Teaching people to be human sounds like an impossible task, but Iyanla Vanzant and Steve Harvey agree that for them, it is all part of a day’s work. While Vanzant emerged as a seemingly more qualified therapeutic voice in the 1990s having been ordained as a minister and earned a master’s degree in Spiritual Psychology, Harvey has only recently (within the past 5 years) become an authority. Despite different beginnings, Harvey and Vanzant have both encountered mid-career valleys and have leveraged the appeal of in-your-face rebukes of women with problems to restore their media positions.

In Part I of this piece, I outlined Harvey’s career climb and offered that it was black women who made the difference for him. While the racially mixed guests appearing on his new talk show receive a much milder flavor of advice—Harvey-lite—his most aggressive critiques are reserved for his first audience: the black women who made his radio show number one among women ages 25-34 in urban markets and who continue to undergird the success of his self-help enterprise (Premiere Radio Networks, Inc.). In the remainder of this piece I will consider the complexity of the enterprise of black female discipline as I focus on a black woman as disciplinarian.

Before her return to television in the fall of 2012, Iyanla Vanzant spent nearly a decade in despair dealing with the cancellation of her first show and subsequent bankruptcy, a divorce, and the death of her daughter. For the 2-part premiere of her new show, Iyanla Fix My Life, Vanzant took on someone who can easily be described as a princess of pathology to demonstrate that despite her public failures to adhere to her own life strategies, she still has the skills to assist people in correcting the roots of their deviance. Scenes of Evelyn Lozada—whose infamous television role on reality show Basketball Wives has characterized her as a self-centered, materialistic, violent Jezebel type—tear-stained and humble by the end of the show are the miraculous proof that Vanzant has maintained her spiritual authority. Although Lozada is of Puerto-Rican descent, her position as wife-mother in a black household, and a cohort of black female co-stars, establish her as a stand-in for other racially marginalized women (Black and Latina).

From what we have seen of Iyanla Fix My Life thus far, a couple of things seem clear about her toolbox.

(1) The toolbox is probably pink.—In addition to largely featuring female guests on her show, Vanzant consistently focuses on shared behaviors among women that harm other women (i.e. gossip) and that harm the self; and distinguishes these acts as more damaging than those perpetrated by men. For example when Vanzant discusses domestic abuse experienced by Lozada, she insists the situation “is so not about your husband. It’s about you, and the choices you made, and the choices you didn’t make” (Vanzant). The estranged husband is characterized, not as an abuser, but as a teacher that “loved her enough to come into her life and show her that she needed to change” (Vanzant). Furthermore it is suggested that Lozada’s delinquent behavior, resulting from a poor example of womanhood modeled by her mother, granted others the permission to wreak havoc in her life.

(2) The tools are just as useful for demolition, as they are for construction.—No show seems complete without tears. Through physical exacts like wading through a pool of water, Vanzant facilitates emotional breakdowns. When guests resist, Vanzant will abruptly clench their head in her hands, or force their bodies into infantile positions in her own bosom. Until women endure the painful process of destroying the old self, they will not be capable of assimilating to the new self as prescribed by Vanzant.

For sure, one cannot consider these productions testaments to the host’s character. Their shows are mediated performances. Yet, it is from the vantage point of fan-critic that I challenge these privileged voices and their handling of black female subjects. In an attempt to offer solutions to the emotional issues that plague women, Harvey and Vanzant have lost sight of structural factors. By highlighting a female-specific pathology passed from mother to daughter as the most important factor in women’s trials (including domestic violence) Vanzant models a scornful and reductive practice of looking (see: Struken and Cartwright). This shaming gaze is just as subversive as that modeled in the Steve Harvey Morning Show. Since Vanzant is herself a black woman who takes ownership of the behavioral deficiencies mapped onto women as a collective, she genders the discourse in a way that Harvey cannot. Ultimately this gaze functions as a tool in the collective policing of black women’s lifestyles. It operates under the mask of feminist care because women are the agents and the objects of the gaze. Thus, the patriarchal order is not actually challenged, merely re-organized.

I call attention to this disciplinary enterprise because it is still yet growing. Vanzant and Harvey will combine forces this season when Vanzant is featured on Harvey’s talk show. One has to wonder, when we make demands for more “authentic” representations of black women in popular culture, is this what we have in mind?

Steve Harvey was once most recognizable for his wit, sarcasm, and refreshing take on everyday life situations–the usual things that make comedians successful. Today the actor, comedian, game show host, New York Times Bestselling author, and media entrepreneur is most well known for his relationship advice. After a mild career slump in the mid 2000s, Harvey’s shift to focus on (mostly black) women with problems led to a career revival. This fall Harvey continues to expand his brand with a nationally syndicated talk show, Steve Harvey. The show, which posted the best first week ratings since the premier of Dr. Oz (until Katie debuted a week later), is evidence that Harvey has surpassed his rank as a “king of comedy” and laid the foundation for a multi-platform media empire. The key building block on Harvey’s climb from comedian to relationship expert stardom: black women.

Harvey first aired his nationally syndicated radio show in the year 2000. Tapping into what media scholar Janice Peck (1995) has described as “therapeutic discourse” popular in the talk show genre, Harvey and co-host Shirley Strawberry introduced “The Strawberry Letter”—a segment featuring a letter from a (female) listener seeking a balm for her troubles.

In every segment, Harvey performs the last word in a style that borrows from the matter-of-fact, down-home vernacular reminiscent of Dr. Phil McGraw, mixed with the roaring declaratives he employs in comedy routines. To a letter entitled, “Pregnant by my Son-in-law,” Harvey responded: “What is yo’ ass doing? First off all you said I’m a 47-year-old attorney. Let’s start this letter off the right way; you’re a 47-year-old stupid attorney. You’re stupid. You’re stupid; you’re trifling; you’re raggedy.” Beginning his response with such a critique marks the parameters of the problem as within the woman’s own moral deficiencies and normalizes the public (albeit anonymous) rebuke and correction of a woman with complex intimate troubles.

After pausing for a commercial break, Harvey ends his thrashing with laughter:

The third son-in-law has got to be sitting down sucking his thumb, just wondering, when is his shot at the Promised Land coming…I hate to tell you this, but you ain’t a lawyer—you a one woman wrecking crew slash escort service (Harvey).

The chorus of laughter and panting from Harvey’s in-studio co-hosts drives the final moment to climax. Laughter here is not merely background noise; it is emphasized as an indicator that the listening audience should join in the moment of amusement. Any woman crazy enough to have an affair with her daughter’s husband, the exercise suggests, deserves our collective mocking. In the end Steve Harvey emerges as an expert in “common sense,” fit to call women on their foolishness one public disciplining at a time.

The success of the Strawberry Letter segment led to two books, both bestsellers, and a film, Think Like a Man (Sony/Screen Gems 2012), which feature Harvey as the friendly voice of truth among the masses of confused and lonely women. The film is punctuated by various Harvey-isms that pathologize the black female leads. In these various platforms, including the new talk show, there is little discussion of what (dis)qualifies Harvey as a coach in human relationships, including the fact that he has had two failed marriages. Rather Harvey claims that his is a “common sense approach” substantiated by 55 years of broad life experiences.

Harvey’s stake in the daytime talk show market is notable because, as an African American male, he is breaking ground in what is currently a predominantly white and female genre. It seems reasonable then that his show would follow the conventions of daytime talk “whereby females are assigned more responsibility for emotional and relational work, and, because of their subordinate status are taught to seek and accept (male) help for their problems” (Peck 60). Yet I argue that Harvey’s empire relies on a particular kind of black gender socialization where black women are subject to a specifically racialized critique.

Harvey is one of a group of African American men that have increased their marketability as national media personalities by critiquing single black women as helpless patients, and offering personalized solutions to their supposed relationship ailments. Hill Harper—actor and author of the best-selling book, The Conversation: How Black Men and Women Can Build Loving, Trusting Relationships—and Jimi Izrael—journalist and author of The Denzel Principle: Why Black Women Can’t Find Good Black Men—are two of the other men who, despite their lack of professional credibility and status as single men, join Harvey in narrating black women’s love lives. Harvey and his cohort turn a profit because they offer an authentic black response to what is deemed a threat to the black community: unmarried black women.

While it feels natural to celebrate the advance in African American representation demonstrated by Harvey’s multifaceted empire, the black feminist in me wonders if his large steps forward will mean a step backward for black women in media.

[This is part one of a two-part series on Steve Harvey – check back next week for the second installment]

For as long as I’ve been watching Maury, I could never pinpoint what was so appealing about revealing the identity of a promiscuous woman’s “baby daddy,” or the truth as to whether or not some creepy-looking truck driver was lying about an affair with a male co-worker.  Something about the show’s dynamics brought me back to the couch time and time again.  So one day, like any intellectually curious researcher with too much time on his hands, I went looking for answers directly from the source.

On March 5^th, 2010, the missus and I drove up to Stamford, Connecticut, in order to participate as audience members of the Maury show.  Our episode, “Sexy Secret Fantasies Revealed and Fulfilled,” first aired on March 25^th, 2010, and featured copious “hot bods” and lame stories from scantily-clad guests.  In retrospect, the most memorable part of being an audience member was learning how the show achieves such a consistently united, cacophonous reaction from its audience: through coaching from the production crew.

Before filming began, Maury’s energetic producer got the crowd roaring with a brief lecture on how to get on TV: “If [a guest makes] a corny joke, laugh TEN TIMES HARDER than usual,” he boomed.  “Exaggerate your reactions; make them bigger than real life—ham it up, people!”  After explaining how to “properly respond” to typical situations encountered on the show, he got the audience to practice cheering vivaciously by promising free T-Shirts to the most vocal participants. When someone didn’t participate enthusiastically enough, he would playfully single them out; fellow audience members were instructed to boo such deviants, and they kindly obliged.  It was clear to me that the Maury crew was tacitly facilitating and crafting a very specific behavioral response from the audience—seemingly outside of the participants’ own realm of awareness.

The producer, adopting the role of the authority within the audience’s hierarchy, establishes a play frame with the audience in which they become pre-conditioned to adhere to the show’s directions and prerogatives. Appeals are made to the audience through intrinsic rewards, and nonconformity is punished via directed crowd jeering—this is tolerated because of the play frame that serves to suspend the full force of reality.  By allowing the show’s producer to guide their actions, the audience members partake in an interactive scene that may actually contest or override their own constructed boundaries of political correctness with regards to race, the social organization of class, conception and fidelity, or ethnic and cultural stereotypes.  At the producer and editors’ instruction, the audience’s outward expression of emotion is meant to be received as the “right” viewpoint, while the guests are either sympathetic figures or antagonists, depending on the contextual storyline.

In essence, the audience underscores and champions the desired editorial angle of the show’s episode.  The viewers at home are meant to psychologically connect with this ethos by rhetorically strategizing an imagined position of moral or cultural superiority over the episode’s villains.  Thus, the Maury show’s real power comes from rhetorically granting permission for fans to explore contentious or taboo subject matters in an open forum.  On the set of Maury (or at home watching along), it is acceptable to poke fun at “white trash rednecks” or mock black men that fathered numerous children with six different women—on this show, guests’ actions can be critiqued by tapping into the unspoken prejudices of its audience members. The viewers’ internal anxiety over political correctness becomes neutralized as the audience subjugates the guests’ behaviors or actions while reinforcing their superior position.

With these observations and analyses in mind, should I be ashamed to admit that I enjoy watching the Maury show?  Should you?  I don’t think so.

I am a folklorist, and one that is particularly interested in how people express themselves through subversive material in an effort to circumvent societal restrictions on decorum.  As much as I would like to say otherwise, I subscribe to the adage that everyone has their own prejudices within them and that these perspectives have been shaped and acquired throughout their lives.  The “Trash TV” genre allows its viewers—some of whom may be underprivileged given the aforementioned commercials’ targeted demographic—to come away with a greater sense of normalcy and superiority through the misfortunes and buffoonery of guests whose personas fall below their threshold of respectability.  While feeling “better than” someone else isn’t typically a socially-sanctioned practice, it is clear that the Maury show’s antagonists are portrayed as lowlifes that deserve to be seen as beneath us.  Viewers are led to walk away from an episode entertained, but also with a greater sense that their own lives are not as bad as “those people” on the screen; the feeling is subconsciously reinforced every time that the show is watched.  As that point of internal satisfaction is reached, the mission of the show’s producer is fully accomplished.

How’s that for a final thought?

The reasons it will survive are numerous, including the fact that with the exception of Comedy Central, the cable nets aren’t providing anything in the way of serious competition to network talk shows. More importantly is history. Even for younger generations (especially as they grow older and become less cool conscious and more boring in their routines), NBC and CBS are simply where one turns for this form of entertainment.

And that, of course, is the point that NBC seemed to miss with this failed experiment–the very particular role that talk shows play in viewers’ lives. With notable exceptions, the late night talk show has been a tremendously stable form of television entertainment, with changes coming very gradually and more reflective of cultural sensibility than artistic creativity.  Simply put, audiences have historically tuned in for two reasons. The first is content–a regular diet of 1) a host-persona they are attracted to (this being most important), 2) a steady diet of celebrities and people in the news as guests, 3) some music, and 4) an occasional comedy sketch or public oddity. That’s it. But while that is also what “The Jay Leno Show” and “The Tonight Show” continued to offer during NBC’s juggling act, NBC violated the second component: daypart. When it comes to cable nets, dayparts are really irrelevant (think Comedy Central or HBO, for instance). But for most viewers, dayparts are what defines broadcast networks. We know where to look and when for a very particular form of routinized pleasure. And when that changes, we often don’t like it (this can even include our finickyness when the networks move a Sunday night drama to Tuesday night).

But it is the interrelationship between these two central components of late-night talk–the hosts/content and the time-slot/routine–that was violated in the NBC decision. Leno simply isn’t prime time, just as Conan isn’t early late-night (not to mention that Conan is New York, not L.A.). Perhaps NBC just didn’t run this through enough focus groups, or failed to do so properly. But one would hope that with such a dominant role the network has played in creating this relationship to viewers to being with, it would “understand” both itself and its viewers better by this point in the history of television.