BLACKNESS AND TELEVISUAL REPARATIONS
Brandy Monk-Payton
The election of Barack Obama as the first African American
President of the United States reverberated across the nation
in 2008, and the racial dynamics of the election seemed to
mark a return to the era of civil rights television in terms of
media culture. Television coverage that invoked the black
freedom struggle was used repeatedly during the presi-
dential campaign and exemplified the construction of a
teleological narrative linking historical black protest to
contemporary “post-racial” victory, signifying “American
triumph and moral clarity.”1 Thus, Aniko Bodroghkozy
suggests, the newscast framing of Obama’s road to the
White House created a semiotic connection between the
first black president and the legacy of Civil Rights Movement
leader Martin Luther King, Jr.
However, the utopian story that television news con-
structed about the success of Obama that fateful day in
November stands in stark contrast to the news coverage of
the post-election years, rife with racialized conflict that came
to afflict the nation’s capital and the entire country. What
appears in retrospect to have been elided in television’s use of
civil rights discourse in the Obama era is the assumption—
and insistence—that his presidency was indicative of a tra-
jectory that culminated with an “affinity between black and
white.”2 Reflecting on television’s representational logics in a
post-civil rights age in which racial antagonism persists off-
camera summons up the ontological condition of black
“freedom in unfreedom” in the afterlife of slavery as
described by television’s circulation of imagery.3
Nowhere, perhaps, is this condition made more visibly
and visually palpable than the depiction of the 2008 election
night address in Chicago. The newly pronounced President
Obama took to the stage in Grant Park and gave a victory
speech, a historic moment that attested to U.S. black enfran-
chisement through the figure of Obama as the pinnacle of
African American civic engagement and achievement. Yet
to examine the moment more closely is also to observe the
Film Quarterly, Vol. 71, Number 2, pp. 12–18, ISSN 0015-1386, electronic ISSN 1533-8630.
© 2017 by The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please
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12 WIN T ER 201 7
bulletproof glass that enclosed the first black president from
both sides of the podium. The structures served as a protec-
tive shield; amidst the atmosphere of hope, there was also a
sense of imminent danger. The glass can also be considered
as a screen apparatus that reflected on television the precari-
ous belonging of blackness within the national fabric.4
Indeed, the television screen has increasingly come to
serve as a complex threshold for images of blackness across
genres. What could be termed “televisual reparations,”
therefore, emphasizes the medium’s attempts to address the
paradox of black “unfreedom” and provide redress for con-
tinuing race-related grievances, especially those connected to
histories of violence. Such televisual acts of reparation occur
at the levels of television industry, text, and audience. The in-
dustry maintains a tenuous commitment to provide opportu-
nities for African American producers, writers, directors,
and actors to the degree that such practice continues to be
helpful to the reputation of the medium as well as profitable.
The programming created often comments on civil rights by
mobilizing references to the past of racial injustice in a vari-
ety of imaginative ways. Reparations, in this way, underscore
how blackness comes to be televisually transmitted to audi-
ences through the realm of spirits—spirits that come to res-
onate with viewers and call forth engagement with, and
response to, representations of black mortality in the afterlife
of slavery.
Race, Representation, and Reparation in the Age
of “Peak TV”
What, if anything, does television owe to blackness? What
forms of repayment can be offered? In the era of what the
Hollywood trade press terms “peak television”—rhetoric
that explains an explosion of programming content across
media platforms irrespective of “quality”—the medium
stays relevant by virtue of retaining its traditional immediacy
and by making TV that “matters.” In the current period of
Black Lives Matter, the television industry strives to com-
pensate for an inability to coherently register threats of ma-
terial violence to African Americans by repairing psychic
wounds through representation.
The Daily Show’s host Trevor Noah.
Such redressal undergirds new claims to “peak blackness”
in media culture, a term for which comedian Roy Wood, Jr.
humorously offered a definition on The Daily Show (Trevor
Noah, Comedy Central, 2015–): “a rare metaphysical anom-
aly that can only occur when an amalgam of black excellence
comes together at the same societal intersection.” Although
the discussion centered on the celebration of African Amer-
ican cinema at the 2017 Academy Awards, where Moonlight
(Barry Jenkins, 2016) won for Best Picture, the state of “peak
blackness” points more broadly to a posture toward the in-
tensified production of black imagery on screen. As media
representation reckons with a climate of “antiblackness,”
many of these images of reparations on television implicitly
or explicitly deal with violence and stage the tensions that
surround justice for racial injury for viewers.
In 2014, public intellectual Ta-Nehisi Coates’s award-
winning Atlantic Monthly essay, “The Case for Reparations,”
brought to the forefront the controversial call for payment of
debt, most specifically concerning African American oppres-
sion, from a past of historical enslavement up to current
forms of state-sanctioned violence. Although Coates exam-
ines the legacy of racist housing practices and, therefore, tan-
gible forms of reparations, the metaphorical language
employed in the essay frequently connects the notion of rep-
arations to a fundamental national demand to witness by
way of seeing. He states: “We believe white dominance to be
a fact of the inert past, a delinquent debt that can be made to
disappear if only we don’t look.” Even further he attests:
“An America that looks away is ignoring not just the sins of
the past but the sins of the present and the certain sins of the
future.”5 In this way Coates describes the persistence of
structural antiblackness in the United States through scopic
activity. His discussion of “looking” solicits the act of bearing
witness, a viewing practice that television seems to court (for
some publics) in its production of “liveness.” For Jose Mu-
ñoz, the “burden of liveness” is specifically placed on black
and brown bodies as a kind of performance that approxi-
mates “realness,” not only through appearance but also via
the reception of presence—that is, through the encounter
with the audience.6
Television is beholden to viewer proclivities—for exam-
ple, watching in a state of distraction is a primary mode of
reception through which the medium understands itself to
function. Itinerant looking is regulated and managed by the
logics of televisual flow that are inherently economically
driven. Given the everyday quality of the medium coupled
with its status as commercial entertainment, televisual acts of
reparation create speculative modes of channeling blackness
at the dynamic intersection of witnessing and spectating ra-
cial violence that warrant close attention.7
F ILM QU A RTE RL Y 13
 Mediations of violence and strategies for moving across is-
sues of aesthetics, politics, and ethics have led television into
an exploration of the televisual register of black death and
life. Fantasies held by TV audiences in their diverse and frac-
tured encounters with blackness have compelled experimen-
tation in televisual form in the current sociopolitical climate.
Such experimentation requires that renewed attention be
placed on the representational capacities of the medium
through a robust theoretical analysis of television in relation
to race more generally and, especially, to African American
experiences. In this regard, the project of Black Studies be-
comes a generative lens for a study of televisual reparations
that interrogates the medium’s relationship to black subjec-
tion and black liberation.
The Roots of Reparations
The story of the struggle for civil rights in the afterlife of
slavery has always been an absent presence for television, a
specter that has not been exorcized since the mid-twentieth
century representations of the Black Freedom Struggle that
came alongside the medium’s rise in consumer culture.
Blackness haunts television, its spectral quality revealing
itself through “mnemonic restitution,” to use Salamishah
Tillet’s term. In the face of post-civil rights estrangement,
justice has become associated with the production of mem-
ory, which is constituted as an important strategy to rectify
the “national amnesia around slavery” and its consequent en-
during racist practices.8 Attending to the notion of televisual
reparations starts with recognizing the long history of televi-
sion’s mediation of racial violence.
In 2016, The History Channel premiered a remake of the
miniseries Roots (David L. Wolper, ABC, 1977), the land-
mark television event based on author Alex Haley’s novel
of the same name that depicted a genealogy of African
American experience from enslavement to emancipation.
The original twelve-hour epic became a network ratings
triumph in its appeal to a racially heterogeneous audience,
educating and entertaining a national public about slavery
and the realization of the American Dream for African
Americans through its narrative of assimilation. Producers
of the reboot—including original program star LeVar
Burton—acknowledged the desire to bring Roots to a new
wave of viewers in the twenty-first century. In many ways,
the decision to revive the miniseries reflects an urgency
informed by the Movement for Black Lives, a movement
spurred by myriad cases of police brutality against African
Americans across the country. Such cases of violence, espe-
cially of black male death at the hands of law enforcement
14 WIN T ER 201 7
officials, are increasingly disseminated to an engaged public
through the medium of recorded videos, via cell phone foot-
age that harkens back to Rodney King’s beating by Los An-
geles police on March 3, 1991, and George Holliday’s
infamous video-taped recording of the assault.
A collective memory of the legacy of racial violence exists
across generations of African American media audiences.
Such a memory spurs a spectatorial response by virtue of its
activation on screen. As Elizabeth Alexander argues, “The
body has a language which ‘speaks’ what it has witnessed.”9
During the summer of 1992, the Communist newspaper
Revolutionary Worker compiled accounts of the rebellion in
Los Angeles, six days of civil unrest in the city incited by the
acquittal of police officers for King’s assault. A student who
was interviewed remarked, “Somebody brought a video to
school—the video of Rodney King—and then somebody
put it on the television and then everybody just started to
break windows and everything—then some people got so
mad they broke the television.”10 The destruction of the TV
set became a symbolic response to racial injustice, highlight-
ing the inadequacy of the machine in its incapacity to broad-
cast antiblack violence.
Television’s navigation of the beating and its aftermath
prompted Sasha Torres to describe the flow of nonfiction
and fiction programming that tried to make sense of the
Rodney King media event notably as “King TV.”11 Such a
designation is instructive for today’s televisual landscape that
engages in the project of confronting pressing issues con-
cerning racial injury. An examination of particular episodes
from such recent fiction programs as The Boondocks (Aaron
McGruder, Adult Swim/Cartoon Network, 2005–14), Un-
derground (Misha Green and Joe Pokaski, WGN America,
2016–17), and Black-ish (Kenya Barris, ABC, 2014–) detail
how American television has come to channel blackness.
Here, “channel” signifies not only the technological
process of transmitting images electronically but also the
ideological state and affective condition of being a con-
duit between death and life, one world and an Other-
world—that is, a channel between oppressions of the
past and the present. In the face of violence, blackness in
contemporary television performs an alterity that speaks
to the racial futures of both the medium and the lives
off-screen implicated within it.
Channeling Blackness
If blackness “orients television’s phenomenology of limits,”
as Stephen Michael Best has argued, those outer limits of
programming push boundaries in the form of haunting.12
The ensemble cast of the History Channel’s 2016 remake of Roots.
These phantasmagoric articulations of blackness through the
ether of television differently orient the idea of reception,
broadly conceived, as it relates to collective racial memory
and justice. In other words, television can bring out the dead
as a means of redressing violence associated with America’s
dark past. Audiences encounter these ghosts that appear in
programming as voices from the void, images that are famil-
iar yet wholly strange.
Two and a half years before Obama’s presidential elec-
tion, Aaron McGruder’s The Boondocks aired “The Return
of the King,” an episode of the animated satire that imagined
a world in which the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.
did not occur. In this revisionist history, King (Kevin
Michael Richardson) wakes up from a thirty-year coma after
being critically injured at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis in
1968. The episode marks the decades-long passage of time
by transformations in the television apparatus: a storefront
display of tube televisions transitions to flat-screen HDTV
monitors. Child protagonist Huey (Regina King) recounts in
voiceover how “King faded into memory” to finally awaken
to a world unfamiliar to him, one that has forgotten the im-
portance of his contributions to civil rights. Indeed, King is
even publicly ostracized when he makes comments seen as
unpatriotic in the aftermath of the September 11 terrorist at-
tack in New York City.
Frustrated by the images of blackness that he sees on tele-
vision while channel surfing, the revived Martin Luther
King, Jr. gives a blistering speech on the state of Black
America that is replayed on cable news and prompts the so-
cial revolution that did not come in the 1960s. In the epi-
sode’s alternative universe, “The Return of the King” ends
with a shot of a newspaper headline of Oprah Winfrey’s
election as U.S. President in 2020. Huey concludes: “It’s fun
to dream.” The episode prompts an engagement with the
millennial political climate as it connects to racial progress in
its playful reanimation of King in media culture.
A similar spirit of resuscitation is exhibited in the histori-
cal drama series Underground that premiered in March 2016
F ILM QU A RTE RL Y 15

The Boondocks episode, “The Return of the King.”
The final shot of “The Return of the King” has Oprah in
the White House in 2020.
on WGN America. Created by Misha Green and Joe
Potaski, the action-packed drama follows a group of slaves
in Macon, Georgia, and their fight for freedom. Although it
aired for only two seasons before its cancellation, the pro-
gram provides a depiction of fugitivity that is epitomized by
the second and final season’s featuring of Harriet Tubman
(Aisha Hinds) as a character in the ensemble. In the sixth
episode, titled “Minty,” the famous historical figure lectures
on her life to a group of white abolitionists in Philadelphia.
Through her shepherding of black folk along the under-
ground railroad, Tubman herself can be considered a medium
or conduit between enslavement and freedom. The stand-
alone episode is so powerful that it disrupts Underground’s
serial quality, as Tubman’s uncanny presence on screen seems
to exist outside of time and approximates a moment of wit-
nessing. The episode is comprised entirely of a monologue
16 WIN T ER 201 7
that is addressed to both the audience before her and the TV
viewers at home. Tubman testifies:
To tell you how I came to be free, first you gotta under-
stand what bondage was like for me. How it attacks the
senses. The sound of it. The crack of a whip like thunder.
The feel of it. Like you could barely take a full breath. The
taste of it like all your teeth made of copper. The smell of
it. The faded stench of everybody sold away. And the look
of it. Every eye turned down to the ground. Away from
the horror.
The visceral quality of her testimony—at one point com-
pelling the abolitionist audience to clap their hands as she
sings a spiritual—facilitates “spectatorial remembering”
through her embodied performance.
The autobiography of Tubman articulated in the episode
not only speaks to the past of race relations in the United
States but also comments on the present and future. Tubman
declares, “I want to live a long and full life. I’m tired of living
under the threat of death. Violence with no cause is brutality.
That’s the way of the slaveholder. But beating back against
those trying to kill you, that’s hope. That’s prayer. That’s be-
lieving you will live a long and full life.” Mortality is a recur-
rent theme for Tubman, her rhetoric acknowledging her
enduring legacy that has not yet come to pass. In her final
moments on screen, Tubman breaks the fourth wall and
states: “You gotta do your part. Beat back those that are try-
ing to kill everything good and right in the world and call it
‘making it great again.’ Nobody get to sit this one out.”
The lines notably indict the “Make America Great
Again” slogan of Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential cam-
paign. In this way, Tubman’s rallying cry is addressed to two
disparate audiences, as her character makes a provocation to
rebel within the nineteenth century diegesis of the show as
well as to twenty-first century America and its TV viewers.
TV Possessions
While Underground’s depiction of Tubman’s monologue at-
tempts to urge political action beyond the confines of the
screen, her speech serves as a symbolic gesture and does little
for structural change that could be associated with the “re-
distribution of material resources” in the fight for racial
equality and equity.13 To account more fully for the
discourse of reparations beyond television aesthetics, heed
the significance of Oprah Winfrey’s OWN Network—a
network established in 2011 that comes to stand not only for
her name but also for an explicit pronouncement of property
ownership. Winfrey’s branded intervention into cable televi-
sion constitutes a renewed economic stake in the medium for
Harriet Tubman (Aisha Hinds) in WGN’s Underground.
African American representation not seen since TV One’s
launch on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day in 2004 as an alterna-
tive to Black Entertainment Television (BET).14
On network television, the industry’s debt concerning a
lack of minority representation on screen has led to be-
hind-the-camera attempts to make repayments literally
through the production of “diversity” programming. Many
of the programs developed with this inclusive goal in mind
engage a politics of difference, commenting on blackness, vi-
olence, and memory in their storytelling. Kenya Barris’s
Black-ish is a popular sitcom in which the series problematic
focuses on race—namely, how a middle-class African Amer-
ican family negotiates the multiplicity of blackness in a pre-
sumed “post-racial” era associated with Obama. However, in
the episode “Hope,” which aired during the program’s sec-
ond season, married couple Dre (Anthony Anderson) and
Bow Johnson (Tracee Ellis Ross) navigate how to talk to
their children about police brutality, as the entire family sits
glued to their living-room television screen watching a fic-
tional scenario: an indictment that fails to be delivered for
the murder of an African American man.
This scene of spectatorship is at the center of the entire
episode, as conversation over racial justice becomes heated,
referencing actual incidents of violence perpetrated by law
enforcement in the country. When the family makes a col-
lective decision to attend a rally in response to the injustice
of the verdict, grandma Ruby (Jenifer Lewis) says that she
will hold down the fort at their house. As the credits roll,
Ruby spraypaints the family garage: “Black Owned.” The
black spray paint stands in stark contrast to the white garage
door. Satisfied with her work, Ruby proceeds to sit outside in
a lawn chair and remarks, “Bring it on, boys.” Her defiant
attitude and assertion of property as the episode ends operate
as a form of protest that also recalls and reproduces tags
placed on property during the Los Angeles riots.
In keeping with its focus on property, a third-season
Black-ish episode, “40 Acres and a Vote,” seems to bookend
the previous season’s “Hope” regarding racial politics. The
episode has oldest son Junior (Marcus Scribner) run for class
president at his school as Dre laments Barack Obama’s inev-
itable departure from the White House. Dre makes a tribute
video to the first black president that uses the R&B group
F ILM QU A RTE RL Y 17
 Boyz II Men’s track “It’s So Hard to Say Goodbye to Yester-
day” (1991) to express his sadness at the end of an era. The
episode connects this attachment to Obama in advance of his
“death” to anxieties about the gutting of voting rights. Its
title pointedly aligns the post-Civil War promise of a payment
of forty acres and a mule to the formerly enslaved—a mate-
rial form of reparations—that went unpaid, back then, to the
recent threat of African American disenfranchisement.
This emphasis on cultural referentiality showcases the
multiple temporal dimensions in which television can oper-
ate to comment on histories of antiblackness. Series such as
Black-ish and others described herein emphasize the richness
of the current moment in television, resonating in a post-
Obama age and deftly continuing to communicate how race
is constitutive of the medium’s past, present, and future.
Many of these programs have in common the production of
an audiovisual terrain that aids in the reparations project.
They might look—and sound—like TV One’s UnSung
(2008–), a documentary series that celebrates those black sing-
ers obscured to history, in some cases unearthing them from
the dead and bringing their archives to light and life. The po-
etic lyricism of filmmaker Ava DuVernay’s Queen Sugar
(OWN, 2016–) tells the story of an African American family’s
sugarcane farm, a story of land reclamation within a necropo-
litical southern geography. The sound of live musical enter-
tainment flows in and out of scenes in Luke Cage (Netflix,
2016–), a series that follows black, male superhero Cage who
is unbreakable—even able to withstand bullets—and pro-
tects the Harlem community from crime. Thus, the ter-
rain of the sonic becomes crucial to channeling blackness
in contemporary television.
There is much more to be discovered about this time of
blackness on television that allows for a deeper understand-
ing of race and representation as it relates to such critical con-
cepts in TV studies as liveness, flow, intertextuality, and
relevancy. In particular, the optics of reparations becomes
useful to explain mediations of racial violence from slavery to
the (new) Jim Crow.15 The images that emerge on screen and
the messages relayed by such imagery to viewers force a look
backward at the long history of civil rights—a revisit to
different forms of struggle—as a means of coming to terms
with black death and life, again and again. In this way, black-
ness has built a possessive hold on television where, in turn,
programming has become indebted to its haunting vitality.
Notes
1. Aniko Bodroghkozy, Equal Time: Television and the Civil
Rights Movement (Urbana–Champaign: University of Illinois
Press, 2012), 229.
18 WIN T ER 201 7
2. Ibid., 228.
3. Fred Moten, “Preface for a Solo by Miles Davis,” Women &
Performance: a Journal of Feminist Theory 17, no. 2 (2007):
243.
4. Many thanks to Racquel Gates for recalling this pivotal im-
age of Obama.
5. Ta-Nehisi Coates, “The Case for Reparations,” The Atlantic,
June 2014. www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/
the-case-for-reparations/361631/.
6. José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and
the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Min-
nesota Press, 1999).
7. See Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery,
and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1997). In her formative study of
black subjugation, Hartman examines the positions of wit-
ness and spectator when detailing the horrors of American
slavery, especially as to how the two positions intersect with
articulations of terror during enslavement that were not
spectacular at all but rather quite quotidian, sometimes even
deemed “innocent amusements.”
8. Salamishah Tillet, Sites of Slavery: Citizenship and Racial
Democracy in the Post-Civil Rights Imagination (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2012), 137.
9. Elizabeth Alexander, “‘Can You Be BLACK and Look at
This?’ Reading the Rodney King Video(s),” Public Culture
7 (1994): 77–94.
10. Michael Slate, Shockwaves: Report from the L.A. Rebellion
(Chicago: Revolutionary Worker, 1993).
11. Sasha Torres, “King TV,” in Living Color: Race and Televi-
sion in the United States, ed. Sasha Torres (Durham: Duke
University Press, 1998), 140–60; and Tillet, 163.
12. Stephen Michael Best, “Game Theory: Racial Embodiment
and Media Crisis,” in Living Color: Race and Television in the
United States, ed. Sasha Torres (Durham: Duke University
Press, 1998), 234.
13. Tillet, 163.
14. Felicia R. Lee, “A Network for Blacks with Sense of Mis-
sion,” New York Times, December 11, 2007, www.nytimes.
com/2007/12/11/arts/television/11one.html?_r=1&. Coincid-
entally continuing the theme of haunting, a popular TV
One advertising campaign “I see black people”—a reference
to the famous “I see dead people” quote from film The Sixth
Sense (M. Night Shyamalan, 1999)—likens the presence of
African Americans on the small screen to the presence of
ghosts.
15. Most recently, the Amazon streaming platform is developing
a new series titled Black America from producers Will Packer
and Aaron McGruder, which imagines reparations in a post-
slavery country where freed African Americans live in New
Colonia, a nation comprised of formerly Southern states. For
more on this upcoming series, see Nellie Andreeva, “‘Black
America’: Amazon Alt-History Drama from Will Packer &
Aaron McGruder Envisions Post-Reparations America,”
August 1, 2017, http://deadline.com/2017/08/black-america-
amazon-alt-history-drama-will-packer-aaron-mcgruder-
envisions-post-reparations-america-1202139504/.