To Be Equal:
Include Other Voices

Marc H. Morial
President and CEO
National Urban League

One of the great achievements of American society since the civil rights years of the 1950s and 1960s has been the acknowledgment that ours is a multi-racial and multi-ethnic society.

That acknowledgement has thankfully taken America far beyond the old notion of the “melting-pot”—a notion whose actual reality was that only members of white-ethnic groups were eligible for assimilation.

Now, even a quick perusal of the spectrum of occupations, from high political office to law, medicine, business, and academia to, finally, the great run of white-collar and blue-collar jobs will find an inclusiveness, an involvement by people of color at all levels that a scant forty years ago was hardly more than the dream of idealists.

That involvement, and, in turn, the consumer power it has put in the hands of people of color, is perhaps most dramatically reflected in television commercials, according to Pamela Newkirk, a New York University journalism professor writing in the current issue of the National Urban League’s Opportunity Journal magazine.

She notes that many of today’s television commercials—whose purpose is to surround the product they’re selling with a “world” that is attractive to viewers—present a noticeably integrated landscape “that has outpaced both the actual diversity of most American neighborhoods, schools and churches, and the casts of television shows.”

There are exceptions, however to the successes of this dynamic of inclusion—institutions and events for which being white still seems to be the most important requirement for participation.

Some of the most significant of these exceptions are the Sunday morning network and cable television talk shows.

There, the virtual absence of people of color as participants makes these shows appear to still be rooted in the mentality of the 1950s—when the larger society deemed discussion of serious issues concerning national and foreign affairs as “white folks’ business.”

The National Urban League Policy Institute, our Washington, D.C.-based governmental and research unit, has just released a study which shows that these programs “consistently fail to include African Americans in their lineups, either as interview guests or analysts.”

For example, during the 18-month period studied, 61 percent of all the Sunday morning talk shows featured no black guests; just 8 percent of the 2,100 guest appearances on these programs were by African Americans; and appearances by just three African Americans—Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, former Secretary of State Colin Powell, and journalist Juan Williams accounted for 69 percent of the appearances by black guests on them.

No one should think this lack of a black presence unimportant, or merely a concern of those “inside the beltway” road network surrounding Washington, D.C., where these programs originate.

For one thing, this dynamic of exclusion applies even more powerfully to other Americans, including Latino Americans, Native Americans, Asian Americans and Muslim Americans.

For another, as the Urban League policy Institute report points out, “Sunday morning talk shows play a unique and substantial role in the political discourse in America … and are a crucial staple in the public discussion, understanding and interpretation of politics and government and other issues in the United States. Each Sunday these programs signal what is news and who are the newsmakers. Their selection and presentation of guests determine who are the experts on a topic and what voices and views will be considered authoritative. [They] frame the perception and coverage of issues that have a substantial impact on the American public.”

Spokesmen for the talk shows generally imply that the pool of people they draw from is itself not diverse.

But, given that the significant development and expansion of African Americans and other people of color in fields of scholarship and government service, including foreign affairs, and in law and business—the bread-and-butter topics of these programs—has been occurring for more than three decades now, there’s no excuse for this exclusion.

We hope this report will be an alarm to the networks and cable programs: They are missing insights on and perspectives about the affairs that concern us all.

We also intend for the National Urban League Policy Institute report to inspire African Americans and other people of color at all levels of the society to make their voices heard, and to listen to the voices of other Americans at the local as well as national level.

As our 24-hour news and information world makes dramatically clear, we all live in a national as well as global village. Those who pretend that the views of only one group of people count are doomed to make fools of themselves most of all.