|
Celebrating Black Racism Month
It’s Black Racism Month, that special time of the year when blacks are allowed to be even more racist than usual. PBS accordingly aired on Saturday night Henry Louis Gates’s “African-American Lives,” a multi-part program tracing the ancestry of several prominent blacks, including Oprah Winfrey, back through the generations, all the way to Africa. Notwithstanding Gates’s jaunty-seeming manner, everything about this program was racist. Every single mention of the larger American society and whites was negative. Not a single affectionate or grateful thing, and barely even a single neutral thing, was said about America and whites. The fact that these extremely successful blacks, including Gates, the chairman of Harvard’s African-American Studies Department, realized their success in America, the fact that America alone made such lives and such success possible, is never mentioned, let alone praised. Everything is about “the African-American people” (presented as a people in its own right, a people apart from America), “discovering our roots,” “finding who we really are,” so that even the good things in their lives are solely due to their struggles against racist white society. When the program travels to Africa, the long journey of the slaves from the interior to the coast was mentioned and deplored several times, yet there was not a single mention that it was blacks who captured the slaves and transported them to the coast in order to sell them to white slave traders. Blacks are only mentioned in a positive light, whites are only mentioned in a negative light. When Gates discovers through genetic testing that half his ancestry is European, he is vocally upset about this, repeating over and over how he wants to find an African, not a European origin for himself. Even positive or mitigating things about America are made negative. When Gates discovers that he had ancestors who were free blacks in the late 18th century, his first comment is, “It must have been really hard to be a free black.” So it was horrible if you were a slave, and it was also horrible if you were free. One of his free ancestors was captured by a white man who wanted to enslave him again, and Gates’s ancestor brought the matter to trial. Gates says how unfair the proceedings must have been to him. But as it turns out, the all-white jury found in favor of Gates’ ancestor and protected his liberty. This fact is reported with no comment, Gates fails to note that his earlier negative assumption about whites was wrong, and the show quickly moves on the next subject. There is not a single acknowledgement that whites often behaved decently to blacks, and that, with all the racial injustice, there was often a human element in the relationship between the races that was meaningful to both blacks and whites. Only pro-black, anti-white, anti-American comments are heard. Also, though Gates is a Harvard professor and a department chairman, there was no scholarly element in this program at all. It was all about the cult of the self and the cult of the race, “How do I find my family roots, how do I figure out who I am, how does it feel to find this out about my ancestors.” Me me me. African-American African-American African-American. This is what the show is about. The overwhelming message is: Blacks are a people apart, many of them living very successful and comfortable lives in this country, yet permanently hostile to the rest of America, not having any warm feelings for America, their extraordinary success having nothing to do with America. Indeed at times it seems they live for tearing down America. Gates seems to assume that the mostly white liberal PBS watchers will automatically approve this black racist message. It didn’t seem to occur to him—or he doesn’t care—that his black racist message may trigger some corresponding white racism as well.
There was only one thing on the program that was of human interest rather than black racist interest: the revelation of the extremely troubled childhood background of Oprah Winfrey. We find out (I never heard this before) that Winfrey, later to become one of the most successful women in the world, experienced a life of shocking sexual degradation, abuse, and rape between the ages of nine and fourteen, at which point she left her mother, who lived in Milwaukee, and went to live with her father in Nashville. Her father, not a sympathetic man but a stern, upright disciplinarian (he is still alive), gave her the structure that saved her life. Email entry |