19 pages • 38 minutes read
Gil Scott-HeronThe Revolution Will Not Be Televised
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1971A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Television
The television is a symbol for consumption of mass media. Scott-Heron represents television as a distraction from important political work and introspection. The television appears throughout the poem, starting in the first stanza when the speaker warns the implied reader, a complacent Black person, that real change cannot be achieved if the reader consumes television much in the same way a person consumes drugs. Numerous other references are to television programs that include an idealized picture of the American home and important relationships; these images center whiteness and present a sanitized, unrealistic portrait of the United States.
Television is also a medium that reproduces dangerous, stereotyped representations of Black America, a point Scott-Heron makes by including allusions to the 1968 riots after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., in the fourth stanza and more generic representation of police-involved shooting of Black people in the fifth stanza. Not only is television anaesthetizing: It presents Black death as entertainment. “The revolution will not be televised” (Line 5) because the medium is too static and too controlled by corporate and government interests to be a tool for true change.
Xerox
“Xerox” (Line 7) is a symbol for conformity. During the late 1960s, Xerox as the purveyor of copier machines was so dominant that “xerox” became a verb meaning “to copy.” The machines were most likely to appear in the offices of corporations that could afford them. Like many corporations, Xerox sponsored television shows, making the approval of corporations a major force in what showed up on television screens. A show sponsored by “Xerox / In 4 parts without commercial interruptions” (Lines 7-8) would be one that avoided overt political messages by offering up only bland, inoffensive programming to its viewers. In practice, anything that undercut the political status quo was deemed controversial. Corporations mostly avoided overtly political material for fear that doing so might damage the brand of the corporation sponsoring the show. Corporations like Xerox help reproduce conformity by shaping the way people understand their realities. The reference to the Xerox machine is just one of the many where Scott-Heron draws a connection between capitalism and conformity.
“Green Acres, The Beverly Hillbillies and Hooterville Junction”
All three of these programs present a nostalgic image of rural America and are symbols of the whiteness of mainstream American television during the 1960s and 1970s. In the poem, “Green Acres, The Beverly Hillbillies and Hooterville Junction / will no longer be so damn relevant” (Lines 37-38) because the revolution will decenter a nostalgic representation of rural America and rural white Americans. In contrast to the riot scene in the fourth stanza, “Harlem” (Line 32), and “Watts” (Line 34), settings for the first and last show appear to exist outside of history and thus present a comforting picture to people bewildered and threated by the political and social movements of the 1960s. The Beverly Hillbillies is a show in which a rural family becomes suddenly wealthy and moves to the big city; their down-home values are used to comedic effect but also to critique the supposed loss of American innocence as a result of wars and political movements. Scott-Heron’s inclusion of these shows is a direct attack on the pacifying effect of American popular media.
