During the uprising that followed the police killing of George Floyd in 2020, black hip-hop artist Killer Mike appeared on television to ask that people remain nonviolent and in their homes. Similar events took place years earlier. James Brown performed a live concert on WGBH to keep Boston peaceful following Martin Luther King’s assassination in 1968. During the 1992 Los Angeles uprising, both The Cosby Show and The Arsenio Hall Show were used to similar ends. These examples demonstrate the ways in which television has activated black identity to quell certain forms of civil rights protest and implicate televisual discourses of liveness, domesticity, and public service.
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