[Mb-civic] A march on too much television - Derrick Z. Jackson - Boston Globe Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

A march on too much television

By Derrick Z. Jackson, Globe Columnist  |  November 2, 2005

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.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2005/11/02/a_march_on_too_much_television/
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