Race: The Obligatory, Ubiquitous Issue

Ten Ideas That Are Changing Your Life: the March 12, 2012 Time cover story. 

Intriguing title.  Is this a must read for anyone interested in taking control of his or her well-being?   Will we find here information worthy of deep contemplation and life-altering insight?

The magazine issue discusses topics such as our increasing over-dependence on computers for access to basic information, what we can do proactively to improve our ecosystems, and how science is using health-friendly ways to  promote the shelf life of food that reduces waste, and, therefore, helps to feed an increasingly hungry world.

Now, the punch line.  Big idea number five is “Black Irony,” or “People using blackness as a text to comment on and perhaps critique or reconfigure it.” Now there’s a topic deserving top 10 status in the pantheon of life-changing ideas. 

Why would Time include black irony in this particular issue?   Perhaps it is purely a marketing ploy.  The black identity lobby is so relentless and so successful in attracting the attention of the general American population that any money-hungry media manager who fails to exploit it in order to drum-up sales is guilty of malfeasance in office.  Second, a black irony article indicates, ipso facto, the intellectual cachet of the magazine itself, since it demonstrates superlative insight implicit in including a black topic in its “Big Ten.”  (Do I detect a college basketball metaphor?)   And, third, by talking black, Time sucks-in those—white, black, and all in-between shades— whose own identities derive sustenance from the intellectual gravitas and swaggering with-it-ness tethered to black identity issues.

What is it about the Time article that irks me?  

The racial pandering of placing Black Irony in the big ten list is as gloppy as breakfast at Pancake House, but that is rather trivial complaint in the grand scheme of things.  The real tragedy is that the Time article elevates and reinforces the pathetic notion that racial minutia is something about which we All (“Ten Ideas That Are Changing Your Life’) must obsess.  Even when merely framed in terms of the intellectual gymnastics of irony, it is patently absurd to think that race is critical to everyone’s everyday well being, that it demands such an obsessive-compulsive focus.  I can only conclude that race truly is the OCD content of American media psychopathology.

The Time management hierarchy either do not realize or do not care that racial preoccupation is not the solution, it is the problem.  Every year for a minimum of one solid month, they bludgeon us with Martin Luther King, Junior’s admonition to judge people not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.  Next February—Black History Month 2013—the media needs to listen to its own racial propaganda and to spend the remainder of the year heeding MLK’s advice.