Editor’s note: The following article is an op-ed, and the views expressed are the author’s own. Read more opinions on theGrio.
Although I was too young to watch most of Norman Lear’s work when it originally aired on primetime network television, I am quite familiar with every episode of the television producer’s Black situation comedies.
Every summer day, at 11 a.m., my sisters and I gathered around the television to watch back-to-back syndicated reruns of “The Jeffersons.” When my cousins visited during our childhood years, they would secretly recount the plot lines from episodes of “Good Times.” Whenever something particularly startling or disquieting happened to my best friend James, he would clutch his chest, stagger in a circle and yell: “It’s the big one! I’m coming for you, Elizabeth!” However, James would never perform his impression of Fred Sanford in front of my mother.
In my house, Norman Lear, who died Tuesday, was contraband.
In all likelihood, my mom probably had no idea that the guy who produced “Good Times” also produced “Sanford and Son.” Because she didn’t have access to the IMDb database, she didn’t applaud Lear for leading a revolution of primetime network sitcoms featuring Black characters. She didn’t care about George and Weezy’s deluxe apartment in the sky or James and Florida’s nuclear family. Aside from her agnosticism on “Diff’rent Strokes,” she hated everything Lear produced. In her mind, Lear produced Blackface caricatures, white people’s versions of Black people.
She had a point.
As far as the American television audience was concerned, “Good Times” is still considered a groundbreaking show that showed an impoverished Black family in the Chicago projects. The main character in “The Jeffersons” was an unapologetic Black man who refused to genuflect to whiteness. “Sanford and Son” was about a single father who ran a Black-owned business ……
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