Yes, it's true: film has done a better job of portraying the black experience in recent years. And they seem to bring out all of their Black stuff this month, to let us know just how far we've come. But to the extent I have any use for black history per se (or Black History Month, in particular), I don't want my kids learning it onscreen.
Television serves well as a source of entertainment, even a babysitter for some, but it serves society best as a propaganda tool and not the kind of medium you could ever trust to give you the straight dope about anything. I wonder if the new Color On TV doesn't inform white prejudice, as Sut Jhally implied in a conversation we had some years back about the burden/failure of The Cosby Show to be the catalyst for change and racial harmony Dr. Bill Cosby imagined it to be when he commissioned this study. Whites look at all the black doctors, lawyers and politicians, middle-class professionals on the grow in prime-time, these noble people comingling freely and overcoming insurmountable odds in the movie-of-the-week, John Coffee raising the dead and curing kidney stones, then look at you and wonder what your problem is. Why can't YOU cure kidney stones? Why can Blair Underwood get on so well with his co-workers and you're such a problem? White people get most of their ideas about people of color from TV and films, and if you're not out there in $600 sweaters, curing kidney stones, you're slipping: The Dream has failed you. For my money, TV fails as an educational tool of any measure, for white or blacks.
Film has a way of deifying historical figures that nullifies them as role models, and for this reason, movies aren't always as inspirational to the next generation we imagine them to be. If you can't inspire your child, do you reasonably think that a bigger-than-life dramatization of someone they can't relate to will stoke any fires? To some of these kids, Denzel Washington's Malcolm X may as well be Luke Skywalker: he was of a time we cannot fully grasp, living a life we could not fully imagine. Malcolm on film becomes a supernatural mythology—practically extraterrestrial—with character and attributes too lofty for any mortal to aspire to.
Some black folks have 65 inch TVs, 2 Xboxes, 350 DVDs and only one book—The Bible—in their homes. Instead of letting TV teach black history—or anything at all about black people—we need to encourage each other to take regular trips to the library and acquaint our kids with learning outside of a schoolhouse setting. Not the internet or Wikipedia: the quiet place with all the books and magazines, where the truths about Our Story lay hidden.
It's hard but it's fair.
Jimi Izrael is a writer and commentator living in Tallahassee, Florida.
