The Audacity Of An Opinion: Thoughts On Perceptions Of Race

[Note: This essay was written over a year ago. I wrote it in response to several rather mean and incendiary emails I got from readers of my 2008 post-election essay, "I Know But Do Not Feel." I post it so late because I needed to let some time pass, of course, being rather raw by the vicious criticism I received. But I also post it because of the recent comments about race made by some of my liberal peers, most notably Mr. Chris Matthews. Odd that I haven't gotten a single email about Mr. Matthews' remarks. Odd, too, that no one who found fault with me minded that Mr. Matthews, white to the core, said that it was his "job" as a "journalist" to make sure Barack Obama succeeds. Surely a white newsman breaching etiquette by announcing the first-ever black president is too weak to succeed without his help should have been perceived -- and denounced -- as a self-righteous oaf given to making racially-charged statements, but he wasn't. Funny. And yet simple and honest words written here, which were not racially-charged at all, elicited serious censure and rebuke from those folks who believe themselves the moral arbiters of all things racial. This merely because someone had the audacity of an opinion about his experiences -- through media, education and society -- of race. - BG]

Not terribly long ago I talked with someone who had a difficult time with my essay on what the racial import of the election of Barack Obama meant to me. My essay was affective in thrust; being intensely personal, it explored how I felt in the wake of Barack Obama’s election. I offered to readers a sort of autobiography: I discussed how I experienced race, and racial justice, in America. I mentioned the role movies, books, sports figures, TV, and entertainers played in portraying the issue of race; I mentioned that I am (along with millions of others) the product of a national effort to eradicate racism via media, art and education. Countless articles have been written and countless interviews given; countless documentaries and essays have been produced, all focusing on the role media have and must play in dealing with racial injustices in America. From film to disc, from poem to song, America has worked on racial harmony -- for decades.

Born in 1961, the same year as Barack Obama, I can’t help but be a part of that legacy. I have been shaped, molded, affected and moved. What person has not? In fact, the vast majority of Americans have experienced racial injustice through media, whether it be through newspapers, books, letters, poems, film or song. I would venture to guess that even many black people, who have perhaps experienced direct racism in their lives at some time, would admit that many of their feelings about race have been formed in the womb of media. Few blacks, really, living today in America can say that they have experienced racism all day, every day, of their lives; I would think there is no one in America, white or black, who would assert that every black and white encounter can be defined as white supremacy and black subjugation; that every encounter a black person has with a white person is racially charged, where inferiority meets superiority or where the disenfranchised meet the enfranchised.

What I am saying is that the vast majority of what any American would call “experiences of racism” are not directly experienced. Instead, racism is experienced only after it has been processed through the media we have come to accept as intrinsic to American life. Few racial incidents actually happen each day in America, at least when compared to the total number of social incidents that occur. But racism via media -- through reportage and screenplays and essays and sermons -- is depicted rather constantly.

Let me put this another way: Remember the story of black churches being torched in the 1990s? Remember how reports that arsons, and fires of undetermined origin, had ravaged black churches across the south in America? I am sure you do. Do you remember, too, that when some astute observer finally did the math; when it was demonstrated that the rate of fires at black churches, including arsons, showed no distinct difference from those fires and arsons at all churches, including all “white” churches, do you remember how the story of racist arsonists just seemed to disappear? In other words, much of what we believe to be racism is merely fueled by the sensationalizing media.

But if the inflated story of arson at black churches does not suffice as an example, let me point to two more events that influenced perceptions of racism in America, both of which were entirely media-driven; both of which were nearly entirely perceived by blacks and whites SOLELY through the media that produced the events. The first is the Rodney King beating in Los Angeles. The second is the O.J. Simpson trial, also an LA phenomenon. The former was undeniably essentially media-driven: the very videotape of the King beating necessarily presented a very narrow, reductionistic view of that event. There was no context, no backstory provided by the videographer. All that was projected was cops beating a helpless black man. As a result of the very restrictions of a camera -- a camera cannot review a wider or total context -- countless figures in media stepped forward to create a fictionalized context for that unfortunate event: Rodney King was beaten merely because he was a black man in America. It is not my intent to comment on the merits of that case; I am specifically talking about how media influenced, even created, the perception of racism. Virtually no one in America, save a couple of people, experienced the Rodney King event directly. Instead it was experienced solely through the media filter, and then shaped to fit prejudices and ideology.

And when the officers charged with assault in the Rodney King beating were dismissed, that dismissal, almost entirely, was experienced by the masses through media. So, too, the ensuing riots.

The OJ Simpson murder trial is hardly any different. This, too, was a media-driven spectacle: it wasn’t the facts on the ground that created the racial narrative that plagued that case, but Simpson’s legal defense team and the media that team exploited who created a racial narrative out of whole cloth. In other words, the racial component was not ever experienced directly by anyone; it was only insinuated, and then passed on through media where it was perceived and apprehended, second-hand and artifically. Call it racism artificially disseminated.

Hence, I can say with some confidence that media of all kinds and shapes have framed all of our experiences and interpretations of race and racism in America. What I noted after the election of Barack Obama was hardly unusual, strange or incomprehensible. The slightest open-minded and honest reflection would have shown that my words were rather clear.

Here’s a question. What do 99.9% of Americans know of Barack Obama, and how do they know it? Answer: Not much, and they know what they know of Barack Obama SOLELY through media. Few people have experienced him intimately, directly and exhaustively. But millions and millions of people believe they know and understand him; they believe they REALLY know him for themselves. But the unalloyed truth is that they know only an apparition: they know him through books, essays, reports, photographs, film and audio clips. Most people know him the way they know many if not most things outside their direct experience. The reliance on media to inform and direct and even shape perception is ubiquitous, irresistible and even overwhelming.

How strange, then, that a person who blithely (and perhaps even blindly) supports Barack Obama finds fault with me because my experience of race in this country is shaped by media and not direct experience. It is not strange, really. Many of us have come to expect such vapidity, even such stupidity, from our interlocutors. Many folks who think they are deep thinkers are really remarkably shallow, closed to any idea that they are indeed shallow.

Let me restate what I wrote in November 2008: While I fully UNDERSTAND what the election of Barack Obama means, both existentially and historically, his election did not FEEL at all new or different. I have seen black men and women in every imaginable high place: Doctors, lawyers, judges, senators, secretaries of state, generals, mayors, governors, astronauts, bishops, news anchors, movie directors, corporate gods, Wall Street millionaires. None of these has been without black representatives for a good chunk of my life; the truth of what I am saying is exactly what made Barack Obama feel so comfortable running for office in the first place. He saw no obstacle, and there wasn’t, and I, and all of us born in 1961, saw no such obstacle, either. Hence, Barack Obama’s election as a person with darker skin than mine did not FEEL SPECIAL -- to me! Nay, it did not feel special or even surprising to me and many of my peers. Is this too hard to grasp? Is this an affront to civility? Is this an indecorous statement to make in mixed company?

Is this the wrong side of history?

So be it. Let the fussy scolds take umbrage at my simple statement of the facts.

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