Television, black Americans, and the American dream

Abstract

This essay examines fictional television representations of black middle class success and nonfictional representations of black urban poverty. It suggests that these representations operate intertextually to produce an ideology which explains black middle class success and urban poverty by privileging individual attributes and middle class values and by displacing social and structural factors. Jameson's notions of reification and utopia in popular culture are used in support of this ideological reading.