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The Racial Gap

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By WALT BELCHER

The Tampa Tribune

Published: July 20, 2008

BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. - A black professor at Columbia University tells Soledad O'Brien that he instructs his 11-year-old son to fear the police.

"When you are stopped, whether you have done something or not, you cower. I want you to cower because I want you to live," he says.

The CNN special-projects anchor says black parents from all social and economic classes told her the same thing.

"It was stunning and disturbing," she said in an interview last week. "What is the impact of that on the psyche of these young children? What does it say about our society?

"And what's interesting to me about that is white people do not have those conversations with their children, but every black person does," she adds. "And the gap between those two things is where our story lies. What is happening in America? Why is that difference there?"

O'Brien spent the past 18 months working on "Black in America," a four-hour CNN special report that airs beginning at 9 p.m. Wednesday and Thursday.

It focuses on how far the country has come with race relations since the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. outlined his dream for equality in America more than 40 years ago:

"I have the audacity to believe that people everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies; education and culture for their minds; dignity, equality and freedom for their spirits. I believe what self-centered men have torn down, men other-centered can build up."

"Black people in this country are seen as rappers, Condoleezza Rice or in cuffs," says O'Brien. "That's kind of a generalization, but a limitation of how they're seen in the media, and there are actually lots of interesting stories that people just don't get to hear about.

"So we wanted to really examine the stories of a black middle class that, to a large degree, is invisible in mainstream media," she says.

Parents' Advice Sticks

The story resonates with O'Brien, 41, whose father was an Australian of Irish descent and mother was a Cuban of African descent.

When her parents met at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland in 1958, interracial marriages were illegal in that state.

"They talked to me a lot about that, and the lesson they taught me from that was to go on and do what you want to do in life and don't let other people define you," she said following a CNN presentation at the Television Critics Association's fall preview tour here.

O'Brien is the fifth of six children, all of whom graduated from Harvard University.

She says she started working on "Black in America" long before Sen. Barack Obama's bid to become the Democratic presidential nominee had any traction. He is mentioned only briefly discussing his biracial identity.

The documentary explores how many middle-class blacks may have achieved the "appearance" of equality but still face subtle discrimination: the CNN producer who can't get a cab because he's black and has to ask a subordinate to flag one for him; another who pays $40,000 a year to send her child to private school, only to have everyone assume she's the nanny.

CNN's hidden camera shows an educated black man being denied even an interview for an entry-level job.

In a CNN and Essence magazine poll, whites said racial discrimination is no longer a serious factor; blacks disagreed.

"Black in America" is divided into two sections: a two-hour block on black women on Wednesday and a two-hour block on black men on Thursday.

"CNN Presents" producer Mark Nelson says it was "very important for us to tell a different story about black men."

He says the media has covered black men as criminals, drug dealers, gang members and as men who abandon their families.

"But we don't hear too many stories about the successes and about the struggles that they've overcome," he adds.

The report on black men also explores the high rate of incarceration of blacks in prison. One in every 100 adults in America is behind bars, and more than 60 percent are racial and ethnic minorities.

Light Skin Versus Dark Skin

O'Brien interviews two brothers whose lives took very different paths. One is Michael Eric Dyson, a Georgetown professor who has written 16 books.

"He is a philosopher, a preacher and a well-respected figure in black America," she says. "He got his Ph.D. from Princeton. They call him the hip-hop intellectual."

His brother, Everett, also is highly regarded - by the warden at the prison where he is serving a life sentence for second-degree murder.

"We were very interested in the dynamic of how does one brother go one way and the other brother go the other way," O'Brien says.

"What I thought was fascinating was that part of their argument is Michael Eric Dyson is a light-skinned black man and his brother is a dark-skinned black man. Part of their argument is that the color of their skin played a role in how they were treated by society.

"In fact, Michael Eric Dyson says he's not even talking about white people; he's talking about how black people treated them, how he, as a light-skinned young man, was encouraged to flourish and his brother, a dark-skinned young man, was not.

"I thought that led to a fascinating conversation about something that a lot of black people will talk about but is not talked about in mainstream media at all."

ON TELEVISION

Black in America

WHAT: A four-hour documentary on race relations

WHEN: "Black in America: The Black Woman and Family," 9 p.m. Wednesday; "Black in America: The Black Man," 9 p.m. Thursday

WHERE: CNN; cnn.com

Reporter Walt Belcher can be reached at (813) 259-7654 or wbelcher@tampatrib.com.

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