| In Norman Lear’s hit television show from the 1970s, All in the Family, there is a memorable moment when Edith—wife of the show’s lead character, Archie Bunker—quips that blacks certainly have “come a long way, on television.” Edith, and Norman Lear, may have been prescient. Twenty years later, in another televisual moment, Regina, the black woman who works as the maid of a prominent Southern family, a leading character in the dramatic series I’ll Fly Away, talks intensely with one of the family’s sons about his apparent inability to see her. After the boy has apologized to Regina for being brash and insensitive, Regina responds with a polite but firm “reading” of the young white man: she tells the youngster, in effect, that he doesn’t know her, that he can’t know her—in other words, that she is invisible to him. (The scene implies that a source of Regina’s invisibility is the son’s constellation of privileges: middle-class, white, and male.) |