The Deliberate Misrepresentation of Interracial Relationships in Film and TV

In the past few years we’ve suddenly started to see the representation of black and white interracial couples explode in Hollywood. Where traditionally, the presence of an interracial couple in a movie or a TV show could be professional suicide, these days we see interracial couples all over the big and small screens.

In TV commercials, interracial couples are hot, selling everything from cable TV to home owner’s insurance. Many are touting Hollywood’s recent efforts at diversity, but in reality it is a sort of racist and sexist slight of hand when it comes to the portrayal of black/white interracial couples specifically. Something of an illusion.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, as of 2010 there were 390,000 married couples where the husband was black and the wife was white, compared to just 168,000 where the husband was white and the wife was black. Yet, in Hollywood’s portrayal of black/white interracial couplings, almost all of the couples are portrayed as being composed of a white male with a black female. It’s not even close.

Not only is there an obvious misrepresentation of such interracial couples, it’s so far from reality that it is clearly not accidental or even coincidental, but deliberate in its misrepresentation. So the question is why? What purpose is there in such a gross perversion of the facts?

The answers are both sexist and racists. Though black/white interracial couples where the male is black and the woman is white, have always been much more prevalent in American society, television and film have usually stayed away from depicting such couples.

In 1968 the TV show, Star Trek, featured television’s first black/white interracial kiss between William Shatner’s Captain Kirk and the black female Lieutenant Ohura, played by Nichelle Nichols. Ironically, in the story line, the kiss happens after the Captain’s mind has been taken over by an alien.

That same year, the soap One Life to Live featured daytime’s first black/white couple, a romance between the daughter of a black housekeeper (who was passing for a white woman) and a white male doctor.

In 1975 the Norman Lear produced show, The Jeffersons, gave us prime time’s first married black/white interracial couple, featuring a white male, Tom (played by Franklin Cover) and a black wife, Helen (played by Roxie Roker).

During all these times, the percentage of black women in interracial relationships and marriages was far fewer than those such relationships where the man was African American. Yet Hollywood and print media consistently portrayed the opposite of reality.

One reason for this is that television networks and the companies that advertise on them were and are still mostly ran by white males. And white males have consistently been more comfortable with seeing white male/black female relationships portrayed than seeing black men with white women.

In 1987 the cable TV guide did a cover featuring the white actress, Jamie Lee Curtis sitting on the lap of African American NFL receiver, Willie Gault to promote the coming season of programing. They received thousands of letters of hate mail.

In 2013 a Cheerios commercial featuring a black husband, his white wife and their daughter received so much racist backlash on YouTube that the comments had to be cut off.

Portrayals of interracial couples where a white husband has a black wife don’t get the torrent of hate male that is typically aimed at black male/white female couples. And networks say that the hate mail they get in these cases is overwhelmingly from white men.

The ABC show, The Bachelor, has been sued multiple times by black men who claim they were turned down because of their race, despite fitting all of the criteria by which the male leads are usually selected for the show.

In fact, after 24 seasons on air, the show has just recently announced it’s first black bachelor as racial tensions escalate across the country over the police killings of unarmed black men. The show, The Bachelorette, had its first black female lead several years ago.

Today we see programing peppered with color, but it is almost always a portrayal of the white male/black female couple, in spite of consistent data that show’s reality is exactly the opposite of what we are shown as a viewing public.

African American film and TV producers have also taken part in this twisting of reality, featuring white male/black female couples in an effort to attract white viewers. Even in shows produced or written by African Americans, the white male/black female couple is much more prevalent, despite its opposition to reality.

These couples have come to be viewed as something of a carrot thrown to white males to try and get a broader audience for black shows that are often almost completely dependent on African American viewers.

The answer is simple, tell the truth. At its heart, this should be at least close to a reflection of reality. This deliberate perversion of reality is done to portray the white male as the object of every woman’s desire, and to insist, not so subtly, that a white woman would never be with a black man when she has the white man at her disposal.

And their message is that once in a while there will be a black woman beautiful enough, worthy enough to attract a white man, even if an alien did have to take over his brain to make it happen.