TV REVIEWS : ‘Dream’ Looks at Black Communities

The legacy of the civil rights movement and the laws that came in its wake is a complicated mosaic of triumphs--an explosion of black prosperity--and miseries--the welfare system and a solidified underclass. But one element of that mosaic--black communities sticking together--is surely not cause for either hand-clapping or hand-wringing. Alas, hands get wrung all over the place during the latest edition of “The Cronkite Report,” ominously titled “The Faltering Dream” (at 8 and 11 tonight on the Discovery Channel).

Despite the redoubtable presence of host Walter Cronkite, the program’s thesis is all too debatable: That there is something wrong and revisionist about blacks, who are financially able to live anywhere, choosing to live in predominantly black middle-class neighborhoods. To do this, Cronkite’s report insists, is to somehow reverse Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream of an integrated America. Yet Cronkite admits that such grouping among one’s own kind is only human nature at work. Surely no one has ever bemoaned the fact that people of Scandinavian descent tended to stick together in such places as Minnesota. Of course. They share much in common.

Indeed, the report skirts dangerously close to a kind of racism that selects the black middle class for special scrutiny and a presumed higher standard, as if black families’ search for safer neighborhoods to raise their kids is a regressive act.

What generally eludes the coverage here is the obvious subject: The struggle of black entrepreneurs to create an economy where a growing number of blacks can circulate dollars among each other. This is the key to business success in every American minority group, but it’s a mere footnote in “Faltering Dream.”