Navel-gazing and move-busting with the African-American intellectual elite at The New Yorker's Harvard bash
By FARAI CHIDEYA
What if you threw a party to celebrate the "African-American Century" and everyone who was anyone came?
That's precisely what The New Yorker did on Saturday night to celebrate the debut of their special double issue "Black in America," the production of which was supervised by Harvard Afro-American Studies chair and all-around media celeb Henry Louis "Skip" Gates, Jr. While the issue is a smashing success (editor's note: see Gary Kamiya's review in tomorrow's Media Circus), a panel on race and the media meant to launch it was most certainly a failure, and the nature of that failure says much about the uncomfortable distance of the black elite from the issues which consume most African-Americans.
How to do this without sounding churlish? (Let me start by making clear that I have nothing against black intellectuals, since I firmly fit the first part of that phrase and at least fancy myself the second.) The panel, "Black in Black and White: African-Americans and the Media," was staged for a standing-room-only crowd at Harvard's Kennedy School and led by actress-playwright-professor Anna Deveare Smith ("Fires in the Mirror") who made a valiant but unsuccessful attempt to keep it on topic. Taped by ABC and broadcast live by C-SPAN and, digitally, New York Online, it was a classic example of "meta-media" --an event sponsored by the media and for the media (despite half-hearted attempts to acknowledge a broader audience).
"Meta-media" is fine if it delivers the implied meat. Unfortunately, the panel turned into something between a black intellectual love-in and a media-elite shove-in, with the tone swinging predictably from self-congratulatory to confrontational.
The players included Cornel West, author of "Race Matters," and with Gates, "The Future of the Race," Jill Nelson ("Volunteer Slavery") and David Remnick (from The New Yorker -- the one white guy). Perhaps precisely because they were such heavy hitters, they failed to move from expositions on their own views and achievements to a true exploration of the topic at hand. The most telling moment took place when Brent Staples, a member of the New York Times editorial board, chided members of "this group called the African-American Journalists Association to which I do not belong" for not expressing their disapproval of their paper's or television station's race coverage for fear that they would damage their careers.
NBC correspondent and "Meet The Press" regular Gwen Ifill fired back, "I do belong to the National Association of Black Journalists, which is the correct title.....We [on the panel] represent the very cream of what we do, white or black....If [most black journalists] went to work every day and banged their head against the same wall trying to be the great spokesman for the race, they would come away with little more than flattened foreheads."
At least Ifill managed to mention the struggles black journalists face. But no one on the panel even began to talk about black readers -- or white ones for that matter. A good place to start would have been the beginning -- that is, do black Americans have a legitimate beef with the media? If so, on what grounds? If not, why all the kvetching?
When I was writing "Don't Believe the Hype," which explored the media's portrayal of African-Americans, I was both vindicated and horrified to find that there was clearly documented evidence of racial discrimination in the media. For example, a study which tracked an entire year's worth of ABC News broadcasts found that 60 percent of network news about African-Americans was negative in tone. In her infamous New Republic article on racial issues at the Washington Post, celebrated plagiarist Ruth Shalit managed to make much of the fact that America's newsrooms were 10 percent non-white. That's only impressive until you realize that this nation is a quarter non-white, and that black journalists, for example, make up five percent of newspaper reporters while African-Americans make up 13 percent of the country.
As I've traveled around the country speaking in university auditoriums, bookstores and church basements about this topic, I've heard scores of Americans of every race express their anger that the media is part of the race problem, not part of solution. These are the people whose issues the panel was supposed to address, people whose voices are un- or mis-heard. Instead, the panel looked inward at those whose concerns they found the most interesting -- the black elite and the media elite to which they belong.
Perhaps it would have been better if The New Yorker had skipped the panel altogether and gone straight to the after-party, which managed both to be a high-class schmoozefest and, in ghetto parlance, to "kick it live." Those lucky enough to score an invitation -- or anyone with cojones, since there were neither tickets nor a list -- strolled across the street after the panel for a night of dinner and dancing at the Harvard dorm Eliot House. America's black luminaries proceeded to bust a move to everything from Marvin Gaye to '90s dance hits like "Here Comes the Hotstepper." Cornel West enthusiastically cut the rug with Whitney curator Thelma Golden, while the power duo responsible for the "Black in America" issue, Tina and Skip (Ms. Brown and Dr. Gates to you), took to the floor for a rather more dignified dance.
Was the irony of location unintended? Before Harvard started "randomizing" its dorms, Eliot House used to be known precisely for the lack of African-American students within its walls. It was the domain of "legacy" kids with trust funds and hideous tartan Bermuda shorts, the congenital elites. It is progress, I suppose, that in a few years the children of the growing black upper class will create a small but critical mass at schools like Harvard and dorms like Eliot, that black America will have congenital elites of its own.
Farai Chideya is a political analyst for CNN and the author of "Don't Believe the Hype" (Plume/Penguin).