My husband and I have been eagerly anticipating Soledad Obrien’s expose on the Black experience in America, “Black in America”. To whet our collective palates CNN aired “Black in America: Reclaiming the Dream” a panel discussion held at the Essence Festival in New Orleans. The piece consisted of snippets of the full documentary to air on Wednesday and Thursday and discussion thereafter with such notables as Hill Harper, Cornel West, Tom Joyner, and Julianne Malveaux.

While watching the piece he and I began to get that bland taste in our mouths that signaled boughie de ja vu. Haven’t we seen this before? Ah, yes it was called the "State of Black America" on BET. It seems that the Black Academia and the Elite have gotten very used to these televised ‘Come to Jesus’ meetings, but are they useful? I assume the point is to highlight, educate, and then facilitate change, but we already know what the problem is- poverty, but very little is said about this issue.

The issues that are supposedly tearing the Black “community” apart, according to the special, were overwhelmingly single parent homes, high dropout rates, and extremely high HIV contraction rates among Black women, but all of these can find their roots in poverty and are self sustaining. I’ll explain.

Step 1. Remove Black Man from Black woman by forcing him into low wage labor.

Step 2. Black woman then raises family on her own, but must supplement her income by working herself, thus neglecting the emotional and educational needs of her children.

Step 3. Without adequate representation of a stable and loving male figure the young black male assumes what he perceives to be the role of the male in a patriarchal society. To help his mother with bills she is overwhelmed by he drops out and begins to sell drugs because it is the quickest and most lucrative avenue for financial advancement in his area.

Step 4. Arrest young Black boy, once released Black boy relies on the only skill he’s aquired in his young life…hustling.

Step 5. Weary of the struggles of poverty the young black girl looks for the quickest and most lucrative avenue for financial advancement in her area….being the dope boy’s girlfriend. Suffering from low self-esteem and zero access to healthcare and health information she refuses to insist on condom use.

Step 6. Young Black girl contracts HIV from young black boy who contracted the disease while incarcerated, but was never tested because of zero access to healthcare and health information.

Step 7. Young Black girl gives birth and begins to raise baby alone as young black boy either goes back to jail or begins low wage labor because of lack of education.
Begin again at Step 1.

The conversations that we have about these issues smack of fear and elitism, because they almost never include the people that we’re trying to save and are done in venues that are exclusively middle to upper class- the Essence festival (where tickets start at a week’s worth of groceries), in University auditoriums (c’mon we’re talking about high school dropouts). Are we so jaded as to believe that the poorest of us cannot articulate why they’re poor and struggling or what they need to best help themselves? Are we afraid of what they might say or have we assumed that we already know what they’ll say and deem it unworthy of air time?

It has been said before and I’ll say it again ‘One man cannot free another’. We need to work with and talk with those who are dropping out, having unprotected sex, having babies left and right and ask them their motivations and see what they want to do about it. Until then we’ll continue to wring our hands at the plight of those po black folk in the inner cities and countrysides who just can’t seem to get it together. We’ll continue to preach to the choir of middle and upper class black folk who tsk tsk their ghettoized cousins behavior, because how many struggling grandmothers raising their drug addicted daughter’s two babies is watching CNN, and that’s assuming she even has cable.

Those who are suffering are suffering silently and it would be nice to hear their side of the story. I would like someone in the audience to stand up and say I’m a single mother and I got pregnant by two different dudes because…. I would like someone to stand up and say I dropped out because….

These voices remain unheard in part because as boughie folk we’re a little embarrassed by the hood vernacular that’s used. We don’t want to have to deal with the rage behind the poverty, the broken sentences and the connection that we feel with them that reminds that we haven’t come so far, and I don’t even want to get into the rampant Republicanism that’s present among the dope boy classes who believe in the survival of the fittest ‘greed is good’ mentality shared by Donald Trump, Eazy E and even 50 cent. Wouldn’t that be embarrassing, to hold a conference on social issues and have your poster child for societies ills stand up and say “Poor folks are poor because they wanna be”?

In any case, I am excited to see how the entire series is handled. Hopefully we’ll all come out better informed.