There's a local component to CNN's two-part "Black in America," which premieres tonight at 9.
In April, as part of CNN's "Black in America" college tour to promote and gather material for the special, about a dozen people involved with the production visited North Carolina Central University in Durham.
"They were trying to find i-reporters for each one of the HBCU schools," says visiting lecturer Dr. Brett Chambers. "They wanted us to encourage our students to send in i-reports. They would pick one student from each HBCU school to be that school's i-reporter."
The winner from NCCU was Erica Horne, then a senior in the school's video production class. You can view her report here.
Another treat for the students was a visit from CNN anchor T.J. Holmes in Chambers' Mass Media and Society class.
"He's young, the students can relate to him — he's got some female fans," Chambers says. "He was really cool with the students. The students listened to what he had to say. He and I were kidding around. I said, 'You know, I can say the same thing you say, and they'll ignore me.'"
CNN's "Black in America" airs Wednesday and Thursday at 9 p.m.
TV Eye is written by N&O media critic and reporter
Comments
I am sending you this
Fri, 07/25/2008 - 10:46 — Anonymous (not verified)I am sending you this response, as so many of us watched in horror, the CNN piece, Blacks In America.
“…..Here you were, to be loved, baby, hard, at once, and forever, to strengthen you against the loveless world.. And now you must survive because we love you, and for the sake of your children and your children’s children…. You were born where you were born and faced the future that you faced because you were black and for no other reason. You were born into a society which spelled out with brutal clarity... that you were a worthless human being.. Know whence you came. If you know whence you came, there is really no limit to where you can go. The details and symbols of your life have been deliberately constructed to make you believe what white people say about you.. Please try to remember that what they believe, and what they cause you to endure does not testify to your inferiority but to their inhumanity and fear.. You come from sturdy, peasant stock, men who picked cotton and dammed rivers and built railroads, and in the teeth of the most terrifying odds, achieved an unassailable and monumental dignity. You come from a long line of great poets.. One of them said the very time I thought I was lost, my dungeon shook and my chains fell off”.
James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time 1962
To explore, seek truth is important. It is even more important in how the truth is told.
How you deliver the truth connects and counts. CNN’s telling, reporting, presenting their truth version was very flawed because the center, the balance, reason and results ended up counting backward, rehashing some old narratives we’ve heard before and providing few answers that were adequate, reflecting critical action for how to move ahead, and take care of the fixes in the mixes. Ms. Bryant’s flawed interpretation, inquiry positioning, and CNN’s “ entertain-media spin”, left viewers to believe few of us are asking our own critical questions, working on solutions nor achieving goals, and that this community spotlighted is devastated, lost and this condition is allowed to sit and be seen as normative and sadly, that Black America has been complacent. The realty is our crisis is real and devastating for sure. With a few segments that were good,( Spike Lee, Hip Hop critique( Lope), Michael Dyson and brother’story, the end segment of part 2 with family reunion..), few times did I significantly feel the pride, celebration, nor the commitment to attain excellence as if these were values absent in our historical, cultural, political, spiritual, economic and aesthetic trajectory. Ms. Bryant’s depiction of what it is to be Black in America, was embarrassingly narrow and unbalanced.
So, the questions today becomes too, whose call is this to accountability?; mom, dad, community, churches, schools, leaders, government policy, entrepreneurial investment, common people in the streets, rehabilitation investment in the industrial prison complex, political bloggers, health care system,(mental, physical )information technology/ info-culture, music, entertainment, sports heroes and she-roes, media mega cultural industry? These are the players in this mega dialogue.
We can only look to models of societal success which are immediate, attractive, valued possibilities and can be seen and sustained visibly.
We have to be courageous and innovative as Black folks have always been. There needs to be a re-positioning, a balance of visible and real options, values, pay-offs presented so that where there is a lack of resources, there is a hike on the values that imbue kids with a desire to seek higher goals that make them independently, self propelled, creative, innovative.
If there are fewer resources at home, there needs to be a higher impacting presence in the schools, churches to fill in the gaps. If there are failing family structures in society, there needs to be a more visible projection of what makes a family functional. We don’t need to be shown “more dysfunction” is desirable, normative nor entertaining. We need to encourage younger people to make a better way for their families, friends, communities. I can only speak as a common person who is a musician and who teaches. In our culture creative arts are powerful image, identity carrying and effective expressions that change people’s lives, and sustains those identities and ideas. Creative culture seeks a deeper engagement, impact and make us, me, you, see and feel a deeper valued world.
In our own professional explorations, examining our creative history, heroes, and their conventions and commitments to cultivate music, a practice in life that raises values that are markings of our best beat in human potential. Everybody has to be accountable for this kind of re-tooling. Profit and greed drives our cultural blind -nesses but the drive for greed must be slowed. But all this circles around value transfer I think, transmission and sustainable valued information, and these must be the center again of our existence in culture. We have to believe again in them and live out within deeper values, spaces of what constitutes the “ good life”. The artificially produced plastic set of market values has taken our minds off the center that was necessary to sustain peoplehood. We have to reach deeper and around the current cultural chaos and come up again as Ossie Davis said, with a new mojo on how to be Black again. This is a mega cultural formula that we can conjure up, mix, prescribe and disseminate.
I truly believe this is the challenge to re-tool and we must take a vow to make good on it. Arts and education that cultivates creativity and reflective thinking are bulwarks against a culture seemed destined to fall into upholding problematic values and identities that push us to celebrate and glorify mean spirited competitiveness, hatred, divisiveness, violence and indecency as normative.
That powerful, poetic griot James Balwin, spoke of our living in the jaws of the teeth of terrifying odds and still achieving unassailable and monumental dignity, and reminds us that we come from a long line of great poets, thinkers, doers and dads and mom’s who have in our past mused so meaningfully they caused the dungeons to shake and the “chains to fall off.”
We must spring forward.