Does Media Matter?
2008-02-07
By Jacquie Jones
I recently received an email from a website I belong to called GreatSchools.net. The subject line of the email read: "How Do Students Perform on State Tests at P.S. 191 Amsterdam School?"
How the students perform is, in a word, poorly. The most appalling statistic is that in 2006, 71% of the students in the 8th grade could not meet 8th grade math standards. That's the worst, but they are pretty much all bad. This school is located on West 61st Street in Manhattan, aka the Upper West Side, about nine blocks away from P.S. 199, also a public elementary school. At P.S. 199, the big difference is that pretty much every student meets or exceeds those same standards. Oh, the other big difference is that the kids at P.S. 199 are overwhelmingly white, while the majority of those at P.S. 191 are black and Hispanic. Amsterdam School scores a four out of 10 on GreatSchools.net's scale; P.S. 199, Jesse Isador Straus School, gets a 10.
As black people, we aren't even shocked by these kinds of obvious disparities anymore. The question is: why not? Is it because, simply, no one cares? Is it because, if you are reading this right now on your laptop, the experience of a poor black kid in a crappy public school is as foreign to you as the experience of being on the first commercial
flight to the moon? Or because you have more "important" things to worry about, like your adjustable rate mortgage?
We know people care about Hillary's wardrobe and Barack Obama's blackness and who will win the next iteration of American Idol. That much has been demonstrated by the numbers. But why don't people care that 76% of new AIDS cases in New York City are women of color? Is it because when we talk about the problems facing poor black people even poor black people can't relate?
I was at a dinner last year with the famous Chilean writer Ariel Dorfman who gave a very compelling argument for the thesis: documentary films are the novels of our times. He said that the novel in the nineteenth century gave people, especially the elite who read, a window into the interior lives of ordinary people, poor people, basically, giving the lower classes a kind of popular humanity that they just didn't have before. And people suddenly felt like they could "relate" to one another in a deeper and more meaningful way. After all, we've all had our hearts broken and that special pain is not more profound if you've got money in the bank.
Now, according to that theory, the documentary form gives us that portal. We can understand how World War II veterans think or Mormons or the Jews of America, to name just a few recent high-profile PBS series, by hearing the moving first hand accounts of their experiences, by seeing their aged and precious mementos - which are not so different from our own - and, not to be overly clichéd here, by walking a mile in their footsteps.
So, when was the last time you saw a high-profile documentary film, never mind series, about black life that gave you that window into someone's ordinary universe of thought, experience and feeling?
As the public broadcaster in a nation renowned for its dynamic diversity, you would think PBS would be the natural place to find it. But, alas, it isn't. With virtually no people of color in any decision-making positions there and without the political will to do anything about it, you will be hard-pressed to find anything that reaches this mark. And, when you do find it, look long and hard because you won't see it again until next February.
As a filmmaker myself and a provider of African American content to the PBS system, this troubles me deeply. But I can't find anyone who cares. It really seems to be that simple.
Which brings me to my final digital media experience of the day, another email. This one headlined: "Boondocks on BET." Maybe you got that one, too; it's making the rounds. It's a parody of the now classic film, New Jack City, in which Black Entertainment Television's CEO, Debra Lee (here called "Lee-vil"), maniacally lays out her plans to destroy black people by crushing them with their own image. It makes a pretty harsh although unoriginal point, I think, that might be worth throwing in here. You cannot sit by, looking an outrageous wrong in the face, stay silent, do nothing, and then claimed to be victimized by it. Real victims are powerless in the face of their oppression. We are not.
That's pretty simple, too.
Jacquie Jones is a filmmaker and executive director of the National Black Programming Consortium
