions continue
around black representation in network television. Though Gray pinpoints the tenuous
nature of this once abundant Black representation in his chapter “Where Have All the
Black Shows Gone?”, his initial question on the persistence of tension around televisual
Blackness suggests that quality of representation matters as much as quantity. Gray
theorizes that blackness in network television bounces between periodic cycles of
visibility and invisibility, which thereby produces this recurring question about the
tension around black representation. While I understand that Gray posits this question as
a way to challenge the investment in representation as the way to achieve African
American membership in national culture, this tension around black representation
pushes me in a different direction. I ask this same question to better understand the
creation of black representation in television in the first place. For me, it suggests an
investigation into televised narrative and popular culture as a kind of “fruit of the poison
23

tree,” where the Black representation that clearly leaves many scholars, artists, and
activists dissatisfied demands that we dig deeper into the process before “the artifact” is
abandoned as out of date in a post-network age.
Cultural and media scholar Christine Acham continues Gray’s theoretical
complication of the place, purpose, and analysis of Black television by drawing on the
work of Gaines and W.E.B. Dubois’ theorization of double consciousness. She
problematizes the work of MacDonald, Bogle, and television critics who write from the
positive/negative binary of representation. Acham argues that to critique Black television
from this binary is to erase the agency and resistive efforts, hidden and otherwise, of
Black actors to shape their representation. In re-reading black televisual performances of
the 1970s-- an era roundly dismissed by MacDonald as “new age minstrelsy”-- as a site
of struggle for Black power, Acham succeeds in looking to other sites within Black
popular culture for ways that performers sought to participate in or counter the
representation of their Blackness which primarily produced and written by white men.
Where I differ with Acham is in my focus on the Black television writer as
producer in order to trouble the investment in the Black actor’s abilities to assert agency.
I seek to provide an answer to the implicit question that is raised by the fact that publicly
political actors such as Diahann Carroll (of “Julia” fame) and Esther Rolle (of “Good
Times”) turned to other means-- magazine articles and interviews chief among them-- to
create intertextual interventions in their own 1960s/1970s sitcom screen personas. In
other words, why did these performers need to turn outside their television shows to
counter their cultural images? How do we then square their interventions and others like
it with scholarship that argues for agency and resistance on the part of Black performers
24

through their performance? While I acknowledge the performer’s capacity for such
image re-shaping within their performances, I still contend there is a major scholarly and
artistic piece missing. For this reason I focus on the veiled process of script creation as a
key pre-performance moment where racial meaning enters into filmed and televised texts
and becomes an indelible part of Black representation.
Kristal Brent Zook (1999) considers previously dismissed Black television
sitcoms from the early 1990s on NBC and FOX. She argues for the acknowledgement of
the presence of an abundance of serious themes: intra racial color caste systems, class,
Black Nationalism, gender, sexuality, and social movement politics. She interviews
African American writers and producers in an attempt to give voice to their struggles in
presenting multi-faceted Blackness on the television screen. Zook acknowledges this
historical first in cultural production, the presence of a community of mass media cultural
producers working to help shape “Black stories” as American stories.
19
The challenge
however, as Zook makes clear, is that Black writer-producers strained against the strict
framework of Black comedies in an attempt to tell stories that took seriously the
challenge of contemporary Black life. The dominant Black television comedy genre has
been notoriously resistant to extended portrayals of a non-comic Blackness. Where shows
such as South Central and Roc attempted to rework the comedic platform to allow for
more unapologetically “serious” stories about Black urban life, the shows were often
problematized in the trade media as ratings underachievers more interested in sending

19
Cultural workers (writers, producers, filmmakers, actors) have also contributed within their own
professional spheres to the questions around television and Blackness. Relevant self-reflexive or
historically analytic works include: Spike Lee’s film, Bamboozled (2001), DVD; Reggie Rock
Blythewood’s HBO film Dancing in September (2000), DVD; Documentaries such as Marlon Riggs’
documentaries Color Adjustment (1992) and Ethnic Notions (1986) and the independent documentary TV in
Black: The First Fifty Years (2004), DVD.
25

messages than creating “successful” entertainment. Though this project is an ethnography
about an attempt to produce an African American drama series, I contend that some of
television’s black comedic tropes eventually traveled from the comedy genre to this
series. This evolution suggests that those comedic tropes had become so dominant that
they coalesced into a foundational televisual norm that shaped to some degree all Black
images on television, no matter the genre of show.
The second area of literature in which I situate my work deals with the critical
media studies analyses called “Production Studies” or “Media Industries Studies.” As
one of the first studies from an artist-scholar to critically examine Black representation
and racial formation as endemic to the television production process, this project offers a
significant intervention in these fields. The most central contemporary texts of production
studies are John Caldwell’s Production Culture: Industrial Reflexivity and Critical
Practice in Film and Television, 2008 and Production Studies: Cultural Studies of Media
Industries by Vicki Mayer, Miranda Banks, and John Caldwell, 2009. A few earlier
foundational texts helped to establish what we now call production and media industry
studies and help us to identify its theoretical legacies as a project with cultural studies
(Rosten 1942; Powdermaker 1950). In fact, Jennifer Holt makes the argument that the
first production studies project is the famous essay by Horkheimer & Adorno, “The
Culture Industry” (2009). Thus, this project also reads the culture of production in
television through the work of cultural theorists who primarily emanate from the post-
structuralist tradition (Stuart Hall 1978, 1996, 1997, 1998, 2005; Raymond Williams
1978, 1990; Bourdieu 1984, 1993; Barthes 1967, 1972, 1977; Deleuze 1991; Foucault
1972, 1978, 1980; Althusser 1971; Gramsci, 2000, Butler 1993, 1999; and Hortense
26

Spillers 2003). However, the most recent shift in the new production studies, of which
this dissertation is an example, is the ethnographic turn that aspires to critically write the
media industry from the inside out. This dissertation takes this turn seriously and attempts
to reach deeply into a realm and a process that have not often been critically examined by
scholars or artist-scholars.
While the consideration of television beyond the primetime era of the big three
networks is important work, I question the term “post-network” within television studies
and its connotation that television as a medium in transition is no longer the prime site for
nation building and imaginary community. Much of what is described as “post-network”
could be broadened to argue that mass media’s increased vertical integration renders
networks and many cable networks as iterations of a fragmented but still unified and
single corporate identity. In other words, if you’re watching Disney Channel, ESPN,
ESPN 2, or the Lifetime channel, you’re still watching ABC; if you’re watching USA
network, Bravo, SyFy, or MSNBC, you’re watching NBC; if you’re watching Showtime,
the CW, The Movie Channel, you’re watching CBS. I contend that what is called post-
network can alternatively be described as the era of the uni-network. At the same time I
heed the call that some scholars have made, particularly where Blackness is concerned,
that cable television may offer opportunities for intervention, particularly for progressive
images and narratives that may be currently untenable from a business perspective on the
traditional broadcast networks.
The third area of literature is performance studies scholarship that takes up modes
of resistance, embodied knowledge, and the performativity of identity as constitutive of
the “subject,” as well as that which constrains through the iteration and citation of norms
27

(Butler 1990, 1993; Phelan 1993; Sedgwick 1995; Cheng 2001; Munoz 1999; Austin
1976; J. L. Jackson 2003, 2005; Brooks 2006, E. Patrick Johnson 2003; Schechner 2002;
Taylor 2003; Kondo 1990, 1999; Moten 2003, 2008; and Hartman 1997). This body of
scholarship allows me to deal with the question of the theoretical limits of representation.
Saidiya Hartman’s Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth
Century America is key to my thinking here. She complicates Black performance as
inextricable from power-- and as almost always compromised. Her interrogation of Black
performance culture casts it as a foundational site where terms like “slavery” and
“freedom” began to lose their clear distinctions. Similarly, I look to television writing
instead of television actors to examine the roots of media as a kind of materialized social
norm, a performativity that constrains the performances-- and the agency-- of Black
actors.
Anne Cheng’s articulation of performativity in popular culture generally, and in
theatre, film, and literature more specifically, inform and inspire my deployment of
performativity in this project. Cheng asks “…can performance ever disturb
performativity?” Likewise, I ask: “Can the actor-- who scholars often imbue with the
powers of agency-- ever disturb the performativity of the already written script? Is it
possible for the actor, and in many respects the audience, to negate what has already been
performed and written in the television writer’s room? If performance, as Schechner
defines it, is “twice behaved behavior,” how does the “thrice behaved behavior”
20
of

20
For me, the “twice behaved behavior” of performance flirts with becoming performativity or what I
might refer to as “thrice behaved behavior.” “Thrice behaved behavior” is first, that which is already
present and unquestionably noticed or mined from society by the television writer-producer; second, it is
this (usually problematic) behavior that is then pitched and incorporated into a television script as part of a
narrative; and three, is when that behavior is re-realized as a performance by actors, a performance that is
then globally disseminated to its consuming audience.
28

television programs help embed our societal narratives to the extent that these television
performances tip over into or become performativity? When do performances on
television morph from societal escapism to a societal force? In other words, how does
television materialize or “dress up” the norms of performativity?
Dorinne Kondo’s book length works are also central for their interrogation and
theorization of race in the realms of the aesthetic (fashion and theatre) and the workplace.
Kondo analyzes these spaces as vibrant arenas where the processes of racialized and
gendered subject formation are deeply embedded. In one sense my work builds on what
Kondo highlights in her book length work. Focusing on the television industry allows me
to perform a scholarly analysis of a single realm that incorporates both the aesthetic and
the workplace in order to unpack how elite and private spaces within media facilitate
subject formations that align with normative notions of Blackness.
Of course, one reason I focus on Blackness is because I am African American. I
also focus on Blackness because television, as a primarily visual medium, is hugely
invested in practices of visible representation. It is not surprising then that this logic of
the visible, which operates most prominently in front of the camera, has migrated to and
organizes industry practices behind the camera. This is one reason why I wish to further
complicate certain arguments made by Herman Gray and Peggy Phelan. Gray and Phelan
trouble notions that visibility and representation are potent avenues to equality, social
justice, and political power. Gray writes:
“My chief assertion is that American commercial television networks are no
longer the primary sites of mass-mediated theater and performance of the nation,
where national identity—the sense of belonging to and connecting with the
nation—is produced, secured, and maintained through crafting homogeneity from
difference. While networks certainly remain vitally important, I nonetheless argue
29

against their continued primacy as a site of cultural struggle for representation and
inclusion” (Gray 2005, 6).

And Phelan describes her seminal Unmarked: The Politics of Performance as:
“[an examination] of the implicit assumptions about the connections between
representational visibility and political power which have been a dominant force
in cultural theory in the last ten years… if representational visibility equals power,
then almost-naked young white women should be running Western culture…”
(Phelan 1993, 1, 10).

In my view, Gray and Phelan are right to question this investment in representation and
they are right to question what I call the frustration with (black) representation. However,
I also heed the important question that Phelan poses soon thereafter in her text. She asks,
“What is required in order to advance a more ethically and psychically rewarding
representational field, one that sidesteps the usual traps of visibility: surveillance,
fetishism, voyeurism, and sometimes death?”
21
Therefore, in order to address such a
question, I caution against premature dismissal of the investment in representation-- if
only because that stance seems to abandon, or at least diminish, television’s primary
mode of communication (the visible) and the struggle over television’s role in, as Alan
Nadel writes, “solidifying what we would call a national imaginary, that is, a common set
of images and narratives that people shared when they thought of America as a nation
and of themselves as its citizens.”
22

Ultimately, I interrogate the production of culture by mapping the culture of
production, and thus contribute to media and production studies by harnessing my

21
Phelan, Peggy. Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (New York: Routledge, 1993), 10.
22
For more, see Chapter 1, “Black Bodies, White Space, and a Televisual Nation” in Nadel’s Television in
Black-and-White America: Race and National Identity (Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press, 2005).

30

professional creative identity as a television writer-producer to my research as an
American Studies scholar. This kind of work has been notoriously difficult to engage due
to the structural barriers of industry access, academic suspicion of multi- and inter-
disciplinary positionalities in the arts and humanities, and the lack of legibility that often
exists between the arts and the academy. Thus, in taking on this work, I lay out the
central role of cultural workers as a discursive process of prime importance to
understanding television making as a process of racial and political formation. I argue
that this discourse and these performances are crucial to beginning to fully understand
media as a process, the contested nature of race and Black representation, and what we as
consumers and citizens are actually seeing when we watch television in the post/uni-
network age. Using my unique position in industry and academe to complete this work, I,
attempt to clear a legitimate critical space for artist-scholars to ask whether we can really
talk about race and Blackness or begin to inscribe the limits of representation as a means
to agency and empowerment when, thus far, we have not enriched cultural studies by
fully centering the cultural producer and the process of cultural production.
When and Where I Enter: Television Writing as Activism
Often shouted from the congregations of many Black churches in America is the
encouraging plea to the preacher or storyteller of the moment to “make it plain.” So I
begin with the root of my intellectual passions and with my own entrance into this
intellectual and cultural work as a practitioner and as a scholar. My journey to
researching television began with working in television as a writer, which in turn began
with working in the theatre as an actor. These four terms: television, writer, theatre,
actor are highlighted here as specific iterations of the more comprehensive terms popular
31

culture, media, and producer. I have found, however, that an effective way to unpack the
meaning of these terms-- in research and in life, in theory and in practice-- can be
uniquely illustrated through the centering of the notion of performance.
Performance-- as theory, methodology, and aesthetic and political strategies-- is
an important common ground in a critical discussion of television, cultural production,
and race. Given that I was born and raised on Chicago’s South Side during the latter
quarter of the twentieth century my need for a strong and transcendent imagination is not
surprising. In my adolescent attempts to re-imagine and transcend the socio-economic
boundaries of Chicago’s racially limiting and over-determined world, an active
imagination-- or a vision of hope and survival that manifested itself in a kind of daily
intellectual and kinesthetic performance of the possibilities that lay beyond what I could
see in my everyday life, a performance of hope, if you will-- was a lifeline. In other
words, performance became the earliest and most consistent of my artistic and life
methodologies before I understood what a research method might mean. It was, before I
fully realized it, my way of beginning to lessen the rigid sting of a poor to working class
black childhood in Chicago-- while at the same time attempting in some way to soften the
polarity of that city’s deeply racialized history. It is no surprise, then, that I became
infused with and then dependent on the possibilities of creative self-definition that the
empty space of theatre as a performance art form and cultural survival tool allows.
23
In

23
Several scholars of African American theatre and performance speak to its use and power in “self-
making” for marginalized populations. I am thinking here specifically of Daphne Brooks’ Bodies in
Dissent (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), wherein she discusses nineteenth and early twentieth
century performers who “drew from the condition of social, political, and cultural alterity to resist,
complicate, or undo narrow racial, gender, sexual, and class categories in American and British cultures”
(3). She coins a term, “Afro-alienation acts” to describe how the “state of alterity converts into cultural
expressiveness and a strategy of cultural performance.” For me, one of the simple ways this performance of
vision and hope took place was in the fashion choices that permeated my Chicago high school. Considered
32

this case, performance gave me the audacity of vision, a claim to hope.
It is also significant that my first sustained exposure to theatrical performance
began with spiritual pageants and plays in the Black church.
24
Indeed, my first solo
performance as a child was a nervous recitation of James Weldon Johnson’s “The
Creation.” Thus, without my knowing it at the time, theatre and the subsequent creative
work to which it led, was informed for me by a setting that combined the history of racial
migration and politics of urban socio-economic subjugation (Chicago) with the politics
and spirituality of progress and racial uplift (the Black church). By the time my local,
embodied work as an actor in the theatre evolved into my globally distributed and
mediated work as a prime time television writer/producer, something other than a
strategic career move was at stake. For me, this evolution marked a conscious step into
the struggle over the power of the images that emerge from the entertainment and arts
industries and their representation of African Americans. Somewhere along this path I
began to realize what my childhood self instinctively grasped: the importance of the act

one of the best high public high schools in the state and country, my urban high school’s economically
diverse population had a reputation, especially among the African American population, of “dressing up” to
attend school. I now understand this culture as more than the trend following mindset of the typical
teenager. It was a daily performance exercise in imaging where we were “going” (in an upwardly mobile
sense) and a transcendence of the poor to working class realities of most of our lives. Dress and fashion is
often more than “superficial” for people of color.
24
I acknowledge that when I speak of the Black church here I am using broad terminology to reference a
complex theological, cultural, and political space. I refer to it here to help identify the space that served as
the beginning of my entry into more formal, theatre-related performance. The fact that my entry into theatre
related performance is so closely tied to the political currents of the Black American church is an important
way to understand how performance works to spiritualize and politicize even its youngest congregants.
Whether that process hinders on the idea of change and the transcendence of material realities on Earth to
the spiritual possibilities in heaven, performance is central to the expression of these ideas. This was
particularly true in my case as I primarily grew up as part of a legacy generation that was born after the
work of prophetic radicals in the black church such as Martin Luther King, Jr. and Adam Clayton Powell.
Even more specifically, I grew up in the grassroots revivalist tradition of the Pentecostal denomination-- a
denomination known for harnessing cultural energy and performance rather than formal theological
training as its primary means of outreach and communication.
33

of creation and the relevance of mining the marginalized journey of the African
American cultural worker in mass media for its wider intellectual, artistic, and political
implications.
My interest in researching television and notions of performance in television as it
relates to racial formations also, obliquely, had something to do with “crack”-- as in crack
cocaine. The entertainment industry, during the late twentieth and early twentieth first
centuries, seemed fixated on seeking African American actors to cast, embody, and
perform characters associated with the use of the street drug known as crack cocaine.
25

The following three examples allow me to illustrate the power of performance and its
relationship to the politics of representation. The first two incidents revolve around
actors, the third around Black television writers.
In the mid-late 1990’s I was fortunate to have found steady professional work as a
young actor in the theatre. Seeking to take advantage of the fact that I was a cast member
of a New York show that looked to be settling in for a multi-year commercial
engagement, I used an extended leave of absence in order to travel to Los Angeles.
26
My
goal was to find more work in the television industry. To do this I determined that I
needed to spend some time establishing a relationship and getting acquainted with my

25
I am attempting to make a disciplinary intervention with this project whereby the ethnographic research
that an artist-scholar might be able to uniquely provide is highlighted and centered as the theoretical
formulation— as opposed to being simply reduced to an “example” of said formulations. Therefore, I pivot
here to speak of the pervasiveness of certain contemporary images of African Americans that revolved
around the use or intimation of the use of illegal drugs. Part of these tendencies to represent Blackness in
relation to drug culture emerged from the discourse on “drug wars” of the 1980s. Still, this was the late
1990s. The entertainment industry appeared stuck and invested in this limited notion of Blackness and
illustrates how the intersection of politics and pleasure contains the power to resonate far beyond the
discourse on government policy.
26
At various points from 1995-2001, I was a New York and Broadway touring cast member of the show
known as “Stomp.”
34

west coast “representation”, i.e. the professional theatrical agents and managers who
work with and for professional actors.
27
Agents are usually necessary at some point in an
actor’s career to facilitate an entry into television and film on the west coast and to find
more financially rewarding work opportunities.
Over the two years that I managed to continue with my show in New York while
also availing myself of the employment opportunities in the Los Angeles entertainment
industry, there were many difficult but educational conversations with my representation
team. Mostly, these conversations revolved around the professional and personal
adjustments they deemed necessary or desirable to maximize the number of roles I might
be “right for” (in casting parlance) and how to transition successfully from a stage career
to one centered in television and film. One conversation in particular continues to
resonate with me as a blunt, succinct encapsulation of the issues that arise when moving
from the entertainment industry’s use of the term representation to the academic,
theoretical meaning of the term representation.
28

27
Agencies are legally licensed businesses that represent actors, writers, directors, musicians, and these
days, even “brands” and corporations. For traditional “talent” like actors and writers, they legally
commission 10% of the income from the jobs that they help the talent they represent procure. While some
agents still function in an advisory capacity to said “talent”, the advisory function, has in recent years,
become the province of the talent manager. While agents are now focused only on whatever jobs happen to
be available at any given time, the manager is expected to be concerned with the “career”—the larger
implications of taking one job over another. In actuality there is a lot of gray area in how these two entities
function, though legally managers cannot officially procure work for their talent clients. The emphasis here
is on “officially.” Since managers are not licensed and regulated they are legitimated by their reputations
and the clients they represent. They can also charge whatever they want, and they do. Typically managers
charge between 10%-15% of a client’s income. Thus, in the modern talent representation marketplace, a
working actor or writer is typically paying 20-25% of their income to their representation team. The fact
that agents and managers act as the primary information resource about the availability of jobs and doesn’t
get paid until the talent gets a job and gets paid, makes the power relationship between an artists and their
representation a complex and fluid one.
28
This practice is one moment of many that I map in this dissertation as a moment of racialization that is
supported and then amplified by the global apparatus of the entertainment industry and its images. It is one
of many moments that conflate creative professionalization with a kind of hegemonic racialization. Though
I mark this moment and professionalization as a cost of entry moment with far-reaching and dangerous
35

Having “representation” is considered crucial to a successful acting or writing
career in mass media. But of course “representation” in cultural studies literature is a
familiar term, albeit one that scholars continue to define and refine in a variety of ways.
For my purposes I invoke Stuart Hall’s widely understood definition of representation as
a practice or discourse in all its varying forms that conveys meaning in the circuits of
culture (Hall 1997, 3). I draw attention here to my multiple uses of the term
“representation” as a way to bridge or highlight the connections I am making between the
importance of culture industry practices and discourse to the ideas that scholars are
accustomed to articulating.
In other words, in centering the processes of cultural production I am showing in
this instance how a subject, especially an already racialized subject, seeks representation
in order to do (the work of) representation on a larger scale. This immediately throws into
stark relief why this project, a production studies ethnography of television making, is
salient for several intellectual conversations on race and racial formations. For in seeking
to attain representation in order to do representation, the performing subject is entered
into over determining matrices of meaning. The performing subject is therefore almost
always initially compromised due to the very fact that the agent who does the
representing, who is the first point of contact, and who represents the actor or writer to
the industry at large, reifies the process of racialization before the subject ever leaves
their office. For example, I was casually discussing a recent audition for a television
comedy with the owner of the Beverly Hills agency where I was represented as an actor,

implications that we see played out in innumerable ways, I would still hesitate to say it is totalizing and
completely determined at this point.
36

when my agent suddenly remarked “You know, you’d make a good crack head or a drag
queen…” I was shocked-- and obviously so. Seeing my face, the agent hastened to add,
“Because you’re so thin and have good cheek bones…” But what he failed to mention is
that he might have also thought that these were roles in which I could be what is
sometimes referred to as “right for”, “castable” or immediately believable in the quick
audition scenario was because I am African American. This happened in 1997, during the
period when a film in which Eddie Murphy starred with Martin Lawrence, Life, was in
the midst of casting. The fact that there was an available role of a flamboyant male
prisoner was, in some ways, what prompted my agent’s odd outburst. His statement about
“crack” and drag queens was, as much as anything else, a business proposal. This might
have become a quickly forgotten incident-- except this would not be the only occasion
where my agent suggested I embrace an aesthetic for business reasons. My representation
often made suggestions as to how I could alter my persona in such a way that I would
become more palatable for drug dealer/addict roles. Alternately, I was often sent to
audition for roles that cast my abilities as a young, classically trained Black actor as a
joke; for roles that suggested that my brand of blackness was a representational
“problem” (i.e., the stereotypical role of the Black nerd who isn’t considered “really”
Black).
Racial stereotyping and distortion for profit were hardly surprising clichés. But
this agent’s statement of what I would be “good” at portraying began to crystallize my
suspicions that my ability to broaden the range of Black characters beyond a well-
indexed catalogue of historical tropes would always be stunted creatively and
ideologically as long as I continued to function solely as an actor. In this case, unlike the
37

role it played in expanding my own sense of life possibilities when I was growing up on
Chicago’s South Side, performance let me down.
Of course, my experience as a young, African American actor was not unique. A
second incident begins to illuminate the dynamics that I am attempting to mine here. It
illustrates how seeking work in television is an important site in the struggle over image
and representation. It was September 2001, only days after the World Trade Center
attacks. After the terrorist attacks the United States became awash in a seemingly
unilateral patriotism that was said by many to transcend America’s boundaries of race
and class. But if this were true, that message had not reached some members of the
entertainment industry in Los Angeles. Approximately one week after the attacks the
head of a major Hollywood agency called a young African American actress with
Broadway credentials into a conference room and told her that he was not interested in
representing her. She was “upscale”, he said, and he didn’t believe she could play a
“crack ho” (Dashiell).
If the juxtaposition of terrorist acts and the verbal and psychic abuse of an actor
seems jarring, I suggest that the brazenness of this agent’s remark, of speaking such raced
and sexed rhetoric to an African American woman in a room full of white talent agents
(right after America’s post-9/11 surge of supposedly post-racial nationalism and only two
years after the NAACP began their media advocacy campaign) speaks to the persistence
of cultural and racial narratives that are deeply entrenched in our cultural imaginary.
29
If,

29
This juxtaposition is neither odd nor is it hubristic. In fact I take my cue here from the NAACP
leadership’s actions shortly after September 11, 2001. As I highlight later in this chapter then-NAACP
President Kwesi Mfume made the explicit point in November 2001 that he would not allow the America’s
preoccupation with war and terrorism dissipate the organization’s focus on representation in the television
industry. Effectively then he was attempting to elevate the NAACP’s fight for Black representation in
television with the government’s war on terror. Whether or not my reading of this juxtaposition constitutes
38

as I argue, the work of television writers is an important citational force upon which
stereotypes are maintained, then this project begins to illustrate how one actor’s painful
experience moves from cultural anecdote to a moment where we can see hegemonic
structures taking root. It stands as a visceral example of experiences that artists and
cultural workers of color often share as “war stories”-- experiences and psychic wounds
that have been endured or survived-- when discussing the process of seeking work in the
television and film industries. Still, whenever I think of this incident, a simple question
remains: What made this kind of behavior in a professional setting to some degree
acceptable? In this case, performance (that is, her ability to embody a “crack ho” or her
“crack-ho-ability”) defined the limits her potential representation (in all forms of the
word), before she entered the room. The compelling, coercive, citational power of
performativity was in the room-- and performativity had already worked the room--
before the performer entered the room. In this case, an initially unstated but racially
required performance of the crack-ho set the actor up for a fall.
This was the period when I began thinking that being an actor, a Black actor,
would inherently place limits on the range of characters, and therefore the humanity, that
I could expect to portray or even compete to portray. I needed to begin at the beginning.
So, after much effort, I became a television writer. And before long, I became a television
writer on strike.

an overreach on Mfume’s (or my) part is not my chief concern. It is Mfume’s attempt that is telling and the
statement that this juxtaposition makes regarding the seriousness of television as a cultural and civil rights
forum is what is of discursive interest to this project. And for more on how post-9/11 American
nationalism was qualified by race see Lanita Huey-Jacob’s article, “Arab is the New Nigger: African
American Comics Confront the Irony and Tragedy of September 11” in Transforming Anthropology 14, no.
1 (April 2006), 60-64.
39

The third incident occurred in November 2007. On November 5, 2007 the Writers
Guild of America began a one hundred day strike against the AMPTP, the organization
that represents the film and television studios in labor negotiations with the unions that
represent creative workers (actors, writers, and directors) and craft workers (production
personnel). The union organizers held one of many “theme” days during the strike-- and
on December 12, 2007 the strike theme was “Diversity Day.”

December 12, 2007. Picketing Paramount Studios during the WGA Strike “Diversity Day.” Photo by Jim Stevenson.
(Figure 1)

Marching back and forth outside of Paramount Studios was a plethora of primarily
African American writers and a diverse coalition of supporters. A casual observer would
never guess that the small African American television writing community was fighting
for its professional life within the union and the industry. The 2006 collapse of the WB
and UPN networks had wiped out the vast majority of television writing jobs that
40

regularly employed many African Americans. There were “backstage” grumblings that
writers of color were being asked to support a strike that was in reality designed to
protect the earnings of wealthy white producers. Though these were the same wealthy
white producers who generally refused to consider Black people for employment, most of
the writers who marched that day and participated in the strike performed their roles with
spirit. In this case, a performance of cross-racial unity that masked racialized workplace
inequities was the price-- the price that James Baldwin speaks of when he states that “it is
still not possible to overstate the price a Negro pays for attempting to climb out of
obscurity” (281). That is, performance was and is the price for sustaining the possibility
of participation in mass media via television and perhaps, the price for sustaining the
possibility of intervention-- the always-evolving possibility for progressive intervention
in and through cultural production.
Reading these three incidents together raises several questions for this project:
Despite the fact that African American television writers often voice their frustration with
employment conditions-- finding work, staying employed, and still feeling marginalized
within the jobs they do procure-- how is it that the union and the industry were able to
compel supportive actions, such supportive performances, from Black writers during the
2007-2008 strike? What happens to African American writers in the veiled spaces of
television production that affect the notions of Blackness that emerge from television’s
creative process that, in turn, enable incidents of psychic violence towards actors like
those described above? Is there a connection between television hiring practices, the
work that television writers do, and a talent agent’s insistence that a Black actor must
play a stereotype (e.g., the Black “crack ho”) in order to be represented as a worker in
41

mass media? What are the implications of such limited notions of Blackness for society at
large? These are questions that this dissertation poses and that the NAACP’s recent
media advocacy campaign suggests that they, too, are asking.
The NAACP and Black Representation
The NAACP’s recent activism in media and entertainment has often struck
some of the organization’s critics as beneath its history and calling. Over the last ten
years some conservative and liberal critics have cited the NAACP’s media and image
advocacy work as evidence that it is a floundering organization past its prime.
30
In fact,
the re-emergence of the NAACP’s media advocacy around Black representation in 1999
still, these many years later, strikes some activists and critics as a low water mark for the
organization that led the charge on seminal civil rights legislation such as Brown v. Board
of Education in the 1950s.
31
However, this kind of critique is difficult to truly engage,
for it fails to consider the NAACP’s history of activism around Black images in mass
media.
“From its inception the NAACP has been at the forefront of the struggle to
ensure positive images in the entertainment industry” or so states the NAACP in the
program book that attendees at the 40
th
annual NAACP Image Awards received in
February 2009. Far from typical award show hyperbole, an examination of the NAACP’s
history finds this description of the NAACP’s interest and advocacy in media to be

30
See PBS. “Online News Hour: The Color of Television.” Accessed March 19, 2012 at
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/media/july-dec99/diversity_7-26.html. Also see Capozzi, Rose. “NAACP
TV Boycott Should Get Poor Reception.” The National Leadership Network of Black Conservatives.
Accessed on September 9, 2010 at http://www.nationalcenter.org/P21NVCapozziNAACP90806.html.
31
McWhorter, John. TNR.com, “If The NAACP Ceased To Exist Tomorrow, Would It Have A Significant
Effect On Black America?” Accessed on September 7, 2010 at http://www.tnr.com/blog/john-
mcwhorter/if-the-naacp-ceased-exist-tomorrow-would-it-have-significant-effect-black-americ.
42

accurate. The NAACP was formed on February 12, 1909, which was the 100
th

anniversary of the birth of Abraham Lincoln. The organization was formed partly in
response to the murderous practice of lynching and to a 1908 race riot in Springfield,
Illinois, the birthplace of Lincoln. The NAACP’s founding came only six years after the
release of the short film Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a minstrel-like parody of slave culture. In
1915, only six years after the NAACP’s founding, D.W. Griffith created the racially
controversial film, Birth of a Nation. Thus, the NAACP came into existence between
notable acts of physical violence and representational violence, as the popular culture
phenomenon of the minstrel show and its demeaning stereotypes of African Americans
began to move into the new, burgeoning mass media of radio and film.
Birth of a Nation, based on the novel The Clansman by Thomas Dixon, holds an
infamous place in the history of American film and popular culture as a revisionist take
on the Reconstruction era. In the film, the violent white supremacist group, the Ku Klux
Klan, is glorified and portrayed as heroes for rescuing the South from the formerly
enslaved, newly free, yet supposedly “still” savage Negro. To say the film was
controversial would be an understatement. But the controversy yielded an unexpected
benefit for the NAACP as a new organizational force dedicated to civil rights in America.
It provided publicity for the then fledging NAACP, as the group worked to organize
nationwide protests against the film. As W.E.B. DuBois biographer David Levering
Lewis wrote, “…The parody was that Birth of a Nation and the NAACP helped make
each other.”
32
The NAACP would continue to monitor the images of African Americans
in popular culture, with an implicit understanding that there was a strong connection of

32
Burroughs, Todd Steven. The Crisis, 116, no.1 (Winter 2009), 11.
43

purpose between the works the organization conducted in the legal and legislative arenas
and the media watchdog work the organization conducted in the popular culture arena.
In 1939, the NAACP would again intervene in the public sphere. When
acclaimed African American soprano Marion Anderson was banned by the Daughters of
the Revolution from Constitution Hall, the NAACP swung into action, securing the
Lincoln Memorial for Ms. Anderson’s now historic performance. In 1942, the NAACP’s
leader, Executive Secretary Walter White, used the occasion of the organization’s
national convention in Los Angeles to convince several studio heads to sign an agreement
to strive to replace Black roles based on stereotypes with non-stereotypical roles. This
effort began a media advocacy campaign that would run until at least 1946. During this
first major phase of media advocacy, White publicly criticized films such as Cabin the
Sky, (1943) and Walt Disney’s Song of the South (1946).
33

In July 1951, television was becoming the dominant broadcast medium,
translating auditory stereotypes from radio (such as Beulah and Amos ‘N Andy) into new,
easily accessed televisual stereotypes that were sent daily into the American home. The
NAACP again turned its attention to the entertainment industry. At their 1951
convention the NAACP passed a resolution critical of the television series Amos ‘N Andy
for its promulgation of negative stereotypes. The resolution stated that Amos ‘N Andy
“…depicted black people in a stereotypical and derogatory manner, and the practice of

33
Ibid, 12.
44

manufacturers, distributors, retailers, persons, or firms sponsoring or promoting this
show, or other shows of this type are [sic] condemned.”
34

In light of this history, Mfume’s actions were not so much revolutionary as
much as they were a return to an older tradition within the NAACP. Those who criticized
Mfume and the NAACP in 1999 for claiming a role for itself as an activist in the
entertainment industry clearly did so by ignoring or minimalizing the NAACP’s past
actions in this arena. Still, the question lingers: Why, after several dormant decades
without a strong advocacy that focused on television’s representational practices, was
there such a strong, unequivocal re-emergence of the organization’s interest in Black
representation in 1999? As Mfume made clear in his charge that television is the most
segregated industry in America, the entertainment industry is one of the last bastions of
blatant discrimination in the United States.
35
It is also clear, through its historic focus on
the arts and entertainment, that the NAACP sees entertainment, and television in
particular, as a powerful medium precisely because it touches the daily lives of
Americans. A consideration then of Kwesi Mfume and the NAACP’s position and
condition as a civil rights organization circa 1999 is illuminating for what it reveals about
the role of performance in the politics of representation.
Melissa Harris-Lacewell writes that television images are only symbolic and
that there is little indication “that Black political power or social equality is derived from

34
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. The 40
th
NAACP Image Awards, NAACP:
Celebrating 100 Years (Los Angeles: The Shrine Auditorium, February 12, 2009), Image Awards Show
Booklet.
35
The viewpoint that in an increasingly integrated world where racism had become more subtle, the
television industry was an outlier that had somehow remained starkly segregated. This view was also
suggested by the NAACP Hollywood Bureau’s periodic reports (Out of Focus, Out of Sync, Takes 1-4) on
the state of minority representation in television.
45

the presence of black faces on television… there is certainly not a direct correlation
between the abundance of black media images and a flourishing black community” (234).
At face value I take issue with this statement, as aesthetics not only reflect but also help
to form the conditions upon which hierarchal American social relations are framed and
constructed, which then affects how different racialized groups accumulate social,
political, and material capital. Hence, as the British and American cultural studies
intellectual project has shown, televisual signs and images have power that is not simply
limited to the aesthetic; indeed, they can affect life chances, a point that Harris-Lacewell
later acknowledges. But what Harris-Lacewell helpfully articulates is how Mfume and
the NAACP challenged the television industry as a way to engage a larger swath of
African Americans, making the organization more relevant by utilizing television to enter
once again into the everyday discussions of everyday Black people. She states that the
NAACP circa 1999 highlighted the lack of diversity of television because, among other
reasons, this battle “gave the struggling organization a visible, measurable,
comprehensible goal that resonated with a broad cross section of African Americans” and
that “the fight to integrate the networks allowed Mfume to access authenticity tropes of
redemption, defiance, and appeals of American promise” (234). In other words, Mfume’s
and the NAACP’s strong rhetoric allowed it to claim that the historically liberal
integrationist organization was no “punk”. In embracing or performing a publicly militant
stance against the networks, the organization could tap into the Black tradition of political
defiance that resonates, rightly or wrongly, with many African Americans in the early
21
st
century as “authentic.” In casting television as America’s face to the world, Mfume
framed its images as a measurement of democracy. In this way, he was making a
46

staunchly “American” appeal to equality and fairness (Harris 236). The combination of
performing African American militancy while invoking “classic American virtues” gave
Mfume power to enter the room with a network president, while still allowing the
NAACP space to negotiate with the networks. This balancing act is one reason why
Mfume was in the position of being inside the building about to meet with CBS president
Les Moonves’ in August 1999 and was able to joke about being outside the building in a
traditional march protest. His ability to perform in varying modalities opened a certain
level of access that, in turn, led to the subsequent announcement of the historic January
2000 agreement with the broadcast networks. It was the first time several networks
pledged, in written form, to increase diversity in front and behind the cameras.
In light of this recent history and with Mfume’s performative and political
tactics in mind, it is easier to understand the political tactics of the African American
writers who marched and performed (racial) unity so dutifully on “Diversity Day” during
the 2007-2008 Writers Guild strike. They performed a front stage racial unity around a
labor issue in order to maintain and enhance their backstage possibility of increasing
integration in the television workplace. Image Breakers, Image Makers is a chronicle of
the structural and performative impacts of the NAACP’s advocacy for representation on
the daily operations of the television industry in relation to the employment, presence,
and industrial performances of African Americans. The centrality of the NAACP’s
political performance in its 1999 Television Initiative leads to a deeper, ethnographic
inquiry that centers performance in an examination of the creation of television and its
shaping of black racial formation in the public sphere.

47

The NAACP and Television in 1999
For the broadcast networks the NAACP’s July 1999 timing couldn’t have been
worse. Put simply, it was bad for business at a bad time for the business. By this point in
television history, the networks and the studios were fighting the emergence of what
Amanda Lotz, Sarah Banet-Weiser, and others call the “post-network era”-- the yearly
and accelerating trend of network audience erosion to cable networks and other growing
media outlets such as the internet and videogame systems. In this setting the annual
launch of the fall television season still represents one of the best and most concentrated
opportunities for networks to command America’s popular culture spotlight (Lotz 2007,
Banet-Weiser 2007). During the late summer and early fall the studios and networks
work hardest to launch new shows, spending millions of dollars on production (the actual
making of its television shows) and marketing (letting audiences across the country know
about its television shows) in efforts to lure loyal viewers back to their favorite programs.
And most importantly, as many within the television and advertising industries would
readily agree, the goal is both to retain those loyal viewers while concurrently and
desperately trying to impress new, preferably younger viewers, with their newest shows.
Therefore, the public threat of an NAACP-led boycott of that fall’s programming was
hardly a welcome event. It was both an economic and a public relations threat. Not only
did the specter of a boycott threaten to further erode the broadcast network’s ratings and
business model, the threat also usurped valuable media coverage and space that would
normally have been devoted to covering the launch of that fall’s new shows.
Yet, while the NAACP’s efforts generated anxiety and controversy with
decision makers in the entertainment industry, it also provoked unexpected, complicated,
48

or even ambivalent reactions within some African American communities in
entertainment and politics.
36
Didn’t the famous civil rights organization have better
things to do than worry about sitcoms? It’s just TV.
37
Of course, the NAACP’s answer to
the last of these not so hypothetical questions was a resounding “yes”. Yes, the NAACP
seemed to say through its ongoing actions, it was worth spending some of its hard,
historically earned cultural, political, and moral capital to bring not only attention but
also measurable remedies to the racial inequality seen on and within television. Not only
was the organization advocating for more images and “better” images on the screen for
African Americans (and increasingly for Latino Americans and Asian Americans), it also
made a push for more and arguably “better” representation in the employment ranks of
those who work behind the camera. This behind-the-scenes focus was especially true
where the employment of Black writers was concerned. This represented a decisive shift
of strategy and inclusion that highlights the role this highly select group of people--
television writers -- play in the national and global representation of Americans and
African Americans.
The NAACP’s Television Diversity Initiative resulted in several historic
agreements in January 2000. After the major networks signed statements pledging to
increase diversity in the employment ranks of writers, producers, actors, and executives it
was expected that the intense nature of the protests would dissipate. And for a moment, it

36
PBS. Online News Hour, “The Color of Television.” Accessed September 1, 2010 at
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/media/july-dec99/diversity_7-26.html.
37
For commentary similar in tone and content to the question I posed above see “NAACP TV Boycott
Should Get Poor Reception” by Rose Capozzi. Accessed at nationalcenter.org on February 1, 2012 at
http://www.nationalcenter.org/P21NVCapozziNAACP90806.html.

49

appeared that suspicion would be confirmed. But if the entertainment industry or the
NAACP’s critics had doubts about the organization’s ongoing commitment to this issue,
Kweisi Mfume’s strategically timed announcement in November 2001, two years after
the clarion call of July 1999 and only two months after the terrorist attacks of September
11, 2001 should have settled for once and for all the seriousness of his intent to make
media representation an ongoing core issue in the organization’s civil rights agenda. In
November 2001 Mfume reasserted that, despite world events, the NAACP remained on
the case as a media watchdog where issues of Black and multicultural representation
were concerned. Robin R. Means Coleman (2001) writes:

“In November 2001, Mfume assured the public that though the terrorist attacks of
September 11
th
held much of the world’s attention, he would not forget about the media’s
(television’s in particular) discriminatory practices… the NAACP hopes its considerable
public reputation, and its $1 million media taskforce budget, will aid in enforcing change.
The organization’s principle strategy is to produce ‘flak’— the generation of negative
responses by the public and demands by individuals or lobbyists in the form of petitions,
boycotts, lawsuits, Congressional bills, communication campaigns (phone, letter, email)--
directed towards the networks and their commercial sponsors. This NAACP boycott
prompts [a consideration] of the role of media in a democratic society… and the quest for
social justice in media…” (25)

Coleman uses the term “producing flak”-- which I interpret here as a colloquialism for a
kind of political performance-- and ties it closely to the activities of social activism that
such “flak” hopes to induce (petitions, boycotts, lawsuits). She therefore highlights,
perhaps inadvertently, a connection that I find crucially important yet largely
unacknowledged by critics of the NAACP’s media advocacy in 1999. For in dismissing
the NAACP’s priorities these critics also dismissed the opportunity to identify, resist, and
intimately understand how the television business and television production might
function as a hegemonic apparatus that contributes to social injustices and racial
50

inequalities through racial formations. Such dismissals of the NAACP’s tactics (and of
television in general) have missed the point historically, socially, politically and
economically. Further, these dismissals betray a fundamental lack of understanding of the
role of performance, imagination, and culture as necessary political tools and especially
as a contemporary and visionary touchstone that serves to call attention to social and
racial inequality.
38
However we might discuss how the NAACP’s campaign could have
proved even more effective, the fact that it employed the techniques of political theatre is
illuminating.
39
In short, the NAACP used the impact and threat of performance (petitions,
boycotts, marches) to advocate for more televisual space in which to display the fuller
range of African American performances and representations. In challenging the
problematic representations of African Americans, the NAACP was challenging the
performances that embody and facilitate the narrative frames that reify stereotypes and
support inequalities based on race (NAACP 2003). Performance fights fire with fire-- if
African American cultural performance is the arena of interrogation, then African
American political performance was the NAACP’s weapon of choice. The NAACP used
the performative tactic of a very real boycott threat to open up the politics of Black labor

38
See Robin D.G. Kelley’s Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (New York: Beacon, 2003).
Also see two of Jill Dolan’s book length works, Geographies of Learning: Theory and Practice, Activism
and Performance (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2001) and Utopia in Performance:
Finding Hope at the Theater (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2005).
39
I see the NAACP’s aggressive, confrontational stance in which the networks were forced to engage in
policy conversations about increasing diversity in television as similar to the agitational stance that is
associated with political theatre. For example, the networks had no warning that the NAACP was planning
to call them to task for their representational practices. By launching their advocacy in public during a
speech at their convention, without at first approaching the networks in private for private negotiations, the
NAACP deployed guerilla style theatre tactics where surprise is often an essential element. Furthermore, in
incorporating an audience at the outset of their campaign, they infused the element of performance as a
core tactic into their campaign.
51

in the entertainment industry and to challenge how representation ends up on our
television screens. They used performance to look beyond performance.
By including a focus on writers, the NAACP’s actions made an attempt to
highlight the political potential of television writing as a (dramatic) literature that we
watch instead of read. Because we watch it, is therefore important to the self-definition
and global images of African Americans. How a people are represented is how they are
treated. Accordingly, who gets to do the work of television writing-- and how that writing
is created in the first place-- becomes immensely important. What and how television
writers create must be examined, both for its primary role in the representation of African
Americans and as a contributor to a false, essentialist notion of race that, in turn, supports
the social and material realities of racial formation in the United States.
Chapter Outlines and Key Words

Throughout this project I talk about television writers and television production
as a performance and as a kind of actor. I focus on several key word and terms
throughout, among them: Access, Ambivalence, Authorship, Activism, African American
(as opposed to “Black”) and artist-scholarship. In so doing, this project produces a
discourse about televisual blackness as a contested racial formation. I therefore argue for
seeing television writing as the construction of a deployable and citable racial
performativity. This project posits that television writing is a hegemonic force produced
by mass media but that embodied performances within mass media can and sometimes do
“break” that hegemonic force.
The coupling of television and performance suggests an ability to both construct
and disrupt identity and representation. This back and forth struggle over Blackness can
52

be seen in the ordering and presentation of my chapters. Through an emphasis on the
NAACP’s media activism, this opening chapter established the historical and current
political importance of the Black representation that operates behind what we think of as
television. Having identified the crucial performance arena of the television writing
room, the next three chapters can be thought of as an ideological tug of war over racial
formation and blackness.
In chapter two, Access, Ambivalence, and “Opportunity”: Television Writing
Programs and the Pre-Production of Racial Formation, I map and analyze the challenges
for entrance into the television writing and producing industry. I focus on the
entertainment industry’s television writing programs and how these corporate avenues of
access for what the industry refers to as “diverse” writers produce significant results, at
least in terms of helping to new writers find jobs. However, I illustrate how these same
television writing programs have become racialized. If “production” means the actual
filming that gives the television narrative filmic materiality, then “pre-production” names
all the preparatory work that must be done before the cameras roll. Therefore, I frame the
ethnographic data presented in this chapter as a period akin to the Hollywood industrial
term pre-production. It is the (racial) work that is done before one actually gets to work.
In presenting my findings from television writing programs-- these crucial, prestigious,
and hard won “spaces of access” I highlight-- theoretically and practically, their
importance as a preparation for the processes of racial formation that occur during actual
television production. I use my field data as a participant-observer in prestigious industry
fellowships to illustrate how the racial performances of program participants are
managed. I examine how these “opportunities” provide real chances for elite jobs in the
53

television industry. At the same time they exercise a hidden, corporatized power that
seeks to pre-marginalize writers of color in television before they ever set foot in a
writers’ room.
In chapter three, Authorship, Authenticity, and Anxiety in Making Black
Television: The Politics of WWB, “Writing While Black” I ask what happens when such
racially marked writers go to work on a television show. What happens when those
writers engage in a creative struggle to form new expressions of non-comic Blackness or
Blacknesses? The struggle to produce this non-comic blackness names the structure of
the invisible whiteness of television and prompts us to also ask: when is a “Black show”
really Black-- especially when it is not “created” by an African American? This chapter
chronicles the first season of a television drama, “Morgan Park,” that features an African
American cast, though its producer was not, initially, African American. Even by the
racialized “writer casting” standards of contemporary television, this was an odd
occurrence that quickly led to creative friction and artistic upheavals. As a result, the
show began production with an overabundance of “blank pages” that could not be filmed
until they were no longer “blank.” This raises the issue of time. In other words, how does
the element of “time” or “not enough time” in television production contribute to the
process of racial formation? I address this question by highlighting the work
performances of the writers. I illustrate how these writers attempted to push against both
the archive of stereotypical televisual blackness and the tendency of television artists to
privilege their own memories, experiences, and “repertoires”-- repertoires that I argue
54

throughout this project tend to further limit the possibilities of representation.
40

Accordingly, I argue that the surveillance of all artists in primetime television coalesces
with television’s archive of blackness in such a way that African American writers are
not only writing, they are “writing while Black.” Thus, network surveillance begins to
represent an attempt to ensure that the repertoire of the Black writer is utilized, but only
in very particular, constrained, and limited ways.
I explore the industry’s historical lack of the Black authorship of non-comic
Black representation in television, as well as how Black television producers negotiate
“authorship” when they cannot make a claim to the “legal” authorship of a show.
41
I
argue that the industry’s economic challenges combine with the pressures of the supposed
“failure” of the African American drama as a genre, in order to illuminate and complicate
the process of getting a new show on the air. In chronicling the process of producing a
non-comic Blackness for television, I show how the still-present negotiation of
expectations surrounding the “positivity” or “negativity” of Black images may now be a
simplistic concern for the academe but it is still important and urgent for practitioners.
In chapter four, “african-AMERICAN not Black”: Negotiating Identity and
Industry through Performance I focus on the dynamics, discourse, and culture of Morgan
Park’s writers’ room. This chapter explores the fight for new articulations of Blackness
in a Black television drama when Blackness is deemed optional or perhaps even no

40
See Diana Taylor’s The Archive and Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Raleigh,
NC: Duke University Press, 2003) for more on the body and performance as an important archive of
cultural memory or repertoire of knowledge.
41
The legal authorship I am referring to here is the ability and opportunity to “create” a television show,
particularly in the drama genre. The number of Black writers who have created a successful African
American centered drama for primetime television can be counted on one hand. In actuality, African
American writers have only begun to be hired on dramas (instead of only comedies) in the last ten years.
55

longer desirable. As the writing-producing team is thoroughly reconstituted to make a
“Black show” more “African American and not Black”, performances of the self shift,
and the creative discourse changes. What is the result of these “backstage” maneuvers on
the “front stage” (Goffman) presentation of the program? I analyze how white writers
perform blackness, Black writers perform whiteness, and Latino writers just get pissed
off in the never-ending search for success and continued employment. The concept of the
performativity of cultural production is delineated here in order to map the limitations of
individual agency and the possibilities of creating new modes of agency in mass media.
In chapter five, “Emotional Activism” and the Frustration of the First: Kathleen
McGhee-Anderson on Theatre, Performance, and Producing African American
Television, I intervene in the history of critical and industrial discourses on Black
television cultural producers and African American women television showrunners. I
disrupt the frustratingly re-current narrative that posits Shonda Rhimes, successful creator
of the hit show Grey’s Anatomy, as the first African American woman showrunner. I
focus instead on the important but overlooked work and career of writer and showrunner
Kathleen McGhee-Anderson. In focusing on McGhee-Anderson’s fascinating life and
career I raise the question of Black non-comic television as a form of activism. I argue
that the term “emotional activism” may carry problematic connotations in the academy
but is imbued with tactical power in cultural production.
Kathleen McGhee-Anderson, who is descended from a long line of family
activists, speaks for herself in this project. My open-ended interview with McGhee-
Anderson implicitly argues for the institutional and critical value of the artist-scholar. I
offer Dr. McGhee-Anderson as an example of the artist-scholar as organic intellectual.
56

She is unapologetic about merging the social consciousness of her work as a Black
woman and playwright into her work as a television writer-executive producer. As a
result of her unique positionalities I argue that McGhee-Anderson functions as an
unexamined link between African American theatre and African American television
drama. Her life is an embodiment of an interdisciplinarity that registers on and between
several levels-- between arts and the academy, between African American television and
African American theatre and performance, and between evolving positive and negative
notions of authentic Blackness.
In the conclusion, Notes on Theorizing Artist-Scholarship and Moving Toward
a Critical and Performative Production Studies, I return to a consideration of “the
break,” and I summarize my analyses of the creative processes and disciplinary and racial
frictions I encountered during this project. Having shifted the focus from the product of
popular culture to the creation of popular culture, and having complicated the ways we
talk about race, performance, and television cultural production, I conclude by suggesting
that a move toward a critical production studies that centers performance opens up a
repertoire in which to examine race, gender, class, and other society structuring elements.
A move toward a critical and performative production studies opens an opportunity to
address the frustration of representation from a grounded space within mass media
cultural production. We still talk about Black representation-- not because it is no longer
productive, but because how we talk about it is too limited. To address these gaps
requires the arduous work of both industry and scholarship. Ultimately, I argue that this
recurring tension around the limited discourse on Blackness and representation (in
television but not limited to television) is a symptom of the need to deepen the discourse,
57

and not a sign that we should abandon the conversation. We’re not there yet. The
NAACP was right in targeting writing and producing in television in its 1999 campaign.
In doing so, the organization identified a performative space and a hidden but powerful
discursive site, where the next level of critique and change must come from a fusion of
the artist/practitioner and the scholar. Given current organizational structures and
disciplinary boundaries this is difficult to achieve. However, if we are to evolve the
politics of representation from a critique of what is and isn’t visible into a progressive
agenda for our discursive formations, it must occur. Otherwise, we risk “moving on”
from representation before we fully understand just how important it remains to our
collective pursuit of a national culture that is interested in social and racial equanimity.

58

Chapter 2

Access, Ambivalence, and “Opportunity”:
Television Writing Programs and the Pre-Production of Racial Formation

“So I wrote a letter to David Milch saying, ‘Why does nobody
ever speak publicly about all these mediocre white writers?’…
It didn’t take me very long to realize that every white writer who
has a job in television is not necessarily a good writer. I was coming
to work alongside of them, and I knew they couldn’t write a lick…
So I know it’s got to be about something more than competence or
talent…”
--David Mills, (circa 1994)
42

“…while it might sound good to proclaim, "There must be brilliant
black writers out there who just can't get hired in Hollywood," I don't
see any reason to presume that's true. Why not? Because in other genres
of writing—novels, plays, narrative journalism—brilliant black writers
are mighty scarce. We, the black culture, simply don't produce many
elite-level storytellers the way we produce tons of elite-level athletes and
musicians. Whose fault is that?
--David Mills, (circa 2006)
43

“… A boundary is not that at which something stops but,
as the Greeks recognized, the boundary is that from
which something begins its presencing…”
--Martin Heidegger, Building, dwelling, thinking
44

In 1999, approximately three months after the NAACP threatened the broadcast
television networks with a boycott, the civil rights organization partnered with the newly
formed Coalition for African American Television Writers (CAATW) and placed an

42
Ross, Kevin. Interview with David Mills (August 2009), Interview. Accessed December 28, 2011 at
http://blog.blogtalkradio.com/television/david-mills-19612010-ive-gotta-healthy-write-treme-gifted-scribe-
told/
43
Mills, David. Slate.com, “Breaking Down the Wire: Why No Black Writers”, (October 16, 2006).
Accessed December 28, 2011 at
http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/tv_club/features/2006/breaking_down_the_wire/why_no_black_writers.h
tml
44
Bhabha, Homi K. Location of Culture (London, New York: Routledge, 1994), 1.

59

unusually stark, two page ad in one of the entertainment industry’s two primary trade
periodicals. Readers of the Hollywood Reporter’s October 11, 1999 edition were greeted
with this poignant and revealing headline: “1964: RCA Introduces Color TV. 1999: Most
Writers’ Rooms Still Cast in White”
45
The ad went on to list every scripted primetime
program airing on broadcast television that year; beside each program it showed the
number of African American writers employed on that show. The ad also displayed each
network’s total number of employed writers and the percentage of those writers who
were African American. The Coalition dissected the numbers to compare how many
African- American writers were employed on what they termed “white-themed” shows
and “black-themed” shows. The ad stated:
“The lack of diversity in writers’ rooms throughout television is even more
startling than the lack of diversity on the air. Out of the 759 writing positions
on white themed shows, 9 (or 1.1%) are held by African Americans. In contrast,
40 (or 50%) of the 80 writing positions on black-themed shows are held by white
writers. It seems acceptable for white writers to work on black-themed shows,
but unacceptable for African American writers to write on white-themed shows…
African Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans, Native Americans and other
minorities make up over 30 percent of the U.S. population. Yet, together, these
groups account for only 7 percent of primetime writing positions…”
46

45
See the Hollywood Reporter, October 11, 1999 edition.
46
Ibid. The emphasis on Black writers by media diversity advocates could be read as an erasure of the
struggles of Latino and Asian television writers. I focus on Black writers for several reasons. First, I am
African American and this project in many ways describes the impact of my own and other writers’ black
bodies and presence on television’s cultural production. This is important, for as this dissertation argues,
television itself is and always has been saturated to its core with a problematic investment in producing
black racial representation. Second, television is a visual medium. As such it is constructed to deal with and
make meaning out of what it sees or what it can present to be seen (i.e., “difference”). The fact that
television, as a cultural technology, depends upon black phenotype as a foundational way to present
difference is not surprising. Of course this foundational way of creating and sustaining a national imaginary
that suggests a good “us” vs. a bad “them” echoes the history of Black Americans in the United States, who
tend to be cast as the least desirable racial group within social and economic hierarchies. Cast irrationally
as the bad “them” Black American struggles for equality in the twentieth century have resonated globally
and with a moral authority and power that is both emulated by the oppressed and resented by oppressors.
Lastly, the phenotypical difference that television is invested in presenting (as “entertainment” no less) is
exactly the point I’m building here, not so much in announcing that television is, to borrow Omi and
Winant’s term, a racial project— but in how television functions and sustains itself as a racial project and
60

In short, the numbers told a story of undeniable, systemic racial exclusion of African
Americans and other minorities from television writing and producing (Adamo 84). The
numbers further substantiated the NAACP’s 1999 accusation that the television industry
was America’s most racist industry and was involved in a continual process of “white
washing” America’s airwaves. The NAACP/CAATW’s ad explicitly suggested a
connection between the absence of empowered Black writers behind the camera and the
problematic nature of Black representation in the front of the camera.
47

The CAATW’s headline also previewed several recurring themes in this project:
1) the hegemonic importance of the television writing room; 2) the television writing
room as an active and powerful process that contributes, reifies, materializes, and
visualizes a common sense about race and Blackness based on racial essentialism and a
black/white binary; 3) the acknowledged but under theorized idea of the writers’ room as
a “cast” of performers; 4) the argument that television is a mass media project that
secures whiteness through its presentation of Blackness and that the culture of the
writers’ room is one way that it remains such a project; 5) the writers’ room as a hidden

how its cultural producers struggle (or not) to transform that project through their television work-- which
is, after all, just meant to be “entertainment.”
47
While this connection may seem simple or direct, it is not. One of the recurring narratives of success that
one often hears at television industry professionalization seminars is the feted television writer who
inevitably tells the story of his journey to working in television with some variation of “when I was a kid I
didn’t even know that television shows were written at all! I thought the actors were making it up...” Now,
however, as a result of the work of journalists, self reflexivity by television writers themselves, and the
growing celebrity of television writers, the TV writer has, within and outside of the entertainment industry,
come out of the mass media closet as one of the most lucrative and culturally powerful creative positions in
popular entertainment. For more information on the powerful position of the television writing room in the
television industry see industry accounts such as David Wild’s The Showrunners: A Season Inside The
Billion-Dollar, Death-Defying, Madcap World of Television's Real Stars (New York: Harper Perennial,
2000); Jeffrey Stepakoff’s Billion Dollar Kiss: The Kiss that Saved Dawson’s Creek and other adventures
in TV Writing (New York: Gotham Books, 2008); and Steven Prigge’s Created by…: Inside the Minds of
TV’s Top Show Creators (Los Angeles: Silman-James Press, 2005).
61

hub of racial formation that operates through the interplay between the idea of post-race
and a multi-layered and complex hyper representation and performance of race. In the
end, the ad told a story about racial exclusion in television, about access and the lack of
access.
48

Therefore, in this chapter I examine the process of gaining access to working in
television. I present an ethnographic analysis from a year of participant-observation in an
American television industry writing program (variously referred to here as “writing
programs”, “access programs”, “diversity programs”, “fellowships”, and “workshops”).
This ethnographic analysis is also richly informed by the ten years I have pursued work
as an (African American) television writer and more specifically, as a participant in
several other competitive television industry writing programs. In recent years, writing
programs and fellowships have played an important role in shaping the conditions of
possibility for African American television writers to find work. This is especially true
for Black writers seeking to work in primetime television dramas.
49
Through performance

48
Of important note here is the untold story of how the Coalition of African American writers managed to
get this information in the first place. A few years after this ad first appeared I attended a house meeting
one evening at a television writer-producer’s home. It was event set up for aspiring African American
television writers to meet and be mentored by experienced African American television writers. At one
point this ad became a topic of conversation and one of the veteran writers revealed that s/he procured this
information by calling the production offices of every show in town, and pretending to be young, white
college students. They often spoke to assistants, who have a wealth of information about show personnel,
and buried their questions about the racial makeup of the writers’ staff among other “research” questions.
In this case, aural cross-racial performance was central to the undercover writer’s ability to gain access to
credible information about their lack of access.
49
Though official data is difficult to confirm, industry anecdote and wisdom by both white and black TV
writers holds that African- American writers have only within the last decade or so been hired to write
television dramas in any measurable numbers. Prior to the mid-1990s, almost all African American
television writers were more or less restricted to writing for situation comedies. Indeed, when I first began
attempting to become a television writer I simply assumed that I would write comedy. It wasn’t until a few
years into the process that I began to think about drama as a possibility. The implications of an industry
history that did not, until quite recently, take the notion of black writers laboring to produce a non-comedic
blackness in television seriously speaks to argument in this chapter-- that the industry prefigures blackness
62

ethnography I map and interrogate the explicit and implicit work that television writing
programs do for and to the Black writers who participate in the programs (and thereby
gain an opportunity to eventually access and work in television writing rooms). I examine
how this type of access point heightens anxiety about how to embody Blackness while
working in television production, and how this “opportunity” contributes to the process
of racial formation before the writer writes.
“Diversity” Writing Programs as a “Pre-Production” to Racial Formation
I frame the ethnographic data presented in this chapter as a phase akin to the
Hollywood industry term pre-production. Pre-production refers to the period of
preparation that occurs after a project has received a “greenlight” (funds to make the
project have been authorized and/or released by a studio or network) but before it has
commenced filming or actual production. In this project and for the purposes of this
argument I embrace the liminality of pre-production in television as an important,
unacknowledged preparation process, and I mine the term as a metaphor for the racial
work that is attempted and embodied before an even more “active” process of racial
formation takes place once television production starts.
I begin by linking the terms ambivalence, hybridity, and performance as central
keywords to a deeper understanding of what is essentially a story about access. I link
these terms as a way to understand and organize the role and impact of Hollywood’s
internal education processes on African American writers. I focus on the entertainment
industry’s writing programs as a way to argue that the access they provide functions in an

before the actual, physical production process begins. The television writing program is but one especially
kinetic and visceral way that we can see this process at work.
63

ambiguous manner around the issue of racial inclusiveness; to acknowledge that the
corporate structure that sponsors the various writing programs does make a sometimes
notable effort to combat institutionalized racism by attempting to “institutionalize
diversity,” but I contend that their efforts are compromised by the very goal of a
corporation-- which is to, above all else, make money-- and by the culture of the
corporation.
The culture of the corporation to which I refer asks its writing program
participants to perform a kind of corporate citizenship in order to gain access to the
creative space of television writing and producing. I contend that the corporatized
Hollywood diversity writing program often acts, a la Althusser, as a hailing process, as an
interpolation and compulsory subjection of the Black television writer as an ambivalently
Black corporate citizen who must be ever thankful for the opportunity that she is
constantly reminded she has been “given.” Thus, gaining access to the job of television
writing via the opportunity of writing fellowships and writing training programs is a
doubled edged sword where race and the production of blackness are concerned. Due to
these opportunities the writer may indeed get the job. But by the time the Black writer
gets the job she is sent so many contradictory signals about how to do the job
successfully, how to perform an acceptable brand of blackness (through embodiment and
discursively through written work), that the program’s professionalization process also
operates as a priming process that marks a certain kind of racial (and class) performance
as desirable. While all professionalization programs are about socialization to some
degree, I argue that the professionalization of television’s writing programs are often
about the attenuation of race (and gender and class) and the flattening out of “front stage”
64

performances of blackness.
50
Thus, I argue broadly in this dissertation that television
writing rooms are central to the American television apparatus’ function as a racial
project invested in establishing blackness as part of a white-black binary that subjugates
blackness and casts an ambivalent eye toward minoritized subjects. Consequently, I
characterize the mostly unacknowledged work that various television writing access
programs do and their ambivalent stance towards Black cultural producers as the pre-
production of racial formation.
While these arguments paint the predicament of the Black television writer in
stark and prescriptive terms, I do not want to suggest that this formation is completely
over determined. I see the interplay between television production, the writers’ room, and
the corporation as a highly kinetic and discordant combination of the corporate and the
creative. I view television writing rooms as a hybrid creative/corporate space, an example
of industrial and cultural hybridity. I reference “hybridity” here, not to invoke the
impossible existence of some “pure” state that never existed in the first place, but in
Homi Bhabha’s sense of the term. He writes:
“What is theoretically innovative and political crucial is to think beyond… and
to focus on those moments that are produced in the articulation of cultural
differences. These In-between spaces provide the terrain for elaborating strategies
of selfhood--singular or communal--that initiate new signs of identity, and
innovative sites of collaboration, and contestation, in the act of defining the idea
of society" (2, emphasis mine).

Bhabha then goes on to say that:
“Terms of cultural engagement, whether antagonistic or affiliative, are produced
performatively. The representation of difference must not be hastily read as the
reflection of pre-given ethnic or cultural traits set in the fixed tablet of tradition.

50
For more on front stage and back stage performances of the self, see Erving Goffman’s The Presentation
of Self in Everyday Life (New York: Doubleday, 1959).
65

The social articulation of difference, from the minority perspective, is a complex,
on-going negotiation that seeks to authorize cultural hybridities that emerge in
moments of historical transformation. The 'right' to signify from the periphery of
authorized power and privilege does not depend on the persistence of tradition; it
is resourced by the power of tradition to be reinscribed through the conditions of
contingency and contradictoriness that attend upon the lives of those who are 'in
the minority'.” (2, emphasis mine)

Bhabha offers the hybrid and the In-between as an ambivalent periphery that nevertheless
contains possibilities. He also names and describes the terms of cultural engagement as
performative. It is not surprising, then, that performance looms large in the space called
the writers’ room. Performance Studies is both a field and a methodology that unearths,
highlights, interrogates, and advocates for the liminal, for the in-between, for that which
is neither “this” nor “that.”
51
Performance studies lives in the in-between and it is
performance that constitutes the daily reality of the television writers’ room. However, as
Bhabha points out, and as Tavia Nyongo defends, this in-between/hybridity/fluidity
allows for subversive possibilities.
52
Not surprisingly, these hybrid contradictions of the
creative and the corporate can be incredibly frustrating, as the writing room turns the
individual work of television writers into a false logic of race that is then
inter/nationalized and institutionalized by a global media apparatus. But the very
friction
53
of the hybridity of the space also allows me to offer an argument of possibility

51
For more on the definition, utilization, and state of Performance Studies see Schechner 2002, Parker &
Sedgwick 1995, Carlson 1996, Bial 2004, Phelan 1993, E. Patrick Johnson 2003, D. Soyini Madison 2005,
Conquergood 1985 & 2002, Diana Taylor 2001.
52
For more on hybridity as both a productive and controversial concept in cultural theory see Tavia
Nyongo’s Amalgamation Waltz (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009). Also see Lisa Lowe,
Robert Young, and May Joseph.
53
Anna Tsing ethnography on the destruction of the Indonesian rainforests develops the metaphor of
“friction” to account for how productive clashes between opposing global forces can sometimes take place
in unlikely “zones of awkward engagement.” See Tsing’s Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).
66

here-- even as my research lays out the treacherous domain of the television writers’
room as a key site in popular culture that upholds the status quo of our national imaginary
as a social hierarchy based on limited ideas of race.
54

I want to suggest here that the Black writer, before ever entering a writers’ room,
is primed, through the industry’s diversity writing programs, to function in an ambivalent
manner regarding the politics of Black representation. Furthermore, this pre-production
of racial formation via an always provisional corporate citizenship sets up multiple,
conflicting demands that work together to compound the difficulty of professional
success for African American television writers. On one hand, the “diversity” writer must
conform to corporate culture; on the other hand, the writer must conform to the decidedly
(or performatively) anti-corporate writing room culture. On the one hand, the writer must
be “more” and do more than represent his “race”; on the other hand, he might have been
and is often hired to represent “authenticity,” to be the de facto authority on his race in
the writers’ room. On the one hand s/he must set all others at ease about her/his fact of
blackness; on the other hand s/he must be mindful of writer room hierarchies that tend to
problematically and inextricably intertwine the writer’s blackness with his/her (usually)
low “status” in the room. As a result, I scrutinize access and “opportunity” in television,
in order to reveal the industry’s ambivalence toward the Black subject it insists on
representing and the Black subject it (sometimes) employs.

54
Not every scholar agrees that performance provides progressive possibilities. For example, Vershawn
Ashanti Young writes: “…it’s not racial performance itself that is of primary concern in my analysis but the
consequences that result when blacks promote or resist the unyielding, unshakeable burden that I argue
always accompanies and compromises that performance.” And whereas E. Patrick Johnson believes that
‘the wonderful thing about performance… is the space it provides for possibilities and transgressions,’ I am
not encouraging performance for its subversive potential or otherwise as a way out of essentialized notions
of race, gender, and sexuality. In actual fact I’m echoing the thought that racial performance reinscribes the
essentialism it’s meant to subvert…” For more on this topic see Young’s Your Average Nigga: Performing
Race, Literacy and Masculinity (Wayne State University Press, 2007), 11.
67

“Is s/he Good in the Room?”
The challenge of gaining access to the creative workspaces in Hollywood in
general and in television writing, in particular, is largely the defining problem for those
who desire to work and make a career in mass media entertainment.
55
Such is the
problem of access that in the entertainment industry blatant nepotism is generally much
less stigmatized than it might be in other industries. This is partly because in Hollywood
even nepotism will not always guarantee success. The difficult problem of access has
become so mythological that the language of the pursuit of access (like “How do I get a
break?”,“What was your big break?”, or “Who gave you your big break?”) still carries
the connotation of referring to the entertainment industry. To become a television writer--
or what I am calling in this project an image breaker-- requires that one somehow,
somewhere along the way, get a “break.” A career as a television writer involves an
ongoing pursuit of “the break(s)” that allows one to get work and to keep working. The
notion of access is especially relevant as an organizational reality and metaphor for
television writers because they must first penetrate traditional Hollywood barriers to get
“inside” television. Then, they find that they must function in a collaborative, multi-
layered, and secretive environment that mostly centers on the so-called “writers’ room.”
In other words, there is “inside” and then there is “inside.”
56

55
The entertainment industry is quite openly reflexive about the fact that it is a business of access
composed of ever smaller circles of exclusivity the closer one gets to “power” within the industry. A
common idea about access and power within the entertainment industry can be summed up by the infamous
industry saying that “there are only six people in show business-- six people who can say “yes” and make a
project happen. Everyone else is just sitting by the phone waiting…”
56
I delineate between inside and “inside” because it is not unusual for the writers’ room on some shows to
splinter and break off into two or more writers’ rooms. When this happens there is often the positing of a
question: which room is seen as more “productive” to the process of breaking stories and therefore more
valuable to the showrunner and the overall television production? This positing is especially true of a first
year show when all writers are being assessed on a daily basis. While all the writers are “inside”, in that
68

The writers’ room is symbolically, literally, and geographically the innermost
sanctum of the creative process in television. Rarely will one find a writers’ room
immediately upon entry into a television production office. The writers’ room is usually
located inside a building that is internally referred to in production discourse as “The
Writers’ Building.” Within the political economy of television production, these two
phrases of ownership-- the Writers’ Room and the Writers’ Building-- mark the role and
work of the television writer as specialized and elite. While the writers’ building is
openly and clearly identified among production crew, the writers’ room is often
unmarked. “The Room” is generally not easily accessible or even visible to most visitors.
If there is a second level to the writers’ building the Room tends to be located on the
higher level. It may be located in the middle or in the back of a suite of production
offices, but it is almost never located in the front. It always has a door that can be locked,
and in my experience it is not unusual for the room to lack windows (particularly if it is
on the first floor of a building). The writers’ room is a real place that does imaginary
work-- work that I argue broadly throughout this project that functions performatively
and enables the citationality of performativity. It is imaginary work that has real
consequences within larger society around animating notions of race and especially
around Black representation. Therefore the question, “Is s/he good in the room?”, often
one of the first queries that an executive producer asks previous employers about a writer
she is considering hiring onto her show, functions practically as a question about

they are one of the few who have been hired to write on a show, the “more valuable” writers’ room has just
now moved a bit closer to the next layer of the showrunner’s “inside.” Some writer’s have speculated,
privately, that the inside and the “inside” are often split along gender and racial lines, i.e. women writers
feeling they have been silenced and Black writers, who are often also the lowest level writers on staff,
report of being physically locked out of the writers’ room and marginalized or cut out of the creative
process.
69

professional abilities-- and discursively, as a question about granting privilege and access
to one of popular culture’ inner sanctums.
“Is s/he good in the room?” is a multi-layered question that appears to speak to
one specific aspect of the television writer’s job but in fact speaks to several. The
question is a fascinating one. First, it succinctly encapsulates the unique performative
aspects of being a television writer. Unlike novelists, playwrights, or screenwriters, the
job of television writing is not, primarily, a solitary pursuit. Ultimately, the process of
producing a television episode comes down to a television writer doing script work that
looks a lot like the work of her/his other writing colleagues. That is, the writer must
create. The writer must confront the blank page and write-- quickly. However, what is
different about the work of television writers is that the writers, especially in comedy, but
also now increasingly in drama, usually spend up to fourteen hours a day inside a bland
conference room doing what looks like arguing with each other before they get to write.
That bland conference room is usually anointed as “the Room.” It is in this space that
television narratives referred to as “stories” are discussed and debated point by point. The
writers’ room and its process are not pleasurable for many television writers. Many
writers come to hate it. The lengthy, complex process of breaking stories, the volleying of
ideas in an enclosed arena, often becomes intense in a way that can make a Socratic
college seminar look like the epitome of good manners. For example, one executive
producer is known to “jokingly” and publicly shout “you’re fired!” to writers in the room
if they pitch an idea that the producer doesn’t like. While the producer laughs at this
“obvious” joke and quickly moves on, many writers on this producer’s staff have realized
70

that too many “you’re fired” jokes from this executive producer tends to result in an
actual termination near the end of the season.
Therefore, the question “Is s/he good in the room?” is posed primarily as a
question of performance-- as in, can the writer contribute positively to the pressure filled
machinery of making television? But “is s/he good in the room?” is also a question of
access. Being hired as a television writer is a ticket of admission to play as part of a team
in an often hidden cultural site that drives the aesthetics of television. The question “Is
s/he good in the room?” also means “Can I let this person into the Room?” It is a
question of who is granted access to the work of television, to the perceived glamour and
perks of television, and to the “success” and power that television can sometimes bestow
upon its practitioners. Television writers tend to earn well-- though not for very long.
Still, the reality that an executive producer is potentially empowering a writer’s work to
reach millions of people while also providing a financially substantial livelihood is an
unspoken issue that reframes “is s/he good in the room?” from a performance question to
a financial question, i.e., “does this writer deserve (the salary) that being in the room will
provide?”
57

If we are to believe that gaining access in the American television industry can be
difficult for virtually everyone, regardless of race-- a point of view that is often
emphasized during diversity-themed industry professionalization events-- it is still not

57
Fred Rubin, a veteran television comedy writer who has taught workshops for two of the television
industry workshops and fellowships in which I participated and observed, tells an interesting story that, for
me, sums up this “elephant in the room” the relationship of television writing to money. He tells of the time
he worked on comedy series “Webster”. One night, the writers were stuck on a script problem at 2am in the
morning. After a prolonged twenty minute silence a writer finally pitched a joke. Fred, as the writer-
producer in charge of the room, then looked at his watch and quickly calculated the worth of twenty
minutes of the collective salaries of the writers present. He then dismissively pronounced “well, that joke
cost over twenty thousand dollars…”
71

surprising that, as in the rest of our society, “race” heightens and compounds this
difficulty. Some networks and studios have, for many years now, recognized that their
system(s) of finding, cultivating, and hiring television writers was, at best, a short sighted
system of friends hiring friends. It was (is) shortsighted because maintaining the status
quo is also a self-defeating system for an industry whose business it was (is) to create and
commodify popular culture. A now rather common short hand logic that advocates for
diversity inside and outside of the entertainment industry is encapsulated by the phrase
“diversity is good business.” If show business, the reasoning goes, remains completely
closed off to expressions of new and diverse voices in a world whose audience is
becoming even more racially diverse, then television runs the risk of being seen as
irrelevant to that audience.
58
Overinvesting in incestuous, hermetically sealed business
practices that foreclose images of diversity in front of the camera and fail to hire diverse
workers-- especially writers-- behind the camera, was (is) quickly becoming a long term
liability for the television industry.
59

Thus, the threat of NAACP’s 1999 threat of boycotts did add considerable
cultural and political incentive for the networks to diversify the ranks of their employed
actors, directors, and writers. A few months after the boycott threat almost every

58
Toward this end-- acknowledging that “diversity” is above all a financial imperative-- in 2011 FOX
television completely eliminated the diversity department it started in 2000 and fired all of its diversity
executives. It then rebranded, claiming to have folded its diversity objectives into a new department called
“Audience Strategies.” This move has been questioned by members of the industry’s minority television
writer communities and is being interpreted as an unofficial beginning of the end of the campaign that
begun in 1999 that forced networks to actively embrace diversity. See the FOX website at
http://www.fox.com/audiencestrategy.
59
See “Diversity on TV: That's What Audiences Want” by Teddy Zee at TVWeek.com (April 3, 2008).
Accessed at http://www.tvweek.com/news/2007/05/diversity_on_tv_thats_what_aud.php on April 26,
2012. Also see “For TV, Diversity is Good Business” by Phil Rosenthal at ChicagoTribune.com
(November 27, 2005). Accessed on April 26, 2012 at http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2005-11-
27/business/0511270367_1_hispanics-alex-nogales-broadcast-network.
72

broadcast studio and network created new “diversity departments” and new diversity
executives of the vice-presidential level to administer those departments. Those
departments worked to identify qualified African American, Asian American, Latino, and
Native American writers and bring their presence to the attention of the network’s
showrunners. The diversity executives attempted to better coordinate with the existing
writing fellowship and industry training programs; at the networks that did not have
access programs these executives helped to create and/or administer new training
programs as another way to open doors for promising diverse writers to compete for entry
level jobs on television writing staffs. Of course, all of these new opportunities were not
entirely new. A few of the industry’s renowned writing fellowships (Walt Disney/ABC
Television Fellowship and the Warner Bros. Television Writing Workshop) existed
before 1999, but as the NAACP’s media advocacy campaign re-emerged those programs-
- as well as the new fellowships and programs (FOX Writers Program, Bill and Camille
Cosby’s Guy Hanks/Marvin Miller Screenwriting Fellowship, the Nickelodeon Program,
NBC’s Writers on the Verge program, the CBS Writer Program)-- began to take on a
new, urgent significance in the employment practices (and PR battles) of networks and
studios.
One of the contradictory secrets of Hollywood writing programs is that they are
largely assumed by people inside and outside of the industry to focus exclusively on
“minority” writers and artists. However, a careful check of the programs’ stated goals and
their actual participants reveals that this is not true.
60
While the ABC program has

60
For confirmation, check the websites of the Warner Bros. Television Writers Workshop and the
ABC/Disney Writers Fellowship Program. They can be accessed at http://writersworkshop.warnerbros.com
and http://abctalentdevelopment.com.
73

consistently selected a multi-cultural mix of fellows, no minority group clearly
dominates. Young, white male and female writers are certainly well represented between
these two programs, in particular, and among all the programs in general.
61
In fact, the
Warner Bros. Workshop website reveals that recent program participants have been filled
primarily with Caucasian writers. Yet, within the industry this program and many others
are primarily lumped together and regarded, sometimes dismissively, as “diversity”
programs (i.e., full of undeserving or underqualified writers of color).
62

Furthermore, recent efforts have attempted to expand the notion of diversity
beyond the black/white binary. The Writers Guild of America, West, via its own recently
launched diversity program (the WGA Writers Access Project), defines diversity not only
in terms of race, but also in terms of women writers, LGBT writers, and writers over the
age of 55. Still, the discourse of diversity in the television industry has historically been
tied to visible racial phenotypes, and as a result “diversity” continues to be measured in
its most visible terms as a proxy term for race and more specifically, for African
Americans.

61
For listings and photos of recent program participants see
http://writersworkshop.warnerbros.com/web/alumni_2011.jsp or
http://abctalentdevelopment.com/fellows/alumni_writers.html
62
In 2010 I was invited by the Writers Guild to a small, select meeting for a frank discussion of diversity
issues. The meeting brought together a small group of young minority writers and a small group of white
male veteran writers. At one point mid-meeting one of the “minority” writers expressed the opinion that the
reputation of the diversity programs was “ruined beyond repair” due to “the fact” that too many
showrunners had “gotten burned” by hiring underperforming minority writers from diversity programs.
While I tried to counter this argument in the meeting by arguing that 30-50% of television writers in any
given TV season are ultimately terminated from the show they are working on, the silence in countering
this claim in this “frank” meeting was noticeable and to me, astounding. The sentiment was accepted as
fact, and despite my protests, the conversation moved on to assuming a problematic Black (or colored)
body and the ways in which the guild could help even experienced minority television writers “be better at
their jobs.”
74

Some of the programs’ track records in procuring work for their participating
writers are notable, especially when compared to the low number of “diverse writers”
who had managed to procure writing jobs without participating in a program. The
programs do not promise participants that they will get a job, only that the writer has
been vetted and identified as capable of writing for television and are prepared for the job
of a television writer. Still, the employment numbers for diverse writers of color (and
women) remain strikingly low.
63
This is especially true when the percentages of those
employed in television are compared to the ethnic composition of the American
population at large.
Since 2001, the Writers Guild of America, West (WGAW) has periodically
released a Hollywood Writer’s Report that quantifies the employment levels of all writers
by race, age, and gender. The latest report, the eighth study to be conducted, was subtitled
“Recession and Regression” and was released in 2011. The 2011 edition refines data
from past years and updates the report by adding employment data through 2009. The
data is highly reliable, having been collected and collated from the computerized earnings
reports that Writers Guild members and their employers are legally bound to file each
quarter.
64
Collectively, minorities have consistently achieved between 8%-10%

63
See the Writers Guild of America Hollywood Writers Reports in 2007, 2009, 2011. Reports can be
accessed at http://www.wga.org/uploadedFiles/who_we_are/hwr11execsum.pdf (“Recession and
Regression”); http://www.wga.org/uploadedFiles/who_we_are/hwr09execsum.pdf (“Re-Writing an All Too
Familiar Story”); and http://www.wga.org/uploadedFiles/who_we_are/HWR07_exec.pdf (“Who’s Stories
Are We Telling?”).
64
The WGA covers almost all the employment on primetime dramas and comedies. The guild tracks
employment but also requests corroborating information from its writer members. Writers are incentivized
to turn in as much information as possible. The reports retrieve their data from the computerized files of the
WGAW, which are based on member reports of employment and earnings. The Guild collects these reports
during the course of business in order to establish member dues and eligibility for health insurance
coverage. A certain income threshold must be achieved in order to receive insurance and to qualify for
75

employment over the past decade-- again, a percentage that is completely out of step with
contemporary minority population demographics. The report also makes clear that there
is a clear, persistent, and significant earnings gap between white and minority television
writers. In fact, 2009 represented the largest earnings gap between white male writers and
minority writers in the last ten years (5). Such quantitative data lays out the problem of
access in inarguable ways, establishing that minorities have been regularly
underrepresented in television by a margin of three to one.
65
The 2011 report concludes:
“it appears that minority writers are at best treading water when it comes to their share of
television employment, particularly as the nation itself becomes more diverse” (5).
The data within the WGAW’s reports are also confirmed by NAACP’s own
periodic reports on employment in the entertainment industry, entitled Out of Focus, Out
of Sync. The latest report Out of Focus, Out of Sync - Take 4: A Report on the Television
Industry was released in December 2008 (See Appendix for a network by network
numerical distillation of minority writers hired). The consistency of the data collected
and presented over the past decade within the Hollywood Writers Reports and the
NAACP’s Out of Focus, Out of Sync reports are an important example of the lack of
access for minority artists in television. The data supports my cultural and political
characterization of the television writers’ room as a constructed white space that
naturalizes whiteness as the unmarked sign of American identity. Therefore, I ask

pension benefits. This makes it unlikely that writers attempt to withhold information from the guild (which
would be futile anyway).

65
See 2011 Hollywood Writers Report at
http://www.wga.org/uploadedFiles/who_we_are/hwr11execsum.pdf. Accessed December 10, 2011.

76

through the ethnographic analyses presented below, the question of what happens to
Black writers when they get into or closer to that space through the provisional access of
a writing program or fellowship? What happens when African American writers are hired
and then groomed to enter and survive the creative labor space that materializes race into
our imaginary?
The First Days: Enter Ambivalence
It was February 6
th
, Orientation Day for the new writing program participants. As
I drove onto the studio’s parking lot and hustled from there to the orientation building, I
expected to find myself in a small room with the other television writing program
participants. Throughout my years in Los Angeles I had come to know writers who were
program alumni, so I knew that participants could expect to spend the first days of the
program in group seminar sessions with television executives, executive producers, and
writing workshop leaders. After several weeks of seminars, the program settled into a
fairly loose schedule that pushed the writers to be productive but allowed them to write
scripts whenever and wherever they wanted. The writers would have to come to the
corporate headquarters only to turn in drafts of their scripts or to “receive notes.”
66
After
the initial seminar sessions, the writing program had been described as an artist’s dream:
one received an income and functioned under a schedule that offered deadlines as
motivation to be productive, but still allowed the writer the freedom to write at his/her
own pace.

66
“Receiving notes” or “getting notes” are the euphemistic terms used in screenwriting and television
writing for getting critiqued on a script.
77

I was surprised, then, when I stepped off the elevator and rounded a corner to
instead find myself joining a long line of other brand new hires for the program’s parent
conglomerate company. As I found out later, these large-scale, conference room
orientations were a part of a bi-monthly ritual at EntertainmentCo. As the line moved
forward, we received name tags, photos were taken, large packets of information were
placed in my hands, and we were all ushered into a mid-sized conference room. In front
of me were dozens of stackable chairs, set out in two groups of several rows each. To my
right was a wall covered with seventy-five or so print logos of the various subsidiary
television networks, cable channels, film production companies, record labels, music
publishers, book publishers, radio stations, sports teams, theme parks and resorts that
together form the entire company. I was beginning a process of gaining access to
television, which in the 21
st
century means I was becoming a part of the most visible and
pervasive part of a corporate apparatus whose reach touches almost every part of our
national popular culture.
67

67
Television’s centrality to the vertical integration strategies of global media conglomerates is one reason
why, despite the proliferation of new home entertainment options, I still question and disagree, or at least
want to complicate current scholarly and popular arguments that pronounce this historical moment in media
as a “post-network TV” or “post-television.” It is true that television does not hold the monopoly on
audiences that it once did in terms of individual ratings for individual television networks and programs.
But television clearly remains the center of our media corporate apparatus and remains the depository
through which many, if not all, of a corporation’s subsidiary entertainment ventures must somehow connect
with, use, or reference the conglomerate’s television network or at the very least it seeks to emulate the
fiduciary model of television (ad rates on websites, etc.). This centrality of television as the ever present
sifter of our morphing popular culture was demonstrated during my first day of orientation as a television
program writer. I was being oriented as a television writer while sitting next to and below over fifty framed
posters that announced the television conglomerate’s multiple business and entertainment companies.
Television is but the tip of the corporate iceberg but it is still at the top in terms of its pervasive visibility.
Therefore it is difficult for me to embrace post-network or post-television arguments. In other words,
television is simply no longer stationary, it is on the move: it is in your living room, but it is also at your
sports arena; it is in your hotel room, but it is also on your computer screen; NBC is “free” but you’re also
paying for NBC on cable whenever you watch Bravo, USA, SyFy, and Telemundo.
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I was surprised that this first encounter was a decidedly corporate affair, but I was
not alone in my surprise. I discovered when talking with other program participants that
they were also surprised at the corporate tenor of the orientation and that it was not what
they expected in starting work as a television writer or writer in training. This first
impression was but one of many that illustrate that even the term “television writer” can
be slippery to define. The term “television” denotes what is now a fundamentally
corporate entity. Television began as a descendent of the radio industry and therefore it
was regarded as a commercial medium-- albeit one whose airwaves were “owned” by the
public.
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The term “writer,” however, has artistic connotations that conjure up images of
the intellectual rebel, the lone wolf wordsmith creating beauty and truth out of language
while making literary sense of the world’s chaos. These contradictory images illustrate
the etymological connotations inherent in the job description of “television writer” itself.
It also speaks to the contradictory position that the television writing program occupied
within the corporate parent’s company.
In this orientation room full of about fifty to sixty strangers several of us writers
were able to identify each other without introducing ourselves as writers. There were
approximately ten rows of ten chairs each, divided equally on both sides of the room. The
chair groupings created an aisle down the middle of the room. There were fourteen
writers (including me), and most of us somehow ended up sitting in the back, in the last
two rows of chairs closest to the exit door. This could have been a coincidence. But it
might have had something to do with the fact that the writers, taken as a group, were the

68
Edgerton, Gary R. The Columbia History of American Television (New York: Columbia University Press
2007), 3-59.
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most racially and ethnically diverse group of people in a room full of mostly white men
and women. The latter were all dressed in either khaki pants and pastel colored, button
down shirts for the men, and below the knee skirts in black, gray, or tan and light colored
blouses for the women. All the men’s shoes were either black or brown loafers or lace-
ups and the women all more small to medium height closed toe pumps. It was as if most
of the new employees had received a memo on the corporate costume and corporate
culture that the rest of us “creative types” had not received. Even the white men in the
writing program stood out when compared to the other white men in the room. One white
male wore bright red, horn-rimmed glasses; another wore worn blue jeans and athletic
shoes. That might not be remarkable except for the fact that no other white male in the
room was dressed similarly.
While I certainly undertaken fieldwork aware that I would pay close attention to
the racial dynamics of creating television I had not realized that a critical conversation
about race would emerge through performances of corporate identity. But here it was,
already confronting me in unexpected ways on my very first day, challenging my pre-
conceived ideas. In short, we looked out of place, and as several writers later confessed to
me, we mostly felt out of place. I can’t say for certain whether that was because we were,
as a group, more ethnically diverse than the other newly hired employees, because we
looked like a bunch of artsy hippies who had crashed a corporate retreat-- or some
combination of the two. Perhaps we writers had not instinctively “found” each other.
Perhaps the preppily dressed “corporate citizens” who had “gotten the memo” about how
to perform and dress on the first day of work at a large, multi-national entertainment
conglomerate, had instinctively abandoned us. This chapter, then, is about how many of
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those who were selected to participate in the writing program eventually “got the memo.”
Though this program had long ago ceased to be only a “minority” program, and there
were several white writers in that year’s class, and this particular program casts a wide
net to assure as diverse a pool as possible among its over one thousand applicants for
what are ultimately approximately ten contracts, there was still a palpable division that
during that first day orientation of “us” and “them.”
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On the very first day the spatial
dynamics in this room were beginning to play themselves out along the multiple lines of
tension between dominant culture and minoritized cultures, and between corporate
culture and creative cultures.
As the human resources orientation continued and information about the company
poured forth at a fantastic but mind numbing rate, all of the new hires present were at one
point called upon to introduce ourselves and choose a favorite company character,
television program, music artist, or sports team. After several of the writers had identified
themselves as writing or directing fellows, one of the other new employees asked the
leader of the orientation-- a bespectacled, genial seeming Caucasian male who smiled
easily and looked to be in his early forties-- “What are writing and directing fellows?”

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The sheer odds against a writer receiving a writing program contract might appear to go a long way
towards continuing to justify its excellent reputation of finding talented writers who go on to have
successful television careers. And there is little doubt that in many cases it indeed does. But as I saw played
out repeatedly as the year progressed, this history of finding minority writers and bringing them into the
television industry seemed to affect both the program administrators’ desire to not be defined by it and the
ambivalent way that personnel in other departments treated the writing program participants. This history
shaped some of the actions of the program’s administration and therefore affected the experience of the
selected writers. In other words, there appeared to be an anxiety on the part of the administration. This was
due partly to the pressure to continue the existence of the program and to continue the role the program has
played in launching the careers of many diverse writers. The anxiety can also be attributed to the
administrator’s sensitivity to how the program presented itself within its own media conglomerate company
and to the Hollywood entertainment community at large. The message became clearer to me as the year
progressed. A double move was at work here: the program’s minority focused history is both trumpeted as
a success and downplayed at the same time.

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The Orientation Leader replied “The fellows are sort of like our company’s interns…”
Before he could say much more, one of the self-identified female fellows, Marie, a young
African American woman from the east coast, late 20’s, assertively interrupted. “WE
ARE NOT INTERNS!” she called out. “We are paid. We are not college students. I have
been out of college for EIGHT years, and we are chosen for their high level of talent and
experience…” This all occurred within two hours in the program, on my first official day
in the field.
So here, already, in microcosm, an esteemed television writer’s diversity
program-- usually described as a real achievement-- was conflated with an internship.
The Orientation Leader seemed well intentioned. Nevertheless, his description of the
most ethnically diverse group of people in the room as “interns” immediately racialized
and hierarchilized the space, marking white people as “employees” and Black, Latino,
Asian and the hippie looking white people as “interns.” I am not dismissing the fact that
the program represents “opportunity” for breaking into the entertainment industry.
However, the employee orientation shows that EntertainmentCo, the program, and its
participants were wrestling from different stances with the program’s status and with a
certain degree of marginalization, both racially and professionally. This often racialized
marginalization is all the more perplexing in light of the fact that the program’s writers
were earning more in salary than most of the entry to mid level employees gathered that
day for the orientation. I know this not only because I conclude it from the job
descriptions offered by the other employees when they introduced themselves, but
because I later saw a list of the new employees’ names, positions, and salaries. A quick
glance told me that the writers were in the upper tier of salaries of those gathered that
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day. Yet the perception that the writers were “interns” still existed, not just in here in the
orientation room but, as I later discovered, in other spaces within EntertainmentCo. Thus,
this perception persisted, despite evidence to the contrary. For example, the company’s
number one movie in national release at the time was a film that was written by a
program writer during his tenure in the program. For me this raises questions about the
ability of financial capital or cultural capital to neutralize racial marginalization within a
media corporation. In other words, how does the fact that the writing program
participants were earning more in salary than the average new employee not anesthetize
the notion that the writer’s were interns? How does the fact that the writers were
associated with one of the more difficult jobs to obtain in the entertainment industry not
remove the connotation of “intern”? In other words, does the connotation of Blackness, in
particular, neutralize the ability of a cultural worker to fully participate in mass media
and corporatized cultural production?
The Orientation Leader “innocently” expressed the commonly held but
misunderstood and inaccurate view that the writing program participants are interns. The
more accurate description would be that the writers are contract employees who represent
a notable corporate investment. This is true, even though the “investment” hedges their
company’s bet and is therefore shot through with an ambivalent commitment from the
beginning. Diverse writers are hired on what is essentially a relatively inexpensive and
pre-negotiated development deal with a contractual time limit. This allows
EntertainmentCo to refresh its creative resources with new writers each year. Relatively
speaking, the entertainment industry’s writing programs are one of the consistent “open
doors” in Hollywood for new talent and especially for new, ethnically diverse talent. But
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because the reality is that it takes years for most writers to be able to establish and sustain
a television writing career, the likelihood is high that many of the program’s participants
will not succeed in attaining that career. While this reality might be true and could be said
of any aspiring television writer, I want to argue that the opportunity to participate in the
television industry’s writing programs functions like a ticking time bomb. In most cases,
if the writer does not find success in this one year his/her selection as a writer in a
program will probably come to represent the pinnacle of his/her television writing career.
In many ways, this system is akin to an extreme form of academia wherein a newly hired
assistant professor is reviewed for tenure after working for only one year, or in some
cases, only three or four months. Therefore, the opportunity of being selected for one of
the entertainment industry’s writing programs (some are as short as three months) sets the
stage for a high stakes game that compels both a corporate performance and a creative
performance.
First Days: “Tough Love”
After the long morning and afternoon orientation sessions we finally headed over
to the writing program department for a meeting with the administration, to be followed
by a welcome meal. The tone of this meeting was warm but also decidedly business-like.
Ms. Eve, the program’s leader stated at the onset of the meeting: “This is an incredible
opportunity but this is also your job. You’re not on vacation…” One of the administrators
later that evening somewhat sheepishly called this their brand of “tough love.” It was
striking that this tone was occurring on our first day, before we had a chance to do
anything other than attend orientation. The “tough love” approach expanded beyond the
verbal communication of this first day. For the first time in the program’s history, Ms.
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Eve established a rule that the writers would no longer be allowed to work from home.
The goal of the writing program was for writers to write and polish multiple “spec
scripts” in preparation for staffing as writers on the network’s television shows.
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Writing
from home or from any location a writer chose had been the custom previously, unless a
guest speaker was on the schedule. Now we were to report every day for at least six
hours, 10am to 4pm. We had access to limited space within the department (a computer
area and cubicles). We were also allowed to write anywhere on the studio grounds as
long as we left word or checked in regularly with our location. In short, we writers had
been infantilized and placed under a new level of surveillance.
To their credit, the department’s leadership made the argument that as potential
staff writers on television shows we’d be expected to write in an office environment. “So
why not get used to it?” This is a reasonable argument, though it ignores the common and
almost universal practice of television allowing writers a hiatus from reporting to their
offices when writing their scripts. This industry practice functions as an
acknowledgement that the creative process necessary to complete a sixty page script
within the typical seven to ten calendar days is best served when not interrupted by
mandatory and distracting drives in Los Angeles traffic and the din of office activity--
unless certain writers finds it beneficial to their own process and personal circumstances
to come to the office.

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A spec script functions as a television writer’s calling card for procuring work on a television show. The
script is written speculatively, that is, without pay and is often based on an existing television series. For
example, a writer may decide that NBC’s Law & Order is the kind of television show she likes to write or
feels she would good at writing, so she creates her own story and episode of that show by “spec-ing” an
original Law & Order script that shows originality but also an ability to write within the given context of a
show. The evaluation of a spec script is how writers are chosen for industry writing programs and writing
new ones are primarily what television writers do until an executive producer of a show decides their work
is good enough or interesting enough to take a chance on hiring the writer to create stories and write script
for a real show.
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The new rules were not only a new level of surveillance, it was also a form of
departmental protectionism, in that the writing program department seemed to feel an
increasing need to protect its own existence and ensure its own future by monitoring the
productivity of the writers in a way that recalled the movie studio contract days of the
early to mid-twentieth century.
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This theme began to emerge for me very early in the
program and then was reified in several administrative decisions. In retrospect, this first
scheduling move set the tone for what was to come.
This raises the theoretical question of how entertainment initiatives aimed at
providing a more open door to Black writers often begin as interventions, but in order to
secure the desired changes, the politics of organization push the programs into embracing
their own institutionalization.
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They might argue, as a senior level executive did later
during the program, that diversity must become a part of the institution itself in order to
step outside its marginalized position. I believe the writing program I observed and others
in which I participated are examples of institutionalization as a strategy of intervention at
work. I would argue, however, that there still exists an ambivalence towards the program
and the department’s existence that manifests itself in the institution itself (the
department) prizing above all else, its own existence. In other words, as the tenor of the

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It was custom during this time for studio writers to report to work at the studio and work in large rooms
with cubicles. We see this arrangement in corporate offices all across America today-- which is precisely
my point. It is what corporations do to their employees, especially those who work primarily in an
administrative capacity. Television writers are considered creative workers and are usually accorded a
much higher degree of freedom in how their work is completed.
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On one level this makes sense, in terms of securing the permanence of progressive diversity initiatives in
television. This, however, raises an important question. What are the “side effects” that accompany
institutionalization (or departmentalization) of the push to increase diversity in television? How do these
side effects, or what we might also think of, a la Max Weber, as the “unintended consequences” of
institutionalization become core affects to the initial, progressive focus of the program? I am arguing here
that one of these unintended consequences is that the institutionalization of the writing program made it
more compatible than it might have otherwise been to the hegemonic effects of television.
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evening made clear, the program itself was considered to be larger than any one writer’s
employment. The message of the evening was hard to miss: You’re fortunate to be here,
so don’t waste this “opportunity,” and don’t make it and by extension, us, look bad. The
program’s administrators were mostly people of color. That these diverse executives were
speaking to a room largely full of diverse writers only further reveals the corporation’s
compelling call for the corporate performances that I argue are essential to gaining access
to the “creative” job of television writing.
In addition to the new requirement of reporting to work at the studio, we were
instructed to compose brief weekly logs of our writing activities and turn them in via
email. This new weekly log assignment was continuously revised several times in an
attempt to streamline the barrage of emails the executives were receiving. This
requirement was eventually and repeatedly streamlined to the point where it became clear
that this was both an attempt to monitor the progress of the writer’s work and a paper trail
to chart progress of the department’s activities as a whole. Again, the program itself was
invested in sustaining itself as a program, as a place of employment for its administrators,
and as an institutionalized door of access for future writers. I do not myopically nor
naively suggest they were somehow wrong to do this. This is not an academic way to call
these people a “sell out” or to question the purity of their motives (as if I could know that
in any case). On the contrary, this is what an activist fight for more representation and
creative opportunity in American television looks like from the inside. Of course, their
moves were in the interest of their self-interest but they were simultaneously continuing
to provide some kind of opportunity to diverse writers. They were responding to the
imperatives of their corporate positionality. This required that they infringe somewhat on
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the creative freedoms that writers treasure and that many writers feel they require in order
to produce their best work. But it also illustrates the corporate and creative hybridity of
industry writer programs as they attempt to reconcile their corporate parentage with their
ability to make their creative and cultural production look more like the America that
actually exists.
At the welcome banquet, another program administrator, Mr. Harold, explained to
me what I had begun to suspect: recent incidents led to these new administrative moves.
He stated that “this year’s writers were paying the price” for the lack of productivity by
three of the previous year’s program participants. Apparently there were several missed
deadlines, and they even discovered that one writer was often “in Las Vegas trying to flip
real estate property.” Ms. Eve made the joke, on this and several other occasions, that
“…sorry, but we can’t have writers working from the beach anymore.”
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Ambivalent Discourse about Contracts
A few days later we writers began our day by meeting before 9 a.m. in
EntertainmentCo’s third floor conference rooms. On our packed schedule was an
overview of our contracts with representatives from the legal department. As we all took
our seats at the massive configuration of tables with our pastries, juice, and fruit, I
noticed two new faces on the left side of the room. They were the legal representatives
sent to answer any questions we might have about our obligation to the company and the
writing program. Both of the lawyers were African American: one male and one female.

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While Ms. Eve’s comment can be understood from the standpoint that the corporation and the program
are paying writers to write, the actions of the writer who was suspected of writing from Las Vegas where
he was also trying to make more income by selling homes highlights the tenuousness of this “opportunity.”
The time element of a year or less than a year might offer the professional chance of a lifetime to “get a
break” in show business. It could also offer the chance to derail one’s finances if the writer had to quit their
previous job to take a chance on a television career that might not materialize before the program is over.
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The race of the legal representatives dispatched to speak to the writing fellows raised
questions (privately) among the writers. It was difficult not to question why these two
legal representatives in particular were sent to speak to us and it caused me and other
writers to wonder about the racial politics of the division of labor throughout the
corporation. Two African American lawyers were assigned to facilitate the program’s
contract session. Was it another example of the program’s designation as a “minority
program” or was it simply a case of two lawyers doing their jobs or was it some
combination of both? Perhaps it was nothing at all, but after the session was over the race
of the lawyers was noted by several of the writers.
One of the writers asked the lawyers and program administrators about some
specific contract language that held the writers as exclusive employees of
EntertainmentCo and as such restricted them from engaging in outside writing activities
and from accepting other offers of employment. Administrator Harold, a Latino man with
a serious demeanor stepped in, impulsively it seemed. He answered the question before
the lawyers could respond. He stated that the program was not trying to stop people from
having “other opportunities, if they presented themselves.” There was an odd silence after
he said this, probably because his statement was a surprise. It seemed to soften the
severity of the program’s rules and contradicted some of the statements made by the
program’s other administrators and directors. Up to this point, the program directors had
constantly reminded us that our salaries and the program represented a sizable investment
on the part of the parent company. Their goal was for us to ultimately go to work on one
of their network’s shows. They were not interested in us going to work for one of the
competitor networks. Mr. Harold spoke again, this time qualifying his statement, adding a
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caveat that seemed to more closely fit with a strict interpretation of the contract. He
reiterated that our first priority was to eventually work for EntertainmentCo and
emphasized the many variables and the amount of hard work that enter into the program
administrators’ efforts to staff writers onto television shows that are broadcast by the
parent company and its subsidiaries.
The discourse by the writers and one of the administrators during and after the
legal session suggested some slippage between the company’s legal position on their
exclusive rights to the writers’ labor and the program’s administrative enthusiasm for
enforcing that legal position. This struck me as interesting, given that this session
occurred only a few days after we started work. Many writers in Hollywood look to these
programs as a chance to gain a toehold in the entertainment business or as a way to
cement their “up and comer” status if they have already begun to work. Many aspiring
writers within the entertainment industry rightfully place a high level of importance on
these access programs as a career milestone. Participants can claim a high level of
selectivity; less than 1% of applicants are ultimately offered contracts. Even so, there was
still a level of fear expressed among the fellows in the first days of employment about the
exclusivity clause in the contract and about losing outside opportunities. At first, I
thought this to be indicative of the stereotype of artists who never want to commit too
soon to a project in case they are inadvertently closing themselves off from a better career
option that might be just around the corner. Upon further thought, however, this does not
make sense, given that most of the fellows had never had a job as a writer in the
television and film industries. So, what to make of this anxiety among some of the fellows
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and the somewhat surprising statement by administrator Harold during this legal session
to discuss the fellowship contract?
The writers clearly wanted to fully embrace the opportunities presented by the
contract-- but within the space of a few days, something had already shifted among them.
Their palpable, collective excitement had given way to a collective anxiety. The tensions
of successfully navigating the hybridity of a space that combined corporate mass media
with creative expression had already begun to manifest among the writers. Within the
space of only a few days the writers had been marked as interns, been placed under a new
kind of surveillance, and many had already confessed that they felt out of place. Had we
already received a message that said this opportunity was more tenuous than it seemed?
The writers’ questions about simultaneously pursuing outside work demonstrated that
they were now viewing this opportunity with an implicit understanding that the
“opportunity” still took place within a larger structure that transformed the “opportunity”
into a provisional one. The slippage between the program’s official stance, as illustrated
by the discordance between the language in the writers’ contracts and the discourse of
one of the administrators, raised a question: Were the administrators, as people of color
themselves, aware that the structure of the program increased a writer’s chance of gaining
access to work in television, but that the odds were still stacked against the writer
achieving long term success? Was Latino administrator Harold, in this moment,
subconsciously and/or surreptitiously signaling to us that we should continue to look after
our own interests first, despite the contractual language of our contracts? Was he saying
to this diverse group of writers that there is “inside”-- and there is “inside?” I can’t know
for sure. But this discordant moment between the legal language of the corporation, the
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attempt to soften that language, and the subsequent performance given by the
administrators in an effort to uphold the corporation’s official stance, indicated that the
writers had entered a site where opportunities to write for television were much more
complex than just having the ability to write for television.
Curtains Up
By the end of the first week in the program we were scheduled to meet our first
television executive. However, before the television executive arrived, we first met a
senior executive from corporate diversity, Mr. Cole introduced himself and “prepped” the
group for our first meeting and “seminar” with a network executive. Up to this point, I’d
noticed his unfamiliar face lurking in the background at some of our meetings, but he
hadn’t really spoken to us until this day. Ms. Eve, the executive directly in charge of the
program, was the public face of the program. It was with some curiosity, then, that I
began to wonder about the man who was suddenly taking the lead in the room. He spoke
to us warmly, but forcefully. Cole was a fit, bespectacled Latino man who looked to be in
his mid-fifties. He energetically and I thought-- somewhat nervously-- introduced
himself. I later suspected that this was nervousness on behalf of the writer’s first
“performance” test in front of a network executive. A former lawyer for the past twenty-
five years, he had been hired that previous November. He told us that after many years in
a variety of corporate and media law positions, he was now interested “in making a
difference.” He then spoke to us about the importance of introducing ourselves
“properly” to the busy and important television executives. He encouraged us to make an
effort to be “memorable” and stressed the importance of making a great impression as a
group.
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I felt befuddled about exactly how one should go about making an impression as a
group. Comments I heard later on from the other writers confirmed that I was not alone
in this confusion. This preparatory moment also suggested and solidified the notion that
the writing program participants were constantly in the position of proving the worth of
the program. This pre-meeting with Cole was designed with the dual goal of helping the
fellows take advantage of this undoubtedly rare access to network executives as well as
needing the writers to perform to such a degree as to assure the program’s continued
access to these executives. Diversity writer programs are always proving themselves,
justifying their existence and their costs. Just as the access the programs offered to
writers felt provisional, the diversity program’s own existence was, it seemed, also
provisional.
While large institutions often created hierarchies that competed for limited
resources, this particular institution was a multi-billion dollar global media brand. It
would seem that such a large company would incorporate space and time for the writers’
to have a learning curve, particularly since the company had already invested money in
the writers’ development. But the revolving door nature of the television industry’s
writing programs (there’s a new cohort every 9-12 months) severely limits its efficacy as
a true space of preparation, professionalization, and access. The dynamics I described
above are a function of the contemporary reality of corporate America (particularly when
a publicly traded company such as EntertainmentCo must contend with proving its
profitability each and every quarter). But these dynamics are also a result of television
industry writer programs functioning ideologically and performatively as an apparatus of
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Althusserian hailing that further identifies the Black writer as a racialized subject who
must first perform “beyond” his/her racialized status.
“How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?”
Soon after the first few executive meetings one of the writers, GH, began a
discussion one day during lunch in the commissary. GH wanted to discuss one of the
writers in the program because she was concerned the writer “Marie” was making the
group “look bad” in front of the visiting television executives. GH, a white female writer
who had moved from the east coast to the west coast in order to participate in the
program, said “I don’t know what can be done, but…” She trailed off. A few of the other
writers agreed that they found Marie to be “a little new.” Later in the conversation GH
elaborated more specifically on her comments about Marie. In her view, the questions
Marie would ask the executives were “basic” and the way she would ask the questions
were “sort of unprofessional.” GH, who often remarked how much she felt she had at
stake professionally and personally in moving to Los Angeles for the program, made it
very clear that she didn’t want the visiting executives to think “we are all green like that.”
Almost everyone at the table nodded in agreement, but no one precisely defined their
issue with Marie, other than her “newness,” her “greenness,” and a general sense that her
manner and speech in the executive meetings conveyed a lack of sophistication and
knowledge of the appropriate protocol. This, I began to see, is what senior diversity
officer Cole meant when he spoke of performing well as a group. Marie was the African
American woman who on the first day boldly challenged the Orientation Leader on his
description of the writers as interns. The majority of the writers had welcomed her
confrontational outburst that day. But now that we had been in the program for several
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weeks, her style of speaking and presenting herself had clearly lost the approval of GH
and eventually, several other writers. Something had changed. These writers were no
longer satisfied to have Marie’s voice take precedence during the important network
executive sessions.
Marie was from an urban city in the mid-west. Marie would often ask what GH
(and several other writers) considered to be “basic questions,” hence her sensibilities and
dialect suggested that she was new to Hollywood. For example, she would often indicate
a lack of knowledge about the network’s shows by asking the visiting executives what the
television shows they referenced were “about.” The first time Marie asked what a
particular show was “about” during one of the executive sessions I noticed GH’s body
stiffened and several eyes in the room widened. Their gestures appeared to betray a sense
of shock and disbelief. I admit that I was also surprised that Marie would ask these
questions. One reason such questions appeared to rankle the writers and the executives
are because television writers, particularly aspiring television writers in a writing
program, are simply “expected” to know the current television landscape. Specifically,
the writers are expected to be extremely familiar with EntertainmentCo’s shows, as they
are essentially a part of the hiring pool to become writers for those shows. If the writers
of color in writing programs are fighting against the perception that they are glorified
interns, then asking “basic questions” that gave the appearance of being a television
neophyte was, as GH made clear later, to be avoided at all costs.
The qualities that made Marie stand out and eventually become marginalized
within the program is uncomfortable territory and difficult to articulate in an exclusively
academic mode of writing. Marie was an example of how Boudieu’s notion of habitus
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materializes in cultural production. It shows us how her talent as a writer provided an
opportunity to access an elite space within mass media, yet her lack of habitus for that
space-- or what might be described as her lack of a “feel for the game” had a negative
impact on her abilities to convert this particular opportunity into a career.
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In some ways
then what emerged here and was embodied by Marie was the always complex interplay
between race and class. Since this project centers on an examination of the performance
of race in television production, it must also inevitably encounter class. While writing
programs such as these are attempts to reconcile the industry’s systemic issues with race,
the reality is that class, or rather the performance of class, is also one of the industry’s
systemic issues.
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The multitiude of ways in which class operates is one of the television
industry’s dirty secrets. Ethnic studies scholars have rightfully and convincingly argued
that we must account for the ways in which race often masks class, as well as how much
class masks race.

74
Johnson, Randal, in the Introduction to Pierre Bourdieu’s The Field of Cultural Production (London:
Polity Press, 1993), 5. Johnson states that the concept of habitus is sometimes referred to as a “feel for the
game” or “ a practical sense that inclines agents to act and react in specific situations in a manner that is not
always calculated and that is not simply a question of conscious obedience to rules. Rather, it is a set of
dispositions which generates practices and perceptions.”
75
I make the distinction between class and the performance of class because the mythology of Hollywood
casts it as an industry where upward mobility is available to all who have talent and/or drive enough to
succeed. Of course this isn’t entirely true, but I would argue that performance is the arena where this
investment that “nobody” can become “somebody” is most prominent. Since the Hollywood that works and
operates behind the camera is known for its rampant use of personal connections and capital, this myth of
mobility based on ability is a deeply flawed point of view. Still, no matter what class status one is actually
“from,” there is an unspoken expectation that once a Hollywood worker finds a modicum of success, a
certain elite class status will be exhibited. Often this exhibition takes place through material goods (cars,
homes, private schools for children, etc.). For example, a television network executive once explained to
me how he often “gets shit” from his co-workers and his family because he has a successful career, yet he
drove a basic American made car. He took it as a badge of honor that he had not succumbed to this pressure
to “go get a Beemer (BMW).” However, what I am arguing here goes beyond the ability to buy a car. I am
arguing that this expectation of a certain class performance also extends to one’s presentation of self, to
one’s habitus-- which, by theoretical definition, is difficult to change.
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Marie’s habitus as a Black, working class mid-westerner who did not “seem” as if
she graduated from an elite college seemed to become problematic for some of the
writers. It was not a problem that she was Black, per se, in a program accustomed to
including diverse writers of color. There was a problem with how she was Black. Marie
spoke in what some deride as “Ebonics” or what others, such as linguistic and
performance scholar Kershaw Ashanti Young refer to as BEV, or Black English
Vernacular (2007). In other words, there was a perception that she was failing the group
by failing to provide unspoken but expected performances of class. She was not meshing,
in some of the writers’ evaluation, with the terms of a corporate habitus or even a writer’s
habitus. In other words Marie came off, as we used to say in street slang, as too “ghetto”
for this particular group of people.
76
It was ironic that Marie, who had fervently and
publicly resisted the label of “intern,” was also the writer whom the others seemed to fear
would confirm the company’s suspicions that writers of color were indeed de facto
interns. In other words, in their view, she didn’t know how to perform in a way that made
it easy for an executive to picture her-- and by extension, all of us-- as a professional
television writer. Of course, the ability to “fit in” to a workplace’s culture could be said to
be important in any workplace, except for the fact that the requirements and practices of
working in television are different from most other workplaces. For example, African
American writers are often hired in television for (the perception of) their privileged
relationship to urban culture. So, we might ask, why is someone like Marie, who clearly

76
For more on the concept of habitus, see Pierre Bourdieu’s Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment
of Taste (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984).

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represented to the writers a kind of working class sensibility that we associate with urban
culture, labeled and disregarded as too new, too green, too (lower class) black?
The coded language used to describe Marie represented her evolving position in
the program and the dissonant conundrum that challenges many African American
television writers. Writers are often intellectuals that tend to present as “intellectuals.”
This is as true of many African American writers as it is of all writers. In television,
however, the African American writer’s ability to render certain cultural insights is often
valued as much, if not more, than their subjective ability to write. Yet, the writer is often
tasked with performing their cultural insights before the writer is allowed to write about
their insights. Yet again, if the performance is, subjectively, too black, then the writer
fails to give the expected class performances of the television writer and is therefore at
risk of not becoming a working television writer at all. In a different context and under
the right circumstances Marie’s presentation of her blackness might have been useful,
overlooked, or even valued as “creative,” “artistic,” or “authentic.” As E. Patrick Johnson
writes: “Authenticity, then, is yet another trope manipulated for cultural capital” (3). But
Marie’s authentic presentation of self did not pass muster in the corporate space of a
writing program. Marie was labeled and disregarded by her peers because her newness,
her greenness, her brand of “authentic” blackness was unsettling. She did not give the
right performance of the right kind of blackness, a blackness that could be contained
within the acceptable parameters of the mass media corporate environment or brand.
During the meeting sessions with executives Marie made several of the other writers
nervous by association, and as result of her early “missteps” she was silenced in future
meetings. Marie still continued to speak, but her questions began to be quickly restated
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by other writers. Eventually, Marie stopped speaking in the executive sessions. She had
been subtly dismissed by several of her colleagues in the writing program. Her peers did
not consider her to be a serious contender for the film and television jobs that became
available, and it also seemed she was no longer taken seriously by the program’s
administrators.
While, on the first day of the program, all the writers had “missed the memo,”
within a few weeks they had all figured out that something else related to corporate
culture was expected of them. They were to show this something else and perform it, if
they wanted to garner the additional level of internal support necessary to successfully
move from the writing program to a position as a staffed writer on a television show.
Marie’s cultural, class, and racial performance had become a problem for GH and her
colleagues during the program’s group interviews with professionally elite network and
studio executives.
77
The dynamic that emerged with regard to Marie illustrated the ways
in which the writers began trying to re-group themselves in a clumsy attempt at
impression management.
78
Though GH made an attempt to employ politically correct or
non-offensive language in discussing Marie, as Julie Bettie points out “these various
gestures of class performance never exist outside of and are always imbued with race and
gender meanings” (55). By marking Marie (and soon thereafter a Native American writer
in the program) as too new, or too green, or too (the wrong kind of) black, several of the

77
For more on individual cultural performances as a reflection of class habitus or origins and for more on
the performative nature of class and its relationship to cultural capital see Julie Bettie’s Women Without
Class: Girls, Race, and Identity (Berkeley: University of California, 2003), 49-56.
78
For more on the theory of impression management see Erving Goffman’s The Presentation of Self in
Everyday Life (New York: Anchor Books, 1959).
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writers were defining themselves against her somewhat “uncouth” brand of unmediated
blackness.
I do not know whatever came of these conversations about Marie, whether the
other writers or the administrators ever approached her about her “performance” in the
group seminars with the visiting television executives. In my view, however, the writers
who often took it upon themselves to make immediate addendums whenever Marie
spoke-- or would quickly change the subject-- were, in effect, performing at the expense
of Marie. In so doing, several of the writers began to signify on themselves, to define
themselves as the “right kind” of diverse writer-- one whose talent, and more importantly,
one whose “diversity” could be harnessed to serve the needs of a mass media
corporation’s television show. I can say that at the end of the program, Marie-- unlike
most writers who move to Los Angeles after being chosen for such programs-- decided
against a writing career in television and film and moved back home.
Transitions to Creative Work: Corporate Style
Approximately seven to eight weeks into the program, Ms. Eve, the leader of the
department, called an unscheduled meeting for all the writers and the department staff.
Once we gathered she announced that, after heading the program and various other
diversity initiatives for several years, she would be leaving her post within a week and a
half to take an executive global position in another division of the parent company. She
described the position as an opportunity she couldn’t refuse. It had been a “very
aggressive” and “very fast” recruit, and she had just made up her mind the previous day.
She stated that her departure would not affect her commitment to seeing the writers
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staffed on television shows and that nothing would change for the day to day process of
the writers. The meeting lasted five to seven minutes.
Afterwards, Cole, the senior executive for the division, entered the room and said
that “change is a part of corporate life.” Though I have spoken in terms of “the corporate”
in this chapter, it was not until this moment that the word had ever been used in speaking
with the writers. The room fell silent after these announcements. Shortly thereafter, I
noticed that most of the writers, visibly upset, packed up their belongings and left for the
day. A few days later, Ms. Eve was packing up her office when Chris, another African
American male writer and I fell into a hallway conversation with her. Chris expressed his
concern that a vacuum would occur, since “that’s what happens when a strong leader like
you leaves a position.” Eve countered by stating that she and the president of the network
are “like this” (she crossed her fingers together to indicate their closeness and alliance in
fulfilling the goals of the writing program). She went on to say that “this company
receives too much good press from the writers program” to let it waste away just because
she was leaving for another job. This was the first time I had ever heard any executive
within the company openly acknowledge that this “opportunity” for the writers was also
an important strategic opportunity for the corporation. Sarah Banet-Weiser writes that
“…within the world of children’s television, racial and ethnic identity works as a kind of
currency, where it increases the political and social clout of a network to be able to claim
that it is diverse…” (2007). I extend Banet-Weiser’s argument here to all of primetime
television. The corporations that own primetime television also benefit politically,
culturally, and economically from the presence of industry writing and directing
programs aimed at that “ensure diversity.”
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A few days after the announcement we all found ourselves at a farewell party for
Eve. It was an emotional gathering of all the writing program executives. The president
of the network referred to Eve as “the consciousness of the company.” This was an
extravagant compliment that, in turn, raises a critical question. If the consciousness of a
multi-billion dollar division of a multi-billion corporation is embodied in one person,
what happens when that person leaves?
Several days later all the writers had scheduled an individual meeting with Cole,
the senior executive responsible for diversity throughout the company. During my
meeting we fell into a unusually frank discussion about race and diversity. We spoke of
globalization as a contemporary cultural force and a fact of life in the business world. I
posited the idea of the institutionalization of diversity as a potential strategy to combat
institutionalized racism. He understood what I meant but cautioned that I not rush to
conclusions, saying that diversity in the company needed to become a “core value of the
company” and “that it wasn’t there yet.” This echoed comments made by a white, female
senior film production executive at our welcome dinner weeks earlier. She stressed that
diversity is “not only the right thing to do, it’s the smart thing to do. Look at our
audiences. They have to see themselves reflected back or our business model is going to
eventually fail.” During my time in the field I heard this particular executive espouse this
line of reasoning at almost every public event in which she spoke. It was clearly
something she passionately believed in. At first I was encouraged, but then I realized that
she was speaking of diversity as a business model, devoid of any social justice
dimensions. Perhaps this was simply her way of easing diversity into the corporate
conversation on terms the corporation understands. But as Banet-Weiser points out, this
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embrace of diversity primarily as a corporate, capitalistic strategy is problematic (2007).
She writes:
“Nickelodeon’s decision to create diverse programming is often discussed as
‘good business,’ distancing the channel from the political implications of
embracing diversity… The underlying question of this commercially driven
commitment to diversity is this: where does this leave racist practices and
minority groups?...This is ultimately the problem with consumer citizenship:
representational practices offer what looks like a more inclusive, more democratic
society— but with no political referent or practice… Race, in this context, fulfills
a political function— increased media visibility and “positive” representations of
race on television— but, through this visual strategy, distracts media audiences
from political practice. My concerns, then, revolve around this ambivalence: what
are the consequences when race or ethnicity becomes cultural capital?…” (146-
147)

I, too, want to ask a version of this question. Where does this embrace of diversity (as a
brand strategy divorced from political dimensions) leave racist practices and minority
groups? Perhaps this suggests the answer: Shortly after my time with the writing program
this same white female executive, who was professionally open about the fact that she
was a lesbian, was publicly, and some say callously, fired from her powerful studio
position. She was fired over the phone while in the labor room at a hospital with her
female partner, as she gave birth to their child.
This was a stark example of how quickly diversity can take a subjugated position
to the core values and primary goals of a media corporation, which is to make money for
its investors. As I continued on at EntertainmentCo I would begin to see this duality at
work in the professional choices I had to make. I took note how embodying even the
“right kind” of “diversity” could quickly come to be seen as a detriment to building a
desirable and sustainable career.

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Getting to “Morgan Park”
Before I was selected for the writing program, I’d met in early November with an
executive at one of the subsidiary cable networks of the program’s parent company to
discuss a new television drama, Morgan Park, which was staffing up and looking for
writers. By all accounts, according to my representatives, the meeting had gone well, and
my scripts were being sent over to the executive producer, who would make the final
hiring decision. But I had already been approved for hire by the network and studio.
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I drove to the executive producer’s home in the Pacific Palisades. The show’s
creator, David, is an Emmy-winning television veteran mostly known for his work on
acclaimed series from the 1980s. David is an affable Caucasian man who appeared to be
in his early sixties. After a hiatus of several years, this show was his return to the
airwaves. I was offered a seat on the plush sofa behind his coffee table in the library. He
sat across from me. Directly behind him, as if sprouting out of his head, stood his four
golden Emmy awards. I had read the script of the series and viewed a rough edit cut of
the pilot episode.
80
The show focused on an African American police officer, Gary, and
his family. Driven in ways even he doesn’t quite understand to better the rough
community in which he grew up and now patrols, he and his wife buy an old, dilapidated
house. They rehabilitate and rebuild the house and move their family into it. The children

79
To be hired as a staff writer or writer-producer on a television show usually requires the approval of at
least three entities: the studio, who financially produces the show; the network, who airs it; and the
showrunner, who writes and creatively produces the show. The decision is ultimately (usually) the
showrunner’s but often the writer must still be on a pre-approved hire list or the showrunner must then
make a strong argument why he/she is hiring outside the list. Sometimes a fourth entity is involved: the
production company who developed the writer’s idea and teamed up with the studio to sell the show to the
network. The production company often gets a say in the hiring of writers.
80
A television pilot is the first episode of a potential new television series. It introduces the characters and
basic premise of the show. Most pilots are never aired because the network decides against making more
episodes.
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and their mother are skeptical of the neighborhood but give it a try, in part to appease
Gary’s need to be a part of the solution to what ails this urban community. In many ways
the show resembles the early 1980s show “American Dream” that Todd Gitlin writes
about in his important television study Inside Prime Time.
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David and I had a good meeting, though I was somewhat surprised he’d created
this show, as he revealed little about his background that would suggest he knew
anything about African American families. Afterwards, my representatives were
optimistic that I would get an offer and possibly receive a much sought after promotion
up the writer-producer ladder, from staff writer to story editor.
82
But after postponing his
decision but keeping his interest in hiring me alive for a few weeks, I was finally
informed that I did not get the position and that he chose to hire an African American
female writer in this slot instead.
While I was cautiously hopeful, and it did seem that I might get this job, I was not
surprised to discover that David decided to offer the job to an African American woman.
When an executive producer is under some pressure from a network to hire an African
American writer, due either to the show’s subject matter or some other political
preference of the day, it has been noted anecdotally in many conversations with Black
writers (and sometimes admitted by white writers) that a Black woman has a better
chance receiving a job offer than a Black man. Whatever the truth of that sentiment, it

81
For more on American Dream see Chapter 6 of Gitlin’s academic expose on television networks in his
seminal television studies text, Inside Primetime (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983, rev. ed.
Published by Routledge, 1994).
82
The general hierarchy of writer titles in television, in ascending order, is: freelance writer, staff writer,
story editor, executive story editor, co-producer, producer, supervising producer, co-executive producer,
executive producer, and executive producer/showrunner, though showrunner is an internal title. For
example, the television viewer will never see in the credits that appear on screen the title of “showrunner.”
Yet, within the industry, which executive producer is also the showrunner is often well known.
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was slightly jarring in this case because the lead character in the pilot was a Black man,
and I was the only Black male writer David chose to interview. His decision not to hire
me or any other Black male for his writing staff went against the grain of even the
entertainment industry’s clearly segregated practices with regard to hiring television
writers.
83

As it turns out, the first meeting that I received while I was in EntertainmentCo’s
writing program was an interview with the same cable television executive I’d met
month’s prior for Morgan Park. As it turns out, by now the executive producer David had
been fired and forced off his show. Among the reasons cited for his termination was the
perception that he’d begun to write scripts that completely abandoned the premise of the
show he had sold to the network. The network executives replaced him with a veteran
female executive producer, an African American woman whose writing I had followed
over the years. The cable executives were eventually able to arrange another interview for
me. Though it took awhile for all the pieces to fall in place, I was eventually offered a
position as a writer on the show. I wanted to take this job for a variety of personal,

83
One of the television world’s many secrets is that Black writers tend to be sought after only if the cast
itself contains a significant Black actor presence. What is “enough” of a presence to warrant the hiring of a
Black writer is up to the judgment of the network, studio, and/or executive producer. For example, the hit
show “Grey’s Anatomy” initially employed three prominent Black actors in series regular roles, two of
whom were African American men. But the show’s writer-producers have not, in the seven seasons the
show has now been on the air, ever hired an African American male writer. This is a sore subject among
some in the Black television writer community in Los Angeles because Shonda Rhimes, an African
American woman, is the powerful creator and executive producer of the series. There had been hope that
she would certainly do no worse in terms of her hiring practices than a white writer-producer might do. But
Rhimes specifically pitches her show as a trans-racial or post-racial universe that presents diversity but
doesn’t acknowledge doing so. One could make the argument that this represents a kind of progress in the
presentation of Black images. But this passive presentation of diversity allows the racially limiting logics of
hiring practices for writers to continue, at least for Black men. Rarely in television is an African American
hired simply because s/he is an excellent writer and observer of the human condition. They tend to be hired
also as observers of their own racialized existences and as experts of urban style. This professional practice
that links the visibility of minority actors in television to the employment of minority writers in television
no doubt explains the disproportionate lack of Asian-American and Latino writers as well.
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artistic, and academic reasons. But since I was already locked into a salary structure per
my diversity contract, it meant that I would be going to work on the show with an 80%
paycut from what I would have earned had I been hired and staffed as a story editor just a
few months earlier. My road to working on Morgan Park was an elaborate process that
illustrates the challenge of gaining access to the writers’ room. For my agent, however,
receiving an offer to work on the show while I was in the writing program meant that I
had effectively “negotiated with myself” to lower my “quote” (a writer’s weekly rate or
price) by a startling amount of money.
“Negotiating with myself” is a term I heard an agent use and describe as the first
rule of agenting and representing actors, writers, and directors. Agents never want to
negotiate with themselves by purposefully or foolishly naming a lower price that the
“talent” will accept if the studio or network has actually designated a higher payroll
budget for that position. The person representing the entity that is offering the job
(generally, the studio) is to name a salary first, then the agent will respond. It is also
called “not leaving money on the table,” and is something that an agent never wants to
do. Since I had previously and recently come close to landing this job when it carried an
almost guaranteed 100% promotion in salary and rank than previous jobs, the fact that I
was taking this same job just a few months later at about 33% of the salary in which I
was first being considered smacked of “negotiating with myself” and was one reason why
my representation was not happy about this development; A writer’s quote is industry
terminology for a writer’s weekly or episodic fee to work on a show. A writer’s quote
usually begins with the last salary he or she was paid to work on a show. The savvy agent
does his/her best to increase a writer’s quote as much as the market will allow.
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After being informed that the show wanted to hire me and that an offer was
forthcoming, I immediately asked the program administrators to phone my representation
to tell them what I considered to be great news. I’d attempted to prepare my
representation that this offer was forthcoming, because I realized that they were no longer
pleased about the prospect of my working for this show. I underestimated their response.
My manager and agent were furious. They told me EntertainmentCo was taking
advantage of me, of knowingly hiring an experienced writer at less than market rate.
“They should have made David (the first executive producer) hire you in the first place,”
my agent fumed. “We worked hard to get you on that show. They should have hired you
then, you were perfect for that job. They (the network) had their chance to hire you, so
screw ‘em! I don’t want your access with the program to be used on that show.” This
conversation begins to get at the knotty political and cultural issues that can emerge with
writers who work on an African American themed television program. In the mind of my
representation and by extension, the entertainment industry at large, it is not necessarily
considered a huge help to my career to be relegated to something that can be marked as a
“Black show” (unless it is on HBO). In the politics of television writing, working on a
Black show is almost always automatically ghettoized and considered indicative of poor,
non-transferable writing abilities.
84
Of course, the Scylla and Charybdis here is that most
television writers find it extraordinarily difficult to get any work at all. My agent and
manager were also ignoring the reality that writers of color work almost exclusively on
so-called ghettoized shows, because those are generally the only programs that will

84
Executive Producer Mark Alton Brown, an openly homosexual white man, stated during his campaign
speech for the 2011 Writers Guild Election that he hadn’t worked in four years because, as his agent put it,
“You spent seven years on Girlfriends, a black show. It just doesn’t translate… (for most studios, networks,
and other executive producers who might be in a position to hire him).”
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seriously consider employing them. In essence, what we see happening in television
writing is a segregated work culture whose segregated product is then broadcast and
distributed all over the world, thus reifying America’s specific brand of social and
political constructions of race, gender, and class.
My representation’s goal, like many representatives, was for me to work on an
established hit show or with an established executive producer, with someone who will
make my resume more desirable to future buyers or employers and thus generate more
work and a long, prosperous career. To their credit, my representation had set a high bar
for my career’s potential. It is telling, however, that for them, working on a Black one
hour drama will do little to lengthening of my career. For them, Morgan Park simply
represented “a job." Of course I had entered the writing program on my own accord, but
the assumption here was that I did so only because of the diminished opportunities
available to me as a Black writer in the first place.
I was officially offered the position on a Thursday night, a few hours after
meeting with executive producer AM, her white male consulting producer, an African
American female story editor, and a male Latino-American staff writer, who I later
discovered was also hired on a different “diversity” contract. The difference in this case
was that his contract pulled from a different budget but it still paid him a full union
salary. This was the only way that he could initially be staffed, and it worked out
financially only because he was an alumnus of the corporation’s writing program.
Therefore, the majority of the writers of color on the show were initially employed for a
time under a reduced compensation contract, because the top two salaries on the show--
which totaled in the range of twenty-five to thirty-five thousand dollars per episode for
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each writer-- were initially taken by two white men, leaving no money in the show’s
budget to hire the “authentic” and “urban” writer “voices” required for the decidedly
African American world view of this show. Even on a show with a strong African
American presence, the business practices of the television industry persist in reserving
many of the most senior positions and salaries for white writers.
The next morning I was sitting in my cubicle in the television building when my
phone rang. I retired to a windowless utility area in an attempt at some privacy. On
conference were my two primary representatives-- my young and driven whipper snapper
of an agent and my older bulldog of a manager. I describe them in such terms in order to
give the reader some sense of how it feels to be in a conference call with both of them at
the same time: like an ant caught in a hailstorm. “We think you should swing for the
fences,” my manager stated, making it clear that from his perspective the job offer that
lay before me was short of a “home run.” In short, they wanted me to refuse the offer and
wait for an offer from another show. The consensus now was that they preferred I wasn’t
in the writing program at all.
85
But now, my “opportunity” was flirting with blackness,
and they were doing their best to advise me based on the information they had at that
time. Again, the space the writing program represented was a shifting and sometimes
ambiguous one. As we talked my representation beagn to acquiesce somewhat, stating
that if I insisted on taking this job, then I was to quit as soon as they could help me
procure a more lucrative job. They were concerned that once I was staffed on this show,
it would take me out of contention for network show jobs, which can be much more

85
This is in contrast to my manager being so pleased at first that I was chosen for the program that he
congratulated me by giving me his court side tickets for that night’s Los Angeles Lakers basketball game.
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lucrative than cable show jobs. Missing out on additional opportunities was not an
unreasonable concern, as this job would begin just as the traditional television writer
hiring period would begin and end before the majority of new writer positions were
available. I asked for time to think about it and said I’d call them back.
After I hung up the phone I almost immediately received a call from an unknown
number on my cell phone. I picked up the call to discover it was an assistant from the
Morgan Park’s production office. They’d tracked down my cellular number and were
calling me directly. Contacting “talent” directly before a deal is done is something of a
violation of Hollywood protocol. The assistant said she calling on behalf of the executive
producer to ask me to start that day, right then and there. Shocked, I stammered that there
was additional paper work to be completed on behalf of the diversity office and that I
couldn’t just walk out of the building and head over to their offices. This was the truth.
Trying to wait for the program’s administrators to return from an off-site meeting, I was
also trying to wait out the situation out for a few hours until my representation agreed
with my desire to go work on the show. I told the executive producer’s assistant that I’d
get back to them shortly.
Later that afternoon, I was summoned to the office of the program’s senior
manager, Mr. Harold. He was upset. He told me that he’d called my agent three times,
and my agent had yet to return his call. He explained to me that he was doing that as a
courtesy anyway, since I was under contract. “I’ve already told the cable execs that the
deal is done. Are you taking this job?!” I responded that this was the exact situation that I
was trying to avoid. I explained to him that I had every intention of being at work on
Monday. I explained that I was simply allowing my representation to go through their
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process so that I would have their support for the next time I would need them to help me
find a job (something that is always a question of when, not if, in television writing). “I
wouldn’t put you guys in that position. I know that the program is larger than any one
person. I am taking the job.” There was an uncomfortable pause where he stared at me, as
if he didn’t believe me. “You’re taking the job?” he repeated. I reiterated my
commitment. “Guys, there’s no way I’m not taking this job. I know it’s a great
opportunity.” There was another long pause. “Okay”, he said, and I was allowed to leave
his office.
In retrospect I realized that the program’s management needed to hear that I was
accepting the job from my representation team. I had somehow become enmeshed in a
situation where my ability to speak on my own behalf had been diminished and
infantilized. Though they were unaware of the conversations that I was having with my
representation, the administration was aware enough of the power dynamics of the
entertainment business to suspect that a young writer would not risk the ire of his or her
agents foolishly. I then realized that the administrators had wanted my agreement as a
potential negotiating tool. Should my representatives call and try to renegotiate a better
deal for me or if they called to say “no, we don’t want him on that show”, the senior
manager wanted to be able to exploit the fact that I’d already said “yes” before any
negotiation. In any case, my agent called me shortly thereafter to say he now wanted us
“to move forward” and that he would be calling the diversity department to communicate
this immediately. Of course, I’d already accepted the offer and intended to be at work on
Monday, but I still felt a sense of relief. In some ways, this is odd. The feeling of relief
should be unusual, but it wasn’t. Legally, a television writer’s representation actually
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works for the writer-- the agent and the manager aren’t paid unless the client works and is
paid. However, it does not feel that way to most writers and actors. This feeling then,
raises several questions about the hegemonic flows of power within the entertainment
industry and highlights the question of agency-- perceived or real-- of writers and cultural
producers in mass media.
For example, the agent and manager must also work to maintain their professional
and cultural capital with the “buyers” of the entertainment industry-- network and studio
executives and even to some extent, the casting directors who determine who will get a
chance to audition for prominent roles and who will not. Thus, in the 21
st
century, until a
talent (writers, directors, actors) establishes as track record to such a degree that any good
agency will want to represent them, it often feels like the talent works for the agent,
because the agent maintains the relationship with the “buyers.” This was recently
illustrated in an article about an agent who sent all his clients an email threatening to drop
them (not represent them anymore) if they call him too much during “pilot season”, a
particularly busy time of the year. It is clear if the agent is threatening to “drop” a client,
then despite the legal arrangement, there is a question of who works for whom.
86

I have elaborated on this journey of access to television production and television
writing rooms in order to highlight the difficulty of attaining and maintaining agency in
the midst of the performative demands that television places on Black writers who are
chosen to participate in the industry’s writing programs. I have illustrated how the tension
between the corporate and artistic performances elicited from television writers in writing

86
See the post “Why Actors Hate Agents” on Nikki Finke’s entertainment news website Deadline.com at
http://www.deadline.com/2012/02/why-actors-hate-agents-at-pilot-season/. Accessed February 3, 2012.
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programs becomes even more complicated and fraught for African American writers.
This is especially true as those writers get closer to the actual point of cultural production.
Writers often find themselves caught between the complex interplay of race, class, and
gender, as they attempt to reconcile the divergent goals of the mass media corporations
for whom they work, and the goals of their powerful agents and managers, who,
technically, work for the writer. The struggles described here represent the beginnings of
a story that elucidates the challenges cultural producers have when they embrace the
opportunities that mass media can provide: the chance to create new Black televisual
images for the 21
st
century. In negotiating this access and opportunity, writers also
negotiate the racial ambivalence that television writer programs represent.
I return now to the pair of epigraphs by recently deceased African American
television writer David Mills that I used to introduce this chapter. In 1994 David Mills
wrote a letter directly challenging the esteemed television producer David Milch about
his racism in not hiring Black writers. He then was hired by David Milch to write for
NYPD Blue as a result of that letter. The 2006 David Mills was quoted as not only
defending the white writers of the show on which he worked at the time, The Wire, but he
went further and simultaneously cast public doubt on the abilities of African American
television writers as a group. For me, the question here is a glaring one: What happened
to Mills? What happened in the hybridity and power matrix of television production that
David Mills would now publicly disavow the deep history of African American
achievement in the literary arts and the potential of other African American television
writers to function at the highest levels of quality television?
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While I have argued for that television’s inherent corporate/creative hybridity
creates space for performance, and therefore opens itself up to the subversive and the
progressive in the creation of new Black imagery, I also offer this comparison of David
Mills quotes as a cautionary note. Doing the work of producing television does not
automatically inoculate a writer from the seduction of television. Thus, I have attempted
to show, through the examination of American television industry writing programs, one
way in which that seduction begins. I have attempted to show how, in television, and
through performance, discordant corporate and creative “selves are crafted in processes
of work and within matrices of power”
87
before the Black writer ever officially goes to
work.
In conclusion, the job of television writing insists on a certain kind of racial
performance almost from the very moment an African American writer begins to journey
toward gaining access and employment in the television industry. Television production,
in particular, serves as visceral example of Bourdieu’s notion in which artistic works are
situated within the (external and internal) social conditions of their production,
circulation, and consumption.
88
Television writing highlights how the creative is never
“just” creative or “purely” creative. It demands, as a kind of price of admission to doing
such “privileged” labor, that writers somehow reconcile the creative/corporate hybridity
inherent to its institutional history and apparatus. As I have argued here, this
reconciliation most notably takes on the additional performative dimensions of race,
class, and gender when African American writers are involved.

87
Kondo, Dorinne K. Crafting Selves: Power, Gender, and Discourses of Identity in a Japanese Workplace
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 300.
88
See Boudieu’s The Field of Cultural Production (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).
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Performance, then, in the context of television writing programs, serves as the
vehicle through which the Black writer confirms his/her recognition that their blackness
is to be deployed primarily in service to the fiduciary goals of television. In demanding
this brand of performance from the Black writer that endeavors to work in television, the
corporation primes the writer to emphasize the style of Black representation over the
politics of Black representation. Thus, the struggle for new images and articulations of
Blackness, due to the pre-production of racial formation that takes shape in spaces like
television’s diversity writer programs, begins long before the African American writer
ever steps foot in a writers’ room.
In light of this, it is tempting to think of the ways in which television labor is
accessed, as always already attempting to “co-opt” the subversiveness of performance
through performance. In the next chapter, however, I interrogate the unpredictable power
and capacity of performance by exploring writer-producer struggles to present new,
televisual images of Blackness in a non-comic context. I examine the notion that in the
television writing room it is performance-- embodied, written, unstable, but also
dependent upon individual skill sets-- that can subvert the very process it is enacting.

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Chapter 3

Authorship, Authenticity, and Anxiety in Producing “Black” Television:
The Politics of WWB – “Writing While Black”

“Oh, this show isn’t like Amos ‘n Andy at all…”
-- comment from a first season director

“I guess he thought he was coming to a show called
‘The Niggers’…”
-- Executive Producer’s response when told about
the above director’s comment

The industry’s entry-level writing programs have become official avenues of
access to the inner processes of television production. Those same avenues have also
served as a way to mark African American writers in such a way that the writer’s
possibility for long term success is compromised from the beginning. As a result, several
questions are raised: What happens when such racially marked writers finally go to
work? What are the possibilities for transcending such strictures, and how are they
resisted? What are the unspoken assumptions that must be countered for writers to
expand the conditions of possibility for success in a job, while also laying the
groundwork for a long and productive career in television?
89
In short, what is the
experience of what I call “Writing While Black” in television? I argue that “WWB”
defines a position that becomes institutionalized into the show’s culture and more
importantly, in the show’s budget.
90

89
Success in television writing is generally defined in terms of keeping one’s current position or being able
to move onto another show at will.
90
Industry training and fellowship programs will sometimes literally pay the salary of a new television
writer in order to entice an executive producer to hire new talent or diverse talent. Where this become san
issue is that the writer’s salary is not a part of the show’s budget. So when the incentive salary runs out, the
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This chapter addresses the above questions by focusing on the television work
place itself. I particularly examine the experience of WWB in the context of working on
a “black show” for a network that refuses to use the label of a “black show.” I
concurrently articulate the anxiety the WWB experience produces when working for a
network that rejects a “Black network” identity, while still desiring to tap into
underserved minority viewers as a strategy for gaining a foothold in the crowded 21
st

century media landscape. In such a context, I ask when is a “Black show” really Black, or
too Black-- especially when it is not “created” by an African American writer? I address
this question through the chronicling of the first season of a cable television drama that
features an African American cast but not, initially, an African American creator or
executive producer.
91
This is an important distinction. Installing a white writer as the
creator of a “black show” can act as a check and balance on Blackness.
92
It is an attempt
to harness the look of blackness, the style of blackness without the perceived essence,

writer is generally fired. Some writers, though certainly not all, manage to make themselves so valuable or
liked that the show “finds the money”, but this is difficult to achieve.
91
The question of an African American creator of a television show is an important one. The creator
position and title represents a most elite status among writers. To write the first script that “creates” a show
and that actually gets on the air-- and is successful in the ratings-- is an achievement accorded to relatively
few writers. In many circumstances the television creator is television’s version of the film auteur. It is also
the position that carries a lot of power as the head writer and chief creative producer of a series. The creator
of a series is often the executive producer as well. But often a show’s executive producer is not the actual
creator. Some executive producers are hired to essentially replace the creator as the head writer. Many
creators of series are fired off the show they themselves created, because while the industry values many
show creators as a kind of auteur, it doesn’t necessarily always believe those auteurs can maintain and
manage the writing and production of a multi-million dollar series over dozens and dozens of episodes.
92
Noted television writer David Mulch, in a November 1994 interview with the Washington Post, stated
“black people have a difficult time becoming good television writers because they write out of the
complexity of their experience and that doesn’t make for good TV drama.” For more see “Black And
'NYPD Blue'; Co-Creator Tells Seminar, 'I'm Racist'”, The Washington Post (November 4, 1994, Friday,
Final Edition. Style Section), F1.
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burdens, or politics of blackness.
93
In addition, hiring a white writer to create a black
drama means the writer, at some point, had to establish his cultural and creative authority
to the network buyers.
As with many writers of television series, the creator-writer established this
authority through the citing his “research.” Often during a “pitch” session in which
writers try to sell a studio or network on their idea for a TV series, the writer must pass an
unspoken authenticity test. Even if the deciding executive likes a writer’s idea, there is a
still a question that must be answered. Why should the buyer trust YOU as the person to
create this world? Often the pitcher must establish this trust by displaying insider
knowledge on the subject they’re pitching. This insider knowledge tends to come from
two places: personal experiences and research. Morgan Park’s creator cited his research
into the West Adams neighborhood in Los Angeles-- and the fact that he had arranged
“ride-a longs” with the Los Angeles Police Department. Thus, the wealthy white writer
who lives in Pacific Palisades, in establishing his credibility to create this decidedly urban
universe through research, demonstrates the parallels that exist between the academy and
the creative work of popular culture and television production.
94
In both cases the
“minoritarian subject” is often reduced to object, and therefore contained at the outset in
prescribed ways that deny the subject access to institutional resources. In the academy
these resources include professorships, tenure, funding, and cultural capital. In
television, these resources are the base salaries, prestige, and the long term financial

93
Tate, Greg. Everything But the Burden: What White People Are Taking from Black Culture (NewYork:
Broadway Books, 2003).
94
See Sherry B. Ortner’s essay, “Studying Sideways: Ethnographic Access in Hollywood” in Production
Studies: Cultural Studies in the Media Industries (New York: Routledge, 2009).
119

payments (residuals) that come with the “created by” credit on a successful show-- a
credit almost universally denied to Black writers of dramas.
Due to the original creator’s lack of experience or vision for the world of the
show, his lack of cooperation with his network executives, and other artistic upheavals,
the show’s writers quickly fell behind schedule and therefore began production (the
actual filming of episodes) without scripts. This introduces the element of time into the
question of representation and the process of racial formation in mass media. While Barry
Dornfeld’s study of the production of public television briefly acknowledges the role of
time and the impact it forces upon the decisions that television producers must make,
neither cultural studies nor production studies scholarship has addressed the relationship
between time (in cultural production) and racial formation. I suspect this is due to a lack
of access to cultural production and a lack of empowered artist-scholars within the
academe who can make the processes at work within cultural production more legible to
our text driven academic enterprise. Access would reveal the crucial effect of time on
cultural production in television. Access highlights the importance of embodied
knowledge in the production of mass media. The under-theorization of time as it relates
to the production and circulation of popular culture, especially in television, strikes me as
gap that must be addressed. In other words, how does the reality of an ever present notion
of “not enough time” in television production inadvertently work to limit representation
and create racial formation? How does the very structure of television production itself
produce the surveillance of artists that compounds the inequalities that structure the
contested racial history of television?
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I also examine the industry’s notorious lack of the Black authorship of non-
comic Black representation in television. I argue that Black television writers negotiate
“authorship” through the act of television producing, and I illustrate how they convert the
discourse of identity and representation into a kind of ownership when “legal” authorship
or ownership has been withheld. In short, how do workplace performances of race, class,
and gender produce intellectual, artistic, and racial authenticity and authorship?
95

Ultimately, I highlight the television writer-producer’s negotiation of the positive vs.
negative image expectations that still surround Black representation in media. This
“positive” vs. “negative” discourse on Black imagery may now be simplistic for some
academic analyses, but it is far from that for practitioners. Thus, my ethnographic data
begins to illustrate the creative struggle to use the niche spaces of cable television to
resist (or reify) “good” and “bad” images, while also taking on the entrenched industry

95
E. Patrick Johnson’s work on authenticity and Barthes writings on the death of the author and his
replacement of author with the term “scriptor” combine to question the idea of blackness as an expression
of a pure black authenticity and to question the existence of sole authorship. Read together and applied to
my work here, they trouble the idea that a black television show must have a black author or scriptor in
order to be authentically black. This is good news-- or rather, offers some hope for Black television drama
writers who do get to serve as television “scriptors,” if not television creators or original authors. Barring a
few recent and notable exceptions, Black television writers are a group that have been almost completely
denied the opportunity to create dramatic television shows that feature black humanity as its main
protagonist. Yet, against this backdrop Johnson and Barthes offer us a way to read how Black television
executive producers, who are often brought on to co-produce subsequent episodes of these white created
Black shows, can artistically co-author or re-author these shows to allow for a greater expression of their
brand of blackness. This does not solve or diminish the institutional problem of the black television
creator’s lack of financial participation in that comes with legal authorship-- materiality is still an issue
here-- but it does offer us some aesthetic and political value. For more, see Johnson’s Appropriating
Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003); Roland
Barthes’ “The Death of the Author” in Image-Music-Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: MacMillan,
1978); Foucault’s essay What is an Author?” in The Foucault Reader by Michel Foucault and Paul
Rabinow (New York: Random House, 1984).
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paradigm that equates Blackness with diminished earning power in the global
marketplace.
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Black television writers exist in a charged workplace where concerns about race
and representation are foundational to its operations and culture. This stands in stark
contrast to the opportunities provided by television’s writing programs, which are
suffused in a corporatized environment that tends to prime the writer in a kind of pre-
production of racial formation. It is worth noting then, that access to the seemingly more
“artistic” workplace of television writing rooms can often only be reached by African
American and multicultural artists who successfully pass through a corporate funnel. The
writing programs help to convert media access into a hegemonic pressure point where
performance becomes key to maintaining that access. Given that, it was something of a
surprise that this actual workplace of a (Black) television drama was consciously and
openly engaged in an aesthetic and political debate over the meanings and representation
of Blackness. In other words, it was a highly visceral, charged, and performative space
that is unlike most “corporate” environments. Here, race and representation-- and battles
over race and representation-- openly permeated the discourse within and outside of the
writers’ room.
97

96
See Timothy Havens essay “African American Television in an Age of Globalization” in Planet TV: A
Global Television Reader (New York: NYU Press, 2003), 423-435.
97
In delving deeply into one show this ethnography is “single sited” and longitudinal, though this single
site encompasses multiple sites. Several different geographical and territorial spaces and communities
compose the single site/show.

122

Morgan Park, Season 1:
The Anxiety of Geography and Televising Blackness

Spring 2006. I start work today-- as a television writer on a new cable drama that
I’ll refer to here as Morgan Park. It features an African American family as its core cast.
My road to this writing job was winding, difficult, and instructive for this project. I
interviewed for the job twice with two different executive producers, had to fight my
agents to take the job, and in order to get the offer I took a 67% pay cut and had to
practically accost the president of the show’s network in an elevator. But I am here, in the
highly restricted halls where television is created. It is often seen as glamorous work.
Sometimes it even feels that way, especially to the few people of color who tend to know
how difficult it is to snag one of these ever decreasing slots. You would never know any
of this pulling into the dingy parking lot of Morgan Park’s production facilities.
We are located in a dusty “no man’s land” on the Los Angeles/Culver City
border. We are working out of what is sometimes referred to as a “satellite studio,”
meaning that it is not located within the gates of a studio such as Warner Brothers, Sony,
Walt Disney, 20
th
Century Fox, or CBS Radford Studios. Nor are we located at one of the
major independently owned studio lots such as Raleigh Studios, Prospect Ave. Studios,
or Manhattan Beach Studios. We are housed in a small-ish, two soundstage facility along
an industrial corridor and are surrounded by several empty dirt lots. We are certainly not
the only show to be crammed into such out of the way facilities (CBS’ Criminal Minds
was located a little further down this industrial corridor, albeit in a gleaming building that
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looked like it was built recently), but it seems to never escape the important notice of the
writers, producers, and crew when they are working in an isolated location.
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Geography can play a significant role in the future employment prospects of a
television show’s crew. Geography is important to the workers of televisions shows
because of the networking possibilities that come from working on a show that is located
on a studio lot. On Morgan Park, however, there would be little opportunity to network
with other employees and decision makers on other, more established shows, little
opportunity to bump into these supposedly “always better positioned others” at the studio
commissary. Therefore the show’s somewhat isolated urban location soon began to play
upon the crew’s perception of the network’s regard for the show, on its perceived status
within the industry, and interestingly, on the (mostly white) crew’s concerns for their
physical safety. This last issue I found to be endlessly fascinating and illustrative of the
impact of race in the creation of a decidedly urban fantasy. While we were located at the
northern edge of South Los Angeles, we were not located near any “dangerous” areas.
However, the show’s subject matter dealt with a family living in the midst of difficult
urban circumstances. To film the show’s exterior scenes we would be required to visit
urban neighborhoods filled with Black and Latino residents. Part of the reason we were
located in this satellite facility was to be able to physically access this urban world in our
production, but it became clear to me later on that there was a deep discomfort on the
crew’s part with this part of the job. They apparently conflated the danger presented in a

98
In short, the thinking goes something like this: I am working on this new show which may come to an end very soon,
as most new shows do. I am working on this new “Black” show, so I must really keep looking for a job since the
industry has never really produced many of these that have worked out.

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fictional urban neighborhood with our present location, with the general sense of
economic and physical insecurity to which our mostly white crew was unaccustomed.
While I would argue that this sense of possible danger was without foundation, the
crew’s concern commented upon the relative privilege within which white production
labor in Hollywood usually operates. I use the word “relative” because many of these
nomadic, but still highly paid blue collar jobs are held by workers who did not complete a
college degree. These workers, barring their unionized status in the entertainment
industry, might have few other obvious options to earn their six figure salaries. I point
this out only to lay the initial groundwork of a pervasive but the rarely discussed class
tension that exists between writer-producers and the production crew that realize their
work. This tension generally exists on most shows. I argue that this dynamic is especially
complicated when the creative laborers, or the “above the line” workers are African
American and the show is crewed by predominantly white, “below the line” crew
workers.
I pulled into the overcrowded parking lot and was given a temporary spot until the
parking assignments could be reworked to allow for my presence. As I stepped out of the
car, Andrew, the lead actor on the show, happened to pass by. “My brother, my brother”
he yelled and greeted me in a bear hug. Andrew, who knew me casually as a member of
the communities of young artists of color in New York and Los Angeles, had
recommended me as a writer to the first (and now fired) showrunner, but he was unable
to play a role in my being hired.
99
I had not mentioned to Andrew that I had recently

99
This fact is actually not unusual. Actors are rarely able to play a role in the hiring of writers. Notable
exceptions exist, particularly in comedy writing. However, the reverse is not true. Television writer-
producers play a huge role in the hiring of actors.
125

been hired onto the show, thinking I would surprise him. The surprise was on me,
however, for he knew I was starting that day. In fact, it seemed everyone I met that day
knew that a “new writer” was starting. By itself, that is not unusual. A new writer on a
television show is a major hire, but everyone also seemed to know what I looked like--
that I was a writer who was also a Black male. That might not also be unusual, except
that it seemed to point to a contradiction that had somehow been ignored until that point:
A show told primarily from an African American male point of view had no African
American male writer-producers on staff! This highlights a little known practice in the
culture of producing television. Hiring behind the scenes, as well as in front, is often a
matter of racial “casting.”
100
This cultural practice further reveals the racialized nature of
the business. In other words, a tradition within television writing and producing says if
you have a Black actor as an important series regular character on your show and that
character is truly integral to the show, then you need that “voice” in the writing room.
The same holds true for television shows that are primarily seen as “women’s
shows.” The writers’ room will then need to have a “woman’s voice, ” which is of
course interpreted to mean that that a woman should embody that voice and thus have a
seat and job at the table in the writers’ room. Shonda Rhimes, creator and writer-
executive producer of ABC’s hit shows Grey’s Anatomy and Private Practice, is an
African American woman. She has also populated her two staffs with a clear majority of
(white) women. With this “casting” of writers in mind, my ebullient greeting by lead
actor Andrew can be better understood. He went on to confirm that the lack of a Black

100
See John T. Caldwell’s interview of television writer-producer of Felicia Henderson in Chapter 16 of
Production Studies: Cultural Studies in Media Industries (New York: Routledge, 2009).
126

male writer on the show had been at least a minor issue (for him). He said, “Boss (the
executive producer) told me ‘we got your black male.’ I was happy to find out it was
you…” In this moment Andrew and I are inextricably linked. The connectedness of Black
actors and Black writers remains an unexplored phenomenon and is definitely
unexploited for its potential as an alliance and power base between (Black) actors and
writers in television and film. Wren Brown, an actor turned theatre producer of the Ebony
Repertory Theatre in Los Angeles, suggested as much when he said:
“If a Denzel Washington took only $300,000 of his $20 million or so per year and
paid ten Black writers the guild minimum of $30,000 to write ten screenplays for
him-- he could take the best of those scripts and put it in the studio pipeline as a
possible leading role for him. For less than 2% of his annual income he could
guarantee himself a stream of quality scripts and he will have gotten ten Black
writers in the writer’s guild at the same time. That’s how you do it. But people
don’t think this way...”
Unfortunately, despite the practice of “writer casting,” institutional forces at work in
television encourage a separation of the Black writer from the Black actor. Allegiance
and identity as a writer to the other writers on a staff is critically important in television
writing; a writer could quickly find herself out of a job if she is seen as having split
agendas. A performance of loyalty is required to the showrunner. Hence, the reason many
actor recommendations of writers go largely unheeded is due in part to a fear of split
allegiances. But as my circumstance illustrates, while Andrew could not get me hired, he
was able to help get someone hired (it just so happened in this case that someone was
me).
As I made way up the stairs to the second floor of the writer’s offices, I ran into
EP, the show runner who hired me. We engaged in small talk and she mentioned how
happy “her star” was to find out I was hired. She said she didn’t realize we knew each
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other and went on to say “you didn’t even play the Andrew card in our meeting,” to
which I replied “Well, I work for you.” I wasn’t being disingenuous. Writers work for
their executive producers. I also had a feeling that I could get along very well with this
particular executive producer and had made a conscious decision to not attempt to play
the questionably effective “I know the star of the show” card. I wanted the offer to come
on my own accord.
I was given a few rudimentary supplies and Michelle, the producer’s assistant,
walked me to my office. It was in the back of the building next to the show’s other staff
writer, a slightly older Latino-American writer, Jorge. After dropping my bag and getting
settled, Michelle gave me a tour of the production office, where I met the rest of the crew
and was introduced as “the new writer.”
Following the new writer parade, I retreated to my office to get organized and
prepared and to await my first meeting with my executive producer. But I wasn’t alone
for long. A steady stream of people began to appear at my door. The first person to come
by was a production assistant, Antonio. Production assistants are entry level jobs on film
sets and in production offices. They perform in a kind of jack of all trades and menial
labor capacity. They work long hours and are not paid well, but many of them move up to
become union crew members, writer-producers, or even studio executives. Antonio was
older than the typical production assistant. He was a bespectacled Black man with an
incredibly kind and professional manner. But it wasn’t long before I discerned his real
desire. How did I, as a Black man, manage to become a professional television writer?
After initially asking what shows I’d worked on before he asked me directly, “Man, how
did you get this job?!” I appreciated his candor and understood immediately why he had
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asked the question. While there was a short time in the early 1990s sitcom worlds of Fox,
the WB, and UPN where a handful of Black male executive producers and writers were
employed, the tide had long since turned. If there was to be an African American writer at
all on a show, nine times out of ten the job would go to a Black woman.
101
Knowing this,
it was not surprising that he wanted to know how I’d landed in a writer-producer’s
office.
102

Following Antonio’s visit, the lead actress on the show, Suzette, stopped by. I
was happy to make her acquaintance, as I had been a fan of her acting work over several
years. However, writers are always a representative of the creative direction of a show
and must be careful when speaking with actors not to reveal story lines. Television
storylines are considered incredibly privileged information.
103
Often these encounters
involve a “sizing up” process. The actor is looking for reassurances that she can trust this
unknown writer with the crafting of her television image. In this case, I definitely
perceived Suzette as conducting a professional investigation of my competence. At the

101
The Writers Guild of America, west and the television industry tracks TV writer employment by race
and gender, but not by race and gender, so there are no “official” statistics that confirm this. But the fact
that this assertion is not a part of the critical conversation about the television industry and its practices is
yet another reason why practitioner scholarship is important for the formulation of new questions. I have
had many conversations with Black and white television writers who have told me anecdotes that they
think reveal a preference for Black women over Black men in the writers’ room due, they think, to a
perception that Black women are somehow less “threatening” to white male power structures and spaces.
102
At the time of this writing in 2011, there are no African American male executive
producers/showrunners in either drama or comedy in the primetime television industry.
103
This has become the case even more since the sudden ubiquity of smart phones with cameras and video
recorder and portable computer tablets. J.J. Abrams, a television/film mogul producer for whom I recently
worked as a writer-producer, is known in the industry to have taken storyline secrecy to a new level. For
example, when I interviewed for a writing job on the ABC/JJ Abrams/Damon Lindelof drama “Lost” a few
years ago, the company released ten scripts to me and another writer that had yet to air on television. The
contract I had to sign to even interview to pitch stories to the show was thick and I must admit,
intimidating. As a result, when I pitched stories to the show’s executive producers I felt more like a fan
than a professional writer. I didn’t get the job-- and neither did the other writer.
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same time, she was obviously pleased to see another brown face. Some writers would
say, cynically, that she was really evaluating how easily she could manipulate me to give
her character all the good dialogue. Frankly, I understand this protectionist stance by
some actors. Given the show’s status as an African American drama and the problems the
production had already experienced preparing scripts that were ready to film, I
understood her urgency in wanting to meet me. Suzette went on to talk about her feelings
about the show and her own acting career up until this point. She called show
“revolutionary” because it showed a loving Black marriage and a loving Black family
that “just happens to live in the ‘hood.” She repeatedly described her current character as
“who I am,” while the extreme characters she had been known for playing prior to this
show. She mentioned that she, as a dark- skinned Black woman, was often cast as “a
character on crack somewhere.” Even the “upstanding” citizens she played never seemed
far from succumbing to some kind of depravity or illegality. As proof, she mentioned a
cop she played on another show; her character had sex with criminals in order to protect
her undercover assignment. I agree with Suzette that her casting represented a break from
typical casting molds, not just for her, but potentially for many African American
women. Her character was raised in an affluent family, which tends to be visually coded
in television and film by lighter hued actresses of color. My wife, an African American
actor, has also dealt with the manifestations and materiality of this casting trope. Her
opportunities have often been negatively affected by her deep, beautiful, and chocolate-
hued skin. She finds herself fighting almost constantly against the fact that she “speaks
too well” and is not stereotypically “urban enough.” What such comments reveal is that
casting directors have color-coded her into a lower class urban sensibility that they call
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“black” and that her poise, stature, and education challenges and resists. She has often
concurred that the casting of a darker skinned Black woman in the role of a happily
married professional and family woman marked a quiet breakthrough. Given these
realities, Suzette’s anxiety that we, as writers and actors, get this show “right” was
understandable. That fraught sense of anxiety proved to be pervasive and made itself
known throughout the show’s production.
First Steps… Re-Negotiating Authorship
The executive producer began my first story meeting by showing us slides from
the proposed images that would open the show. We were all very excited by the work of
the designers. The most striking image was a black and white rendering of cracked
asphalt and in the center-- a beautiful yellow flower rises out of the ground. Below the
flower were shadows of the feet of our family characters as they looked up at the former
dilapidated house that was to be their home. The excitement in the room was palpable.
She also announced that she had just hired a new production designer to give an overhaul
to the show’s already constructed sets. The new designer was an award-winning designer
she had worked with previously, and he had already given the EP a veritable laundry list
of what was wrong with our current sets. In short, he claimed that the sets were “too
clean”-- yet another error committed by show’s creator and first executive producer.
The fact that the show’s first executive producer and showrunner was an older,
white man who lives in the Pacific Palisades confounded many people involved with the
show. No one could figure out how this particular white man managed to sell and air a
show about an urban, African American family to a network. Though this incredulity
might appear to arise from simplistic thinking about markers of authenticity, it is actually
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an acknowledgement of how the television business currently works-- at least for writers
of color. To create a show takes more than just a good idea. One must be in the position
to reach studio and network buyers and then be able to convince the buyers that the idea
is good, and that you are one of the few who could tell that story. This becomes deeply
problematic when writers of color are limited to material that is somehow connected only
to their race and ethnicity. Yet historically American networks have not been interested in
serialized dramatic stories about African Americans. In essence, Black authorship is
effectively excluded from an entire level of the television business. The point here would
be that even when an African American writer would seem to have an edge, they don’t.
Development is the name for the process of creating of television shows and is
seen as the next tier of power and financial remuneration beyond staffing on a television
show as a writer. A number of comedies on the major networks and on the smaller
networks, such as the WB and UPN, were created by Black writers. But few dramas
featuring African Americans as the lead protagonists have ever been aired. This reality
leads many Black cultural workers and critics to surmise that America is willing to laugh
at African Americans on television, but not to deal with their humanity in the telling of
dramatic stories that invite viewer empathy. One must understand this history in order to
comprehend the tension that exists in the television producing world between Black
writers and white networks-- and, consequently, to comprehend the anxiety that was
present at the beginning of this show’s production. I was working on a show about Black
people that was created by a white man, who was then fired. The show was now being
run and managed by a Black woman who often stated, wearily, that she had pitched
“versions of this show” for years but couldn’t get it on the air as a creator. But, however
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we had arrived to the show, we were all pleased to have the opportunity to work and tell
Black stories. Nevertheless, the fact that a white writer would reap the economic rewards
of creating a non-comic, televisual Blackness was not lost on any of us. We were still, in
some ways, working against fulfilling dominant culture’s vision of Blackness and to put
money in the pocket of the show’s creator, who retained the financial benefits (royalties,
profit participation) of “creating” the show. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why many
of the Black writers and actors speculated that he could not have possibly came up with
the idea for the show on his own. Some even hinted (without any proof) that he had
stolen the idea from a nameless entity. Their suspicions were a way to re-claim the right
to define and represent Blackness in this arena and reassert the question “Who gets to tell
a Black Story?”
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Later that day, I spoke with the one of show’s writers, Lynn. She’s a smart,
energetic, Black female writer who had joined the Writers’ Guild on the same day I did a
few years ago. She generously acknowledged the absurdity of this moment, where she

104
“Who Gets to Tell a Black Story?” is also the question posed and the name of an essay by reporter Janny
Scott in How Race is Lived In America: Pulling Together, Pulling Apart, (New York: Times Books, 2002)
a compilation of a Pulitzer award winning series of articles on race in America by New York Times
Correspondents. I lived in New York at the time, and this series of articles had a deep impact on me and
helped to formulate this intellectual project. In particular this essay article chronicled the racial dynamics of
the award winning television mini-series The Corner on HBO. The Corner told the stories of lower class
African Americans in Baltimore who were all impacted by the flow of drugs onto their streets and into their
homes and by the “war on the drugs.” It was based on a book by white journalist David Simon. The article
followed the travails of the mini-series’ Black actor-director Charles Dutton, his mistrust of Simon, and his
battle with HBO that the series employ a diverse production crew. The success of The Corner inspired the
Baltimore set series The Wire. The Wire was also created by David Simon and became known during its
run for refusing to hire many Black writers. This did not stop many critics from habitually declaring The
Wire to be “the best series to ever air on television,” an accolade that annoyed many Black television
writers, who sometimes refused to watch the show in quiet protest. In fact, the popular and controversial
blog “Stuff White People Like” was started because of its author’s observation that white liberals had made
a fetish out of the The Wire. Nevertheless, what counts as authentic Blackness and who gets to make a
claim to representing such slippery authenticity is illustrated in stark terms here. See “Coffee and Yoga and
Prius and Juno” at
http://www.boston.com/lifestyle/articles/2008/03/24/coffee_and_yoga_and_prius_and_juno/?page=full.
Accessed February 4, 2012.
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was, literally, earning over five times the money I was earning on a weekly basis. This
was true despite the fact that I had as much, if not more, experience as she. Lynn
remarked to me that the show’s original creator was “an old, clueless white man” whose
only references were always to “how we used to do things on ‘Mary Tyler Moore’ and
‘Mash’.” “What the fuck is that?” Lynn asked incredulously. She went on to chronicle to
me how the original creator, David, didn’t really want to hire the Latino-American writer
Jorge at first-- even though the network’s New Talent Department was initially paying
his salary. Again, this fact is significant because it means the salary won’t come out of
the show’s budget, in effect giving the show free labor (as I was). This is a seriously
double-edged sword for minoritarian writers. One tends to not value what one does not
pay for-- something I learned painfully in season 2 of this show. Lynn was upset, as if
this happened yesterday instead of two months ago. “They don’t even want a free nigger-
- this shit is worse than slavery!” She went on to say that at one point before I joined the
show, she had called her agent to tell him to “get me out of my contract, get me out of
this show… but now it’s cool.” At least that’s what she said to me. Later, I noticed that
she fielded a call in my presence that sounded suspiciously like she was talking to her
agent to set up an interview to go onto another show. I know this because she
immediately reached into bag, popped a DVD into her computer, and began to print out a
script for a pilot. She later went to work for the other show.
Anxiety about Black Men on Television and in Television
While the images of Black women were often the focus of discussion, there
seemed to be omnipresent questions on the condition of Black men that permeated
creative and casual discourse on the show. Simply put, this conversation was everywhere.
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For example, I began one particular morning early in my tenure by going to say hello to
Gina, the script coordinator, and Michelle, the executive producer’s assistant. Both were
Black women, and both were aspiring television writers. I knew both from my
membership in the Organization of Black Screenwriters. OBS is a professional
organization started by Black screenwriters to form community and to advocate and to
educate their members about writing and show business. They often bring in established
writer-producers to talk about craft and the process of having a career as a screenwriter.
Michelle was a woman in her early 30s, an alumna of Hampton College and UCLA. She
is originally from Louisville, KY and is of lighter, hazelnut complexion. Gina is also in
her early 30s, is from St. Louis, MO, is a graduate of Creighton University, and has been
a script coordinator for many years. A few years earlier she had been hired as a staff
writer on a new NBC medical drama. She didn’t last long on that show, a casualty of a
general house cleaning by the new executive producers who had been brought in to
“save” the show. Gina is a compact, round shaped woman of dark chocolate complexion.
Gina’s employment status illuminates the instability that accompanies the television
writing world in general, and the situation of Black writers and other writers of color
specifically. It’s certainly “nice work if you can get it.” According to several experienced
Black writers that I met during my time as a fellow in Bill and Camille Cosby’s Guy
Hanks/Marvin Miller Screenwriting Program, once writers got and kept their first job in
television that writer could typically find work for several years. However, due to the
expansion of the hiring pool of television writers, and the contraction in the size of
writing staffs, this is no longer the case. This new reality has been felt even more
drastically among writers of color. Thus, the importance of African American writers’
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participation in the show creation process, in the development portion of the business, has
become a desirable key to sustaining a long career as a television writer.
My conversation with these two women quickly turned towards personal dealings
that centered on African American men. They both agreed that they found men in Los
Angeles to be undesirable, in part, they said, because the men in Los Angeles tended to
find them undesirable. Gina waved her hand in front of her face to indicate her skin color
while repeatedly stating that in Los Angeles, “…men here do not see me. They just don’t
see me.” She went on to say “…there’s nothing here that suggests ‘Shaniqua.’ I can see
the turn in people’s eyes when I open my mouth and speak.” When I ask if she’s talking
about white people or Black people, she responds “across the board.” Gina said the men
here “are still stuck on color.” Assistant Michelle continued to stand up during our three
way conversation. She was very animated and continued to field phone calls to the
producer’s office while we were talking. She said she rarely dates, and the last time she
did, the guy asked her if she was “mixed” (multiracial). “Now do I look mixed? There are
lots of Black people who look like me, and I wouldn’t think they were mixed.” Michelle
went on to say that she also wants a man with a college degree, perhaps even a graduate
degree, because “my daddy says everybody’s got a bachelor’s”. I responded that women,
Black women in particular, should be careful about wanting a guy just because he fulfills
all the criteria on a “list”; there is often a price to pay for being with such a guy. Michelle
agreed. She then began talking about a woman who got everything on her “list” but
seemed unhappy anyway. “I don’t know about their marriage, it might be okay but…”
Later, when speaking to Lynn about writers she’s worked with in the past, she
mentioned a Black male writer with a reputation for being somewhat socially inept. I
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asked how it was to work with this writer. Her response was a sharp, sarcastic look that
might be interpreted as “what do YOU think?” She went on: “I don’t want to say
anything because it’s too hard for a Black man to get a writing job…” I asked if the
writer in question had hurt his cause by his performance on the job. “Yes,” she replied. I
then asked if this writer had hurt the cause of other Black male writers. She answered,
“Yes.” She paused and then amended her answer a bit more, saying “Well, probably.”
She went on, quite unexpectedly, even expressing misgivings about whether she deserved
a television writing job: “It’s just harder for a Black man. Like, how come I got this job
(the 1
st
time we both interviewed several months prior), and you didn’t?” I tried hard to
be gracious (she was earning five times my salary and I had already come in and
“rescued” a story she was working on that was giving her trouble). I replied, “Only one
person could get the job…”
A few days later, I had another conversation with a Black female writer, Theresa,
formerly of ABC’s sitcom “My Wife and Kids.” She was in the midst of transitioning
jobs, because her show was unexpectedly cancelled and she was looking for a new job
and a new agent. We spoke for a few minutes before I asked for her thoughts on Black
men finding employment as television writer-producers. She agreed that Black men have
“a harder time” getting a job than African American women in the industry. Hearing this
yet again confirmed for me what I already suspected, but had worked hard to
compartmentalize, as I could not imagine that this mindset would be helpful to me when I
go to meet on a potential job or even in this setting. Yet, here it was, mentioned again for
the 2
nd
or 3
rd
time in as many weeks. It was as if the perception of Black males and
writing had become a certain “common sense” within show business and was so accepted
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now that one could discuss it openly. Still, as soon as VP mentioned this subject, she
complicated the notion. She offered her observation that in comedy writing, a Black man
would get a job over a Black woman, “especially if it’s a Black man doing the hiring.” I
agreed with her, given the history of gender bias that has been documented in the world
of stand-up comedy. This gender bias transfers to television comedy on some level, as
stand-up comedy is often where new television personalities are found and cultivated by
network casting directors. It is also possible that the Black male executive producer in the
position to hire knows and identifies with the inherent struggle another Black male
candidate has had to endure to get to the point where he can even be hired. Yet, in 2006,
there were approximately five to seven Black female show runners and or/executive
producers (though more rare, a writer can be an executive producer without being the
show runner).
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There were no Black male show runners.
Back at the studio offices, Lynn and I spoke of the new CW network, which was
being formed by the shutdown of the WB and UPN networks. Together UPN and WB
accounted for 75% of employed Black television writers. “I’m scared for so many of us”
she said. We’d already spoken several times about the likelihood that many of those
Black television comedy writers would probably never work again. We began to see
some of the fallout from the 2006 network collapse in the Tyler Perry dispute with the
WGA during 2008. Tyler Perry fired four writers who collectively have written over one
hundred episodes of his TBS sitcom, “The House of Payne.” Though Perry uses SAG
contracts for his actors and DGA contracts for his own directing services, he has refused

105
At the end of the 2005-2006 television season the Black women showrunners were Mara Brock Akil,
Yvette Lee Bowser, Meg DeLoatch, Pam Veasey, and Shonda Rhimes.
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to use WGA contracts for his writers. Most of his writers are indeed experienced WGA
writers and are primarily African American. They were working without health benefits
and for pay that was less than a fifth of what they would command elsewhere. They no
doubt would have refused such working conditions if the hiring practices of the television
industry allowed any real additional employment options for them.
When I first began my journey to writing for television, I had been counseled by
experienced Black television writers to beware of writing for most African American
comedies, because white showrunners tend to dismiss the credits of Black television
comedy writers. Even high level writer-producers on Black shows many in the television
industry considered “respectable”-- like UPN’s Moesha-- simply aren’t considered for
jobs on “white network shows,” though it was often argued by Black writers that many of
the “white shows” are just as “bad” as the bad “Black shows.” It is my assertion that the
employment practices of the industry created a situation where a “businessman” like
Perry could exploit experienced Black cultural labor for relatively penurious wages. I
believe that the white show runners who signed an open, public letter of protest
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to
Tyler Perry are suffering from a serious case of myopia (at best) or hypocrisy (at the
worse) for not acknowledging their complicity in helping to create the conditions for this
financial and creative abuse.
A few days later writer Theresa called me and said she had reconsidered our
previous conversation. She was now wondering whether or not to “count” Ali Leroi as a
Black male show runner. Ali Leroi was the executive producer and showrunner of

106
Finke, Nikki. Deadline.com, “TV Showrunners Tell Tyler Perry: Firings for WGA Activity Simply Not
Acceptable.” Accessed at http://www.deadline.com/2008/10/big-name-wga-showrunners-send-open-letter-
to-producer-tyler-perry/ on February 10, 2012.
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Everybody Hates Chris the show that was based on the childhood of Chris Rock. Our
consensus was that we should not “count” him, certainly not as a person who had
achieved his position on the strength of his writing or producing skills. Ali Leroi had no
background that would justify his position as an executive producer, save for one fact: he
is one of Chris Rock’s best friends and was installed by Chris Rock himself. I suppose
the truth is if Chris Rock were my friend and wanted me to take a job that could make me
wealthy, I would do it as well. But based only on his accomplishments prior to the show,
the highest position Ali could have possibly competed for was as junior or mid-level
writer. A reported exchange between Leroi and an accomplished Black male co-executive
producer illuminates the situation in unexpected ways. Leroi took a meeting with a
seasoned co-executive producer who had just completed a long stint of work for the UPN
sitcom One on One. According to Theresa, Leroi reportedly opened the meeting saying “I
gotta be honest with you-- your credits suck.” Theresa could not believe this myopic
arrogance and his lack of consciousness. That an African American man in the television
business would treat another African American man so rudely, failing to acknowledge the
small amount of work available to Black comedy writers in particular, speaks to Leroi’s
mistaken sense of institutionalized comfort. While Leroi may have genuinely disliked the
writer’s work, his statement that the writer’s show credits “suck” as a primary reason to
not consider hiring him suggested that his knowledge of the recent and contested history
of Black male un/employment in the television industry was limited. By the television
industry’s “standards” almost all Black writers’ credits “suck.” Leroi’s willingness to
adopt that standard as his standard illustrates an issue that his success and the success of
other African American creator-showrunners, like Grey’s Anatomy’s Shonda Rhimes,
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conceals. While this kind of nepotism is not unusual in Hollywood, there is an additional
danger when a network installs a Black showrunner who was not cultivated in the
traditional systems of television writing before becoming a showrunner. The danger is
that the writer carries no institutional memory of the struggle that Black writers endured
to work and prosper as television writers. This lack of embodied knowledge of the Black
writer’s professional and racial history in television opens up the possibility of the
neophyte showrunner individualizing their success and seeing it solely as a result of their
exceptionalism. And, indeed, the writer might be exceptional. But to embrace this Black
exceptionalism in television is also a fatal coupling of race and power.
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It conveys the
“power of the exceptional” to the showrunner in the short run, but in the long term it
divorces the writer from the political project of Black representation that television has
always represented.
As a result, we can see through the Leroi example how even the presence of the
rare Black man who holds power in television can be rendered powerless to extend that
presence and opportunity generationally to other Black men or women. As a result, the
specter of the Black male presence continues to produce anxiety and is unabated in the
cultural production of television.
Re-Negotiating Authorship and Ownership, part 2
I was in the EP’s office, along with her assistant, Michelle. We were watching
dailies. Dailies are the actual rough footage of screening from the previous day’s filming.
They are quickly compiled onto a tape or DVD and distributed to writers and producers.

107
See Ruth Wilson’s Gilmore “Fatal Couplings of Power and Difference: Notes on Racism and
Geography,” in Professional Geographer 54, no. 1, (February 2002), 15–24.
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If time permits we watch them individually or on our own. This allows us to see the
written work come alive. Furthermore, dailies give the EP some sense of what she will be
working with during her final editing sessions, when filmed scenes of an episode are
finally put together. Watching dailies is a process that is largely unknown or
underexamined by media scholars, but the process and the discourse that surrounds it,
greatly influence the final product. As writer Lynn joined us, we settled in. We were
watching scenes from the pilot (first) episode that were written and filmed under the
auspices of the show’s creator and first executive producer, David. These scenes were
shot before any of us in the room were hired. Incidentally, all of us in the room happened
to be African American. In one scene, several peripheral characters’ names were
mentioned. Among them was the name of “Shaniqua.” The assistant Michelle, unlike
many assistants, often voiced her opinions. She stated vehemently that she “hates that
name.” The show runner responded, “I guess that’s who they think we are.” This phrase
“who they think we are” would become a recurring motif in the offices.
We continued a critical discussion regarding the dialogue in the episode. In one
scene, a neighborhood drug dealer grabs the arm of an angry father who is about to strike
his young son. “Hey, you don’t give a kid disrespect,” the drug dealer said. I had first
noticed this bad snippet of dialogue months earlier, when I viewed a preliminary cut of
the pilot. We all still thought it was off base. The consensus was that the original writer
and creator of the show was attempting to capture “Black” voices and had mangled the
sense of the dialogue so badly that none of us could figure out how to fix the line. Of
course, questions of authenticity represent difficult terrain, but on this day all of us were
in agreement. This continued the battle over the creatorship and authorship of the show.
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While Black writer-producers were eventually brought in to “save” the show, what
became clear was that this vitriol was not aimed at David, the creator, so much as it was
aimed at the historical cultural process that would pay a white man to create a show about
African Americans without seeking real input from African American writers. The
show’s pilot did have an African American director but one of the underlying points of
this project is to show that television is a writer’s medium. As such, the agency of the
other collaborative artists in television, actors and directors, is almost irrevocably enabled
and limited by the words and images that are crafted by television’s writers. The situation
suggested that, in the year 2006, despite all evidence to the contrary, African Americans
could not tell their own stories in a non-comic manner. It was as if, throughout the life of
the show, its writers, producers, and actors were constantly engaged in a process of re-
creation, re-authoring, and re-producing a more “authentic” and non-comic Blackness.
After deciding that she definitely wanted to re-write and re-shoot certain scenes in
the pilot, the EP paused the DVD. “Look at her nose,” someone stated. We were looking
at the lead actress’ face on close-up. Another pause, then: “Did she have [plastic surgery]
work done?” There was speculation that Suzette had undergone a rhinoplasty in the five
months between the shooting of the pilot and the beginning of production on the series.
Eventually, there was a consensus in the room that she had indeed had plastic surgery.
This assessment was not harsh or as judgmental as it might sound out of context. Another
writer remarked upon closer examination that they believed Suzette’s nose had been
thinned somewhat, but that she “still has a Black nose.”
This conversation is even more interesting in light of a recent conversation with
the head of the make-up department. The EP had called this woman, Caucasian, 30s, into
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her office to discuss the grayish pallor she was noticing in the dailies on some of the
actor’s Brown and Black skin tones. The make-up artist admitted she was trying to
“lighten” their skin tones to ease the lighting challenges of the cinematographer in
quickly lighting so many varieties of dark skin. Clearly, there are too few examples of
Black skin being lit well on film. It is much more rare to do the kind of technical work
required to adequately film dark skin for a one hour drama, than it is to execute the flat,
brightly lit palette that is standard on television comedies. The entire production initially
fumbled about for guidance on how to cinematically represent a beautiful, Black, non-
comic aesthetic that served as the center of the story telling.
Policing Black Spaces on a Black Show?
Within the first two weeks of production, a new script coordinator was hired, as
Gina prepared to leave for another project. The new script coordinator, Barbara, was a
young Caucasian woman in her late 20s, who had worked on other shows produced by
this same network. Barbara didn’t last long. She was hired one day, started work the next
day, and was gone by the end of the following day. The EP and her assistant Michelle
suspected immediately that Barbara would not work out. She refused to take off her
sunglasses for most of the day. Later, I discovered that the writers interpreted this act as
an attempt to create distance. It was not looked upon kindly. Barbara never articulated the
reasons for her barely disguised disgruntlement, but I did hear her say that she hated the
long hours on her first day. She also mumbled something about “being in this area, this
neighborhood at night.”
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108
I should point out that script coordinator hours are traditionally among the longest hours in a television
production office, a work place known for long hours. My personal record is twenty hours straight.
Actually my record might be something like forty-eight hours, if you count the time several years ago
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Barbara was a highly experienced script coordinator. The idea that she would
complain about the hours after one day of work is absurd. The EP swiftly decided that it
would be better if she left the job, and Barbara happily agreed without hesitation. At the
end of that day, when the writers and producers gathered in the EP’s office to wish
David, the previous script coordinator well, Barbara refused to eat any of the cupcakes
that were served. “I’m a vegan. I don’t eat cupcakes,” she stated as her reasons for
refusing. I quickly saw writers Lynn and Jorge look at each other. Then they made eye
contact with me and smirked with disbelief. It was clear they thought Barbara was being
disingenuous, at best. They interpreted this as further evidence that Barbara clearly
wanted nothing from us. When Barbara left the room the writers could barely control
themselves. Television writers are a caustic lot and one generally doesn’t want to be the
target of their unleashed ids. “What is her deal? Did you see those socks she was
wearing?” and “Who does she think she’s fooling? Vegan? With those hips. Pleaaase. If
she doesn’t eat cupcakes, it’s because she’s been eating twinkies…” were some of the
more memorable comments. The writers clearly felt that there was a subtext to Barbara’s
actions and refused to believe much of what she actually said.
Barbara, I believe, personified and gave embodiment to an anxiety that the show’s
writing staff had begun to perceive from several members of the predominantly white
production crew. This anxiety manifested itself as a free floating race and class dynamic.
The discomfort about our location; the recurring and negative discourse about our

where I just never went home. If a script is due to the production crew and the writer is still working on that
script or awaiting final approval before being released by the executive producer, the script coordinator
must wait for the writer’s work to be done in order to perform proofing and coordinating duties. It is, in
many ways, an intense and thankless job-- but it is one that must be done well in order for a television show
to stay on schedule and on budget.
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proximity to the Fox Hills Mall in Culver City (or as Mark, the assistant production office
coordinator, a white male who lived in Beverly Hills, described it-- “the gang mall”); the
repeated complaints about the reduced salaries typical of cable television production-- all
were duly noted by the writing staff. For a lower level employee to immediately show
such obvious disdain for her environment, for the people working within that
environment, and to display behavior that could be read as uninterested or unprofessional
was taken as a negative comment on the show itself and on her perception of the show’s
“status” within the industry. The fact that she felt she could communicate this to us via
her actions and lack of engagement was seen as an exercise in white privilege. Though
this opinion was not baldly stated, the conversations spurned by her behavior and the
veiled comments about her behavior and disposition revealed that the writers extracted a
meaning from her actions. Barbara was fired in due haste.
Later that week, I went on a location scout. The purpose of a location scout is to
find and identify exteriors (buildings, parks, streets) or non-studio interiors (pool halls,
homes, etc.) that could serve as part of our fictional world on the show. It is vitally
important to a new television series that it establish tone and character through the use of
appropriate interior and exterior locations that speak to the “world of the play.” Our first
stop was in the West Adams neighborhood of Los Angeles, a neighborhood to which we
returned on a regular basis. We first went to a large house located near Venice Blvd. This
house had been chosen to portray the exterior of our fictional family’s home. Because the
house itself did performative work as a visual symbol of Black ownership to be cherished
and protected at all costs, this home, literally and figuratively, became a character in the
show. Its importance would only increase as the show continued. I argue that the fictional
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house represented a microcosm of the desires for upward mobility that still characterize
large segments of the African American community. In other words, the symbolism of
the house asked an important question: What happens to Black communities if those who
acquire professional and cultural capital leave? An emphasis on a house located in the
inner city renders visible, within the narrative of this show, a critique of the American
Dream and how that Dream is complicated by racial and economic realities. The house
and the surrounding neighborhood became the conduit by which issues of community,
diversity, and upward or downward mobility could be addressed.
The story of this house and its owners paralleled the fictional story we were trying
to tell in this television series. The power of narrative is key here. Morgan Park centers
on a cop and a nurse who, in order to pursue their American dream of home ownership,
take advantage of an economic incentive program that encourages police officers to live
in the areas where they work. The officer takes a former dilapidated drug house,
rehabilitates it, and moves his family into their own home. In doing so, the family
embarks on a personal commitment to community revitalization. Now, on this day, when
I was sent to investigate settings for the show’s pilot episode, I met the home’s owner,
Robert. Robert is an affable, African American man who looks to be in his late 50s or
early 60s. Robert is also a retired Los Angeles police officer. He has lived on this block
in this home since the early 1980s. He bought this almost 4,000 square foot house when it
was one of several that had been abandoned in the area. According to Robert, many were
being used as “crack houses”. Now, the values of the homes had benefited from a real
estate boom, “though not as much as they should,” Robert told me.
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Robert is clearly a principled man. After I introduced myself as a writer-producer
on the staff of the show, he seemed to relax and take a kind interest in talking to me. I
was the only Black man traveling with the production crew-- who, by now, were busy
scouring Robert’s home. I noticed that Robert kept a wary eye on the members of our
crew who were now walking in and around his yard, making plans for our upcoming use
of his home. An almost unspoken understanding passed between us, and Robert began to
talk to me about the benefits of having our show on his street and of using his home. Our
production had painted his house, built a large, beautiful front yard gazebo, and he was
being paid a retainer of about two thousand dollars weekly for a season’s worth of use of
the outside of his home. He seemed to voluntarily explain his wary look, saying that he
had worked production before and knows how callous “they” can be. He reported that he
always said “no” to other producers who wanted to use his home, but he made an
exception this time. He implied that the subject matter of the show had something to do
with his change of heart.
Robert continued, speaking about the neighborhood’s HPOZ regulations (Home
Preservation Overlay Zone). He stated that the white home owners in the area use HPOZ
to exert fiduciary control and only seemed concerned about the integrity of the
neighborhood when location scouts started looking to film on the “other side of the
Avenue… but it’s quiet, here. It’s quiet.” Robert repeatedly emphasized his description of
his street as “quiet.” Like many code words used to describe residential areas in our
country, quiet is equated with “good” and “safe.” Robert was a policeman who was
policing his Black space by keeping a wary eye on white production personnel, should
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they disrespect his space.
109
And he insisted on using coded words to describe his
neighborhood. It was a way of asserting that there is value in the Black humanity that
lives “on the other side of Avenue.”
I asked the production crew to leave me in the area after they’d finished their
scout. Then, after wrapping up my first conversation with Robert, I went on a walk
through the neighborhood, notepad in hand. I walked the Washington Blvd. corridor,
where there were several auto body repair shops, mom and pop shops, and a Korean day
care center. I also noticed, like the image in the opening credits slides the EP showed the
writers, several colorful flowers growing out of patches of concrete and dirt. Later that
evening I looked up the value of the homes in this neighborhood. Most were safely in the
$550,000-600,000 range. This begs the question, what is an urban ghetto? Why is this
neighborhood labeled the “hood,” when property values are more than twice the value of
the national median for housing costs in the U.S.A.? Clearly, there is enough value for
this “stereotypically” Black neighborhood to have attracted newer white residents. These
new residents are interested in the economic or architectural values of the area, so much
so that Robert describes them as trying to control the flow of production dollars via their
influence on the HPOZ boards. This speaks to the power of monolithic images of
Blackness as always poor and destitute, which fails to convey the complexity of urban
geography.

109
As described later in this dissertation, my reading of Robert’s sensitivity towards white production
personnel disrespecting his home proved correct. In subsequent seasons he limited how often the show
could film at his home and at one point, refused to allow the show to shoot there at all,
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Authentic Fictions
Michelle, the producer’s assistant and an aspiring writer, wanted to talk to me.
She urgently pulled me away from a conversation I was having with the show runner and
Dean, the consulting producer, to tell me that she was “confused about the neighborhood
of the show.” Michelle wanted to know whether the show and the neighborhood were
primarily African American, white, Latino, multi-cultural? Michelle’s confusion raises
questions about the typical mindset that shapes television creation and consumption. Her
confusion about the demography of this fictional world we were building seemed to arise
from a lack of consistency in the racial compositions of Morgan Park’s protagonists and
antagonists. This discourse also presumes that television narratives work with fixed,
monolithic representations. This presumption confirms how conditioned we as spectators,
media consumers, and culture creators have become in seeing visually coded ethnic
subjects defined primarily through fictional relationships to law and order and fictional
portrayals of illegality and criminality. Anything that seems inconsistent or challenges
these pervasive social narratives runs the risk of being dismissed as unrealistic, fake, and
full of fantasy-- forgetting, of course, that television itself is a space of fantastic
constructions.
I was pitching to create a new character that would be the antagonist to our hero
police officer. The character was a new crime lord in our fictional neighborhood and was
to be named “Rook.” The EP liked the idea and soon thereafter asked me, “Is the
character Black?” At first I said “yes”—but then I admitted that I hadn’t fully settled on
an answer yet. A discussion ensued about whether it would be more interesting if the
character of Rook, a ruthless criminal looking to expand his underground businesses, was
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not Black-- but rather white or Latino or Asian? We discussed the character’s age.
Should he be older? The EP expressed interest in this idea due to her ongoing interest in
finding a role on the show for the veteran actor Michael Warren. This is yet another
example of the connections between Black actors and Black writers in television and
film. The “availability” of an actor can precede the creation of a character. This reality is
not the norm but still contains possibilities for cultural workers to exercise agency in the
push-pull dynamics of cultural production and representations of Blackness.
Earlier that day, writer-producer Dean tentatively approached me about the
proposed character’s race. At that moment I began openly questioning my own
assumptions about what this character looked like. I told Dean I wasn’t sure. “I guess we
don’t want all the criminals in the show to be African American, do we?” I asked Dean if
he’d ever seen the FX cop drama, The Shield. “I used to…” he responded. I told him how
much I admired the craft of the show’s storytelling but that, in my view, the show’s
politics of representation were problematic. The producers may have picked up on my
opinion when I met with them about a writing job on the show the previous year; I didn’t
get the job. In fact the experience potentially harmed my career and led to a heated
argument between my agent and me. But the question of how to embody criminality
hangs over many television drama series. Many drama series must continually offer up a
gallery of criminals. Morgan Park was no different in that regard. The structure of the
show dictated that the neighborhood where our nice family moved would be considered
undesirable by most middle class standards. The assumption was that the undesirable
neighborhood is primarily African American. Did that automatically mean that all or
most of the criminals should be Black? What does this say? Is the fact that the main
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characters are African American mean that the show functions inadvertently as a
comment on “Black on Black crime?” Do we deal with the fact that since the patriarch of
this “good Black family” is a police officer, the family is also a symbol of the state? Does
this, in effect, strip our Black family of familiar, more “authentic” notions of Blackness?
This conversation and others like it highlighted how the presentation of an
“authentic fiction” that centers on non-comic African American representation must
necessarily tangle with the racially structuring elements of our society that inevitably
form perceptions of what counts as authentic. In this case it had to do this while trying to
present a more progressive image of televisual Blackness. This episode reminds us why a
binaristic view of positive vs. negative tropes is a problematic and reductionist theoretical
construct, but it is still a real and practical problem that demands engagement by Black
cultural producers. John L. Jackson writes of authenticity as that which caricatures
identity. He offers racial sincerity as an alternative and internally analytical mode for
thinking about race, to counter “how race is overimagined as real” (2005, 11). If indeed
race is overimagined, or as Baudrillard argues “images [are] murderers of the real,” this
seemingly innocuous production discourse about the race of a neighborhood and the race
of the protagonist’s antagonist is really about the search for a way to avoid committing
murder.
110
In these terms, the tired positive vs. negative discourse which critically
frustrates us, and that we want to rush beyond, slows us a down just a bit. It instead
points us toward the ways cultural producers try, in their own terms, to think through
these images, through these issues of life and death.

110
Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 5.
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More Authenticity: “The Mutha Fucka”
While I was working in my office one day, the lead actor of the show, Andrew,
came into my office and shut the door. We’d just had a table read of the next episode that
would start filming soon. Attending the table read were the cast, the writer-producers, and
network executives. Andrew wanted to talk to me because he was upset with an aspect of
the next episode that required his character to question his teenaged daughter’s interracial
relationship with a white classmate. He said he hated the way it was written, because “the
white boyfriend steps up to me to confront me on my prejudices.” After this comment,
the conversation turned into a more general discussion about Andrew’s perceptions that
the supporting characters had the “interesting” lines of dialogue. “This is my show. I’m
supposed to be the mutha fucka [sic], but we don’t see where he is. What’s in my
character’s head…?”
As stated previously, actors in television series can be vigilant and protective of
their characters. This power battle is often expressed through character dialogue, which
character speaks the last line in the scene, or who is perceived as driving the scene. These
seemingly small privileges are often not part of the experience of a Black actor on a
series, because he or she tends not to play the lead character. I understood that the lead
actor, therefore, would not want to give up the spotlight to a younger, white actor who is
billed 7
th
in the series’ credits.
Television writing and production is more than creating a story/”breaking” a story
for one actor. It is creating a story that can be produced. Beyond budgetary issues, no
one knows the individual idiosyncrasies that can make or break a producible script better
than the show’s writer-producer staff. It would be easy to dismiss Andrew’s complaints
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as the ranting of a “pampered star.” I suggest, however, that this would be a reductionist
stance that fails to consider important underlying issues that move beyond that actor’s
individual concerns. This discourse is, in fact, a site for the contestation of cultural
images and it is part of the writer-producer’s job. Part of the experience and training that
promotes the writer to writer-producer involves learning procedures and dispositions in
how to “deal with your stars,” and “how to “handle your actors.”
111
While an actor’s
behavior is often the stuff of rumor and innuendo on the set and fills the glossy pages of
grocery store periodicals off the set, the smart writer-producer has to know when to pay
attention and when to allow the moment to pass.
As my conversation with Andrew continued, he mentioned the fact that when this
show finally aired he would be the only Black male lead in television. This fact made the
writers and the actor playing the role anxious about giving his character flaws that
weren’t “good flaws.”
112
Still, Andrew responded that he felt his character was “too easy”
(going?) for him and “has no edge.” A careful reading of Andrew’s last two statements
reveals that they are loosely connected. They point to several masculinist tensions and
anxieties that coalesce around the imagery and work of Black actors in general, though I
am in this moment considering the tension about Black male actors. Many actors say they

111
The “your” in the above analysis is italicized, not only because this is the way these sentiments are
usually articulated, but also because they are, in a business sense, true. The buck stops with the show
running executive producers. To the network, they are your actors and the network wants to hear little of
the everyday issues with an actor, unless the egregiousness becomes a budgetary or image problem (such as
the actor Isaiah Washington on Grey’s Anatomy-- who was seen as hugely problematic in the industry and
mainstream press for having uttered a homophobic epithet on the set and created press problems for writer-
executive producer Shonda Rhimes and ABC).
112
In television writing and story breaking giving a character “good flaws” might include: the lead hero
always makes decisions that put him/her in dangerous situations, but only because s/he is always willing to
sacrifice in order to save others from a bad situation; the hero character is a cop with a violent temper, but
he only loses his temper with a violent husband during a response to a domestic violence situation.
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want to convey positive images, but then lodge the complaint that the characters are
bland, boring, or too “easy” to play. Andrew’s critique is that his lead character has no
“edge”. Though in recent years, there has been a concerted increase in the number of
white anti-hero heroes on television (on House, The Shield, The Sopranos, etc.) the
traditional mold casts lead actors as likeable characters. So Andrew’s desire that his
Black characters “not be a boy scout all the time” and “have some edge” as a lead
character, speaks to something that television has not yet figured out: how to produce an
“edgy” lead in a Black male body.
For me, this raises several questions: Do Black male actors see their roles as
opportunities to advance their humanity in a hyper masculine way? Was Andrew’s
attempt to claim in performance what life often denies: “respect” and a sense of being
“the mutha fucka?” What is behind this desire or tendency? Does it have anything to do
with resisting the feminizing connotations that have historically surrounded artistic and
performance work? Does it have anything to do with the desire to perform an ideal
African-American male, to contribute to the imagery of what Mark Anthony Nelson calls
the “strong, Black man” (2005)? Andrew clearly reveals that one of goals in this project
was to portray the “strong Black man.” As Neal makes clear, however, the trope of the
strong, Black man often silences women and Black homosexuality. But here, in the realm
of cultural production, we encounter an actor who articulates that the strong, Black man
doesn’t quite exist in popular culture and is angry that the potential for his character to be
a SBM is undercut by his scripted (and therefore forced) silence in response to a much
younger and white male character. I tried to explain that the scene demands conflict and
that a younger, white character confronts his fear in order to stand up to him, Andrew
155

countered with, “Why does he have to stand up to me at all? It’s like the seventh episode
or something. He’s doing this already?! I’m the father, he’s dating my kid, he should
have nothing to say, whether he likes it or not. He’s a punk! He’s not even respecting me
as a Black father…”
For the actor, then, there is no room for subtlety here, because the imbalance of
Black imagery does not allow for depictions of such cross-racial nuances across
generational lines. He argues for a privileging of the need to present a certain kind of
Black (male) representation, even at the expense of storylines or extracting dramatic
value. For him, in this instance, image is what mattered. For writer-producers, however,
where we can (and do) consider image, the constructs of the television business dictate
that story always matters and is always privileged. Ultimately, the actor performed the
scene as written. Afterwards, he young, white actor was thrilled that “he” got to “stand
up” to the lead Black actor’s character. Thus, as this project argues, the performative
aspects of the writers’ room which first constructs the story, sets very clear parameters on
the agency of the actor. In one sense, this is a rather straight forward argument. But I am
trying to illustrate how the admittedly limiting discourse that positions positive images
against negative images still remains a tool for cultural workers to at least formulate an
argument. While we must deepen this discourse and complicate its theoretical
implications, I question its abandonment without first attempting a strong collaborative
artist-scholar effort to hand our “on the ground” cultural workers additional tools with
which to resist the performativity of the work that the television production apparatus
often performs.

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Costumes, Production Design, & Casting
During a “notes session,” my executive producer began to share with me some of
the challenges she was having with crew members. They didn’t seem to understand her
vision for the show. In particular, the costume designers were having trouble costuming a
young, female character that I had described in a script as “a combination of a Black,
pseudo-militant who wears clothing from an American Girl catalogue.” EP, a Black
woman, said she knew what I was going for, but that the white costume designer was
flummoxed. She stated she didn’t believe this character, “Kelly.” “They don’t think Kelly
exists.” I then mentioned that I often had that exact problem with casting directors when I
was still an actor. I am from the South Side of Chicago, a largely segregated, working
class to poor community that is often represented in popular and academic culture as a
ghetto of black pathology. The fact that I presented as educated but young often played a
major part, I was told on numerous occasions, in the fact that I was not often cast in roles
specifically designated for young, Black males. Roles for young, Black men usually
meant there some kind of criminalization attached to the role that I needed to
convincingly convey. The executive producer sighed, saying, as she would on numerous
occasions “because that’s who they think we are.”
Later, the EP asked me to change the name of a fictional ice cream shop that we
were planning to establish as part of the show’s neighborhood. The name I had given the
establishment, at first, was “Margie Moo’s Ice Cream,” but the EP requested that it sound
like something that would be in the urban neighborhood of Morgan Park, and not
something that sounded like something out of “Brentwood.” While this is a simple
producing task, it carries implications for the mise-en-scene of what the viewer will
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ultimately see. It will dictate to a large degree the work that the production and design
departments will do. It begins with the writer and what that writer’s words suggest to the
other interpretive artists who work to realize the production. After working on the names
for a several minutes, I went to the support staff to ask their opinions. I suggested “Annie
Mae’s Ice Cream.” Jake, the white, male script co-ordinator, liked this choice. Michelle
hated the name and asked why I needed to change the name of the ice cream shop at all.
When I told her I was told to make it more “Morgan Park” she replied “I hate that shit,”
and walked away. Later, we were looking over and discussing actor’s pictures and
resumes, which represented several of the potential casting choices for the new villain I’d
created. This major character would soon be introduced into the series. Michelle
indicated that she liked one of the more handsome actors because he was “lighter
skinned” and had a “softer look”. She went on to explain that she likes to “go the other
way” and not be “typical” when casting. Instead of casting the actor who immediately
registers as “hard and dangerous” for a villain or thug, she’d rather cast a “softer” actor,
as long as her atypical casting choice “can bring it, is a good actor.” Michelle, through a
casual discussion on casting, articulates her resistance and objection, through language
and gesture, to the practice of portraying darker skinned Black male images as hyper-
masculine and hyper aggressive criminals. Her thoughts on the aesthetic choices in
production design and casting decisions made clear her consciousness and concerns over
representation and her disapproval of images that conjure up familiar representations and
connections between Blackness and inner city business establishments, between
blackness and “obvious” notions of criminality.
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While Michelle, an assistant, would not have a significant voice in the casting
decision, I, the writer who would also produce the episode, would have a voice. Hence,
her somewhat unusual forthrightness with me had the potential to intervene in how the
show might choose to embody the role of a villain-- if I agreed with her, and if her
choices became my choices. The fact that Michelle felt comfortable enough to offer her
opinion also speaks to the sense of purpose and investment that many African Americans
on the show felt regarding the images the show would release into the media landscape.
Michelle’s comment on resisting a typical casting choice is also revealing. She clearly
calls for her idea of an atypical actor, but one who can still “bring it”-- convincingly play
a villain or criminal. She is interested in performance, not essence. On the one hand, she
fails to see how this move could simply deepen the representation of black criminality to
actors of all phenotypes because for her, it is a deconstructing move. In insisting that the
actor be able to “play” the role, rather than “be” the role, she seeks to nuance the Black
villain with “softer” personality traits. Though she never specified exactly what she
meant by “softer,” I understood it as an attempt to humanize depictions of black
criminality. She does this, even at the cost of casting “believability,” because she wants
to disrupt the accepted aesthetic of authenticity that has constructed darker hued actors as
criminals, a construction that frequently finds itself into the represented on television.
Despite her status as an assistant, Michelle clearly sees television production as a
politicized space. In making her thoughts known to me, the writer who might have some
authority to speak, she was attempting an intervention. In arguing for an actor who can
“play” the part rather than “be” the part, she invokes a desire for the possibility of a
159

Brechtian theatre aesthetic into television and mass media.
113
In calling up the possibility
that an actor who portrays hardened criminality not actually physically match our
conventional image of a hardened criminal, Michelle sets herself against a certain
segment of casting practices in television production.
HBO’s acclaimed television series, The Wire, strove to achieve an urban
authenticity in its presentation of Baltimore’s drug dealing culture. It achieved this, in
part, by strategically casting several recurring roles with former and in some cases,
current, Black and Latino drug dealers. This blurring of performance with reality in an
effort to achieve a greater authenticity is an instance, I would argue, of using casting to
dictate performances, and therefore to create or strengthen racial performativity. I deploy
the term performativity here in much the same way that Anne Cheng deploys the term.
114

If performativity, through reiterative cultural citations that attempt to “naturalize” the
meanings attached to race, restricts the actor’s agency to resist stereotypes, then the
lauded “authentic” casting practices on shows like The Wire-- which found actual drug
dealers to “play” drug dealers and actual felons to play felons-- are dangerous. Such
practices reify racialized portrayals of criminalization by confusing racialization and
phenotype with “authenticity” while, at the same time, rewarding real criminal acts with
the temporary allure of money and glamour that Hollywood as industry can provide. It

113
“Brechtian theatre,” based on the work of director/playwright Bertolt Brecht, puts forth the notion that
acting and theatre is presentational-- as opposed to the theatrical realism movement that privileges that
theatre and acting is to be representational and as much like “real life” as possible. Brecht believed in the
creation of an alienation affect. Alienation is any number of theatrical reminders throughout a production
that remind the audience that they are indeed watching a crafted performance.
114
See Anne Cheng’s The Melancholy of Race, p. 58-59, for her nuancing of the relationship between
performance and performativity. She describes the power of performativity, in that it not only exceeds and
constrains performance and the agency of performers-- but it also is that which competes with performance.
She writes: “Only then can we understand the coexistence of coercion and agency in any act of cultural
performance… between a scripting history and individual response…”
160

infuses what many would call “negative” representation with exchange value and
suggests that representation through performance is not enough. The game has been
upped-- and for Black actors the message becomes confusingly clear. Forget craft and
your degree from Julliard. Go rob somebody, get arrested, do some time, and then come
to the audition.
115

The Wire was not alone in blurring the meaning of representation in the name of
seeking greater authenticity. During casting sessions for roles on Morgan Park, I became
aware of a unique company in the entertainment industry, Suspect Entertainment.
116

Suspect Entertainment, Inc. is an actor/artist management and production company that
specializes in representing and turning former gang members and drug dealers into
actors-- where they then primarily portray gang members and drug dealers in television
and film. Suspect Entertainment’s goals in providing another, safer, and profitable
alternative life to its actor clients are largely commendable, though still deeply
problematic. The irony of the company’s success in converting people who have
committed felons into mass media representations of their former felonious selves comes

115
When I signed my contract with my first theatre and film agent in New York in the mid-1990s I noticed
she had this sign posted on her wall: “What they don’t teach Black actors at Julliard: ‘Hey Lady, Give me
your mutha-*&%$! purse!” This sentiment would be echoed again when I signed my contract with one of
New York’s most prominent voiceover and commercial agencies at the time, SEM&M. After signing,
several voiceover agents told me that they needed to let me know that I might often be told to make my
readings more “street”—and that I should know that I wasn’t sounding “Black” enough. These moments
also echoed my first signing with an agent in Los Angeles, while I was an undergraduate. The agents there
also told me, right after signing, that I “spoke very well” and to know that was a quality I wouldn’t always
be asked to audition with. In retrospect, I was so happy to get my first Hollywood agent that I didn’t really
understand the implications of what they were saying to me. The fact that each of these three signings, race
was somehow in the room before I was and was already demanding certain performances from me, begins
to illuminate my notion in this project that performativity gains its materiality through the entertainment
industry generally, and through television writing rooms and production, more specifically.
116
For more information, see Suspect Entertainment’s website at
www.suspectentertainmentinc.com.Accessed April 2, 2011. Also see “The Unusual Suspects at Suspect
Entertainment” at http://www.oyemag.com/suspect.html.
161

with a cost. The issue here has little to do with Suspect Entertainment per se, but with the
dangers of legitimizing of this kind of entertainment business practice. In
institutionalizing this directly from the streets to Hollywood path actors of color who
undertake professional actor education and training are further marginalized. While
many actors of color, whether they hail from the streets or a college quad, might like to
invoke some version of Hattie McDaniel’s famous statement, “I’d rather play a maid than
be a maid”,
117
the fact is that casting practices that equate authenticity and reality with a
real police rap sheet blur the line between traditional notions of performance and reality
in problematic, mind boggling ways. African American and Latino actors struggling to
move beyond playing the maid, the drug dealer, or members of the so-called underclass
are now faced with an even starker choice. The logic is one that says an actor of color can
now no longer simply play a maid or drug dealer, because you must now convince
casting directors and producers that you can actually be, might have been, or could be a
maid or drug dealer. The former gang members sitting next to you in the casting office
almost certainly meet this new level and test of “authenticity”.
I do not mean to suggest that if one commits a criminal act, that act should be
branded as the sum total of their existence or that the person in question deserves to be
permanently labeled as a criminal. I am, however, raising the concern that this particular
way of securing authenticity-- as an example of an increasingly acceptable and
institutionalized way to cast actors who tend to be Black or Latino-- aids in the
representative criminalization of their ethnic communities. This practice carries great

117
Statement has been famously attributed to Hattie McDaniel. For more information see SeeingBlack.com,
“Hattie McDaniel: What We Don’t Know about Mammy” by Esther Iverem (September 10, 2001).
Accessed April 2, 2011 at http://www.seeingblack.com/x091001/hattie.shtml.
162

potential to strengthen the bond between racialization and criminalization by lending the
logics and optics of cultural representation to future surveillance (i.e., the circle of being
racially profiled, arrested, and introduced to the penal system). Therefore, when Michelle
says she wants to “go the other way” in casting the villains and criminals, it is, in light of
current and future casting practices in television, much easier to understand her point of
view as one of potential intervention.
Phenotype and Playing “Low”
As I exited my car in the parking lot one June morning, a veteran actress, JJ,
approached me to say hello. JJ had been cast to play the lead actor’s surrogate mother, a
member of an inner city Black community who had never left the community. The
surrogate family was clearly intended to represent a different social class and demeanor
than the show’s primary Black family. JJ informed me that she was happy to portray the
role, but that she had not accepted “billing” on the show.
118
Sometimes when an
established actor takes a role that her agent or manager considers smaller than the stature
of her resume, the actor agrees to perform in the role, but it is done “without billing.”

118
“Billing” is industry shorthand that refers to the order and category level of an actor or writer’s name
and credit as it appears on the television screen. For example, as a show’s opening credits roll, there is
often a category of credits that list the “guest stars” that will appear in that week’s episode. There might
also be an even higher level of billing for incredibly established actors under the category of “special guest
star.” In television dramas, the billing that occurs at the beginning of a show is generally, though not
always, considered more prestigious than the billing and credits that appears quickly at the end of a show.
The industry language for this is “top of show”-- as in “If Tom Cruise is guest starring on Law & Order,
then he’s definitely beyond top of show.” For actors, the billing that appears at the end of a show includes
the levels of co-stars and day players. Writers who are also producers and show runners also receive “top of
show” billing, while story editors receive end of show billing. Staff writers, coveted positions that they are,
represent the lowest level in the permanent writing hierarchy and generally receive no on screen billing
whatsoever. The fact then that many Black writers never progress beyond the staff writer level carries
important implications for the historical televisual record. Those writers of color are not written into the on
air record of cultural production. As such, this business practice represents a kind of erasure of black
representation.

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Accordingly, the reduced billing and payment do not contribute to the actor’s official
“quote” price in the industry. In 2007 a co-star or non-billed role paid approximately
$900/per day and generally would conclude filming in one day. A guest star or “top of
show” role pays a minimum of $6,500 for one week’s work, even if the actor only works
one day. The differences are substantial, but JJ decided to take the role on the show
without billing, recognizing that the perennial lack of work for Black actors diminished
her position to negotiate an amount more commensurate with her experience. She was
also gambling that the role would re-appear on the show in future episodes, and so she
might be able to better negotiate her standard fee at that time. Speaking to me, however,
JJ stated that she wanted to perform on Morgan Park because of the “material.” This
phrase is a way to summarize that the she was interested in acting on the show because of
the show’s writing and its position as the only African American drama on television.
JJ’s willingness to forego her fee for the opportunity to work on a certain kind of
“material” speaks, again to the sense of purpose the show engendered among its Black
artists. Indeed, many of the Black artists were de facto financially subsidizing the
production of the show by working at reduced rates. In citing the show’s “material” as a
reason for desiring to appear on the show JJ highlights for us the notion of the materiality
of Black representation. In laying bare the materiality of Black representation via an
examination of television I am also asking how is it embodied and what is its cost? The
fact that the show had yet to air and was, at this stage, almost completely represented by
its scripted pages illustrates both the importance of the written page and the process that
produces the written page to the materiality of Black representation in television.
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JJ went on to state that she was glad to see the lead actress on the show, Suzette,
playing “something else”, i.e., a role different than that in which she is normally cast,
because “they usually have her playing so low.” “You mean ‘dregs’,” I offered. She
agreed. She went on to say that this was due to Suzette’s dark chocolate brown skin color.
Therefore, JJ liked that “you’re trying to do something different in having the low class
ghetto family be lighter skinned than the show’s main family…” (JJ is a light caramel
hued actress and TM, a multi-racial actress who played JJ’s jobless, foul-mouthed
daughter, is of an even lighter skin tone). Here JJ, like the assistant Michelle, references
skin tone and phenotype as a way of expanding the encoded possibilities of Black
representation. Together, they illuminate that writing and casting are two sites in the
production process that carry the power to intervene in popular discursive formations.
Their observations also illustrate the high level of interest by Black actors in a kind of
Black writer-Black actor collaborative authorship. The actors attempted to let us know
when they were pleased with the direction of a script and when they were not. Many
Black actors have told me, however, that they would rarely openly comment on a script
written by a white writer-- or if they did they would select when to do so very carefully.
But in this case, where the show’s original template-- written by a white writer who had
come to be seen as out of touch with the televisual world he created-- was being actively
re-thought and revised by its Black practitioners, the black actors seized on the
opportunity to at least be heard. In this case, the writers, the actors, and the support staff
recognized that the success and quality of this new show might contribute to expanding
the possibilities for Black representation. Therefore, they actively sought opportunities to
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theorize this expansive notion of blackness while already in the act of trying to realize its
creation.
Hair/Power
During the middle of the first season we began to have writers’ room meetings on
a more regular basis. The EP was interested in doing an episode that centered on the idea
of the show’s young son character, Brandon’s, having a “coming of age party.” Dean, a
veteran white writer-producer, had never heard of a Black coming of age party. The EP
then described it as a “Black Bar Mitzvah.” During the meeting the idea of Brandon
shaving his head was proposed. This opened up a humorous exchange among several of
the writers about the issues around African American hair. The binary of “good hair” vs.
“bad hair” was one topic. That some older generations of African Americans would
chastise younger mothers for cutting a baby’s hair too soon, thus causing the hair to grow
back much coarser, was another topic. I volunteered that my own mother, a Mississippi
southerner, had begun to ask me on a regular basis whether or not my then two year old
daughter’s hair had “turned” yet? The Latino and white writers on the staff were
perplexed by this entire story meeting, stating that they did not understand Black hair. It
was then that the EP shared with the rest of staff the production experience that she and I
had recently (and quietly) negotiated.
A young Black male actor had been cast as a friend of Brandon. The actor,
Johnny, was thirteen years old, and the make-up and hair stylists decided that to properly
prepare him for filming they needed to shave his very slight mustache and chin hairs.
They did so. Johnny’s mother, who did not know that her son’s mustache and beard had
been shaved until after it had happened, became very angry. She threatened to remove her
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son from the set-- a circumstance that would have been a costly delay to production. The
EP was informed of the situation. She updated and asked me to accompany her to the
dressing room trailers as she addressed the situation. The mother was visibly upset and
accused the white hair stylist of violating her son’s contract and of cultural insensitivity
in cutting her son’s nascent beard. She stated that the cutting was a violation and that the
stylist should have been shown her respect by asking about his hair first. She stated
“…this is something that my son would do with his father for the first time,” and she
argued that the ritual had been taken from them. The EP and I listened very carefully,
apologized sincerely, and asked her not to leave the production. We asked if there was
anything we could do to help rectify the situation. She replied that our listening and
understanding were all she required. They would not leave the production. The EP related
this story to the rest of the writing staff to illustrate the role of hair in rites of passage in
African American communities (the passing from innocence to knowledge, childhood to
adulthood) and Black hair as site of power struggles (Jacobs-Huey). Hair as a site of
power relations in television production would soon make itself known again, but this
time in a different racial context.
The EP soon found herself in the midst of a severe disagreement with Brian, a
white actor on the show. Brian was a series regular and played a fellow police officer that
was something of friend to Andrew, the lead actor on the show. A storyline required that
Brian cut his hair in order to go under cover as a white supremacist. Brian refused to cut
his hair. He cited his contract, which did not include language about altering his
appearance. Furthermore, he argued that he would soon be auditioning for other roles
outside of the show; drastically altering his appearance would have an effect on his
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marketability. The EP was stunned at his reaction and interpreted his actions as a
comment on the long term-prospects of Morgan Park, on the Blackness of Morgan Park,
and on the quality of the work she was doing as EP. The EP was further upset that her
authority was being challenged, given the fact that Brian occupied the sixth billing
position on the show but was the second highest paid cast member on the show. She felt
he should do what he was asked. The EP inquired with the network about firing the actor.
They were upset about the actor’s actions and took it as a comment on how little he
valued the show. However, the EP also confessed that the tight budgets made his firing
financially difficult.
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The EP defended her position to me: “…If I let him get away with
this, next thing you’ll know he’ll tell Andrew, (the lead actor) then it’ll be another actor
who doesn’t want to do something, and I’ll lose control of my own show.” She went on
to state that Brian didn’t consider the racial dynamics of his insubordination. The EP
went on. “I’m a Black woman and he’s a white man. If I let him get away with this…”
Irritated, she then grabbed a pen and held it over a sheet of paper, saying: “…doesn’t he
know, you don’t mess with THIS”, meaning the power of the television writer’s pen. She
then held a brief meeting with the show’s line producer, the non-writing producer in
charge of budgets and physical production, where they strategized how to reprimand the
actor through silence. This may seem petty but other considerations are at stake. The
showrunner’s power to “run the show” must be maintained among other writer-
producers, the production crew, and the cast. For a show that struggled in its early stages,

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If a showrunner gets permission from the network to fire a series regular actor, the show, in all
likelihood would still have to pay out his contract. For a first year show on a tight budget to simply absorb
this cost of tens of thousands of dollars per episode is usually prohibitive. The showrunner must then wait
for a natural breaking point in an actor’s contract in order to release him without further financial
obligations.
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causing the replacement of the white male show runner’s replacement with a Black
female showrunner, and then lived in a state of anxiety regarding the maintenance of
physical production and the implications of its Black images, the attempt by a white actor
to assert agency over his hair-- especially when connected to his desire to maintain
viability for outside acting jobs-- could not go without response. Even the line producer, a
white man, understood this.
Brian’s performance of loyalty to the production that employed him and paid him
well was found wanting. His inability to recognize just how much he had placed his job
in jeopardy had nothing to do with his inexperience; he had been a series regular on
shows before. He was well acquainted with the power structures of television that place
the largely invisible show running executive producer at the top of the production
hierarchy. Rather, I believe it had to do with a deeply ingrained suspicion of power that
did not look like him and, from his perspective, the foreignness of his situation. He was a
white actor on a predominantly African American cast show that was run by an African
American female executive producer who considered the producing of this show to be an
important exercise in creating African American imagery in a new context. Compared to
the reality of Brian’s life and status as a white man in America, his work reality was
entirely inverted, and his white privilege needed to be deployed in ways that could not be
interpreted as a challenge to the authority of the producers. He attempted to assert a kind
of agency, but the conditions of possibility of an actor’s agency are severely policed by
the writing and the work of the television writer-producer. Brian soon realized his
missteps, however, as news of his insubordination and the network’s involvement
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reached his representation. Later that week, he could often be seen sitting alone in the
corners of the soundstage for the rest of the season.
Black Humanity, Black Criminality
On June 21, at 7:29 am and again at 7:50am, I received phone calls from Richard,
the director of the latest episode of Morgan Park. He informed me that he wanted to
make a script change, and it seemed that the change was causing a work slowdown
among certain members of the crew. In the second phone call Richard confessed that it
was actually the 1
st
Assistant Director’s resistance to a script element that was threatening
to hold up production. The 1
st
AD was an African American man so I was somewhat
surprised when the director, Richard, then said, “I’m just gonna say what was said. The
AD claims that ‘Black people don’t speak that way…’” I responded, slightly irritated,
“Well, we can see that the character is Black.” I told him I’d be arriving on set, as the
producing writer, as soon as possible. This is another example of the anxious investment
of many writers and the crew in achieving an authentic presentation of blackness. But it is
also an example of just how contested the notion of authentic blackness is among Black
people and non-Blacks. This tension over authentic blackness is especially heightened
among those working in the entertainment industry.
Later, when discussing this incident with the EP, she related her recent
experiences in working with a director of a previous episode. Executive producers, as the
stable presence on a television show, often communicate what he or she wants to see in
their work on the episode to the director, who is usually considered a guest.
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The

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This is one reason why film is considered a director’s medium and television is referred to as the
writer’s medium. It is the only mass media form where the writer tells the director, to some extent, what to
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episode in question featured a kidnapper, played by a young African American actor,
who abducted the family’s young daughter. The director wanted to show the kidnapper
slapping the young girl across her face. The EP objected, suggesting that the story called
for the kidnapper to have a sense of humanity. She thought this was an obvious choice,
since the story would call for the kidnapper to eventually let the young girl live without
harm. “He went right into that box”, the EP remarked. The EP struggled in the moment
with how to describe this duality to the director. She finally told the director that the
kidnapper was more like the character of “Fredo” from the Godfather films. The director
got very excited and said that he understood. In a later meeting the director’s phone
rang-- and his ring tone was the theme to the Godfather films. The EP couldn’t believe
her good fortune in selecting Fredo as a comparison.
Harry J. Elam writes that “the particular collisions of the real and the figurative
have proved consequential for African Americans, and the meanings of blackness have
depended on conscious negotiations with representational economies” (173-174, 2005
ed.). The fact that it was the performance of a white ethnic film character, Fredo, that
managed to communicate the possibility of the presence of humanity in an African
American kidnapper raises questions about (racialized) embodiment and the capacity for
cross racial empathy through representation. It took the visualization of humanity through
Fredo’s “white” body to make credible the counterfactual possibility of both criminality
and humanity residing simultaneously in a black body. What is disturbing is that the
director’s artistic examination of the narrative failed to lead him to the conclusion that, in

do and what results are to be achieved in their directing. Still, it is a collaborative process and the executive
producer tends to at least engage some of the artistic sensibilities of their guest director.

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this case, a character’s criminal act did not necessarily negate his humanity. Instead, the
director was interested in actually increasing the character’s capacity for criminal
violence toward a young girl. The character’s Blackness literally blinded him, while
another character’s whiteness created space for his identification and empathy.
Whiteness, even in a fictional film, had to be grafted onto Blackness for him to see its
capacity for humanity.
Later in the first season I spoke with James, a veteran actor and former star known
for originating several roles in 1970s Blaxploitation films. He has gone on to have a
successful career it television and films. While we were working on set one hot morning
he mentioned to me how pleased he was to see the Morgan Park pilot and to be a part of
the show, because it wasn’t a comedy and “we’re always joking and jiving. But this show
shows Black people trying to make it. What a novel idea…” he added sarcastically. I
replied “…and as quiet as it’s kept, dominant culture knows what it’s like to try and make
it, too.” He then spoke of the possibility that the show might be “too good” (to be a
success) and that it shows “too much humanity” among Black people who “live in a poor
neighborhood.” He went on, “They don’t like to see that,” never specifying whom he
meant by “they.” When I asked whether he thought these “likes” and “dislikes” were
conscious, he stated emphatically that he thought it was “sub-conscious.” Still, we both
agreed that “the result was the same”; that these subconscious actions spoke to the deep
level where cultural codes and structures operate. “It’s just in them,” he stated. Then he
shared the following example. His white golf partner has a habit of slipping into Black
slang while they play. He does it subconsciously, but enough so that one day he chastised
his friend by asking him “Do you hear me talking that way?”
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Though we had never met each other before that day, the ease with which James
and I slipped into this conversation indicates the presence of a meta-discourse about
Black representation that intersects depictions of Blackness with depictions of the
working class. James’ comment about the incredulity of the existence of a show that
depicts “Black people trying to make it” casts as subversive the show’s positing of a
working class Black humanity into the television landscape. In fact he thinks this is such
a novel representation of Blackness, that the show may already be in danger of
cancellation because, as he states: “They don’t like that.” Thus he paints television as a
political apparatus in which ratings matter but the personal likes and dislikes of “they”--
the power brokers we do not see-- matter even more. Of course, neither James nor I can
document who or what “they” are, but the term does capture a certain structure of feeling
in its attempt to name the unseen forces of hegemony. Not incidentally then, the fact that
these analytical comments came from an African American actor who had survived and
thrived through several representational epochs-- beginning with Blaxploitation--
suggests he is drawing from a deeply embodied well of knowledge and that his
empirically informed point of view is his theory. It is a theory we might never hear,
however, without the project of knowledge production taking seriously what long time
cultural workers of color have learned in their travails.
His comments also echo that of the EP, when she refused the requests of the white
episode director who could not imagine a Black character who had committed a criminal
act as capable of empathy. It did not strike him as authentic. Placing these two
conversations by the EP and James side by side brings to the forefront how accustomed
we as television consumers have become to seeing either an abject Blackness that is
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saturated in an irredeemable illegality that we call “negative,” or an upwardly mobile
class inflected Blackness that we call “positive.” That Morgan Park endeavored to call
positive what tends to be coded as negative in Black television suggests a way to
reconstruct the value of those over determined terms without abandoning them. It also
suggests why Black representation in television produces so much anxiety by those who
watch it and by those who produce it.
Anxiety over Black Quality
In mid-June, the EP was informed that the director of the next episode, which was
scheduled to start preparations for filming the following day, would not be showing up
for work. He had decided, at this late notice to take another job on a pilot. The EP was
highly irritated, saying “the director had a three week out, not a 24 hour out!” While most
people who work in television ultimately understand a director choosing to take a job
directing a pilot-- it could mean years of steady work and remuneration-- the late hour
and lack of warning were seen as an insult. The EP stated “that anybody who would do
this isn’t right for our show anyway.” This could, of course, simply be sour grapes. But
this language also indicates the almost spiritual nature that producing the show had
become for its leader. According to her, the fact that a non-comic show described by
some as a “Black show” was being produced on a television network that wasn’t “Black”
made it a political act. Its home on a basic cable network would have, just a few years
prior, automatically marginalized the show. This is clearly no longer the case in our
fragmented media universe, but this particular director’s actions suggested that most
basic cable shows still wrestled at times with their placement in the hierarchy of
television. The director who pulled out his directing assignment with less than 24 hours
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notice confirmed the traditional point of view (at that time) that he and his representatives
felt they could risk the fallout that might come from upsetting the executives of a basic
cable channel. When this is combined with the history of real disregard of Black shows in
the past, this event serves as a piercing reminder of the show’s position in a racialized
television landscape. On one hand, was simply the act of one (white) director. On the
other, it expresses another form of the anxiety I have theorized here as foundational to the
enterprise of Black representation.
For example, toward the end of production on the first season, the actors had
increasingly begun to register their opinions about the quality of the scripts the writers
were producing. This is a common refrain on many, if not most, television shows. But
does the discontent of the cast speak only to the script at hand-- or to an ingrained
perception that their black and brown faces automatically represent an inferior (read as
“non-network”) product or experience? Does the filter they use to access their own
performances possibly affect the work itself? However, I noticed a respite from this
steady march of internal criticism from the show’s lead actor after he returned from a
Juneteenth Festival in Dallas, Texas. He went as part of the promotion efforts of the
show, so he could personally introduce a commercial trailer for the show. It was screened
several times at the festival, and the response from the audiences was overwhelmingly
positive and enthusiastic. This external response to the forthcoming show seemed to
excite the actor and mollified some of his critical tendencies. In his own words, he stated
it was good to “step out of the box” (of television production) and see what ordinary
people are saying and thinking when they encounter the show. The box that Andrew is
referring to is the insular nature of television production. Especially during the first
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months of a new show, in the void between the announcement that a show has been
“picked up” (scheduled to go on the air) and its premiere date, involves hard,
introspective work. The only external input comes from the studio and network. The
metrics by which the writers and actors assess their work at this juncture are largely
dependent on their own past aesthetics and politics of “good” or “bad” Black imagery. I
stated earlier in this project that the question of positive and negative Black
representation is far from settled for practitioners in television. I offer here that this is
perhaps most true before a new show airs, during those hermetically sealed months of
production, when the only external input in the echo chamber of production soundstages
is a variation of what was already present in the minds and politics of the artists.
Anxiety over Black Imagery
Toward the end of the season, I discovered that lead actor Andrew had perfected a
system for acquiring scripts for future episodes before they were ready to be released to
him. This is a clear breaking of protocol, but it again reveals just how invested the Black
artists became in the purpose of the show. In one episode of the show, the lead
character’s former girlfriend is revealed to also occasionally work as a neighborhood
prostitute. This story line caused great disagreement among the writing staff. The episode
was conceived and written by Michelle, the outspoken assistant. Several writers tried to
talk her into choosing another way to tell this story. The EP seemed to go along with the
story, in part due to the pressures of time on the production schedule. There simply was
no time to stop the production machine and create a new story from scratch-- which is
what scrapping this story would have required. So it proceeded, as many television
scripts do, with the hope that the process could fix what might be wrong.
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When I encounter Andrew on the set, I noticed his reticent demeanor. I asked: “So
I take it you’ve seen the new script?” He answers affirmatively, “Hell, yeah.” He went on
to ask how his character, a loving husband and father, would perform the actions the
script required. “How am I going to bring a prostitute into my house, and she’s got better
cooking than my wife who cooks for three kids everyday…” I bow my head in response.
I saw this exact problem in the script prior to this moment and had been doing my best as
a colleague to address it with the writer, but I had not succeeded.
Several days and a few drafts of the script later, Suzette, the lead actress on the
show, cornered me on the set and gave me her ideas. Feeling somewhat bombarded, I
eventually responded, “I didn’t write it.” This was not a satisfactory response for her. She
became upset, began to cry and eventually left the set. The actors were so upset with the
script that they began avoiding Michelle when she visited the set, or they acted distantly
toward her and the entire writing staff. Soon thereafter there was a table read of the script.
Table reads of dramatic series scripts tend to happen a day or two before the script is
scheduled to begin filming. It is a chance for the writers to hear the script and fine tune it
one last time. The read through did not go well. The lead actors read their dialogue in a
decidedly monotone manner. In short, they refuse to “perform.” Such a refusal can
potentially create problems. Networks executives were generally present at the table read
and weren’t always attuned to the ways in which an actor can influence how they “hear”
a script. A network executive is more apt to believe there is something wrong with the
script rather than citing an actor’s tired performance as the problem. This was an attempt
by the actors to regain some measure of control, to enact agency in a last attempt to
sabotage a script whose images they found problematic. Notably, at the end of the table
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read the EP did not, per her usual, extend an invitation to the actors to drop by her office
with their notes and thoughts. She was aware of the actor’s “protest” and what she
interpreted as their attempt to force re-writes. She did not approve. Her retort: the script is
“frozen,” and no significant changes will be made.
The above incident weaves together the affects and materiality of time, anxiety,
and battles over black representation and authenticity. There was not enough time to
change the script without a delay that would cost the production hundreds of thousands of
dollars. The anxieties over black imagery manifested as a battle over authenticity that
seemingly pitted actors against the writers. What the actors had no way of knowing,
however, due to the almost impenetrable veil over the television writing process, was
how contentious the script had been even among the writers. The writers were all well
aware that if the script’s problems had not been worked out amongst themselves first,
there was very little the actors would be able to do to counter those problems.
After the last table read of the season, the network executive in attendance, LM,
congratulated the show’s writers, cast, and crew on a successful season. She spoke of her
confidence that the show would not be tagged as “only a Black show” and that she could
proudly compare the quality of the show to any show in Hollywood. I appreciated her
statement-- but the fact that she found it necessary to state that a perception of the show’s
high “quality” would help negate the assumed liability of its Blackness to be a paradox
that was deeply revealing and deeply unsettling.
The first season struggles of a program that features a predominantly Black cast
are, on the surface, similar to the first season growing pains of any new television show.
However, as my examination has shown, the first season growing pains on Morgan Park
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took on an urgency and purpose for the African American writer-producers. Fighting a
tide of common industry wisdom and a television history that suggests an African
American drama has never and will never succeed seemed to literally and figuratively
haunt the production. However, far from silencing and intimidating the creative minds
and talents responsible for writing, producing, and performing the show, this haunting
seemed to liberate the internal discourse on the representation of Blackness. This is
unusual in television. Thus, the first season served as a productive laboratory in which we
can see that cultural production in television and its relationship to Blackness, its
construction of Blackness, is complex in a way that product oriented analyses cannot
capture. The nuances at play as television practitioners seek to find commercial and
artistic success within a treacherous work landscape and an uncertain media landscape
reveal that many Black writers do find ways to both surreptitiously and openly theorize
race. They accomplish this through discourse in their workplace that serves as a debate
over the potential of their power to advocate for certain kinds of representation and
through the realization of televisual narrative. In short, there seemed to be no escape from
the question of blackness in a television production that aimed to depict a dramatic, non-
comic blackness. It spurred a depth of casual discourse that was uncommon in most
workplaces. In the ways examined here, the writers used the writing process and the
subsequent production process to anxiously construct purposeful claims of authenticity
and authorship.
As the production neared the end of its first season, the strain of the physical and
mental investment in creating a successful Black dramatic television series began to
show. Writers became ill. Actors would stop performing their scenes in the middle of
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working, suddenly overcome with tears that had nothing to do with the scene at hand. It
was exhausting work only made more so by an ever present sense of anxiety. First, there
was the unlikely rescue of the show from a white creator uninterested in the very
blackness that helped him get the show on the air. Also adding to the fatigue at seasons’
end was the ongoing revision of the show’s authorship through the production process,
and the careful parsing of every creative decision. Ultimately, there was also the anxiety
of knowing that the show could either mark an intervention in television history with
respect to non-comic Black representation, or become yet another television failure that
proves there’s no place for serious portrayals of Black humanity on television. The
politics of Writing While Black, like all politics, had extracted a cost.

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Chapter 4

“African-American. Not Black”:
Negotiating Identity and the Television Industry through Performance, Season 2

“…to be as little Negro and as much American as possible.”
--Langston Hughes
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“…whenever the American people shall become convinced
that they have gone too far in recognizing the rights of the
Negro, they will find some way to abridge those rights.”
-- Frederick Douglass
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In this chapter I focus on the changing dynamics, discourse, and culture of the
television writer’s room in subsequent seasons of the television series Morgan Park, in
order to illustrate how the struggle to represent Blackness was both facilitated and
attenuated through performance in the television writers’ room. Whereas the last chapter
showed how Black writer-producers struggled to complicate new and progressive
iterations of Black representation, this chapter argues that the slipperiness of performance
and Blackness set the stage for a contested process that endeavored to empty Blackness
of its politics. I argue in this case that Blackness was, as Frederick Douglass suggests in
the above epigraph, abridged and flattened out through the television network’s mandated
reconstitution of the writers’ room. The room was reconstituted by adding several new
writers and by denying promotions to the old writers. I read the room’s reconstitution as a
move to encourage the writers to deliver a show that could be seen as a more
“mainstream” success. It was, in effect, a reconstitution that more completely re-

121
Hughes, Langston. “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain.” African American Literary Theory: A
Reader. ed. by Winston Napier (New York: New York University Press, 2000).
122
Martin, Waldo E. The Mind of Frederick Douglass, Volume 2 (North Carolina: University of North
Carolina Press, 1984), 133.

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materialized the hegemonic function of popular culture. In other words, I show how the
reformation of the writers’ room served to reify the racialized nature of television images.
I show how the writers’ room materializes performativity through images and the
construction of images.
More specifically, I explore the battles between African American writers’ and
Caucasian American writers’ articulations of Blackness, particularly once the network
executives suggested that the Blackness of the show had served its initial business
purposes in the television marketplace. Though the producers seemed aware that a series
featuring a non-comic blackness was deployed, in part, because it was “different,” they
also hoped the show would be seen as something important, as something that would
contribute to the Deleuezian notion of “the cinematic.”
123
Deleuze describes the
cinematic as something more than a medium or an art form. He invokes the cinematic as
that which not only reflects life (via film) but structures how we see and experience life.
The writers hoped that their show would be seen as something to watch, and most
importantly, as something to keep on the air. However, after the writing-producing team
was thoroughly reconstituted by the network to make a “Black show” what I refer to as
“african-AMERICAN and not Black,” the writers’ performances of self shifted, and the
creative discourse changed. Thus, the ability to continue my ethnographic research
beyond the initial launch of the show proved to be productive and allowed this project to
generate several new questions.

123
Kara Keeling’s The Witch’s Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme and the Image of Common Sense
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2007) centers the notion of the Deleuzean cinematic in an analysis of
black femininity and sexuality in contemporary film. I elaborate on this definition of the cinematic later in
this chapter.
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What happens when Blackness is suddenly deemed optional or no longer
desirable by the distributing network? In other words, how does televisual Blackness
continue to exist in the political economy of television after its depictions of Black
culture and racial difference have been mined for its initial “worth” in capturing
“underserved” viewers? Does the show continue to register as something that viewers
still recognize or embrace as Black representation? Does it matter? What is the result of
these “backstage” maneuvers on the “front stage” (Goffman) presentation of the
program? In this new and uncertain production milieu, why and how white writers
perform Blackness, how Black writers perform whiteness, how Latino writers get pissed
off at their liminality, and how the Asian-American assistants just tried to get noticed, are
critically explored. I explore the potential for the contradictions of racial performativity
within cultural production to set the terms of racial performativity outside cultural
production. My goal, then, is to examine the discursive contours of these hegemonic
performances in the television writers’ room in order to trace the limitations of individual
agency within mass media-- with the hope that by doing so, we discover new possibilities
for creating modes of agency outside mass media.
The Alchemy of Television Contracts: Spinning Black(ness) into White (Gold)
The first sign that the second season of Morgan Park was to be fundamentally
different from the first was when I was contacted by the EP and asked to send new
writing samples (scripts or plays) to her home office. This call came as something of a
shock. It was shocking because I had fought hard to get on the show and even
interviewed with two different executive producers. Once I was hired, I had officially
written or co-written several first season scripts and contributed a great deal of
183

unaccredited work to the pilot script and many other scripts. This was unusual for any
writer employed at the staff writer level. Therefore, the call asking me to submit new
writing samples was also shocking because I understood immediately that the network
was taking advantage of a technicality with regard to my employment as a writer on the
show’s second season. I had functioned as a producer on the show’s first season, but I
had not been granted the title of producer. The reality was that I had worked on a writing
program contract for the first season and to continue on the show I would need a new,
formal contract for the second season and beyond. I found myself in this predicament
even though the network executive, LM, had told me that I had succeeded beyond the
staff writer level, and that they were “so lucky” I even accepted the staff writer position
since I had initially interviewed for the higher level “story editor” position. I had also
written, co-written, and co-produced almost a full quarter of their first season at no cost
to their budget. Yet suddenly I was being asked to apply and compete all over again for a
writing job I thought I already had.
124
Even for the notorious entertainment industry, this
was a surprisingly callous and short-sighted way to conduct business. The EP, while
asking for the new material, also tried to assure me. “You have nothing to worry about--
it’s just a part of the process this year,” she stated. This year? She went on to tell me that
she was being forced to consider new writers for the show because the show is
“changing,” and there was a good possibility that we would produce twice as many
episodes in the second season than in the first. She didn’t elaborate on what those

124
An unspoken business and cultural dynamic exists in television writing of not valuing what one does not
pay for. When a writer’s salary doesn’t come from the show’s budget many writers, showrunners, and
executives tend to discount the writer’s work. The fact, then, that I was getting a new contract on the show
at all, given the practice of dismissing “diversity writers” when “diversity money” runs out, was a
testament to the network’s regard for the level of work I completed. They clearly thought well of me, but it
didn’t mean they had to think of me as an equal.
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“changes” were, but she stated that she would honor the work that I, Jorge, and Dean had
done in the first season and that I would have a job. Still, I was unsettled. Things were
changing, but I didn’t know yet how or why.
Further evidence of the show’s shifting creative priorities surfaced when Jorge,
the Latino writer who also wrote a significant portion of the show’s first season, received
his formal offer to return to the show on a Thursday evening, only three days before work
was to commence on the following Monday. For a first season show, such last-minute
deals are not uncommon in television, but the late timing of contract “pick-ups” for a
returning show was somewhat unusual. The fact that the network’s offer did not include a
significant promotion for Jorge, as had been verbally promised to him, made the timing
of the official offers appear to be a strategy for containing costs-- by using the element of
time to pressure the writer to accept a lackluster deal at the last minute. A furious Jorge
called to tell me the news and to protest the broken promise and the minimal amount of
time he had been given to respond.
Often, before a deal is officially finalized or “closes,” a writer is contacted by
the executive producer or through an agent, who lets the writer know when to expect to
begin work. This is also not unusual, as much of the television industry, in the interest of
expediency, is run on handshake and a verbal agreement.
125
This had been the case with
Morgan Park, so the writers were waiting and excited to go back to work. While Jorge
received his offer on a Thursday, I waited in vain for the rest of the evening for my call to

125
It is not unusual for a writer to begin work on a show without a completed contract or with only the
sending of a one page deal memo that stipulates title and salary for the next one to three years as well as
other “guarantees” (the minimum number of weeks a writer must be paid before he or she can be fired, for
example). Thus, verbal promises or agreements do hold significant weight and are important to the timely
functioning of the television industry. It is not unusual for a writer to receive his completed contract for a
show a full year after the writer has started and perhaps even completed work on a show.
185

come. I didn’t receive my formal contract offer until 4pm the next day, on Friday. But
before I received the formal offer, I became concerned and called the EP directly to see
whether our start day had been pushed back. She began the conversation by apologizing.
She thought I had just spoken to my agent. But I hadn’t yet. She then let me know that,
unlike Jorge, I would not be promoted at all and would be offered a take-it-or-leave-it
contract to return to the show as a staff writer once again. The EP said, “I fought for you,
I told them that I believe in rewarding good work and that you deserved promotion, but
the business affairs lawyer pushed back hard.”
126
She reported that he said, to her surprise
and mine: “Who is Anthony Sparks? And why should we do this for him?” It seemed, for
some unknown reason and despite my significant contributions to the first season, I had
become more disposable.
127

When the writers reported to work the next Monday, it became clear why the
network’s business affairs unit had refused to alter their hard line stance towards the first
season writers. Three new writers had been hired on the show. All three were women,

126
“Business affairs” is the department at a studio or network that is responsible for officially making
offers and negotiating the terms of contracts for “talent” (producers, writers, directors, and actors). It is the
studio’s in-house law firm. The talent’s representatives (agents, managers, entertainment lawyers) talk to
the business affairs department after an executive producer informs the network whom they have chosen to
hire. Assuming the network has already approved the hire, a lawyer in the business affairs department is
then instructed to draw up an offer for the talent and to contact their representative. The representative then
calls the talent. The talent agrees to the terms or, with her agent, strategizes how to get better terms. The
executive producers and lawyers in business affairs are usually working with an overall budget to hire
talent, but how they choose to divide their pool of money among the talent they want to hire is up to them.
127
I later discovered that the network’s stance was partly a hard line negotiation tactic. Yes, the network
was not willing to promote me because it wasn’t a top priority, but there was concern, at least from the
Executive Producer, that I would choose to walk away. This was evidenced by the fact that immediately
after my deal closed later that Friday evening the network executive in charge of the show immediately
called the executive producer to reassure her that my deal had closed and I was on board to return for the
second season. While I was disappointed what they didn’t know was that I had discovered the day prior to
all of this that my wife was pregnant. We would soon be expecting twin babies. I had to weigh that seismic
life event along with my fervent desire to continue my research in this arena. In short, I had to accept a
lower salary in order to keep my job and maintain this research. I mention this only to illustrate how
personal issues can highlight the challenges involved with embodying this kind of interdisciplinarity and
with conducting ethnographic research on television.
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two of the three new writers were white, and despite the fact that their experience was
arguably not much more expansive than ours, two of the three new writers were being
brought on at much higher levels than their last television writing jobs. They had been
promoted and given the titles of producer and supervising producer. The third writer,
despite having never completed a full season of television as a writer, had been given the
same rank and title as mine, a third year writer in the industry. Later that week, Jorge
asked me to join him for lunch, alone. This was unusual because most writing staffs tend
to eat lunch together at the beginning of the season. However, Jorge was furious. He had
discovered that the new writers had been “double promoted” to entice them to join
Morgan Park.
128
On one hand, this might seem like the typical politics that goes on in
any workplace in America. But television production and television writing is a particular
kind of workplace. Since the stakes are higher in terms of cultural and financial capital,
personnel decisions serve as de facto cultural power brokers. These decisions shape who
places their hands on the controls of television.
In scripted television, the composition of a show’s writing staff communicates
the vision of the executive producer or the network and studio. The network
misrepresented itself by stating that it did not have room in its budget to provide raises
and promotions to its veteran writers. It neglected to mention it could not provide those
promotions because it was making budgetary room for more (white) writers or writers

128
Receiving what is known in the television writing industry as a “double promotion” (in the hierarchy of
producer titles) from your last show to a new show, means that the network is almost desperate for that
writer to join the show. It means the writer has leverage in a business climate where the writer rarely has
leverage. In this case, since the new writers were unemployed at the time, the leverage they had didn’t have
to do with competing offers. It appeared that their leverage had to do with their previous credits writing for
shows such as the WB’s Dawson’s Creek, Roswell, etc. Their leverage was their ability to burnish the
reputation of the show to the industry’s creative community by lending their whiteness or their “white
show” credentials to this “black show.” In other words, we want our show to be more like the WB, so we’ll
go get WB writers and pay well to do it…
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with “white show” credentials.
129
The truth was they could not afford to provide raises
and promotions to Jorge and me. The hiring of new writers and the promotions of those
writers to producer level titles highlighted in which (racial) direction the network wanted
the show to grow. The network was especially clear here. They wanted to change the
show in order to broaden its demographics. Though the network had originally bought a
“black show” with an African American male lead, it was no longer interested in such a
show. They were repossessing the show and, to borrow George Lipsitz’s term,
possessively investing in whiteness. It needed to alter the show’s visual palette and its
attendant connotations. In other words, it needed to get rid of phenotype without getting
rid of phenotype. The network needed to somehow, without controversy, find a way to
re-invent a show that featured an abundance of black and brown faces into a show that
appealed primarily to young, white teenage girls.
130

In retrospect then, it is not surprising that the network felt it did not need to
reward the show’s African American and Latino writers with unnecessary or “off-brand”

129
The writers came from shows that were recently on the WB or the new CW networks. By the late 90s
and the turn of the century these two networks were known to specialize in airing shows drenched in what
critics often called white teen angst.
130
As explained throughout this project and elaborated later in this chapter, networks “cast” their writer
rooms. Therefore the labor practices of television writing operates under an overwhelming and almost
totalizing assumption of embodiment as the best representative for cultural knowledge-- with the glaring
exception that white men, given their overwhelming dominance in television writing, seem to be regarded
as neutrally capable of writing and representing anything and anybody. Thus, generally speaking, if the
network wants a show to appeal to young white girls, they go out and hire writers who have experience
writing on shows that previously appealed to young, white girls or are themselves a young, white, girl. This
homogenous and hegemonic logic and practice is pervasive in television and gives credence to my
argument that the “blank pages” of a script that a television writer faces are never truly “blank” but that the
site of television writing provides a unique opportunity to construct or reify hegemony and materialize
performativity. I am also arguing that it is those same “blank pages” that offer an opportunity to some
extent, to de-construct and challenge hegemonic racial representations.
188

writer promotions.
131
Jeffrey Stepakoff, a retired television writer, details how interracial
casting on the show Dawson’s Creek was negated by the WB network because of the
network’s “brand” considerations. I extend Stepakoff’s logic to the “casting” of writers.
The network had little hesitation in asking me, a black male writer who, even by their
accounts, had done well on the show, to effectively re-audition for a position on the staff.
Phenotype and embodiment, which in television writing is represented by the term
“voice”-- as in the “writer’s voice”-- is key to understanding the alchemy of transforming
a “Black show” into something more than a “Black show” (financially) by making it
something less than a Black show (culturally and politically). If television is considered
to be a writer’s medium then the way to change a television show at its core is to change
its writers.
132

The most desirable television viewers (by advertisers) are often referred to as
the “Millennial Generation.” This is important because television and advertising
companies typically place greater value on the ratings of young viewers. There has been
much discussion over the Millennials and their conceptions of race. Many scholars and
pundits are still debating whether or not this generation can accurately be described as the
first “post-racial” generation or whether they, at least, see skin color as less of a social

131
For more information on how the television industry uses commercial branding issues as a proxy for
business and representational practices that might otherwise be called racist, see Chapter 11 in former
television writer Jeffrey Stepakoff’s Billion Dollar Kiss: The Kiss that saved Dawson's Creek and other
Adventures in TV Writing, (New York: Gotham Books, 2007).
132
Goldstein, Patrick. Los Angeles Times, “Happiest Medium for Writers? TV” (October 23, 2001).
Accessed October 30, 2011 at http://articles.latimes.com/2001/oct/23/entertainment/ca-60460.
189

barrier.
133
On the one hand, Morgan Park’s network often cited (unspecified) research
about the Millennial generation and their lack of prejudice towards skin color as a reason
to show images and tell stories about interracial relationships. On the other hand, they
used this unspecified research as a reason to argue that the show no longer needed to tell
stories that they considered too identifiable with Black people. Blackness, it seems, had
quickly become old news. So while the network could not replace the Black family that
was central to the show’s initial premise, it could attempt to replace their blackness.
134

Through the writers’ room it could slant the production of the show in a direction that
would still allow the show to appear as something different (Black) but resonate as
something more “American” and familiar (white). In other words, the show’s writing
staff was reconstituted to write more white. It was an attempt to compel the writing and
the writing staff to perform a multicultural whiteness. For me, this circumscription of
blackness generates an urgent question: When does cultural appropriation become
cultural extinction? This writing of whiteness, this foundational performance of
whiteness by the show’s writers in the writers’ room, would almost invisibly transform
the show’s Black actors into mainstream vessels of pop culture whiteness. As Lipsitz’s

133
For more, see a report on this subject, New Progressive America: The Millennial Generation at
http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2009/05/millennial_generation.html. Also see Don Apollon’s
“Don’t Call Them ‘Post-Racial’, Millennials Say Race Matters to Them” at Colorlines.com. Accessed
October 30, 2011 at http://colorlines.com/archives/2011/06/youth_and_race_focus_group_main.html

134
See E. Patrick Johnson’s Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 3. Johnson writes: “Individuals or groups appropriate this
[blackness] as a complex and nuanced racial signifier in order to circumscribe its boundaries or to exclude
other individuals or groups. When blackness is appropriated to the exclusion of others, identity becomes
political.” In this moment I am pushing Johnson’s definition even further, asking what happens when
cultural appropriation becomes cultural extinction? How does one circumscribe blackness to the point
where one attempts to get rid of blackness (and its politics) without necessarily getting rid of black people?
This, I argue, outlines the creative negotiations between the network and the writers during subsequent
seasons of Morgan Park.
190

argues, actually being white has never been a requirement for being an agent of white
supremacy (viii). In this case, we see the high stakes that are involved in the very
construction of who gets to sit in the writers’ room, and thus who gets to participate in the
creation of television. In other words, the very constitution of the writers’ room, reveals
television’s hegemonic function.
Television writing, especially in dramas, serves as a kind of mass media based
intellectual and creative sifter of what issues and phenomenon will be highlighted in
popular culture. For example, until a television show is cancelled, the writing of that
show is a never ending process of finding stories that must, by the standards inherent in
broadcast television, appeal to the interests of a broad cross section of the population.
Therefore, if you walk into almost any writing room, you will find in the center of the
room a table filled with piles of books, magazines, newspapers, and journals. The writers
often begin their day by sifting through the sources they have deemed salient to a show’s
central premise (cop books for cop shows, CIA treatises for spy shows, etc.). As they
search for nuggets of information on which to build an episode of television, the young
writer-in-training who holds the coveted position of the writers’ assistant is permanently
connected to the Internet. Often the assistant conducts preliminary online research while
simultaneously chronicling the discourse in the room. The better budgeted shows and
those shows that are more technical in nature (medical shows, CSI, etc.) tend to have a
dedicated researcher who can quickly supply or find the answer to any writer’s query on
just about any subject.
135
Eventually, what is created in the room is passed on to the

135
Greggory Nations, the researcher on the ABC drama Lost became increasingly valuable as the show’s
backstories and scientific “mythology” became more and more complex. In fact, the mythology became so
intricate that the show’s creators and writer-producers couldn’t keep track of it without help. The job of
191

actors. Though television’s hegemonic process then becomes somewhat subject to the
interpretive powers of the actors, the process must always and ultimately return to the
writers’ room-- where the process of writing the next script begins again.
The irreplaceable and circuitous return to the writing room sits at the center of
producing television highlights Anne Cheng’s questions about performance and
performativity: Is performativity, as Judith Butler suggests, that which exceeds traditional
notions of performance and the agency of performers? Or can performance ever disturb
performativity? And finally, is it possible to escape performativity… (57-59)? I am
suggesting that in the second season of Morgan Park, we witnessed the nuanced
competition that Cheng wants us to acknowledge, that is, the competition between
performance and performativity. In the following pages we see how one show’s
progressive performance of blackness was transformed into a performativity that
surreptitiously attempted to restrict Black representation in its political/cultural
expression. It did so with the goal of creating a more consumable Blackness for a young
and presumably post-racial mainstream audience. In short, while the mandate to
circumscribe blackness came from the network’s desire to increase its appeal to white
television viewers, the materialization of this show’s de-politicization into something
more African American and less “Black” began in the writers’ room.

keeping track of the show’s backstory and mythology became the province of the show’s researcher. As a
result of his value, he was eventually accorded the title of co-producer in the show’s later seasons. For
more, see “The Man Who Makes Sense of ‘Lost’,” at New York Times.com. Accessed November 1, 2011 at
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/18/arts/television/18wyat.html?pagewanted=all and Variety.com,
“Gregg Nations maintains 'Lost' bible.” Accessed November 1, 2011at
http://www.variety.com/article/VR1118002950?refCatId=14.
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First Days Back, 2
nd
Season
The EP was out sick on the first day of work for the writers. We were working
out of temporary offices in the Santa Monica, which meant that we were working in
tighter quarters and in closer physical proximity than we normally would. For the time
being, the work of the writer’s room occurred literally around a conference table in the
EP’s office. I arrived early, and claimed the office next to Jorge and Dean, my colleagues
who were also returning from the first season. Around ten o’clock (the “starting time” for
most television writers) the three writers from the first season (all male) met the three
new writers (all female). In addition to the returning EP, this was to be the team of
writers who would creatively guide the second season of the show. Without the presence
of the EP to play referee, the first day became an awkward meet and greet of old and new
personalities, of old first season survival stories and new second season agendas, of men
and women.
Given the way the business affairs department handled the writers’ contracts for
the upcoming season, this was one of those moments during my lengthy time in the field
when my ethnographic stance was clearly helpful to me professionally. I was
professionally disappointed by the strategies the network used to ignore and essentially
invalidate much of the hard work the other writers and I had done the previous season.
But I suspected that, as a result, my research would only be enriched by the insensitive
way the network had reconstituted the writing staff. As one of the returning writers said
to me, “This is clearly a disaster waiting to happen.” If this were true, then it was clearly
a disaster the network was willing to risk because, in retrospect, I realize that the
reorganization of the writing and producing staff served to underscore the ways the
193

supposed color-blindness (and presumed progressiveness) of the Millennial generation
was actually being deployed for reactionary purposes, as the reason to try to undo the
Blackness within a Black series.
136

After our first awkward greetings-- which resembled the social fumbling one
might associate with first day of elementary school
137
-- the writer-producer Dean, or the
show’s “number 2”, as this person is often called, convened us around the writer’s table.
He communicated that the EP had told him that there were to be changes to the direction
of the show. The show needed to become “less cop/street stories” and “more about
family.” To my surprise, much of the initial awkwardness and shyness exhibited by the
new writers disappeared. They quickly began to contribute to the creative discourse in the
room. This is somewhat unusual as new writers, even if they hold a high title (co-
executive producer or executive producer) tend to ease their views into the discourse over
several days or even weeks. Given the almost blatant abandonment of this etiquette it
thus became clear that the new writers had been told prior to our first day of work that
Morgan Park needed to become something other than what it had been in its first season.
Hence, I was not surprised when later that evening, writer Jorge called me to express his
anger and frustration. He was upset about the number of new writers hired, at the new
writers’ goal to “fix the show,” and the blatant lies about money that the network used to
justify refusing both of us raises and promotions. I acknowledged the points he made, but

136
Of course the goal of television programming, generally, is to generate the highest possible ratings. In a
sense, the business affairs department (whose job it is to also execute the goals of the networks
programmers within a specified budget) illustrates the classic Marxist paradigm of base and superstructure.
In this case, we see the network concerns with expanding the (demographic and ratings) base dictating, via
their business affairs department, the terms and possibilities of the show itself, of television’s role in a
(cultural) superstructure.
137
Its practitioners often refer to the entertainment industry as “high school with money” and the first day
of work on a television staff is also commonly referred to as the “first day of school.”
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I also did not want to overindulge my own feelings about the matter. I was definitely
angry, yet I have often wondered since then why I wasn’t even angrier. Perhaps I was
exhausted by the entire affair. If so, this was an instance, I believe, where an emphasis on
constantly reevaluating my positionality as part of my efforts to blur “traditional”
ethnography and critical ethnography was productive for my research. In this case, this
effort helped me to remain committed and focused on the work of the show and on the
larger project of completing a critical performance ethnography on mass media cultural
production.
Once the EP returned to work, the room seemed to settle into a work rhythm
within a few days. It was an uneasy rhythm, but work was still getting done. The new
writers, perhaps realizing that their zealousness on the first day could be misinterpreted as
disrespectful to the first season writers, seemed to allow more space for Jorge and me to
speak. Since “room etiquette” had already been violated, I wondered why this was
occurring now, when two of the new writers clearly outranked Jorge and me. They held
much higher positions on the staff. Were they simply being nice and making an effort to
be good colleagues? Were they respecting our longer tenure on the show? Perhaps they
were they taking their cues from veteran writer Dean, who outranked everyone except the
EP, and seemed to go out of his way to “perform” that he was listening to what Jorge and
I wanted to say regarding the storylines?
Part of the new writers’ generosity during pitch sessions could also be attributed
to the noticeably hostile stance that writer Jorge adopted in the room. This is not mere
conjecture on my part. Lisa, a new African American female writer, noticed Jorge’s
hostility. About a week after we started, she came into my office at the end of the day.
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After a few minutes of small talk, she asked me if Jorge was “cool”? I knew what she
meant. I replied that he was “a good guy.” She responded that he seemed frustrated and
angry. “I mean, I’m sorry he didn’t get promoted…,” she stated. I paused, unable to tell
whether she was being sarcastic or not. But this told me that Jorge’s method of resistance
and of pushing back in the room-- through strategic and prolonged silences or a sudden
non-participation in the writer room discourse, or alternately, aggressively questioning
the pitches, statements, and story ideas of the new writers-- had been noted. It became
clear in those first weeks that the new direction the network was advocating would not
come without internal resistance. Several of the first season writers were invested in the
presentation of a progressive televisual blackness; we felt our hard work earned the show
a second season (and with it, the jobs of the new writers).
Another form of pushback occurred when the EP decided to take advantage of
the network’s diversity writer program and interview several writers with the idea of
adding one of them to writing staff. Ostensibly this was because, the EP stated, she
expected the show’s episode order to be increased, and we could use the help later on in
the season. But I also saw it as a way to shrewdly fight for her vision of the show and as a
way to not, as she put it off-handedly, “completely sell out the show to the teenage
audience.” It was a smart maneuver. The network couldn’t object because hiring from
their diversity program meant that the writer’s salary wouldn’t come from or impact the
show’s budget. At the same time, the writer would be “diverse” and would likely counter
the new direction the show. Generally, writers are interviewed by the showrunner and
perhaps the #2 writer-producer. These interviews took on an added dimension, however,
when the EP decided we would all interview the four potential hires at the same time in
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the writer’s room. The EP stated that she wanted to see how the potential writer might
function with this newly assembled group of writers.
One of the first to interview was Michelle, the Black female writer’s assistant
from the first season. Michelle had actually contributed to the writing in the first season,
and I knew that she had been disappointed that she was not brought onto the staff of the
show as a result of her work. Michelle was nothing if not tenacious, and she had
contacted the network’s diversity program and managed to arrange a meeting.
Consequently, the diversity program agreed to access its pool of money and to agree
upfront that if she could get a showrunner to hire her (presumably the showrunner of this
show) that the program would pay her salary. When the EP decided that all of the
potential hires would interview in front of the entire writing staff, this set up the
uncomfortable dynamic of the first season writers passing judgment on a woman who had
served in the bunker of the show’s first season pressure cooker. It also elevated the new
writers to a position where they could assess whether or not this “old writer” fit in with
the new, but still emerging second season staff dynamic. It was an odd version of
academic peer review brought into an industrial system not accustomed to operating in
such a manner. Though I recognized the research value of witnessing a writer’s interview
performance, I squirmed uncomfortably throughout Michelle’s meeting.
Michelle gamely ignored the situation, however, and came in with smiles and
her typical high-energy gregariousness. She was prepared with several ideas about
storylines for the new season. Here, in some respects, she faltered. Her pitches were good
and interesting-- but they were stories that best fit the first season version of the show and
not the new family/teen oriented version of the show. In other words, Michelle, unaware
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of the new direction, unaware of the network’s attempts to increase the show’s ratings by
diluting its blackness, presented stories for a show that would no longer exist.
138
After the
interview, the EP stated that she liked Michelle and that she could help her “learn a few
things” because Michelle might “get in trouble out there,” she didn’t believe Michelle
was the strongest candidate. This effectively ended Michelle’s chances for getting the
job.
The conversation turned to the other candidates. The EP eliminated one writer,
an Asian American male, almost immediately because, though she liked his writing and
he was incredibly energetic and likable, he confessed he didn’t know much about the
show. Like many other jobs, this is often a huge error in the performance necessary to get
a job as a writer on a television show. The difference in television interviewing however,
is that the writer must know something about the show and convey a realistic sense of
enthusiasm about the prospect of working on the show.
139
Even though writers are often

138
It is worth noting that a paradox of being hired as a writer on a show is, in the interview or “meeting”, to
give a sense of what you might contribute as a writer in the writers’ room-- without actually going into too
many specifics. Legally, according to the WGA, a writer cannot be made to work for free in order to get
hired. In other words, coming in and presenting full blown storylines constitutes a kind of free labor. I was
once paid $400 by Comedy Central because they had asked me and all the writers they were interested in
hiring for The Man Show to write several sketches specifically for that show. The Writers Guild found out
about it and Comedy Central settled the grievances by paying each writer they interviewed. In this case,
Michelle’s bold presentation of stories only helped to end her candidacy for the job because they were out
of sync with the show’s new direction. Still, the writer who goes in and does find a way to walk this fine
line in their meeting and at least hint at what they might bring to the room will probably not get the job
either.
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In communication theory narrative rationality is process whereby people reason by telling evaluating
stories. Part of their evaluation is an assessment of narrative probability (coherence) and fidelity
(consistency). Therefore, I juxtapose the words realistic and enthusiasm because one of the unwritten rules
of television production that is most salient in the interview process is that the writer’s performance must
have fidelity and probability; i.e., it must be believable according to the internal logics of the television
industry. For example, if a writer is interviewing for a light comedic network drama such as Nash Bridges
she cannot behave blindly as if she is interviewing for a groundbreaking dark cable television drama such
as Breaking Bad. Nash Bridges was a successful show, but it was not what is called in industry parlance an
“industry show.” Breaking Bad would be referred to as “industry show,” meaning a show that many other
television writers, practitioners, and executives themselves watch and respect as representative of the
highest standards of television. It would not be a successful performance in a meeting if a writer were to
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informed of their television interview with little notice, often with no more than a day’s
lead time, it is expected that the interviewing writer will do the necessary research to
know what can be known about the show. Whereas Michelle’s interview performance
intersected with her phenotypical and political blackness and was considered out of sync
in some respects, the Asian American writer’s performance offered too little beyond his
personal charm, and, thus, neither interview was successful.
Those two eliminations left the last two candidates, both African American, one
male and one female. The room seemed to lean toward the female writer, WD, a mother
of two who had only recently begun to pursue television writing. One of the reasons she
became the leading candidate, according to the EP, was that she was a mother of young
children. While the show’s new mandate to increase its appeal to teenagers and young
audiences was, in industry logics, fulfilled by the three new female writers and their
backgrounds in writing hip shows for teens, the EP pointed out to all of us that none of
the current writers was a mother to adolescent children. The unspoken question: Who
would provide that perspective? Who could provide the mother’s point of view regarding
the raising of adolescent children in today’s society? Given that the show, even in the
midst of its reconstitution, still featured a Black mother who was raising children, the
lack of a contemporary mother’s perspective was indeed glaring. Thus, identifying this
“gap” in the casting of the show’s writers’ room was also another shrewd decision by the

interview with the EP of Nash Bridges and pontificate about the show as if it had just won Breaking Bad’s
Emmy award-- UNLESS, and this is where the improvisatory nature of performance in television becomes
important, the writer discerns that the EP of Nash Bridges thinks his show SHOULD have won an Emmy.
At the same time, the writer must convey, beyond the generous paycheck, some artistic desire for wanting
to work on the show in question. The point here is that the EP of Morgan Park, rightly in my estimation,
thought the show to be an important one, if underrated in the eyes of the industry. For more information on
narrative fidelity and narrative probability see Walter Fisher’s Human Communication as Narration
(Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1987).
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executive producer. Filling this newly identified need with an African American female
who was also a single mother would ostensibly allow her to give the network what it
clearly wanted (stronger female voices and more emphasis on teenagers). The new writer
could represent both a mother’s and a teenager’s perspective. But it also allowed the EP
to continue fighting, to some extent, for her original vision of the show as one that
addressed themes of blackness, community, and the struggle for daily economic and
political survival in an urban space.
The room also seriously considered Chris, an African American male writer
candidate. The EP mentions after his interview that he would bring a needed Black male
perspective to the show. As soon as she said this, however, she looked to me and quickly
added, “Though you cover this territory beautifully… he might add something else.” I
acknowledged her comments, but also wondered about this move, given my difficult
contract negotiations that suggested that a “black male point of view” had been rendered
less relevant for the current season. This is particularly revealing, since television shows
have not hired African American male writers in large numbers. If they do, they certainly
tend not to hire more than one writer. The idea of two Black male writers on a drama
television staff at the same time is incredibly unusual-- as was the overall diversity of the
staff. In the end, the EP hired the last two candidates, one as a writer and the other as a
writing intern. The EP had managed to staff five new writers or writing interns, three of
whom were African American, and tapped the financial resources of the network’s
diversity departments in order to afford them all. The staff was now unusually diverse for
television. It included three white writers, three African American writers, a Latino
writer, an African American writing intern, and two Asian-American writer assistants.
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Save for one exception, the writers of color were all clustered in entry level positions, at
the bottom of the writer room hierarchy. However, the fact that the EP made these hires
at all in light of the network’s stated desires to privilege the stories of the show’s teenager
characters represented a smart and significant resistance tactic. In effect, the EP embraced
the network’s new direction for the show and used it to promote diversity in the labor
pool.
140
As the network strategy of expanding audiences is dictated from above on the
back of personnel moves that function as a process of de-racializing racialization,
141
the
writers and executive producer are able to take advantage of their positionality as “on the
ground” cultural producers to deploy tactics that subvert the network’s total domination
of stories and images. However, this same juxtaposition of the goals of the network and
the processes of the writer-producers would set the stage for deeply discursive battles
over story narratives, casting, and personnel decisions-- battles that would continue to
grow for the rest of the season and for much of the show’s run on television.

140
Foucault theorizes “tactics” and “strategies” according to its intentionality or not. Kevin Jon Heller
writes about Foucault: “Tactics are the intentional actions carried out in determinate political contexts by
individuals and groups; “strategies” are the unintentional—but institutionally and socially regularized—
effects produced by the non-subjective articulation of different individual and group tactics. Both tactics
and strategies involve power, because both create social change; only strategies, however, involve non-
subjective power.” On a similar topic, de Certeau states: “A tactic is a calculated action… The space of a
tactic is the space of the other. Thus it must play on and with a terrain imposed on it and organized by the
law of a foreign power.” This is another example and materialization of how de Certeau’s conceptions of
the practices of strategies and tactics can manifest in television cultural production and mass media. See
“Power, Subjectification, and Resistance in Foucault,” in SubStance 25, no. 1, (Issue 79, 1996), 78-110.
Also see Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven F. Rendail (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1984), 36-7.
141
To clarify, I am describing the network’s methods of using white writers to reduce the presence or
concerns of Blackness as a “de-racializing process.” This is a purposeful misnomer, however, in that this
kind of de-racialization only serves to amplify the normalization of whiteness. Though whiteness is also a
form of “unmarked” racialization, I call this sort of de-Blackening of the show a “de-racialization” that
actually does the work of racialization in the form of whitenesss. Hence, this turn of phrase… “a process of
de-racializing racialization.”
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In fact, I later asked Dean, the co-executive producer, if the teen characters
were to carry the show’s “A” story lines, something I’d heard the new writers openly and
casually state as a given. To clarify, we had all been made aware that we were to increase
the prominence and air time of these younger and whiter characters, but it had not been
explicitly stated that we were to now habitually and exclusively construct the dominant
stories in an episode, the “A” stories, for these characters. The fact that the new writers
began the job assuming that was indeed the goal was revealing. It meant that the network,
in their vetting of the writers, had made it clear that crafting “A” stories for the teenagers
was a top priority. Dean didn’t answer my question directly, but instead stated that he’s
“sure that’s what the network wants.” He stated that complying with that desire would, in
his opinion, “weaken the foundation of the show. They can’t handle it.”
Dean identified “they” as the two young ingénues in the show. He articulated
the challenge in television with radically changing the structure of a show that has
already completed airing at least one season. Morgan Park was constructed as a show in
which the adult characters, the mother and the father, generally drove the stories.
Therefore, the most experienced actors were given the most screen time and the most
artistically demanding story lines. It is the usually the lead actors who fulfill the
leadership function commonly referred to, in industry-speak, as “carrying the show.” As
a result, television shows attempt to cast their series regular actors with an eye for which
actors can be believable in the role, and who can marshal the screen presence and talent
to “carry a show.”
142
Generally, the scrutiny of casting the lead is, as might be expected,

142
Sometimes television executives will also refer to an actor’s “watchability” or “relatability,” the ability
for the audience to identify with the actor and the character being played. These terms are never explicitly
defined. In fact, the point of the terms is that they name what cannot be easily defined and therefore
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much more intense than the casting of the supporting characters. Of course, almost all
roles and casting processes in television are difficult and challenging. But the roles of
young teenagers who are secondary characters are often cast with strong considerations
given to the actor’s physical characteristics-- sometimes above all else. Therefore, often
their chief contribution to a show is their physical attractiveness. Consequently, the idea
of simply migrating the show’s important “A” stories to two young actors who might
have been cast because they were young and pretty is not so simple. In the case of
Morgan Park, this was seen by the producers as hurtful to the writing staff’s ability to
create smart, compelling television.
Of course, the economic realities of television demand acceptable ratings that
produce either profits or some other kind of cultural capital. As stated earlier, Morgan
Park’s ability to produce cultural capital through (tele)visual difference was seen as
having run its course. It was now time to make money or disappear-- hence the mandate
that the show move creatively in a new direction. But the EP eventually confirmed her
tactics of resistance when she stated one day that she didn’t “want to sell the show out
completely to the teen audience.” By now it had become clear that terms such as “teen
show”, “teen audience”, “less procedural stories and more family stories,” and “more
high school stories” were acceptable ways to reference the unspeakable: the desire for
more whiteness in the show. This discourse became safer for everyone present, as it
allowed the writing staff to move towards more “mainstream success” without calling

becomes a marker and catch-all phrase that I would argue is bound up in designating whiteness as a
universal “everyman.” A performer’s watchability or relatability is simply “there” or it isn’t-- it’s an “X
factor.” However, what goes unstated is that to appeal to the widest possible audience an actor’s
“watchability” or “relatability” is often related to either their actual whiteness or ability to somehow reflect
the priorities of (middle class) whiteness.
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attention to the uncomfortable task at hand. It can also be seen as a protectionist measure
on the part of the EP. In a sense, the addition of white writers and the network’s desire to
move the show in a new direction served as a de facto policing of this African American
producer’s creative vision. Even though the EP hired the writers sitting in the writers’
room, the impetus for hiring of these additional writers came from the network. Each
writer also interviewed with the network, and it become clear that they had been told to
change the show. Thus, there was an unusually direct line of communication established
that could by-pass the executive producer. This direct line could be tapped “innocently”
with a simple phone call or email from the executive to the writer. The seemingly simple
inquiry--“How’s it going over there?”-- could be five of the most dangerous words a
television writer hears, if that inquiry is coming from a network or studio executive while
the showrunner is out of earshot. It could be dangerous for the writer, who might believe
she is being asked to divulge the story developments within the writers’ room, and it
could be dangerous for the showrunner, depending on what that writer says and how
much investment the executive gives to what the writer said. This dynamic is particularly
salient when a show is in the midst of re-branding itself.
The sensitivities around the show’s re-branding extended into the writers’ room
and, as was intended, affected the language used to pitch developing stories to the
executives. For example, it has become common practice for a showrunner to be required
to get “story area” approval before writers begin to “break” an episode’s narrative. The
writers’ room had wrestled with balancing the network’s mandate for the new direction
of the show with a desire to begin the season with an attention grabbing episode.
Eventually, the room settled on the idea of staging a city wide civil disturbance-- a riot.
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The EP was pleased with this story but she came back a few days later and instructed us
to make one major adjustment. She told us to remove the word “riot” from the story area
pitch document. She had casually floated the word as a kind of trial balloon in a
conversation with one of the network’s executives and had noted the executive’s
concerned response. The executive became alarmed that we would write and therefore
see “Black on black crime”, “Black on white crime” (there was no mention of “white on
black crime” as a possibility) and reiterated that this story had to cater to the “millennial
audience who do NOT see color.” Eventually, the room reworked the idea into a hybrid
story that we thought would allow us to address both concerns. We would stage an
ambiguously named riot-- but we would use it to place the young ingénues at the center
of the show by putting the characters in the middle of a series of dangerous
confrontations. The riot would be used as an obstacle for keeping a teen romance from
igniting. It would, in essence, be a love story. We would also not call it a “riot.” The
word riot, it seems, had become so thoroughly and rhetorically racialized that it could not
be uttered. Apparently, the images it conjured were “off-brand” and did not mesh with
the new direction of the show. So, while we were reluctantly allowed to develop this
story, we were forced to find a way to stage an inner-city riot that had nothing to do with
race explicitly and that showed little to no violence. Our response as a writers’ room
could best be summed up as a collective “What the fuck?!” One of the writers stated
wearily, “Yeah, good luck with that.”
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As usual in situations where writers strongly disagree with network “notes,” the
notes become comic fodder for the discourse in the room.
143
In this case the writers began
to sarcastically refer to the riot as a “meelee”, a “disturbance”, or “an out-of- control
fight.” Morgan Park was not the only show in which such restrictions on language
occurred. I spoke to a television writer-producer who worked on FOX’s 2007 post-
Katrina/New Orleans police drama K-Ville. One of the senior producers was furious at
what he saw as attempt by FOX to turn K-Ville into a fluffy Miami Vice knockoff he
referred to as “New Orleans Vice.” When I asked for more details, he stated that the
network’s executives eventually banned all references in the show to the 2005 hurricane.
The writers were reportedly eventually banned from using the word “Katrina” at all. The
writer stated that he found it “unconscionable” to set a police series in post-Katrina New
Orleans and then attempt to strip this recent history out of the show. The writer reportedly
began to use methods of resistance such as withholding script pages from the network
until the production was actually shooting (filming) those pages. When the network
would object to the pages, the writers would respond that the pages had already been
shot. While this writer’s actions are notable, it must also be pointed out that K-Ville came
under some criticism within the industry for initially employing only one African
American among about ten writers. This lone African American writer also held the
lowest position on the staff and thus had less impact on the show than any other writer.
This illustrates a common phenomenon in the industry, one with deeply problematic
consequences for African American representation. Even when shows are making an

143
For more information on how a network’s suggested “notes” in the television writing-producing process
functions as de facto orders and to understand the role of “notes” in establishing a network’s surveillance
over its writers see Chapter 5 in John Thorton Caldwell’s Production Culture: Industrial Reflexivity and
Critical Practice in Film and Television (Raleigh: Duke University Press, 2008).
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attempt to engage issues of race and representation, they often, as Morgan Park did
initially, appoint white writers as the arbiters and caretakers of those shows. While that is
not a guarantee that Black voices will be silenced, the business tends to relegate Black
writers to “Black shows.” If the writers on “Black shows” are still not allowed to be a
major creative voice on those shows, then the writer becomes little more than the window
dressing to a house that was constructed on a foundation of structural racism.
Television is an image business. Clearly, restricting words such as “riot” and
“Katrina” is a reminder that racialized images travel both through the pictures we see on
the screen and in the words that we hear. Certain seemingly benign words carry the
power to provoke images and thoughts of race or racially motivated violence, images that
apparently make the presumably white television viewer uncomfortable. Thus, such
words, as Judith Butler explains, become linguistic injuries (1997). These words “do”
work and so the logic is clear: the presumably white audience must be protected from
words that are somehow constituted as a scene of (racial) injury. Intercultural violations
through language and image must not be allowed, lest the white viewer turns the channel.
Network executives are aware that certain words have become racialized and that such
racialized words “perform” in such a specific way that they cannot even be uttered.
The fear of words that cannot be uttered in television indexes their power and
raises their potential impact to the level of the Deleuzian “cinematic.” Kara Keeling’s
reading of the work of Deleuze argues that the cinematic reaches beyond what we see on
the traditional movie picture screen and extends into the very ways in which we think of
and see life itself (3). She writes:
“Deleuze’s cinema offers a way of thinking about questions of ‘race,’ ‘gender,’
‘sexuality,’ and ‘representation’ that challenges demands for ‘positive,’
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‘negative,’ or ‘accurate’ representations… Deleuze’s theories of the cinematic
contest these assumptions, allowing for a nuanced and critical understanding of
film as part of reality, rather than a reflection or representation of it, and of the
dominance of cinematic processes in making sense of the world for those whose
sensory-motor schemata has been habituated by film… For Deleuze, cinema is a
mode of thinking, that is, of creating concepts.” (5)

In other words, for Deleuze, the cinematic becomes “the organ for perfecting a new
reality.”
144
I view television, then, and its function as the fantastical but pedestrian lens
that frames popular culture and our everyday lives, as more “cinematic” than cinema. The
Deleuzian notion of “the cinematic”, where cinema is also a form of thought, opens up
another space where we can take seriously the discourse that structures television
production as a maintenance and extension of this particular form of thought. The efforts
to control the actual language that enters into a television script (and is then embodied
and realized) are efforts to control the images that can be filmed and the thoughts those
images can conjure. It is an effort to control the image by controlling the rhetoric that
references the image. Words are a battleground, and image control begins in television by
attempting to control the discourse and the discursive frame of what can and cannot be
said in the writers’ room.
Writers, Actors, and “Documents of Power”
Alfred Hitchcock once infamously denied the accusation that he had publicly
insulted the character of actors. In his defense he stated that: “I never said all actors are
cattle; what I said was all actors should be treated like cattle.”
145
The attitude behind that
sentiment may have once prevailed in film production, but television writer-producers

144
Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara
Hammerjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 8.
145
Cox, Damien and Michael Levine. Thinking Through Film: Doing Philosophy, Watching Movies
(Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell Publishers, 2011), 5.
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tend to treat actors in a considerably different manner. When television writers begin to
produce a new program they are entering, potentially, into a long term work relationship
with their series regular performers. If the show is a success they could be working with
each other for years. Therefore, the producers tend to make certain gestures of respecting
or appearing to respect their lead actors as artists. Writer-producers might even, on
occasion, engage their thoughts and desires about the character they portray in a show.
While this engagement of the actor as collaborator is often genuinely desired, it is also an
attempt to establish a workable flow of power between the lead actor and the primary
writer-producer on terms that the producer defines.
Successful television producer Steven Bochco sums up a typical flow of power
between a showrunner and a show’s star in the following way: “The first year they [the
actors] work for you, the second year you work together, the third year, you work for
them.”
146
With one eye watching and managing the possibility of this power flow or
power transfer and with the other genuinely interested in collaboration, the actors on a
returning series are sometimes invited to meet with the writers inside the writing room.
This is a significant opportunity for both the writer and especially the actor, because
generally actors are not allowed to enter the writers’ room-- unless they are considered
big star and have negotiated an on-air credit as a producer of the show. That is not to say
that actors do not occasionally “wander into” or “drop by” the writers’ room, but if they
do the discourse and function of the room careens to an immediate halt. It stops suddenly,
completely, and without comment. Later, after the small talk is over and the actor leaves,

146
DeArmitt, Jenny. Written By, The Magazine of the Writers Guild of America, west, “Training Days”.
Summer 2007 issue. Accessed September 25, 2011 at
http://www.wga.org/writtenby/writtenbysub.aspx?id=2396.
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the door is almost always shut when the room’s real work resumes, as if to underline the
exclusivity of the writers’ creative space and to discourage future “drop-ins.”
When the writers began to meet with the actors in the writing room at the
beginning of the second season, the room was always careful to remove the white
erasable marker boards that hang on the most of the walls. There are many reasons for
this. White boards are where narrative beats of a television episode are plotted out as the
story is “broken.” As the episode is debated among the writers and producers, the
“winning” story point or narrative beat-- as judged by the executive producer or another
producer left in charge of the room-- is placed on the board. Often the discourse in a
writer’s room becomes an unspoken contest to see who can get the best or the most story
beats “on the board.” This can especially be the case on a new show or on a show with
several new writers. The more beats or the more prominent the story beats that make it
onto the board the more the writer who pitched the ideas can make a tenuous claim of
authorship. This is important, as writers actively seek to earn the respect of the
showrunner and the producer who is in charge of the day to day functioning of the room.
The more a writer’s ideas are approved and thus make it onto the board, the more capital
that writer accrues in the room. The more capital a writer accrues for being “good in the
room,” the greater the likelihood of more scripts being assigned to that writer. The more
scripts assigned to the writer, the greater the increase in opportunities to prove that the
writer is also “good on the page” (capable of quickly producing excellent first drafts of
scripts). The more a writer is considered “good in the room’ and “good on the page,” the
greater the chance to earn more money beyond the writer’s base salary, and the greater
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the chance to acquire job security in an industry notorious for its lack of job security.
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In the writers’ room, the ability to pitch a narrative that is considered good enough to be
written on the white board carries significant cultural and financial stakes.
In performance terms, the white board in a writers’ room can almost be likened to
a proscenium stage. Only the best and brightest (ideas), in theory, make it onto the stage
(the board). The white board is also a material encapsulation of the cultural playing field
that is so visceral in a television writers’ room. It is a score board that tracks the points in
a violent intellectual contest. It is an unofficial tally of cultural and intellectual labor. This
is one reason why, as another African American writer once joked to me, “the only black
you’ll find in most TV writers’ room is the black ink they use on the white board.”
Another writer theorized the idea of a white fear of competition from African American
writers in the room. The anonymous writer said, “On a TV show they don’t really want
your input. They just want your body so if anybody walks in the room and looks around
they see some Black bodies on this Black show. But they don’t really want you to be
there at all because you remind them that they don’t know what the hell they are
doing.”
148
What might be surprising about this comment is that it refers to the dynamic on
a “Black show,” where it could be thought that the Black writer might be accorded a

147
Working television writers are paid in at least two ways for their collective labor and their individual
labor. They are paid a weekly salary for their work as a writer on staff, contributing to the overall creative
direction of a show and its storylines. They are also paid an additional fee for each television script or
teleplay that they actually write or are credited with writing. The existence of these script fees can be
thought of as considerably healthy “bonuses”, in that they are paid on top of a writer’s normal salary. Such
script fees must be paid, per union regulations, to someone each time a script is written. Script fees
therefore function like bonus payments that MUST eventually be distributed among the writing staff. The
presence of such script fees, which are distributed however the showrunner chooses, introduces an
additional and permanent element of competition into the writers’ room.
148
Adamo, Gregory. African Americans in Television: Behind the Scenes (New York: Peter Lang
Publishing, Inc., 2010), 109.
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sense of cultural and professional capital by the white writers. But as I have argued here,
the slipperiness of defining the authenticity of a Black show reveals that the Black
television writer is always already primed for devaluation regardless of the context of the
show.
The presence of a Black writer-producer in a television writing room asks a small
collective of usually hyper-educated white folks to respect equally hyper educated Black
folks. History tells us that is challenge enough. It is compounded, however, because this
occurrence-- a Black writer in a television writing room-- is automatically asking that
white cultural producers assign a value to black intellectual labor in a space where
intellectual and creative labor is compensated relatively quickly and well. Thus the white
board, in its industrial and symbolic complexity, becomes the television equivalent of the
White House: you might find a way to get inside it, but the hegemony that marks the
resident of color as “other” remains unaltered.
As a result of its role in the formulation of a television narrative, the white boards
display encapsulations of future episodes and perhaps even of an entire television season.
This is considered privileged information, and thus the white boards speak to the
privilege of those who write on the boards. In the process of outlining an episode of
television, the mundane white board becomes a document of power. It is used to signify
the power relations within the room and to dictate the power of the written narrative
outside of the room. The boards-- the act of writing on the boards, the quotidian decision
of which writer gets to write on the boards, and which writer’s ideas gets written onto the
boards-- begins a process. It is a process in which the writers’ discourse, through the
breaking of the episode’s story, moves from the ephemerality of a stage performance into
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a more filmic permanence; the writers’ discourse moves from an improvised performance
into a scripted performativity.
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Though the information on the boards is privileged, it is also unstable information
that is subject to change. Hence, writers and producers do not like for actors to see the
white boards. Storylines and scripts are still in the process of being “broken” and written,
meaning they are the result of an energetic and sometimes psychically wounding debate.
The white boards are located within a sensitive space and are the visible evidence of a
sensitive process, that I would argue, to the writer often feels violent and is full of
violation-- especially when one’s ideas and intellectual labor are continually rejected.
Therefore, the boards are often turned around or made invisible when an actor, an
outsider, enters the room. In television, the white boards are, literally, to employ a twist
on James C. Scott’s terminology, the “hidden transcripts” of cultural production.
150
This
practice of hiding the white boards was also the case when the writing staff met the actors
on Morgan Park at the beginning of the second season.
One of the practical reasons for keeping storylines from actors is that they
represent work that is in process and unfinished, and the showrunner and the writers do

149
The television script and the television episode have the capacity to create reiterative citations through
their production of narrative and image. Thus, I see the performances in the writers’ room, which is largely
improvised, as creating many of the compelling “scripts” that are cited in the individual’s process of subject
formation. This is why I describe the writers’ discourse as a performance that moves from performance into
performativity.
150
For more information on “hidden transcripts,” see James C. Scott’s Domination and the Arts of
Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992). Also see Robin D.G. Kelley’s
expansive use of the concept in Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (New York:
Free Press, 1996) and Tricia Rose’s comments on public and hidden transcripts in Black Noise: Rap Music
and Black Culture in Contemporary America (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2004.)

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not want this delicate creative process disrupted by an actor’s individual concerns. The
actor’s (potential) concerns, in most cases, is seen as self-focused and ignorant of the
overall agenda and the work that must be accomplished in order to complete a producible
script and episode within tight time frames. The confidentiality of storylines and the
normal television production practice of releasing scripts to actors only a few days before
the start of filming is a function of a demanding television production schedule that halts
only at pre-determined junctures. But this confidentiality is also a management tool. It
curtails the amount of time an actor has to protest, demand changes, or “cause problems”
for the writers and producers. This is one of the on-the-ground realities of television
making that opens up the space for my argument that the television writers’ room
functions as a hidden site of cultural production that limits the agency of actors. I would
not argue that producers categorically do not want to hear from actors, but actors tend to
begin work on a television show ignorant of the realities of television production and the
time frame in which the work must get done. This ignorance is seen as a potential
liability to an executive producer’s impossibly full schedule, but the writer-producer’s
sense of confidentiality about their work is also used to maintain a production hierarchy
that strengthens the industry adage that television is the “writer’s medium.”
Despite the staff’s normal vigilance in protecting the white board from actors,
there are slippages. When lead actor Andrew arrived for his meeting with the new writing
staff, the boards were inexplicably left visible. This was a problem that several of us
noticed while in the midst of our meeting with him. He was the last of several cast
meetings, but there had been a break between the actors’ appointments. During the break,
the boards had been turned around to their normal positions so we could work while
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waiting for Andrew. In our fatigue, however, we had all forgotten to turn the boards
around so he could not read them. There was little that could be done at that point without
calling attention to the fact that we were purposefully getting up and turning the boards
around because he was in the room. So the boards remained visible while he met with the
writing staff. After he left, the room’s collective faux pau was noted, but several of the
writers commented that it was probably “no big deal”; Andrew didn’t even seem to notice
the boards. Sure enough, I received a phone call later that night from a writer friend who
worked on a different television show. She was a mutual friend of Andrew and mine. She
let me know that Andrew had called her to complain about his meeting that day; he was
furious. He had indeed managed to glance at the boards during his meeting and had
interpreted much of what he had seen as a demotion for the centrality of his character and
his role on the show. “I could barely find my [character’s] name on the board!” he
reportedly shouted. He was also reportedly upset because when he did see his name, it
was among a listing of character names where one of the teenager characters was listed
first. His name was listed second. He interpreted this to mean that the teenager character
was now the priority (which wasn’t completely wrong). But he went further. He also
interpreted to mean that he was no longer “first on the ‘call sheet.’”
The production “call sheet” is the daily document that is universal to production
in the American entertainment industry. It is distributed to producers, cast, and crew each
day that a show or film is working or in production. It is usually distributed in the
evening. The call sheet is a two sided legal sized document that contains detailed listings
of what scenes are to be shot the next work day, the time crew and cast are to report to
work, the soundstages or outdoor “locations” will be used for filming the next day’s
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scenes. It also contains listings of “above the line” creative personnel (producers, writer,
director) on the front page and listings of almost all personnel by job title on the back
page. It may have maps attached to it or any other pertinent information about, for
example, special effects that will be in use the next day. It also contains the weather
forecast for the next day and the location of the nearest hospital (information that the
unions demand be listed). The most noted parts of the document, however, are the listing
of scenes to be filmed and the actors who will be working in those scenes. It would be
cumbersome to list the name of each actor in tiny print in tiny grids, so a short hand is
used. Each actor is assigned a number… 1, 2, 3 and so on. The actor considered to be the
lead character in the show and who has first billing in the show’s on-air credits is
generally referred to as “#1.” Therefore, the actor that is listed as #1 on the call sheet
occupies a special position. He (and it is usually, though not always, a “he”) is given a
certain cachet because “#1” announces, literally, the hierarchy of the show’s politics of
organization.
The call sheet is a map, and as such it is an important document of power, one
that is re-circulated on a daily basis, sometimes for years. As long as a show is in
production, a call sheet is distributed. Crew persons do not leave the set at the end of the
day without a call sheet for the next day’s work. Distributing call sheets to each member
of a 200-300 person television crew is one of the primary responsibilities of the assistant
directors and their assistants. Production is organized according to the call sheet; thus
cast, crew, and producers are constantly and continually checking their call sheets.
Therefore, the call sheet serves as a daily reminder of a show’s “star hierarchy.” When
lead actor Andrew fumed that he believed he would no longer be #1 on the call sheet, one
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might dismiss his anger as the ravings of an egocentric actor--- but I am also arguing that
it is more than that. This is especially true for an African American actor or any other
actor of color who, when cast in television shows or films, is rarely cast in a role that
receives top billing, either on the air or on the call sheet. Even in the rarefied air of a
television show where actors are earning relatively handsome wages, hierarchy exists,
and it has material and discursive affects. For example, it is not unusual for the #1 to stop
a scene if s/he has questions about how the scene is written or how s/he should perform
the scene. Several series regulars might do this in the service of doing a good job. But it
might be viewed as a problem if the #7 actor on the crew sheet began to make a habit of
asking endless questions and holding up production while he was in a scene with the #1.
In this case then, Andrew was rightfully wondering whether or not he had actually been
demoted from #1 on the call sheet so that the actress who played his teenage daughter
could be given that role. He was, in effect, asking if the shift in story focus to the young
ingénues on the series, a shift that could be difficult for a casual viewer of the show to
perceive, was being solidified in the actual production processes of the show via the use
of the call sheet.
Still, if, as Gargi Bhattacharyya writes, every document of power reveals the
hegemony of the norm, then the matrices of power within production that were
implicated here are complex and revealing.
151
In Andrew’s interpretation, the writing on
the white board would lead to a change in the call sheet-- a change that would document
on a daily basis his loss of position and power in the already tenuous universe of an
African American show that featured a non-comic Blackness. In Andrew’s interpretation

151
Bhattacharyya, Gargi. Sexuality and Society: An Introduction (London: Routledge, 2002), 22.
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the call sheet was incontrovertible proof that the show had reorganized itself in order to
break his image-- and substitute the older with the younger, the (black) male with the
(black) female, and season one’s progressive presentation of televisual blackness with
season two’s embrace of televisual blackness as a style absent of politics. The ability of
the one page, two-sided call sheet, to signify so much calls attention to the sheet as one of
the entertainment industry’s most under examined documents of power.
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Andrew’s interpretation of what, in reality, was intended as a random scribble on
the writers’ white board simultaneously highlights the power of the board and the call
sheet to signal the discursive priorities of the writers, the producers, and the network. The
listing of character names in a particular order was not intended to send a message to
Andrew specifically-- but the simple ordering of names on a white board in the writers’
room did carry a kind of a message. The fact that in this case the board’s “message” was
unintentional does not mean it was meaningless. The white board incident, did occur in
the midst of an actual reordering of the show’s narrative priorities. The entire incident,
still manages to illustrate the power of the writers’ room space to order the stories,

152
Several stories circulate among production and crew personnel of skirmishes that have erupted over time
on film sets about who would be listed as #1 on the call sheet. For example, a crew member who had joined
Morgan Park regaled the set one day with tales over a call sheet battle on a big budget studio film she had
recently worked on. One of the film’s stars, Jamie Foxx, had recently won an Oscar, and this was his major
follow up film. But his co-star was Robert Downey, Jr., who had just rocketed to a new level of fame for
his role in the superhero movie Iron Man. When Downey had first signed onto the film during the planning
stages—which was before his Iron Man success-- he was to be billed as the co-star to Oscar winner Jamie
Foxx’s lead. But Downey was fresh from his Iron Man success, and this fact set up a question: Whose
stardom was now more important— Downey’s recent box office success or Foxx’s recent critical acclaim
and Oscar? Reportedly, at the table read for the film the topic of call sheet billing was broached. Foxx
apparently made it clear that he expected to be #1 on the call sheet. Downey, apparently frustrated by
Foxx’s stance, was said to have yelled out “Fine! Just make me #8 then!” This was Downey’s way of
skirting the entire issue. If he would not be #1-- he would not be #2 either and clearly subjugate himself to
Foxx on the call sheet. So he was #8 for the rest of the time the film remained in production. While
Downey did cede to Foxx’s #1, his move to #8 was an attempt to make a mockery of the competition. The
intersection of racial and economic dynamics here cannot be proved but are, nevertheless, difficult to
ignore.
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images, and performances of television as a hegemonic cultural apparatus. This fact
leads me, again, to one of my overall arguments and interventions with this project: that
the agency of actors in television production exists, but it is already always severely
constrained by the mostly invisible processes that are rendered more visible here. If a
simple listing of a show’s primary characters-- if five words on a writers’ room white
board-- can cause that kind of reaction in a lead actor, then what can an entire script that
emerges from this space do? We can still ask the question that Cheng poses: Can
performance ever disturb performativity? But we must ask it in recognition that the
hidden, internal processes of performativity are a daunting challenge for the agency of the
performer to surmount.
(Racial) Performances of the Self
In Crafting Selves, Dorinne Kondo argues that “selves are crafted in processes
of work and within matrices of power” (300). For my purposes here I want to focus on
the final “s” in “selves”. I want to focus on how the discourse in the second season
writers’ room at Morgan Park, despite its foundational construction by the network to
write more white, began to change in ways that suggest a shifting presentation of the
(racial) self by several of the writers.
153
I highlight how the performances of multiple
selves by the writers were prompted by their various readings of the showrunner’s
aesthetic and political priorities. Subsequently, I also show how these multiple selves
then became tangled in efforts to signify an allegiance to a subversive televisual agenda
operating to preserve a progressive image of non-comic blackness. The television writing

153
If I were writing a satiric play this would be the juncture where a white character might burst into a
nervous musical number, a patter song called “Things My Mother Never Told Me, or ‘Uh Oh’, An Unhappy
Negro is in Charge-- How do I keep my Job?”
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room became a kinetic laboratory for the examination of the racial performances of
cultural workers. This is especially so when privileged white cultural workers perceive
themselves to be in the insecure situation that they are rarely, if ever, prepared for: how
not to function as the dominant and privileged member of a racial majority.
After the EP completed the additional hiring of two staff writers she began to
speak more openly to us about her desire to “not sell the show out completely to the teen
audience.” She also continued to push the network toward accepting a “riot” storyline and
an extended “gang battle” storyline. It became clear to me then that she would not simply
“accept” the instruction to produce a new version of Morgan Park without fighting for
her original vision of the show. At the beginning of the second season the writers’ room
was clearly headed in the network-mandated direction of transforming the show into a
teen centered soap opera. At first, the teen soap direction was one the new writers clearly
advocated. Shortly after the above named events I noticed the performances in the
writers’ room had begun to change.
I noticed the first attempted shift in the presentation of self in Frances, a white
female producer on the show. Television writers spend many hours working together, so
it is admittedly difficult at first to distinguish whether the increase in a writer’s sharing of
personal narratives comes as a result of hours spent together or whether these narratives
were being used to advance another purpose. Strategic or not, the EP became noticeably
engaged when Frances began to speak more and more of a television mini-series she had
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previously written that featured several Black characters. For experienced television
writers and producers, their past work history travels with them as a kind of repertoire.
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Sometimes their history and knowledge literally travel with them as an archive, in the
sense that veteran writers have been known to bring their previous show’s story bible
with them to their new show.
155
Frances also mentioned her relationship with the former
executive producer of that series, a Black male writer who happened to be good friends
with Morgan Park’s EP. At first, Frances’s talk about her past work experiences seemed
to be nothing out of the ordinary. Upon further reflection, however, I noticed that she
began to speak of this job more than any other job and of her former Black male
executive producer after the EP made it clear that she would not surrender her vision for
the series so easily. Before this shift, Frances spoke often of the white teen soap opera she
had left in order to work on this show. She began to tap into a different repertoire, one
that she deemed to be more important than other shows she had worked on in the past.
Whether or not this strategic performance could ultimately be judged as successful, it
certainly represented an attempt to change her repertoire, to change the well of past
experiences from which she drew in order to build capital in the writers’ room.

154
For more on the textual “archive” and the embodied practices or embodied knowledge of the cultural
actor’s “repertoire”, see Diana Taylor’s The Archive and the Repertoire (Raleigh: Duke University Press,
2003).
155
A “story bible” is the ever growing document that most television shows develop that records all
pertinent information-- characters, storylines, changes in storylines, etc.-- about every episode of a scripted
television show. The bible, in the case of a show that reaches more than two seasons, can become quite
comprehensive. Sometimes upper level producers or resourceful lower level writers from a successful show
will literally bring a copy of that show’s bible with them to their new job on a new show. The stories are
rarely lifted wholesale from one show to the next, but can be used to identify “story areas” that a similar
show’s writers might want to use as a jumping off point (i.e., a “story area” might be how another show
handled a domestic violence storyline or a family member with Alzheimer’s). Story bibles are important,
inside archival documents that also represent what I call a “zone of circulation” for television
representations and narrative structures to travel from one show to the next. If it seems sometimes that you
are watching an episode of a show that feels like you’ve seen it before, there’s a chance you actually might
have seen it before on another show.
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Writer Clarissa was another white female writer with a demeanor that was often
interpreted as “nervous” and “anxious” by a few of the other writers. This was her first
television writing job in several years, but she had served as a writer’s assistant for
several years before, working as a writing intern for a first season, teen-oriented show on
the WB network. Her road to this show had been a long, hard one filled with many gaps
in her employment. Television writers often experience gaps in employment due to a
variety of causes: the show’s cancellation; termination from a show; inability to quickly
find another job after their last one ended. Whatever the reason for their unemployment,
television writers are ever conscience of their image and reputation in Hollywood and
generally don’t talk about their “down time.” This had been the case with Clarissa at the
beginning of the season. But after the EP began to make clear that she would not simply
acquiesce to the network’s demands, Clarissa began to voluntarily fill in the gaps in her
work history timeline. She revealed that she spent much of her time between television
jobs volunteering and teaching poetry and other forms of writing in Southern California
prisons populated by former and current gang members who were mostly African
American and Latino. She also revealed that her husband was an African American man
she’d dated for several years while they both attended college at an Ivy League
university. She also revealed that she was the aunt to an adopted African American child
(and often showed the writers pictures of her sibling’s multiracial family). It is plausible
and possible that Clarissa’s new autobiographical discourse was simply a function of her
increased comfort in the writers’ room. But her gestures also caused some suspicion
about her motives. Clarissa’s actions did not escape the notice of the other writers
(communicated through body language, eye-rolling, and comments to me outside of the
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room). The suspicion was that this writer was trying to increase her “voice” and her
cultural capital in the room by signaling her experiences or allegiance with certain forms
of blackness.
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Writer Clarissa was using her association and experiences with prisons,
gangs, and her family’s commitment to “liberal” politics as illustrated through their
recent inter-racial adoptions to perform blackness in a space that was trying to value
blackness. She was willing to risk being seen as currying favor with the EP by
diminishing her relationship with whiteness. Whether the writers in the room believed her
performance wasn’t completely irrelevant-- but their belief was not as important as the
EP’s beliefs. Clarissa’s positioning of herself as something of an expert on gangs and
prisons increased her blackness at a moment when it seemed the EP’s priorities were
changing. Clarissa did this by communicating her “liberal” political investments in
educating carceral populations and through the seemingly successful racial integration of
her extended multicultural family. As a result, Clarissa’s performance held enough
fidelity and coherence that the EP believed that that those experiences would be useful to
the breaking and building of storylines for the season.
Clarissa’s autobiographical disclosures were also read by other writers as an
attempt to de-feminize her positionality as the “youngest white girl” in the room. In
strategically revealing that she has been willing to teach writing to prison populations,
she cast herself as an atypical young (white) woman, one “tough enough” to enter and

156
To be clear, I do not assume that gangs represent blackness. But that doesn’t mean that others didn’t
assume this connection. Gangs, in the minds of most people, certainly represent criminality and there is a
vast literature that attests to the fact that criminality in American society is almost always racialized as part
of the essential being of Black people and other persons of color. For more information, see Robert M.
Entman and Andrew Rojecki’s The Black Image in the White Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2000) and Stephanie Greco Larson’s Media and Minorities: The Politics of Race in News and
Entertainment (Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2006).
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survive that space and one politically committed enough to do so in the first place. In
casting herself as the writing room’s resident expert on gangs, she was also attempting to
urbanize her east coast suburban upbringing. This was important, because she was
writing on a show that was primarily set in an urban landscape. Though she was informed
by the network that her goal in writing for the show was to draw upon her white teen
show experience, Clarissa eventually realized rather quickly that her executive producer
might look upon a different racial performance favorably.
I do not suggest that Clarissa’s commitments were disingenuous or
Machiavellian in some respects. In fact, they appeared to be a part of her sincere, long
term commitment to cross-racial engagement. However, the securing of “Black capital”
through a personal association with gangs was deeply problematic and bordered on the
unintentionally offensive. In addition, I want to suggest that the timing of her personal
revelations was performative. It highlighted how the constructed nature of race can be
particularly salient in a television writer’s room. Her performances carved out a (racial)
common ground in an unusually multi-cultural space within television production. To the
extent that Clarissa’s performance was “successful” is indicative of the writing room’s
preference for privileging the experiential as the most valid and desirable form of
research and capital. In the writers’ room performances of the self tend to be dictated by
phenotype, but because most writing rooms privilege the experiential or claims to the
experiential, racial performances can be strategically deployed in order to enhance one’s
standing within the room and in the hierarchy of television production.
Another attempted shift of the self occurred with Jorge, a Latino writer on the
show. As I explained earlier in this dissertation, Jorge often displayed ambivalence at
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being identified as Latino. He was, in fact, a Latino American with white skin and an
ambiguous surname; he told me that when he first meets white workers in the industry,
they often don’t know that he is Latino. Further, he confessed that he doesn’t usually rush
to correct them. In fact, he was often able to pass for white. He certainly never denied
that he was Latino and often criticized other writers who, he felt “are Latino only when it
helped them,” but he made it clear that he steered as much as possible away from the
label of “Latino writer.” I was somewhat surprised, then, when he came into my office to
complain about a Latino character that the writing staff was creating. He didn’t have a
problem with the character’s attributes or function in the show; he was concerned about
the character’s name. It wasn’t “Latino enough,” he complained and “sounded stupid.”
After I listened to all the reasons he gave that the character’s name “was stupid” he ended
with the statement “but no one cares anyway…” I told him that wasn’t true, but I couldn’t
help but note that this was the first time that Jorge had made a serious statement
regarding Latino representation on the show. That this was occurring after the EP made it
clear that characters of color would continue to remain central to the show was not lost on
me. It was obvious that Jorge cared about this major Latino’s character’s name. Given his
anger at the situation and that he felt he could not approach the EP about it, it also
seemed to me that there were other, silent undertones to this incident that weren’t being
discussed. In a business that is racially stratified along the white-black binary, it is not
surprising that a Latino writer would be hesitant at being identified as such. If the
industry tends to racialize its hiring practices, slotting “Black writers” for its very few
“Black shows” and “white writers” for its many “white shows,” where is the Latino
writer or the Asian American writer able to work? There have been a handful of “Latino
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shows” and only one Asian-American television show throughout the history of
broadcast or cable television. This leaves Latino and Asian American writers with no
institutionalized place, not even a ghettoized one, in the apparatus of American
television. The few Latino television writers who do work must negotiate a landscape
where they do not clearly signify either side of the problematic white-black binary.
Jorge’s decision not to identify as a Latino writer might at first appear to be a case of
ethnic disavowal, and for much of the first season I was indeed tempted to consider that
to be the case, but the reality of television production suggests that something more like
professional survival was also at work in such instances.
Jorge now found himself in the middle of a tension that revolved around a
television show that was trying to transform itself from a presumably totalizing blackness
that alienated white audiences into as a multicultural urban-ness that appealed to
everyone. The show would now also attempt to incorporate major Latino representations
as part of its urban landscape. But Jorge had not invested heavily in the presentation of
Latinos and therefore was seen by some of the other writers as having abdicated the
position of being able to speak for Latinos in the television writing room. This is a double
bind common to Black writers who don’t want to be known only as the “black expert” in
the room, but still feel obligated to speak around issues of black representation.
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Likewise, Jorge stated, “…as the only Latino presence on the show I feel I wouldn’t be
doing my job if I didn’t say something [about the name issue]…” The next day, during a
meeting with the EP, I mentioned that I was getting notes about the name of the new

157
For more information on the constraints Black writers feel to always represent a monolithic “Black point
of view,” see Chapter 5 in Gregory Adamo’s African Americans in Television (New York: Peter Lang
Publishing, Inc., 2010).
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Latino character. To my surprise, the EP didn’t want to change the name, stating
somewhat curtly that she had “…met a Black girl named Snowball yesterday” as an
example of non-ethnic names that “ethnic” people often possess. I mentioned to Jorge
later that he might not want to bring up the name issue at that juncture. Jorge was
annoyed that he couldn’t bring it up and asked if the EP realized the note came from him.
I said, genuinely, that I believed she did not. He seemed unconvinced. “Who else gives a
damn?” he sighed in response.
In short, Jorge found himself in a performative conundrum, a bind that was
working against his ability to continue building any cultural capital in the room that was
specific to ethnicity. He had previously refused to perform Latino-ness as part of his
professional strategy to increase his work opportunities, but he was now on a show whose
showrunner was asking for an investment from her writers in continuing to present
cultural representations. New white female writer Clarissa was able to deploy her work
history and family autobiography to shift her performance of whiteness to a performance
of a usable (though still problematic) multicultural blackness. In fact, Jorge became very
upset one day during this period because Clarissa had interrupted him in the room while
he was explaining the meaning of the Spanish word “ese” to one of the senior producers.
He did not appreciate the interruption nor did he like what he saw as Clarissa’s
performance of racial usurpation. She “acts like her teaching a class qualifies her over me
to explain ‘ese.’ Are you kidding me?!” he fumed. Jorge now wanted to perform his own
ethnicity in the room, but because he wasn’t a new writer and had already invested a full
season (and much of his career) in not performing his ethnicity he found himself lacking
the cultural capital to do so when he desired, and was therefore constrained in openly and
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successfully performing in such a manner. Because his capital had been spent to some
degree on whiteness, he found it difficult to spend it on authenticating issues around
Latino culture. He seemed aware that his performance might lack, at this point, in the
terminology of Kenneth Burke, narrative fidelity and narrative coherence-- and he was
pissed off about it.
The Empire Network Strikes Back
One late summer Friday afternoon, about two hours before the writing staff and
the network executives were to meet for drinks at an ocean bar in Santa Monica, one of
the network executives called the EP to inform her that they were rejecting the first script
that I had written for the show’s second season. The EP promptly rushed into my office
to tell me that the network was “tossing the script” and that we would need to break a
new episode. I would need to have a new episode written by Monday morning. Off my
stunned face, she then went into the writers’ room and told them to start searching for
“A” stories that we had earmarked as possible episode ideas for later in the season
(sometimes known as “the story bank”). The episode was to begin “prepping” that
Monday, so this toss back had the ability to seriously throw the show off schedule and to
negatively affect its slender budgets. This show operated on a narrow margin of error,
and while it is not uncommon for a script to be rejected at some point during a show’s
season, it had never happened while under the aegis of this executive producer. It had
never happened on a script that was being well received internally among the writers and
crew. And it had never happened right before “prep” was to start on a script.
“Prepping” an episode means to prepare for filming. It is the seven to eight day
period where the lead crew personnel receives the script and begins an endless series of
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tasks and meetings in order to plan how and where to film the episode and what will be
necessary to produce it within television’s compressed seven to eight day shooting
schedule. The day that one episode begins filming is generally the first day of “prep” on
the episode that follows. It’s a constant creative and industrial machine with dozens of
moving pieces, millions of dollars and people’s careers at stake. To toss out a script the
business day before it begins prep is a serious matter that could cost thousands of dollars
in increased production costs, put production behind schedule for the rest of the
production season, and even worse, run the risk of demoralizing and burning out a
writing staff. Furthermore, the script approval process involves numerous checks and
balances to prevent this very circumstance. Story areas must be approved, then story
paragraphs, then story outlines-- all before the writer completes a first draft. To have
successfully completed that process and then to have the network toss the script is almost
unprofessional on their part, as they are quite aware that television production on an one
hour drama is a machine that must be “fed” quality new script pages every day.
However, as it turns out, their seemingly hesitant objections that they voiced along the
way had been much stronger than the EP believed. Though the network executives had
reluctantly agreed to the first episode’s non-riot “riot” the episode I had written had
clearly crossed the line of what the network was willing to air.
The now tossed script told the story of a Black police officer’s young son who
had been racially profiled and ruthlessly harassed by another officer in his department.
This event set up an explosive confrontation between the father and his own police
department and provoked a conversation at the end of the episode where the policeman
father has to explain the “unwritten rules” of being a Black man in America to his young,
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innocent son. I had not seen anything like it on recent television, certainly not under the
auspices of a family friendly show, and I must admit I was pleased to have pitched the
story and that I wrote the script. However, the network wanted no part of this story and
refused to produce the script. Though unspoken, one of the unwritten rules of television is
that when a writer’s script is rejected-- either by the executive producer or the network--
that means the writer’s job is possibly at risk after his/her contractually guaranteed
employment period is over. As one of the producers said to me at the awkward network-
writer party that evening, “I guess the network’s whispers were louder than we all
thought.”
The struggles to define this new version of Morgan Park-- how to make this
show more “african-AMERICAN and less black”-- appeared to come to a climax that
weekend. While the EP had been able to retain some of her original vision of the show in
the first episode, reasoning that the show needed a strong and dramatic opening, it
became clear that we were then to quickly pivot to a much more benign version.
Continuing along a creative path that resembled the show’s first season was simply not
acceptable, and the executives decided to make their intentions known loudly, clearly,
and without ambiguity. The struggle for the show’s representation of a non-comic and
progressive blackness had been stopped in its tracks.
That weekend the EP and I held a story breaking conference over the phone for
about four hours. We broke a new episode that was based on a story I had actually
pitched for later in the season. I then had about thirty hours in which to produce a new,
workable script in which I would transform the emotional story of a young boy’s clash
with institutionalized racism into a comedic farce where that son, in an attempt to connect
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with a girl he met on the internet, ends up as part of a police department sting operation. I
managed to finish the script on time-- and to our relief but not our surprise, the network
absolutely loved it. Later that week, the EP told me quite emphatically that it was “good
that you were the one who re-wrote it” (as opposed to the script being re-written by the
entire staff, which is what usually happens when a script is gets in “trouble”). Until this
incident I had not proved that I was a suitable writer for this new, “less black” show. The
first script I turned in, which was shot through with a critical engagement around the
dangers of blackness in an urban environment, served to only confirm that impression.
Therefore the showrunner made a point of telling me that it was “good” I re-wrote the
script because, as she confirmed later in the season, the network needed to be convinced I
was still an asset to the show. Despite what they had acknowledged as my excellent work
during the first season, my blackness had now made me suspect. I was, as I stated earlier
in this dissertation, WWB or Writing While Black, and the network needed to be
convinced that I could write more African American and not Black.
My ability to quickly change a script that used a violent encounter with the state
to interrogate a young boy’s coming into a greater consciousness of his own DuBoisian
double-veiled blackness into a more comic script where blackness was completely
incidental turned that script into a different kind of performance. It became a performance
in which I proved that I could quiet my desire to explore blackness discursively through
television production in order to serve the capitalistic goals of the show’s network. In that
sense, I paid the price of aiding the show’s contribution to a performativity that compels a
silencing of blackness in order to secure a greater sense of inclusion in “America.”
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I must admit that when I reflect on this second season event in particular, there
are many times when I imagined a responding in a much different and much less
professional manner. Thinking that I should have told the network “where they could take
their script and shove it” might be pleasurable to imagine, but actually saying it would
not have been responsible to the show’s executive producer, nor would it have been
productive to my writing career, or helpful to my ability to complete this research. John
Caldwell writes of the challenges and necessities of scholar-practitioners who are
“working both sides of the fence.” He states: “…the intimate working knowledge of
production processes… pushes beyond the sometimes rudimentary questions that
scholars with little direct knowledge of film/television raise. Yet straddling the fence also
forces [scholar-practitioners] to regularly negotiate both their access and their critical
distance from those granting access” (Caldwell 2009, 214). Again, an ethnographic
stance proved helpful here. I must admit that when I first recorded these field notes I
simply wrote down the date and at the top of an otherwise empty page: “A-story thrown
out.” I then waited two weeks before returning to that page to complete my notes and my
thoughts, because it took me that long to attain the critical distance that I felt was
necessary. At the same time, I am vulnerable to the charge that ethnography actually
compelled me to make a more complicit decision. In a sense this moment reveals two
things at the same time: It highlights the constantly negotiated nature of ethnography as a
methodology and the costs of maintaining access to hidden arenas; and this field moment
also illuminates what the reality of fence straddling in production and media industries
studies can look like in day-to-day terms.

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Checks and Balances on Representation and Power
As a revealing epilogue to this series of events, the EP told me about a lunch
she had with one of the network executives who worked on the show a few weeks after
the A-story was tossed out. The network official was complimentary to the executive
producer’s work and congratulated her on the great job she was doing with the (new
version of the) show. She went on to say, “We have a mainstream show with a Black cast
that isn’t ‘woe is me, how hard it is to be a Black man’…” The EP paused, allowing this
to land with me. She then looked up with an irritated expression on her face and said
“that’s why they didn’t want to do the profiling story.” It was a blunt confirmation of
what we had suspected. Certain images, certain stories are deemed “black stories” and
were still off limits on a “Black show” or a show that featured representations of a non-
comic blackness. The executive reiterated that if the story does not appeal to a wider
mainstream audience, then the network is not interested. This is true even though, in a
post-network television universe, the majority of television has become a niche
business.
158
In this instance, a story that featured a young African American male’s
struggle for humanity in the face of an institutionalized humiliation was not
“mainstream.” It was not worthy of exploration because it bumped into the egalitarian
notion of the American dream, the “heartland” narrative of individual effort and triumph
that most television shows are invested in portraying (V. Johnson 2008).

158
For more on television and the post-network era see Amanda Lotz’ The Television Will Be
Revolutionized (New York: NYU Press, 2007); Redesigning Women: Television after the Network Era
(Champaign-Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006); and Beyond Prime Time: Television Programming
in the Post-Network Era (New York: Routledge, 2009). Also see Cable Visions: Television Beyond
Broadcasting by Sarah Banet-Weiser, Cynthia Chris and Anthony Freitas, (New York: NYU Press, 2007)
and Banet-Weiser’s Kids Rule!: Nickelodeon and Consumer Citizenship, (Durham: Duke University Press,
2007).

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The EP told me about another realization that emerged from her mid-season
lunch with the network executive: the variety of ways a network can put checks and
balances on a showrunner’s power. “They control me through casting…” the EP stated.
Because the EP was brought onto the show a few weeks into production on the show’s
first season, the casting directors had already been hired by the show’s creator in
conjunction with the network. When the EP expressed her dissatisfaction with the work
of show’s casting directors and her desire to replace them, the network executive waved
off her concerns, saying, “We should have another lunch about that.” It was at that point,
the EP told me, that she realized that the casting directors’ allegiance was to the network,
and she felt that they were being used as a way to further control her artistic decisions.
To understand why the executive producer interpreted the network’s response in
that way, it is important to understand the role of the casting director in television
production. Casting directors are responsible for finding the best available actors to
audition and ultimately play the roles that are available on a film or television show.
Casting directors “screen” and “vet” actors before they even get to audition for the final
decision makers-- the show’s producers and directors. Usually the show’s creator or
executive producer will interview casting directors for the crucial job of continuing to
cast a television series. These jobs are desirable because the job can last for years and for
as long as the series is on the air. The constant work allows casting directors to increase
their “stable” of good, reliable actors that they can identify and with whom they build
relationships, thereby increasing the casting director’s professional capital and ability to
procure jobs on future productions or in the few permanent executive casting director
positions within studios and networks.
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Casting directors are also responsible for taking the overall budget that an
executive producer allots to them for casting guest star and co-star roles and dividing it at
their discretion in order to hire the best available actor at the best price (in this case, the
best price typically means the cheapest). Due to the severe time constraints in television
production, the writer-producer in charge of that casting session usually has time (two to
three hours) in a typical casting session to audition four or five actor options for each
major role, perhaps seven to eight actor options for smaller roles. Casting directors do not
usually make the final decision to hire a particular actor-- that is the province of the
executive producer, the episode’s writer, and sometimes the episode’s director. Still,
casting directors can and do advocate for their favorite choices. They also act as a
knowledge resource regarding an actor’s professional reputation-- i.e. their behavior on a
set, punctuality, etc. Because casting directors usually decide which actors gain access to
the casting room or “producer’s session” for these final stages of auditions, they have
significant but hidden power to shape the embodiment and representation of what we as
consumers see on television.
159
They also are able to limit the executive producer’s
choices of who embodies a script, even if the EP is not pleased with the variety of actor
choices presented to her. In such cases, the common casting director claim is “This is the
best of what’s out there, there’s no one left,” or “These are the only choices who will do
it for the money that’s available.” This is a difficult claim to combat, unless the EP is

159
The smart television producer has an awareness of the acting pool. But most do not, because they are
promoted based on their ability to write and lead a production team. Casting directors have been known to
take advantage of the typical TV writer’s ignorance of actors to surreptitiously steer the hiring of actors in
the direction that the casting director wants. They have been known to “stack the deck.” This is when the
casting director will purposefully surround the actor they really want to get the job with other actor choices
that they believe will be unsuccessful in receiving a job offer from the executive producer or director. The
end result is that the actor they are advocating for looks just that much better since the other “best
available” choices come off as being sub-par.
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willing to upend her already hectic schedule to spend what she does not have enough of--
time-- to search for new actors.
In general, if an EP wants to replace a casting director that is not a decision she
would have to discuss with the network. The fact that the network was involved at all and
that they were thwarting her desire to replace the casting directors, allowed the EP to read
the executive’s comments as an attempt to turn the casting process into a process of
surveillance. It was an attempt to turn the casting room into an abnormal method of back
channel communications between the network and the casting director. Therefore, it was
an attempt to further “control” how a Black female executive producer’s creative choices
were literally embodied and represented on the television screen.
A Breakthrough and a Breakdown at Season’s End
As the breaking of episodes for the second season reached the mid-point of
what was expected to be a much larger order than the first season, the EP became
concerned that another story the writers’ room was developing would not be accepted by
the network. The storyline was again attempting to place the fictional family’s young son
in physical danger, this time due to his desire to avoid being drafted into a local gang’s
turf battle. His efforts would eventually lead him to the contemplation of using a gun for
protection. It was a story that could be read, problematically, by the network as being
very specific to the experiences of a young black male and therefore, in their thinking,
limited in its appeal. But the story was also a logical conclusion to a narrative thread that
the EP and the staff had managed to insert as a background story during the season.
160

160
Secondary storylines, what is often referred to as “b” and “c” stories, or sometimes just “stray” lines of
dialogue, can be used to potentially insert stories and images that the network may disagree with as the
focal point of an episode. The sheer amount of narrative that a television series tends to consume creates at
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The show’s background narrative had slowly but steadily addressed the travails of
growing up in urban America. As I explained earlier, the subject was first broached in a
comic manner by turning the son’s racial profiling story into one where he tried to meet a
girl he encountered on the Internet. But the approach in this episode would be more direct
and dramatic. The writers’ room was nervous, but it was also committed to creating an
episode worthy of being a mid-season cliffhanger.
161
In television a cliff hanger often
translates into a storyline that raises the immediate stakes for the characters. It is not
unusual for cliffhangers to involve violence, the potential for violence, or for the
cliffhanger to make a narrative bid for social significance. The forced, somewhat clumsy
reach for "importance" is often derisively referred to by television writers (and critics) as
“the very special episode.”
However, as it turns out, our fears about the network’s response proved to be
unnecessary. At the same time that this thirteenth episode’s story was being broken in the
writers’ room, the show’s first fully completed episodes began to air-- and to the
network’s surprise, the second season debut rating improved over the show’s first season
ratings. Two days after the ratings for the first episode of the second season were released
the EP and I pitched the thirteenth episode to the network, and to our surprise the network
immediately and enthusiastically agreed with the premise of the episode. The writers’

least some space for a showrunner’s creative input, even when the network is micromanaging a series and
disagrees with that input. Done artfully, the “b” and “c” stories can slowly emerge and reach a point where
they become an episode’s “A” story. A network can still intervene at that point, but it becomes more
difficult because the foundation has been laid and the audience’s expectations are that there will be some
pay off to the narrative threads they’ve been “teased” with throughout previous episodes.
161
In television writing, a “cliff-hanger” traditionally refers to an episode that is structured so that the most
dramatic event, the event that cries out for a resolution, occurs at the very end of the episode. The dramatic
event is not resolved because it is designed to assure that the audience returns to watch the next episode to
see the resolution. An example would be the 1980s primetime soap series, “Dallas” and its infamous
cliffhanger that introduced the phrase “Who Shot J.R.?” into the pop culture lexicon.
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room was perplexed at the lack of resistance. The EP concluded that the network “was in
a good mood” because of the first episode’s ratings. Because the episode we pitched was
similar in dramatic stakes and tone to the first episode, they were willing to go along with
her plans. She also surmised that they were showing some flexibility because the writing
staff had managed to make the melding of the show’s disparate elements work to some
degree. We had combined the soft and friendly “teen” and “family” elements to the hard
and edgy urban landscape at the show’s core-- and the show‘s ratings had increased. As
far as the network was concerned it looked as if the EP and show’s writers had been
successful in making the show more “african-AMERICAN” and less traditionally
“black.”
The EP had fought for her vision and still managed to retain at least the
potential for constructing episodes that presented a more progressive, non-comic image
of Blackness. Her ability to do this while in the midst of a mandate to produce a show
more friendly to the white millennial audience is instructive and helps us to see how
malleable the idea of blackness can be in the contemporary mass media marketplace. The
network itself seemed surprised but pleased that this new incarnation of the show was
successful. In some ways the show’s initial success at the beginning of the second season
could be interpreted in a way that suggests that the network was right in demanding
changes to the show. But their new found euphoria would not last. Immediately after the
first episode the ratings began to decrease. For several weeks, as the “softer” more
millennial friendly episodes aired, the more the show’s ratings decreased. As a television
practitioner and scholar, I know that there are several variables outside of a show itself
that contribute to a show’s ratings. That the softer storylines that attempted to
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circumscribe blackness as little more than style cannot be considered the causal link to
the show’s weakened ratings. In fact, the network executive suggested at one point that it
was the first episode’s hard(er) hitting story (the “non-riot” riot) that may have led to a
decrease in the ratings of subsequent episodes. The reason ratings go up or down is not a
hard science. If a network executive could quantify the formula for a hit show, then every
show would be a blockbuster success. But what is interesting here is that the centrality of
the show’s depictions of blackness was being referenced at all as a possible rationale for
the instability of the ratings. It was an attempt to affix a numerical scale to the question of
blackness on television. In other words, how much non-comic (read as political?)
blackness could a white audience accept? Whatever the answer to that question, the harsh
reality of television is that eventually all shows, regardless of the variables, are blamed or
celebrated for their ratings success or failure. Therefore, it was not a huge surprise when
the network’s initial euphoria over the second season debut quickly gave way to a
noticeably measured ambivalence about the future of the series.
When the writers began work on the second season it was expected that the
network would order more episodes and extend the season. The network characterized
the expected, official order for more episodes as little more than a formality. It was, after
all, another reason that the network had been willing to pay to bring on several new
writers. By the time the season’s ratings began to continually erode in the second and
third episode airings, it was too late to stop the production of the show’s harder edged
(and more specifically “black”?) season ending episode about gangs. But it wasn’t too
late to halt production on the show and to turn the “mid-season” cliffhanger into a
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“season ending” cliffhanger-- which is exactly what the network did on the last day of
production on the mid-season cliffhanger.
In a visit to the show’s soundstages, the visibly frustrated EP introduced the
network executive to the cast and crew, several of whom were already in tears (bad news
gets around). You could hear a pin drop as the network executive made the
announcement. The executive spoke clearly, reassuringly, and insisted the show was not
cancelled, but that the network had been “overly ambitious” in how many episodes the
network could produce and make financially feasible to overall budgets. The executive
also hastened to add that the reduced number of episodes was a template that the network
was embracing for all of their shows.
Shortly after the executive finished this announcement, a loud bell rang. It was
the unmistakable sound of a soundstage bell. It rings to indicate to all cast and crew
personnel that filming is about to start. So after the network executive’s job ending
announcement, the crew immediately went back to work to finish this last episode-- yet
another indication that the element of time is often the real boss in television production.
But the young African American actress who played one half of the show’s millennial
teenager couple was unable to continue working. The burden of carrying the series had,
in many ways, shifted to her shoulders. No one had asked her if she wanted that burden,
and she hadn’t initially been cast to carry that kind of responsibility. Filming eventually
stopped to accommodate her tears and uncontrollable sobs, as she asked repeatedly,
“What did I do wrong?! What did I do wrong?!”
Later that night, several of the writers were hanging out and talking with the
show’s actors near their trailers. The fact that the show appeared to be cancelled and that
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this day was suddenly the last day of work for many of us seemed to enable many of the
show’s African American actors to speak more freely. They talked openly of the
network’s “other” television programs, saying how the ratings of many of the network’s
other programs, were not as high as Morgan Park’s. Yet they had heard conjecture and
rumors, that the network’s other programs (described as “white” shows) would see an
extension of their season order. Shortly thereafter these rumors would prove to be true.
Lead actor Andrew, visibly struggling to make sense of television’s unwritten rules when
it comes to “Black shows,” theorized out loud, saying: “I guess our ratings are lower
after you add in the Black tax.”
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The Black Tax
Though Morgan Park wrapped production that day, by the end of the show’s
season and after all the episodes had aired, the show’s ratings had rebounded. In addition,
the mid-season cliffhanger turned season cliffhanger episode that caused so much
consternation and fear among the staff had garnered several nominations and awards
from industry organizations. In the end, the network’s insistence that the show was not
being cancelled and that they needed to “wait and see” proved correct. The show was
eventually resurrected for a third season. So even with the turmoil of the second season--
the contested contracts that seemed based on race, the discord among the writing staff as

162
Law scholar Jody David Armour describes the Black tax as "…the price Black people pay in their
encounters with Whites (and some Blacks) because of Black stereotypes… The concept of a `tax' captures
several key characteristics of these stereotype-laden encounters: like a tax, racial discrimination is
persistent, pervasive, must be dealt with, cannot be avoided, and is not generally resisted. Taxes are
commonly regarded as ineluctable facts of human existence, as in the old saw, `Nothing in life is certain
save death and taxes.'” For more see Armour’s Negrophobia and Reasonable Racism: The Hidden Costs of
Being Black in America (New York: NYU Press, 1997). This incident might also be described as
television’s version of a racial microagression. See a consideration of Chester Pierce’s body of work on
racial microagression in Ezra Griffiths’ Race and Excellence: My Dialogue with Chester Pierce (Iowa City:
University of Iowa Press, 1998).
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a result of those contracts, the cross-racial claims on blackness when it seemed
remunerative, the rejection of a script that was seen as a reprimand to the writer and the
executive producer’s commitment to producing a show that tried to keep a non-comic
blackness at its center, and the seemingly sudden death of the series at the mid-point of
the season-- the show still managed to find a measure of commercial and critical success.
Therefore, the second season highlighted the ways in which a certain kind of televisual
blackness, a black-authored and unapologetically black-centered representation had
struggled-- but still survived. Though television history suggested otherwise, perhaps a
non-comic blackness could survive within a certain niche of television’s mass media
enterprise.
There was, however, a cost involved-- a 21
st
century payment demanded in the
form of compromises on Black creative ownership, Black authorship, and remuneration.
As the performances of the writing staff shifted within the writing room, within that
unstable, performative cultural playing field, so did black representation. Clearly, as we
have seen here, the implicit and explicit debates over Blackness in the writers’ room led
to some kind of black representation on the television screen. Blackness, then, proved its
malleability through those performances in the writers’ room. It proved it was stubbornly
central as it shifted and morphed in the name and game of chasing ratings. It moved from
the pursuit of a progressiveness determined to find life among representations of the
urban decay conventionally associated with Blackness, to a more amorphous
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multicultural hybridity that smacked of post-raciality.
163
The problem however, is that the
ratings the network desired were to come from the imagined community of the
supposedly post-racial Millennial Generation. However, it is hugely problematic that the
burden of representing a progressive and non-comic blackness fell on black people who
had to illustrate their humanity through television’s limited definition of success. The
cost of succeeding on television’s terms-- ratings and the money that comes with ratings--
was at the expense of blackness. A “black tax” was extracted for attempting to be
unapologetically and self-definitively black in television and on television.
Herman Gray writes: “…in popular culture and mass media representations of
race, blackness has become the cultural site of a kind of discursive shift, one that
constantly recodes and repositions blackness as an entrée into America’s multicultural
future” (2004 ed., 163). Sarah Banet-Weiser, in her interrogation of the cable network
Nickelodeon, goes further than marking the entrée to multiculturalism by speaking to the
costs of post-racialism. She writes:
“race and ethnicity within current media culture are inextricably tied to dynamics
of the market, where segmented marketing strategies and more localized ethnic
ventures lead to a consumer based valorization of ethnicity. The current moment
is thus characterized by ambivalence rather than racial specificity, where an
ambivalent racial category (“the urban”) becomes dominant and is the entry point
to a commercially defined “post” or transracial society.” (2007, p. 156)

The “Black tax”, then, that Morgan Park’s cultural workers began to invoke as the
pivotal reason for their looming unemployment is also what I see as the recurring cost of
admission that upstart, entrepreneurial organizations (such as cable networks) must pay in

163
Fred Moten argues that blackness “has been associated with a certain sense of decay, even when that
decay is invoked in the name of a certain (fetishization of) vitality.” For more, see his article “The Case of
Blackness” in Criticism 50, no. 2 (Spring 2008).

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order to make a claim on American popular culture through the television marketplace. In
other words, what Morgan Park’s network did here has been done before.
Among the most successful 20
th
and 21
st
century media strategies for a fledgling
network was to define an underserved market and then cater to that market aggressively,
branding the new network as a destination for (usually) African Americans. First, FOX,
then the WB, and then UPN used this same strategy to start their networks and establish a
presence in an American television universe teeming with choices for the consumer.
After the African American audience was established, the networks eventually forced the
shows to skew young (usually defined as broader, sillier, hipper and always with the
incorporation of hip hop music), knowing that this would begin the process of attracting
more young, white viewers. Like the hip hop industry, the shows used the sign of
blackness and the style of black popular culture, which has historically been seen as the
“freshest” and most cutting edge of American popular culture, to entice white suburban
teenagers to watch.
164
After this demographic began to watch in significant numbers, then
the network developed shows targeted specifically for the white viewer and at the
exclusion of the non-white viewer. Hence, the Black Jamie Foxx Show on the WB,
yielded to shows such as Dawson’s Creek and Roswell-- two shows that featured
completely white casts set in homogenous, rural settings. Then, eventually, once the
“white shows” took root, the network canceled all of its “black shows.”
165

164
For more on new network strategies see Chapter 4, “Where Have all the Black Shows Gone?” in
Herman Gray’s Cultural Moves: African Americans and the Politics of Representation (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2005).
165
Ibid.; Also see Kristal Brent Zook, Color by Fox: The Fox Network and the Revolution in Black
Television (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).
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In the case of Morgan Park, however, this was one of the first times that a
“white” basic cable network used a leaner version of this strategy. Instead of airing
several black situation comedies and temporarily embracing an identity as a “black
channel,” the network aired one “black” drama. Instead of eventually dumping the shows,
entirely, the network tried diluting or dumping the Blackness within the show. This was
done, in part, because the network was still new to scripted programming and was
therefore too vulnerable as a network to risk losing Morgan Park’s audience in its
entirety, no matter what color they were. Still, the network’s actions suggest that they did
not want to risk being branded as a “Black network,” so they moved quickly to interrupt
that possibility by forcing the show to “perform” differently. The network’s method of
eliciting a new performance from the show was to change the writers and the writing
while leaving the show’s phenotypic Blackness in place.
I would argue that the American television networks know that Black
representation in television, which is almost always studied through an analysis of actor’s
performances, has much more to do with writing than with acting, much more to do with
the backstage “performances” behind the scenes than the front stage performances in
front of the cameras.
166
The actions of the network further identify television’s writing
rooms as a collective space where society’s hegemonic social scripts are written, made
ready for embodiment, and primed to do the work of the Deleuzian cinematic. The
network’s actions during the second season further identify the writing room as a space
where performance is not only crucial to the writer’s professional life but where racial

166
For more on backstage and front stage presentations of the self, see Erving Goffman’s seminal text, The
Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York: The Overlook Press, 1959).
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performativity as a compulsory citable norm is constructed, animated, and enabled for
popular culture. Therefore, this space becomes crucially important to the way we see
blackness, to the way we appropriate blackness, to the way structures of inequality are
reinforced through our mass media. Finally, the network’s actions, and the writers’
struggles to perform multiple selves as responses to those actions, identify writing rooms
as spaces where the socially constructed nature of blackness is thrown into stark relief. In
television writing rooms, we see how blackness is made visible, how it is rendered
malleable, and since representation conveys more than it intends but is never totalizing,
we also see in such rooms how blackness retains its capacity for subversiveness.

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Chapter 5

Emotional Activism & the Frustration of the First:
Kathleen McGhee-Anderson on Theatre, Performance, and Producing
African American Television

“…now is the time to think like poets, to envision and make
visible a new society, a peaceful, cooperative loving world
without poverty and oppression, limited only by our
imaginations… unless we have the space to imagine and a
vision of what it means fully to realize our humanity, all the
protests and demonstrations in the world won’t bring about
our liberation.” (196, 198)
-- Robin D.G. Kelley
167

“…my career has been about trying to project something
positive, something about who we are as a people…”
-- Kathleen McGhee-Anderson
168

“When I wrote my first play as an undergraduate at Spelman
College, a professor remarked that it was highly cinematic…
I found the effect of cutting together different images incredibly
potent. It’s like alchemy… No matter how resistant people may
be to an intellectual argument, they respond to the emotional
experience of theatre. Though I love experimenting with form,
it’s always in an attempt to drive the point home or to work the
emotions.”
-- Kathleen McGhee-Anderson
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This chapter attempts an intervention into the history of critical discourses on
television and professional discourses within television. Its first intervention is to
acknowledge the presence and contributions of African American women television
writer-producers, particularly those who have achieved the high-ranking title of
“showrunner.” I begin by briefly considering and problematizing Hollywood’s industrial

167
Kelley, Robin. Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (New York: Beacon Press, 2002).
168
McGhee-Anderson, Kathleen. Interview, January 29, 2010.
169
Scasserra. Michael P. “Kathleen McGhee-Anderson: Categorical Denial,” American Theatre 10,
(September 1993), 45-46.
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narrative and the positionality of television writer-executive producer Shonda Rhimes,
before turning my focus to the career of television writer-producer and playwright
Kathleen McGhee-Anderson. I then share excerpts from several in-depth interviews I
conducted with Ms. McGhee-Anderson over two months in early 2010. McGhee-
Anderson’s self-reflexive and intellectually wide-ranging voice speaks for itself as a kind
of critical oral history and reveals several over-arching, powerful motifs that reside
within her work. Home, community, urban politics, and trans-racial connections that
refuse to devalue Blackness are some of the themes that tend to recur in McGhee-
Anderson’s writing. Her life, her career, and her family’s history and primary role in the
demolishing of America’s racially restricted housing covenants suggest that she is not
“only” a television writer and producer, but rather an emotional activist and artist-scholar
at work in the field of mass media cultural production. Focusing on her career offers us a
hopeful example of what a successful career and life as an artist-scholar functioning
within our 21st century mass media looks like. For McGhee-Anderson, Blackness, or the
representation of Blackness, is most definitely a critical practice.
I also call attention to McGhee-Anderson’s significant career as an African
American playwright and take seriously her suggestion that representation and what I
have called “image breaking,” begins with the self-possession and purpose of the African
American artist inside cultural production. As such, theatre, and more broadly,
performance, plays an important role in McGhee-Anderson’s efforts to construct a more
complex image of Blackness in television. Centering her career as an important one in the
canon of American television writers reveals to us how the political aesthetics of the
African American theatre have extended into television. Through Kathleen McGhee-
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Anderson we can see how the canon of African American dramatic literature has not
acknowledged or fully considered its playwrights who-- through their work in African
American television-- have expanded the creative and social outlets for the exploration of
issues that have been traditionally explored in African American theatre.
Herman Gray and Peggy Phelan have each questioned and problematized the
belief in Black or female visual representation as a means to gaining greater cultural and
political power or as a means of securing a greater sense of national belonging.
170
Phelan
makes her point bluntly. She writes: “If representational visibility equals power, then
almost-naked young white women should be running Western culture” [sic] (10). Gray
echoes a similar theme regarding racial representation, questioning “…conventional
assumptions about recognition and visibility, especially assumptions about African
American investment in representation as route to African American membership in
national culture” (2005, 2). Centering Kathleen McGhee-Anderson’s own words,
however, provides us with a different articulation of this concern. As an artist and cultural
producer McGhee-Anderson complicates the conversation about representational
investments in important ways. She does not seek to abandon black representation as an
efficacious way to impact our cultural politics, but instead seeks to deepen the project the
representation. Her discourse opens up a space to make the “frustration of Black
representation” a more productive and progressive enterprise for cultural production and
scholarship.

170
See Gray, Cultural Moves: The Politics of Representation (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2005) and Peggy Phelan’s Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (New York: Routledge, 1993) for more
on their theorizations of the limits of visible representation as a means to securing social justice, power, and
cultural capital.
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I interviewed Kathleen McGhee-Anderson four times over the course of six
weeks at a restaurant in Marina del Rey, California. This is an unusual gift of time from a
busy television writer-producer and probably would not have occurred if the interview
request had been approached cold-- that is, without accruing cultural and professional
capital as a fellow television writer. Though some of the information shared with me
during our sessions was “off the record,” the ability to conduct this interview at all
illustrates and confirms the interdisciplinary value of maintaining a production identity
while conducting a production studies/performance studies research project. But first, in
the following examination of what McGhee-Anderson and I referred to as the “frustration
of the firsts” within Black politics and Black representation, I explore why Gray and
Phelan’s concerns about representational investments can be validated through a
consideration of the successful television career of Shonda Rhimes. I then examine why
Kathleen McGhee-Anderson’s work and career suggest that we continue to invest and
investigate black representation as a road towards greater political power and societal
equanimity.
“First Negro” Narratives
On December 7, 2011 the Hollywood Reporter released its annual “Top 100
Women in Entertainment Power List.” After the by now obligatory (and deserved) nod to
media mogul, actress, and television personality Oprah Winfrey, the next African
American woman to appear on the list was Shonda Rhimes, a television writer-executive
producer and “showrunner” of several successful primetime dramas. After listing her
numerous dramatic shows currently on the air (Grey’s Anatomy, Private Practice,
Scandal) the profile of Ms. Rhimes described her, erroneously, as "…the first ever black
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female showrunner in television..." While Ms. Rhimes is indeed an unprecedented
presence in television and her multiple achievements in television are, without question,
historic, this article, through the promotion of Rhimes’ exceptionalism, exemplifies the
larger erasure of the history of black women’s achievements in primetime television.
Shonda Rhimes has inarguably become one the most important and successful
showrunners of any race and ethnicity to ever work in television. The fact remains,
however, that she is far from the first black female showrunner in primetime television,
even if we exclude comedies and only consider drama series showrunners.
I know this because I have worked for at least two or three black female
showrunners. I have also had the privilege of meeting quite a few others. Still, this isn’t
the first time Shonda Rhimes or occasionally, prior to Ms. Rhimes, television writer-
producer Mara Brock Akil has been referred to as the first black female showrunner or
show creator to run a “successful” show. Clearly two separate people can’t be the first--
and even if one of them was “the first,” they can’t both be the first.
171
I am not contesting
the accolades that flow to Ms. Rhimes or any other working African American writer in
Hollywood. Many of these writers have been my colleagues in the past and will be in the
future. Successful, working Black writers are not often spotlighted within the
entertainment industry as excellent writers and producer. The magnitude of Rhimes’ and
Brock Akil’s success is stunning and unprecedented in many ways. The numbers are too
small to ever complain about the fact that within the last decade two or three writers seem
to have moved beyond the daily reality of most television writers-- simply procuring

171
For an example of an earlier references that erases the history of Black, female primetime television
showrunners by describing Shonda Rhimes as “the first” see Television Week, “Creating a Mix in the TV
Industry; McPherson's Dedication to Multicultural Participation Earns Televisionary Award: Special
Report: Diversity in TV” (August 15, 2005).
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work on a consistent basis-- and have broken through to the upper echelons of the
cultural producers who drive the television industry.
172

Still, the television industry seems to remain invested in recycling these “first
Negro” narratives of Black achievement as a way of celebrating their racial
progressiveness. Rhimes has been rightfully celebrated for presenting shows that embrace
multicultural casting, but often more critical voices argue that her shows are
fundamentally racially ambivalent.
173
Her first show, Grey’s Anatomy, is, in the words of
Rhimes, “about fairy tales.”
174
It is, however, a modern day fairy tale that embraces a
gender discourse while largely avoiding meaningful discourses about race or class.
Grey’s Anatomy is an enjoyably “aspirational” show, but it is also a post-racial fairy tale
that fails to acknowledge the implications of the multicultural images it presents. Rhimes
has been celebrated for her hiring of Black and minority actors but she has also been
(privately) critiqued for her perceived thin record in hiring African American writers and

172
Mara Brock Akil has enjoyed unprecedented success in Black centered sitcoms. She is the first African
American to create and executive produce two comedy shows simultaneously, and she has had at least one
show on the air for almost ten years straight, starting with Girlfriends (2001-2008) and then The Game
(2006-2009 on The CW network and resurrected on BET in 2011 where it continues to air). Since 2010,
however Shonda Rhimes has eclipsed the exalted rank of the television showrunner and has joined an
exclusive club of writers who are also considered mogul. This short list includes writers such as JJ Abrams,
David E. Kelley, Steven Bochco, and John Wells (all of whom are white men). Rhimes has rather quickly
become a mogul, a television producer with no less than three primetime dramas on the air or in production
that bear her name as the creator and/or executive producer. In 2010-11 these shows included: Grey’s
Anatomy, Private Practice, and Off the Map (all on ABC). In 2011-12, Off the Map was cancelled, but
Rhimes was able to replace it with another show, Scandal. She currently has no less than three new pilots in
contention for the 2012-13 television season. This gives Rhimes the unprecedented possibility of having as
many as six primetime dramas on the air in a single season.
173
See Amy Long’s “Diagnosing Drama: Grey's Anatomy, Blind Casting, and the Politics of
Representation,” The Journal of Popular Culture 44, no. 5 (October 2011), 1067-1084; Also see John
Caldwell’s interview of television writer and scholar Felicia Henderson in Production Studies: Cultural
Studies of Media Industries (New York: Routledge 2009), 224-230.
174
Buchman, Eric. ‘‘Some Thoughts on Meredith, Derek and Faith . . .’’ Grey Matter (August 3, 2006).
Accessed October 1, 2011 at http://www.greyswriters.com/2006/08/some_thoughts_o.html.
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especially African American male writers.
175
The combination of these two dynamics--
the multicultural racelessness of her shows and the perception that she has not taken
advantage of her unprecedented influence to hire and mentor more minority writers on
her mainstream dramas-- suggests that Rhimes’ success as a talented writer who is also
an African American woman is both a contained success and a missed opportunity for
institutional advancement. These dynamics suggest that, at best, the progressive power of
her success is constrained by a super-narrative of individual exceptionalism. As such, it
has had little structural impact on television writer business practices. At worst, it allows
mass media power brokers to consider Rhimes’ success “a fluke”-- which oddly
diminishes her achievements and thereby allows the marginalization of the majority of
Black television writers to continue unabated. In other words, her success as a writer is
exceptional, but her success as a Black woman writer is exceptionalized. An embrace of
multi-cultural actors without an equal embrace of Black and multicultural writers renders
her success an isolated and conditional one. As E. Patrick Johnson observes “The black
who has been accepted into the elite circle of whiteness is expected to bracket the
blackness that proffered his or her (temporary) invitation to the welcome table of
whiteness…” (9). In these instances, Patricia Williams suggests, “You need two chairs at
the table, one for you, one for your blackness.”
176

175
Each show contains between 8 to 10 writers and writing staffs tend to have a high turnover rate.
According to Hollywood information website IMDB.com, Rhimes’ shows (Grey’s Anatomy, Private
Practice, Off the Map, and Scandal) have employed between 50-65 writers. Of that number, and as of this
writing in April 2012, three of those writers have been African American: one African American female on
Grey’s Anatomy and two African American females on Private Practice. And recently, one African
American male writing intern was hired on Private Practice.
176
See Patricia J. Williams’ Seeing Through a Color Blind Future: The Paradox of Race (New York:
Noonday Press, 1997), 27; Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity by E.
Patrick Johnson (Durham: Duke University Press 2003); and Amy Long’s “Diagnosing Drama: Grey's
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It must be noted, however, that the perceived failure of one show runner to hire
more Black writers flirts with the notion of a pre-existing obligation to a monolithic or
essential Blackness and an obligation to a natal community, real or imagined. One person
cannot possibly do everything. The issue, then, is not so much the actual or perceived
actions or non-actions of Ms. Rhimes, but instead the histories, practices, and pressure
points that exist within television. It is these histories and practices that produce the
frustrated desires of artists and cultural critics who hoped to see an institutional follow up
to Rhimes’ mainstream success. It is understandable and logical why such artists and
critics would hope that television networks, who are known to copy key elements of their
rival networks’ most successful shows, would have embraced more representations of
Blackness in front of and behind the camera. But it is also television’s history of behind-
the-scenes representational practices that suggest why those expectations remain
unfulfilled. The arena of television production is a deeply political space and only
became more so since the NAACP renewed its focus on television in 1999. Thus, when
African American writer-producers enter this space, they become entangled in a
politicized history of the medium and a history of those cultural producers who “came
before” their arrival.
How the politicization of television impacts African American writers is
complex. Rhimes occupies a powerful position as seen through her ability to hire
numerous actors of color. However, her more cautious pace in hiring Black writers who
could readily participate in the writers’ room-- the creative power seats of television--

Anatomy, Blind Casting, and the Politics of Representation,” The Journal of Popular Culture 44, no. 5
(October 2011), 1067-1084.
254

could be read as a stark example of what I have illustrated throughout this project: the
multiple ways that Blackness is circumscribed and limited in mass media, even when a
Black cultural producer gains access and “control.” In other words, if Shonda Rhimes,
with the millions of dollars her work has earned for television, can’t get more Black
writers hired, then who can? It looks like a simple proposition, but perhaps it is not.
Therefore, I would argue that the public and private discourse around Rhimes’ ability to
craft Grey’s Anatomy’s post racial and romantic fairy tales is not about Rhimes at all.
Instead, it is an argument about the ability of Black cultural producers to reshape to the
politics of representation. Ms. Rhimes’ success appears to make an attempt to do just this.
Therefore the question arises as to whether this reshaping of representation through an
embrace of post-raciality is indeed the road to greater Black writer-producer
representation and power in the upper echelons of television production. Ms. Rhimes
success suggests a cultural argument that is publicly grappling with Patricia Williams’
assertion that perhaps we really do need “two chairs at the table,” one for you and one for
your blackness.
Consequently, the erroneous declaration that Rhimes is the first African
American woman drama showrunner becomes a serious matter. It was a de-politicized
celebration that minimizes the history of Black cultural struggle in television and mass
media. In other words, it is not a celebration at all. The declaration erases, disavows, and
dismisses as unimportant the work of Black female television writer-producers who had
previously achieved showrunner status, particularly in primetime dramas. What such
articles are really saying is that Shonda Rhimes is the first black female showrunner in
television “important” enough to acknowledge. Indeed, those outside the industry may
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find it difficult to identify African American women showrunners, but industry insiders
are familiar with the fact that Black women showrunners exist. It is not secret
information. In comedy, in addition to Brock Akil, writer-executive producers such as
Yvette Lee Bowser, Winifred Hervey, Meg DeLoatch, Eunetta Boone, Sara Finney-
Johnson, and Vida Spears have succeeded as showrunners. The list is noticeably shorter
in drama, but in addition to Rhimes, Felicia Henderson, Samantha Corbin, and Pam
Veasey are African American women who have either created their own shows and/or
achieved the position of executive producer and showrunner. Others, such as Judith
McCreary, Dee Harris-Lawrence, and Janine Sherman-Barrois have served in high-
ranking positions on television dramas as either co-executive producers or executive
producers. They, too, are considered well positioned to achieve the rank of showrunner.
While one could debate the larger impact of any television writer’s work as well as the
current total absence of African American men among television drama showrunners,
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those debates are quite separate from the fact that almost all of the women listed above
have achieved the rank of showrunner, in many cases before Rhimes’ Grey’s Anatomy
first aired in March 2005.
178

177
It is believed, as of this writing in early 2012, that the last African American male television writer-
executive producer to serve as a television showrunner on a network drama series was the respected writer
Laurence Andries, who served as executive producer and showrunner for NBC’s “Medical Investigation”
series at the start of the 2004 season. He was, however, removed from the position before the show
completed its initial order of thirteen episodes.
178
The list I supplied here is by no means exhaustive and while my focus here is on Black women
television writers who achieved showrunner status and on the important role of Kathleen McGhee-
Anderson’s body of work in particular, I would be remiss if I did not at least point out pioneering Black
television writers such as Judi Ann Mason, a head writer of the NBC daytime serial “Generations”,
Christine Houston (227, Punky Brewster), and Helen Thompson, the first Black member of the Writers
Guild of America in 1953. See Tina Andrew’s “Tribute: And the People Shall Know Thy Name, Judi Ann
Mason 1955-2009” in Written By: The Magazine of the Writers Guild of America, West 13, no. 5
(August/September 2009), 8–11.
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Kathleen McGhee-Anderson is another African American woman and writing
warrior who has battled the racial and gender biases of the television industry and who
has achieved the position of executive producer and television showrunner.
179
It is in the
consideration of her work and career where the danger of an erroneous comment in a
listing of “powerful women in entertainment” becomes starkly visible. McGhee-
Anderson's creative work as a high ranking writer- producer and/or executive
producer/showrunner on shows such as Fox’s South Central, Lifetime’s Any Day Now,
Showtime’s Soul Food, and ABC Family’s Lincoln Heights provides an exemplary case
for illustrating the challenge of producing a non-comic blackness within television. Her
work thus far suggests the possibilities and the limits in current and recent mass media
landscapes. Her trajectory opens up a space for the examination of the importance of the
theatrical traditions of Black performance in television.
180
As I will later argue, her career
also serves as an example of the under examined link that exists between African
American dramatic literature and African American television. Her work offers a lens

179
My writer as warrior characterization may feel like a reach at best and an uncritical celebration at worst.
To be sure my use of this formulation here is purposeful, if not provocative. It is also Foucauldian, in that I
have argued throughout this project the multiple ways that television production is a political process. Thus,
if “politics is war by other means,” as Foucault states in The History of Sexuality, Volume 1, (p. 93) then it
is not such a reach to describe Black television writers as embattled. It is also indicative of how Black
writers in television and film see the scope and importance of their ability to work in Hollywood. It is a
ground level formulation that clearly theorizes cultural production as a contested field and process. The TV
writer as warrior articulation is also inspired by Tina Andrews, an accomplished screenwriter herself, who
describes Judi Ann Mason as a “peaceful warrior” in the entertainment industry. “Peaceful warrior” is a
term I see as related to my description of McGhee-Anderson’s television work as that of an “emotional
activist.”
180
The Black American theatrical tradition, as I define it here, has to do with the struggle over what should
be the primary purpose of a vibrant African American theatre. WEB Dubois famously articulated that a
Black theatre must be for us, by us, and near us. Alain Locke, on the other hand, advocated for a Black
theatre that was to be judged only on its aesthetics and the positing of a theory that argued that the best use
of Africa-American theatre would be to literally stage what we might now call a kind of post-Blackness.
This interplay between presenting a positive representation “of us” and “to us” as well as the desire to
move beyond the bifurcated frame of positive and negative representations can be sensed in McGhee-
Anderson’s body of work in theatre and in television.
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into the aspirations of African American television writing and how it links the African
American dramatic literary canon.
The recurring threat of erasure of Kathleen McGhee-Anderson's presence and
ongoing career in television and theatre, as well as that of other Black television writer-
producers, is particularly problematic. First, such writers are habitually not counted by
their industry as powerful. Even more important, such instances of erasure contribute to a
marginalization, re-writing, and epistemological severance of the Black woman from the
history of mass media cultural production without any context of the efforts that helped to
shape the conditions of her career possibilities. The celebration of Rhimes rightfully
compliments her immense talent but at the same time it actually exceptionalizes her to the
point where it becomes a constraint to all those who might follow after her. Alternatively,
this celebration of Rhimes as the ultimate exception to the history of marginalized Black
television writers shows us how dangerous a presentation of “the post-racial” can be.
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This historical exclusion and epistemological erasure forms the foundational motivation
for my intervention here. It leads me to consider how a writer-producer such as McGhee-
Anderson, who first emerges prior to Rhimes’ moment in the history of African
American writers in the television industry, has contributed to a kind of collective Jackie
Robinson success in television, where the success of some African American writers
helps to open doors for others, rather than shut them.

181
Rhimes’ Grey’s Anatomy has been celebrated as a post-racial show that just happens to be created by a
Black woman. But as a further example of what I mean here, I point out the dangers of this post-racial
discourse in the description of her shows’ success. Rhimes, in her ascension to uber producer has, in
preparation for the 2012-13 television season chosen to mentor and develop three television drama pilots.
Those three pilots are written by three white female writers and importantly, they do not appear at the script
stage to follow in the mold of Rhimes’ successes, which at least presents a multicultural universe via its
casting. Rhimes success is presented as “post-Black”. Her ability (for I cannot speak to her desire and do
not wish to speculate on what I cannot know) to advocate for additional Black writers to become show
creators has yet to be seen.
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Kathleen McGhee-Anderson has written for numerous television comedies,
among them The Cosby Show, Amen, Webster, Benson, 227, and South Central. She is
primarily known, however, as a member of the first wave of African American television
drama writers-- one who has managed to sustain a still active and thriving career not only
as a writer, but as a Black cultural producer openly invested in the representation of
Blackness and the exploration of a common humanity across a multiplicity of genres.
Though African American writers have only within the last ten to fifteen years been
consistently hired to write for primetime dramas, McGhee-Anderson made some initial,
groundbreaking strides in this arena by winning her first television writing job on
Michael Landon’s American frontier drama The Little House on the Prairie. She has also
written for top-rated network dramas such as Touched by An Angel. More recently, she
served as an executive consultant, writer-executive producer, showrunner, and/or
developer of contemporary dramas such as Any Day Now (Lifetime), Soul Food
(Showtime) and Lincoln Heights (ABC Family). In addition, she has written films such as
The Color of Courage (Studios USA) and Sunset Park (Tri-Star).
Despite her success in television, however, I want to emphasize the fact that
McGhee-Anderson readily and enthusiastically identifies herself as most at home in the
theatre and as first and foremost, a playwright.
182
Her plays often use deceptively small
personal stories as points of entry into staging large, unwieldy social and historical issues.
For example, her play Oak and Ivy addresses race and gender through an imaginative
treatise on the lives and marriage of African American poets Paul Laurence Dunbar and

182
See a 2004 interview with Kathleen McGhee-Anderson with her undergraduate institution, Spelman
College, at http://thestudyofracialism.org/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=2749. Accessed February 18, 2010.
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Alice Dunbar-Nelson. An original member of the Mark Taper Forum’s Blacksmyths
writer lab in Los Angeles, McGhee-Anderson’s plays have been performed in New York
and in regional theatres across the U.S. She would eventually go on to enjoy a theatrical
home for several years at two theatres devoted to African American communities: the
Crossroads Theater in New Brunswick, New Jersey, a former LORT theatre;
183
and the
Vineyard Playhouse in the historically African American Oak Bluffs section of Martha’s
Vineyard, Massachsetts.
McGhee-Anderson’s most produced works include the popular Oak and Ivy;
Mothers, a commission by Bill Cosby that focuses on the relationship in a Chicago
apartment building between a Japanese woman and a white Appalachian woman, both of
whom are raising Black teenage daughters; and Venice, an ambitious play that
interrogates the legacies of the Vietnam war through the intertwining stories of a white
family and black family struggling with racial tolerance in Southern California. More
recently, she has authored and received productions of her plays Quindaro, a large canvas
play that tells the story of the founding of a town in Missouri that figured prominently in
the history of the Civil War and the Underground Railroad; The Irresistible Death Club,
which combines the spirits of singer Maria Callas, writer Zora Neale Hurston, artist Frida
Kahlo, and playwright Lillian Hellman as they travel to Machu Picchu for an other-
worldly tour; Five Mojo Secrets, about a Black couple’s loss of love and divorce; and the

183
A LORT theatre is a designated member of the League of Resident Theatres. Together the 74 LORT
associated theatres form a national chain of prestigious, professional American theatres. In terms of
institutional exposure, LORT theatres, as non-profits, rank just below Broadway and established off-
Broadway companies in New York. These theatres often develop new plays and productions for eventual
Broadway engagements. Crossroads Theater was, for a significant amount of time, the only African
American focused LORT theatre and played a prominent role in the infamous argument made by August
Wilson in his speech The Ground on Which I Stand, in which he basically called for more theatres like
Crossroads, theatres that were dedicated to presenting plays written by Black playwrights. See Wilson’s
The Ground on Which I Stand (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2000) and www.LORT.org.
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upcoming A Shift in Gravity, which will be produced by Philadelphia’s The Bushfire
Theatre, which highlights the work of African American playwrights.
McGhee-Anderson’s career is a rare amalgamation for a writer of any race or
gender and represents an investment by several African American theatres in her artistry.
Therefore, in television-- that “vast wasteland” which “only” seeks to entertain-- it is not
surprising that she has carved out something of a specialty. She has become an expert in
the subversive television drama: that is, television that is entertaining and accessible, but
actually carries a deeper, more political meaning, if the viewer cares to discover this
content. Some of the dramas in which McGhee-Anderson chose to work display this
depth. Any Day Now on the Lifetime network was a series set in the South during both
the contemporary and Civil Rights eras. It revolved around the long-term friendship
between a Black professional woman and a white female homemaker. Soul Food
(Showtime) concerned an African American family’s struggles to live and prosper in the
city after their guiding matriarch suddenly dies. Lincoln Heights was set in an interracial
community in a fictional inner city. These brief summaries allow us to see a common
theme of a literary investment in presentations of Blackness and explorations of social
justice. McGhee-Anderson’s theatre work and television credits align in powerful ways,
suggesting that her body of work is a conscious attempt to speak to the core social issues
of American citizenship and Black representation. Her work takes a crucial step toward
reconciling the historical question at the center of African American drama: Is Black
drama for entertainment or is it for political purposes and representative uplift?
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A

184
For more on the historical arguments of the purpose of African American theatre and drama, as
articulated by W.E.B. DuBois and Alain Locke, see Samuel Hay’s African American Theatre: A Historical
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simple comparison of the topics of McGhee-Anderson’s theatre and television work
shows us that she answers “yes” to both sides of the “Black theatre question” by
illuminating the false choice of that binary through her work in television.
An examination of Kathleen McGhee-Anderson’s television career reveals an
artist constantly and repeatedly working on shows that allowed her to infuse into her
television work the set of social concerns that she has staged in her theatre career. On the
one hand many creative and academic writers do this-- articulate, elaborate, and refine
themes that have moved or impacted their lives in some profound way. But, as I have
argued, writing for television, particularly writing while Black about Blackness, is to
write for an employer that is hostile to anything that might threaten corporate profits. Yet
to write for television is also to work for an employer that is willing to appropriate the
style of Blackness, as long as the politics of Blackness remain in the background.
McGhee-Anderson has openly worked to break images and craft progressive television
narratives of Blackness that push against easy tropes that reduce representation to
comparisons of “positive” vs. “negative” Black images. Her rare ability to straddle
successfully both the television and professional theatre worlds, and her regard for the
lineage of her family's important, historic, and activist struggles around issues of housing
and neighborhood integration in Detroit
185
suggest that McGhee-Anderson's career has
quietly functioned within mass media as an overlooked example of artistic activism.

and Critical Analysis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) and Errol Hill and James Vernon
Hatch’s A History of African American Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
185
Figure 2, seen below, encapsulates the McGhee family’s role in the Supreme Court’s striking down of
restricted housing covenants in Detroit, St. Louis, and all across the United States. Restricted covenants
were clauses written into housing deeds that forbade non-whites, specifically Blacks and Jews, from
owning or occupying houses in “white” neighborhoods. As McGhee-Anderson relates later in this chapter,
her grandparents, at great personal risk, refused to abide by the restricted covenant in the deed of their
home on the “white side” of Detroit’s Tireman Avenue. Financially drained after losing their battle at the
262

A Lineage of Activism: The McGhee Family and Detroit

Michigan State Historic Marker in front of the McGhee Home
186

(Figure 2)
Kathleen McGhee-Anderson’s work, career, and artistic activism might also be
described as a kind of “emotional activism.”
187
I want to carefully articulate my use and

local and state levels, the NAACP and lawyer Thurgood Marshall then stepped in to litigate the case, which
eventually appeared before the Supreme Court. The McGhee v. Sipes case was eventually bundled with
similar cases, including the lead case Shelly v. Kramer. In a surprise 1948 verdict the Supreme Court
reversed their 1922 ruling and ruled that restricted covenants could not be enforced. See Reynolds Farley,
Sheldon Danziger, and Harry J. Holzer’s Detroit Divided (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2000), 152.
Also see http://www2.metrotimes.com/editorial/story.asp?id=4772. Accessed January 25, 2012.
186
This sign designates the Orsel McGhee House, the home of Kathleen McGhee-Anderson’s grandparents,
as a historic residence in the city of Detroit. It is also listed as a historic site in the State of Michigan for its
role in the abolishing of racially restricted housing covenants in Detroit and, as part of the Supreme Court’s
1948 Shelly v. Kramer decision, throughout the United States. This figure and more information can be
found at http://detroit1701.org/McGheeHome.html. Accessed January 25, 2012.
187
For more on emotion as a social form and the role and complexities of emotion in shaping individual
and collective bodies, see Sara Ahmed’s The Cultural Politics of Emotion (London: Routledge, 2004) and
Durkheim’s The Rules of the Sociological Method, trans. S.A. Solovay and J.H. Mueller (New York: The
263

meaning of the term “emotional activism,” especially as it relates to McGhee-Anderson, a
Black female cultural producer. Women television writers must often contend with
entertainment industry culture and practices that effectively restrict them and their work
to “soft” genres like primetime soap operas, family dramas, and romantic relationship
shows. In embracing a term such as emotional activism I risk reinscribing a problematic
“feminizing” connotation into the term.
188
But in taking on the term, both as a whole
(“emotional activism”) and in its individual components (“emotion” and “activism”), I
am attempting to de-link the term from an automatic juxtaposition that casts it as beneath
“rational thought.”
On the one hand I deploy emotion, as Sara Ahmed highlights, in the way that
sociologists and anthropologists such as Catherine A. Lutz and Lila Abu-Lughod, Simon
J. Williams, and Theodore Kemper have argued it should be viewed: not as a
psychological state but as a social and cultural practice (9). On the other hand, I do not
discard the individual connotations of the term, believing that together, and especially in
the arena of cultural production, emotional activism names something entirely different
than a description of anti-rationality. If to be active is associated with strength, and
emotion is associated with passion and creativity, then to view emotion as a critical
practice begins to move it from a state of irrationality to a tactic. I use the term to indicate
a subversive way to display strength and advocate for the issues close to an artist’s

Free Press, 1966); Catherine Lutz and Lila Abu-Lughod’s Language and the Politics of Emotion (London:
Cambridge University Press, 1990).
188
The feminization of emotion and affect has, at times, marginalized its use in the academy. It is a
feminization that echoes the traditional anti-theatrical prejudice of the academy that disregards the arts as a
less positivistic and scientific (and therefore less valuable) form of expression and knowledge production.
My use of the term then continues one of the underlying themes of this project in that it invokes the
collapsing of traditional meanings and uses and calls back to this dissertation’s first chapter “Storming
(Racial and Disciplinary) Barricades…”
264

intellectual heart. Emotional activism is a version of Jose Munoz’ “disidentification”:
taking on the connotations of “femininity” as a cloak in order to gain entrance into the
gendered and racially restricted space of television production, in order to do the
important work of influencing and constructing the narratives and images of mass media.
I argue McGhee-Anderson’s strategy is an artistic one that is based on invoking the
viewer’s empathy for a character, his/her situation, or his/her emotions.
Moreover, I embrace the term because McGhee-Anderson herself has gone on
record to critique and then embrace her (at one time) perceived “softness” as a writer. In
response to criticism that she’s a “soft writer” McGhee-Anderson recast the term as one
of strength and strategy. She countered in a 1999 Los Angeles Times interview about her
family history based film The Color of Courage: “Now I celebrate that softness… You
have to change inside before you can change anything outside. I think the real courage is
emotional courage. We’re different, and I celebrate our differences as a people, but I
believe that there is a commonality in our humanity. That’s what I strive to point out in
my work. It’s what I embrace.”
189
Hence, I see emotional activism as a viable attempt to
access the viewer’s emotions in the service of a cultural and social justice.
190

I view emotional activism as a cousin to the term artist-scholarship. This
became clear after considering McGhee-Anderson’s own description during our

189
Heffley, Lynne. “They Built a Home in Which All Could Live: In the Color of Courage Kathleen
McGhee-Anderson shares a family story that’s really a part of America’s story.” Los Angeles Times,
February 10, 1999. Accessed February 18, 2010 at
http://articles.latimes.com/1999/feb/10/entertainment/ca-6537.
190
Recently, and before her confirmation, Supreme Court Justice Sonya Sotomayor was accused of
practicing from the judicial bench what some termed “emotional activism”. In this case, the term was used
in an attempt to critique her perceived liberal leanings as a judicial activist and specifically, as a woman of
color who is not “neutral” and is irrationally swayed by empathy or in issuing her rulings. See
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/evolution-the-self/200906/sotomayors-empathy-will-it-lead-
emotional-activism-or-justice-mercy for more. Accessed January 26, 2012.
265

interviews of her position and relationship to her immediate family’s history of political
activism. During one of our first interview sessions, she stated: “I’m the emotional one in
a family of thinkers, a family of activists…” -- a sentiment that confirmed an earlier
description of her family as one in which “there was a mandate to work politically, to
raise controversial issues, and to fight. I was always expected to continue in that tradition
and in my own way, I think I have…”
191

Later, in that same interview, McGhee-Anderson made another statement that I
found compelling-- though at the time I didn’t quite know why. “My friends tell me that
I’m an iconoclast…” she said. Her choice of the term “iconoclast” so thematically
dovetailed with the goals and title of this project that I consider it one of those happy
accidents of fieldwork. The Oxford English Dictionary defines iconoclast as: 1. a
destroyer of sacred images, specifically. 2. One who attacks and seeks to overthrow
traditional or popular ideas and institutions. The 2012 edition of the Random House
Dictionary is more direct. It defines iconoclast as: 1. A breaker or destroyer of images.
Kathleen McGhee-Anderson is an exemplary image breaker and image maker. As a
television writer-producer she is committed to using her work to break stories that disrupt
hegemonic images. In the process, she is able to improvise new images (of Blackness).
Hers is an activism whose discursive reach extends from the theatre, to the television
writing room, and onto the cultural field that is our television screen.

191
Kathleen McGhee-Anderson, as quoted in an article by Michael P. Scasserra in “Kathleen McGhee-
Anderson: Categorical Denial” in American Theatre 10, no. 9 (September 1993), 45-46.
266

Kathleen McGhee-Anderson as Organic Intellectual
As a television writer, playwright, and cultural producer who is also a Spelman
College and Columbia University alumna, and as an honorary doctoral degree recipient
and former Howard University film professor, McGhee-Anderson carries many of the
markers of the traditional intellectual. However, the fact that her career is no longer
primarily located in academe, and that she is an enthusiastic heir to her family’s political
history, recasts her more accurately as an educated artist who is an organic intellectual in
the Gramscian sense.
192
Stuart Hall writes in his influential essay, Cultural Studies and its
Theoretical Legacies:
Gramsci's definition of intellectual work, which I think has always been
lodged somewhere close to the notion of cultural studies as a project, has
been his requirement that the "organic intellectual" must work on two fronts
at one and the same time…as Gramsci says, it is the job of the organic
intellectual to know more than the traditional intellectuals do: really know,
not just pretend to know, not just to have the facility of knowledge, but to
know deeply and profoundly… If you are in the game of hegemony you have
to be smarter than "them." Hence, there are no theoretical limits from which
cultural studies can turn back. But the second aspect is just as crucial: that
the organic intellectual cannot absolve himself or herself from the
responsibility of transmitting those ideas, that knowledge, through the
intellectual function, to those who do not belong, professionally, in the
intellectual class. And unless those two fronts are operating at the same time,
or at least unless those two ambitions are part of the project of cultural
studies, you can get enormous theoretical advance without any engagement
at the level of the political project… (Hall 1996, 267)

As a television writer-producer McGhee-Anderson, like all television practitioners, is an
entertainer in the business of entertainment. She also takes seriously Gramsci’s notion of
the “responsibility of transmitting ideas.” She is, therefore, an on the ground activist,

192
See Gramsci’s writings on his definition of the intellectual, the organic intellectual, and their role in
either maintaining or disrupting hegemony in The Antonio Gramsci Reader: Selected Writings 1916-1935,
ed. David Forgacs (New York: New York University Press, 2000). Also see Gramsci’s Selections from the
Prison Notebooks (New York: International Publishers Co., 1971).
267

image breaker and image maker of media, who places a premium on her role as a socially
engaged artist who is not “above” entertaining. Of course, behind most pleasures exist a
politics. Thus, the foci of McGhee-Anderson’s career meshes thematically with this
project. Her work is an implicit argument that activism within mass media around issues
of race and representation is an embodied, on the ground, time-sensitive practice. It is,
therefore, an "interdisciplinary activism" that willingly works with the master's tools (in
media) because it acknowledges the permanence and the pervasiveness of the media
apparatus. But McGhee-Anderson’s brand of emotional activism opens up the possibility
to further resist the hegemonic capacity of television, a hegemony that, as I have argued,
does the work of racial formation through the regulation of access to the television
writer’s room, and through the performances that take place within the writer’s room.
During our interviews McGhee-Anderson generously shared valuable and
delicate family archives with me. It was then that my initial interest and argument for
focusing on McGhee-Anderson’s career was confirmed. I more fully realized the depth
and the costs of her dual commitments. Her commitment to working as both a playwright
and a television writer-- and the sacrifices involved in bridging those two worlds
193
--
echoed the costs of being a television writer who aims to entertain while challenging her
audience by conducting a discourse about humanity and social justice through the prism
of blackness.

193
In “Kathleen McGhee-Anderson: Categorical Denial” by Michael P. Scaserra, McGhee-Anderson
speaks of a recurring anti-television bias she has encountered in the professional theatre world. She
explains that in the past theatre directors often resisted and distorted her work because she dared to make a
living by writing for television. Also see “Looking Both Ways” in American Theatre, July/August 2008
issue. The article interviews three established playwrights who also write for television and film. The
article has a defensive and explanatory tone. It can be accessed at
http://www.tcg.org/publications/at/julyaugust08/looking.cfm. Also, see Theresa Rebeck’s defense of
writing television to the theatre community: “Why I Write for Television” in American Theatre, 12, no. 10
(December 1995), 7.
268

The interviews began with a kaleidoscopic warm-up session-- a discussion that
covered the entertainment industry, Blackness, national politics, and notions of
meritocracy, performance, and impression management. I must admit to struggling to
decide whether or not to include any of this initial session. I could have chosen to tightly
edit the session or exclude it altogether, but ultimately I did not. Given television’s
contested history as the epitome of Adorno and Horkheimer’s “culture industry,” I chose
to present her words, even when the interview seemed to stray from the topic of
television or performance, in order to allow the reader a glimpse into the mind and wide
ranging intellectual interests of a television writer-producer such as McGhee-Anderson.
In many ways it is a sketch or a portrait of the television writer, and especially the
African American television writer, as an engaged artist. What follows below is an
attempt to allow her voice and self-reflexivity to speak critically to scholarly
communities.
Interview – The Warm Up: On Blackness, Television, Politics
AS: I’m recording some of this because I can’t write as fast as you and I can talk. We’ve
talked “for real” before and we just go – and I can’t write that fast! (Laughter from
Kathleen)
KMA: We can! And you might take a note that I want to go back to [reference]!
AS: We’ve talked on and off about “how to be” when you work in this industry, and the
perceptions that go along with being Black, and how you have to “manage” that... So I’ll
start generally with the idea of performance in what we do… For example, I have
discovered that when you’re an educated Black guy here you have to watch out for
certain perceptions... It’s not nearly to the level that you’ve experienced and as a woman
I’m sure but--
KMA: You mean… the critique of being sentimental, melodramatic, and soft?
AS: Yes. I think it has something to do with being educated and coming off as educated
and therefore inauthentic because Black authenticity, however that’s defined, is almost
like a “hard” commodity. Whatever it is, it’s not “soft.” And so some people, some Black
people in the industry will go “the other way”. Like I’ve seen some people in town who
269

say they’re writers, who come off like maybe they could be writers – or they could easily
be confused with somebody hanging on a corner chillin’. And sometimes I notice that
they then go to work on “gritty” TV shows. Gritty shows that I think put forth a lot of
uncomplicated stereotypes about “real” Black people or seem to say “this is how it really
is on the streets…” I see some people playing into that…
KMA: This industry can attract a certain kind of person who is drawn to it because of the
veneer and wanting to be in the “Hollywood lifestyle”… And they analyze how they can
fit in creatively. If they’re not drawn to acting or one of the specific design specialties--
which means that you have to have some kind of artistic ability-- like editing, production
design, lighting, those technical aspects… I think for some people there may be the allure
that writing can give them an entrée because it’s “so easy to write,” many people believe,
right? It’s “just so easy to write” so they don’t come at it from a writer’s point of view,
they have a calculated point of view, thinking “how can I fit in and make all that money.”
AS: I once heard a showrunner on a panel say they don’t want to hire someone who just
wants to be in “show business”. They said they want to hire someone who is a writer who
wants to work in show business--
KMA: I agree with that. Even more so, I think that those of us who want to live a creative
life, in show business-- that’s the definition of the person I want to work with. Because
we have a need to express ourselves creatively, to say something, and you can do that in
this industry and get paid for it. But the most important thing is that you are in service to
your creativity-- which you could do some place else and not get paid the same.
AS: That’s what makes it attractive?
KMA: That’s what makes it attractive but also the whole idea that you are in show
business, not necessarily the medium itself.
AS: You mean that you can “say” you’re in show business?
KMA: Yes. That you’re a “star” in some way or associated with the stars. You’re in the
movies or even more so now, in television… Everybody wants to be in television. Just
this week alone a friend called me up to tell that her piano teacher on the east coast is
going to call me up because she has story ideas for television that she thinks I will want
to develop with her. A piano teacher?
And then a woman I met at a beauty shop apologized to me recently because “she forgot
her tapes” -- she had mentioned to me once that she had taped her whole life story and
thought it may be something I would want to write. She thought I should write her life
story, and so she apologized for forgetting her tapes.
AS: I’m sure you’re like “that’s okay that you forgot those tapes.” But it brings up the
point. A lot of people are trying to get inside that TV box, and a lot of people will be
whoever they need to be to do it… I think it (the desire to work in entertainment and
writing for television) has to do with many people thinking of Hollywood as a pop
cultural lottery.
270

KMA: That’s a great way of putting it.
AS: So anybody and everybody can participate. And there are just enough stories put out
there, true or untrue, to keep the fantasy alive. It’s what keeps people, every day, coming
from all over and getting off the bus in Los Angeles.
KMA: It’s exacerbated by reality TV culture where anybody’s story is worthy of a
television series. Anybody! Which means nobody’s story is worthy. And then, it’s funny,
my mother said something interesting the other day. She said “I think this whole pundit
culture has encouraged people to go crazy and shoot folks.”
AS: Right. Talking heads on television. Powerful. The power of television?
KMA: Right. Because… what’s this new story, a person in an airplane… flew their plane
into the IRS building in Austin? Because they were mad--
AS: Yes. I have friends in Austin, I called them yesterday because they protest stuff all
the time. I called them and said “You weren’t protesting at the IRS yesterday were you?”
(Laughter) They were okay and I said right out “Good. Cause your wife is Pakistani and
you’re Mexican-American and they will arrest you two real fast.”
KMA: And wasn’t there this Harvard educated professor who shot up a bunch of officials
or something?
AS: I heard about that. She was denied tenure, and they were meeting on her appeal and
she showed up, and she was like “Deny me tenure. No, I’m going to deny you life.” And
killed three people in her department!
KMA: Well, you know what? It’s a sense of entitlement. Like we’re supposed to get
everything we want in life. Absolutely not! Life is not fair. We’re not going to get it all.
And you have to be good with that… That equal opportunity thing is sort of being
skewed and co-opted. Believing that everyone is going to get equal dispensation-- it’s
never been that way. Ever. How can it be? Even though this is supposed to be a culture
based on meritorious promotion.
AS: That’s what been difficult, I think, for Black people to accept. What’s ironic is I
think that Black people believe more in meritocracy than just about anybody, and in the
idea of it, because that’s all we have to fight with… the idea that if I do well, then I’ll be
rewarded… I think it’s hard to realize that being excellent may put you in the game, but
that there are still some other systems going on that is difficult for us as individuals to
have access to. Of course, some do get that access…
I’ve thought on the merit question, the Pew Foundation recently came out with their
survey that revealed that Black people on the lower rungs of the socio-economic status
ladder believe more in the American dream than upper middle class Blacks. What I think
that says is that as you get “closer” you realize that it’s not all about where you went to
school and all of that... Bill Cosby found that out right, when he tried to buy NBC. Even
though he had the money and it was a good deal, they were like “No, you can’t have
this…”
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KMA: Yes, as Paul Mooney says, he had that “wake up” call.
194
But Obama didn’t have
it, not yet. So now we must re-calibrate people’s ideas of “how far” can they can go and
we can go. He’s dispelled that notion that you couldn’t reach the top politically and he
did it based on his optimism… Barack Obama got elected because of his equilibrium and
his optimism. I think that’s what he promised he’d give us. He has to continue to give us
that. He’s like Churchill. I’ve been thinking about Churchill a lot lately. He led that
country to victory in Europe during the darkest time and he did it by his leadership and
his ability to make people believe that everything was going to be okay. Churchill was
eternally optimistic… because if you go dark on it (the country, when it’s suffering) there
won’t be any hope.
AS: There’s a tendency to want to say about Obama, that he’s all talk and that’s all he
is—
KMA: That’s an easy criticism. And it’s an attempt to detract from his brilliance. And it’s
what Sarah Palin says. She’s not an eloquent or deep thinker, because she can’t think and
articulate. Those are not her best qualities…
AS: She’s an interesting performer though. A manipulator who plays on fears.
KMA: Which is where the pundits and especially the shock jocks come in, too. They’re
playing on the idea of “poor, disenfranchised white people”-- look what these people are
taking from you… Everything’s a contest, some kind of television show…
Interview – Activism and the McGhee Family
KMA: My dad was a race man. Race was part of the conversation over the dinner table
every day.
AS: What did that mean to you when you realized that you were growing up in a family
that was purposefully, it seems, trying to raise you up in a certain way-- or was it
something that just always seemed to be there.

194
Mooney, Paul. Race, 1993, CD; Also see Mooney’s Black is the New White (New York: Gallery Books,
2010).
272

Minnie and D. Orsel McGhee (photo: Detroit Free Press)
195

(Figure 3)
KMA: It was when the Civil rights era started. And my mother was one of the founding
members of the Congress for Racial Equality, for CORE, in Detroit. She started that
chapter with her comrades. But the ideology that was accepted in our family was
considered radical by my friends’ parents--
AS: Were these Black or white parents?
KMA: I didn’t have any white friends (growing up). And where we grew up African
Americans back then were afraid to even say the name “Malcolm X”.

195
This photo appeared in the Detroit Free Press article, “Orsel McGhee’s Quiet Fight opened Doors for
Millions” by Neal Shine on January 29, 1984. A copy of the article was supplied to me by Kathleen
McGhee-Anderson from the McGhee Family Archives. Photo can also be accessed at Historic Images:
Original Photos from the Past at http://stores.ebay.com/historicimages-store. Accessed January 25, 2012.
273

AS: You know what’s really interesting about my generation and those after-- there is
this idea about Civil Rights that everybody was doing it and everybody Black was
involved.
KMA: You know that really needs to be addressed and dispelled, because you’ve really
got to be able to understand history in order to move forward. It’s a popular notion now
that African Americans back then had an elevated consciousness-- but we have to
continue elevating our consciousness with every step. There have to be forerunners
always, really pushing forward with new ideas about how we can really continue to
progress. And back then the Civil Rights struggle was only embraced by a small minority
of African Americans in general, back in the late 60s, even the early 70s.
I remember when I was one of the student radicals in the building that was taken over, at
the Atlanta University Center. There may have been twenty or thirty of us, maybe thirty
of us at the most, in that building. It was the administration building. The student body
from every single one of those colleges around there came and circled that building at
night, with the twenty or thirty of us inside, with torches, trying to pull us out of there!
All because we were trying to change what had been status quo in the Atlanta University
Center. I looked out over the second floor and there were waves of other students who
wanted to yank us out and really just pummel us and make sure we were taken out of the
university system.
AS: What were you trying to do?
KMA: One thing, which was really big, is we were trying to get a Black curriculum!
AS: Black studies? At a Black college?
KMA: (laughter) The audacity of us, right?! There was a lot of hatred… When I was a
freshman at Spelman I went down with this long, curly hair and in the middle of my
freshman year I cut it all off and got an Afro. With the help of every chemical I could
find to make my hair as big as Kathleen Cleaver’s!
AS: You went the other way, with the chemicals!
KMA: And the women in Atlanta who were classmates and other girls said “why would
Kathleen… do this to herself?
AS: She went down there and went crazy!
KMA: (laughter) My brother and I came home for Christmas and we’re sitting there
together in the living room, and my Afro was as big as his Afro. He went to Lincoln
University in Pennsylvania… where Langston Hughes went to college and where all the
heads of African nations went to college here… But no, the majority of African
Americans were intimidated by the ideology that was being espoused by the Black Power
movement especially… You know, it’s funny. When I was in elementary school I didn’t
fit the image that African Americans had of what a Black person should look like in
general.
274

AS: Did you get grief for that?
KMA: There was this love-hate thing going on. Some of my detractors confronted me
one day and said “You’re not really a Negro.” The pain this caused me, having come
from a family where pride in who we were was so paramount, it was the central issue--
So for someone to say that you weren’t really Black wounded me to the core. And I ran
home in tears, thinking… “What can I do to prove…?”
This was all my personal pain, I didn’t disclose it to my parents-- and I remembered that
my parents had bought me a membership in the NAACP. I had a little cardboard NAACP
card, it was all tattered and card board, and I found that damn card. I took it school,
marched up to these detractors and I pretty much said “Look, I am a card carrying
member of the NAACP! Don’t tell me!” Of course, it was elementary school, and no one
knew what the NAACP was but there was my name, and it said National Association for
the Advancement of Colored People. They were like, “she’s got the card…!” I will never
forget. That was my card, and I was very grateful to have it…
Interview – The McGhee Family and Fighting for the Right to a Black Home
KMA: …we went to my grandmother’s home every Sunday for dinner. They were the
ones who fought the fight. Brought the case. The Sipes.
AS: Sipes? S-I-P-E-S?
KMA: Yes. So I remember hearing about what had happened, but the part that was really
interesting from a story telling point of view, because I’ve always been a storyteller, a
teller of stories… is that the whole neighborhood that my grandparents had lived in at the
time… the whole time was a black neighborhood in the 50s and 60s. And yet next door to
my grandparents was a white family. And we would say “Hi. How are you, Mr. and Mrs.
Sipes!” Then it stuck. And I started putting two and two together. Wasn’t the name of this
case you all were involved in named Sipes. They were fighting you. What the hell are
they still doing here? Nobody else white lives here. And that intrigued me…
275

The Historic McGhee House, 4626 Seebaldt in Detroit, Michigan
196

(Figure 4)
KMA (con’t.): That also was something that made me think a little bit about racial
relations in a real deep way. These white people hated my family so much they put them
through grief for four fucking years. My grandmother had to carry a gun in her purse--
AS: Really. Wow. She was the original Madea!
197

196
Accessed at http://www.ebay.com/itm/1981-Press-Photo-Minnie-Sims-McGhee-house-controversy-
/250850409996?_trksid=p4340.m263&_trkparms=algo%3DSIC%26its%3DI%252BC%26itu%3DUCI%25
2BIA%252BUA%252BFICS%252BUFI%26otn%3D15%26pmod%3D250850409936%26ps%3D63%26cl
kid%3D6052757056288167191 on January 26, 2012.
197
Madea is the popular character played by African American actor-writer-director-mogul Tyler Perry.
The character appears in several of Perry’s plays and films. Perry, who is over six feet tall, crosses genders
to play the elderly but comically aggressive Madea, a grandmother who always carries a loaded handgun in
her purse and often threatens to use it on her enemies— or anyone who disagrees with her or owes her
276

KMA: Right! She was! (Laughter)
AS: It was that deep. These restricted covenants?
KMA: Well, when they moved into the house they legally couldn’t live in the house--
and white people didn’t want them living in the neighborhood. And every day they said
they were going to get rid of them. So they had to protect themselves. So for those years
that my grandparents chose to stay there while they fought that court case they were
living in the midst of white people who could lynch them-- and they knew it.
They did awful things to my grandmother. As she walked back and forth to a bus stop, to
go to work every day… from hitting her and throwing rocks at her. The whole
neighborhood hated them. They hated them! But my grandparents didn’t run, they didn’t
move out. They said we’re going to stay here. I don’t know what was going through their
minds but they did. And the people who were really spearheading things lived right next
door to them.
AS: So when you were growing up--
KMA: The neighborhood was all black (by then).
AS: But the Sipes (were still there)? So who was living in the house then, the Sipes’
descendents?
KMA: No. The people themselves-- the Sipes. My grandparent’s contemporaries.
AS: So… somehow then… there was a huge thaw… because these were the people who
were fighting against your grandparents.
KMA: Yes. This was the man who came over to my grandfather’s house initially and said
“We found out you all are Black. You have to move. You’re moving.” It’s like in “A
Raisin in the Sun.”

money. One might say that Perry became a media mogul largely due to the massive popularity of his
Madea creation.
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The State Court Restraining Order invoking restricted covenants. The order was brought against the McGhee Family of
Detroit in January 1945. (From the McGhee Family Archives)
(Figure 5)
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KMA (con’t): But the difference was my grandparents were already living in the house.
In fact, Lorraine’s case… this was part of the case that inspired Lorraine Hansberry to
write “A Raisin in the Sun.” McGhee v Sipes became part of that overall national case.
It’s a Supreme Court case that had several different addresses in the U.S. They all signed
on to this one large restricted covenant case, and they were all happening simultaneously.
AS: So the fact that you’ve written television series that feature a Black family somehow
connected to a house, or wanting a house… How did your grandparents manage to buy
the house in the first place?
KMA: It’s a fascinating story. They lived on the other side of Tireman Avenue, where all
the blacks live. There was a dividing line in this Westside neighborhood in Detroit. All
the black people lived on one side and the all the white people lived on the other side
where there was a more lovely neighborhood-- the homes were more spacious, the streets
were wider, the lots were bigger. They lived on Seebaldt. A beautiful street. The
postmaster general lived on that street. The superintendent lived on that street, Seebaldt.
Tireman was the dividing line. And my grandparents needed a bigger house. They had
saved, but they could not find one, because it was a war time and there were no houses
for sale or being built because all the effort for new construction was going to the war.
My grandfather worked at The Detroit Free Press as the superintendent of the building--
as a white man… as a white man. He was passing for white during the day and was going
back home to his black neighborhood, among his black friends and neighbors, at night.
AS: You are kidding me. What a smart and brave guy.
KMA: Well, he needed a job. Black people weren’t mad at him at the time. I don’t know
how many of them even knew what he was saying at work. And my grandmother worked
at the post office. She was a well-educated woman, a graduate from Tuskegee Institute,
and a doctor’s daughter. She was well educated, refined, and also very proud…
So they wanted a house. My grandfather, while working at the Free Press, would look at
the classified ads that were being printed before they hit the street. He was always doing
that, looking at the real estate ads, and he saw there was a house a few blocks away (that
was for sale). When he got off work, he walked over there and saw the house. It was for
sale by owner. My grandfather talked to the man and told him he would like to buy it.
The man said great cause he needed to sale quickly because he needed to move to
California. And my grandfather said, “I want you to know, I’m a colored man.” And the
owner said “I don’t care what color you are, as long as your cash is green.” And they
made an arrangement.
Interview – Playwriting and Television Writing as Activism
AS: So do you see your path as a writer in Hollywood as being a part of that (history),
albeit in a different way?
KMA: I do. I think it’s a part in that it has really influenced what I have worked on
thematically through my whole body of work. Now that I’m thinking about it.
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AS: Was that conscious?
KMA: It was unconscious. Unconscious. But as I told you the whole family lore, which I
internalized, was about my family fighting to stay in this house-- despite their race. For
me, it gave me a sense that having a place… was my right. Having a place, a home, a
sense of security, having a community was important and something worth fighting for.
So I think all of my work is about that sense of place-- not just a place in terms of a
physical place but also place in terms of our story, being a significant part of our history,
having our place in history. Of course when I came along those stories were not as
prevalent in our media, so telling our story and making it a part of the American story
became about fighting for that space.
From Oak and Ivy, which was about Paul Laurence Dunbar and Alice Dunbar Nelson and
by extension about having a voice— particularly having a voice as a poet at a time when
we didn’t have a voice. That voice wasn’t one that we were identified with. Did you
know that Dunbar was the first African American writer to make a living as a writer. He
influenced me from the very beginning of my career.
Going from that play I think the next big thing I tackled was Mothers, which was a
commission for Mr. Cosby about mothers raising mixed race daughters who were trying
to have their place in a community that was hostile to them. This was set in Chicago--
which by extension to me is very much like Detroit.
Then I wrote Venice, which was about Venice being gentrified and at one time being a
community that was largely peopled by African Americans and Latinos and was about
them fighting to have their place by the sea-- it, to me is, by extension, the story of
Detroit, the story that I grew up with. If I’m a standard bearer at all for our family, and I
think we (writers) are, then continuing that story and that narrative forward in my work
has been my journey…
What I think I’ve been working on-- on an unconscious level, but consciously too…
Because I watched my father: a brilliant man, an African American man living in Detroit
and being frustrated because he was not able to really actualize in his life what his dreams
were.
AS: Do you know what some of those dreams were?
KMA: Yes. My father was a writer. Before he died he handed me an unpublished
manuscript. He was writing a novel. (Prior to that) My father wrote and produced what I
consider to be one of the first “how-to” sell books. And he put it on a record, an LP. A
book about how to sell and market yourself, how to present yourself. He financed it,
saved the money for it, and produced it.
AS: What was his name?
KMA: Reginald McGhee. I remember him taking our family savings and investing it and
hiring the top DJ in Detroit and going to the studio… and getting the art work done, and
boxes and crates coming to our house, full of records, so he could sell them through
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advertising in Ebony magazine, but never selling one record. Until years later… we got a
letter from Africa where someone had read about it in Ebony and sent for his album book
on sales and marketing. These records sat our basement for years, but he finally sold one,
to Africa.
AS: Wow, that’s interesting!
KMA: But by the time my father died, he had really carved a niche for himself in local
politics. He had gotten a broker’s license, so he was able to realize his ambition of being
an investor. He sat on the board of the ballet in Detroit; he was on the zoning board… he
was quite a Renaissance man. He was also on the original commission for cable
television in the state of Michigan; he was a visionary.
Anyway, what I grew up with was a very strong sense of a brilliant African American
man. If he had not been an African American man, he would have been a millionaire. He
had that kind of force of personality and intelligence. He could do anything. I saw that
satisfied in part-- but I knew he could have been so much more. What motivates me,
partially, is to be able create that kind of character that was my father in what I’ve been
writing.
AS: What a great way to pay homage. And to say that a man, a Black man, like your
father exists...
KMA: We’re out there. But my father was an ordinary man as well. He was
extraordinary, and he was ordinary. We don’t get to see that personage on the screen. We
see an athlete, or we see the tough guy principal…
Our family was considered to be pioneers in Detroit. And we were proud to be west
siders. When people left the city and went to the suburbs, my family said no, we’re
staying because we’re West Siders. My family integrated the West Side, and we stayed
there. And we’re still there-- my Mom is still there. My brother is still in Detroit. When
people say that anyone of any intelligence has left the city of Detroit a long time ago--
but not the McGhee family (Laughter)…
My brother sort of paved the way for me. He was the one who told me, “You should
check out this whole area (Los Angeles and filmmaking),” and he sent me a camera. My
brother had a brilliant career ahead of him, and what did he do? He went back to Detroit
(after Stanford graduate school) and became a union organizer. He was a voice for the
working class people of Detroit. He could have stayed in Los Angeles… but he was a
fighter and decided to fight for worker’s rights. I feel like I’ve been fighting, too -- but on
a different platform. Sometimes I feel subversive, and I have to be. I can’t go into a pitch
meeting and say, “I’m here to talk about the story of a race. Or I’m here to talk about
uplifting my people.”
AS: Right. “There’s the door. Use it.”
KMA: Yes… And here’s the thing. My grandparents were the first people who went
through a certain door in Detroit and therefore could open a door for people throughout
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the country, which made us very proud and gave us a mission. So I have been the first in
some ways about opening a door for African Americans-- and women-- in Hollywood
and in certain genres.
But what I’m concerned about now is not being the first but being the second. Like what
is the next chapter after these “firsts”? You could write a book about African Americans
who were “the first.” You know, the first in their field athletically, the first in their field
in terms of corporate careers, the first in their field in entertainment. There are lots of
trailblazers. But that’s not enough. I’m wondering what is the follow-up to being the
first? Because it’s not good enough to be the “first” anymore. And we’re still celebrating
being “firsts”?!
AS: Especially right now.
KMA: But getting comfortable being the first is probably not… (good). I mean we can
consider that (Martin Luther) King (Jr.) was a first, the first Civil rights workers who sat
at lunch counters and marched, they were kind of like a first. But we’re talking the 50s
and 60s! Now we’re in a new century…
AS: I think that’s going to be the question in a few years. Whenever Obama’s term is up
or right before, I think that’s going to be the question people will ask: “So we got “the
first,” so what does that mean NOW? What happens now-- are we all done with that?
KMA: Right. My grandparents did their major achievement in 1948. That was the first
then. Okay, I’ve done something and when I started doing what we were doing in
Hollywood it was 1985, 1990? So here we are twenty years later…? It’s not enough to be
number one at this point. I’m now past that and trying to think about… what do the
number two’s do? Or what we do as ones since we did the one? We’re still working. But
we should still be doing something more.
AS: Right. So what’s up with number two-- that the question? What’s the follow-up act?
Once you can say the barrier fell.
KMA: What’s the next part?!
AS: Because otherwise it becomes a very individual achievement. It was great for that
person--
KMA: And now it’s every man for himself. In a more conscious way than ever before in
my career I am concerned about holding the door open… I’ve been very consumed with
the opportunities that have been afforded me since I’ve been able to walk through the
door. But more than ever before, it’s important for me to continue lifting and reaching
and pulling up. I’m sure there are others who have been doing that all along. But even
beyond that, I think there’s a question of direction. I can try to pull you up where I am,
but then… you wind up in the same place that I am.
AS: Well, at least you’re asking. I think it’s a challenge for some people to get to that
place where they can reach and pull up.
282

KMA: Maybe it’s because they’re not secure enough in where they’ve been or where
they are. You have to be secure where you are in order to help other people.
AS: And maybe an immature point of view is to not realize that. If the floor under you is
crumbling, and you’re on a mountain, and you’re trying to pull somebody up, you’re not
helping anybody.
KMA: No, you’re not. But I was born secure. I had people who had fought for that
security and so I didn’t come from a place where I was concerned about my footing. That
battle had been fought for me before I showed up. I had family who had fought for that in
a very high way, a Supreme Court case. I never worried about that. I feel blessed and
highly favored. And once you’re aware of being blessed and favored-- that’s a place
where you can help reach back and pull up. But not everyone recognizes that.
AS: And it may take a different level of security for different people to feel secure. I
guess that’s where we all have to be critically generous with other.
KMA: And to me there has to be a vision that we’re working towards. Not just self-
aggrandizement, not just “Okay, I’m here now and going to help others do. Do what?”
The door has been open, but where are we headed now? I’m happy that you’re doing this,
that we’re talking. But on the other hand, I’m not happy where I am, because I want to
ask more of myself.
AS: I get that. We should all ask more of ourselves. Beyond a job I sometimes ask myself
why I’m even doing this (becoming an artist-scholar with a Ph.D.)? It’s hard sometimes.
People on both sides can be hostile and suspicious, because it’s not that common, and I
didn’t understand the rules at first. But I kept going. Why is this chronicling so important
to me? Maybe it’s my way of being subversive, too. Because I can’t walk into the door
and everything that I’m pitching and that I’m bringing (to studios and networks) is “Let
me tell you about the BLACK MAN…” (Laughter)
KMA: You can’t do it.
AS: And anybody who thinks that you can, you’re really showing just how little you
know about this industry and where we really are…
KMA: It has to be a by-product.
AS: And so for me, doing this work is a way to have other areas in my life where I don’t
have to be subversive,
198
where I can be more explicit… I mean, I’m not where you are...
KMA: But the point is when you get here, beyond the “reaching back” and the “pulling
up,” what are we supposed to do then, other than continue writing our stories?
AS: Is that something you feel like you have an answer to-- or you’re asking?

198
My use of “subversive” here is similar to the way that many artists of color in the entertainment industry
use the term. Subversive indicates a way of subtly incorporating politics or social justice messages under
the rubric of “entertainment.”
283

KMA: I’m asking myself that, because I’m trying to demand something more of myself.
It’s a general question that in the evolution of being an African American woman in this
industry-- an industry which does not favor females, people over forty, minorities…
when you reach this point it goes without saying that you are to reach down and brings
others up, but once you’re here-- what do you do? What do you do?

The Historic McGhee House, 4626 Seebaldt in Detroit, Michigan – date unknown.
199

(Figure 6)
Kathleen McGhee-Anderson poses an important question that cuts
performatively, epistemologically, and ontologically across artistic, disciplinary, political,

199
Accessed on January 25, 2012 at http://detroit1701.org/McGheeHome.html.
284

and racial boundaries: What do you do now? This question carries significant resonance
within the context of the current political moment, when Barack Obama, an African
American man, holds the United States presidency. At the time of his election, the
historical nature of the achievement led many in our popular and political culture to echo
statements like those of Oprah Winfrey, who stated that Martin Luther King’s “dream”
had now been achieved. Even at the time of Obama’s election, this struck me as a myopic
and ridiculous statement. While the ability to be elected president has always held an
important symbolic value as an expression of the hope of American equality, especially
among African Americans and those committed to realizing social justice, it also
summarizes the paradoxical “frustration of the first’ that I have addressed in this chapter.
The ability of American mass media as a power regime to enact a “changing
same”
200
that allows hegemonic structural apparatuses to appear progressive while still
remaining relatively intact, is starkly illustrated through a focus on African American
women writers in television. Thus, in examining the life and career of Kathleen McGhee-
Anderson we discover alternative and productive ways to contest normative modes of
racialized expression. Fueled by the aesthetics and politics of African American theatre,
McGhee-Anderson insists on an engaged, artist-centered complication of Black televisual
representation. Consequently, she helps to move us beyond a false focus on “the first”
and toward a focus on the societal forces that continue to impact our ever evolving future.

200
For more on race and the concept of the “changing same” see Leroi Jones’ essay “The Changing Same
(R&B and New Black Music)” in The LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka Reader by Imamu Amiri Baraka, ed. by
William J. Harris. Also see Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s analysis on the “triple duty” work that “racism’s
changing same” does, in her essay “Race and Globalization” in Geographies of Global Change:
Remapping the World, ed. by Ronald John Johnston, Peter James Taylor, Michael Watts (Malden, MA:
Blackwell Publishing, 2002), 261-276.
285

The success and the struggle of Kathleen McGhee-Anderson’s career, and the
history that informs and to some degree drives her career and creativity, is emblematic of
the dangers of adhering too closely to disciplinary boundaries. Strict obedience to rigid
notions of disciplines and recurring attitudes that question whether artists can be taken
seriously as scholars and activists who contribute to those disciplines risks leaving out the
voices and experiences of the marginalized who have still attained “success.” As a Black
woman who has achieved the highest rank in television writing and producing while
continuing to center a direct engagement with the politics of Black representation, she
offers minority artists working in mass media a successful and impactful way forward.
This is especially true in a television universe that has become incredibly fragmented.
While that fragmentation opens up a way to contribute to television, it also extracts a
price and a compromise, particularly when creating work that puts forth a larger societal
commentary. To some degree we see this price symbolized in the ability of an
entertainment journalist to bypass the checks and balances of that profession and print a
clearly erroneous statement that casts Rhimes as the first Black female showrunner. That
said, McGhee-Anderson’s career also speaks to progressive scholars and artists who have
invested in romantic notions of the “pure” artist or activist. Her career reveals that such
notions are a privileged construction, and worse, such notions are non-productive. We see
in McGhee-Anderson’s career that producing pleasure and producing politics aren’t
necessarily at odds. To assume so is to reify boundaries that ultimately prove to be
hegemonic.

286

Chapter 6
Conclusion, or Notes on Artist-Scholarship and Moving Towards
A Critical and Performative Production Studies

“…non-fiction portrayals of production often reflect the drama
of some of their producers’ best known fictional works.”
--John T. Caldwell
201

“Performance helps me live a truth while theory helps me
name it-- or maybe it is the other way around.”
-- D. Soyini Madison
202

In researching and writing Image Breakers, Image Makers¸ a performance
studies approach to a production studies project about Blackness and racial formation in
television, I witnessed and encountered “drama.” This should not have surprised me, nor
should the fact that the inherent drama of existing in two places at once, this inherent
friction was also incredibly productive. Through this project, I have embarked on what I
imagine to be an ongoing project and career endeavor that seeks to collapse the
“intellectual” and the “creative,” that seeks to continue the interrogation of the materiality
of (Black) representation and the performative processes of cultural production. In this
case I have done so through an unprecedented mapping and examination of television
production and television’s writing room-- a media industry and cultural space that is
powerful, mythologized, hidden, and therefore relatively new to academia and the
institutionalized apparatuses of knowledge production. I have centered the notion, the

201
Caldwell, John T., Production Studies: Cultural Studies of Media Industries (New York: Routledge,
2009), 1.
202
Madison, D. Soyini. “Performing Theory/Embodied Writing,” Text and Performance Quarterly 19, no.
2 (1999), 107-124.

287

culture, and the act of “breaking” in television writing rooms and in television production
as a whole. “Breaking” as a process that not only “makes” television, but continually
“makes” and “re-makes” race in contemporary America. My choice of “breaking” as a
central metaphor not only describes the performative and improvisatory ways that stories,
narratives, and (racial) meanings are debated and created in television,
203
but it also
locates the capacity for disrupting these same racial meanings in the very process that is
materializing those meanings. Again, Fred Moten’s productive concept of “the break” (in
jazz music) was essential to theorizing the writing room breaking process as the location
of an improvised creation of Blackness that has the capacity for emancipatory and
progressive expression. I extended Moten’s musical breaking to television’s narrative
breaking and I came to a similar conclusion with regard to Black representation: breaking
is a (hidden) performance and as such, it possesses both a constraining power and a
progressively emancipatory power.
With this project I have quite clearly been interested in demystifying production
processes and illustrating what Dorinne Kondo describes as a politics in motion. I have
attempted to do so from several different positionalities: as a now formally trained
(junior) scholar and ethnographer, as a self-reflexive cultural producer and television
writer, and as an aspiring organic intellectual committed to strengthening the flow of

203
That television production is simultaneously a project in creating or disrupting racial meaning was once
again made clear by the controversy over the new, 2012 HBO series Girls. While the show is ostensibly
about the early adult growing pains of post-collegiate life in New York City among a group of friends, the
lack of diversity on the show became a controversy. While the show’s producers attempted to make light of
the controversy and dismiss the audience’s concerns, it was recently announced that the show’s second
season would include a new character to be played by an actor of color. No word on whether the show’s
writing staff would also be diversified. See “CNN Panel Slams HBO ‘Girls’ for Lack of Diversity”,
accessed June 1, 2012 at http://www.mediaite.com/tv/cnn-panel-slams-hbos-girls-for-lack-of-diversity-odd-
out-of-step/. Also see the New York Times article “Broadcasting a World of Whiteness.” Accessed June 1,
2012 at http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/29/arts/television/hbos-girls-is-hardly-the-only-example-of-
monochromatic-tv.html?pagewanted=all.
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cultural knowledge and processes among the academy, the entertainment industry’s
practitioning denizens, and “the street”.
In this case that “street” could be the Los Angeles street where my wife and I
shed violent, angry, and uncomprehending tears as we endured yet another moment of
psychic injury and tried to figure out why pursuing and achieving our goals as actors and
writers meant that we were subjected to almost daily open assaults on our sense of
humanity and Black subjectivity. Had we made a mistake? Had we made some kind of
deal with a racial devil? How is it, we wondered, that the youthful joy of starring in high
school musicals had somehow led to a feeling that as young adults we had become a part
of a symbolic but real civil rights struggle? How is it that we didn’t know we had signed
up for this kind of racialized struggle? How is it that many people didn’t seem to even
know this struggle existed or if they did know, didn’t take it seriously? This dissertation
is but one way to illustrate that the decision to become an African American performing
and literary artist, especially in mass media, is indeed to become inevitably subjected to
the various “scenes” that compose the career of the Black writer and cultural producer.
204

It is a decision made in the dark (without knowledge), to fight in the dark (in hidden
spaces and processes), but the products of those processes are seen in the distorted light
of popular culture.
Then again, that “street” could be the theorizing that happens on the ground--
wherever that “ground” may be. The street and the ground are not only essential to

204
For more, see Saidiya Hartmann’s Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in the
Nineteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press US, 1997) Hartmann locates the extensions of
antebellum and postbellum slavery in the quotidian and in so-called sites of pleasure. In many ways what
this project has attempted to do is to describe an entry point to the modern, mediated scene of subjection
that is the Black artist who works or seeks to work in the entertainment industry.
289

theory; they are theory. They are the litmus test that keeps theory honest. When the street
combines with theory (as the portable expression that allows the empirical nature of
cultural production to move beyond the individual and the anecdote) it becomes a kind of
mass medium that challenges the hegemonic function of mass media within and outside
of the academe. To do this work, I have, like other scholars committed to excavating and
valuing corporeal epistemologies, uttered many confused and defiant prayers.
205
For me,
these prayers were uttered while holding a book in one hand and one of my sleeping,
African American infants in the other, experiencing simultaneously both the difficulty
and the reason for enduring the stresses inherent in embodied interdisciplinarity and
scholarship.
Image Breakers, Image Makers has made an attempt to intervene by reducing the
chasm that exists between the media industry’s cultural production and academia’s
knowledge production, particularly around the ways in which race is formed and
deployed in American media. Equally, this project has aspired to hold a mirror up to
entertainment industry practitioners who might take such work seriously, and thereby
take another step in suggesting ways that those who make television can move their
discourse about “best practices,” “representation,” and “stereotypes” from the overused
euphemism of “diversity” to a discourse around “justice.”
This entire project has endeavored to articulate at least one reason for the
presence of what I previously called the “frustration of representation.” It is my hope that

205
My use and understanding of the term “corporeal epistemologies” is derived from many conversations
with Dorinne Kondo. Her forthcoming work, Towards an Anthropology of the Creative, centers
epistemologies that cannot be deeply assessed except through methodologies that privilege the body and
the empirical as equal to more “traditional” modes of scholarship. Valuing corporeal epistemologies creates
space for the arts and for artists within institutions of knowledge production.
290

I have suggested an alternative and complimentary answer to scholars such as Herman
Gray who question what they have described as the continued overinvestment in Black
representation.
206
I also interrogated this investment-- but not from the stance that the
investment is no longer productive. Instead, I argue that that the frustrating discourse on
representation suggests that a crucial piece of the question is either missing or remains
ineffectively formulated.
My fear is that academic discourse can rush to run so far “ahead” of its objects of
focus that important, on-the-ground empirical knowledge can be left “behind.” But how
can those objects of focus and the Black subjects who create those objects, possibly be
“behind,” when their discourse is shaped by the quotidian realities of the structures that
surround them? Gray is right to identify and advocate for the “cultural moves” that push
black folk and their images beyond “…the limit of cultural politics that aim primarily for
cultural visibility and institutional recognition” (Gray 2005, 189). Culture does indeed
move and we are to move with it, helping to shape and aim it toward more productive
conversations-- but to risk leaving the practitioners and artists who struggle to work
within terms that are not of their own choosing, makes our work incomplete and not as
engaged as we might otherwise be.
The danger is that cultural workers and producers then become threatened with a
double erasure: the habitual erasure from the apparatus in which they work and the
erasures from scholarship that purports to address these erasures. Thus, to alter slightly
Patricia Williams’ metaphor, there is still one chair missing at “the table”: that of the

206
See Gray’s Cultural Moves: African Americans and the Politics of Representation (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 2005) for more.
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artist-scholar and/or the scholar-artist. I am suggesting that perhaps we would all be
better served if the former is able to sit at the table of cultural production and that the
latter sits at the table of knowledge production. The larger goal is to realize that scholars
and artists are equally connected to how we understand and experience hegemony. Their
collective impact, however, is bifurcated and diminished because we have allowed
traditional disciplinary and institutional boundaries not only to organize, but to obscure.
Chapter one addressed disciplinary boundaries and the desire for many scholars to
move beyond certain recurring and limited discourses about Black representation, a
desire that I called “the frustration of Black representation.” I enlarged the canvas in
which I addressed this frustration by situating the discussion within the context of the
NAACP’s 1999 media campaign to improve meaningful African American
representation in jobs in front and behind the camera. The call for “better” images flirts
with the limited, simplified notion of positive vs. negative images. I also suggested that
NAACP, in choosing to focus for the first time in their media advocacy history on the
hiring practices of Black writers, was complicating and wedding the push for “better”
Black images with better Black opportunities that would, in turn, induce cultural and
creative structural change. This was a new tactic. Whether the NAACP realized it then or
continues to realize it now-- they had just identified one of the hidden bastions of cultural
constructionism within American society: the television writers’ room.
Chapter two identified a primary method of entrance for Black writers into the
television industry and analyzed how this professionalization process serves as a kind of
“pre-production” to the racial formation that I argue occurs in television production
television writing rooms. It mapped and analyzed the challenges for entrance into the
292

television writing and producing industry. The chapter also made clear that the industry’s
writing programs produce significant results for participating writers of color, in that
several of the writers do find initial employment. But I also illustrated how these points
of access function as a foundation of racial formation in the television industry by
imposing a corporate ethos and performance onto the creative work of storytelling. At the
same time, the chapter theorized and illustrated that the corporation’s introduction of
performance into the process of gaining access to television writing rooms is, to some
extent, at odds with the corporation’s goals. For in introducing performance into
television’s hybrid spaces, the power of performance to infiltrate the production
apparatus is also introduced. As Homi Bhaba makes clear, the in-between is a productive
space, and thus the capacity for performance to interrupt, interrogate, or decenter master
discourses is made present. Still, the complex natures of the writing room and the process
of gaining access to the writing room were made clear. I centered my field data as
participant-observer in several prestigious industry fellowships and interrogated these
“opportunities” in order to reveal their powers of ambivalent marginalization toward
writers of color in television. It is an ambivalence that is not totalizing, but it is one that
renders as euphemistic the edict that working in television and media is “creativity under
constraints.”
207

The question of “access” holds a structuring power for the industry. Access and
the lack thereof is a constant motif that quite literally organizes Hollywood’s creative
labor into multiple layers of those who “have” (access) and those who “don’t.” Access is
also a defining problem for scholars who wish to study of the entertainment industry from

207
See John Caldwell’s Production Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008).
293

“the inside.” This is especially true for anthropologists or those who use anthropological
methodologies.
208
Access that is eventually granted to researchers is still rife with
potential trap doors that can lead to an abrupt revocation of that access. As Mayer, Banks,
and Caldwell write: “…the ignorance of longstanding trade languages, personnel
networks, and rifts over resources can be the surest route to a short meeting, unreturned
phone calls, or even the failure to achieve research goals. Even a cursory visit by scholars
to a field site, whether a producer’s office, a studio set, or a run-away film location will
inevitably involve confronting discourses and practices that have been defined by
convention over decades…” (5). The theme of access comes up repeatedly throughout
their field defining anthology, Production Studies, most notably in the contributions of
Amanda Lotz, Sherry Ortner, and in Caldwell’s interviews with scholar-practitioners,
where he explicitly asked how multiple researchers managed to gain access to their
subjects of study. Hence, a large portion of academic research in production and media
industries studies coincides with the classic methodological concerns of anthropologists
and revolves around a question of how-- as in, how does one even do this research?
One approach to cultivating research access in media industries is to become a
cultural producer. The scholarship of researchers such as Paul Malcolm, Erin Hill, and
veteran television writer-producer Felicia D. Henderson makes clear that production
studies and cultural studies scholars must often achieve and maintain production
identities as well as scholarly identities (Mayer, Banks, & Caldwell 214). This has been

208
Hollywood has been studied only once by an anthropologist, Hortense Powdermaker. The resulting 1950
book was Hollywood, the Dream Factory. For more on the problem of scholars gaining research access to
Hollywood see Sherry Ortner’s essay in Chapter 13 in Production Studies: Cultural Studies of Media
Industries, eds. Vicki Mayer, Miranda J. Banks, and John Thornton Caldwell, Routledge: New York, 2009.
Also see Jennifer Holt and Alissa Perren’s Media Industries: History, Theory, and Method (Walden, MA:
Blackwell Publishing, 2009).
294

my approach, and though the early twentieth century work of Leo Rosten
209
reveals that
this methodology is not without precedent, it is far from common due to the difficulty of
access. Furthermore, when access is granted in television and Hollywood, it is often with
those production laborers known as the “below-the-line” workers. “Below-the-line”
refers to the blue collar-ish and mostly manual labor jobs of film crews. This line refers
to the budgetary line that separates television’s creative producers from its crew workers.
Mayers’ fieldwork on the television craftspeople and crew, who are not usually seen or
regarded as “producers,” is an important intervention. In terms of “power,” below-the-
line workers are almost always much lower in the production hierarchy than the “above-
the-line” worker (Caldwell 2008). However, what is significantly different about this
project is that it took place at the top of the creative hierarchy and within an exclusive
“above-the-line” television community. This kind of research requires deep access into a
business that is predicated on the very notion of multiple layers of exclusivity. In short,
gaining or not gaining access is a constant, flowing currency in Hollywood.
The study of Hollywood in the 21
st
century is difficult but innovative work that
exemplifies interdisciplinary scholarship. It often requires at least the appearance (if not
the actual possession) of two distinct skill sets: 1) the ability to perform technical or
artistic work to such a degree that access is eventually granted to some realm within the
entertainment industry; 2) the educational and economic ability to access traditional
modes of scholarship and, for me, a willful desire to serve as a kind of interpretive bridge
figure who makes legible connections to both sides of this false divide. Though the

209
Rosten, Leo Calvin. Hollywood, the Movie Colony, the Movie Makers (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and
Company, 1941).
295

scholar-practitioner divide has real, dangerous, and tragic epistemological and material
effects for both the creative world’s ability to access cutting edge research in the
humanities and social sciences, and the academe’s ability to account for how minoritized
subjects enact agency and resistance in popular culture, I argue that it is a false divide. In
reality, as Sherry Ortner points out, the creative practitioner and the academic scholar
share many professional attributes and proclivities that render them theoretically and
practically much closer to each other than is traditionally assumed.
210

Chapter three problematized the notion of original authorship in television as a
barometer of Black authenticity. I did so while examining what an attempt to construct a
progressive and non-comic televisual Blackness looks like when a first season “Black”
show is not “created” by an African American but is produced by a multi-ethnic team that
includes African American writers and producers. I also explained some of the essential
mechanics of television in an effort to theorize how the element of time and the constant
reality of “not enough time” in television production function to create an atmosphere
that conducive to racial formation. I also illustrated how the now habitual surveillance of
writer-producers in television by studio and network gatekeepers compounds into an
anxious hyper-surveillance where Blackness is concerned, a phenomenon I call WWB, or
Writing While Black. Furthermore, I problematized the “freedom” of cable television,
arguing that it creates an anxious sense of purpose for African American writers
interested in advancing Black imagery. I analyzed how cable television offer
opportunities for resisting old industry and image paradigms, but also how cable

210
See Ortner’s “Studying Sideways: Ethnographic Access in Hollywood” in Production Studies: Cultural
Studies of Media Industries (Routledge: New York, 2009).
296

television has adapted practices from network television that reify old paradigms by
seeking to hollow out the politics of blackness. The chapter also explored the industry’s
notorious lack of Black authorship of non-comic Black representation, and highlighted
how Black television producers negotiate “authorship” when “legal” authorship is
withheld.
Chapter four focused on the dynamics, discourse, and culture of the television
writer’s room. This chapter explored the survival of Blackness in a Black television
drama when Blackness was suddenly deemed “optional” and no longer desirable. Shifting
racial performances by the writers after the writing-producing team was thoroughly
reconstituted to make a “Black show” more “african-AMERICAN” were mapped and
examined. I asked, what is the result of these “backstage” maneuvers on the “front stage”
(Goffman) presentation of the program? I showed how white writers performed
blackness, how Black writers performed whiteness and how the continual search for
success in television pushes against easy notions of racial authenticity. I argued that the
performativity of the television writers’ room precedes actors and the product of
television in such a way that, while must acknowledge that performance can sometimes
disturb performativity, it is much more likely that this performance with the power to
break images and make identities is in the writers room, not “on stage.”
Chapter five focused on the career of Kathleen McGhee-Anderson as a way of
suggesting that African American television writers have often functioned as a kind of
mass media activist. A focus on McGhee-Anderson showed how this potential activism is
related to African American theatre and dramatic literature, her family’s history of
activism against racial inequality, and, ironically, emotion. In considering on the work of
297

Shonda Rhimes and McGhee-Anderson I also argued for the importance of African
American women producers in creating historical televisual images of non-comic
Blackness, and illustrated the structural danger of erasing their achievements in the rush
to celebrate the commercial success of Ms. Rhimes. In interviewing McGhee-Anderson
and allowing her to narrate the oral history of her family’s civil rights struggles in Detroit
and beyond, I was able to trace a potent but overlooked line of Black activism that has
branched out into many fields of culture, including television. In so doing, I illustrated
how the aesthetic concerns historically staged by Black theatre have found an even larger
audience through the television work of writers such as Kathleen McGhee-Anderson.
McGhee-Anderson’s career in theatre and television suggests what an active embrace and
fight for the articulation of a progressive Black representation looks like now-- and
perhaps what it can look like in the future.
Television, Performance, and the Black Intellectual Tradition
I considered briefly the history and reality of television writing by some Black
writer-producers as an overlooked 20
th
and 21
st
century cousin to the intellectual tradition
and social activism often attributed to African American novelists, playwrights, essayists,
poets, and scholars. In focusing on this struggle by African American television writers to
articulate blackness, I also located their work as a bridge in media to the social activism
that exists and can exist within the connections between writing and performance. The
idea of Blackness, as necessarily expressed in the connections between writing and
performance is actually not new, even in the more “traditional” Black literatures. For
James Baldwin and W.E.B. Dubois in particular, the idea that (a racialized and classed)
performance is important and crucial to an upwardly mobile Blackness permeates
298

throughout their work. Speaking on the topics of obscurity, performance, and Blackness,
James Baldwin writes:
“The question is: Is he for real? Or is he kissing ass? Almost all Negroes... are
almost always acting, but before a white audience— which is quite incapable of
judging their performance: and even the ‘bad nigger’ is, inevitably, giving
something of a performance, even if the entire purpose of his performance is to
terrify or blackmail white people… It is still not possible to overstate the price a
Negro pays to climb out of obscurity— for it is a particular price involved with
being a Negro…”
-- The Price of the Ticket (281)
211

The price of being a Negro, as Baldwin wrote in 1961, is as particular as it is multifaceted
in its vast reach. He suggests this “price,” especially if a Negro is determined to climb
out of obscurity, has everything to do with America’s evolving struggle for racial
equality. This price has, as many have argued, illustrated itself in a multitude of socio-
economic arenas throughout American history, ranging from politics, law, and education
to religion, culture, and the everyday pursuit of individual freedoms. I contend that the
“price” that Baldwin cites can be seen vividly in the struggles over television and Black
representation. Clearly, television, as the largest popular culture phenomenon of the last
seventy-five years, is a path out of obscurity for its workers. It provides the potential for a
massive visibility that, for African Americans, is often based on acceptable performances
of their blackness. From an economic perspective, television’s ability to erase obscurity
can be defined as the ability to erase poverty. Put simply, television can provide a path
into considerable earnings. The television industry knows this, and the NAACP, in
focusing on television writers, came to know this. Hence, when Baldwin speaks of a

211
James Baldwin originally wrote these words in an essay entitled “Alas, Poor Richard.” It first appeared
in Reporter on March 16, 1961 and was first collected in Baldwin’s Nobody Knows My Name.
299

“price to pay for climbing out of obscurity,” he speaks presciently of the visceral power
of television to dramatically transform the lives of its cultural workers (actors and
writers) in terms of visibility and capital. It should come as little surprise then that “the
privilege” of working in television is constantly re-enforced by its practitioners. This is
particularly true, I have observed, when the writer is African American. For example, in
every television job I have ever held a white writer has always mentioned to me
specifically, within a few days of starting work that “we” were blessed or lucky to have
our jobs. While I tend to agree with this sentiment from a spiritual perspective, I have
never thought to mention to another writer under any circumstances that they are
“blessed” to have their job in television. This sort of microagression is one way that the
television industry exacts a price from its African American writers. Another example is
that many African American writers get their first television job through a writing
program. As I showed earlier, this fact tends to marginalize the writer. As such, the high
stakes battleground in television for power through aesthetics is complicated by
“representation” in such a way that the writer often enters the work environment with an
unstated deficit.
For Baldwin the “price was closely tied to the idea of a compulsory racial
performance. He complicates the dramatic metaphor that “all the world’s a stage” and he
links it to America’s specific brand of racialization. He anticipates the street corner on
which the field of performance studies meets the reality of African American history and
African American life. In so doing Baldwin elevates the notion of everyday
performance-- wherever it takes place-- as a critical social strategy before the field of
performance studies ever announces itself during the 1970s.
300

The idea that there is a problematic societal and individual price to be paid
ontologically and performatively by African Americans for, oddly, being African
Americans is perhaps best summarized by W.E.B. DuBois in The Souls of Black Folk.
“… The Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-
sight in this American world— a world which yields him no true self-
consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other
world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double consciousness, this sense of always
looking at one’s self through the yes of others… One ever feels his twoness,-- an
American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two
warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being
torn asunder… This then is the end of his striving: to be a co-worker in the
kingdom of culture…” (3)

Of course, Dubois goes on to famously add that “the problem of the 20th century is the
color line” (10). In positing the much cited notion of “double consciousness” and the
“veil”, DuBois invokes the two-ness of stagecraft to presciently identify the ongoing
dramatic legacy of America’s original transgression. That is, he highlights America’s
“two-faced” subjugation of its stated moral and governmental ideals, in its embrace of a
race-based economic system to implement those ideals for only some of its citizens.
DuBois also described how that original transgression continues to manifest
itself psychically and physically, in the spirit, minds, and bodies of African Americans.
What scholars often ignore, however, is DuBois’ stated goal of Black inclusion of the
“kingdom of culture.” Therefore, DuBois, in using the metaphor of the veil, and Baldwin,
in his essay on Wright, theatricalized America’s continuing transgression of nurturing
and legalizing a social order based almost entirely on race and phenotype. Baldwin, then,
begins to extend the logic of DuBois’ metaphorical veil. The image of peering through a
veil or an opaque curtain suggests a barrier that stands between the ability of American
dominant culture to see African American humanity without distortion. Yet, the image of
301

the lifting of a veil or a curtain also suggests the ritual that initiates a formal theatrical
event. With both of these images in mind then-- the veil as obstruction and the lifting of
the veil as potential revelation-- we can see that Dubois and Baldwin’s formulations
begin to inform each other in profound ways. Together, it says to white America and
agents of whiteness that, you can’t see/don’t want to see me. It also says, If you do
happen to see me, you are not really seeing me, because the mise-en-scene of America’s
racial history won’t allow you to see me. What you see is always performative. Baldwin
reaches for language mostly associated with art and entertainment to describe the impact
of American history on the coping mechanisms of African Americans. The fact that he
was a celebrated writer spurred to pen these words when discussing the life and influence
of another writer (Richard Wright) calls attention to cultural production as an important
political space where the performance matters.
It makes sense, then, that whenever the veil was raised on popular culture
representations of African Americans during the twentieth and early twenty-first
centuries, especially those representations in the mass media mediums of film and
television, African Americans-- and multicultural African American organizations such
as the NAACP-- were often ready to police what the masses might be seeing when it
consumed Black images. Those images preceded us, those images performed us, and
performance-- either in person or in mass media-- remains hugely important to how
African Americans see and are seen.
Therefore, in identifying moments of racial formation in television production, I
was able to ask and illustrate how television rises to the level of a racial project and how
attempts by Black writers to advance televisual blackness are attempts to resist and
302

redefine the capacity of that project. In simple terms, I asked: How are the ways that
television is constructed and produced central to the work of a society that insists on
giving “race” meaning?
Next Steps
How does this project not only contribute to our cultural and industrial
knowledge but what, if anything does it open up for future studies? While this is one of
the first production studies/performance studies project to center the making of race from
an “above the line” stance, I must acknowledge that this longitudinal study is but one
piece that attempts to marshal “traditional” and corporeal epistemologies in order to
reveal and more importantly, to challenge television’s status as a racial project.
There has yet to be a rigorous ethnographic study of the contemporary
Hollywood talent or literary agent and how they supply talent, determine the market for
talent, and how their work might contribute to the normalization of whiteness and the
racialization of African Americans. The same kind of study would also be informative
from a scholar who had access to or held an identity as a lawyer in a studio or network’s
business affairs unit. There we could see the legal and economic machinations that I
suspect work to create hierarchies of racially disproportionate remuneration to writers,
actors, and directors. This project highlighted the journey of Black writers invested in
creating blackness. There is an ethnographic study waiting to be completed that reverses
the dynamics of this study. An examination of how Black and other non-white television
writers participate, survive, or thrive in show environments with little connection to
Black imagery would complement this research. This would speak to the entertainment
industry’s appetite, or lack thereof, for Black participation in more “mainstream” cultural
303

products and interrogate Hollywood’s conception of itself as a bastion for liberal
ideologies.
To accomplish this work requires a field and academic enterprise that
understands the embodied interdisciplinarity and long-range time frames that such
research demands. There should be room for that agent’s assistant (or agent) in the
entertainment industry who decides that the only way she will remain in the industry is if
she can find a way to write honestly and expansively about its central role in formulating
our popular culture. This takes time. The field can either simply wait for these super
motivated and capable researchers to appear, or it can help to cultivate an environment
that is friendly to this work by enthusiastically embracing the performative realities of
what it takes to do such work. “Production studies” or “media industry studies” is a rich
field that is poised for much exploration and growth. I am suggesting however, that to
achieve this growth it must become a field that institutionalizes performance ethnography
and the critical ethnographer as a foundational presence within the academe.
Performance studies is said to take seriously that performance is about “making
and not faking” or “making belief vs. make believe,” then in the context of this project I
explored how the (writer) performances that shape the production of images designed to
imitate or fake real life (television), actually “makes” real life. In some cases, this
“making of beliefs” also facilitates the social, economic, political, and physical “taking”
of real lives. The circumstances surrounding the February 2012 murder of Florida
teenager Trayvon Martin is a recent example of the confluence of blackness and image.
In that case, the image of Blackness and the image of the “hoodie” worked together to
produce the suspicion, if not the certainty, of black criminality. The criminalized
304

combination of Blackness and the hoodie, which has been reinforced through television
narratives innumerable times, pre-performed Martin’s subjectivity into a dangerously
vulnerable objectivity. It did so to such an extent that Martin’s pre-mature death was the
unfortunate outcome. The fact that it was raining could not and did not cleanse the
materiality of the hoodie’s image. Blackness, the power of image, and the piece of
clothing we call “the hoodie” are but a recent example of the important stakes located at
the nexus of performance and media, and image and materiality.
In conclusion, I return to one of my central issues in this project: the frustration
with the discourse on Black representation. There is no single definitive answer to this
frustration in television and mass media cultural production. But I do insist that the
search for the answer to this frustration does not and cannot begin when the consumer or
the critic watches race and Blackness on television. By then, much of the discursive work
that facilitates hegemonic discourses has already been done. It has been imaginatively
materialized in the break, in the processes of writers and producers who often seem to
believe they are pulling from clean, blank slates to fill their already white blank pages--
but who are, in fact, acting as a kind of cultural filter. The television writing room and the
television production process are ways that “structures of feeling” perform themselves
into being. They are one way that structures of feeling become, quite simply, structures--
structures that we imagine safely allow us to think, speak, hear, and see either what we
want to see-- or what we consent to seeing.

305

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