Fair Game?
Posted by amend73 on February 4, 2010
This weekend, I saw a documentary on TVOne called Fair Game?. Produced by Mario Van Peebles, it featured a host of Black men in all fields of study, work, including community workers and leaders. This documentary was moving because it attempted to answer the question, have things really changed much for the Black man since the election of Pres. Obama?
It yielded daunting results specifically in the areas of education, mental health, economics, and others. According to this documentary, the situation for young Black men has actually gotten worse compared to 10-15 years ago. The fact is a disproportionate rate of them are stressed out, suicidal, uneducated, incarcerated, and hopeless. The grim “truth” is, for the average Black male things are not faring well at all. Not to mention the disparaging images and stories that are constantly fed to us by the media. Notwithstanding, there have been substantial progress made in the Black community and for African-Americans in the US as a whole.
Surely, there are exceptions to these findings and those exceptions are as a result of the sheer mental and physical fortitude of those who do well, but also because in some capacity, those who do succeed have the necessary opportunities, support, and mentoring/fathering/authority figures that the others lack. Which brings me to my point which this documentary confirms. All of the necessary opportunities and support systems have to be in place in order for these young people to succeed. Unfortunately, there are various of reasons why these things do not exist, which I won’t get into right now, so this outcome is not surprising.
To view the documentary go to: http://www.tvoneonline.com/shows/show.asp?sid=1081&id=2575
