I tuned out CNN’s “Black in America 2.” From jump-street, I questioned why CNN was “investigating” black folks.
Then as now, I think CNN should probe wrongdoing rather than citizens whose only “crime” is being black in America.
CNN should investigate miscreants like Wells Fargo, Wall Street banksters and subprime loan modification sharks.
If CNN wants to “look at the most challenging issues facing African Americans,” then investigate the impact of President Barack Obama’s stimulus package on reducing black unemployment and expanding opportunities for black-owned businesses.
We know what it means to be black in America. As my friend Bill Reed recently wrote:
The people talking that smack of America entering into “a post-racial society” are engaged in much more fantasy than fact. The facts are: In June 2009 unemployment rates reported were: adult men (10%), adult women (7.6%), teenagers (24.0%), whites (8.7%), Asians (8.2%), Hispanics (12.2%), and Blacks (14.7%).
In an interview with his daughter, Elizabeth, Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. observed:
The only people who live in a post-black world are four people who live in a little white house on Pennsylvania Avenue. [laughter] The idea that America is post-racial or post-black because a man I admire, Barack Obama, is president of the United States, is a joke. And I hope no one will even wonder about this crazy fiction again. I am proud of the American people for electing the best candidate who happened to be a black man and that’s a great historical precedent in the United States, but America is just as classist and just as racist as it was the day before the election—and we all, to quote my friend Cornel West, “are recovering racists,” and we all have to fight those tendencies. In America there is institutional racism that we all inherit and participate in, like breathing the air in this room—and we have to become sensitive to it.
