e appeal then was directly to the white audience, still the largest audience and still the "buying public." When it is proven that there is a large black audience and that this audience will watch and spend money, shows are produced for that audience. This seems to be precisely what has happened in recent years.
The changes that have come about have occurred because the Civil Rights Movement created an awareness of the black community and in the black community leading to a demand for change. Change was slow, and it was always limited in the lifestyles it would reflect. The black world arrived in some form in the 1970s during the era of television relevance, when relevance sold. As long as there were viewers, shows like Sanford and Son had their place. Such shows still featured stereotyped portrayals by showing only one aspect of the black experience as if it were representative. The Cosby Show would do the same thing in a different direction, showing a middle-class family that was superior in lifestyle and values in a way that was not realistic to the American experience, black or white. The changes have been positive because they have given greater opportunity to blacks and have broken down barriers so that blacks are accepted in other capacities--news people and commercial spokespersons, for instance--but they still do not reflect the diversity of black life. While admitting that television by the 1970s had started to move toward a more equitable treatment of blacks, J. Fred MacDonald also found that progress stopped in the early 1970s for a time. He says that in the 1960s there was a move today a realization of the color-blind promise in television:
The promise, however, was not fulfilled, The evolution toward nonprejudicial television came to an abrupt end in the early 1970s. For reasons which were political, economic, and social, the role of blacks in TV was refashioned to reflect the popular attitudes and nat...