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In recent years, several new black-owned cable stations have entered the marketplace raising new questions about the relationship between ownership and content. In an effort to understand how industry logic shapes the social mission of black-owned networks, we focus on ASPiRE, an upstart cable network specifically designed to provide positive programing for African American families. Using a case study approach, we found that, like other black-oriented cable networks, ASPiRE has institutionally defined the black television audience as solidly middle-class, upwardly mobile and spiritually engaged. This construction of the audience reflects capitalist ideologies, but we further argue that ASPiRE invokes what Gaines refers to as an “ideology of uplift,” in which white, middle-class conceptions of respectability are appropriated by black elites. We argue that like other black-oriented cable networks, ASPiRE builds on two tenets of uplift ideology: emphasis on individual responsibility and the promotion of Christian piety as manifested in the patriarchal black family.
