Activists Must See the Bigger Picture in NAACP-TV Agreement

Poor Kweisi Mfume. In July the NAACP president at the group's annual conference threatened the network TV executives with boycotts and protests for their blatant ethnic cleansing of minorities from TV shows and their pathetic hiring record of minorities. The reaction was swift and brutal. First the TV executives accused Mfume of meddling in their business. Next black activists hammered him for wasting time on an industry they see as a hopeless wasteland of hype and hustle totally irrelevant to African-Americans.

They demanded that the NAACP spend its time and energy fighting against job discrimination, rotten public schools, police brutality, hate crime violence, criminal justice system abuses, and the crime and drug plague in black communities. Then some black actors claimed that the NAACP protests made TV executives gun shy about hiring them for fear that if they cast them in any roles at all they'd be accused of promoting racial stereotypes.

At the same time Mfume was being slammed by blacks and TV executives he got solid support from Asian, Latino, and Native-Americans activists who were waging their own battle for inclusion in Hollywood. They trusted him to carry the torch for them and to cut a deal with TV executives that would get them more jobs in the TV industry. It appears that Mfume did just that. NBC agreed to add a minority writer to each of its second season shows, double its purchases from minority vendors, and hire more minorities at all levels of its operations up to and including more executives. ABC, CBS, and the Fox network promised to come up with a similar plan for minority hiring.

Yet at the moment of triumph Mfume is now under blistering assault from Latino, Native-American and Asian activists who say that he double-crossed them by signing the deal with the TV executives without them. Despite Mfume's protest that the deal will result in more jobs for all minorities, they fear that blacks will still be the prime recipients of whatever goodies Hollywood chooses to bestow.

While their complaints seem like a bad case of identity politics gone awry, Mfume's critics have good reason to be concerned. According to figures compiled by the NAACP and industry sources, African-American, Latinos, Native-Americans and Asians comprise less than 5 percent of the writers and directors currently working on network TV shows. And the four groups taken together make up less than 15 percent of the members of the Screen Actors Guild. However as sorry as these figures are for minorities in the TV industry, blacks are still far more represented in the industry than Latinos, Asians, and Native-Americans.

And this was why they are so mad at Mfume. They fear that the TV executives will interpret "minority" hiring to mean only hiring more blacks. This would leave them even further out in the cold. The action by Mfume and TV executives also feeds their deep suspicion and resentment that TV executives who are mostly rich, white males in the East are mired deep in a time warp and still define the racial struggle in America exclusively in black and white terms.

If indeed as the activists claim Mfume was negotiating on their behalf he can and should be criticized for not consulting with them and inviting them to the signing table. But they badly shoot themselves in the foot if their ethnic lens are so horribly blurred that they don't see the bigger picture. The reason the issue of minority exclusion in Hollywood became the explosive national issue it did is not because of NAACP racial favoritism but because of the TV executives shameful history of minority exclusion. Not one of the twenty six new comedies and dramas that debuted on CBS, NBC, ABC, and Fox last Fall had an African-American, Latino or Asian-American character in a feature role. And only a paltry number of the new shows feature minorities in support roles.

Even after a season of boycott threats and protests by the NAACP and Latino activists the industry remains virtually lily-white. The deal also forced TV executives who are used to talking and listening to no one but themselves and their gargantuan corporate advertisers to a near open confession that they deliberately crafted a special brand of media apartheid. But the danger of carrying identity politics to the extreme is that the TV executives could use the bad public odor from the ethnic infighting as an excuse to weasel out of their pledge to hire more minorities.

Even if they don't backslide, given their slippery track record when it comes to minorities, Mfume, Latino, Asian, and Native-American activists must still put aside their ethnic identity politics long enough to work together to make sure the TV executives quickly fulfill their pledge. This is the bigger picture that the NAACP and its minority critics must see.

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