A Normal Television Family Means White

In an article entitled Why Is The ‘Normal Television Family’ Always White?, writer SL Huang explains that a white nuclear family is what networks think everyone can relate to.  And even if people can’t relate, they see and recognize that “ideal” and know what sort of cultural message the writers are trying to send. It gets the point across that these are your typical, everyday, hard-working American family.

The problem he brings up is that television family shows are starting to see the “ethnic sidekick” problem: that the ethnic or mixed families are being shown in contrast to a “normal” and “ordinary” family, and are therefore implicitly not normal or ordinary themselves.

Take for instance the popular show Modern Family. Part of the premise is clearly that the two families that are more “modern” versions of what family can be are being contrasted against the white nuclear family of a happily married mother and father and their three children living in suburbia.  The two families being contrasted? The mixed-generational couple of Jay and Colombian immigrant Gloria with Gloria’s son Manny—who becomes a stepson to Jay—and the gay couple with their daughter adopted from Vietnam.  All of the diversity in the show is bundled into the families that are billed as having “complications.”  What if, instead, Claire’s husband had been cast as an African-American man, and her kids were all half black? Or, even more scandalously, what if Jay’s first wife had been an Asian woman, and Claire and Mitchell were both happa? You might argue that it wouldn’t be the same show, and, well, of course not. But it’s a show that bills diversity as part of its message, and all I’m saying is, what if the diversity weren’t billed as being so “different,” but instead mixed in with what we’re meant to see as “normal”?

This is not the only show that puts different ethnicity in the same category as not normal. In the new show The Neighbors about aliens taking human form, the family who moves into the alien development, the “normal” human family we’re meant to contrast the aliens against, is all white.  Because white is normal.  And human.  It’s the weird alien family who cry tears of green goo out their ears who have people of color among them; diversity is acceptable there. And in another show, Switched at Birth, the Kennishes, the white, upper class nuclear family, are contrasted with the Vasquez women—the family that has a very poor single mother raising a Deaf daughter, the “different” family, and, oh yeah, the one with a mother who just happens to be Latina.

I do agree that television is getting better at showing diversity. However, it may not be in the places that perhaps the majority would want to see. Having an all White family always represent the norm and the families with more ethnic diversity being the "different" family may not be sending the right message. I think networks should stop worrying that the majority may not be able to relate to television families if they are not all White and try different things.