Television has been “a primary source of America’s racial education,” according scholar Stephanie Troutman Robbins.

“We still need more critical, deliberate and politically aware representations of Blackness for adults.”

Troutman Robbins is the co-editor, along with Daniel J. Leonard, of Race in American Television: Voices and Visions that Shaped a Nation (Greenwood, 2021). Covering five decades, the two-volume encyclopedia explores representations of people of color in American television and examines how television has been a site for both reproduction of stereotypes and resistance to them.

Troutman Robbins is head of the gender and women’s studies department at the University of Arizona and an associate professor of gender and women’s studies and English in the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences.

Here, Troutman Robbins talks about the evolution of how Black people are depicted on TV, how an influx of media platforms is leading to more diverse stories about the Black experience, and where there’s room for improvement: