Director in Person "The country's image of the Negro, which hasn't very much to do with the Negro, has never failed to reflect with a kind of terrifying accuracy the state of mind of the country." This quote from James Baldwin sets the tone and the stage for Marlon Riggs' documentary. Riggs proceeds with an accuracy both terrifying and entertaining to examine the presence/absence of blacks on television, and what this has said about American society since 1945. From Amos 'n' Andy and Julia to The Cosby Show, from Father Knows Best to Frank's Place, Riggs explores the split between black lives and white television. (Most profoundly, the Civil Rights Movement resonated in television fiction with the lengths taken to avoid the subject altogether.) He interviews African American sociologists and entertainers, white television producers who strove to place blacks on t.v. and those who did not, and other media analysts. But perhaps the most moving are the personal recollections of being black spectators in Leave It to Beaver-land. "Television, the American Dream, the family, indeed the psyche of this country provide the landscape against which Riggs examines how we are created by and create the fictions we try to live." (Patricia A Gozemba) Meet the Huxtables, America's most popular television family in the 1990s. Marlon Riggs' acclaimed documentaries include Ethnic Notions and Tongues Untied. He teaches in the Journalism Department at UC Berkeley.