Looks like an interesting piece, airing at 9pm tonight:
I finally have a TV, although I almost never watch is so I have no idea whether or not I get MSNBC. I’ll try to tune in tonight, though. And after the show airs, Brian Williams will be hosting a 90-minute live discussion about race in America.
I
Heh
Ha, I know, I know… it wasn’t for any moral reasons. Honestly, it was because (a) I was always too poor to buy one, and felt that my money was better spent elsewhere, and (b) I’ve always lived in shoebox apartments where there wouldn’t have been any room for a TV. After seven years of living in NY, I finally have a living room. And so now I have a TV as well (which is technically my roommate’s, and which doesn’t have cable).
Hi,
This is my first visit to your blog!
I hope that someone tapes this and puts it on video.google.com in its entirety! I mentioned it on my blog but I don’t own a tv.
I hope that this documentary handles the issues of race intelligently. From the trailer I watched online, it seems that the black journalist, David Wilson, is trying to state that “the black experience” is what HE experienced as a black man. I find a lot of our people doing the same thing…. telling America that THEIR OWN experience (and that of those they know) is the total sum of the “black experience”.
Thanks for letting me blow my trumpet!
Lisa
http://blackwomenblowthetrumpet.blogspot.com
To paraphrase Liz Lemon, what have you been sitting in front of all this time?
This goddamn blog, actually.
Hey I’m new to your blog as well. I have been blogging for work but this week started my own personal blog and hope to begin with a discussion of this documentary. I have been fascinated by the recent dialog around race that has begun. I loved Barack Obama’s speech last month.
I agree with Lisa’s earlier post. I do hope that this gets out and to a wider audience as soon as possible. It is too bad it is being shown on MSNBC instead of NBC where it could garner a larger audience.
I have a TV but only because I watch movies on it. I rarely actually turn it on and I don’t have cable, just rabbit ears. Most anything I want to watch, I can somehow watch online, anyway.
I watched some of it, then turned on BSG at 10 pm on SciFi. I didn’t get the sense I was missing that much. The discussion I saw afterward didn’t change the perception.
The documentary was okay, but I think it would have been better if he’d been able to get some of the voices from the following discussion into it. There seemed to be a lack of a real academic look into the race problem. Good conversation starter though.
This looks like an amalgamation of what Henry Louis Gates, Jr. has done with all of his documentaries for PBS: Wonders of the African World, America Beyond the Color Line, and the two African American Lives series. All of them are extremely problematic and tend to:
-Reduce political problems such as economic inequality to a matter of personal strength and overcoming adversity. For instance, Gates interviews people from the Ida B. Wells housing projects in Chicago and says things such as: “People in this community used to work hard. They were poor, but they didn’t know it. Now, the community is overrun with drugs, teenage pregnancy, etc.”
-Shift the blame for the Trans-Atlantic slave trade on to Africans themselves (Note: Yes, there were some Africans who participated in the trade, but Gates vehemently asserts this without bothering to mention the fact that many Africans were coerced into participation. Or that African communities mounted hundreds of uprisings against the traders during the period.).
-Essentialize Africans (Gates repeatedly repeats stereotypical tropes like “barbaric,” “ruthless,” “warrior-like…” It’s maddening.).
In any case… I’m curious whether or not anyone noticed similar problems in this documentary? I didn’t get to watch it, and I’m curious about what people thought.
-