Gov. Rick Snyder has endorsed former rival Pete Hoekstra for the GOP nomination for the U.S. Senate.

MLive.com reports the announcement came in Southfield:

“We need the best, and that’s why I’m proud to be here today to endorse Pete Hoekstra,” Snyder said this morning at a press conference in Southfield. “It’s a great opportunity because he’s a person — through the campaign process — I gained a lot of respect for in recognition that he is the right person for this position.”

Hoekstra is a former U.S. Congressman who left Congress to run for governor last year. Snyder bested Hoekstra, former Michigan Attorney General Mike Cox, and Oakland County Sheriff Mike Bouchard.

During the his campaign to be governor, Hoekstra brought a wide range of extreme right wing political activists to the state to stump for him. He also admitted to participating in activities with the shadowy The Family group.

The GOP primary to challenge U.S. Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Lansing) is a field of five candidates. The candidates include Detroit charter school executive Clark Durant, former Kent County Probate Judge Randy Hekman, Roscommon businessman Peter Konetchy and Midland resident Gary Glenn, president of the American Family Association of Michigan.

State Democrats were quick to respond to the endorsement Monday morning:

“It is going to take a lot more than an endorsement from one of the most unpopular Governor’s in the country to make the people in Michigan support a Congressman-turned lobbyist like Pete Hoekstra. Even conservatives are troubled by Hoekstra’s support of bailout money paying for the bonuses of Wall Street CEOs and his long track record of backing tax giveaways for special interests like oil companies. Does the Governor seriously think a lobbyist is the best person to fight for the people of Michigan in Washington?”

A scarecrow stands in a sea of collard greens at D-Town Urban Farm (Photo by Minehaha Forman/Michigan Messenger)

But to those paying attention, harvest time also highlights a less attractive facet of Detroit’s agricultural social scene: social divisions between black and white urban farming groups.

That’s not surprising, according to Monica White, a sociology professor at Wayne State University who studies African-American involvement in Detroit agriculture. “Given the historical context of race relations in Detroit, any kind of movement is racially segregated,” White told Michigan Messenger in an interview. White said one of the ways Detroit’s history of racial tension manifests itself is in activism because grassroots movements like urban farming are “driven deeply by community.” According to White, the overall racial divide can be seen more clearly in smaller, focused groups where the general population is not involved. “Urban farming is not mainstream,” she said.

Perception v. intention

A recent influx of predominantly white residents into the city to start agricultural projects has hit a sore spot for some lifelong Detroiters. Tumultuous race relations from years past — which came to a head with the 1967 riots and white flight to the suburbs — left many native Detroiters wary of outsiders. That broad distrust of incoming people, especially as it relates to race, leaves the intentions of who come in and start gardens in the city misinterpreted. Additionally, farming is often associated with white culture while more than 80 percent of the city’s current population is black.

“Urban farming is often represented or seen as a mostly white phenomena,” White said. “The primary agent for any social network is group dynamics — if it’s a white group then white people are attracted. It’s racially contextual.” Language and perception are two major barriers that keep the movement from being more integrated, White said. “It has to do with race and class.”

Many black Detroiters have a negative perception of white people who come into the city and start projects in neighborhoods regardless of these groups’ good intentions. “What matters is how do their intentions come across?” White asked. “A common perception is that this is a pet project to make them look and feel socially responsible,” she said of how some native Detroiters look at incoming whites who jump into the urban farming movement.

White emphasized that the judgments some Detroiters make about outsiders joining the movement can stunt the overall effort to have a greener, sustainable food source in Detroit. And the productive efforts of those coming in to help forward the urban agriculture movement are thwarted by a social disconnect rooted in race and culture. That’s why White suggests that more attention be paid to communication across racial and socio-economic barriers in order to fuel the movement. “We have to find a way to articulate these issues to broader audiences,” White said.

Separate by default

One obvious example of the urban farming movement’s racial dynamics can be seen at Eastern Market on Saturdays at the Grown in Detroit farm stand. There, youngsters who are mostly black and Latino, work for a stipend under the supervision of community educators and farmers and sell produce that is grown organically on city land. The youth who work the Saturday market are part of the Garden Resource Program’s Youth Farm Stand Initiative, a collaborative effort between Wayne State University’s extension program, The Greening of Detroit and Earthworks Urban Farm. The initiative aims to educate youth to understand the work and benefits tied to urban agriculture.

While the city’s population is mostly black, the majority of adults who lead the Greening of Detroit — the non-profit that houses the Garden Resource Program — are white, which lends to the fact that there are usually white mentors and supervisors who work at the Grown in Detroit stand to help youth involvement in the program’s initiative.

One educator and urban farmer heavily involved with the Garden Resource Program’s Grown in Detroit efforts at Eastern Market is Greg Willerer.

Willerer, who is white, has noticed the racial divide between the program’s leadership and youth in involved but said in an interview that it’s not intentional. “It’s not like we make an effort to include Latino and black kids, but they have to be from Detroit,” Willerer said. He noted that the program requires youth involved to live in city limits, but the same requirements are not made of those leading the program. “Teachers interested in this usually are white,” he said.

Aside from the majority white-lead greening of Detroit, there is a lesser known black-lead group in the city that is growing each year. The Detroit Black Food Security Network, a non-profit, grassroots, community organization, seeks to educate and sustain black communities in Detroit where fresh healthy produce is scarce. While the DBFSN, which runs a two-acre urban farm, welcomes anyone to get involved in the network, the group mainly attracts black volunteers and activists.

The DBFSN, like the Greening of Detroit, also has a youth outreach program that targets predominantly black schools that focus on Africa and African heritage. White calls the DBFSN’s Food Warriors youth initiative a “gallant effort” that assists in developing school farms and educates young students on food security.

Education and profit

One reason educating youth is crucial to the urban farming movement in Detroit is to make the idea of growing food locally a more universal concept in a city where many shun the idea of working with soil.

Part of the goal is also to teach youth how farming in the city leads to a secure community and can make money. Today with the total acreage of vacant land in the city growing each year, the commercial potential for urban farms is growing. “What happened three years ago is the entrepreneurial arena of urban farming,” said Willerer, who owns and operates his own urban farm. “Beyond efficiencies we’re starting to see it as a viable business.”

Corporate investors are starting to see it as a viable business as well. In fact one investor, John Hanz, wants to use 80 acres of land in the city to create a commercial farm, a plan that is unpopular among those active in the grassroots farming movement. Many in the movement fear that an industrial farm will not be community focused and will use unsustainable growing methods used in mainstream agriculture.

Although there is a social and racial rift in urban farming efforts overall, that’s not to say that people of all races aren’t working together to improve the movement day by day. In fact, the urban farming movement that exists today stems from the late 1980s and early 1990s when the late Gerald Hairston, a black southerner who moved to Detroit to work in the auto industry, began organizing urban farming efforts, enlisting elders in his neighborhood to a group known now as the Gardening Angels. Hairston is remembered for bringing people of all backgrounds together and his efforts helped pave the way for the groups that lead the movement today such as the Detroit Agriculture Network, the Greening of Detroit and the DBFSN.

Many urban farmers today are inspired by the fact that the city’s history is closely tied to farming. One famous early farming effort in Detroit was in the 18th and 19th centuries when French settlers created ribbon farms — narrow strips of cultivated farmland land that stretched up from the Detroit River inland. Even Detroit streets such as Chene and Joseph Campau are still named after ribbon farm owners.

Collective effort

Although Detroit has come far in developing urban agriculture, the movement still has a long way to go before it can sustain a significant portion if the city’s population. In order to get there, White said, a more collaborative effort among those who struggle for food security in the city needs to be made in addition to educating youth to understand where their food comes from.

“These are issues within the movement that we have to address,” she said. According to White there are “overwhelming barriers” keeping people accustomed to an urban setting from becoming involved and willing to “go out and get dirty” on a farm.

These barriers include myriad issues including a socio-economic stigma that is tied to farmers and working with soil, the wide availability of cheap, unhealthy fast food and a disconnect in the language between micro-cultures within the subculture of urban farming.

But the underlying issue that powers the urban farming movement is a human issue that is not based on race or culture. It is the need for a sustainable food source.

On a local level, the city of Detroit has been called a food desert, a place where fresh produce is scarce and the food that is available comes from gas stations, liquor stores and fast food chains which contribute to health problems.

On a broader level, as Fred Carter, executive director of the Chicago-based Black Oaks Center for Sustainable Renewable Living, told Detroiters at a DBFSN meeting this month, is American dependence on fossil fuels and how the current food system would shut down if access to oil were to be cut off. “Detroit is a vanguard of transition to a post-carbon world,” Carter told the audience. “Supermarkets are part of the broken food system.”

It is for these reasons that White thinks it’s important that groups of all backgrounds congregate around and work toward a more sustainable food source.

“There are farmers who are so deeply dedicated to this, they have overcome insurmountable odds and they’re so resilient,” White said of her experience researching and working with dedicated urban farmers. “These people get up early and work their hands literally to the bone … until they bleed, over these issues. People ask ‘Why don’t you go to the store and buy a bell pepper?’ It’s the larger issues — the autonomy of doing for self — that drives this movement.”

Because the urban farming movement is not mainstream, many of those who have gardens are making a political statement.

Urban farming, or the choice not to rely on the larger food system is an act of defiance, according to Willerer. “It’s a quiet renaissance after the problems industrialism created. Everything tracks back to food choices people make,” Willerer said. “The act of growing stuff is an act of rebellion, sustainability and independence.”

Guiliani’s negative reference to Detroit and crime didn’t sit well with Fred Siegel, a historian and Giuliani biographer, who found the former mayor’s comments “indefensible” and racially divisive. Seigel told The New York Observer that Giuliani was using Thompson’s race against him. “If this isn’t a rude, racial invocation, then you don’t mention Detroit. The problem there is unsustainable pension costs,” Seigel said.

Treva Nickens, who worked for more than 20 years at the Benton-Harbor based appliance manufacturer’s La Vergne, Tennessee plant claimed that she was refused a promotion by a supervisor who said she spent too much time with black people. Nickens said she was also physically threatened for reporting racist jokes to a supervisor.

Last week the federal appeals court in Cincinnati dismissed two other cases about discrimination based on association at Whirlpool but said that Nickens should have a chance to argue her claim about Whirpool’s hostile work environment in the U.S. District Court in Nashville.

In 2005 Whirlpool agreed to a $850,000 settlement in a case involving hiring practices that discriminated against African Americans.

(photo: just_riaz via Flickr.com)

On the night after Thanksgiving, I was invited to Berkley, Mich., a predominantly white suburb of Detroit, to visit a friend from high school at a local bar. Over the past year I’ve spent so much time in the city of Detroit, I almost forgot how it was to be on the other side of Eight Mile Road, in the suburbs.

Except for me and the three black people at a corner pool table everyone at the bar was white. I am black at first glance, but like Obama I have a white mother and black father.

I noticed the racial makeup of the room instantly, because in Detroit it’s often the other way around. I also noticed a heavyset man playing pool in a black T-shirt with a Confederate flag across his chest.

No one in my group said anything about it, though I thought it was very visible, so I brought it up. I asked my friends (who are all white) if that shirt bothered anyone. They were quick to call the man a racist and said he was “probably in the KKK,” but then they quickly changed the topic.

I couldn’t let it end there. I approached one of the three black people in the bar. I asked a young man who was playing pool at a table next to man in the shirt if the Confederate symbol bothered him. He said it did, but that he didn’t want to get into a fight “around here.”

There was no reason to start a fight. After all, it was just a T-shirt, and I hadn’t talked to the guy wearing it yet. So I decided to do just that. I approached the man in the flag with a smile and asked how he was doing. He stopped and stared looking surprised and rather speechless. I went on to compliment his shirt.

The surprised look on his face turned to fright and he stepped back two paces.

“It’s not mine,” he said quickly as if I were threatening him. “My friend gave it to me. I’m not a rebel.”

I laughed and said I was just curious about it.

The man looked like he wanted to run. His pool partner just stared on with a grimace but didn’t say anything.

“I didn’t buy it. It’s not mine,” the man in the flag continued.

His face was getting red. I’m not sure if it was out of embarrassment or frustration, so I decided to leave him alone. I shook his hand and wished him a good night.

Within five minutes he and his friend left the bar.

Later that evening one of the three black people in the bar, a girl about my age got on stage to do some karaoke. I overheard one of my white friends say to the other, “She’s so black,” in a scornful tone.

My other friend responded, “She’s ghetto.” I leaned in to ask what they meant by that, but when they noticed I was listening in they changed the topic and avoided eye contact with me for a couple minutes as if ashamed.

These were the people who minutes before were condemning the man wearing the Confederate flag. Furthermore, these are people who voted for Barack Obama and agreed with his message of unity.

But I found that the tension and the mocking go both ways. When I went back to talk to the black people in the bar, one of them asked in a critical tone if I always hung out with so many white people.

I was beginning to see that that my attempts to ease the tension were not doing much. Maybe I had forgotten the level of tension that’s created among mixed groups.

When I got back home to Detroit, I wondered: Was it always like this, or has living in Detroit made me more sensitive to racial issues? It could be that I, like many others, assumed that Obama’s election would somehow change how we deal with petty racial differences.

Obviously not.

More people are talking about race now, but it’s still a topic that is hard to address and makes many feel uncomfortable. We just need to keep talking.

The McCain campaign, in response, issued a statement seeming to chastise the senator from Illinois for his condemnation of those who would see him killed. Nicolle Wallace, a senior McCain advisor, responded with the following: “Barack Obama’s assault on our supporters is insulting and unsurprising. These are the same people Obama called ‘bitter’ and attacked for ‘clinging to guns’ and faith. He fails to understand that people are angry at corrupt practices in Washington and Wall Street and he fails to understand that America’s working families are not ‘clinging’ to anything other than the sincere hope that Washington will be reformed from top to bottom… Attacking our supporters is a new low for the campaign that’s run more millions of dollars of negative ads than any other in history.”

And, rather than quell the fears of those in the country who, thanks to the campaign rhetoric about Obama’s relationship with former 60′s radical Bill Ayers, already think that Obama is an enemy agent seeking to do us harm, the McCain camp issued a new ad claiming that Obama is “too risky for America”.

Here’s a link to the ad: Obama-Ayers video by McCain campaign

Political consultant David Gergen warned McCain and Palin of “whipping around anger that could really lead to some violence.” It’s one thing when the New York Times says McCain and Palin have “gone far beyond the usual fare of quotes taken out of context and distortions of an opponent’s record — into the dark territory of race-baiting and xenophobia.” It’s another when someone like Gergen, who worked in both the Nixon and Reagan administrations, warns that you’re likely to incite violence.

Given the video clips currently going around the web of men and women gathering at McCain/Palin rallies in swing states like Pennsylvania and Ohio, it certainly seems as though something may be about to boil over.

Speaking of Ayers, and these accusations of terrorism, I found the following comment on Metafilter to be particularly good:

Even after every stunt they’ve pulled, today’s McCain ad left me stunned. “Ayers and Obama ran a radical education foundation”. This is the Chicago Annenberg Challenge we’re talking about. A public school reform project founded by Walter Annenberg, Nixon’s ambassador to the UK. Annenberg’s widow has the same “terrorist ties” as Obama does, but McCain welcomes and promotes her endorsement, because he knows this is a non-story.

Radical. They know this claim isn’t connected to reality. Maybe they are not themselves racist. But they are willing and eager to stir up racism, and they are willing and eager to allow their rabid base to believe that the Democratic nominee for president is a terrorist. In their lust for a tiny chance at power, McCain and Palin are willing to risk the assassination of the man America wants to be president.

Update: McCain finally came out Friday afternoon and said that Obama was a “decent person and a person that you do not have to be scared of as president of the United States.” He was, of course, met with a loud chorus of boos from the audience… Hopefully he’s still able to rein it in at this point. I’m afraid, however, the damage may already be done.

The poll, conducted with Stanford University, suggests that the percentage of voters who may turn away from Obama because of his race could easily be larger than the final difference between the candidates in 2004 – about 2.5 percentage points…

More than a third of all white Democrats and independents – voters Obama can’t win the White House without – agreed with at least one negative adjective about blacks, according to the survey, and they are significantly less likely to vote for Obama than those who don’t have such views…

“There are a lot fewer bigots than there were 50 years ago, but that doesn’t mean there’s only a few bigots,” said Stanford political scientist Paul Sniderman who helped analyze the exhaustive survey…

Statistical models derived from the poll suggest that Obama’s support would be as much as 6 percentage points higher if there were no white racial prejudice.

The study was designed to make people more likely to admit to their prejudices:

The AP-Yahoo poll used the unique methodology of Knowledge Networks, a Menlo Park, Calif., firm that interviews people online after randomly selecting and screening them over telephone. Numerous studies have shown that people are more likely to report embarrassing behavior and unpopular opinions when answering questions on a computer rather than talking to a stranger.

To be frank, this has been a concern of mine all along, that the polls are not reflecting the reality of such prejudice because people aren’t likely to admit to a pollster that they have misgivings about Obama based on his skin color. But when they get into the voting booth by themselves, will they pull the lever for Obama? This survey found that 58% of those who agreed with at least one negative adjective about black people still planned to vote for him. But in an election that is going to be very close, it won’t take many people who choose not to do so to determine the outcome.

Update: For a dissenting view, see this post by Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight.com, who is frankly far more qualified than I to evaluate the methodology and legitimacy of this survey.

The chairman of the Republican Party in Macomb County, Michigan, a key swing county in a key swing state, is planning to use a list of foreclosed homes to block people from voting in the upcoming election as part of the state GOP’s effort to challenge some voters on Election Day.

“We will have a list of foreclosed homes and will make sure people aren’t voting from those addresses,” party chairman James Carabelli told Michigan Messenger in a telephone interview earlier this week. He said the local party wanted to make sure that proper electoral procedures were followed.

State election rules allow parties to assign “election challengers” to polls to monitor the election. In addition to observing the poll workers, these volunteers can challenge the eligibility of any voter provided they “have a good reason to believe” that the person is not eligible to vote. One allowable reason is that the person is not a “true resident of the city or township.”

The Michigan Republicans’ planned use of foreclosure lists is apparently an attempt to challenge ineligible voters as not being “true residents.”

One expert questioned the legality of the tactic.

“You can’t challenge people without a factual basis for doing so,” said J. Gerald Hebert, a former voting rights litigator for the U.S. Justice Department who now runs the Campaign Legal Center, a Washington D.C.-based public-interest law firm. “I don’t think a foreclosure notice is sufficient basis for a challenge, because people often remain in their homes after foreclosure begins and sometimes are able to negotiate and refinance.”

As for the practice of challenging the right to vote of foreclosed property owners, Hebert called it, “mean-spirited.”

GOP ties to state’s largest foreclosure law firm

The Macomb GOP’s plans are another indication of how John McCain’s campaign stands to benefit from the burgeoning number of foreclosures in the state. McCain’s regional headquarters are housed in the office building of foreclosure specialists Trott & Trott. The firm’s founder, David A. Trott, has raised between $100,000 and $250,000 for the Republican nominee.

The Macomb County party’s plans to challenge voters who have defaulted on their house payments is likely to disproportionately affect African-Americans who are overwhelmingly Democratic voters. More than 60 percent of all sub-prime loans — the most likely kind of loan to go into default — were made to African-Americans in Michigan, according to a report issued last year by the state’s Department of Labor and Economic Growth.

Challenges to would-be voters

Statewide, the Republican Party is gearing up for a comprehensive voter challenge campaign, according to Denise Graves, party chair for Republicans in Genessee County, which encompasses Flint. The party is creating a spreadsheet of election challenger volunteers and expects to coordinate a training with the regional McCain campaign, Graves said in an interview with Michigan Messenger.

Whether the Republicans will challenge voters with foreclosed homes elsewhere in the state is not known.

Kelly Harrigan, deputy director of the GOP’s voter programs, confirmed that she is coordinating the group’s “election integrity” program. Harrigan said the effort includes putting in place a legal team, as well as training election challengers. She said the challenges to voters were procedural rather than personal. She referred inquiries about the vote challenge program to communications director Bill Nowling, who promised information but did not return calls.

Party chairman Carabelli said that the Republican Party is training election challengers to “make sure that [voters] are who they say who they are.”

When asked for further details on how Republicans are compiling challenge lists, he said, “I would rather not tell you all the things we are doing.”

Vote suppression: Not an isolated effort

The issue of voter challenges is arising around the country. In Ohio, the Columbus Dispatch, in an July 6 article titled “Foreclosed-on voters using old addresses could snag election,” reported that Doug Preisse, a member of the board of elections in Franklin County and the chair of the local GOP, said he has not ruled out challenging voters before the election. 

Hebert, the voting-rights lawyer, sees a pattern.

“At a minimum what you are seeing is a fairly comprehensive effort by the Republican Party, a systematic broad-based effort to put up obstacles for people to vote,” he said. “Nobody is contending that these people are not legally registered to vote.

“When you are comprehensively challenging people to vote,” Hebert went on, “your goals are two-fold: One is you are trying to knock people out from casting ballots; the other is to create a slowdown that will discourage others,” who see a long line and realize they can’t afford to stay and wait.

Challenging all voters registered to foreclosed homes could disrupt some polling places, especially in the Detroit metropolitan area. According to the real estate Web site RealtyTrac, one in every 176 households in Wayne County, metropolitan Detroit, received a foreclosure filing during the month of July. In Macomb County, the figure was one household in every 285, meaning that 1,834 homeowners received the bad news in just one month. The Macomb County foreclosure rate puts it in the top three percent of all U.S. counties in the number of distressed homeowners.

Wayne, Oakland, Macomb, Kent and Genessee counties were — in that order — the counties with the most homeowners facing foreclosure, according to RealtyTrac. As of July, there were more than 62,000 foreclosure filings in the entire state.

Joe Rozell, director of elections for Oakland County in suburban Detroit, acknowledged that challenges such as those described by Carabelli are allowed by law but said they have the potential to create long lines and disrupt the voting process. With 890,000 potential voters closely divided between Democratic and Republican, Oakland County is a key swing county of this swing state.

According to voter challenge directives handed down by Republican Secretary of State Terri Lynn Land, voter challenges need only be “based on information obtained through a reliable source or means.”

“But poll workers are not allowed to ask the reason” for the challenges, Rozell said. In other words, Republican vote challengers are free to use foreclosure lists as a basis for disqualifying otherwise eligible voters.

David Lagstein, head organizer with the Michigan Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), described the plans of the Macomb GOP as “crazy.”

“You would think they would think, ‘This is going to look too heartless,’” said Lagstein, whose group has registered 200,000 new voters statewide this year and also runs a foreclosure avoidance program. “The Republican-led state Senate has not moved on the anti-predatory lending bill for over a year and yet [Republicans] have time to prey on those who have fallen victim to foreclosure to suppress the vote.”

—-

Correction: This article has been amended to reflect the fact that Doug Preisse informed Michigan Messenger that he did not “state or imply” that he had not ruled out challenges “due to foreclosure related address issues,” as originally reported.

In an odd turn though, the former Georgia Governor referred to the Democratic presidential candidate as a “black boy,” as you can see in this excerpt:

…And I think it already has sent a wave of approbation and admiration in many countries around the world, just knowing that this black boy who grew up with just a loving mother and grandparents — and that was about all he had to start with — does now have a chance to become the nominee of the Democratic Party for president.

Carter spoke just before Sen. Teddy Kennedy took to the platform at the convention in Denver.

Once upon a time I was required to write a 30-page thesis paper on a topic in journalism. So I got this great idea: I would write about the Internet’s effect on print media.

Long story short, my adviser rejected the proposal and with good reason.

See, you can’t sum up what the Internet is doing to print media in 30 pages. He said I could write a 400-page book on that and still not have covered everything.

I narrowed my topic way down and that’s when I realized: In researching and news reporting, sometimes less is more.

When I decided to watch videos and read stories from CNN’s special report “Black in America,” I wondered why such a broad topic was attempted in four hours.

It seems that all of a sudden, whether it’s because a black man is getting closer to moving into the White House or some new push for social awareness just hit the ground, two major news networks have invested time and money in seeking to explain what it means to be “Black in America” (CNN), and “Multicultural in America” (MSNBC). It may be coincidental, but Congress also passed a resolution last week apologizing for slavery. But I digress.

MSNBC’s “Multicultural in America” went to the homes of  multicultural viewers who shared some joy and awkwardness that come from a merger of cultures. As a multiracial person, I understood what each person was describing. But I think it was a safer approach than CNN’s “Black” venture because it was more conversational and focused more on the positive. I liked that it didn’t attempt too much at one sitting. We just need to see this stuff more frequently.

CNN’s report was a bit more in-depth. It profiled black people who were struggling to get by. It also interviewed a few prominent African-American figures in their attempt  to illustrate the struggles that those with dark skin have to overcome. For the most part it concentrated on the negative aspects of being black — how many are living in poverty with no health care and poor education options in single-parent households.

I live in Detroit. I don’t need CNN to tell me it’s rough for blacks out here. Then again, the target audience was not poor black people, even though that’s who they’re profiling. So maybe a better title and angle for the report would have been ”What happens to a race in the face of discrimination” or “What racism has done to blacks in America.”

There needs to be something that would remind people that being black in America doesn’t mean being poor and uneducated, but rather that many blacks are subjected to this because of a biased —  sometimes racist — white institution. As much as we’d like to bury the past, African-Americans are still suffering from the aftermath of slavery.

It may have been more effective if some of the everyday challenges that both black and white people encounter could be quantified in a way that truly illustrates the disparity between both groups in their respective categories: white rich and poor versus black rich and poor.

The show was made as a tutorial geared for an audience that is on the outside looking in. That’s important to understand when watching it.

The truth is there is no way any writer or videographer can define what either of these topics — being multicultural or being black — mean in four hours or less. This sort of reporting should be done every day so we don’t need these  oversimplified “specials.”  There isn’t a special for whites in America. That wouldn’t be special. It’s on every day.

I think part of what was missing from the CNN and the MSNBC reports is the analytical aspect to these topics. Sure, they presented the problems, but it ended there. It should have gone something like: These are the problems blacks/multicultural people face; let’s investigate why it is this way. Let’s create a forum to talk about institutionalized racism and how to work together to recognize and stop it.

Or is that too hot for TV?

In all seriousness, though, I have to give credit to CNN and MSNBC for even covering such a touchy issue as race in America. It’s such a tough topic to harness and demonstrate in words or video without ruffling someone’s feathers. And that can be why it’s so discouraging to cover race. But it needs to be done. And what’s been done so far is important in breaking the ice on race talks, and it may start up a bit of dialogue on the topic amongst people who otherwise would never have this conversation.

It is up to us to make sure this cross-cultural dialogue is maintained off-camera. If these reports have inspired any such dialogue then they have served a great purpose.