Last month, I found myself in San Diego for a wedding party. For those of you familiar with the state of California and its discrete, culturally autonomous regions, you’ll know that San Diego and its outlying suburbs trend to the right of the political spectrum, contrary to the received wisdom that all Californians are atheist, barefoot fornicators. As such, at the aforementioned wedding party, I was prepared to experience one or more cultural misunderstandings. At a point in the evening, a bit of karaoke broke out and someone made the unhealthy decision to perform Gold Digger by Kanye West. Gold Digger contains the dreaded N-word, and the white woman who was soon to be my adversary for the night dropped the variety of N-word that ends with an “a”. I confronted her, as any self-respecting biracial liberal would do, explaining the error. “You can’t say that word. It’s way too powerful, has too much awful history behind it, and is a racial slur when it comes out of the mouth of someone who is not black,” I reminded her.  “If you have a problem with it, call Kanye. This is a pop song. I just said ‘nigga’, anyway.”  At that point, I took my leave – well aware that there was no getting through to this person – but the incident did make me reflect on just how far black pop culture has come from the days when David Bowie had to complain on air that MTV refused to play music videos from black artists. Black music is so popular that white people from San Diego feel totally comfortable saying the N-word in front of a black person. If I was stoned or brain-damaged, I could pretend like that’s some kind of moral victory for the civil rights movement, but it’s not. At the very least, it’s a sign of how deeply we’ve penetrated the psyche of the nation.  And now, with the continued massive success of Fox’s Empire, that domination has spread to television. The show’s success has bred imitators and creative cousins – series that hope to cross over from the black households of Baldwin Hills and Buckhead to the living rooms of white folks in San Diego and elsewhere.  The arms race to claim the next Empire is motivated by profit, as anything is in the entertainment industry. There’s no altruistic aim here. These shows are not greenlit for the purposes of extending an olive branch to the African-American community. The #OscarsSoWhite controversy and related boycott by stars like Will Smith remind us that Hollywood is still not fully attuned to the needs of its minority audiences and co-workers. Still, the steady rise in black faces (and Hispanic faces and Asian faces) on TV provides some hope. This year’s pilot season offers a smattering of programmes that aim to push diversity into mainstream television.  Fox, continuing to bask in the glory of Empire, ordered something called Shots Fired straight to series. It stars Sanaa Lathan as the investigator of a series of racially motivated shootings in the south. The network is also considering another musical drama from Empire co-creator Lee Daniels, this time focusing on three women who join forces to start a band in Atlanta.  Atlanta is also the setting for (and title of) an FX drama series starring Donald Glover. At the Television Critics Association press tour, Glover described the series as “Twin Peaks with rappers”, a provocative pull quote if I’ve ever seen one. Glover plays a Princeton dropout who moves home to manage his hip-hop wunderkind cousin. Glover also referred to rappers as “the most existential people” – not a common way to describe those in that profession.  I wouldn’t call Empire particularly existential either. On that show, Lucious, Cookie, Jamal, Hakeem, Andre, and the rest of the main cast stay focused on two basic principles: the importance of family and the need to get paid. It’s a straightforward, bombastic soap opera with broadly sketched characters in flashy clothes. Atlanta might have better commercial prospects in the wake of Empire, but it doesn’t sound very much like it in artistic execution.  Whether white audiences embrace shows like Atlanta or Shots Fired is hard to predict. This last fall season, Fox premiered Rosewood, a law enforcement procedural starring Morris Chestnut that is one of the network’s highest-rated shows, but the lead didn’t necessarily have to be black for it to work. What separates a “show starring black people” from a “black show” is that the latter contains the intrinsic cultural DNA of the black experience. Empire’s characters had to be African American, because the show’s story is specifically about the inner-city drug trade, the hip-hop industry, and acceptance (or lack thereof) for LGBT people in the black community. The star of Rosewood could have been Patrick Dempsey and it wouldn’t have been a drastically different program. Rosewood’s creator, Todd Harthan, is also white, which might explain its colorblind approach to storytelling.  To find TV shows that reflect the African-American experience, you still have to venture into the cable hinterlands more often than not. OWN (Oprah Winfrey Network) and BET retain a strong grip on black-centric programming. By my count, Tyler Perry currently has four series airing new episodes on OWN, though I should be forgiven if I missed any while drowning in his prodigious output.  Those Perry shows are soon to be joined by Greenleaf, created by former Six Feet Under writer Craig Wright. Greenleaf focuses on a Memphis, Tennessee, megachurch and the family that runs it. Of course, that family has secrets, as befits its soap opera genre. Wright, like Harthan, is white, but its setting would be one that wouldn’t immediately lend itself to a white cast. In that sense, Greenleaf sounds the most Empire-y of them all, though churchgoing southern folk might be less marketable to mainstream audiences than Terrence Howard pistol-whipping some hapless extra.  That begs the question of whether white audiences have an appetite for black stories or just an abiding interest in the myth-making and hubris of hip-hop rebellion. When I think back to my nemesis from San Diego and her rationale for using a racial slur in the midst of a party, I remember that her reason for doing it was simply that she should be able to and I shouldn’t get offended – that it’s a harmless pop song. But those songs, like the word she employed so carelessly, hold more meaning than, say, Surfin’ Safari by the Beach Boys. Gold Digger is imbued with the sexual politics of black America.  As popular as Fetty Wap’s Trap Queen was last year, that doesn’t strip it of its origin as an ode to selling crack and trying to earn a living as an oppressed minority in this country. Empire is successful partially because it revels in those same themes, which are thrilling up until the point when you’re actually living that lifestyle. Empire does a fine job of injecting pathos, humor and humanity into those genre tropes, though. That’s partially why it succeeded where 50 Cent and Starz’s similarly themed music industry drama Power did not. But it remains to be seen if a black show can break out without the benefit of a gun and a beat.
After the runaway success of the ‘hip-hop Dynasty’, a new crop of shows are coming to our screens – but do they reflect the African American experience, and will white audiences embrace them?