ABC's "Good Morning America" is doing a series called "Black and White Now" where I guess they are trying to figure out when racism will be over or not. They got a three-part series jumping off this week, and I swear I wish someone would just shoot me now. These programs about black people most often focus on the shiftless, curious and dangerous Negro male, but black children are exploited upfront in this GMA joint. Re-enacting the well-known Clark experiment, GMA had children look at black and white dolls and make some choices about how they see themselves, and then pinhead academics try to glean something useful from this.

I think the Clark experiment had traction at one point, but that point was a long time ago. What it doesn't tell us is how these kids were raised. It's handy and sad to blame society for poor self-image, but a lot of children get their impressions about color from their parents. Their parents may be colorstuck, and the kids observe that and internalize it. If TV can teach your children something home-training can't short circuit, then something has gone terribly wrong. But I could do without shows like this.

Is it my imagination, or is the mainstream media re-discovering black people?