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CNN to offer a glimpse of black life in America

Les Payne

July 21, 2008

As the world's window on the United States, CNN is offering its second documentary on black life in the republic, as Barack Obama is visiting Europe and the Middle East, with the three TV network anchors in global tracking mode.

Dick Parsons, board chairman of the cable network parent company, Time Warner Inc., wondered aloud why he was invited to launch the two-part series, "Black in America," that starts Wednesday. "It may have something to do with the fact that I'm black in America." Gilding the lily, as CEOs are well paid to do, he said that the documentary illustrates a "new paradigm."

Soledad O'Brien, the CNN host of the show, however, kept her feet on ground and was closer to the point of the 18-month production. "We did not have a desired outcome," she said, "what we wanted to do was to tell stories; not to pull punches. We wanted to tell stories through human beings ... who have to make choices; some are personal, others are influenced by policy."

The Time Warner honcho seemed intent on nudging the CNN series away from its journalistic moorings toward the open sea of politics. "Things have changed," said Parsons, sliming African-Americans' struggle to achieve parity as a "paradigm of victimization." "It's time to stop thinking in the old way and start thinking in the new way. Barack Obama is trying to get us to converse through this new paradigm."

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Such efforts, which hold great appeal for whites, collide with the very reality that the CNN series explores. As cited in a recent New York Times poll, Americans are sharply divided along racial lines over the nation's first presumptive black presidential nominee. Blacks are nearly three times more likely to have a favorable opinion of Obama than are whites; twice as likely to embrace his wife, Michelle; and twice as likely to see "race relations" as "bad," with no improvement in recent years.

While African-Americans agree with whites that these troubled times render America "ready" to elect a black president, they do not view this change as a significant sign of improvement in race relations.

This perception, chairman Parsons might note, flows not from a black paradigm of victimization but rather a white American history of villainy. Such a model of villainization does not reassure the lamb when sitting down with the wolf to discuss dinner. The American experience instructs that most whites who would dare vote for Obama will do so not out of altruism but rather a cataclysmic desperation brought on by Bush-Cheney. Sen. John McCain comes with a plethora of disquieting inadequacies, and offers little reason to hope.

The new racial "paradigm" that Parsons preaches and Obama campaigns upon is, unfortunately, quite a ways off. The CNN documentary flicks at the structural problem when discussing the raw side of the criminal justice system that bludgeons black men unfairly. Those who don't run afoul of the law are nonetheless stigmatized. Potential employers, the TV series reports, treat black job-seekers without criminal records less fairly that they do comparable whites with criminal records.

Reporter O'Brien found the level of terror police generate in black neighborhoods simply "staggering." "No matter what the socio-economic class, people told stories of what they told their 12-year-old sons to do when pulled over by cops." The "almost verbatim" spiel was given "whether it's inner city Detroit in a house that is falling down around you or a Hollywood star in a giant mansion with a pool that is humongous."

"If you're pulled over by a cop, here's what you do, here's what you say." Single mothers; couples, everybody had the same speech. Typically, "an Ivy league professor said, 'I tell my boys, you cower, cower, because I want you to live.'"

"These are conversations that white people do not have with their children," said O'Brien. With its global audience of 1.2 billion viewers in 212 countries and territories, CNN will offer a mere hint of this sense of terror police sustain throughout black America.