We’re not on television. Is that a blessing?

A pair of groups concerned about the lack of Latinos on television (the pop-culture medium that most influences the way we perceive our society) are giving out their own grades to the networks.

The grades stink. They’re about as good as those of a 300-pound high school linebacker.

SURE ENOUGH, IT is true that there aren’t very many Latino characters on the television programs that people watch. In fact, there are too many instances when it seems like a Latino actor who finds work winds up having to downplay his ethnicity.

The actor claims it helps enhance his/her ability to find work, which is true enough. But it still reeks when a Latino actor winds up getting cast in roles that are written to be “Italian” or “Greek” or some other not-quite-white ethnicity that people don’t have too much trouble accepting.

Yet I must admit to not being as offended as the National Latino Media Council or the National Hispanic Media Coalition are these days.

Perhaps it is because I look at the overall quality of the programming that appears on television. A part of me is actually pleased that none of these third-rate programs has a strong Latino-oriented flavor to it.

BECAUSE YOU JUST know there are people in our society who would blame the low quality on the Latino presence.

That particularly goes to the new genre known as “reality” programming, which always struck me as being incredibly unrealistic. These shows play off the rank stereotypes that exist – more to make us try to feel better about ourselves than anything else.

After all, we’re not “loser” enough to ever go on one of those shows. Are we?

These coalitions actually think it is a bad thing that there aren’t any Latinos on these “reality” programs. I say they’re nuts.

JUST THINK OF how tacky a Latino-themed “reality” show would be. It would wind up feeding into every tacky theme that isolated white people have about the growing Latino population.

It might very well make the “Amos and Andy” programs of old seem like serious, sociological studies of the African-American population (Or should I refer to it as the “Negro” population, to keep in touch with the times?) that existed back in the 1950s?

I’d rather not have my ethnic brethren associated with it.

Not that I’m saying there isn’t a place for Latinos on television. If anything, the programs we watch ought to be reflective of the time period in which they were made (which is why I find so much of the television programming of the 1980s to be so unwatchable today).

BUT THE REALITY of today is that there is a growing Latino population. It is becoming a significant part of our society, and in some places a dominant one.

So there is a place for that to be reflected in the programming that appears on television.

I’m just hoping that some network nitwits don’t look at the “F” grades that the council and the coalition are giving out these days concerning the lack of Latinos working in television or appearing in its programs, and don’t decide to appease it by putting some schlock on the air.

That kind of trivial, knee-jerk reaction is what I would expect from television executives, and it likely would produce more third-rate embarrassment from which we would have to hide.

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