Tell us less: That seems to be the message that listeners have sent to NPR executives. “Tell Me More,” the daily public-radio newscast on racial issues and diversity, has finally been canceled after seven years.
The show was never able to get more than a million listeners — less than a quarter of the audience for the talk show “Fresh Air” and less than a twelfth of that for the evening newscast “All Things Considered.”
Some would say this is no surprise, given that almost 90 percent of NPR’s audience is white.
Of course, maybe NPR wasn’t looking to reach blacks and Hispanics with its dialogue about race, but also whites.
As an executive producer of the show explained a few years ago, “It’s really a tricky thing. We want to have conversations that people of color would want to hear, but we also want to create opportunities for other people to hear about these issues.”
This echoes the recent wail of New York Times columnist Charles Blow about our “endlessly ached-for, perpetually stalled ‘national conversation on race’ that many believe is needed but neglected.”
Hey, folks: Maybe audiences, black and white, have just gotten tired of these conversations.
Maybe they’re done with national dialogue on race. Bill Clinton’s “One America Initiative,” all of the analysis of Barack Obama’s life, all of the panels, the cable talk shows, the harangues by Al Sharpton, the psychoanalysis of Donald Sterling — what if America has no appetite for this anymore?
A recent MTV survey found that 73 percent of millennials “believe never considering race would improve society” and “68 percent believe focusing on race prevents society from becoming colorblind.”
And the vast majority (84 percent) of these young people say their families taught them that people should be treated the same regardless of race. Yet only 37 percent say they were brought up in families that talked about race.
A writer for Slate, deeply upset by these results, explained that millennials misunderstand racism.
It’s not about the “different treatment” of some groups, says Jamelle Bouie, but about “white supremacy.” Bouie concludes: “As such, their views on racism . . . are muddled and confused . . . A generation that hates racism but chooses colorblindness is a generation that, through its neglect, comes to perpetuate it.”
The idea that millennials will perpetuate racism via colorblindness is, of course, idiotic on many levels. Their colorblindness, for instance, has led to unprecedented rates of interracial marriage.
Less than 7 percent of newly married couples reported marrying outside their race or ethnicity in 1980; the figure jumped to almost 15 percent in 2008, according to Pew.
But our country’s media elites are still stuck on a liberal baby boomer racial narrative. Which brings us to this month’s Atlantic cover story, “The Case for Reparations.” The author, Ta-Nehisi Coates, has been called the “single best writer on the subject of race in the United States,” and this is the best idea he can come up with?
Coates goes through “250 years of slavery, 90 years of Jim Crow, 60 years of separate but equal, and 35 years of racist housing policy” to conclude that we need reparations — “more than recompense for past injustices — more than a handout, a payoff, hush money or a reluctant bribe. What I’m talking about is a national reckoning that would lead to spiritual renewal.”
By extending his argument about black oppression to the present day — the subprime-mortgage crisis was really a racist plot — he can charge people who arrived in this country last week with having to pay up.
Coates offers nothing new here, not even a figure for these reparations. (“Perhaps no number can fully capture the multi-century plunder of black people in America. Perhaps the number is so large that it can’t be imagined, let alone calculated and dispensed.”)
He has no measure of how to determine who would get compensated. (The one-drop rule, perhaps?)
And he has no evidence that simply sending checks to black people will help them improve their situation. Fifty years after we launched the War on Poverty, with all of its government redistribution, the wealth gap between blacks and whites is larger than it was before.
For all the thousands of words spilled on the tired idea of reparations, though, Coates isn’t willing to get into any specifics.
He wants us to pass HR-40, a bill that has been introduced by Rep. John Conyers every year for the past quarter-century, to launch a commission to study the lingering effects of slavery and possible remedies for it.
That’s the progress achieved in all these decades of dialogue? Please don’t tell me more.