The Politics of Cultural Studies: Racism, Hegemony, and Resistance

Abstract

IN RESPONSE TO HERMAN GRAY'S RECENT REVIEW OF OUR BOOK, ENLIGHTened Racism: The Cosby Show, Audiences, and the Myth of the American Dream, we would like to make a general comment regarding the purpose of the book and the current debate on audience research in cultural studies. In general, we found Gray's comments thoughtful and fair-minded (apart from a few minor quibbles, which we have no intention of boring you with). He does, however, raise an important general issue, which we feel calls for some clarification on our part. Gray expresses a concern that our analysis is too ideologically driven, that we focus on those aspects of our interview data that indicate television's culpability in the cultivation of certain reactionary attitudes toward race and class. One of our main arguments, in brief, is that the assimilation of fictional black characters into the upper middle-class world of the United States sustains myths of classlessness and the American dream in such a way that viewers (particularly white viewers) assume that social inequalities between black and white people must be the result of the failure or refusal of most African Americans to take advantage of the opportunities repeatedly displayed on television. This analysis, Gray suggests, ignores the more complex, discursive interplay between television and television viewers, which produces a range of contradictory and multidimensional ideological positions. While we do spend some time discussing the complexity and range of responses in our focus groups, we would acknowledge that the polemical