TV addiction and racial inequality

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Pundits and politicians habitually focus their eager attention on statistical evidence highlighting differences between blacks and whites, suggesting that these dramatic numbers – on crime, education, economic performance, even personal health – provide irrefutable evidence of racism and injustice.

These same establishment experts, however, refuse to address one of the most significant behavioral distinctions – even though addressing this particular imbalance could play a powerful role in closing the racial achievement gaps that continue to plague so many aspects of American society.

A new study confirms a disturbing, long-standing trend: African-Americans watch far more TV than whites. This dubious investment of time brings with it a host of significant and negative consequences. Initiative Media North America, a leading media buyer, just completed a major and detailed scientific study of the viewing habits of African Americans. This report revealed that black households watch a staggering average of 74.4 hours of television per week – a figure that represents 21.5 hours more than all other households. In other words, a typical African American family wastes three more hours on TV every day than do white, Asian or Latino families.

This tendency contributes to a host of pathologies. For instance, recent studies of obesity show an appalling crisis among all young people – but an even more widespread, more serious problem, among blacks. This same analysis by the Centers for Disease Control also shows that heavy TV watchers face a vastly increased risk of obesity.

Concerning school performance, literally hundreds of studies indicate that excessive viewing of television undermines academic success. Professor Edward Gordon of Yale University has spent years analyzing the perplexing inability of black children from even the most successful families (those with reported incomes of more than $75,000 a year) to keep pace with their white counterparts on standardized tests or school success. He recently told the New York Times that one possible explanation for this discrepancy involved the much heavier television viewing among even upper middle class black families.

Concerning the higher rates of arrest and incarceration for African Americans, the conventional wisdom suggests that racial discrimination accounts for all of the difference. A massive new 17-year study at Columbia University Medical School, however, shows that among males who watch "significant" amounts of television, the likelihood of violent criminality increases between 16 percent and 116 percent. The Columbia study defines "significant" amounts of TV viewing as an hour a day or more – while black children view an average of nearly five hours a day.

These observations do not suggest that racism plays no role in the well-publicized problems of the black community; race-based hostility and negative stereotyping clearly contribute to a host of challenges. But so does the greater rate of television addiction, and the black community can do more to control its own TV viewing than it can to change the deep-seated prejudices of white Americans.

In this arena, the premiere "civil rights" organizations like the NAACP contribute to intensifying the problem rather than solving it. The pressure on the TV networks, and the threats of a national boycott of TV programming, aim to encourage more shows aimed specifically at African Americans, so they can watch even more of the tube than they do now. The NAACP, in other words, pushes an agenda that would only exacerbate overindulgence in TV by the black community. Ironically, the threatened television boycott might benefit the black community by reducing the amount of time spent watching the tube, not because it changed the racial composition of characters on network series.

One of the reasons that the mandarins of the mainstream media refuse to touch this issue involves their inability to blame the TV-viewing gap on racism. Even if you assume that the major networks under-represent and insult African Americans, you can't escape the fact that black households already watch more television than any other ethnic group in America. It's possible to blame innumerable black hardships on the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow, but no one can argue that the Ku Klux Klan forces African American households to turn on the television set for 21 hours a week more than their white neighbors.

The good news about this situation is that the power for constructive change lies entirely in the hands of blacks themselves. Cutting back on TV doesn't require legislation or a new bureaucracy or a seismic alteration of white attitudes. But it does demand a recognition that African Americans make some contributions to their own difficulties, and can therefore make immediate contributions to progress. Part of that progress might come from black leaders who spend less time insisting on more black people on television and instead agitate and organize for less television in the lives of black people.

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