Cable News, Soledad OBrien and the Construction of Diversity

Enku MC Ide GWS 600 Fall, 2010 Dr. Karen Tice

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The central argument of this essay is that CNN anchor Soledad OBrien serves (especially in her self-framing) the neoliberal project of educating communities of color into accepting neoliberal assumptions, especially in emphasizing American exceptionalism, overcoming (individualized) prejudice and discrimination, and championing getting ahead. By focusing on real stories, cable news channels may be particularly well-suited to legitimizing these claims. Launched in 1980, the early years of the neoliberal state, CNN was the first allnews cable channel and the first channel with 24 hour news coverage. According to CNNs

parent company, Turner industries, The people who represent our brands embody the broadest possible range of age, gender, sexual orientation, race and ethnicity, mirroring the diversity of the viewers we serve and the markets in which we operate (Turner-About-Diversity). Hasinoff has noted that neoliberal imputes toward diversity in television tends to promote a post-race rhetoric that all citizens are (now) equal under the free market (2008: 328). In setting the parameters for how race is understood, corporate mass media is an (at times overt and at times subtle) educational tool (ibid. 330). News channels expressly function to educate viewers about current events. Their more elusive instruction is primarily symbolic, via what bodies are shown (and how), framing how objective stories are received. Television has long been seen as an educational tool in this way. For example, Nguyen describes how her Korean immigrant family learned about normal American lives through sitcoms (2009: 68). Similarly, bell hooks says that television promotes the myth of a classless society through representing the rich as heroic (2000: 71). I believe that the neoliberal impulse has changed this characterization, however. No longer are the rich heroic. While they are still to be respected and emulated, they are now normalized and within reach.

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This essay is informed by specific data. This is primarily excerpts posted on cnn.com from Ms. OBriens newly-released autobiographical book, The Next Big Story. Throughout this essay, all quotes by OBrien came from this work. I have also collected data from essays written by my Sociology 101 students in response to OBriens November 3 presentation given at UK. While a further exploration of OBriens work could prove useful in developing this theme, I hear focus on autobiographical accounts both written by OBrien and as understood by undergraduate students. As an anchor of Afro-Cuban and Anglo-Australian heritage, Ms. OBriens light skin, straight brown hair and exotic name serves the neoliberal ideal of promoting mixed-race womenas an erotic amalgam that has wide market appeal (Hasinoff 2008: 330, 335). According to Hasinoff: if the representation is brown but not too brown it has the potential of appealing to all, because it could be tanned white, everything in between, and light blackmarketable lighter skinned mixed-race women can be positioned to stand in for all racial differences. (Emphasis added) (ibid. 330) OBriens ambiguous ethnicity is central to legitimating the work for which she is most wellknown. Her in America series is devoted to untold stories in underrepresented communities. The first and best-known feature of this series is the six-hour Black in America mini-series. OBrien has also produced special programming on Latinos in America where viewers are asked to rediscover what it means to be American, and Gay in America. This final series was added after pressure from LGBT organizations, but has since been criticized for focusing on a rich, white gay couple who paid $150,000 to have a surrogate child. The ambiguity of OBriens ethnicity expressed through a safely attractive posture, style and Standard American English (SAE) self-presentation, as well as her full embrace of meritocratic ideology, positions the anchor as a pluralistically-assimilationist ideal to be held up
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for all people of color. As a multi-ethnic individual (both Afro-Latina and white) she is authorized to speak on behalf of these communities of color for consumption both within the communities and to white audiences. OBrien reflects in her book that, in relation to Black in America, there was concern from some Black people that she was not part of the Black community. In response, she asserts her Blackness not in relation to others or to collective struggle, but by reference to individual acts of prejudice, always disappearing into her childhood, when she suffered an afro in elementary school. I first thought of Soledad OBriens relation to neoliberalism while reading reaction papers from my Sociology 101 students. As a Sociology teacher, my main goal is teaching students to recognize the influence of social structures on their lives and in their society. Extra credit opportunities try to persuade these mainly white and self-identifying middle class students to attend talks where they can hear about work that highlights the effects of social structure. For example, students have been given the opportunity to hear Michelle Alexander speak on mass incarceration in the Black community. I also extended the opportunity to hear Ms. OBrien speak on diversity. This presentation was well-received on campus, with the MLK Center on campus filming all six hours of her Black in America special coverage and reports of a nearly full Singletary Auditorium which seats over 1,400 patrons. In reviewing my students response papers, I noticed themes of meritocracy, competition, overcoming, and ethnic pride that. When viewed through a neoliberal lens, these are ideological antitheses to the sociological understandings I try to foster in my students. For example, Ms. OBrien praised super teachers at one charter school in New York (they wake up at 4:30 every morning to make sure all their students go to school) and encouraged competitive educational programs that pay students for achievement. According to one of my students, Ms.
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OBrien pointed out that students needed to compete to succeed because in our society we need to compete to get where we want. Paradoxically, another student noted her description of education as the great equalizer that makes us great gives us the ability to succeed and can place us on an even playing field. Even more clearly than Ms. OBriens views on education, her personal story of overcoming racism is key to her neoliberal success story. OBrien, who went to Harvard along with her six siblings, worked her way up according to one student. Her early difficulties with diversity taught her that anything is possible if you work at it, no matter where you come from or what race you are if you have enough commitment to reaching your goals. Despite this view, OBrien assured students that embracing your [ethnic] identity is important to succeed at life. Hasinoff notes that ethnic pride is important in supporting happily superficial neoliberal version of race where one can proudly sell their racial identity (2008: 335). This version of ethnic and racial pride is especially important for corporate spokespersons for people of color. In promoting neoliberal, highly individualized, a-historic accounts of racialization, famous people of color serve as the authentic voice. (Joseph 2009: 249) While lauding an embrace of ethnic identity, this news personality also devotes space in her book to discussing how she has been impacted by racism, from both white and Black people. This is always explained as individual acts. In both her autobiographical excerpt and my students responses, the only criticism of structural racism is given in relation to her parents, neatly tucked away in the past. As an interracial couple, it was illegal for them to marry in Maryland where they lived, but they overcame this barrier. This story is clearly instrumental in forming Ms. OBriens sense of getting ahead. In her memoir, she notes that her white father and fashionable Black mother
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were approached by a lawyer hoping they would serve as a challenge to racist anti-miscegenation laws in Maryland. They turned him down, choosing to get married in Washington, DC, where it was legal. She describes their response: They didnt want to be part of a legal case that would stop their forward motion. An individual response over a collective challenge to structural racism is then woven through Ms. OBriens story. Individualization and personal responsibility as opposed to collective empowerment are seen as central elements to neoliberal discourse (Hasinoff 2008: 329). In her life, recounted incidents of racism repeatedly take the form of individual offensive statements, upholding the attitude of whites as the bedrock of racism under neoliberal discourse (Joseph 2009: 249). OBriens typical response to such incidents is summed up in her statement, I pursed my lips and kept moving. I had to get to class. Going farther than her parents individualistic challenge to racist laws, OBrien keeps her mouth shut and keeps moving. Noting that she would not stop and confront every injustice OBrien states that she would prove white supremacy wrong by succeeding in her career. Not only is OBrien not the type to dwell on bad things, but she has no patience for people who do. Within neoliberalism, the oppressed are to move on and abandon a critique of structural inequality (Joseph 2009: 248). In OBriens multiculturalism, racism is evidenced in statements by both white and Black people. In her book, OBrien recounts a meeting where Jesse Jackson told her she didnt count as a Black reporter. Noting that she is proud of the black I am, OBrien reflects that skin color matters so much to black people with no reflection on the color caste system initiated under slavery and upheld in the media, from which she has benefitted. Her portrayal of Rev. Jackson is indicative of her feelings on this matter. When he discusses with her the lack of Black anchors on CNN, OBrien describes him as angry, in a rage and with a strong Southern accent,
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casting him as the other to her collected, SAE presentation. She seems uncomfortable with this emotionality, which was likely uncommon in the classic and well-off Long Island suburb where she was raised. According to Lisa Chavez, middle class people are socialized to see such emotionality as a working-class way of acting out that will not help (2009 128). In distancing herself from this Black leader, OBrien is expresses this socialization, informing how she acts and how she instructs other oppressed people to respond to their oppression. In an especially violent statement from an un-named Black critic of her work, OBrien is called biracial whore for the white mans media. Her response is to laugh off this misogynist racially charged statement. Later in her book she seems to take this criticism more seriously. She explains that some Black people want to see her as white so that the social problems she shows in Black in America can be discounted as an outside critique putting people down. As a news anchor, OBrien does not engage neoliberal discourse as directly as many performers in other genres. While neoliberal (post-) race discourse is salient in her work, gender is never directly discussed. This invisibility of gender gives the message that, while she has overcome others racist attitudes, gender inequality is not even worth addressing. She is post-feminist in the sense that gender plays no role in her self-assessment. When offended by a white male shopkeeper as a child, she recounts her and her sisters indignant response, but gender plays no role. These stories of a hard past which would, it seems, be unimaginable in OBriens modern world, which serves to enforce post-race and American exceptionalism. She (and we) has moved on, and today can truly be anyone she wants to be. A major theme in OBriens memoir is American exceptionalism that is part of a postrace discourse. According to Ms. OBrien: One of the great things about this country is that we get to have a cumulative past. It doesn't matter when or how you come here, the past of this country and its principles
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belong to you, good and bad. It's what makes America special. It doesn't matter how you look or speak, you get to be an American because you're here. In recounting the history of her Long Island town, OBrien describes how a white man won the town from the Nesaquake who have all but vanished. This is not problematic because the names of our ancestors [The Nesaquake] have been emblazoned on our towns, and they lived on in our public schools, where we learn to memorialize our collective roots. The lesson here is firmly established. Neoliberal racial visibility requires a profound blindness to current and historical racial injustices (Hasinoff 2008: 326). To succeed in our land of possibility and opportunity, one must look forward, forgetting injustices including slavery and genocide. One critique of her role in presenting Black in America was that OBrien might not get it, because she is not a part of the Black community. Recognizing this critique, OBrien falls short of any analysis of what it means to be a member of a community. She states that Black is not a credential; it's not even a skin color. African American culture is so much more than that, although she does not go on to say what that so much more entails. Her retort is that she is secure in her identity. In asserting her Blackness, OBrien casts herself as a member of the Black Bourgeoisie, mediating between the black masses and the whites who are really in charge (hooks: 2000: 91). This role is implied in the attack on her as a whore for the white mans media related to her work in highlighting underrepresented communities in her Black in America series. This series centers on an upper-middle-class Black family. Interspersed with stories of financial struggle and imprisonment, the well-off family is held up as the ideal to which others have failed to reach. As Black is often coded as poor and criminal in American media, the Black bourgeoisie truly is underrepresented in much media. When they are represented, however, this portrayal serves not to shift white cultural understanding of the Black community, but to shame those Black people who have failed to rise in the market system.
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While a more thorough analysis of OBriens work would be necessary to understand how identity politics and neoliberal sensibilities are articulated in the in America series, insight into OBriens self-styling of (post-) race is important in understanding the frame in which these works are created. Individualist impulses to overcome racist attitudes by both Black and white people, as well as a lack of class or gender analysis, serve as neoliberal underpinnings that one can assume would play out in her professional work. Casting herself as a member of the Black (and Latino) Bourgeoisie, despite criticisms from other Black people, OBrien is able to authoritatively tell the stories of these communities through the mass media. It is important to understand the assumptions that go into this work, as the media legitimates particular stories and frames at the expense of others, for both members of these minority communities and others.

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REFERENCES Cable News Network. The Next Big Story By Soledad OBrien. November 11, 2010. Retrieved November 12, 2010 (http://www-cgi.cnn.com/2010/LIVING/11/11/inam.soledad.excerpt2/index.html). Chavez, Lisa D. In My Mothers House Pp. 117-130 in An Angle of Vision, edited by Lorraine M. Lpez. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press Hasinoff, Amy Adele. Fashioning Race for the Free market on Americas Next Top Model. Critical Studies in Media Communication (25)3: 324 - 343 hooks, bell. 2000. where we stand: CLASS MATTERS. New York, NY: Routledge Joseph, Ralina L. Tyra Banks is Fat: Reading (Post-) Racism and (Post-) Feminism in the New Millenium. Critical Studies in Media Communication (26)3: 237 - 254 Nguyen, Bich Minh. Laverne & Shirley Days Pp. 66-71 in An Angle of Vision, edited by Lorraine M. Lpez. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press Turner, Inc. Turner-About-Diversity. 2010. Retrieved November 12, 2010 (http://www.turner.com/about/diversity.html)