What's black and white and Ted all over?
"Nightline's" baby steps towards racial honestyBy GARY KAMIYA
It has never been easy for Americans to talk honestly about black-white relations. Whites have tended to oscillate between a simplistic guilt and an equally simplistic denial of guilt, while blacks have all too often failed to move beyond a comfortable politics of emotional grievance. And a paralyzing code of discretion, born of fear, has long stifled any attempts to break the psychological impasse."America in Black and White," "Nightline's" week-long series that concludes Friday night, shows how difficult it is for the mass media to break out of its timid, consensus-oriented stance and address an issue of such tortured subtlety. Clumsy, at times sensationalistic, superficially reported, largely devoid of genuine interracial dialogue, "America in Black and White" nonetheless represents a commendable attempt to open a taboo subject.
The series' putative "gutsiness" was announced by moderator Ted Koppel at the beginning of Monday's episode. "If you're looking for an exercise in bleeding-heart liberalism," he intoned, "you've come to the wrong place." This was clearly intended to send a strong signal to viewers who have grown weary of being subjected to racial orthodoxies: Don't turn off your set, Angry Caucasian Man, we're gonna talk turkey here. Indeed, the series as a whole seemed addressed not to the East Coast liberal but to the questioning heartlander. Viewers were invited to discuss the subject throughout the week on AOL, and the producers, to their credit, acknowledged their views in a timely fashion: Koppel opened last night's segment by saying, "Many of you on AOL said there are as many black racists as white racists," and then followed up with two commentators debating the issue.
The episodes followed a similar pattern. First, polarized views on a hot-button issue were presented, with whites denying that such-and-such an event revealed racism and blacks saying it did. Then the event was reported. Then the two sides were interviewed again, sometimes in a group format. Various experts, academics and commentators were also heard from, usually staking out provocative positions. Explicit conclusions were left up to the viewer.
Unfortunately, the series' dialogic approach rarely got beyond quick-hit sensationalism. The first segment was without question the most dramatic, and most depressing. It dealt with the widely-reported case of Brigitte Ward, a black single mother who was driven out of a white Philadelphia neighborhood by hate mail and death threats. What was shocking -- and shockingly portrayed in the segment -- was the attitude of the white neighbors, who were interviewed in a potent "Town Hall" format. To a person, they denied that they were racist yet refused to condemn the shameful episode, arguing again and again that "every time they move into a neighborhood, it goes downhill."
The cognitive dissonance and just plain stupidity on display in this bull session was at once pathetic and enraging -- and a good corrective to the easy belief that white racial insensitivity, or worse, no longer exists. Along with the undoubtedly racist attitudes of some of these neighbors, however, there was a trickier issue: so-called "rational discrimination." These whites clearly believed that there was a correlation between falling property values and integrated neighborhoods, and based their attitudes on that belief. They feared having even one black neighbor because they saw her as the thin end of the wedge, the first harbinger of decline: white flight, houses falling into disrepair, crime from the inner city. But why did they assume that this pattern is bound to happen? There are many healthily integrated neighborhoods. The assumption of neighborhood decline becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
"Nightline," however, never explored these issues -- ones which might have forced the whites, who seemed sincerely to believe that they were not racist, to confront the contradictions in their position. Instead, in a remarkably offensive display of misguided "toughness," Koppel dug into Ward's dirty laundry, asking her about back rent she owed. Ward's answer was eloquent: "Nobody don't need to know my history...everybody owes somebody. This is a racial thing." Trying clumsily to somehow respond to the concerns of the white neighbors, Koppel chose precisely the wrong, ad hominem approach: this was a rare example in which the tired catch-all phrase "blaming the victim" truly applied.
The same failure to dig beneath the surface meanings of the word "racism" marred the series' strongest segment, Wednesday's piece about the death of Cynthia Wiggins, a black teenager who was forced to jaywalk across seven lanes of fast traffic because the inner-city Buffalo bus line didn't stop at the mall where she worked. The bus didn't stop because the mall owners allegedly had no desire to make their nice, white shopping oasis easily available to black youths. After opening clips of white yuppies in a bar denying that Wiggins' death was due to racism, the well-reported segment showed that in some complicated sense, it was.
Commendable as that revelation was, the show should have gone further. The decision was sort of racist, yes -- but also sort of corporate-rational. If the bus line was ferrying a bunch of black yuppies, it would have probably stopped at the mall. Anti-black feeling -- or anti-unemployed-inner-city-black-teenager feeling? "Nightline" chose not to venture into these murky waters: again, rational discrimination, the complicated relationship between racism and reasonable fears or concerns associated with race, was a taboo subject.
The clumsiest, least illuminating episodes of "America in Black and White" were Tuesday's and Thursday's. On Tuesday, Koppel gave way too much time and credence to Andrew Hacker's flawed but attention-getting thought experiment, in which he asked whites how much money it would take for them to agree to be turned black. On Thursday, the anchor highlighted one Jane Elliott, a humorless and strident figure who parroted the standard diversity-training, blacks-can't-be-racists, all-whites-must-acknowledge-their-bigotry-first line. Such cartoon ideologies make good footage, but they fail to advance the dialogue.
Despite its shortcomings, however, "Nightline's" series represents an improvement over the standard network pieties about race. Baby steps are better than no steps at all.