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American racism is getting more coverage on the mainstream news than it has since the Civil Rights era.   And, that’s not surprising given antics like this image included in a mailing from the Chaffey Community Republican Women, a regional arm of the GOP in California (more on the story and image source here).  For her part, the group’s president, Diane Fedele, draws on the rhetoric of “race-blindness” to defend her actions.  She reportedly said that she received the illustration in a number of chain e-mails and decided to reprint it for her members in the group’s newsletter because she was offended that Obama would draw attention to his own race. She said she doesn’t think in racist terms, pointing out she once supported Republican Alan Keyes, an African-American who previously ran for president. She continues this “race-blind” rhetorical strategy when she says:

“I didn’t see it the way that it’s being taken. I never connected,” she said. “It was just food to me. It didn’t mean anything else.”

Now, the somewhat encouraging news is that lots of people are pointing out this overt racism and calling it what it is, including those on rather mainstream (albeit left-leaning) blogs and cable news networks.

However, the way stories like the one about the circulation of this image of “Obama bucks” are overly focused on individual racism, rooted in psychological explanations.  For example, Fedele made the top of Olbermann’s “Worst Person” list on his nightly broadcast, as have others in this political season who’ve been guilty of engaging in the most overt racist tactics.  And, in a perfectly fine piece at the Huffington Post, Peter Wolson has a thorough discussion of the psychology of “othering.”   I don’t disagree with either of these. Indeed, I welcome more discussion of American racism in as many venues as possible.  The problem with these is that the focus on the individual and psychological aspects of racism within a larger political discourse of “race-blindness” elides the way in which racism is systemic, built in, institutionalized, and structural.

The focus on the individual expressions of overt racism and the psychological roots of such expressions also forestall any sort of discussions about responses to racism by society as a whole. To illustrate this, note the contrasting response to individual racism in Denmark recently.  A 33-year-old woman was convicted under Danish laws against racism after posting racist remarks on her personal web page (she was given a fine).   Unfortunately, in the U.S. we seem reluctant to adopt such a societal-level response to overt expressions of racism, even in this political season and even when many, many people see such expressions as wrong and immoral.   Instead, there is a knee-jerk, libertarian response to any call for accountability under the law for such expressions in the United States.  In point of fact, the U.S. Supreme Court has made a number of decisions that restrict certain types of racist speech that don’t make a contribution to the public sphere.    Yet, prominent figures such as Rush Limbaugh, get away with what amounts to enciting racist hatred with their speech, such as this recent tirade against black children allegedly “raised as militants.”

Identifying individuals who engage in overt racism is important, and understanding the psychology of such expressions is valuable, but coming to terms with American racism takes much more than that.  And, dealing with it will require a broad-based political will and systemic social change.   We’re not there yet.

In a recent column called “White Privilege and Barack Obama,” John Stossel, the co-anchor of ABC’s show 20/20, deploys the white racial frame - and hides behind the writing of African American neo-con Shelby Steele to disguise his own ignorance about racial matters in the U.S.

Stossel begins his piece by sharing his “assumption” about the significance of Obama’s success, then picking up on the widely circulated Tim Wise piece on Obama and white privilege, (which Adia Harvey wrote about here first), and then attacks Wise for his message. Here’s Stossel:

I assumed that the success of Barack Obama, as well as thousands of other black Americans and dark-skinned immigrants — many of whom thrive despite language problems — demonstrates that America today is largely a colorblind meritocracy. But a white campus lecturer, Tim Wise, gets tremendous applause from students by saying things like, “[W]hite supremacy and privilege continue to skew opportunities hundreds of years after they were set in place” and in America, “meritocracy is as close to a lie as you can come.” His message is in demand — he is invited to more than 80 speaking engagements a year.”

Stossel never refutes the charges that Wise and Harvey (and lots of others) make about white privilege and the way it operates in U.S. society and particularly in this campaign. Instead, he engages in a rhetorical strategy that’s best described as “nuh-uh, Shelby Steele says…” The line that immediately follows the paragraph quoted above starts like this:

But black writer Shelby Steele argues that whites do blacks no favors wringing their hands about white privilege.”

The rest of Stossel’s column consists mainly of lots of re-tread quotes from Steele’s book White Guilt. The bottom line: “nuh-uh, Shelby Steele says all that stuff is minor and he should know, ‘cuz he’s black.” So there. The only ground that Stossel ever concedes to racism is this bit:

Of course, there is still racism in America. At ABC News we’ve aired hidden-camera video showing sales clerks spying on black customers, cab drivers passing blacks to pick up whites and employers favoring white-sounding names.

Steele says those are minor problems.

Here, Stossel is referring to one 19-minute segment called “True Colors” that 20/20 did back in the early 1990s when Diane Sawyer was still on the show. It’s an excellent piece. I’ve used in classes and I include here on our list of recommended videos to use in teaching about racism. That’s one segment - in the twenty-plus years the show has been on. What Stossel fails to grasp here, and what Steele minimizes in his analysis, is that this discrimination is daily, ongoing, and life-threatening. In fact, in the very segment that Stossel references here African American economist and social commentator Julianne Malveaux points out how damaging and pervasive this sort of discrimination, when she says “it grinds exceedingly small.” Yet, this is not the African American Stossel chooses as his spokesperson to address racial inequality; instead, it’s Shelby Steele because his message is much more consistent with the white racial frame that Stossel deploys here. Once again, he quotes Steele to make his point:

“The fact is,” he adds, “we got a raw deal in America. We got a much better deal now. But we can’t access it unless we take … responsibility for getting there ourselves.”

He makes good points. White privilege does still exist, but Barack Obama’s success is more evidence that it’s not the whole story. There are plenty of people in America who want to vote for someone because he is black. Or female.

Next, Stossel trots out that tired old trope in discussions of racism: “political correctness.” And, he slips easily between race and gender here, deftly protecting white, male privilege as he goes:

It’s not politically correct to say that. Hillary Clinton supporter Geraldine Ferraro said she wouldn’t have been nominated for vice president in 1984 were she not a woman and that Obama would not have been doing so well were he not black. “Could I have said … his experience is what puts him there? No. Could I say because his stand on issues have distinguished him? No … If Obama were a white man, he would not be in this position. … He happens to be very lucky to be who he is. And the country is caught up in the concept.”

For saying that, she was repeatedly called racist.

Yes, yes she did. (Including this excellent piece, again by Adia Harvey.)

In the closing line, Stossel makes the non-sensical claim that there is “black privilege” that is somehow the equivalent of white privilege. And, predictably, calls for a stop to “complaining” and for race-blindness:

There is black privilege — and white privilege. It’s time to stop complaining about past discrimination and to treat people as individuals, not as members of a certain race.”

Yesterday, I wrote about Kristof’s call to fellow journalists for more critical analysis of racism in the presidential campaign. And, as the election grows closer and the polling data continues to show that racism is costing Obama the votes of whites, such an analysis is sorely needed. Unfortunately, most journalists - like Stossel - are blind to the reality of racism and ill-equipped for such an analysis due to the white racial frame.

Writing for the Washington Post Writers Group, George Will, vividly describes a pogrom that occurred in Springfield, Illinois in 1908. On that date 89 blacks were lynched. The article describes how

Forty black homes were destroyed, as were 21 black and several Jewish businesses.

The writer does not mention that this type of occurrence was not rare, but another example of violence perpetrated against African Americans and Jewish Americans with a a purpose beyond what was immediately obvious. As is true of many (especially white) Americans, Mr. Will speaks of these events as something of the distant past and closes by saying:

So, remember Springfield. The siege of the jail, the rioting, the lynching and mutilating all occurred within walking distance of where, in 2007, Barack Obama announced his presidential candidacy. Whatever you think of his apotheosis, it illustrates history’s essential promise, which is not serenity — that progress is inevitable — but possibility, which is enough: Things have not always been as they are.

The purpose for mentioning this pogrom in connection with Barack Obama is, I gather, to remind us that racism and its associated violence has ended. Well, James Byrd, Jr. was lynched in Jasper, Texas 10 (1998) years ago. According to the record, it was the first time in the history of the state that a white man had been convicted of killing a black man. A 1993 publication by Marquart, Ekland-Olson, and Sorenson examines how lynching was replaced with capital punishment. When one examines the disproportionate number of African Americans and Latino males in prison the logical conclusion is that very little has changed except the method of applying violence. An example is Angola Prison in Louisiana that operates likes a slave plantation. This practice is described in detail in an article posted on this site. Add to this that the NAACP put out the following statement on August 20, 2008 as an Action Alert message regarding the imprisonment of men of color:

These disparities are particularly true for African American men and boys, who are grossly overrepresented at every stage of the judicial process, from initial contacts with police to punishments. African Americans routinely receiving more jail time and harsher punishments; 42% of Americans currently on death row are African American. Nearly a million African Americans today are incarcerated in prisons and in jails, and unless there is a change, a black male born today has a one-in-three chance of going to prison in his lifetime.

While Barack Obama’s run for President signals an important historical event, some spoke of lynching when talking about his wife Michele Obama. As Media Matters noted, this happened on the February 21 broadcast of a nationally syndicated radio program.

Yes some things have changed, but the practice and the strong belief in intimidation and violence as a tool of racism still exist.

Patricia A. Bell is Professor of Sociology at Oklahoma State University.

As the Olympics continue in Beijing, I wanted to follow up on Terence’s excellent post about Blacks being banned from certain venues around the games, to make note of a couple of examples of both racism and the sort of white-framing that characterizes the majority of mainstream writing about race. First, I’m not the first to remark on the rather astonishing racism displayed by Spain’s basketball team (pictured here, photo from ABC). The Spanish national basketball team posed for a photo in uniform pulling back the skin on their eyelids, with smiles on their faces. As C.N. at The Color Line explains:

As any Asian American will tell you, this “chink eye” gesture is deeply hurtful and offensive to us. Many of us have experienced the pain and humiliation associated with this racist gesture throughout our entire lives, whether it’s in the playground of our elementary school, or as we walk down the street even as adults. For Asian Americans, it is the visual equivalent of being called a “nigger.”

C.N. goes on to note that the “racial insensitvity” meme used by most writers in the mainstream media to explain the Spanish team’s actions is obfuscate the underlying white privilege in such a gesture:

Of course, many Whites will respond by basically saying that even if the Spanish basketball team meant it as a joke, Asians should just shrug it off, that it was harmless and that we Asians should just lighten up and not take things so seriously.

The problem with that argument is that it ignores the larger historical and cultural context. What we need to recognize is that there are fundamental institutional power differences inherent in situations in which Whites denigrate minorities.

Each time an incident like that happens, it reinforces the notion of White supremacy — that Whites can say and do whatever they want toward anybody at any time without facing any negative repercussions.

Indeed, this sort of racial obliviousness is part of the underlying problem that Joe has written about here (and elsewhere) so persuasively, and it’s a key element in the white racial frame. Take for example, this reporting on Olympic gold medalist and African American Cullen Jones, this time from the New York Daily News (tip of the hat to Mordy for sending this along). This is the lede on the story about Jones’ achievement:

Bronx-born swimmer Cullen Jones didn’t just help power the U.S. relay swim team to Olympic gold - he just may have shattered the stereotype that blacks can’t swim.

This opening paragraph sets the tone for the rest of the article, which is entirely framed around this moronic stereotype. The article also notes that Jones’ started swimming after he nearly drowned as a child and the fact that his mother took him to his first swimming lessons, and as he progressed in skill-level, drove him to lessons at 5 a.m. in the morning. So, the article could have started out with the dramatic near-drowning story, or with highlighting the dedication and sacrifice of parents of Olympic athletes. Instead, the reporters in this instance chose to start within a white racial frame by reiterating the stereotype that “blacks can’t swim.” No matter how solid the reporting and writing is in the rest of the article, that’s the part that most readers are going to take away from the piece.

While the ideals of the Olympic games are “tolerance, equality, fair play and, most of all, peace,” the incidents described here and elsewhere suggest that the hosts, participants, and observers have fallen far short of these ideals.

In her “The Last Word” column at Newsweek this week Anna Quindlen gave us a new and useful concept to describe what many whites do—the “Caucasian card” (H/T Jose Cobas). When African Americans object to racist framing, antiblack commentary, or antiblack practices, whites accuse them of “playing the race card.” This is a white-framed, whitewashed phrase designed to deflect objections to everyday racism. It was doubtless invented by whites for that purpose. (Can anyone tell me its first use?) (photo: kevinthoule)

Quindlen cites the way that African Americans carry a heavy load of racial hostility and discrimination on their shoulders:

When one of the white guys blows an account, the office line is that he’s a loser. But when a black guy does it, it means that they—that’s the all-purpose “they,” sometimes used interchangeably with “those people”—don’t seem to be able to close the deal.

This burden of everyday racism makes a black person’s life quite different from that of a white person. Somehow most whites assume their lives are the same. They assert that blacks have equal opportunities compared to whites–in education, employment, housing or health care.

She later notes that Senator McCain justifiably likes to cite his long trials in a Viet Cong prison with it torture of a physical and psychological kind for five years. That, he and his supporters plausibly assert, “builds character.” But they forget or intentionally ignore the huge burden of contending with white hostility and discrimination that black men and women face (as well as other Americans of color). They face it for lifetimes, for far more than five years. This heavy burden often involves physical and psychological torture of its own kind. This should be fully recognized by the white media and voters, but is not.

Quindlen then comments on the McCain campaign’s reaction to Senator Obama’s recent and reasonable commentary on being viewed by many (whites) as not looking like other presidents on U.S. money and as being portrayed by McCain supporters and others as somehow foreign and “other.”

The man is black. His candidacy is indivisible from that fact, given the history and pathology of this country.… The suggestion of [his doing] something untoward was pandering to stereotypes and fear. Senator McCain was playing the Caucasian card.

She nails it this time. Whites invented the racist system of this country and have maintained that system, with great white privileges, since the 1600s. They have “played the white card” in every era. They played it in the abolitionist era of the 1850s-1860s, and they played it in the civil rights era of the 1950s-1960s. With no sense of irony, privileged whites (coming from what one blogger bobbosphere calls the “deal”) still play that white card today when they regularly accuse African Americans who critique the racist system and try to bring it down as “playing the race card” and being unfair to our “really democratic” system.

In a recent article, “The Color-Coded Campaign,” John Heilemann seems to be one of the very first journalists in the mainstream media to take a serious and detailed look at Senator Obama’s problems with overt and covert racist thinking and framing by white voters. He begins with a customary question as to why Obama is not way ahead of Senator McCain, and indeed below 50 percent of the voters in all national polls. After discussing the usual reasons given for his modest (or in some polls no) lead over Senator McCain, such as contentions he is too “effete,” “aloof,” “liberal,” or quick to change positions, he then moves to the more likely reason:

Where he’s lagging is among white voters, and with older ones in particular…. Obama’s lead is being inhibited by the fact that he is, you know, black? “Of course it is,” says another prominent Republican operative. “It’s the thing that nobody wants to talk about, but it’s obviously a huge factor.”

He points to the coming troubles as the Republican attack machine cranks up:

And now he faces a Republican machine intent on blackening him further still. Add to that his exotic background (Kenyan father, Indonesian upbringing), his middle name, his urbanity and intellectualism, and the scale of the challenge ahead for him comes into sharp relief.

Most observers are very or fairly optimistic about his chances because of his campaign’s great efforts to get out the vote so far. But this effort, Heilemann argues, has some obvious limits. One veteran pollster

calculates that even if black turnout rises by 25 percent from 2004 (and Obama wins 92 percent), if Hispanic turnout holds steady (and Obama wins 60 percent of it, seven points better than John Kerry did), and the under-50 vote rises by 5 percent (and Obama wins half of young white voters), the Democrat would still need to win 40 percent of the [white voters], one point less than Kerry garnered and two points less than Al Gore did in 2000…. “To get there, he’s got to win roughly the same proportion of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents that all other Democrats get. . . . He can’t win it just by changing the electorate.”

Yet numerous exit polls in the Democratic primaries showed that 9-11 percent of Democrats who voted for Clinton admitted to strangers (pollsters) that “race” was important in their choice. Heilemann then quotes the savvy and pro-Democratic poll analyst John Judis who believes that in the general election that figure in November could be 15-20 percent of Democratic and leaning to Democratic independent white voters. Heilemann then raises the million dollar question that few have analyzed in detail in the media:

Polling on African-American candidates has often been unreliable in the past, overstating support for them, coughing up large blocs of alleged undecideds who actually have no intention of voting for a black contender but are too embarrassed to say so…. “[Surveys] in this race…ask the ballot question ‘Who are you voting for?’ and then ask the ‘Who are your neighbors voting for?’ question,” says a GOP operative, referring to a common pollsters’ tactic of seeing through obfuscation revolving around race. “And between the first and second question, you see a five-to-ten-point shift in the answers. . . . And in primaries too numerous to list, exit polls overpredicted Obama’s performance….

Heilemann then suggests that the Republicans are trying to highlight Senator Obama’s “otherness,” which was the main point about the Paris Hilton–Britney Spears commercial, which had the unstated premise that he was only a (lightweight) celebrity because of his race. In this way, his race can be highlighted for the white racial framing in the back of many/most white voters’ heads by McCain’s campaign without mentioning his race. When Senator Obama tried to highlight these and similar Republican tactics as trying to scare (white, of course) voters because he “doesn’t look like the other presidents on those dollar bills,” then the McCain campaign accused Obama of “playing the race card,” the conventional white response to being called out on racial issues publicly.

Heilemann argues that almost all analysts have viewed Obama’s response there as a mistake because it highlighted his racial identity for white voters. That is, anything that highlights his race plays into the white racial frame and thus likely alienates some/numerous white “moderate” or “independent” voters. Heilemann points to  Senator Obama’s racial dilemma: He presumably cannot speak out against racism (he may have to?), but he cannot ignore the racist attacks either. And changing the subject does not easily work either:

What he needs is to find a way of talking not directly about race or racial politics but about his identity that at once elevates and grounds the conversation, that elucidates, soothes, inspires. That takes the air out of the attempts to make him seem foreign, not one of us.

But can he easily do this in a country where racist framing and action are still the foundation of the country–where most whites still operate, especially in private and backstage, out of a white racial frame in which the “dangerous black man” is at its center? As I have pointed out several times on this blog, there is plenty of social science data indicating this is the reality today. Why does the media, or the left blogosphere, not deal directly and openly with these issues of the white racist barriers standing in Senator Obama’s way? Can he overcome them as easily as many say?

Mike Allen at politico.com has a significant story August 10, 2008 on “Clinton told to portray Obama as foreign.” According to this account, which reports on an article coming out in the Atlantic magazine:

Mark Penn, the top campaign strategist for Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign, advised her to portray Barack Obama as having a “limited” connection “to basic American values and culture,” according to a forthcoming article in The Atlantic. The magazine reports Penn suggested getting much rougher with Obama in a memo on March 30, after her crucial wins in Texas and Ohio: “Does anyone believe that it is possible to win the nomination without, over these next two months, raising all these issues on him? … Won’t a single tape of [the Reverend Jeremiah] Wright going off on America with Obama sitting there be a game ender?”

Allen then adds from the Atlantic article that

Penn, the presidential campaign’s chief strategist, wrote in a memo to Clinton excerpted in the article: “I cannot imagine America electing a president during a time of war who is not at his center fundamentally American in his thinking and in his values.”

Allen and the Atlantic article focus on conflict within the Hillary Clinton campaign organization and her/their inability to act on various strategic recommendations, but the greater story is, once again, the white racial framing of Senator Obama.

This idea of the “foreign” and “weak values” character of African Americans is very old in whites’ racial framing of African Americans so as to rationalize slavery and Jim Crow segregation, as well as contemporary discrimination, for white minds and consciences.

For example, in a 1690s preamble to a South Carolina colony’s slavery law the elite white lawmakers, slaveholders, comment on enslaved Black Americans: They

are of barbarous, wild, savage natures, and . . . constitutions, laws and orders, should in this Province be made and enacted, for the good regulating and ordering of them, as may restrain the disorders, rapines and inhumanity, to which they are naturally prone and inclined.

The terms “barbarous, wild, savage” serve a double framing purpose. They not only conjure up notions of African Americans as foreign and uncivilized, the early cultural stereotyping, but also views of the latter as dangerous, rebellious, and criminal, ideas applied recently in the Dr. Wright case too.

In the 1700s influential Christian ministers also articulated views of African Americans as foreign and alien. Important in this regard were ministers like Cotton Mather and Jonathan Edwards, the earliest North American intellectuals to aggressively defend the racial hierarchy and white racial frame of the new colonies. They too viewed African Americans as inferior “uncivilized savages.” Thus, the English colonists often spoke of themselves as “Christians” and of “their negroes” (sic) as non-Christian “heathen.”

Later, these ideas were celebrated by white leaders in the 19^th century like Nathaniel S. Shaler, prominent scientist and Harvard dean, who argued that African Americans not only were inferior, uncivilized, and an “alien folk” in the United States but also but would eventually become extinct under Darwinian evolutionary processes. Again and again, we see that the dominant racial frame was not something on the margins of an expanding and powerful United States, but rather something arising from its intellectual, political, and cultural center. (on this history, see here) Like modern political campaigns.

For centuries white Americans have insisted that they were the “modern” and “civilized” people and have had to contend with “foreign,” “backward,” and “uncivilized” peoples. And now we see it again from some Clinton advisers.

In the August 1^st, 2008 issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education, Harvard psychologist Mahzarin R. Banaji wrote an excellent article entitled “The Science of Satire” about the failed attempt at political humor by The New Yorker on the cover of the July 21^st 2008 edition. (See here)  She begins by quoting the artist Barry Blitt in his response to Huffington Post when asked if he regretted posting the article in retrospect. Blitt responds:

“Retrospect? Outcry? The magazine just came out 10 minutes ago, at least give me a few days to decide whether to regret it or not.”

Banaji makes clear in her next paragraph that she is not denying The New Yorker or Blitt’s First Amendment rights, merely pointing out their failure to understand

basic facts of information transmission that accompanied the reasoning behind the drawing.

In the same article, Banaji quotes the editor of the New Yorker, David Remnick defends the cover saying

“it’s a satire about the distortions and misconceptions and prejudices about Obama.”

She points out the flaw in this reasoning by using examples of other covers from the New Yorker that Remmick claims are equally as offending.

When the artist’s intention was to depict Cheney as the boss, he faithfully drew Cheney as the boss. That’s satire? When the artist’s intention was to depict the drowning of the administration, he sketched the drowning of the administration. Far out!

The difference that Banaji reveals and pokes fun at is that with other satirical comics, the cartoon depicts literally what

When presented with A and B in close spatial or temporal proximity, the mind naturally and effortlessly associates the two. Obama=Osama is an easy association to produce via simple transmogrification. Flag burning=unpatriotic=un-American=un-Christian=Muslim is child’s play for the cortex. For decades, psychologists have described the “sleeper effect” — the idea that information, even information we might reject at first blush, ends up persuading us, contrary to our intention, over time. That often occurs when the content of the message (Obama=Islamist) and the source providing the message (The New Yorker trying to be cute) have split off in our minds. When satire isn’t done right, as in the case of the Obama cover, the intended parody easily splits off from the actual and more blatant association.

With knowledge of the process that the mind uses to digest information, artists cannot blame their own ignorance for placing the association in the minds of Americans whose brains are quick to complete the equation of A=B by simple association.

Harvard psychologists have embarked on much research concerning this idea of implicit association. Check out the website for Project Implicit for more information.

(Note: This was prepared by Hannah and Amanda.)

MediaMatters did an important recent report on the rather extreme racial and gender bias in the distribution of experts/guests who appeared on three major cable news networks (Fox, CNN, MSNBC) during the prime-time hours for one whole month (May 2008). Examining nearly 1700 guest appearances, they found that

67 percent of the guests on these cable programs were men, while 84 percent were white. MSNBC showed the greatest gender imbalance, with 70 percent of its guests being male. CNN and Fox News were not far behind; each of those networks featured 65 percent male guests

It comes as no surprise as to who had the worst record, the most monolithic guest roster:

Fox News was the whitest network, with 88 percent white guests. CNN and MSNBC were close behind, with both featuring 83 percent white guests.

The representation of Latinos, who now makeup 14-15 percent of the U.S. population, was very poor. They

made up only 2.7 percent of cable news guests. The worst of the three networks on this score was MSNBC, which featured only six Latino guests out of 460 prime-time appearances during the entire month.

Asian Americans and Middle Eastern Americans were all but invisible on the networks:

During the month of May, Fox News and MSNBC each featured a single Asian-American guest. Across the three cable networks, there were only four appearances by guests of Middle Eastern descent, two on Fox and two on CNN.

And not one Native American was a guest on any of the networks during that whole month. However, the affirmative action “quota” for white men on the programs was quite high, as it has been for centuries:

Though white men make up only 32 percent of the population, they made up 57 percent of the guests on prime-time cable during this period.

And Americans of color as a group were only represented at about half their proportion in the U.S. population. Again, not surprisingly:

Every prime-time cable news host is white, and all but two . . . are men.

It is interesting how just how “diverse” the U.S. cable new media really are not. In effect, the communications networks called the “mass media” are part of a larger white-dominated societal networking system.

In recent decades white elites—especially white male elites—have continued to dominate the construction and transmission of new or refurbished racial ideas and images designed to buttress the system of racial inequality, and they have used ever more powerful means to accomplish their ends. The mass media now include not only the radio, movies, and print media used in the past, but television, music videos, satellite transmissions, and the Internet. Given that most whites have little recurring, sustained, or equal-status contact with African Americans and other darker-skinned Americans, their views of such groups are significantly reinforced and created by those of their informal networks and those racial stereotypes in the white-generated media images of the still white-controlled mass media. (See here)

On July 23 and 24, CNN aired their much-hyped series entitled “Black in America,” which sought to examine the varied and wide-ranging experiences of African Americans in the contemporary U.S. The series sought to explore and document “what it really means to be black in America,” by focusing on the experiences of a wide range of everyday black Americans and the trials, tribulations, and triumphs that they face (image from CNN). The segment on July 23 focused on Black women; the segment on July 24 addressed Black men. Together, the two segments addressed topics including the high numbers of female-headed households, the challenges of public education, inner-city isolation, hip hop culture, and the staggering rates of imprisoned Black men.

While many people I know emailed reminders and made it a point to watch the show (my mother even marked it on her calendar!), I wasn’t overly excited about it. I figured that if CNN did an accurate job reporting what it means to be black in America, then they wouldn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know. If they did a poor job and misrepresented things (which they have done in the past), then I would just get irritated. But I was pleased to see that in many ways, CNN made some important points and addressed some key things that urgently need to be addressed.

One thing I appreciated most about “Black in America,” was the focus on the things that everyday Black people do to improve their communities and to try to make the world a better place. In the July 23 segment on Black women, the show followed a Black male high school principal who, troubled by the high numbers of Black students who do not complete high school, actually tracks down truants to encourage them to come back to school. Reporter Soledad O’Brien later profiled a Black woman cardiologist who does outreach to encourage Black people to get routine preventative health screenings and to overcome distrust of the medical establishment. (This distrust is well founded. The Tuskegee experiment, in which Black men were injected with syphilis and/or denied medical treatment in order to study the progression of the disease, is the most infamous example of Blacks being used for medical experiments in ways that violate ethical standards and human rights.)   The show also featured a Black male economics professor who, in an effort to address racial disparities in educational attainment, is trying a controversial experiment where he pays children for good grades in an effort to build strong study habits and an appreciation for the value of education.

 
Examples like these are an important counter to many of the commonplace myths about Black Americans that abound in popular culture, policy decisions and in everyday interactions. Many believe that Black Americans in general are lazy, unmotivated, and unwilling to take advantage of the opportunities available to them. To this way of thinking, the main challenge facing Black Americans is their refusal to exert any agency to change their circumstances. This perception does not characterize most African Americans. One of the most valuable contributions of “Black in America” is that it documented many everyday, ordinary African Americans who work hard for themselves and to make life better for others. This is a picture we rarely see in mainstream media, which disproportionately depict Blacks as perpetrators of crime rather than everyday Americans trying to make changes. (See Joe Feagin’s Systemic Racism for more discussion of this.)

 
I also appreciated the program’s emphasis on Black fathers, and their acknowledgment that contrary to popular opinion, many Black men are actively involved in their children’s lives and parent under unbelievably difficult circumstances. The show also made connections between the fact that while some Black men are absent parents, often this is a consequence of many complicated factors—cycles of parental abandonment, incarceration as a result of a racially biased criminal justice system—structural issues that are often overlooked.

 
Now for the problems: one glaring omission in “Black in America” is the absence of any Black (openly) lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgendered individuals. While I applaud “Black in America” for its attention to how gender and class are important factors in creating a myriad of experiences in Black America, I think the segment should have acknowledged that not all of Black America is heterosexual. Black LGBT individuals face issues and challenges in the Black community that stem from intersections of race, sexuality, and gender. Too often they are alternately overlooked or demonized, and CNN missed a valuable opportunity to speak to their experiences. How might the story on Black women have been changed had Soledad O’Brien spoken with the family of Sakia Gunn, the 15 year old Newark, New Jersey lesbian who was murdered in 2003 after refusing the sexual advances of men by identifying herself as a lesbian?  Gunn’s story shows not only the ways that homophobia impacts Black Americans, but the threat of violence that Black women face every day. This is another very important part of being Black in America that should have been included.

 
On a related note, the July 23 segment on Black women did not seem to focus very heavily on issues facing Black women. The stories in this segment included an incredibly poignant account of a single Black father in Brooklyn trying to maintain steady employment to keep his children in school, and his young son’s involvement in the experimental class where children were paid to earn good grades. Another story detailed a young woman who, abandoned by her father and searching for a father figure, ended up raising several children alone, and the impact that male abandonment can have on young women. A third story focused on black professional women’s struggles to find comparably educated Black professional mates, and the challenges of doing this given the high numbers of Black men who are incarcerated, uneducated, and unavailable.

 
While these stories definitely include Black women, I did not feel that there was a heavy emphasis on the ways intersections of race and gender create specific experiences for them.  In some ways, these stories still seemed to be more about Black men than Black women. In a profile of a Black woman who had no health insurance, Soledad O’Brien emphasized the difficulty this woman experienced maintaining her health when no stores in her neighborhood provided fresh fruits or vegetables, and the fact that without a car, she had to travel over an hour to get nutritious food. And, in a compelling quote that captures the essence of urban health disparities, the woman said that in her neighborhood, “it’s easier to buy a gun than a tomato.”   While this is definitely an important story,  it reflects intersections of race and class much more so than race and gender. I’m surprised that a segment on Black women did not discuss the fact that Black women are much more likely than white women develop and die from breast cancer, to develop uterine fibroids, and to give birth to low-birth weight babies (as Jessie posted about recently), and the studies that connect these issues to surviving daily onslaughts of racism and sexism. It’s also interesting that in this discussion of health, there was no mention of the fact that Black women are the fastest-rising group of new HIV/AIDS cases, are 26 times more likely to contract AIDS than white women, and that this occurs most frequently through heterosexual intercourse.   Finally, Black women experience sexual assaults at higher rates than women of other racial groups, yet are less likely to see their assailants prosecuted. From slavery on, Black women have enjoyed little ownership over their bodies and have had to combat issues including rape, forced sterilization, and limited access to birth control, so the current issues Black women face in this vein have clear historical precedent. Yet for some reason, these were overlooked in the segment that purported to focus on Black women.

 
Lastly, I felt that the July 24 story about race and education overstated, as mainstream media outlets frequently do, the “acting white” phenomenon among Black Americans. The show reported that for many Black Americans, school success is perceived as “acting white,” which leads African Americans to shun it in favor of pursuing other routes to popularity. The “acting white” argument, first introduced in academic circles by Signathia Fordham and John Ogbu “Black Students’ School Success: Coping with the Burden of ‘Acting White,’” has been retested and analyzed among many other researchers who find little empirical support for this theory. In short, Fordham and Ogbu state that Black students don’t perform well academically in part because they see it as “acting white,” and because they recognize that in a racially unequal society, there will be little reward for their educational efforts. Yet numerous other scholars have performed more empirically sophisticated tests of this theory and have gleaned different results. In several articles, Jim Ainsworth and Douglas Downey have argued that Black students who earn high grades are very popular among their peers and believe that their educational gains will earn them occupational rewards down the line. Sociologist Karolyn Tyson has also argued that Black students with high grades are popular among peers, and that their academic achievement is met with positive regard rather than negative sanction. This is not to say that Black children never taunt others with “acting white,” but that a well-documented body of research suggests that this label may be given for reasons other than academic success, and that it is likely not the deterrent to academic achievement that Fordham and Ogbu initially suggested. It is rather unfortunate that CNN ignored a body of social science literature that challenges this theory in order to perpetuate what cultural critic Michael Eric Dyson has referred to as “the academic equivalent of an urban legend.”

 
Overall, I felt that the CNN special told me little I didn’t know about being Black in America—which, to me, means that for the most part they accurately reported many of the varied, diverse experiences of African Americans in contemporary society. For other educators, this series could be a useful tool for initiating discussion about race, class, and social structure in America. The series definitely challenged some—not all—of the preconceptions and stereotypes that persist about Black Americans. It is worth watching, but definitely warrants watching with a critical eye.