My favorite T.V. Mom

The reason Julia Baker of the T.V. Show Julia was my favorite T.V. mom is egocentric on my part. Diahann Carroll who played the part of Julia was the very first actress to star on a T.V. show as an African America male or female without the stereo typical references associated at the time. Now remember this is relative. That show was aired in 1968- 197 something or other( I graduated from high School and was no longer using TV as my primary form of entertainment) and what would be seen as stereotypical then would not bat and eye now. It was well writing for its time showing a lower middle class mom that had a career(nurse), who could pay her bills and was not living in the slum(we used the word ghetto incorrectly so I won’t use it)of new York, Detroit or pick one of the various cities they normally use in Cali. She was a single mom but not because her husband deserted her and ran off with another woman or he (her son Corey) was born out of wedlock but because he died and she was a widow. The show really did not deal with that issue very much.

The dynamics of the show deals with her relationship as a single mom trying to raise her son into a well adjusted well behave child. She dealt with juggling her work schedule and yet still having time for Corey. She had two idea men as love interest that had jobs and cars and could pay their rent on time. He went to a school that was racially mixed and race was not an issue. Corey Baker a young (at the time) American actor who played her son was cute and pretty much the idea boy through white America’s eyes. She simply did not have the usual Afrocentric problems that would show up in the later shows of the 70’s like Good Times, The Jeffersons, That’s My Mama, What’s Happening and the variety of other shows that came after it. First, it predates them. Finally most important it gave a white American an T.V. show that would silence the black critics of the time of why they did not have more people of colored represented on their networks

The reason this mom appealed to me was because it (the show)gave a formerly racially torn nation a show that we could not only identify with being but aspire to. This was a period of time when we no longer wanted equal status of white America but to be white America. African Americans at that time were striving hard to get their piece of the American dream by imitating white America success story. This worked out well for the network (which happen to be NBC) because it fulfill the requirement of African Americans without offending white America’s sensibilities. This would later give way to a movement of African Americans that was labeled the buppies (or Black Yuppies) which defined by Merriam Webster: a college-educated black adult who is employed in a well-paying profession and who lives or works in or near a large city. This is what many of my peers and I was aspiring to at that age and the show gave us positive reinforcement that our dream was possible.