Preview of Black in America 2: is Part I Weak, Meek or Bleak?

No, neither weak, meek, nor bleak. The word is “safe.” And thus the mess over the Washington DC premier and panel discussion isn’t a metaphor for 2009’s Black in America 2. It’s the other way around…

By Christopher Chambers

In the Oscar®-winning film The Departed, it turned out that gangsta Jack Nicholson had two moles (rats?) infiltrating the Massachusetts State Police: Matt Damon and another dude. The Black Snob is no fool; better safe than sorry, so I'm sure she's glad two of us went. While the nonsense at the door last week at the Navy Memorial ensnared Retort correspondent Lamar Tyler (he’s better looking than I am so I’ll call him Matt Damon—please re-read his 7/15 post "CNN Treated me Like I was Black in America" here), I snuck in very early at the direction of CNN publicist Jennifer Dargan, and under the wing of D.C.’s usual shakers and movers of color. If you live in the Nation’s Capital, you’d recognize folk in this latter group by sight, name or rep. The kind of folk who are used to being ushered in under the velvet rope, or given comps, or other such largesse for reasons of money or political clout (or the having the appearance of either).

Among the annointed was Dayo Olopade of The Root.com . Pushing BIA 2 heavily on its site, The Root appears to have annulled its Election 08 marriage with Henry Louis Gates, and various other black public intellectuals, favoring instead to dish up news and cultural-political gossip a la its white fraternal twin, Slate. That said, The Root, is helping present a BIA 2 viewing party here in D.C (at Busboys & Poets 5th Street NW location on 7/23). on. Will The Root provide hard-hitting analysis/critque of CNN...or cover? From the panel discussion on which Dayo sat, it’s hard to say at this point. I couldn't discern who was there on a press pass and who wasn't; no hard questions flew or were fielded. Accordingly, it was a perfect event from a flackery point of view, so bravo Jennifer. The media coverage was safe. The panel discourse, safe. Allegory for CNN's production?

Certainly.

"Safe" has many connotations. Familiarity, universality, steady and expository communication. It also means routine, typical, unchallenging. Banal. The usual thing, made for the usual people, about the usual topics, garnering the usual responses. The make up of the panel and the folks who managed to get in on 7/14, and their input, their responses, is thus no accident, and it's easy to see why CNN would consider the affair a success. It is ideal set-up, accordingly, for Part I's initial stories premiering 8pm Eastern on 7/22 [assuming the President's press conference doesn't cut into the debut]. American University Professor Steven Taylor has studied how black folks see brokering, hooking up/being hooked-up, a sense of being “in” not out--all as premiums. It's what we expect from our political, religious and media/entertainment leaders. (1) The hook-up, being under the velvet rope, will counterbalance a litany of sins and silence a lit of complaints--especially those about Black in America 2. Lamar can attest to the opposite from the folks waiting on 7/14 (albeit in mercifully low humidity for DC). Out there, the sins register. Inside, they are co-opted.

If the above sounds unduly cynical, perhaps this next angle might be less odious. While regular black people waited and were denied entry, the U.S. Naval Reserve and the Marine Corps were putting on a concert and cocktails there at the Navy Memorial. The guests, along with fannypack-festooned white tourists and yuppies on their way to happy hour milled about, gawking at the gathering well-dressed professionals of color. I went back outside to look around close to 7pm. A young lady waiting to flash a ticket to CNN flacks at 701 Pennsylvania Avenue was texting while simulatenously talking with her cohorts. The young woman peered up from her from iPhone at the gaping white people and said to her friends, “They [the white people] are ones who should see this, if things are going to get better.”
“Ya know,” a girlfriend answered. “This'd be like preaching to the choir." Exactly. Safe. And I went back inside to hear the choir.

Presiding over the church music was Roland Martin , resplendent in his summer weight suit and ascot. The tone of the Q & A and panel banter—which included broader social/economic/justice comments from participants like Maudine Cooper of the Washington Urban League—was safe. The VIPs were impressed. Nodded along. It’s good to be in under the rope, sitting at the reserve table in the club. Safe.

So now what did the safe crowd see in Part I (and what will they see in what I digested from Part II airing 7/23 at 8pm; preview courtest of CNN's press DVDs)? Nothing weak, meek or bleak. Just safe. But here are some highlights...not-so-safe, powerful journalism to savor:

• Dr. Lisa Newman’s sights and reflections during her expedition to Ghana, a reverse-, or rather anti-Middle Passage exploration, to discover the genetic cause and fix for triple negative breast cancer (TNBC).


• The physical ordeal and spiritual odyssey of Dr. Newman’s patient, an educated, fairly well off suburban Detroit mother named Dawn Spencer, and joyful, hype-less volunteerism of the African American breast cancer group Sisters Network.


• The apparent self-immolation of Project Choice graduate and ex-con Chris Shurn, and the eerie foreshadowing tour he gives of his old home, an empty “Dogtown” in Oakland, California.


• Everett Highbaugh of Project Choice, fretting over young Brian Hall’s lack of a plan. But sometimes having the plan isn’t enough.


• D.C.-area husband James Barnes witnessing his 21 year marriage to wife Tina crack, and yet tearfully, he cannot articulate his innermost feelings why the fracture occurred. happened.


• The images of Frank Wilson, heart attack victim and ward of Chicago’s Project Brotherhood. Frank Wilson--metaphor for so many things.


• One genuine moment in Soledad’s otherwise hagiographical treatment of Tyler Perry: when he says the word “ownership.”
  

There are nits a viewer can pick. CNN pushes the usual buttons; risk isn’t the hallmark of the corporate media in 2009. Yet a gay man of color wondered if Nisa Muhammad’s Wedded Bliss Foundation would turn he and his partner away if they were having troubles, for the sake of the two biracial children they adopted out of D.C.'s troubled foster care system. A single mom who confided that marriage alone won’t solve Black America’s issues. Indeed the part of Maryland from which the Barnes family in Part I hails—Prince George's and Charles County, recently a bastion of comfortable black suburban living—is now being decimated by foreclosures, debt and layoffs. Soledad navigates the safe, typical course by highlighting celebrities and famous elders (especially in Part II, as we’ll see). Haven’t we heard enough from them—why not talk to ordinary people who are hanging on despite layoffs, or plant green jobs? Not so famous yet archetypal Chris Shurn and Brian Hall are center stage; but what about young black men outnumbered by females in HBCUs, and trying to learn and succeed in a troubled economy? There is no mention of the state/local budget crises which could derail Project Choice or Project Brotherhood, or the stimulus which might save them, and provide African Americans, shut out of every major infrastructure revolution for 250 years, a platform to be pioneers in this one. Nor is there any mention--warm or as counterpoint-- of the stimulus’ chief architect: Barack Obama.

Project Hope beneficiary Brian Hall may have inadvertently stated the allegorical motto for what we at The Retort have previewed thus far in BIA 2 (when he speaks of his chance to re-eneter society after prison): “It’s not a clean slate, but it’s a start.”

True, Brian, and I wish you luck, young brother. But you’re preaching to the choir. Perhaps CNN could have taken a lesson from HBO's America Undercover documentary series. Recently it debuted "Prom Night," about new spate of segregated proms in the South. The point of that film is to bring separate groups together, not market to a demographic. That's not safe and risk doesn't sell, even to VIPs. But it's a start.

Photos by Chris Martin/CNN

(1) Polity Magazine, Vol. 37 2005