Reading While Black

In another time, it wouldn’t have been too hard to guess where Frances Harris would have ended up going to college. She has managed to do very well in very difficult circumstances, and she is African-American. Her high school, in the Oak Park neighborhood of Sacramento, was shut down as an irremediable failure the spring before her freshman year, then reopened months later as a charter school. Midway through high school, her father developed heart problems and became an irritable fixture around the home. She also discovered that he was not actually her biological father. That was a man named Leroy who, when her mother took Harris to see him, simply said his name was George and waited for her to leave. In Harris’s senior year, her mother lost her job at a nursing home and the family filed for bankruptcy.

Harris somehow stayed focused on teenage life. She earned an A-minus average and she distinguished herself as a debater. Her basketball teammates sometimes teased her for using big words, but they also elected her co-captain. As she led me on a tour of her school and her neighborhood one day this summer, she introduced me around with an assured ease that most adults can’t manage, even if her sentences are peppered with “like,” “you know” and “Oh, my God.” Her bedroom in the bungalow she shares with her parents is a masterpiece of teenage energy, the walls covered with her prom-queen tiara, her purple-and-white basketball jersey (No. 3) and photos of her friends. “The hardest part of high school,” she says, “was to be smart and cool at the same time.” She decided her dream college was the University of California, Los Angeles.

Ten or 20 years ago, Frances Harris almost certainly would have been admitted. Her excellent grades might not have even been necessary, because Berkeley and U.C.L.A. — the jewels in the U.C. system — accepted almost all of the African-Americans who met the basic application requirements. To an admissions officer, Harris would have seemed like gold: diversity and achievement, wrapped up in a single kid.

But in the early 1990s, the elite campuses began to pull back from their aggressive affirmative-action policies, and in 1996, California voters passed the California Civil Rights Initiative, also known as Proposition 209. After that, race could no longer be a factor in government hiring or public-university admissions. The number of black students at both Berkeley and U.C.L.A. plummeted, and at U.C.L.A. the declines continued throughout the next decade. The reasons weren’t entirely clear, but they seemed to include some combination of the admissions office taking Proposition 209 to heart and black students falling further behind in the academic arms race. (Harris, for instance, scored a 22 on the ACT test — slightly above the national average and well below the U.C.L.A. average.) The changes on U.C.L.A.’s campus were hard to miss. In 1997, the freshman class included 221 black students; last fall it had only 100. In the region with easily the largest black population west of the Mississippi River, the top public university had a freshman class in which barely 1 in 50 students was black.

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I followed a link from the Smart Bitches to this website Harlequin set up where people could confess their “naughty” forays into the seven deadly sins. Most of the confessions are bland and boring–the type of stuff you see on soap operas both daytime and primetime–but included on the website is a romance survey and a romance report. I took the survey for the hell of it and then clicked on the link for the romance report for 2006.

As I flipped through the (pdf) pages I was really like “WTF?” Is Harlequin running some sort of therapy/dating magazine? The report really read like a bad issue of Cosmo with features on favorite celebrities, how to spark a romantic relationship, how to act on a first date, etc. Here I am assuming that a romance report was a report on what readers desired to read, what the market was like, and so on, and all I see are copies of the sort of articles you see in any womens magazine each month?

Geez louise! Do any publishing houses really care about what readers want? Or least listen to some feedback!

I’ve made it an issue to watch as much TV as possible this season after a long hiatus from regular TV watching. While I haven’t watched everything, with the new technology and TV stations airing their episodes online, I’ve been fairly pleased with the new pickings. Two stand-out debuts were Dirty Sexy Money and Big Shots.

One of the problems with pilot episodes is that they tend to be unevenly written in an attempt to both introduce the characters and their issues while not seeming like an introductory episode. Thankfully, DSM and BS nearly seamlessly interwove introducing the show and kicking it into high gear.

Dirty Sexy Money was a winner for me. The Darling family is ludicrously dysfunctional and Brian Krause as Nick George is easy to identify with as the family’s harried new lawyer who also grew up with the Darling children. While I did roll my eyes at the very Desperate Housewives-esque introduction of a whodunit sub-plot to dominate the show (or first season), it was done well enough to feel unique. The actors are marvelous even if a few of the characters fall on the wallpaper side (the senator, the youngest brother, and the sisters), but all in all, I’m hooked.

Big Shots was another hit. But first can I gush over Nia Long? With more and more black actors turning to TV due to the chilly movie climate, she is an extremely underrated actress whom I hope this show utilizes to her fullest potential. Dylan McDermott, Christopher Titus, Michael Vartan and Joshua Malina are four men whose characters could loosely be described as a male version of SATC, as they struggle through life, love, and of course, sex. There were more than a few chuckles elicited by their antics, though Titus’ character Brody seems like the “straight man” to the other three characters’ drama. Stand-out storylines include the crazy three-some between Malina’s character Karl, Karl’s wife and Karl’s mistress (in a hilarious scene, his mistress takes him to couple’s therapy–and to the same therapist Karl is seeing with his wife), and the friendship-rivalry between Nia Long and Michael Vartan’s characters (mucho chemistry). Oh, and can I jump with joy over the addition of Charisma Carpenter as a recurring character?!

A few returning shows I’ve tuned into include America’s Next Top Model, Survivor: China, Ugly Betty, Grey’s Anatomy and Beauty and the Geek. Tonight the first episode of Moonlight airs tonight on CBS. I’m still mourning Angel, but I’ll see what this show is about. *g*

The Associated Press is reporting that authorities have confirmed that the badly decomposed body found behind several vacant businesses in Calumet City this week is that of Nailah Franklin, 28, who went missing nine days ago. Dental records were used to identify the body. Nailah’s unclothed body was discovered Thursday not far from where her car was found in Hammond, Ind., last week.

My prayers go out to her family, as well as any families of other missing persons. It is my deepest hope that the case is solved and the sick person who did this to Nailah is brought to justice.

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In the wake of the words spoken by Bill O’Reilly and Adrienne Curry, I nearly forgot to mention the fifty year anniversary of the “Little Rock Nine until RfP linked a Vanity Fair article. Adrienne Curry wants Black American History to be American History? Well here it is, the legacy of hatred this country was founded upon and fostered long after the Civil War was fought. I remember watching The Ernest Green Story on TV, the documentary about the Birmingham bombings, even a bit of Roots my junior year, but with the same disdain most teenagers have for serious subjects, the implications of this never really hit me. So I was black and knew about slavery, but despite my working-class background, racism never really touched me. Perhaps because my school career began with myself being the only black kid in school, or because I was so wrapped up in my own personal turmoil what I wasn’t experiencing was chalked up to a Godsend, but nothing about this country ever really hit me until about a year or so ago.

It was when I looked at my grandmother, suddenly with new eyes, after attending a family reunion where I met relations in their seventh and eighth decades that it really hit me: Jim Crow was real. It wasn’t just some words in a textbook or a documentary I saw on TV. Here was living proof that until the 1960s, racism, bigotry and anti-Semitism was an accepted mindset in America. That these octogenarians spent the majority of their lives staring at “whites only” signs, reading (and maybe witnessing) lynchings, unable to walk into a shopping center or restaurant, and do many other things I and my generation take for granted simply because they were black. I used cackle over the fact that my mom, who was born in 1963, had the word “Negro” on her birth certificate and that twenty-one years later when I was born, it said “African-American”.

And Adrienne and other “color-blind” people have the nerve to denounce that word, a word black Americans had to fight use instead of the word the white majority placed on us, as “racist”? (Even other ethnicities had to fight for their own self-given label: prior to the ’60s Asian-Americans had the word “Oriental” and who knows what Hispanic-Americans were labeled before 1980 [Latino was coined in 1997].)

“Getting over it” and desiring a “color-blind” society does no-one any favors because of what this country was founded upon. All we should be doing is striving together, to appreciate differences without stereotypes or the extremely troubling existence of colonialist attitudes towards non-whites.

And if you didn’t know (as I didn’t until just now), the U.S. Mint has issued a commemorative $1 coin to honor the Little Rock Nine. Pretty cool.