EVERYBODY REALLY HATES CHRIS? I LOVE HIM

1. INTRODUCTION


This work intends to be useful for those who teach English as a foreign language for initial series to high school.
Nowadays, the great challenge for these professionals is teach not only grammar and reading skills but also introduce the students to the culture from the countries that have English as mother language.
Media productions can help them overcome this challenge. There are many kinds of them that portray cultural aspects. As example we can mention some TV shows as: Friends, House, My wife and Kids, Freddie and Everybody Hates Chris.
In order to demonstrate how media production can be an important pedagogic tool for English teachers, I chose the last TV show of the list above to analyze the cultural aspects embedded in it.

2. GENERAL INFORMATION ABOUT THE TV SHOW EVERYBODY HATES CHRIS

According to Wikipedia, Everybody Hates Chris is an American television production inspired in real life of Chris Rock during his adolescence and many aspects of the TV show are based on the reality as the main characters, the set, and the plot.
The TV show author, Christopher Julius "Chris" Rock III, is an American comedian, actor, screenwriter, television producer, film producer and director that was born on February 7, 1965 and grew up in Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York, where the series took place and it is often referred to in the show as Bed-Stuy.
Four of the main characters, Julius Rock, Drew Rock and Tonya Rock, beyond Chris were inspired on Chris Rock’s family, his father, Julius, two of his brothers, Andrew Rock (Drew) e Tony Rock (Tonya) and Chris Rock was inspired on Chris himself.
The series has eighty-four episodes divided by four seasons and revolves around Chris’s everyday life and his challenges. One of his big challenges is to attend an all-white school in Brooklyn Beach where he had to deal with a bully named Joey Caruso (In real life Chris Rock also suffered bullying at school because he was the only black boy at school). He has only a friend there, Greg that although being a white boy is considered a “nerd” and also suffers discrimination from Caruso. This is one of the characters that are not related with Chris’s real life because Chris Rock had no friends at school.
The final episode titled "Everybody Hates the G.E.D." also had direct relation with Chris Rock life. The episode focused on his decision in drop out school due to having to repeat the tenth grade for being late 30 times.
Still according to Wikipedia, the TV show was praised by critics and was selected as one of the best 10 television series of 2007 by The American Film Institute that stated that the show "provides a very real look at growing up in America — a challenge that demands a discussion of race and class often absent from television today."
The series was also nominated for fifty-four awards and has won six of them: Best Family Television Series (Comedy), Outstanding Cinematography for a Single-Camera Series - Mark Doering-Powell for episode "Everybody Hates Funerals.", Outstanding Actress in a Comedy Series - Tichina Arnold, Outstanding Comedy Series in 2006. Outstanding Actor in a Comedy Series - Tyler James Williams in 2007. Outstanding Writing in a Comedy Series - Ali LeRoi for episode "Everybody Hates Guidance Counselor" in 2008.
On May 21, 2009, the TV show was cancelled by the CW and Chris Rock announced that as the end of season 4 matched up with his own past (dropping out of high school to become a comedian) it was time to end the show.
Although the series had been canceled its episodes are still being rerun on TV (in Brazil all Sundays morning on Record TV) and we can learn and teach some cultural aspects American people by watching them.

3. DISCUSSION ABOUT RACISM PRESENT ON TV SHOW

As it was said, the main theme of the series is the everyday life of a teenager, his challenges and the way that he overcomes them. So its main audience is mainly teenagers, but this does not exclude the parents as viewer since all adventures lived by Chris involve his family context and the main characters are composed by him and the household. It is important to mention that this household is formed by black people that live in a black neighborhood.
Then it is possible to observe and discuss the behavior and challenges of black American people. The main of them is how the American society deals with black families. In fact the TV show gives to the audience the opportunity to reflect about the racial discrimination that occurred and even occurs, not only in American society but also in many others like Brazilian.
This segregation is showed in the TV show in many ways. One of them is through the set. All the episodes take place in Brooklyn, more specifically in Bedford-Stuyvesant (also shortly known as Bed-Stuy), a well know neighborhood of Brooklyn that became a popular landing ground for African-Americans, in the early-to-mid 20th Century, that moved to north in search of racial equality and freedoms and new industry, according to Wikipedia.
In the TV show the neighborhood is represented as a lawless land and in many episodes the others characters, as Chris’ teacher, Ms. Vivian Morello, refers to it as a very dangerous place and shows her prejudice all time insinuating that all people that live there are marginal, drunker or drugs addicted. Although, Chris’ family and many of the Bed-Stuy residents, be honest workers.
In Bed-Stuy lives also a white man, called Mr. Levine that appears in the episode “Everybody Hates Mr. Levine” and reinforces the idea of segregation that occurs in United States. This episode presents a white man, Mr. Lavine, who lives in Bed-Stuy, but keeps himself  locked in his house all time, because does not feel safe in deals with the neighbors, specifically because he is a white man living in a black territory.
But not only, Ms. Morello and Mr. Levine classify Bed-Stuy as a dangerous place, the author himself represents it this way through some characters as: Jerome, an older teenager in the neighborhood who takes money from smaller kids by saying "Lemme hold a dollar”, Malvo, a criminal who robbed Chris at Doc's, was arrested and threatened to kill Chris when was free, and others. In others episodes Jerome is an unsuccessful thief who tries to take advantage of the absence of the owners of the house to try to steal it. The mainly difference, in my opinion, is that differently from the others characters, the author intends to show that these characters are not bad because they are black, but because there are bad people in all place. Jerome, in relation to Chris for example, is a kind of bully, similar to Joey Caruso that is a white boy and practices the same kind of violence against Chris.
As demonstrated in the previous paragraph, the characters are the other way used by the author to represent the racial prejudice in the TV show.
Ms. Vivian Morello is one the characters that frequently demonstrates prejudice against Chris and his family. She is Chris’ teacher and in many episodes says prejudiced phrases as the said in the episode “Everybody Hates Earth Day” that demonstrates the idea that black people have the same appearance. In this episode Ms. Morello said that apart from the fact that Chris can see he did not owe anything to Steve Wonder. The same idea is showed in the episode “Everybody Hates Mother’s Day”. In this episode Chris is taken to the manager's office accused of theft and the manager try to prove that Chris has already been there before by showing him a picture of Lionel Ritchie and states that it is Chris’ picture.
In the same episode the author makes clear the discrimination against black people by using the narrator’s speech in a scene of department store. In this episode the narrator describes the scene that shows that a black people in a department store will be followed by the security team. It does not matter if you are a baby using diapers, an elder using diapers or even part of the security team.
    The black people suffer discrimination also from the police in the TV show. In the episode "Everybody Hates Gretzky". Chris’ mother, Rochelle Rock, asks to the police to help her look for the children and the first question she has to answer is: “Are they black or white?”  When she replies that they are black the policeman says that she had phoned to the wrong place. In the second time she states that the children are white and before she turns the phone off the police had already arrived.
Other racial aspect that can be discussed by the TV show is the difference between black people that are considered well succeeded and those who have not successes, and what is the real success. In the episode “Everybody Hates PSATs" Chris’ mother tries to join her children in a society organization composed by black success families called Hansel and Gretel Society that is considered the top of black society. She aims to introduce them to “the right people”, but after much confusion she does not get be part of the society.
Issues about self-esteem related to the skin color and the financial condition can also be observed. Rochelle Rocks repeats many times through the episodes that her husband has two jobs then she has not “to endure this.” For this, she means abusiveness, normally related to a job situation.
In the episode “Everybody hates Picture Day” Chis convinces her mother to buy new clothes to him by using the argument that once he is the only black boy in whole school, if he uses the clothes that she suggested, that were Drew’s clothes, the people will thought he does not have neither a house where live in and it will reinforce the idea that he was delinquent due to his skin color


4. CONCLUSION

As  it was said in the beginning, media can be an useful tool in order to teach foreign language, and the TV shows have  a rich material to help those who want to innovate in his classes and teach not only grammar skills but also to introduce the students to the cultural aspects of the other countries.
In this paper we focused on racial aspect that is the main theme of the episodes of the TV show Everybody Hates Chris, but there are many others TV shows - some of them was mentioned in the introduction of this job - that can be used to teach many others cultural aspects. The particular goal of this job was arouse interest in using the media as a resource of the English classes, believing that it is worth investing in lessons that will reduce the resistance of students for the subjects of foreign languages, especially English language, and that this investment will result not only in good lessons for the students but also in a greater satisfaction of teachers who will see their efforts matched.