November 2nd, 2005
A March on Too Much Television
By Derrick Z. Jackson
Boston Globe
We have had many marches to commemorate marches. There was the 10th anniversary of the Million Man March. There were marches to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act, the 40th anniversary of the Selma-to-Montgomery trek for voting rights, and the 40th anniversary of the Boston procession for civil rights. Thousands of Americans stood in line to view the coffin of Rosa Parks in the Capitol Rotunda.
We need marches to keep memories alive of how hard and dangerous the movement was. We also need a march into the future as millions of African-Americans remain well behind white Americans in virtually every quality of life indicator. It was the vogue this past weekend for everyone from television personality Oprah Winfrey to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to say that without Parks they would not be standing here today—at the top of a television empire or near the top of the very American empire.
But African-Americans in leadership positions have struggled to make a stand for the masses. As Barack Obama, the only black member of the 100-person US Senate, put it in The New York Times this week, ‘’In the absence of dogs and hoses, there is no immediate, obvious enemy before us, so it’s harder to mobilize a sense of outrage.”
There is a very obvious enemy before us. It is the academic achievement gap. Of all the things that can outrage black people in this country, it should be number one. We do not need to walk the 54 miles from Selma to Montgomery. The longest march in this struggle is only a few feet long. The rekindling of the civil rights movement just might be walking up to the television and turning it off.
This is a march where everyone can be Rosa Parks, refusing to be told where to sit. It is easy to blame America’s halfhearted and hypocritical commitment to its public schools. Massachusetts governor and presidential hopeful Mitt Romney tells us that education is the next civil rights struggle. President Bush told us he would fight the soft bigotry of low expectations. Those claims ring hollow with continued state school funding gaps and Bush’s massive underfunding of No Child Left Behind. Then they throw standardized tests at us and feign puzzlement that the achievement gap did not go away.
Bob Moses, the civil rights leader of the 1960s who today inspires youth around the nation toward academic excellence and political awareness with his Cambridge-based Algebra Project, said over the phone this week that today’s public schools are still poisoned by a sharecropper legacy. He has campaigned for public education to be a federal civil right as he watches only a relative handful of black children being rescued by vouchers or affirmative action. Most black children, he said, are consigned to a caste system where the message is clear: ‘’You are only going to serve a certain purpose in society, so your education is not set up to put a floor under you to make you viable.”
But for leaders like Moses to get his message across, African-Americans have to end a peculiar passivity. Everyone knows that African-Americans watch far more television than any other ethnic group in the nation. According to Nielsen Media Research, the television is on in the typical African-American home 11 hours, 10 minutes a day, compared with 7:34 in white homes. Nielsen translates that to 79 hours a week of TV in black homes compared with 52 hours a week of TV in white homes.
On average, black children watch nearly two hours more television a day than white students, which translates to 14 more hours a week that black students could be reading or doing homework. In addition, different studies indicate that the percentage of black children who watch six or more hours of television a day, about 40 percent, is as much as triple that of white children. Virtually every study concludes that when you watch that much television, you will be a poor student in every subject.
So if I were a leader looking for a new cause to spark the new civil rights movement, a cause to honor the end to passive acceptance of back-of-the-bus status, a cause to honor the 381 days that black folks refused to ride the buses in Montgomery after Parks refused to move, I would call for a boycott of TV on school nights and limit it dramatically on the weekends. It might seem like a simple thing. But with the TV off, parents just might have time to march on the schools themselves to demand a just education.