I am not a poor black kid. I am a middle aged white guy who comes from a middle class white background. So life was easier for me. But that doesn’t mean that the prospects are impossible for those kids from the inner city.

Seemingly lost in the ongoing spat between President Obama and the Congressional Black Caucus is the point that was raised in the first place: unemployment.  But, headlines are quaking with an increasingly chalkboard scraping pitch of rhetoric lobbed back and forth between Black political titans.  The past week has been filled with a national conversation on the President’s rift with his former colleagues, each side unwilling to give ground on the other’s perception of a desperate situation.

There are a multitude of interpretations regarding what exactly the President meant or who exactly he was targeting at the end of a combative, knuckle-up speech at a recent CBC Annual Legislative Conference dinner.  What was apparent that night was the image of a President not feeling the adulation of his surroundings or the company of the dinner crowd.  Few smiles were found as he worked through his maturation moment: the tone since a fiery “You Should Pass It” jobs bill joint before Congress a few weeks earlier had been angry and exasperated.  There is indication that the President has, perhaps, grown up – not in any way that assumes he was childish beforehand.  But, a sense that the reality of his predicament has set in hard, that desperate times require the aggressive management style of desperate measures.  Forgotten by many swimming in the euphoria of 2008 is that then-Candidate Obama had little, if any, executive background before settling into Oval Office chair.  To a degree, the learning curve has worn rough on the former Senator.

by Charles D. Ellison, UPTOWN Magazine online

The President’s speech last night was primarily billed as his chance to plead his case to the nation for the ongoing military intervention in Libya. It may have become the foundation for his doctrine.

I was in the Water Tower Mall the other day and saw this poster. The Chicago Code, created by Shawn Ryan (The Shield), will apparently cast a Black alderman (Delroy Lindo— whom I nearly bumped into a few months ago in the same mall; I assume he’s been in town for awhile filming the series) as the politician who has “built an empire of corruption”. Given the task to “bring him down” will be the archetypical television hero/anti-hero: a rule-breaking but brilliant white man who will stop at nothing to end evil.

Ryan’s Shield was an incredible show (and not archetypical). It’s likely that The Chicago Code will be excellent as well. Incredibly well written; incredibly acted. But it’s disturbing to look at this poster and see the image of Chicago corruption manifested as the face of a Black man, while the valient police force strives to bring him to justice.

In a city besieged by police violence and ruled by wealthy politicos, how should we view the fiction represented by this poster?

In fairness, the show hasn’t aired yet, so it remains to be seen how honest it’s portrayal of the Chi will be. Yes, crooked aldermen come in every shade, but will the show focus only on Lindo? Will their be a Black hero who functions as more than a sidekick? (Jennifer Beals, who co-stars as Chicago’s top cop, is biracial; not sure if this will come into play). Or will The Chicago Codefollow the mainstream media legacy of portraying Black and Latino criminals as one-dimensional stereotypes who were born bad, live bad, and deserve to die bad?

The answer, regardless of what the show offers, is that it doesn’t matter. What matters is us and the salient question of how we will choose to spend our time.

In other words: will we watch?

Television is, at best, a terrible place for us to gain the information or influence that will inevitably shape our world view. No matter who is cast as the corruptor in The Chicago Code, it’s the misconceptions and mistruths of television itself that stand the greatest chance of corrupting us all.

Spoken words program your spirit (heart) either to success or defeat. Words are containers. They carry faith or fear, and they produce after their kind.