Study Guide: Color Adjustment

This page presents background information and study questions for Color Adjustment, written and directed by Marlon T. Riggs, 1991. (Further details about the video are available from the distributor, California Newsreel.) The comments and questions below are intended to focus your viewing on the themes that are most important for our course. 

Part one ends with three key quotations, which sketch out the major arguments contrasted by the video as a whole:

Hugh Kanter, producer: "What I said at the time was that the audience gets enough of the confrontation and the incendiary actions of people in the ghettos and people in Watts, for instance. They see enough of that on the news;  they read enough of that in the newspaper. When they turn on the television to have a half an hour of pleasantry, let's ignore all that. In those days, our mandate was to amuse an audience, not to excite them, and I stuck to that mandate to try and amuse as many people as I possibly could."

Aaron Spelling, producer: "Television is cotton candy for the eyes."

Herman Gray, sociologist: "The point is that there is this universe of experience that is held up as the norm, and once people enter it, including whites, that everyone has to sort of work hard to participate in that universe. The entertainment function of television is predicated on the assumption that this world is a comforting world that we all aspire to--black, white, Latino, Chinese, Japanese, it doesn't matter. That's where I think television's ideological function--to use that language--really starts to show up, but it's hidden behind this notion that television is only there to entertain. Well, in its entertainment, what it's doing is reinforcing, legitimating, normalizing, that particular universe."

Part 2 is called "Coloring the Dream, 1968-88."

Summary Questions

1. What is "the American dream"?
2. In what ways do idealized images of the American family fit into this dream?
3. How does television reinforce and perpetuate this dream?
4. What kinds of families and family life were portrayed on television during the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s? Why did television show these kinds of families and not others?
5. How was All in the Family different from traditional television shows?
6. What was the difference during the 1960s between the portrayals of race in America by (1) news and (2) entertainment shows?
7. How does Riggs's analysis of TV stereotypes of African American men compare with Michael Moore's analysis of news & reality shows in Bowling for Columbine? What about stereotypes of African American women?
8. What is a "positive image" of African-Americans? Can a positive image also be negative?
9. Both Amos and Andy and Julia were criticized for their portrayals of African Americans. What problems did critics see in the two shows?
10. What is a "white Negro"? Are their white Negroes on television today?
11. Color Adjustment compares the character of J.J. on Good Times to nineteenth century minstrels. What is a minstrel, and in what ways did J.J. fit this stereotype?  
12. Are their minstrels on television today?
13. Do you think that television portrayals of Black Americans affect the views of White Americans? In what ways? Do you think television affects Black self-images?

Updating Color Adjustment

1. What popular shows today have all-Black casts?
2. What popular shows on television today include major characters who are Black?
3. What is the whitest show on television today?
4. In general, are Black characters on popular television shows now more diverse and complex than the were in the Cosby era? Is television "done" with this problem? 
5. Are TV representations of other minorities similar or different from those of African Americans?
6. How does the rise of cable TV and the Internet relate to representations of race on television?