On the list of the top-grossing 100 movies released last year, the only ones with a central African-American cast were Madea’s Big Happy Family, Big Mommas: Like Father, Like Son, and Jumping the Broom. (There was also The Help, which, two Oscar-nominated African-American actresses aside, was a movie told from a white point of view, with a white lead actress, white director, and based on a book by a white woman.) And during the 2010–2011 broadcast television season, there was only one network series with a black protagonist on the air: The Cleveland Show. Once you get past the big-studio film releases and broadcast networks, you can find Kevin Hart’s surprisingly successful Laugh at My Pain standup concert movie and Dee Rees’s Pariah,which garnered great reviews and awards in Focus’s limited release, and BET produces programming for the black market while Tyler Perry has his own night of sitcoms on TBS — but that doesn’t change the fact that the dominant entertainment companies don’t see much value in catering to the black audience. It didn’t use to be this way: In 1991, Boyz n the Hood, New Jack City, Jungle Fever, House Party 2, and A Rage in Harlem were among the 100 top-grossing films of the year and the network schedules contained seven shows with predominantly black casts, including In Living Color, The Cosby Show, and A Different World. (All ended up becoming crossover hits, but didn’t get that way by having the network insert a Caucasian lead in the attempt to make the shows more palatable to white viewers.) Five years later, when UPN and the WB networks were starting out and looking to establish an audience as quickly as possible, that number increased to thirteen African-American shows. And strangely, if you go back even further in time — long before we had a black president, black secretaries of State, or black CEOs at companies like American Express, Merck, and Time Warner — one could argue that programming that prominently featured African-Americans was even stronger, with shows like The Jeffersons and Sanford and Son found on networks with largely white shows, as opposed to being segregated onto two struggling networks. Why have things been moving backwards, not forwards, and why are the major entertainment companies shunning a vibrant market that is only becoming more economically valuable, culturally and politically important, and ripe for crossover appeal?