Q: If someone from the 1950's suddenly appeared today,

[Marcuse]

94. Intentionally so.

In his new book "Television in Black-and-White America: Race and National Identity" (University Press of Kansas; $29.95; 224 pages), Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute professor Alan Nadel argues that the medium in the 1950s and '60s deepened racial divisions by offering an intentionally skewed version of reality.

It was, quite literally, a whitewash: "Television was the place where one found definitively normal families," Nadel writes, "and no black children were to be found in that excessively normal world."Nadel, 58, argues that the absence of blacks on television shaped Americans' view of their country and the rest of the world. The denial reached backward too: Would you know from your favorite TV western of yesteryear that up to a quarter of the cowboys were black?

As Nadel lays out in his book, the federal government's decision in the late 1930s to put nascent broadcast television on the VHF bandwidth, rather than the broader UHF, limited the number of frequencies available in a given market, thus constricting the variety of channels -- and choices.

Going with the UHF band, Nadel said, would have created more channels and "would have made diversity possible." Television was thus limited to the Big Four networks: CBS, NBC, ABC and Dumont, which disappeared after the 1954-55 season.

Another major change came in 1952, when a freeze on broadcast TV licenses was lifted; many of the new stations were located in the South, where it was perceived viewers might not be as accepting of minority faces on television. Nadel said that if Desi Arnaz of "I Love Lucy" had "not been a light-skinned Latin, [the show] was a non-starter."

Television did not become more diverse until the 1970s. Again, Nadel said, the reasons were economic. While TV in its infancy was a luxury item, by the 1970s the opposite was true. Had early television gone a different route and shown America a more diverse image of itself, the racial divide that still divides the nation might be narrower.

"There would have been more of a possibility that American people would have been more aware of one another, less scared of one another," Nadel said.https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-2005-12-28-0512270255-story.html