Color Decoding: Black Men on Television

Meanwhile, Collins was insisting, ''I don't want to be known as the superhero for black rights on this show,'' yet that's how the ''houseguests,'' in deeming him arrogant, stereotyped him. (Brother's other black occupant, Cassandra, shrewdly remarked to William, ''Your body language is intimidating ... You have so much power'' — that is, a power to provoke.) In a 1969 essay on black power, the critic Seymour Krim wrote that ''art is not enough unless it becomes a revolutionary weapon that will affect society in just about the same way that a bomb will.'' Substitute the word ''TV'' for ''art'' and you'll know how Collins felt, and why he was doomed to be disappointed by the level of discourse he wanted to detonate amongst his timid Brother brethren.

Indeed, the debates that Collins prompted proved to be the most stimulating moments on this show, which degenerated into staring-at-the-walls banality the instant he was voted out. Given a television landscape in which, on any given week, the most well-rounded images of black men may be the underrated cartoon characters of Eddie Murphy's The PJs and David Letterman's stage manager Biff Henderson (no flunky, he enhances Dave's man-on-the-street stunts with his own good-natured but firm irony), I don't want to hear TV sitcom and drama writers whining about how the reality-show craze is robbing viewers of vivid characterizations. Let's see if the writers for The Hughleys, on which Gervase is scheduled to make a guest appearance, can come up with an image any more comic and pointed than the black T-shirt emblazoned with a bulls'-eye on one side and the word target on the other that Peterson devised for himself his last night on that island.