Keywords: Black in America, CNN, Black Americans, race, racism in America, public school, segregation, discrimination, diversity, Black test scores

After watching CNN's special "Black in America," hosted by Soledad O'Brien, I was left with one question: Why?

"Black in America" is a two-part, four-hour series, with the first segment shown Wednesday on CNN. Billed as being about the state of Black women and the family in America, the documentary offered a whirlwind tour through issues as varied as education, poverty, the growing middle and upper classes, health and poor eating habits, HIV/AIDS, murder, single parenting, dating, marriage and biracial relationships. In trying to cover so much ground in two hours, it could only hint at the deeper roots behind the more intractable problems it showed.

The idea for "Black in America" evolved 18 months ago while CNN was planning its coverage of the 40th anniversary of the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., according to the New York Daily News. O'Brien, whose beat at the network is finding stories that are underreported, broadened the project into the two-part documentary.

While watching Wednesday night's show, I was at times encouraged, shocked and dismayed by the statistics "Black in America" cited.

Encouraging:

• Since 1970 the number of Black women with degrees has tripled.
• The number of Black-owned businesses has increased 45 percent in the last 10 years.
• In 2006 32 percent of Black households earned at least $50,000 annually, up from 18 percent in 1970.

Dismaying:

• Forty-five percent of Black women are not married or have never been married.
• Half of Black high-school students drop out.
• On average, Blacks die five years earlier than whites.

Shocking:

• Seventy percent of Black children today are born to unwed mothers, while only 25 percent of Black children were born to unwed mothers in the 1960s.
• Forty-nine percent of the nation's homicide victims are Black.
• Blacks account for half of HIV/AIDS cases, and two-thirds of American women recently diagnosed are Black.

While these statistics are important and in some cases surprising, the documentary barely touched on the causes behind them.

"Black in America" opened as the Rand family, a clan of 300 Black and white people, traveled to their reunion. The Rands can all trace their ancestry back to the same white man, his wife and a Black woman in the 19th century. Stories about Rand family members were interspersed throughout the show, illustrating the various circumstances of Blacks who achieve success and those who struggle for the basics.  

The documentary's failing is that it provided little historical context for what it showed. For example, there was no effort to discuss why Black children routinely score lower on tests than children in developing countries, as Harvard economist Roland Fryer told us.

For each problem, the documentary did profile someone who was trying to provide a solution. Fryer has developed a controversial program that pays high-achieving children in New York City's schools when they earn top test scores and grades. "Black in America," however, missed an opportunity to provide more context detailing why Black children perform poorly on standardized tests; or why schools with predominantly Black student bodies don't do as well as schools with predominantly white student bodies; or how the historic lack of education and an economic community affects what is going on today in these schools.

To put being Black in today's U.S. in historical context, CNN could have interviewed Douglas Blackmon, author of "Slavery by Another Name."

Blackmon, while being interviewed about his book by PBS commentator Bill Moyers, said there were laws throughout the South that "essentially criminalized a whole array of activities that [were] impossible for a poor Black farmer to avoid encountering in some way."

Blackmon's example is vagrancy. "You were breaking the law if you couldn't prove at any given moment that you were employed," Blackmon said to Moyers. "Well, in a world in which there were no pay stubs, it was impossible to prove you were employed. The only way you could prove employment was if some man who owned land would vouch for you and say, 'he works for me.' And of course, none of these laws said it only applies to Black people. But overwhelmingly, they were only enforced against Black people."

In "Slavery by Another Name," Blackmon points out that under vagrancy-type laws, thousands of Black men were arrested, charged, jailed and then sold to Southern plantations, railroads, mills, lumber camps and factories. This went on until World War II.

"The records that still survive, buried in courthouses all over the South, make it abundantly clear that thousands and thousands of African-Americans were arrested on completely specious claims … and then, purely because of this economic need and the ability of sheriffs and constables and others to make money off arresting them, and that providing them to these commercial enterprises and being paid for that," Blackmon told Moyers.

The root cause of many of the ills that "Black in America" revealed is racism. While that was implied throughout the documentary, it was never directly addressed. To do so would be to assign blame, and a mainstream news agency will not do that on its own.

"Black in America" did provide shocking statistics about HIV/AIDS, especially concerning Washington D.C. In the nation's capitol Blacks account for 80 percent of the HIV/AIDS cases. That is five percent of D.C.'s entire population and nine times the national average.

"Black in America" asked AIDS activists what has caused this epidemic, to which they said a lack of education and a general feeling among Blacks that the disease does not concern them.

"We have probably not done a good job of meeting a direct need," said Gary Smith, a Black minister. 

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