Simply put…that special sucked. I maybe watched 30 minutes to an hour of it because my company wanted to watch the crap, but that is all. This however comes from the perspective of a socially aware Black man.
To me, the whole ‘Black in America’ special was just awful because I already knew everything that they were talking about on that special. Intelligent Black people have known about the struggles that the average Black person faces with their day to day life forever. Black people know about how education (or lack thereof) affects the Black community, we know about racial profiling, everyone has opinions on interracial dating/marriage. It is all common knowledge that any douche with a brain (and a blog in my case) can analyze and tell you everything that they covered in the series. Now all these people are clamoring about how CNN was brilliant and deserve awards for their excellence and competency in dealing with thus subject. Please…give me 5000 bucks and a video camera and I could make a better special. Now while I think the series is bad, I won’t say that it went without a purpose. That purpose is something that is desperately needed amongst people in the United States. White people SHOULD know about Black people.
Black people are forced and expected to know every aspect of White culture or else we seem uncivilized and unfit to wear anything more than a potato sack shirt and some itchy wool pants (commando…no drawz…one can imagine the pain). I speak from my experience in my various dealings with about half of my best friends in the world (White people). I have been expected to know a sundry of things that pertain to White culture. For example any time a music question comes up about the Beatles or Whitesnake (or something else that I find horrendous usually pertaining to classic/old as crap rock and or roll). If I admit I have never watched that show Arrested Development then I will continuously get told about how amazing of a show it is and then looked upon like I have AIDS once I admit that I no intention to ever watch that show.
But when I will bring up a rapper (who isn’t 2Pac, BIG, Kanye West or Will Smith) certain White friends of mine have never heard of them before. EVER! But I can’t call them out on their ignorance or look at them in disgust or flabbergastosity (yes I made that word up, one of my majors is Sociology…that’s how we get down) because they don’t need to know. They SHOULD, but it isn’t required and their life will go perfectly smooth if they don’t know one iota about Black culture. And given the state of things the necessity of them needing to know about other cultures won’t change any. They’ll just steal it, pretend they didn’t, alter it to make it their own and pretend like they have always had it. However, this is nothing new because they’ve been doing it for centuries now.
FIGURE ONE: To unlearned White folks, this is the birthplace of fireworks…
But I’m not angry with them (that much). I’m angry with the fact that Black people were publicizing this thing to death! Facebook was covered with statuses talking about how they were watching the special. I saw none of these statuses from anyone else (although I didn’t look very hard). I also got a text message saying that if I wasn’t watching it, I needed to be watching it. My first thought was “Do rich white females who live in Southern California watch MTV shows? Odds are that they don’t because their lives are those shows,” So I proceeded to go back home and eat Chinese food (yes I’m fat, leave me alone).
The next day I was watching one of the 500 reruns on CNN and they showed some comments from viewers. All the viewers they showed were Black. Most of them were pseudo-intellectuals trying to use big words that didn’t go together, or tried to vary the words only to use the same things over and over again like Oswald Bates. I thought that the success of the special was the type of social dynamic (besides institutionalized racism) that made sure that all ‘Black’ movies in Hollywood would have to be about sports, Madea, or some quasi-religious, hood-set, comedy. It portrays the stereotype that Black folk don’t care about things that don’t relate specifically to them…even though we do because I wasn’t the only little kid in the hood watching DBZ. This pissed me off even more, so I left it alone (or else I’d end up hating CNN like I hate almost anything Tyler Perry related). In closing…the intentions of CNN were great, but the road to hell is paved with good intentions…and republicans…and democrats…and vegans…and fat people…and emo kids.
