A three-way failure.

While the corpses of small children an babies, lashed to their mothers' bodies, wash up on the shores of Lake Victoria, the commentators of America sit giggling over a White House aide's misuse of a Government helicopter. While China continues to amass an appalling human-rights record, John McLaughlin describes granting it "most favored nation" status as "the most enlightened move Clinton has made." And while Clinton is floating a "welfare reform" proposal straight out of Oliver Twist, the Paula Jones case is put forward as the most important "woman's issue" story of the day.

The focus on so-called private morality, on individual lapses and peccadilloes, on image over substance, and on misadventures inside the Beltway continues unabated in punditland, while various disasters don't even merit a comment. And this isn't just "giving the people what they [allegedly] want"--titillation over analysis, domestic news over foreign. There is a racism here so thorough, so naturalized, and so subtle, that it takes work to recognize it. It is a racism that justifies moral resignation, justifies turning our backs and applauding cruel, heartless policy moves at home and abroad.

The same few weeks that the newspapers described, in stomach-turning detail, the butchery in Rwanda and terrorism in Haiti, the McLaughlin Group, when not devoting two-thirds of its show to Paula Jones or to predicting the outcome of the next elections, was insisting that disclosures in Haldeman's diaries about Nixon's racist, anti-Semitic, paranoiac ravings were of no historical importance.

Over on Inside Washington, the discussion soared to the stratosphere of speculation: What kind of a Supreme Court justice would Stephen Breyer really be? Would Dan Rostenkowski cop a plea? Would Hillary ever run for President? Anyone could discuss these issues, since the correct response, at the time, was "Who knows?" The self-indulgent, white-centered frivolity of these topics is revolting in the face of those photos from Lake Victoria.

Most of us know little or nothing about Rwanda; I'm sure the pundits are no exception. And with Clinton dismissing the crisis as outside the American national interest, why bother? It took more than a month for the news media to stop dismissing the conflict as tribal warfare and to acknowledge that there were actually political and economic reasons for the bloodshed. But with the sensationalized obsession with the carnage--and there is hideous carnage--without any more in-depth analysis, the media legitimate Americans' sense that with people like these (you know: savages), nothing can be done.

Let's not forget that the only time most black African nations make the headlines is when there's a natural or political disaster of this magnitude. I have no idea what the United States should do about Rwanda, but when the choices laid out are (a) nothing, or (b) military intervention--the same choice we're being given for Haiti--we have a failure of imagination, a failure of information, and a failure of morality. And it is a failure excused by unspoken but powerful notions of white supremacy.

Over here in America, we're civilized. We don't skewer black babies on spears. We just let the ones born to poor mothers live in cordoned off, domestic war zones. And soon it will get worse. There was not a peep in punditland about Clinton's welfare proposal, apparently put together over the protests of Donna Shalala, church workers, activists, and others. To finance the termination of "welfare as we know it," the Administration will cut billions from existing programs that assist elderly immigrants, prevent homelessness, and subsidize lunches at day-care centers. Environmental cleanup money has also been earmarked. Clinton rejected raising money by, say, increasing the taxes on gambling establishments or other fat cats.

Clinton will also allow states to deny additional money to mothers on welfare if they have more children. (I didn't notice anything about extending free birth control, medical attention, and abortions to these same women.) And what if these mothers can't feed their babies? Send them to orphanages, urges Bill Bennett and others. ("After all," you can almost hear them saying under their breath, "they don't have the same regard for human life that we do.") The same set of assumptions is operating here, that dark people are beyond the pale, that they can't help but cannibalize their own kind, and that the best thing is to cut them loose.

In this environment, it is not surprising that the talk shows ignored the fiftieth anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (or the fact that, as The Nation pointed out, the Justice Department has not filed a desegregation suit since 1980). This Week with David Brinkley gave the topic a minute or two. Sam Donaldson--who seems lately to have gotten some religion--was a voice in the wilderness, denouncing the ongoing segregation in America and asserting that we aren't making progress at all, but "we're going backwards."

It has become a cliche among some that race relations in this country are at a new nadir. Less discussed is how the media's treatment of black Africa as, still, a "dark continent" where nothing happens except coups, massacres, famines, disease, and drought justifies racist foreign and domestic policies. For when we ignore and dehumanize black people from Africa, it's much easier to ignore and dehumanize them here.

In the case of Bosnia, and now Haiti, Clinton has been bashed (and rightly so) for his indecisiveness, for wavering, for talking big and turning tail. But what we're seeing is much more than indecision; it's the moral collapse of American policies at home and abroad. Conducting foreign policy in the post-cold War world is extremely difficult, but the unholy alliance between American ignorance and white people's sense of racial entitlement has also bankrupted these policies.

Dismissing Africa isn't just isolationist; it's corrupt and corrupting. And when we have white mothers unable to think of other mothers, black mothers, in the next town or the next neighborhood as sisters who need help, we see how numb our ignorance and our racism have made us.

Susan Douglas, who appears in this space every month, is the author of "Where the Girls Are: Growing Up Female with the Mass Media," recently published by Time Books.