Urban Entertainment Needs to Change Its Tactics
- Posted by: BenjaminNugent , Ted McGrath
- on October 3, 2007 at 5:22 pm
BET’s new show We Got to Do Better airs candid footage of poor people doing stupid things. The majority of the poor people are black. In the pilot episode, a girl in leather shorts freak-dances until she falls off a stage, backward, and keeps on freaking upon landing until, in a moment of inspiration, she climbs a decorative column of palm fronds and humps it until a frond snaps beneath her weight, and she goes to the ground a second time, still frond-humping. A dealer sucker punches an addict. Girls pull on each other’s hair and clothing while a spectator modestly reminds them they’re fighting over a guy who is in prison. Then there are the “Street Walkin’” segments, in which people on the street are asked who Barack Obama is, and wonder aloud if he is the president of the NAACP. Between clips, the host, Charlie Murphy, enjoins the audience to better itself with literature rather than just watching television. He also explains the reason to watch: “We want you to think of this show as a little tough love for America.”
The creator of We Got to Do Better is Jam Donaldson, a black woman. In 2004, while still a law student at Georgetown, she launched a website called Hot Ghetto Mess that collected images of dubious behavior among the urban poor. It eventually came to draw millions of hits. This year BET brought it to television—changing the name to We Got to Do Better when Home Depot and State Farm pulled ads—and gave Donaldson the sole writing credit. Her job is to write monologues that ennoble the enterprise. Within the first two minutes, it’s evident that Donaldson’s calling is the law; after a sequence of freak-dancers sustaining injuries, Murphy is obliged to speak the line “Have those folks ever heard of Alvin Ailey?”
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| American entertainment has long trafficked in negative images of black people. |
But because the show is so obvious in the way it tries to win over its audience and defuse controversy, We Got to Do Better is instructive. It lays bare the mechanics of a formula followed more gracefully by many of the shows, movies, and songs we call “urban.” The formula is:
1. Minstrelsy.
2. An assertion that what is shown is of documentary authenticity: “realer than real,” “the black man’s CNN,” “all about reality,” etc.
3. A reminder that “the reason we have brought you this programming is so that you might learn by negative example, and be inspired to do better,” not, as it might initially appear, so that you might feel better about yourself in comparison to others.
This is pure speculation, but could it be that one reason the public finds, say, Diddy compelling is that he’s so good at following the Formula? When he produced an MTV “documentary” about his own preparations for running the New York City Marathon, the final cut emphasized both the amount of money he raised for charity and his own (clearly staged but presented as authentic) inability to cut fried chicken out of his diet during training. What a one-two punch of self-aggrandizement and self-degradation. The idea in Get Rich or Die Tryin’, the movie starring 50 Cent (written by Terence Winter, an extremely able Sopranos veteran), is that 50 is honest about the daily routine on the street, and inspires us to rise above our circumstances. One wonders: having been given this official reason to like 50 Cent, do people feel more free than usual to smile at how many times he has been shot and how he says he’s going to kill his competitors? In both of these cases, the ruse is so effective because the perpetrators seem to halfway believe it themselves.
American entertainment has long trafficked in negative images of black people. But plain old negative images of black people aren’t as much fun as the Formula. There’s nothing quite like the traditional pleasures of minstrelsy mixed with the euphoria of making a virtuous consumer choice. That’s what makes the Formula so dangerous. Donaldson is well educated enough to grasp this, I suspect, and that may be one of the reasons her monologues are so awkward. Her writing reeks of a guilty conscience. It would be nice if more urban entertainment suffered the same affliction.
DISCUSSION: 3 Comments
Hot ghetto mess was in fact a mess.
As a young African American male working as a paralegal at the time I can hurtfully recall my outlook ‘in’ bin being filled almost to the brim with Ghetto Mess pics that enraged and humiliated at the same time. What made it worse was that these emails trickled down from one popular legal assistant who in fact was African American.
I once confronted her about these emails after she refused to halt circulation. She insisted that my behavior was in fact offensive and decided to file a complaint against me regarding the responses to said emails.
For the sake of my position, I discontinued my “disgruntled” behavior towards her and simple blocked her entirely. I’ve since petitioned the halt of these emails which proved victorious but I’m in now way satisfied with the response of the majority of my African American co-workers who stamped my condition as one of self hate.
I believe Donaldson to be a walking contradition. She points to other in flaw when in fact she is the flaw within the formaula. A visit from the Drop Squad will work wonders.
Often these sterotypes are so ingrained, that people do it without realising it can be very offensive. Memorial gift
This is a perfect example of how money can and will completely eradicate any sense of cultural pride. It isn’t proprietary to African Americans (why do we make it seem this way?). This is evident across all cultures and races. People will do anything for a buck – even if it means selling out their own. I am assuming, however, that these “poor people doing stupid things” consented to the public display of their behavior. Some people, regardless of culture and race, do not care how they are perceived as long as they have their 15 seconds of fame. But the bottom line is that this is a morality issue. It is unfair to prey upon the uneducated – especially when you know exactly what you are doing.