XX Marks The Spot? CNN's Black In America Part I: the Black Woman and Family

[Im The Truth]

The X Chromosome Doesn’t Mark the Spot: CNN’s Black In America: The Black Woman and Family
Wednesday, July 23, 2008
By Ronda Racha Penrice
Ebony Jet

CNN’s The Black Woman and Family, a full one-half of CNN’s unprecedented televised, four-hour exploration into what it’s like to be “Black in America today”, begins promisingly enough with legions of the Rand family, more than 300 in all, traversing the country to attend their family reunion in Atlanta.

Their stories aren’t all cheery, especially not that of a mother who has lost her children presumably to violence. Still, they are together, if just for the family reunion, which occurs every two years on a grand scale. But the tone shifts dramatically with the family portrait. As we watch the old, the young and not so young, in all shades of Black uniformly sporting the Rand Family Reunion t-shirt, strike a pose, we encounter the family’s white ancestor who “fathered” six children with his Black mistress, not a slave, according to CNN.

Very few among us are free of white ancestors, either indirectly or directly. It’s problematic, however, to focus on the interracial reunion of Black and white family members before the first segment of an unprecedented look into Black America firmly plants its feet. A thoughtful analysis, particularly of the economic disparities among Black and white Americans, might have put such a reunion to better use.

Education is a pressing issue here. In Houston, Victor Keys, accompanied by an enthusiastic bunch, knocks on Brandon’s door, a shack of a home that looks unchanged from 40 years ago, hoping to re-enroll him in Booker T. Washington High School. In contrast, the Smiths, a Houston branch of the Rands who maintain a two-parent household and their own construction company, have already sent five of their six children to college. To do so, they chose magnet schools. Horrifically, only 70% of all American students graduate from high school in four years. For Black high school students, it’s 50% so the main question is how to close the achievement gap.

To answer that, Soledad O’Brien, the series host, turns to Dr. Roland Fryer, a 30-year-old tenured Harvard professor and economist who supports a program that pays fourth-graders in New York, not all of them Black, to learn. During O’Brien’s roundtable with participating fourth-graders, 10-year-old Eric Kennedy defends the program: “It’s just encouraging us to do more work,” he passionately argues. “It’s not ruining our chances of getting good grades, it’s actually highering it.” For Eric, he is growing up in poverty, albeit with a single father and his 7-year-old sister. He intends for some of his academically-earned cash to help his father pay the bills and to save the remainder.

Fryer isn’t immune to Eric’s struggles. His father was incarcerated and his mother was MIA. He lived with his grandmother and hung with relatives who sold drugs, something he himself tried before an athletic scholarship rescued him so Fryer’s own life experiences motivate him. Still NYU professor Pedro A. Noguera, an outspoken critic of Fryer’s experiment, and his realistic concerns about the paucity of quality teachers, as well as poverty, and how each affect the education the Black community receives cannot be ignored.

Inadequate access to healthcare, the scarcity of fresh fruits and vegetables in Black communities, the rising AIDS epidemic among Black women, single parenthood and the declining rate of marriage are also among the many topics discussed. So many subjects are tackled at a rate never witnessed before in any format that it’s impossible to cover anything with resounding success. The problem isn’t in the range and quality of topics but, rather, the noticeable absence of the female voice outside of Soledad O’Brien’s.

With the exception of Julianne Malveaux, you’d be hard-pressed to identify the Black female experts, especially young ones comparable to Fryer. Like Fryer, T.D. Jakes, Michael Baisden and a plethora of other male voices dominate, even though CNN has dedicated "The Black Man," two-hours of programming solely to their concerns. The women who do speak up are noticeably in their 30s and 40s.Why didn’t O’Brien dialogue with a grandmother raising her grandchildren alone? Does Eric’s sister also feel that good grades will help their family? What challenges face teenage girls or young women in college besides HIV/AIDs? And, most glaringly, where is the voice of Black students attending HBCUs? Not one of Dr. Malveaux’s Bennett College students receives any face time and she heads a college of young, Black women. There’s no discussion of the career obstacles young women face, only their inability to find comparable Black mates. And what about women who love women?

Even in a program titled "The Black Woman & Family," hosted by a Black woman, our collective voices are largely missing and, no matter how interesting the discussion may be, it’s an inexcusable oversight and proof positive of the ongoing struggle for Black women to be heard. So, while we must applaud CNN for delivering such landmark programming, we also have to take them to task to paint a fuller picture. Just because it’s landmark programming doesn’t mean it’s free of old-school sexism.

The Black Woman & Family airs on CNN Wednesday, July 23. To learn more about the series, visit Special Reports - Black in America.

Veteran freelance writer and self-diagnosed television junkie Ronda Racha Penrice is the author of African American History For Dummies.