Lots of viral chatter about a segment of ABC’s “What Would You Do?” reality show, which is sort of a cross between the old Candid Camera and Michael Sandel’s much ballyhooed Harvard course on “Justice” I suppose. ABC set up for a sting of sorts in a black barbershop in Harlem, where, the story line went, a black guy had his white girlfriend come into the shop, where ABC had planted black actress to make snarky reverse-racist comments about a black dude dating white woman in order to provoke people in the shop. And it is supposedly a mark of mild shame that many people in the shop didn’t speak up against this reverse-racism.
Everyone supposes this is a real coup for ABC News to expose that racism can go both ways, though this is not news to most people outside the Eastern establishment/academic cloisters. But it seems to me everyone is missing two obvious points. First: seriously? This is how we need to go trolling for racism these days? It’s another indicator of how far we’ve come from separate drinking fountains, forcibly segregated schools, and back-of-the-bus seating (all coercions of the Democratic Party, let us not ever forget) that we have to resort to contrivances such as this.
But second, given the serious problem of black men who abandon their children in massive numbers (often without ever getting married to the mothers in the first place), is it really unreasonable for black women to resent white women who are thought–rightly or wrongly–to lure black men away? This is, I hear, is a frequent topic of conversation in many black communities, but you’ll never hear the media, or black studies programs on campus, discuss it because it is too hot to handle. How brave of ABC merely to play up the obvious angle instead.
The complete video is about eight minutes long:
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