Recurring Dialogue on Racial Tension

The place is rocking. African drums are beating out exciting rhythms that make you want to lose your inhibitions and dance. But it’s a funeral, James Baldwin’s funeral.

So begins “James Baldwin: The Price of the Ticket,” a haunting, beautifully made biography of one of America’s foremost contemporary literary figures, author of “Go Tell It on the Mountain,” “Giovanni’s Room,” “Another Country,” “The Fire Next Time” and other works.

“Jimmy was God’s black revolutionary mouth,” activist-writer Amiri Baraka (formerly Leroi Jones) says in this deeply passionate, 90-minute film airing at 9 tonight on KCET Channel 28 as part of PBS’ “American Masters” series.

Baldwin was 63 when he died two years ago of cancer. Film maker Karen Thorsen presents him eclectically, through the eyes of his brother and friends, through grainy film clips, through his writing and through his own spoken words, delivered in a soft, velvety baritone that belies the rage about America he said he felt in his heart.

Although Baldwin’s literary voice was often as solitary as tonight’s jazz saxophone that wails in the background, he reaches us this time, through television, amid a chorus of healthy dialogue on one of America’s most critical and painful subjects.

Whether it concerns the recent murder of Black Panther co-founder Huey Newton or the implications of Spike Lee’s powerful new movie, “Do the Right Thing,” people are again talking about race.

ABC News talks about it in “Black in White America,” a thoughtful and moving documentary airing at 10 p.m. Tuesday on Channels 7, 3, 10 and 42. And the discussion will continue at 11:30 p.m. on an expanded edition of ABC’s “Nightline.”

Coming Sept. 5 and 6 on NBC, moreover, is a two-part news special cutely titled “The R.A.C.E.” and featuring an array of famous Americans giving their thoughts on race relations.

Ordinary citizens will participate, too. Studio audiences in Los Angeles, New York, Milwaukee and Jackson, Miss. will be connected to a Quick Tally computer system that will record their responses to a series of race-related questions. The data will be instantly translated into fancy graphics and compared to the responses of the celebrities.

Anchored by Bryant Gumbel, “The R.A.C.E.” has enormous potential to be as technologically overloaded as the two-hour live “town hall” on racism that KCBS-TV Channel 2 put on the air last Thursday.

Preceded by an hourlong Channel 2 documentary that effectively explored the possible economic underpinnings of the racism victimizing Los Angeles minorities, the cumbersome “town hall” look at race problems was eclipsed by its elaborate and confusing Quick Tally format and by moderator Jim Lampley.

Not only was Lampley given more visual prominence than the studio audience and underused panel of experts, he was a virtual talking machine. He did have a difficult job, however, and the three-hour focus on racism--something CBS is also doing at other stations it owns--had a noble purpose that deserves applause.

Although in many ways a disaster, the evening at least dealt with racial tensions in a way that far surpassed the filmy unreality of TV’s entertainment programs.

Continuing to smother in its own must, prime time is a venue where race almost always refers to a contest of speed and where regularly scheduled dramatic series focusing on blacks have been virtually non-existent. And black characters that do slip under the white curtain--primarily in sitcoms--are generally happy with their lot.

“Racial tension is commonplace in the real world, but virtually invisible among the white and minority characters on entertainment television,” concluded a recent study commissioned by the National Commission on Working Women.

When racial bias is portrayed, the study said, it is usually done so in a way that reduces injustice “to individual conflict, denying the reality of oppressive social structures. . . .”

It was just those structures that angered and tormented Baldwin, who, even as a child, made plans to escape the oppression and poverty of the Harlem ghetto where he grew up.

“I knew I was black, of course, but I also knew I was smart,” he says tonight in an old interview. “I didn’t know how I would use my mind, or even if I could, but that was the only thing I had to use. And I was going to get whatever I wanted that way, and I was going to get my revenge that way.”

Although he knew early in his life that he wanted to be a writer, he spent three of his teen years as a Pentecostal preacher, a period that had a great impact on his life. And his memory of the pulpit as “anguish and despair and beauty” could also apply to the black experience in America that he later wrote about, much of the time from abroad.

Film maker Thorsen monitors Baldwin’s return to America to join the civil rights movement of the early 1960s, and his pain when later ostracized by black militants for refusing to join them. He was an angry man in an angry world, but loathed violence and believed whites were redeemable.

“Love has never been a popular movement,” he said.

The same message threads Tuesday’s “Black in White America,” whose production team and correspondents--Carole Simpson, Charles Thomas and George Strait--are black and report on racial tensions that permeate all levels of black society.

Although probably reenforcing a perception that minority means only black , the program is a valuable hour that’s especially strong in showing how at least some blacks perceive themselves, starting with young children shown drawings of white and black children by a psychologist.

One drawing depicts a white boy and a black boy together. When asked which of the two is “the dirty boy,” young Chandler Carter points to the drawing of the black boy. “Can you tell me why?” the psychologist asks. “Because he . . . he’s not the same color he’s supposed to be,” Chandler replies.

Black self-images vary greatly, yet seem to converge here when the subject is television. Neither an affluent black family in San Diego visited by Simpson nor a poor one in Chicago profiled by Thomas finds much reality in “The Cosby Show,” NBC’s enormously popular comedy about an upper middle-class black family largely untouched by racial bias and suffering no identity problems.

Living the American dream with his family--in a white neighborhood--corporation executive Howard Holley notices that white women “put a karate grip” on their handbags when he passes them.

The problems are more fundamental for 34-year-old Judy Dunn, who lives with her three children (the second oldest a 16-year-old unwed mother) in a drug-ridden housing project where reporter Thomas says “criminals and victims are imprisoned together” and “darkened hallways reek of urine and garbage.”

Thomas asks if she feels cheated by life when watching “Cosby.” “No, ‘cause that is not real . . . that is fake,” she says. “What’s the real world?” he asks. “The one I’m living in now,” she replies.

And the one her 13-year-old son, Steven, is living in. He is an honor student who wants to be a doctor. But he is blind in one eye from accidentally having been shot in the head by his other sister’s boyfriend.

Seeing Steven returns your thoughts to James Baldwin, small and intense, eulogized by friends at his funeral, which also closes tonight’s film about his life. And you wonder about the other American masters in the ghettos and barrios who won’t be able to beat the odds and break out.