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Notes -
You can use fiction as a reference for a culture was like in a certain time ... but only fiction created during that time AND if you know something about the agenda of the creators, the pressures that went into making the show, the constraints and demands of the medium, etc. Usually the way you use fiction to learn about a culture at a certain time, is by looking at what the creators inserted as background that they expected the audience to be familiar with, and what kind of message they thought their audience would be receptive to hearing. So the Cosby show doesn't tell you what a default black family is like. It tells you that the audience was receptive to a story about the default black family being like that. And it tells you something about what the typical American family was like, or what it aspired to be like.
I actually thought he was pretty representative of a black nerd from when I was in high school a decade and a half later. It really wasn’t that uncommon for white nerds to have a non white person in their nerd crew. Nerds were always pretty accepting in my experience, regardless of what libs say about communities like Magic or DnD.
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