TV Reviews : Passions Run High in PBS’ ‘The Issue Is Race’

Urban critic Jonathan Kozol faces Phil Donahue and says, “I heard this same debate 25 years ago.” Then journalist-commentator Tony Brown chimes in to agree.

Could be. But the debate that bubbles to the boiling point on the Donahue-hosted PBS special “The Issue Is Race: A Crisis in Black and White” (at 9 tonight on KCET-TV Channel 28 and KPBS-TV Channel 15; 8 p.m. on KVCR-TV Channel 24) marks a new level of intensity--at least on television--regarding America’s centuries-old legacy of racism and the chasm between blacks and whites.

Just because this two-hour discussion is taped at the Cambridge Multicultural Arts Center rather than a TV studio, it would be easy, and wrong, to dismiss it as an upscale “Donahue” segment. Oh yes, there is screaming, yelling and pounding of tables. But this shouting match is fundamentally different.

For one thing, the debate is broken up by four taped reports (by reporter Paul Solman and by three of the African-American panelists: Brown, journalist Sylvester Monroe and professor Cornel West) that add much light to the heat generated by the panel. Just as crucially, this is a dramatic opportunity for blacks to debate each other on key issues--precisely what was missing from the African-American forum on PBS’ recent “Voices of the Electorate.”

In staging a drama, casting is everything, and the casting here guarantees fireworks. Rapper Sister Souljah and activist Dhoruba Bin Wahad voice the radical politics of black youth, alienated from both the NAACP line and “The Man.” Republican senatorial candidate Alan Keyes is meant to be the voice of conservative blacks, but surprises many with a call for a variation on Wahad’s and Brown’s themes of “taking power into our own hands.” Kozol forcefully indicts U.S. society for neglecting its poor, but his hand-wringing is useless compared to Brown’s call for the black middle-class to invest in the place it fled--black ghettos.

At the same time, Souljah’s own alienation, sometimes devolving into nasty word-spews, alienates Washington Mayor Sharon Pratt Kelly, who essentially tells Souljah to shut up, stop complaining and do something. Wahad’s declaration that “there is no freedom of speech in this country” is absurd on its face, for he makes the most of his time to articulate a vision of a society built on the white man’s “rape, murder and plunder.”

Wiser minds prevail, however: Playwright Anna Deavere Smith correctly wonders why this debate didn’t include other races, and West concludes that rage is no more productive than allowing racial divides to persist.