The framing of race.

The O.J. verdict, Louis Farrakhan on the cover of Newsweek, the Million man March, talk show after talk show devoted to Colin Powell's possible run for the Presidency: no doubt about it, race relations in America--at least those between blacks and whites--was the story in October. Getting the mainstream media to pay attention to race (although look what it takes!) is welcome-sort of. Because when we see how these stories were framed, we see the sorry perpetuation of white vanities about black culpability and white innocence that helped get us in this mess in the first place.

We also see the role the media play in fanning mutual mistrust and resentment by sensationalizing racism and placing African-American men on a spectrum of good (Powell) and evil (Farrakhan, O.J., the Simpson jury). When we finally got to see a few of the hundreds of thousands of black men in the mid-range of this spectrum, the sound bites selected for us to hear were used to soothe the consciences of white America and excuse institutional racism.

First, the Simpson jury. Yes, the verdict produced different reactions based on race that we cannot ignore. But in playing that footage from Howard University Law School over and over, in which the black students cheered while white students sat in stunned silence, the news media neglected other images, like those of white male jocks also cheering, in a way I found much more chilling.

Let's not forget that approximately one-third of whites agreed with the verdict, and one-fourth of blacks didn't. Even more important--and something television cameras are notoriously incapable of capturing--was the ambivalence many Americans, black and white, felt in the wake of the verdict, disgusted with both the prosecution and the defense.

Worst of all, the race frame obliterated the critically important gender issues involved, a disgrace given that October was "domestic-violence-awareness month" and that we live in a country in which only 1 percent of those charged with domestic violence ever do any time.

The verdict set the stage for media reaction to Louis Farrakhan, who unleashed a level of hysterical commentary among conservative white pundits that also reveals why race relations remain so miserable in our country. Farrakhan's deliberately incendiary remarks about Jews and Susan Douglas teaches at Hampshire College. Her column appears in this space every month. white supremacy have been widely circulated and rightly denounced. But does anyone seriously believe that he would have gotten the media attention he has without them? Have his searing and often all-too-accurate analyses of institutional racism gotten the same coverage?

One of the worst effects of his extremist remarks is that they have given too many white pundits permission to vent their racist anxieties in the name, ironically, of fighting bigotry. The boys on The McLaughlin Group gave a fine display of this, and I found it especially entertaining to run my tapes of these shows on fast forward with no sound and just focus on the body language--the lunging, arm waving, and almost canine facial expressions Farrakhan can evoke in someone like Fred Barnes. Frothing at the mouth over this dark demon against whom whiteness is elevated as rational, fair, good, and pure, Barnes pronounced Farrakhan's role in organizing the Million Man March as "an incredibly alarming development." He was especially upset that the "leading anti-Semite and separatist in this country" (so much for the skinheads or the Aryan Nation) has so many "limousines and fancy houses." Uh-oh, an uppity you-know-what assuming the privileges of white Republicans--how dare he!

John McLaughlin, equally agitated over Farrakhan's desire "to become the President of Black America," asked whether the Million Man marchers were "reaching out to white America." "No, no, not at all," asserted white millionaire Mort Zuckerman, who pointed out that he did attend the march--the one in 1963, that is. Continuing to speak for all African Americans, Zuckerman insisted the march was "a disaster for the black community." It's hard to say what's more ignorant: positing a monolithic black community, or Mort Zuckerman presuming to speak for it.

Coverage of the march itself was more contradictory. On the one Chand, ABC News, especially Peter Jennings, sought to convey the profound sense of exhilaration and solidarity that African-American men clearly felt at the march, and emphasized that the event "far overshadowed the man who organized it." Probably the most striking aspect of the coverage was how many middle-class and upper-middle-class black men we got to see on TV, in contrast to the usual fare on the nightly news. Leave it to George Will to put the right spin on this. It was refreshing to see these men instead of the "urban underclass--a violent, pathological group." (Can't we lock this guy in a room and refuse to let him out until he has read Jonathan Kozol's last three books?)

Yet the framing of the coverage repeatedly reaffirmed Farrakhan's call for black male responsibility, while completely ignoring the powerful role that institutional racism continues to play in oppressing blacks. ABC News emphasized that the march was an opportunity "for black men to atone for their failures," and that black men "acknowledged they are partially responsible" for the plight of their own people.

When ABC noted that black men also blame racism, the man whose sound bite they chose to use to illustrate this said, "Yes, racism does exist, but it doesn't inhibit me from doing whatever I need to."

Another interviewee was quoted as saying, "I can't blame white people for what we're doing to our race. I think a major part of what is happening to the black community is our fault." To let such statements stand without reminding viewers about redlining, denying mortgages and loans to blacks, the separate and unequal status of schools for blacks and for whites, and the disparity in incomes, completely lets whites off the book.