STIMULATING TV -- 2010 HARLEM BOOK FAIR PANEL DISCUSSIONS

STIMULATING TV: 2010 HARLEM BOOK FAIR PANEL DISCUSSIONS (July 17 – 19, 2010)

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
August 22, 2010

REFERENCE:

As is my inclination of a Sunday, I look at BOOK BEAT and other programs that are on C-Span, and if interested, I stay with them. Such was the case today when I viewed 2010 HARLEM BOOK FAIR. There were panels on black history, black biography and black graphic arts in the digital age.

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IMPRESSIONS

My first reaction was that I wished every American whatever his color had a chance to watch and listen to these most articulate and interesting people share their works and points of view.

I felt like a primitive never having had such concentrated exposure over a three-hour period of what African intellectuals think and feel. These panels reflected the true power of the television medium.

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I had read such black authors as the legendary Civil War era black, Frederick Douglass (“Narrative of Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Myself,” as well as William S. McFeely’s “Frederick Douglass,” 1991).

More recently, I’ve read the op-ed columns of Thomas Sowell in the newspaper, and his “Inside American Education: The Decline, The Deception, The Dogma” (1993), and “The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulations as a Basis for Social Policy,”(1995). I've also read John McWorter’s “Authentically Black: Essays for the Black Silent Majority,” and “Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America.”

In my graduate work, I also read Gunnar Myrdal’s two-volume study, “An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem & Modern Democracy” (1962).

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Given this exposure, I wasn’t prepared for the treat of listening to people who have come out of the Civil Rights struggle, and have taken their places in society to the great advantage of us all.

In addition to sharing their expertise in literature, history and the graphic arts in the digital age, they shared their own particular journeys, and what they had learned from them.

Wes Moore, an over accomplished individual if there ever was one, graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Johns Hopkins, is in the Maryland College Football Hall of Fame, was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, a captain of paratroopers in Afghanistan in an elite airborne group, a White House Fellow and Special Assistant to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, an investment banker with Citigroup, and author of “The Other Wes Moore.”

The book is the biography of a life timer in prison for killing a police officer. Both men are the same age, same ethnicity, came out of similar culturally demanding neighborhoods, one ended in prison and the other on Ebony magazine’s “Top 30 Leaders Under 30.”

When the successful Wes Moore asked the incarcerated Wes Moore if cultural disadvantage was his problem, he said, “No, it was a matter of expectations.” Most of us can relate to that.

Dr. Peniel Joseph, a black scholar who is often on such programs as PBS Nightly News as a demographic expert, is a professor of history at Tufts University and the author of “Dark Days, Bright Nights: From Black Power to Barak Obama” (2010). I am looking forward to reading this book.

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These two were typical of the three panels, placing the emphasis on “making the life experience your own,” and no one else’s, and translated your pain and anger into productive effort. Again, I think most of us can relate to that.

One panelist, in the graphic arts and digital age discussion group, said something that I’d never thought about before.

When I was a boy of seven or eight until I was ten, and the good nuns introduced me to reading books, I was a voracious comic book reader. While the guys would hang out at the courthouse jail when it rained (see IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE 2003), I would bury myself in comic books in my room.

What I didn’t know as one of these panelists pointed out is that the iconic images in comic books massaged my right brain, or my intuitive mind, while the words in the bubbles above the iconic images supplied subtext to the story and stimulated my left-brain or cognitive mind. It made sense when I think of the nature of my conceptual orientation.

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One of the phenomena of the digital age is that graphic arts are cutting into the book business. Children, and many adults for that matter, are not interested in reading books but will read comics.

One questioner of the panel, a teacher in elementary education for past ten years, said that children hate to read books.

One of the panelists asked him, “Then explain why they read Harry Potter books without pictures that are 400 or 500 pages long?” The questioner hesitated.

The panelist answered his own question, “Because the imagery clips with them. They can visualize the stories.”

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Finally, my sense is that these panelists successfully reached out and connected with the audience, not in a token way, but in a genuine effort to direct and influence it to be more active and confident in the conduct of its lives, and by extension, the lives of those it influences.

Granted, it was a black conference about black scholars and authors, relating to their indigenous community, but I found the appeal to be consistent with the core values of my being.

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