Black(s) in America?

Either Soledad O'Brien is the dumbest TV journalist in America, or CNN's producers are far more interested in sensationalism than they are in solutions. For two days last week the network made a feeble — and disingenuous — attempt to portray to viewers what it’s like to be a person of color in these United States, but brought little new or truly incisive to the table. I’m now sorry that last week I encouraged readers to watch.

While the two-part series showed Blacks in virtually every situation imaginable, one of the most successful programs for Black children in America (and the person who runs it) was totally ignored ... conspicuous by their mind-boggling absence. Geoffrey Canada runs the Harlem Children’s Zone. His organization mentors over 13,000 mostly Black and Hispanic children in New York City... and his program is wildly — beyond all expectations except those of Canada’s — successful. The teen birthrate among the young people his program ministers to is almost non-existent, while the college graduation rate is well over 90 percent. The first group of charges that he began with over 20 years ago is now set to graduate from college, and many will go back to Harlem — to the same program that molded them — and begin to give something back. This is far and away the most successful mentoring program in the county, yet CNN gave it no air time. Zero.

Beginning in the early 1950s, and throughout the following decades, a phenomenon occurred whenever a Black person was slated to appear on television: Black people all over the country called each other to make sure friends and relatives know about it and tuned in. Of course Black faces are now commonplace on the tube (too commonplace, in my opinion, when you factor in the buffoonery and minstrel shows sometimes evidenced on BET). Nonetheless, this CNN special had Blacks all over the country waiting with eager anticipation — yet it delivered little of real sustenance other than a segment on paying children for grades and the closing portion which featured the always brilliant Michael Eric Dyson. The series, which purported to examine Black attitudes, Black culture, and Black problems, totally ignored the one program in America that offers genuine Black solutions. Why?

When O’Brien asked filmmaker Spike Lee why positive stories about Blacks are not featured more in American cinema and pop culture, his answer was “because that’s not what White America wants to see.” Obviously the producers of “Black in America” agreed to the extent that Canada and the Harlem Children Zone received no attention. Again: Why?

Here’s why: By featuring a program which proves that when Black babies (no matter how poor the parents they are born to, or how meager the circumstance of their birth) are given the same love, care, mentoring and education as White babies, they will turn out just as successful, flies in the face of cherished American notions that underclass Blacks are in some way genetically inferior and beyond being helped. Canada’s success with a program that intercedes in the lives of these newborns (the get in from day-one and they never get out) exposes our lack of political will to solve the problems of the underclass once and for all. Put simply, all it takes to break the cycle of poverty, low goals (and the resultant crime and violence) is 24/7 mentoring ... but the good news is, it’s a program that only has to be dome for one generation — and it will work just as well with poor Whites in Appalachia as it does with poor Blacks in Harlem. Why isn’t a program that has been proving for 20 years that it works being replicated all across the United States?

So, again the question: Is Soledad O’Brien just that dumb, or is it that we really don’t want to solve the problems of “Black(s) in America?” Could it be that in light of Obama’s ascendancy, CNN only wants to capitalize by putting on sensationalized — but vacuous — TV special featuring Blacks so that the network can sell more soap for its sponsors? If the latter is the case, then buckle your seatbelts, we’re about to inundated with this type of empty programming while the problems of the underclass remains unaddressed.

From Cool Cleveland contributor Mansfield B. Frazier mansfieldfATgmail.com

Friends:

''I share Mansfield's disappointment about the CNN program on "Black in America." It did seem slanted toward social pathologies and away from the well documented successes that occur every day in black America. The program taught me nothing I did not know already, and for those who knew very little about black life in America this two-part program left them largely in the dark about how far we have actually come since 1619. Nothing about black colleges - little about black businesses and CEOs - nothing about the rapid rise of blacks holding elective office - nothing about blacks in every aspect of American life beyond the construction industry and those who are strung out on drugs or locked up in prison for the same reason.''

''I watched the CNN series "Jews in America" last year, and believe me it took a very different approach. I am not sure what CNN or Soledad O'Brien were trying to accomplish by this program, but it fall far short of my hopes and expectations.''

-- Rev. Marvin A. McMickle, Ph.D., Antioch Baptist Church, Cleveland. (:divend:)