RACIAL BEAN COUNTERS, always seeking grist for their ever grinding mills, have found their most spurious cause yet — the lack of “diversity” on network TV shows. The NAACP led the way, with Kweisi Mfume calling last month for boycotts and even legal action against the networks. Now Hispanics, despite being every marketer’s “hot” ethnic group — courted by presidential candidates, ubiquitous on magazine covers and MTV — are following suit. The National Hispanic Foundation for the Arts last week called for a “brownout” of network programming, to protest both the lack of Hispanics on prime time and their often stereotypical depiction. Al Gore turned out to cheer them on.
Formed in 1997 as the brainchild of actor Jimmy Smits, the Foundation held its third annual “Noche de Gala” fund-raiser in Washington’s plush Mayflower Hotel last Monday. Vice President Gore was the featured speaker. He played to perfection his role as one of the nation’s leading self-appointed racial tutors, urging the networks to emulate the Clinton administration’s achievement of “looking like America” and showing off his familiar Spanish soundbites — familia, amor de pais, education.
But Gore’s performance aside, what was striking was the surreal politics of the cause. If there are impediments to the progress of America’s Hispanic population, insufficient call-backs for the likes of Jimmy Smits are not among them. Poor schools and dysfunctional bilingual education might be worth talking about, but here in the genteel ballroom of the Mayflower at a $ 1,000-a-plate dinner, successful entertainers tinkled wine glasses with bureaucrats like Education Department quota queen Norma Cantu and racial ideologues like Mfume and Jesse Jackson — all apparently more concerned about haranguing network executives to make work for Erik Estrada, so that Hispanic kids will have “role models.”
Far from looking to the boob tube for inspiration, ambitious young Hispanics, like other Americans, would rise faster in the world by watching less TV. But that’s not the only absurdity of the TV-diversity cause. Consider this statement Smits made in 1998: “When positive images of Hispanics are nearly vacant in the national consciousness [i.e., on TV], our presence becomes minimized and undervalued in the workforce.” Such underrepresentation, he continued, makes it difficult for Hispanics to “see themselves in a positive way or feel as if they are part of the American fabric.” What Smits is promoting is therapeutic television — the notion that TV exists to burnish the self-esteem of viewers and to confer recognition on the contributions to American society of different ethnic groups.
If mere proportional representation on sitcoms were the issue, the National Hispanic Foundation for the Arts might have a point. While Hispanics make up 11 percent of our population, they account for about 3 percent of television roles. In response to this disparity, the publisher of Latina magazine recently wrote in Newsweek that NBC’s Friends should “find some amigos.” But this highlights a possible reason for the monochromatic nature of prime time: stereotyped characters are the stock in trade of TV entertainment. Which of the Friends could have been cast as a Hispanic without the potential for the sort of protest that spooks TV executives? Womanizing, dim-witted Joey? Ditzy airhead Phoebe? Perhaps the self-absorbed and promiscuous Rachel?
As one network executive recently vented to Entertainment Weekly, “It’s become a no-win proposition. Unless you’re putting on an hour-long show about a black brain surgeon helping Third World children, you’re insulting the race.” Activists decry the lack of non-white faces on TV, yet simultaneously denounce almost all television portrayals of minorities. Last year, when Kramer accidentally burned a Puerto Rican flag on an episode of Seinfeld, NHFA president Felix Sanchez demanded an FCC investigation and said that Jerry Seinfeld and NBC “must realize that they cannot continue to make profits off ethnic mudslinging.” With reactions like this ever possible, it’s no surprise risk-averse networks air programs aimed at “hip white urban singles” with gobs of advertiser-friendly disposable income.
To be fair, NHFA also awards scholarships to Hispanic college students who plan to pursue careers in the entertainment industry. This will result in a deeper pool of talent, which will do more to change the racial makeup of prime time than protests like the “brownout.” Mean-time, how about a show where Al Gore speaks Spanish? It’s more amusing than most of what passes for TV comedy.
Lee Bockhorn is an editorial assistant at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
