CNN weekend anchor Don Lemon is in boiling hot water for some disparaging remarks he made recently regarding black people.
The openly gay Lemon, who also happens to be African-American, caused a stir within the black community when he said on air that a lot of black bias is the fault of black people themselves, who should pull their pants up, stop using the “N” word and stop having children out of wedlock.
Since making the remarks, Lemon has been publicly maligned by a variety of black leaders and celebrities, who took offense to his belief that blacks are themselves responsible for any racial bias against them.
In an open letter to Lemon on The Huffington Post, entertainment mogul Russell Simmons said:
I respect your courage on many other issues, but I can’t accept that you would single out black teenagers as the cause of their own demise because they don’t speak the King’s English or wear belts around their waistbands.
If you want to tell the rest of America this weekend when you go back on CNN how we fix black America, tell them to re-start the “War on Poverty.” Tell them to end the failed “War on Drugs” that has cost this nation over one trillion dollars and unjustly incarcerated a generation of black men. Tell them to support the President’s plan for universal Pre-K, so no child enters elementary school having to play catch up with the other children who are fortunate enough to go to pre-school. Tell them make college affordable and obtainable for young students who come from low-income families. Tell them that the right to a healthy life should be universal and not just for the fortunate few. And lastly, tell them that young black men and women don’t just need “role models” or “mentors,” they need “sponsors” who are willing to offer them a job.
In another Huffington Post article, 24-year-old writer Antwaun Sargent said this:
I have watched the Don Lemon CNN No Talking Points, segment over and over again. I was looking for some truth in his five suggestions to young black men. Don Lemon said, we should pull up our pants, stop using the n-word, stop littering, finish school, and not have children out of wedlock.
I have by Don Lemon’s estimation done all the right things. I am a 24 year old black man. I don’t sag my pants. I went to Georgetown from the Cabrini-Green Housing projects and then on to get a Masters degree, and recently just finished teaching for two years in an under resourced community in Brooklyn. I don’t litter, and I don’t have any children. But I do feel alienated by Don Lemon’s comments. I feel alienated by his comments because they translate into a form of media violence, that Black men know all too well.
Don Lemon’s comments are reminiscent of the media violence that has played out across news broadcast with reports that have called young black men crack babies, predators, dropouts, absentee fathers, and thugs. Reports that have captured the American imagination, and created moral panic. Reports that lead most of America to believe that the “scene of the crime” was not in historical processes and institutions located in American history but in black neighborhoods with black men. These reports and the media figures that delivered them have sought to construct the Black male identity for the large part of the last 40 years. It is a construction that makes black men suspicious because the media has pathologized the way we talk, act, and dress.
Was Don Lemon correct that if African-Americans took more responsibility for their image, there may be less bias, or was he completely out of line for the thought that perhaps blacks give “permission” for racial bias through their own actions?
