The Tipping Point
“You know, Laurel, this morning I was looking to watch the news on TV, and I couldn’t find anything but Black news reporters or Black people being interviewed. And I do mean Black, not light-skinned at all. Yet I’d flipped through five different channels!” My elderly mother looked at me over the top of her reading glasses, her faded green eyes clearly distressed.
“Mama, that’s disturbing. What did you end up watching?” I handed her the cup of instant coffee she drinks every morning. No sugar, just creamer.
She stirred the coffee thoughtfully for a moment. “Well, sweetheart, I just turned the TV off. What could they have to say that would be interesting to someone like me?”
What indeed?
I didn’t think for a moment that the mainstream media news shows gave anything resembling a flying leap about who an ancient White woman wanted to watch read his or her TelePrompTer script. Far from it. After all, this demographic isn’t exactly the popular 18-49 crowd. The aging of the White population has made them seem irrelevant to the producers of our media buffet. You want to become invisible? Get old. It’s a sure way to do it. No cape or incantation involved.
It’s as if we’ve reached some kind of a tipping point in what kind of people will be presented in the media. Not just TV, but print media as well. Because of the changing demographics of the younger populace, fueled by the simple fecundity of Hispanic and Black populations relative to the lack of fertility shown by the White population, the editors and publishers of all sorts of publications are choosing the public face they will present by reflecting the younger faces they lust to sell to.
And it isn’t just the TV news anchors whose skin colors and demeanors have changed. I was paging through one of the slickly produced professional journals I receive each month from one teaching organization or another, when I noticed something new and different about the editorial content.
There were no White children shown in any of the photographs illustrating the articles in the magazine. None. Zero. Zip. Nada.
There were a few White kids in an advertisement or two, but not one single White kid in any editorial photo.
There were Latinos galore and Blacks scattered through various classroom environments. One little guy even had his short, crimped curls carved into patterns that seemed to echo the convolutions of the human brain, that latter item being what the boy will really need in the classroom. Perhaps he thought if he carved his hair that way, the brain would follow?
When Whites were shown in photos, they were middle-aged, worn-looking teachers and administrators. The younger teachers shown were ethnic, save for a few.
Leafing through the pages, one might think NO White children attended government schools.
I know some do attend, but where were they in the pages of this journal? Did the editor even notice what he or she had done? Was it a knee-jerk decision to put these particular photographs where they were? Or was this a planned transition to the new face of government schooling in America?
It seems so convenient, so designed, to have the news anchors darkening as if dipped in cold tea, to have only the darker kids pictured in the photos in the magazines. The flyers for the local department store sales feature interracial couples, some Black and Hispanic, some Black and White.
I fear we’ve reached a tipping point.
I fear that White is no longer the face of America.
I fear becoming invisible, irrelevant.
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