No one would accuse DeWayne Wickham of being a culture warrior, or at least not a culture warrior of the Right. The African-American USA Today columnist is a liberal Democrat and a critic of social conservatives. But Wickham knows racism when he sees it, and he knows what a coarsening culture means for the future.
In his column, Wickham points to VH1 reality show, Flavor of Love 2, as confirmation that Neil Postman knew of what he spoke when he suggested that the future is closer to Aldous Huxley’s vision than to George Orwell’s. Citing Postman’s preface to his 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death, Wickham agrees that the future we should fear is not the banning of books, but a society in which no one wants to read one anyway.
Wickham explains that the reality show features the has-been rapper’s search for the “love of his life” by a competition among an inter-racial group of twenty women. The antics involved among these women will not be described here. Wickham pronounces it as “less than ladylike,” and that’s about as kind as one can put it.
It is not just the sexual crassness of the program that worries Wickham. It’s the way the program continues the racist stereotype of the American black male, via the “star” of the show, a former member of the rap group Public Enemy.
Wickham concludes:
“It also offers us the kind of caricature of black men that makes Stepin Fetchit and the Amos ‘n’ Andy character Algonquin J. Calhoun look like straight men. With his ever-present mouth full of gold teeth and oversized clock that hangs around his neck, Flavor Flav is a cartoonish figure that only a mother — or VH1 — would believe might be hotly pursued by women with an IQ above room temperature.
“On one level, his buffoonery is laughable. But more often than not it makes my skin crawl to know that as Lincoln Perry (who played Stepin Fetchit) and Johnny Lee (who was TV’s Algonquin J. Calhoun) did, Drayton has to assume such a shallow black role to find stardom in Hollywood.
“If you think Flavor of Love 2 is innocent television fare, you’re wrong.
“‘We do not see nature or intelligence or human motivation or ideology as “it'” is but only as our languages are,’ Postman wrote. ‘And our languages are our media. Our media are our metaphors. Our metaphors create the content of our culture.’
“And shows such as Flavor of Love 2 dumb us down and define us to others in ways that ought to cause an awful churning in our national gut.”
Wickham is on to something here. The answer is not to organize a boycott of VH1 or its advertisers. The real answer is to model marriage and manhood in our churches and communities, especially among the next generation of African-American males. How many young black men see in the media, this many years after the civil rights movement, role models that are only either comic buffoons or violent gangsters?
The media occasionally take notice of a “Million Man March” highlighting male African-American role models, led by Muslims such as Louis Farrakhan and others. What they miss is the quieter, but more powerful, revolution taking place in Bible-believing churches all over the country, where strong, decisive, godly black men are taking responsibility to shape and disciple not only their own sons but the young men of their neighborhoods and communities. The Holy Spirit is at work among a new generation of young black men, in a way that is less flashy than VH1 and more dynamic than Islamic idolatry.
We should join DeWayne Wickham in denouncing the racist minstrel shows of contemporary pop culture. But we shouldn’t be despondent. We should model instead churches made up of reconciled persons of every race, churches that equip our men to pattern a more excellent way. Jesus tells us that, as with the wind, we can’t see the Spirit moving. We can only see the aftermath.
As I write this, there are young black pastors and missionaries and laymen who are willing to take on the drug culture, the fatherlessness crisis, and Satan himself with a gospel that transforms. Let’s pray for a national outpouring of this, among all of our men, in a way that even the entertainment industry is forced to notice. That won’t be a reality show; it will be Reality.
