Tomorrow night, "Black In America 5" premieres on CNN at 8:00 p.m. ET. This installment is called "Who Is Black In America?" and will again explore "interpretations of race and identity for African Americans." In it, Soledad O'Brien will focus on topics of interracial marriage and multiracial acceptance in Black communities. Here at Strong Black Woman, we hope the program will be better than CNN's first round of "Black In America" back in 2008.
Below is a little piece one of us wrote in after the first set of "Black In America" premiered.
CNN’s Black in America aka
Black People are Reason for their Own Misfortune in America
“You think you know what it’s like to be Black in America. You have no idea.”
This was how CNN advertised its self-proclaimed
groundbreaking documentary series Black
in America. CNN’s own
multiculti poster child, Soledad O’Brien, was the host of what she said would
give the rest of America “a good picture of what it means to be Black in
America.” Unfortunately O’Brien,
who identified herself as Black for the series in many promotions on Black
radio stations, failed at fulfilling this lofty goal.
Originally a skeptic, I wondered who gave CNN the right to
present the story of Black people to the rest of the country. I was, however, slightly relieved that
FOX News was not offering its authoritative take on Black America. Still doubtful, I sat down to watch
with low expectations. Right away,
one of my friends mentioned that O’Brien said 'Black' like it was a disease or
some other negative characteristic. At first, I thought she was thinking too far into things but soon came
to agree with her.
The series started out with Reclaiming the Dream, a mishmash panel of “Black experts”
discussing topics ranging from education and incarceration to HIV and Barack
Obama. Harvard economist Roland
Fryer offered a costly and implausible plan to keep Black students in school:
pay them, costing already struggling schools $250 per student. Pastor and leader of Texas megachurch
Bishop T.D. Jakes stated that black men go to prison for several years, come
home after serving their sentences, and infect their whole families with
HIV. That’s right: not only do Black men sleep with their “mothers, girlfriends, and children,” they only
contract HIV after sexual contact with other men. No one on the program corrected his outlandish assertion or
his antiquated thinking about HIV/AIDS transmission. I thought there might be hope for the program when president
of Bennett College Julianne Malveaux attempted to correct the falsehoods
presented by other panel members but ultimately there was a lot of superficial
talk and no feasible solutions proposed.
The next part of the series was a decent report about the
assassination of Dr. King, highlighting conspiracy theories and evidence that
pointed away from James Earl Ray. Nonetheless, the rest of the show was unable to draw a strong connection
to the present.
The main two programs were separated into The Black Woman and Family along with The Black Man. It was CNN’s way of arguing that those two components of the
Black community do not even belong together.
The Black Woman and
Family began with a Kodak moment of black family reunions. Unlike at most reunions, CNN was
present to record the meeting of an estranged white woman with her Black
relatives. The segment lasted long
enough to zoom in on the white woman and her Black cousin walking hand-in-hand
with smiles at the rural barbeque. Sadly, most of the documentary was not focused on the Black woman at
all. An extended part of the
program focused on the difficulties of a single father without mentioning the
hardships that the millions of single women in similar positions face. The crisis in education, HIV, and
violence comprised the rest of the program with a small mention of the increase
in Black-owned businesses. “Most
Black people have not been arrested.
Most Black people are not poor,” said Malveaux, a point which the
documentary makers did not seem to believe.
The Black Man
focused on three things: the lack of responsible Black fathers, crime, and the
lack of educated Black men. CNN
could have stopped after a few sentences but chose to highlight man after man
who dropped the ball in addition to negative statistic after negative statistic
about the peril of Black men in America. After mentioning that there are almost 1 million Black men in prison,
mostly for drug offenses, CNN brushed over mandatory minimum sentencing laws
which force judges to impose long prison terms on users and low level
dealers. Even though the second
part of the series was focused on Black men, it neglected to emphasize the
affect of the high level of incarceration on women and children. It overemphasized statistics without
placing them in the context of conspiracy laws, racial profiling, and general
racism of the criminal justice system.
Laws cannot be inherently racist, claimed a conservative legal expert. The Black Man continued with a brief discussion of the growing
Black middle class and glass ceilings to Black professionals but again was
overshadowed by its indictment of rap music and Black underachievement. The series ended with an interview of
famous academic and social critic Michael Eric Dyson and his brother who is
serving a life sentence for murder.
The conclusion: dark-skinned Black children don’t get the same opportunities
in the Black community as light-skinned children and that negatively affects
the rest of their lives. In
addition to being a huge overstatement and oversimplification, the documentary
makers purported that this common plight was only that simple. Again, CNN blamed Blacks for holding
their own children back in America.
The major problem with this documentary was that it
professed to tell “the whole range of our story” yet focused on the negative
stereotypes and did not stray far from them. Black in America presented
the effects without examining the causes of those effects. It highlighted a high level of unwed
pregnancy among black women without examining the lack of health care and
availability of birth control. It
showed the prevalence of drugs and drug convictions in the Black community
without showing the huge role of the government in the drug trade. Ultimately, it did a great job of not
holding the government or other societal institutions more than an iota
responsible for anything. Its
overall guise of showing “the Black story” to the rest of America was merely a
farce for presenting its traditional overly negative portrayal of Black people
for seven hours of television programming.
