“Black In America”….? Negro, Please!

In watching CNN’s “Black In America,” I could not have been more turned off than after watching the first few seconds of the piece itself. Soledad O’Brien, who acted as the correspondent on this 4-hour documentary, started the piece off with a look into the “Rand” family, a black family dating back to the latter days of slavery. In those initial minutes, the documentary explained how the Rand family’s paternal roots originate with a white slave owner, and it showed the first meeting between one of the Rand family’s black members and one of their white members. It was touching, but what on earth did it have to do with being “Black in America?”

Without even seeing the documentary, anyone could tell you that such an occurrence has little to do with being black in this country. And even if you watched the documentary, Soledad failed to explain how on Earth that Rand family meeting had anything to do with the thesis of what is supposed to be a journalistic expose on black life in America. Of course, given that it appeared Soledad had no real thesis anyway, I guess it would have been hard to tie something to nothing.

Of course, I don’t want to go too far in blaming Soledad for this. Mark Nelson (yes, the same Mark who was in the 1996 film The First Wives Club) was the executive producer on this piece. I believe it was one of his first major productions as an executive producer, and hopefully it will be his last. However, the most troubling contributor to this outlandish fact-giving children’s book on black subsistence was Essence Magazine, which was in association with the content of the documentary. I would slam this magazine personally, but given how many blacks (myself included) hold this publication in high regard, I won’t say anything other than that they should be ashamed of themselves.

I wanted to sum up this documentary in one piece using my own words, but quite frankly, somebody else put if far better than I ever could have. Brian Lowry of Variety.com said that “At times, Black in America seems like a Nickelodeon special for kids who have never met a black person—aimed at an audience completely naïve about the African-American experience.”

And he is absolutely right. I couldn’t have summed it up better. The documentary is littered with facts about how blacks have a harder time finding jobs, how they lack many of the resources in their neighborhood, how many of them are poor, how some of them are rich, how some blacks grow up without fathers and how blacks go about dating inside and outside of their race. All of it could have been in a 9th grader’s 3-page essay and I wouldn’t have thought anything about it. There was no insight into how the current state of black life got to the point it is at, how it continues to manifest itself, nor how there are still factors in play that guarantee that many blacks will experience the same type of life generations down the road.

The only insight offered was that of a few celebrities, such as Spike Lee and D.L. Hughley. All of the expert opinions shown in the documentary focused on studies or stories of attrition. The section on the education of inner-city youths was the closest the piece got to offering an expert’s insight into why life is what it is for blacks in America, but explaining how the education gap has caused a disparity in quality of life for blacks versus that of whites is far from breaking news—especially to black people.

So what did I want? What did I expect?

I guess, as a black person, I wanted more insight. I wanted to see Michael Erick Dyson come on the show and offer his opinions, based on his knowledge of the subject, as to why the cycle continues. I wanted a Howard  professor, a high ranking white lawyer, a black woman who works at McDonalds or white college student from HBCU to not just share their stories and answer Soledad’s fluff questions, but I wanted them to tell me why black people stand where they stand in this society, and I wanted the more knowledgeable people to tell me how we got to this point almost 40 years after the civil rights movement.

I didn’t necessarily want to hear how bad it is, or how good some think it might be, but I wanted to hear personal truths on a community-wide scale, not just the stories of individuals that I can get from a po-dunk local news station everyday at 6 o’clock.

And the thing I most expected to see was some insight from the journalist herself, Soledad O’Brien. Whether the host herself was black, white, Italian, Cuban, Australian or whatever nationality, ethnicity or race she belongs to,  I needed to hear what she learned after reporting all of the stories she shared. I understand it’s supposed to be an investigative piece, so perhaps by definition that means that very little opinion is supposed to be shared, and perhaps that’s why there was so little insight and opinion throughout the documentary. Then again, an investigative piece is supposed to have some sort of goal and it is actually supposed to unearth some unknown reality, and neither objective was achieved, so why not make up for that?

So why not share an opinion, Soledad? Why not tell me what it is you hoped to accomplish with this piece and then tell me whether or not you think you accomplished it? Tell me what you’ve learned. Tell me what you’ve seen. Tell me about your experience as a black or with other blacks in America. I’m sorry, but you can’t do a documentary about Blacks in America and not editorialize a little bit. Because if there is one thing that you should learn from any investigative piece into black life, it should be that eliminating one’s voice in society is the worst thing that can be done. So why not speak up, Ms. O’Brien?

~ by Uzo Ometu on July 27, 2008.