False Portrait
Reversing the news media obsession with evil
November/December 1995
By Gary Gilson, COLORS: Opinion
Newspeople are very good at conveying their version of how we die. They do poorly at telling us how we live. As a result, we limp through our daily lives burdened with stereotypes foisted upon us through distorted images of criminals and race. Out of fear we recede from each other, instead of reaching toward each other, learning and cooperating to build our communities.
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After the Detroit uprisings of 1967, public television sent me to do a documentary on its causes and effects. The film's title -- Do You Think a Job Is the Answer? -- came from a question a young black man asked me as I was interviewing him. His name was Lloyd Love. He was 20, a high school dropout dividing his time between an Urban League street academy, where he was supposed to earn an equivalency certificate, and the streets, where, he told me, he and his friends committed crimes. I asked him if he'd ever had a job.
"I thought of takin' a job," he said, "but my old man, he had a job workin' at the factory, and if that's what I have to have for my kids, what he had for me, then I don't need to be in the factory.
"And they think that's the answer -- a job? Do you think that's the answer?"
Twenty years later the Detroit public TV station asked me to find the people in the original film and report on their lives and the life of Detroit. Their personal histories and their perspectives on the changes Detroit has gone through made riveting television. Nothing like it makes the evening news.
The week I interviewed Lloyd Love he was turning 40. I asked him to watch himself as he was at 20, on a screen in the studio, and to tell me what had become of him in all those years. He looked at me as if I was crazy and said, "You mean, like, in a nutshell?"
"Make it a big nut," I said.
He said he'd served 18 months in state prison after being convicted of carrying a concealed weapon. Now he was working as a laborer, carrying cases of empty pop bottles at a soda plant.
"You?" I said. "A guy who wouldn't take a job at the auto plant when you were 20?"
"I don't like it, but I have to do it. I have responsibilities. I'm married and I have an 8-year-old son. He's very intelligent, he's into gymnastics, and I don't want him doin' the easy thing [running drugs] to get the money for a $150 pair of sneakers."