black in america

last week i blogged about the first half of the black in america series. while i was watching that one, i was prepared to be skeptical. i just knew i'd have some kind of commentary. my blog was more like my notes with very little commentary but that was ok. when i watched the second half, "the black man," i was thoroughly disappointed. i started off taking notes, but then i got kinda unhappy with it and just watched. i've had almost a week to soak everything in and formulate an intelligent opinion instead of just a rant.

first, my initial criticism about the show was that:

a.) cnn is only putting this on because obama is running for president - i mean they don't even do this shit during black history month and we know how much white people love to celebrate and highlight black history month [but that's another blog...]

b.) i'm tired of "creating a dialogue." i didn't want to watch a bunch of people say "black is beautiful," and i surely didn't want to watch a bunch of people say "being black is hard." too many times black people start on that "black is beautiful" stuff to ignore or hide our actual issues. and being black is not hard. dealing with the way some people treat us because we're black is what's not cool.

and c.) all the people that needed to watch it didn't. in the time since the shows, i've talked to 3 black people who DEFINITELY could have been on that show (since all it did was highlight our shortcomings) and none of them even bothered to watch it. one didn't even really know what cnn is. how do you live in america and own a tv and NOT know what cnn is?!?! the white people who watched already think they know what it's like to be black in america or already "sympathize" with us.

all of those things made me weary of watching, but my mom pointed out that i couldn't not watch just in case someone had something to say. i couldn't not have anything to say. so i watched as cnn kinda tore us down under the guise of building us up. on the first show about women and the family, they showed a large loving black family. the catch was that they're decedant from white slave owners and and an equally large white branch to their family. i'm interested in the stories and legacy that comes with a large family so i liked this black family and i liked that cnn tried to use it as common thread throughout the show.

i also really liked the program that roland fryer has going. education is huge for me. i wasn't too impressed with that guy in houston trying to get high school drop outs back in high school [mostly because i went to a school that had a lot of drop outs and i had truancy cases come to me in teen court and i know what a distraction those students can be to students who do want to be in school.] but i'm a fan of roland's experiment because it gets kids interested in their future while they're young. i also like that they used this time to show a single black father struggling as opposed to the familiar face of the single black woman with the 5 kids she can barely support who's not getting any sufficient help from anywhere.

i didn't like when they started talking about marriage and black people. the whole "marry your baby daddyday" didn't sit right with me at first. however, the people who took part in that are a little different from the norm. those people when through a selection process and counseling. they already wanted to be together and get married. they just had kids first and had issues getting to the last step. i think they put too much of an emphasis on marriage though. there are some people who have kids that shouldn't be together at all. and it's not that marriage isn't for black women. women out number men across the board. i didn't like the implication that black men aren't good enough so black women have to look outside their race.

i also wasn't interested in the "homicide is killing our men and AIDS is killing our women" segments. this goes right along with my "i'm-not-interested-in-harping-over-the-same-shit" attitude. this also effectively made us out to be pretty shitty people to the thinking person. we hate ourselves so much that we're out killing each other and fucking everybody all willy nilly? not the black people i know.

on the next one about the black man we learned that you have to be light skinned and aspire to be just like the caucasians that run the country in order to be successful AND if you're dark skinned you're pretty much gonna be on drugs, or be a pimp, or end up in jail, or some combination of all of them. you'll be down and out for sure. hmmm... come to think about it... the single father in the first half was a little on the darker side...

anyway, the common motif in this one was this duality between dark and light although they didn't specifically say that the issue boils down to skin tone. when they did it was more of a "do you think maybe perhaps this could be the problem?" first they looked at 2 people from the ["historic"] Little Rock Central High class of 1968. One is a light skinned man who started a business, raised his 3 sons after white role models, and now lives in a white suburb. The other is a dark skinned man who lived a life of crime, drugs and bitches, and has turned his life around, changed his name to something symbolic and african, and become a preacher.

to further reinforce that this is the norm, they show us michael eric dyson, esteemed author, professor, comemtator, black leader/opportunist, and his brother everett who is serving a life sentence for homicide. m.e.dyson is light skinned; his brother is dark skinned. using them, soledad brings up the contrasting skin tones and beats around the bush about what the show has been showing us the entire time.

just like in the first one, there is no solution to our social ills; just and endless barrage of statistics that show that being black in america in 2008 is still like being on the bottom of somebody's shoe. and then to put the cherry on the sundae, they give us martin from the cosby show saying basically "yes they deserve to die and i hope they burn in hell!" in reference to black men in prison on drug charges even though it has been shown that drug laws are slanted to get record numbers of non violent minority offenders locked up.

i think it's time for cnn to run something like... WHITE in america. if the majority got a glimpse of how the minority sees them then some things might change. and i'm not talking about an american president "aplogizing" for slavery 100+ years after the fact. i'm not looking for reparations. i just want white people to be more aware. minorities in this country have to be on alert all the time because the white establishment unnecessarily sees [or wants to portray] us as a threat. it's like going to war to "protect" the freedom of american citizens from iraq. what? our freedom is constitutional. iraqi's are going to take that?

the worst part about it is that black people are american. instead of saying look at how hard it is to be black, they should have been saying look at how hard it is to be american in this economy. surely there are some things that are unique to the black experience, but there are poor people of every race who make stupid choices and turn to drugs, crime, and bitches. when they talk about these stats they forget to mention that black people are only about 13% of the population. we can't be the only ones on welfare.

sigh... i feel like i'm saying the same thing over and over again. i'm at work and surrounded by white people getting all worked up. and this woman on the phone is getting on my nerves... adios!