The Vast Whiteland

This was, in retrospect, perhaps not the best month for Calista Flockhart to invite the press to "kiss my skinny white ass." And for once, "skinny" wasn't the problem. "White," rather, reminded us too vividly that Fox had bumped to midseason the heftier black keister of Thurgood Stubbs, animated star of The PJs, in favor of Ally, the half-hour Mini-Me to Ally McBeal and, incidentally, part of the most Caucasian fall lineup in years. It should not have surprised anyone, then, that N.A.A.C.P. president Kweisi Mfume last week issued a similarly spirited directive to the Big Four networks, ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC: Put some color back in prime time, or we'll boycott, possibly even sue.

Of 26 pilots the four networks announced for fall, none has a minority star, an embarrassment that led the same TV executives who unveiled the vanilla slate to issue chagrined statements, point to minority characters on existing shows and scramble to make last-minute cast additions. But the issue is more than numbers. It's the future of integration. Network prime time has not just been whitewashed, as Mfume says, it's also been redlined--divided into distinct white and minority (mostly black) 'hoods. Four years after Oprah Winfrey challenged Ross and Rachel to "get a black Friend," the most diverse group on NBC's Must-See comedies is the paint-colored men diving into the peacock logo at breaks, while UPN and the WB have a stable of black-cast comedies. Only a few sitcoms, like the WB's For Your Love and UPN's upcoming Grown Ups, are integrated.

And black-themed programming is, comparatively, the good news. Space aliens will have more network lead roles than Asians or Native Americans, while Hispanics, the fastest-growing segment of the U.S. population, are woefully underrepresented. "Networks have realized they can't stereotype us, but instead they ignore us," says Lisa Navarrete, spokeswoman for the Hispanic advocacy group the National Council of La Raza. And the networks' few efforts at Hispanic- or Asian-themed programs (see, or better yet don't, the misused Margaret Cho in All-American Girl) have been feeble and short-lived, feeding the belief that they're untenable. Norman Lear produced ABC's AKA Pablo in 1984, but says "the interest simply hasn't been there" for a Latino program since. Even the networks' critics largely blame not blind Klansmanship but the belief that white viewers are key to the ratings and ad bucks that big broadcasters seek. "They think about the market," says Screen Actors Guild president Richard Masur, "and you have to address them in those terms." But a scarcity of minority executives and the pigeonholing of minority writers don't help. "Programmers and executives know Latinos only as people they see in their kitchens and gardens," remarks Latina TV writer Julie Friedgen.

And in the viewers' kitchens? Minorities are best represented on workplace dramas (ER, NYPD Blue), but sitcoms, which focus more on family and society, tend to be colorless, color blind or awkwardly color conscious. (A rare exception is the wonderfully nuanced relationship between the Hill clan and Laotian next-door neighbors the Souphanousinphones on Fox's King of the Hill.) And if these casting decisions are injurious to minorities, they're insulting to whites, who the networks essentially imply are retrograde racists, years after warming to Jefferson, Huxtable and Urkel. And what if--God help us--they're right?

Racial optimists might look to cable, where channels like Lifetime, MTV, HBO and Showtime offer multiracial fare--while siphoning away broadcast's audience and acclaim. Indeed, Mfume's jeremiad may be an ironic compliment: at least someone still considers the ratings-troubled networks worth fighting over. Is it any wonder the nightly lineup looks like a divided school district, pre-Brown v. Board of Education? If you were running a network today, you too would wish it were 1954 again.