Disclaimer: This post is fictional. I did not watch CNN’s “Black in America 5”, but, taking a page from We Are Respectable Negroes, I can write about what CNN should show (this is half-serious and half-mocking):
“White in America” (2013-2016) was a CNN/PBS documentary series about White Americans. With the success of “Black in America” (2008-2014) and given the white Republican soul-searching after Mitt Romney’s defeat in 2012, CNN came out with “White in America”. When advertisers backed out after the third season, PBS picked up the series.
White in America 1: The End of White America?
CNN, July 21st 2013
Romney’s defeat. Interviews Angry White Men: Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity. The hard demographic truths about the future of White America. Show a demographically average classroom of eight-year-olds. Voice-over: “This is what America will look like in 30 years.” White identity politics. The rise and fall of the Southern Strategy. Nixon, Reagan, Lee Atwater. Interview Ruy Teixeira. Institutional racism. Will racism grow weaker or stronger? What would either mean for whites?
White in America 2: Who is White in America?
CNN, August 17th 2014
Why is racial purity so important to white people? The One Drop Rule. Interviews and stories of blacks who pass for white while others in their family cannot. The roots of white racism, the invention of whiteness. How the Irish became white. How the Jews became white. How Jesus became white. Immigration law. Interview Nell Irvin Painter. Will Mexicans or Asians become “white”? Interviews and stories of Mexican and Asian immigrants about racism. Interview Delores Huerta, Frank Wu, Eduardo Bonilla-Silva.
White in America 3: The Roots of White Violence
CNN, April 5th 2015
Start with closeup of John Wayne. He says something implicitly racist, like something about “our” country. Then kills some Indians. Genocide. Homestead Act. Whites living on Dead Indian Land. Manifest Destiny. War in Mexico, Philippines, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan. America as arms dealer. The history of guns in America. Gun violence, gun laws, gun clubs, gun culture, gun nuts, gun heroes in Hollywood films. Dirty Harry. Charlton Heston holding up his gun. The gun and the slave trade. Fear of slave uprisings. Slave patrols. The Klan. Lynching. The NYPD. Police brutality. The War on Drugs, racial profiling and mass incarceration of black men. Serial killers. School shootings. The gun industry, the NRA and Congress.
White in America 4: Class in White America
PBS, September 25th 2016
The stories of five white New Yorkers: beggar, maid, schoolteacher, doctor, millionaire. Follow each in the course of the same day: show food, housing, clothing, family life. Ask about unemployment, work, education, healthcare, justice and politics. Ask them to compare their lives with their parents’ and what they expect for their children. Interview Charles Murray, Joseph Stiglitz. Talk about how American social mobility is worse than in most other rich countries. About how and why the American economy has left behind the bottom 80%, how racism and the Southern Strategy have made that possible.
PBS lost corporate backing and cancelled the fifth season: “White in America 5: Breakdown of the White Family”.
See also:
“White in America 2: Who is White in America? –(I’m hangin’ with Mr. Baldwin, as he hangs with you, on this one…http://www.cwsworkshop.org/pdfs/CARC/Family_Herstories/2_On_Being_White.PDF
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Good one.
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I’ve never watched any of the “Black In America” series before, but decided that I would watch it last night to see what was all of the hype about. I never made it through the first fifteen minutes before I fell asleep from sheer boredom. During that short period of time I saw young people who have some very troubling identity issues which the show could not solve in one hour or a whole year.
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Another “Abagond” hit out the park.
! I love it when black people flip that script. My personal take on “Black in America” is it was a deliberately crafted recipe to provoke racial antagonism by making it appear that black people were getting more attention (and more help) than white people. Otherwise, why would the white media — that largely ignores the pain of black people — all of a sudden put all these “specials” on about black people?
What about “Hispanic in America” ?
Or “Asian in America?”
why is this kind of attention only focused on blacks? Because WE are the chosen scapegoats for everything wrong in America, starting with the (s)election of a President Obama, who will be blamed for everything bad that is going to happen in America, and by default ALL black people will be blamed.
Fasten your seatbelts. .
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Funny post!
And I think you’re right, TrojanPam. The concern cnn expresses for black people’s problems is very ironic (and perhaps unwitting. perhaps.).
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@TrojanPam
They have had a couple of “Latino in America” episodes. I’m wanting to say this is a Soledad O’Brien project (w/ CNN’s approval), since she has Black/Latino roots. At any rate, this series isn’t for folks like us and others who have already studied this and I’m about positive they wouldn’t allow the likes of Abagond anywhere near CNN HQ…LOL (j/k, AB)!
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From the white point of view: Whites are not “in” America, like blacks, Latinos, Asians and even Native Americans. Whites “are” America.
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The general pattern in American news:
whites are right, default, centred, raceless, innocent, harmless
blacks are othered, pathologized, scapegoated, threatening.
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I would definitely watch this.
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Brilliant!
Exactly.
Why is this still on? I watched the first one on CNN, then lost interest after that. The series is like a bad case of “othering” almost as if we aren’t human, let’s dissect them and study them.
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Is this a real series that PBS is putting on?
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@ Y
No. The post is purely fictional.
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Ok, thanks! 😀 It would be a interesting series to watch =…if only for the delusions and ignorance SOME of the interviewees display.
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@Abagond
If you’re gonna critique white folk, you need to paint with a broader brush. You throw stones at white-americans, yet, ignore white-arabs, white-indians, and white spaniards, Why? They think and act the same as their american cousins. Black folk need to stop the madness, Seriously! We put all of our eggs in one basket, assuming that whites in the US are the only problem. It’s very stupid and naive of us to think like that. White is White. I don’t care what part of the globe they hail from, the racial nonsense is the same. Again, black people being fed lies by other so-called intelligent black folk…Al Sharpton! Black people are the greatest enemy of black people, stupid white people just happen to give them a platform for their stupidity.
Tyrone
Logical Thinking
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This is awesome!
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hehehehe…
I needed this today.
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I would love to see a show such as this. It could open eyes. This whole system runs on the delusions of white folks on the bottom. As long as they can feel superior to minorities and use them as scapegoats, the rich white dudes at top can continue their program of exploitation. That’s how I see it, and that’s why CNN would pull the plug on such a show as “White in America” and why PBS would lose corporate backing.
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Good one, Abagond, very funny.
I watched all the Black in America series by Soledad and after each one, I was hoping that they would get better. Something is missing from her shows, I just can’t quite put my finger on it.
This last show to me was silly….it showed one confused biracial girl who had a hard time saying she was “black’ and an Egyptian girl who wanted to be called and accepted as “black” but confessed to putting “white” on her college applications because she didn’t want to be discriminated against (on paper)
The show didn’t do a good job in explaining colourism from the light vs dark point of view..the only good point that was made was stated by Tim Wise, who said more or less “at the end of the day, (the dominant society) white society in America decides whose black in America — not black Americans.”
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This is actually a thing I want to see on TV now. It’s s likely to happen as it is to snow in Miami, but a girl can dream.
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Oh Abagond you rascal, I was excited until I went back to the top and read the fictional part!
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Done right, with someone like Frank Wu or Bonilla-Silva as an executive producer, I would love to watch a documentary like this.
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@ Linda
Pretty bad if Tim Wise has the best line.
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How kind to see your ideas and the link! Cool stuff. Here is the link to my story from a few years back where I took my stab at the special on “white in america”. I am going to do a second installment. I also have something else up my sleeve that I don’t want to reveal just yet.
http://wearerespectablenegroes.blogspot.com/2008/07/what-if-white-in-america-never-to-be.html
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Abagond…Ditto!
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Abagond,
Your comment implies that you have a problem or problem with Tim Wise. If so what is it? Have you done a post on him?
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This was good. very funny.
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lol white in america would be funny.ooh do a post about white entertainment television next that would be hilarious.you forgot white in america would also have the whites on there saying how hard it is to be white and not be allowed to say the n word or be allowed to sound racist.
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Indeed, why do we need CNN or PBS to produce this? There is probably already a global demand for such a series, we just need someone to mobilize the interested parties together.
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@ mstoogood4yall
White Entertainment Television. Yes, brilliant. I must do that one.
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Good post! I would add oe more show: “But I’m a good person – how absolute ignorance and immorality became the way of life among the white”
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I thought almost all the television channels in the USA are part of the WET network, including PBS and CNN. Maybe one of the other non-WET channels needs to put this proposed “White in America” series together.
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@ abagond
thanks for taking my suggestion
@ jefe
you are right that whites pretty much are television but they don’t see it that way since its not spelled out. i thought cmt was their wet just look at the shows on there like my redneck wedding and other white shows. bet is owned by a viacom which is white so basically they do own tv while they complain about the one or two networks we have.
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@ aspergum
I did a post on Tim Wise:
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Okay Abagond, I think I get your comment here now about Wise — the best line should’ve been from someone who’s not white, instead of from him. You were cricizing the program, not Wise.
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Loved this. Too early to do it for real, Whites don’t have the consciousness to look at themselves in that manner. They would have a complete melt-down. We of course have survived them with an acute (if not pained) sense of humor.
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@aspergum… Tim Wise is more into his bank account than racial harmony.
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dave,
I doubt that.
I know Wise does well financially, but someone that smart and energetic could do much, MUCH better in many other fields. You think he couldn’t have made a kick-ass lawyer?!
Having listened to and watched him repeatedly and having read a couple of his books, I don’t doubt his anti-racist sincerity, however much he earns from doing anti-racist work.
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At least 27 shot dead, 18 of them children, at a grade school 100 km north of New York in Newtown, Connecticut, a white upper-middle-class town. The shooter is a 20-year-old man with ties to the school.
http://bigstory.ap.org/article/ap-source-20-year-old-suspect-had-ties-school
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A 20 year old WHITE man.
Not that all white men are like that, but a higher percentage are. When oh when will white Americans wake up to the fact that they’re white and start dealing with it?
What IS it about white American men that makes this way of acting out more common among them? It’s not something genetic, since mass shootings aren’t the same kind of problem in Canada, where guns are just as common . . .
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Reblogged this on The Racist and Unoriginal Anglo-American Entertainment Industry.
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Abagond, you’re so forward, you’re FAST FORWARD — http://www.huffingtonpost.com/blackandbrownnews/race-talk-it-is-time-for-_b_2274470.html
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the huffington post live is hosting a discussion on white in america now.
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@ solesearch
Awesome! Thanks.
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no problem. I’d love to hear your take on this. I’ve only watched black in america once a long time ago, so I have no idea how this compares to it.
However, there was one thing I think desperately needed to be mentioned in this discussion. One of the main points was that not all white people are prosperous or have benefitted from white privilege (which I don’t agree with) and that there are communities of white people who are struggling and are ignored. That class issues are forgotten behind race issues.
I wish someone would have mentioned that that is the purpose of racism. That’s how white racism was created in America. It was created to divide and conquer. It divided poor people, the majority of people in America, so that poor whites would identify with rich white people more so than poor black people. To facilitate this transition they gave poor whites and indentured servants more rights and privileges although not enough to make them not poor and they took away rights and privileges from black slaves enough to make them not human.
Many poor whites continue to cling to white privilege at their own expense. They put race ahead of class.
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This was really good! I got a laugh out of this one!lol Good upload Aba!
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We really need this series done, but CNN does not seem to be in a hurry to put it together.
We can use some footage from Michael Moore’s films if you must, but we really need this documentary to be done now.
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I think the British have already done something like this. I have to check the title but it pretty much is a slam to American health insurance which mention Chavez giving oil, British aid workers coming to America to help out those uninsured (most of them were white) Americans. I know the BBC ran it last year but I can’t for the life of me remember what the name was.
Was it the movie “Men at work” that talked about the ills throwing away a perfectly good white boy.
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lol good post! I thought this post was for real until I read the top that it was fiction!
Honestly I felt it would have been cool if there was a program called White in America.
After all, the country’s demographics are rapidly changing from Anglo Saxon Caucasian to a more Hispanic/mixed ”brown” look.
But I still believe that Whites will have control over the media despite the changing racial demographics of the nation.
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