Unshackle Race From Sitcom Safety : The entertainment industry should be smart enough to address issues seriously and still keep its audience.

Americans are an inquisitive bunch; we’re nosy about others’ affairs and not a little introspective about many of our own. How else to explain the plethora of talk shows, of on-air analysts and therapists, the well-subscribed advice columns? We talk about money, spousal relations, sex. We talk about everything, in fact, except race.

Race, apparently, has become to the 1990s what sex was in the 1930s. Certainly people had sex in the ‘30s, but they didn’t much talk about it--at least not publicly. The whole notion of sex, before the sexual revolution, was talked around; it was hardly ever talked about--unless one was a physician, and therefore entitled to a little clinical interest--in polite company.

The national reluctance to directly plumb the depths of an issue with such painful, complicated roots has given rise to an ironic phenomenon. While there was consistently little interest in discussing the ramifications of race on us as a society in a contemporary vein, great wellsprings of interest have emerged in examining race relations of the past. Let’s call it retro race relations.

Television and the film industry have been busy carrying us back, if not to Old Virginny, then to Mississippi (“Mississippi Burning”), Alabama (“The Long Walk Home”) and, more recently, Georgia, “I’ll Fly Away.”

It’s understandable--the 1950s and 1960s seem, comparatively speaking, infinitely less threatening. African-Americans were Negroes then; we marched and prayed. We did not promise to fight back “by any means necessary.” Whites who joined in the fray felt the lines clearly drawn between good and evil, right and wrong. They could feel noble about resolving an intolerable situation, and relieved that our 20th-Century bondage was being lifted.

Things got more complicated in the late ‘60s, what with the Black Power movement and all. Too many of us declined to be nobly suffering backdrops for well-intentioned white folks. Tensions arose when that well-meaning assistance was rejected for political reasons. And affirmative action sometimes exacerbated those tensions.

Not fun stuff for the movies or television, but necessary to a constructive dialogue on race, if this country is to move forward. Producers and executives in both arms of the industry must be aware of this--even though the homogeneous nature of their executive suites is part of the problem. It is, after all, hard to commission a show or film that intelligently addresses racial tension if you’re surrounded by people of the same race. . . . Perhaps when there is more of a mosaic in studios’ front offices, we’ll have a better chance of reaching that goal. (And take a hint, folks: The human life span is still finite; it would be nice if this happened before I slip into old age.)

Till then, we’re treated to sitcoms with happy black families who apparently discuss race rarely, if at all (“Family Matters,” “Fresh Prince of Bel Air”). Or, in the recent CBS pilot of “Driving Miss Daisy,” we’re given nostalgic looks at the good ol’ days, when times were simpler and blacks weren’t so, well, uppity .

The entertainment industry can, and should, do better than that. Given the numbers of new shows that pop up for public consumption every fall, it’s a shame that more don’t have the courage to inject race into their story lines in a meaningful way.

There have been valiant attempts: “I’ll Fly Away,” despite its early ‘60s setting, does a fine job of focusing on its black co-star’s growing political awareness and her quiet insistence on being treated with dignity and respect. The now-canceled “Equal Justice” gave some unsettling but very real insights into class stratification among African-Americans. And “Law and Order” has examined the repercussions of racial violence on both black and white communities.

Perhaps the answer is less comedy, more drama. To release African-Americans from the shackles of a laugh track, to address serious issues seriously and maintain the audiences’ interest is a tall order. But the entertainment industry is full of smart people--they tell us so in interviews all the time. What it needs to be full of now is smart, brave people. For all our sakes.