Buckwheat's Sweat & Magical Negroes

William "Billie" Thomas, Jr. as the popular Our
Gang (The Little Rascals) character Buckwheat

Having read through and reflected back on, "A Dangerous Distortion of Our Families", the report co-produced by Color Of Change and Family Story that was the subject of my previous blog, I wanted to pivot back to the same topic and share some personal observations about the distortion of the black family by American media.

As a child, long before I developed the ability to use writing as a vehicle to articulate my thoughts and perceptions, it was apparent to me that there was something wrong with the way that the media portrayed my family.

In the 1970's the popular series of short films known as Our Gang (later re-released as The Little Rascals when it went into syndication on television in 1955), was still being shown on kids' TV.

Created back in 1922 by producer Hal Roach, the Our Gang series revolved around a group of (racially-integrated) kids who basically got into all kinds of mischief - they were originally short films that ran in movie theaters in the 20's, 30's and 40's alongside cartoons or newsreels before or after the feature film.

Last produced in 1944, the series survived in syndication on TV for decades, which is where my younger brother and I used to watch them together in the 70's.

One day, there was this episode in which one of the African-American characters on the series, I think it was Buckwheat played by actor William "Billie" Thomas, Jr. (pictured above), but it may have been the character Farina played by actor Allen Hoskins, was standing near a stove.

Something was frying in a pan and the stove was hot, and the character used his arm to wipe the sweat off his brow, and the shot quickly cut to a white kitchen wall where drops of black ink splashed across in a pattern - as if to suggest that Buckwheat's sweat was black.

Some of the most popular of the 41 different child
actors who were characters on The Little Rascals

Now a lot of weird, goofy shit took place on The Little Rascals, and to his credit Hal Roach was one of the first Hollywood producers to include black characters alongside white characters in film - but I distinctly recall feeling very strange about that particular scene.

I'd watched dozens of the 220 short films that were made, and even though I was young and knew that scene was intended as comedy, it wasn't funny to me.

I distinctly recall feeling very uncomfortable about it.

Long before I could articulate what racism was in the intellectual or vocal sense, I instinctively understood that the black droplets of sweat played on demeaning racist stereotypes - even though that particular "cut" lasted less than five seconds.

I never felt the same way about "The Little Rascals" after that - and that was the very first memory I have of seeing the African-American image intentionally distorted on TV.

Over the course of the hundreds of essays I've written on this blog, I've often reflected upon the fact that as a child of color coming of age in the mostly-white suburban landscape of the northeastern United States in the 1970's and 1980's, I rarely saw "myself" in the print, television and film media that I consumed and watched.

Too often the images of black males I did see on TV, (television being the first real "mass media" medium I watched) were distorted in cartoonish, demeaning, or sometimes even grotesque ways.

From an early age, my parents, both well-read college-graduates, insisted that my siblings and I read in order to inform, educate, and entertain, ourselves.

Sesame Street circa 1973 - 1974 when I was watching it

For example, they always made sure that in addition to subscribing to mainstream news magazines like Newsweek and Forbes, they also subscribed to magazines like Black Enterprise and Ebony - magazines owned and published by African-Americans which focused on topical issues from the contemporary black perspective.

My mother in particular, always made sure to bring home books from the public library for us to read, and she'd take me to the local public library, and let me take my time and browse for books that interested me.

Aside from Sesame Street, which (to public television's credit) had a racially diverse cast, many of the popular cartoons and children's shows that I watched on television as a young child rarely included characters who looked, sounded, or acted like me.

Even most of the popular, long-running "family" prime-time shows that we'd watch together as a family, like Little House on the Prairie, or The Waltons, tended to feature storylines that revolved around white characters.

That's not to say there's anything wrong with that, or that I didn't enjoy those shows.

On the contrary, I watched them religiously; and I loved some of those characters.

When the older sister Mary Ingalls went blind on Little House on the Prairie I almost cried.

I'm just re-emphasizing the point that I didn't see a whole lot of myself on those network shows in the mid-to-late 70's.

Diahann Carroll and Mark Copage on
NBC's Julia (1968 - 1971)

70's network comedies like Sanford and Son, Chico and the Man and Welcome Back Kotter all featured diverse casts with characters of color, but the gritty urban settings in which they took place were unfamiliar to me as a kid from the suburbs - I was drawn to more escapist fare.

On Saturday mornings, when my younger brother and I would sit in our PJ's in the family room watching cartoons until about 11:30am, Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids, (which was based on creator Bill Cosby's childhood in North Philadelphia and was named for his real childhood friend Albert Robinson) a cartoon that ran on CBS from 1972 - 1984, was really the only animated series that featured African-American characters.

Ground-breaking 60's shows that featured black characters like I Spy and Julia were well before my time, but there were definitely some interesting black characters on mainstream television when I grew up.


The original Star Trek, which was still running regularly in syndication in the 1970's and 80's, had actress Nichelle Nichols playing Lieutenant Uhuru on the bridge as a main character.

And thanks to creator / producer Gene Roddenberry, the occasional recurring African-American Enterprise crewmen and crew-women as well.

Including, for example, actor Booker Bradshaw who played the amiable Dr. M'Benga on a couple episodes, or the  actress Janet MacLachlan who played Lt. Charlene Masters in one episode.

Science fiction author Robert J. Sawyer wrote an interesting blog post back in 2014 about the black actors cast in the first season of Star Trek which includes some pretty interesting script notes too.

It is of interest to note that in March of 1968, just a month before the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Star Trek also featured African-American actor actor William Marshall as the lead guest star on the episode "The Ultimate Computer".

Capt. Kirk & Lt. Uhuru watch in horror as Dr. Dystrom's
M-5 computer destroys the starship USS Excalibur

A distinguished actor with a long career, Marshall appeared in Broadway shows like Carmen Jones, six different stage productions of Othello, and even the title character in the 1972 blaxploitation film Blacula.

But Trek fans will remember him fondly as Dr. Richard Dystrom, the brilliant Star Fleet computer scientist who installed his revolutionary  "M-5 Multitronic System" on the Enterprise to test its ability to run a starship using artificial intelligence.

Let's just say that Dr. Dystrom's little experiment didn't end very well.

(We see you Hal-9000).

Now obviously Star Trek wasn't the only popular American television series to feature black actors in supporting and feature roles in the 1970's.

Ground-breaking series like CBS' Good Times and The Jeffersons (both spinoffs of All in the Family and all executive-produced by Norman Lear) brought "complete" black families (including fathers) to primetime television audiences for the first time.

While the aforementioned NBC series Julia is considered the first network prime-time series with a black family, it's important to note that her character played a nurse whose husband had been a U.S. (Air Force?) artillery spotter who'd been shot down over Vietnam.

Was that to "justify" her being single?

The series obviously deserves credit for portraying the first black family on network television, but it's interesting that the NBC executives who green-lit the show decided that a single black mother raising a son would be the main characters, rather than having a strong black male role model as the father.

I honestly don't know enough about the show to get into what the creators were thinking.

But while I can admire the casting of a black female lead, given the litany of painfully-average prime-time network TV shows in the 1960's that featured white married couples (Bewitched? I Dream of Jeanie?) I can't help but wonder about the reluctance of showing a "normal" black nuclear family on network TV.

1968, the year Julia premiered was a tense time for America, and not just because of race relations - it was the height of the Vietnam War, a growing counterculture was challenging traditional norms, the passing of civil rights legislation was upending the boundaries of a segregated American society.

Given all that, was the presence of an average well-adjusted black family a threat?

Was it really too controversial for Julia to have a husband in 1968 considering America landed a man on the moon in 1969?

The cast of ABC's Barney Miller in 1975

Perhaps if a black man had been written as what is jokingly called a "Magical Negro" endowed with some kind of magical powers NBC would've cast someone to play Julia's husband.

Don't laugh, see the aforementioned Bewitched or I Dream of Jeanie which featured a perky suburban witch and, yes - a mischievous genie from a bottle.

I'd mention The Flying Nun starring a young Sally Field but this blog is already way too long.

But alas, I digress. Let's move on.


In 1975 ABC introduced the comedy Barney Miller which featured a diverse slate of series regulars including African-American actor Ron Glass as NYPD Detective Sgt. Ron Harris, actor Jack Soo as Japanese-American Detective Nick Yemana, and actor Gregory Sierra as Puerto Rican Detective Sgt. "Chano" Amanguale.

Two years later, ABC brought the popular series The Love Boat to television with the African-American actor Ted Lange cast as series regular Issac the bartender - Lange would be one of only three actors to be in every episode of the series (and several made-for-TV movies) which ran from 1977 until 1986.

Yaphet Kotto being cast as one of the crewmen of the Nostromo on director Ridley Scott's visionary 1979  sci-fi classic Alien, and Billy Dee Williams being cast as Han Solo's friend Lando Calrissian in The Empire Strikes Back in 1980, were both pretty big moments for me as a kid.

Maybe it sounds strange, but as a kid sitting in a darkened movie theater watching both of those films seeing that people of color existed in the fictional Hollywood sci-fi universe made me feel better about myself.

Mainstream network television, especially NBC, was finally taking strides to make more diverse casts with multi-dimensional characters of color a part of popular prime-time programming by the late 1970's and early 1980's.

With ground-breaking series like the critically-acclaimed cop-drama Hill Street Blues (1981 - 1987) and hospital drama St. Elsewhere - series regulars included Denzel Washington, Mark Harmon, Norman Lloyd, Ed Begley, Jr., Howie Mandel and David Morse.

(St. Elsewhere, which centered around the fictional Boston hospital St. Eligius, unquestionably had one of the strangest final episodes in television history.)

The cast of NBC's Different Strokes (1978 - 1986)

My brother and I both watched the half-hour NBC comedy Different Strokes, with actors Gary Coleman and Todd Bridges, pretty religiously too.

But even at that age we understood that those characters, two Harlem brothers adopted by a wealthy white man who go live in his 5th Avenue penthouse, fell more into what African-American film audiences and critics jokingly call "Magical Negroes"

Characters who exhibit almost (or literal) magic qualities, and who exist in a sort of fictional fantasy outside of the real black American experience.

Or as critic Christopher John Farley described:

"Black film characters who exist primarily to help troubled white folks, and who generally have few meaningful characteristics of their own."

While I watched all of those shows to some degree, for me, a young African-American coming of age in the suburbs, it really wasn't until The Cosby Show premiered on NBC in 1984 when I was just starting high school at Walt Whitman Senior HS in Bethesda, Maryland in the 9th grade that I first saw what I considered to be a reflection of myself and my family on primetime television.

Here was a black family headed by two college-educated professionals, Dr. Cliff Huxtable, a doctor played by Bill Cosby, and his wife Claire, a lawyer played by Phylicia Rashad, raising their children in a comfortable upper-middle class home.

In the Huxtable's only son Theo, I finally saw a character that, to some degree, mirrored my own existence - a somewhat shy, at times painfully-awkward black boy trying his best to live up to the expectations set by his professionally-successful parents.

Like millions of other Americans I watched almost every episode, The Cosby Show was the number-one series on network television for five seasons and the most successful show of the 1980's - one that helped define the decade in a cultural sense.

But at that age, as I was becoming much more conscious about the world around me, I was also beginning to wonder why the media didn't show more positive imagery of people of color on television.

UC Berkley data showing the percentage of some American
workers who receive some type of government assistance 

For example, in the early 1980's when I was in middle school, I clearly recall the efforts by the Reagan administration to stigmatize and marginalize poor and working class Americans as part of a broader strategy to cut federal spending on social programs to pay for tax cuts in order to nudge the American economy out of the recession.

Reagan actively promoted the myth of "Welfare Queens".

A racist term popularized by Republican politicians that was meant to intentionally propagate an image of a lazy urban African-American woman "getting rich" on welfare to justify gutting social spending to finance tax cuts - sound familiar?

It wasn't accurate then, and it isn't now - as Maria Godoy and Allison Aubrey reported for NPR earlier this spring, when Trump's cartoonishly-right wing budget director Mick Mulvaney piously declared, "If you're on food stamps and you're able-bodied, we need you to go to work.", he was apparently unaware that statistics from the Department of Agriculture - which operates the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) - showed that 55% of families with children who receive SNAP are bringing home employment income.

Despite statistics that show otherwise, conservatives continue to peddle the myth of a lazy population of poor non-whites who don't work and want to "live off the government" again, that's not reality.

That's just one example of the myriad ways in which social conservatives and Republican politicians intentionally distort the image of people of color and the poor and working class in America to alter public policy.

In 1995 I saw African-American writer and professor Ishmael Reed speak at a black writer's conference in Brooklyn, and I went out and bought his 1994 book "Airing Dirty Laundry" - a collection of his essays and articles reflecting on how the mainstream media covers the black community.

In particular, his essay "Beyond Los Angeles" examined the media's massive distortion of the 1992 LA riots that broke out after the Rodney King verdict.

I remember the footage of truck driver Reginald Denny being beaten by a group of black rioters being played over and over again in addition to the footage of rioting by blacks.

But as Reed observed in his analysis of the media coverage of the riots, the mainstream television coverage never showed images of the white Yuppies in Santa Monica rioting or looting stores - he also quotes former LA Mayor Tom Bradley as noting that there was almost no television coverage of the young whites rioting in downtown LA either.


Reed notes that the former San Francisco "Mayor Frank Jordan said that few blacks participated in the San Francisco disorders" but media coverage of the LA riots disproportionately showed images of blacks looting - much of the media riot coverage that Americans saw on television was not factually representative of who was rioting and looting.

I'm sure there are some people reading this who had no idea, or don't believe that large numbers of white people were looting stores in California during the Rodney King Riots in 1992. 

Skeptics should check out the CityLab article citing some interesting facts of the '92 LA riots - including the fact of the 12,111 people arrested during those riots, only 36% were black.

Ishmael Reed's analysis of the distorted media coverage of the LA riots is pretty eye-opening, and just one example of the many writers, activists and scholars who've been bringing the media's distortion of the African-American community to the public's attention years before the Color of Change study.

If you're interested you can pick up a copy of "Airing Dirty Laundry" on Amazon pretty cheap - it's an enlightening read, although a disturbing one in the intellectual sense.

In conclusion, I cite all of these examples to make the point that it wasn't until years later that I began to explore how the distortion of the African-American identity affected my own sense of self.

I spent a lot of years absorbing a lot of media content without critically examining how it shaped my sense of self - writing in this blog helps me do that.

Sometimes it's hard to discern that kind of distortion within popular entertainment or news media, it can be cleverly buried deep within a narrative that's familiar and comforting.

But like those drops of Buckwheat's black sweat on a white kitchen wall I saw so many years ago, there are times when it's just too obvious to ignore.