When I ask black males of all ages about the place of love in their lives, they express the desire to receive love but they do not talk about whether or not they know how to be loving. Young black males, like their female counterparts, will never know how to be "real" parents if they have known no loving care or have never learned from books or any other source what it means to be loving. Religious teachings were once the place where most of us learned ways to think deeply about love, but the place of those teachings has been usurped by mass media.

In general, the mass media tell us that black people are not loving, that our lives are so fraught with violence and aggression that we have no time to love. The most common image of a black person showing care in the mass media is the portrayal of the self-sacrificial black mother figure. When The Cosby Show first aired, many folks thought it was radical because it showed an upper-class black family. Although these images were new to television, all traditional black neighborhoods have been peopled by well-paid black professionals. One of the most unacknowledged realities in our lives is that racial integration is still quite a recent phenomenon. As late as the early seventies, the vast majority of materially privileged black people lived in all-black or predominately black neighborhoods. Racial integration led to black flight from areas that were once peopled by folks from diverse classes. Even though I was raised in a working-class home, I was always aware of the lifestyles of the black upper class in our community. It was only when racial integration allowed those individuals to move into more affluent nonblack communities that the black poor and working class ceased knowing intimately how their more privileged counterparts lived. In the days of total racial segregation, materially well-off black folks sent their children to the same schools and churches as those less privileged. The poor knew what the real lives of the privileged were like, and did not need to romanticize them.

After racial integration, with so many monied black folks leaving predominately black communities, a new generation of underprivileged children was born who often had no awareness of a black privileged class and how that class lived. It was these individuals who looked at The Cosby Show and believed it was based on pure fantasy. To them, the lifestyle depicted on the show was alien and therefore "not black," since they did not know any black folks who lived this way. In this sense their perceptions of blackness were as limited as the vision of racist whites who looked at The Cosby Show and believed it was pure fiction because they have never acknowledged the existence of black professionals - doctors, lawyers, et alia - or known anything about how they live. To this day a large majority of black doctors are educated at predominately black institutions. Most racist white folks know little about the existence of these institutions because they refuse to let go of their stereotypes about black lifestyle and educate themselves. They were eager to perpetuate the notion that the lifestyle portrayed on The Cosby Show was fantasy. It speaks to growing class divisions in black life that so many black folks also insisted that black family life as it was represented on The Cosby Show was not realistic.

While the upper-middle-class lifestyle depicted on this show was not representative, and could not be, since a majority of black people are poor and working class, the same holds true for shows that depict well-off white families as the norm. In her essay "In Memory of Darnel," Sylvia Metzler, a white woman, fondly recalls her friendship with a ten-year-old inner-city black boy who expressed surprise when he went to the suburbs and saw no trash and graffiti. He wanted to know, "How come black people's neighborhoods are so dirty and ugly?" She had the foresight to show him middle- and upper-class black neighborhoods as well as poor white neighborhoods so that the stereotypes he had received from representations in mass media, as well as those he had constructed from his limited knowledge, could be challenged.

Mass media tends to ignore the diversity of black experience. The worst aspects of black life are fictionalized on television and in cinema so as to reproduce race and class stereotypes. Before The Cosby Show challenged the narrow vision of blackness presented by television, the sitcom Good Times depicted a working-poor black nuclear family that constantly struggled to create a love ethic despite the hardships created by poverty and racism. More often than not, this show failed to radically challenge stereotypes. Instead it was the stereotypically "funny" behavior of the coonlike character J. J. that made the show a hit. His antics, not the efforts of the family to be loving, usually took center stage. The Cosby Show was a refreshing alternative because family life rooted in a love ethic was the central focus of the sitcom.

Critics often trash The Cosby Show, but despite its many flaws it remains one of the few mass-media productions that represents and celebrates a loving black family. We see very few mass-media images of loving black parents. Tragically, so many black families, like other families in our society, are unloving because continual lack of emotional and material resources makes living environments unnecessarily stressful. Instead of home being a place where love can grow, it becomes a breeding ground for despair, indifference, conflict, violence, and hate. Again, this is not to suggest by any means that materially privileged homes are necessarily loving ones; the point is simply that when people are not struggling to overcome depression caused by material lack and ongoing deprivation they have the psychic space to focus on loving if they choose. Still, one can choose to be loving no matter what one's economic status. When poor families are portrayed in mass media, they are always and only depicted as dysfunctional - spaces where love is absent and foolish behavior reigns supreme.

One of the major problems anyone faces when they endeavor to create affirming images of loving black people cross-class is the constant insistence that images of black life be realistic. In actuality the images of upper-class black lifestyles are as rooted in some aspects of reality as those of the poor and underclass; they are simply not representative. Most viewers confuse the two issues. Images of loving black people are often deemed unrealistic no matter the class of the characters portrayed. Even though a huge majority of destitute, poor, and working-class black folks may find it more difficult than their more privileged counterparts to create loving environments, material privilege does not ensure that one will be raised in a loving home. Loving black families exist cross-class. While they may not be the norm, everyone benefits when images of a loving family, whether real or fictional, are shown us. By focusing solely on situations of lovelessness in black life, whether fictive or real, the mass media participate in creating and sustaining environments of emotional deprivation in black life. Despite its flaws, The Cosby Show, and some other predominately black sitcoms that followed in its wake, offered new and alternative images of black family life. Most importantly, family life was depicted as grounded in a love ethic.

Too much focus on "realistic" images has led the mass media to identify black experience solely with that which is most violently depraved, impoverished, and brutal. Yet these images are only one aspect of black life. Even if they constitute the norm in underclass neighborhoods, they do not represent the true reality of black experience, which is complex, multidimensional, and diverse. Why is an image of an uncaring out-for-what-she-can-get crack addict more "real" than the image of a churchgoing single mom who receives welfare and attends college courses in an effort to change her lot? Both images reflect realities I know - people I know. The fact is that racism, sexism, and class elitism together encourage individuals to assume that the negative image is more "real"; individuals approaching blackness from this biased perspective have an investment in presenting the negative image as the norm. To do so promotes, perpetuates, and sustains systems of domination based on class, race, and gender.