In the words of Blaine Edwards and Antoine Merriweather: hated it. It felt to me like two hours of rubbing salt in the wounds of the problems in the Black community while offering little (if any) solutions toward remedying these staggering conditions. I mentioned sometime during my Twitterfest during the two 2-hour installments that I felt like CNN phoned it in. In Part 1, they mainly focused on the Rand family, picked and chose relatives from within that one family, and tried to present it as a microcosm of Black women in America. Part 2 focused on two men attached by the Little Rock Nine and their struggles while presenting it as a microcosm of Black men in America. Overall, neither installment did their topics full justice. Or even half justice, to be honest. The series felt like a primer for non-Black communities to get a glimpse into the Black community through use of an annoying spoken word poet, bold fonts, and statistics (without explanation). Overall, it just rubbed me the wrong way for several reasons (even more than what’s mentioned here). Then again, could you really expect an American news organization to condense the 200+ year “Black experience” in all its intricacies and nuances and developments since the assassination of Dr. King forty years ago into just a four-hour period?
Deep sighs all around.
So what did you think about the series? Provocative? Watered-down? Necessary? Share your thoughts here, and please, do not hold back. I sure as hell won’t.
