by Raina Kelley

As a teacher in a predominantly black school district, my husband often discusses civil rights, diversity, and integration no matter what his curriculum says. And for whatever reason, his eighth-grade students wanted to know why there are so few people of color on television. Despite the fact that they should have been discussing the Revolutionary War, my (white) husband commiserated with the kids for a minute: “If all you knew about America was what you got from TV,” he told them, “you’d think we were composed of 99.9 percent white people.” And sadly, my dear husband is right.

Despite the fact that one out of three people in this country is a member of a minority, the majority of prime-time television shows feature shockingly pale casting. With just a quick look at the top 10 shows for the first full week of the fall TV season, one finds just a few supporting characters of color (Chandra Wilson from Grey’s Anatomy, Omar Epps in House) and no leading roles unless you count Fox's The Cleveland Show, with the animated black guy voiced by a white guy, or The Desperate Real Housewives of Atlanta. And their complete reliance on negative stereotyping just leaves me feeling that we’d be better off without them.

At this year’s Primetime Emmys, only three of the 39 presenters were people of color, and only one nonwhite person won an award (Shohreh Aghdashloo for supporting actress in a movie or miniseries for House of Saddam on HBO).  And I can’t help but think that if the country can elect its first African-American president, surely studio execs can find a way to reboot Good Times or at least find more of their characters on all those medical shows and police procedurals some black friends. The main reason I make this complaint, aside from the fact that it makes me angry, is that I can’t understand why the executives who greenlight shows don’t realize that they’re making themselves anachronistic. The farther their programming strays from reality, the worse it gets, and the less likely it is that people will stick with shows.

All my favorite TV shows have strong people of color in their lineup (CSI, Fringe, The Office, Lie to Me, and Psych, just to name a few). Diversity of casting doesn’t mean your show is pandering to liberals; it just means there are more and better storylines, which is all I want. And I don’t buy the excuse that people don’t watch shows with black leads. The Cosby Show (1984 through 1992) was, as TV Guide describes it, “TV's biggest hit in the 1980s, and almost singlehandedly revived the sitcom genre and NBC's ratings fortunes." And that’s not because of Rudy’s white friend Peter, either.

The NAACP’s report on diversity in the television industry, released last December, found that “the exclusion of people of color by network management was less a purposeful and deliberate denial of opportunity than the effect of narrow thinking and a propensity for executives to hire people they already knew.” That explains not only why Kelsey Grammer keeps getting sitcoms, but also why Two and a Half Men takes place in an alternate universe where L.A. has no black or Mexican people. And my response to that is "How stupid can you be?”

The NAACP also noted that black viewers subscribe to pay TV, such as HBO or Showtime, in greater numbers than the general population—perhaps because those channels are a bit more generous with diversity. Shows such as Dexter and True Blood and movies like Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee are chock-full of characters of color, and these characters often have rich storylines. Yes, there’s Everybody Hates Chris and the Tyler Perry shows, but where are the shows to compare to The Jeffersons or Sanford and Son or even, God help me, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and Family Matters? It seems somehow unpleasant and ridiculous to have to reach back to the '70s and '80s for hard-hitting comedies that weren’t afraid to go after the racial stereotypes of their time.

So words cannot express how thrilled I was to discover Lincoln Heights on ABC Family. It follows the Sutton family and their move to the eponymous Lincoln Heights, a rough-and-tumble urban neighborhood in Southern California beset with the copious crime, drug, and poverty problems that typically beset such 'hoods. It’s a fascinating show that really examines the choices and opportunities available to people of color and manages to do it without negative stereotyping. The Suttons don’t have to live in Lincoln Heights, and in fact their families give them guff about it. They choose to because for them, giving back to the black community is important, no matter the difficulties. Oh, and did I mention that the love story at the center of the drama is an interracial relationship? That’s rare enough on TV to attract my attention. Not to mention that it’s the first show I’ve ever seen that actually addresses class issues within the black community—without resorting to bad slang and shootouts with gang members.

I asked Paul Lee, president of ABC Family, why he wasn’t afraid to greenlight a show full of colored people, and his answer was very telling. “Our target audience is the millennials. It’s a group that makes decision by consensus, got trophies even if they lost, and had helicopter parents,” Lee said. “But it’s the most colorblind generation ever. Lincoln Heights isn’t something we’re forcing on them. We just set out to be relatable to them and reflect our audience.”

You’d think in the age of Obama that there would be at least one other drama on TV that centers on African-Americans—but alas, there isn’t. And that’s a terrible shame. As endlessly fascinated as I am by my crime procedurals and sci-fi thrillers, where I live, black people have more to do than serve as comic relief or be the bad guy everyone’s chasing. The black people I encounter are more like the Suttons—hardworking, striving people with problems I can relate to. Tune in, and maybe if we’re lucky we can make prime time look a bit more like the world that watches it.