Dear CNN,
I don’t watch you by choice. I watch you when you’re on that TV in Annenberg Hall when I’m eating lunch and it’s an easy way to know what’s going on.

But today I am seriously disgusted by you. More than usual.

See, your ‘Conversation with Black America’ isn’t helping. It’s setting up black America as something different from the rest of America that you normally cover. It’s exoticising a whole group of people. I mean, for chrissakes, you had a survey asking ‘black America’ which issues they were concerned with. Guess what, number one was still the economy, followed by the war in Iraq, education, and all the same issues the rest of Americans are concerned with.

Stop patting yourself on the back because you’re broadcasting from the “nation’s first black radio station” (which gives the impression that the first black radio station is a recent thing). And for Martin Luther King’s own sake, stop giving John McCain a platform to offend all those of us who remember that he voted against the MLK holiday and voted against King’s civil rights bills. John McCain does not give a rat’s ass about Martin Luther King.

Hillary Clinton is only slightly less offensive, considering that her argument to superdelegates is basically that the people who support her won’t vote for Obama, which is a thinly veiled reference to the fact that she’s pulling the racist vote.

And maybe that’s why John McCain is pandering, CNN, in case Hillary does manage to win. In any case, you should know better.

But maybe if you’d followed the recommendations of the Kerner Commission from 40 years ago and actually hired more than a token black reporter here and there, you’d know better. You wouldn’t feel the need to have a ‘conversation with black America’ because you’d have one every day, like I do.

See, black America is not different from my America. It is my students and my professors, my friends (and maybe more than friends), my neighbors, the people I talk to every day, and they want the same things that I want.

They certainly don’t need your condescending to have a ‘conversation’ with them one day out of the year. And why this year? Because it’s the 40th anniversary of King’s death, or because we have a black man who’s the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination?

Talk to black people about issues that aren’t just “black” issues. Talk to women about issues that aren’t just women’s issues. Stop reducing the presidential race to a pile of demographics and actually go out and report on what the candidates are talking about and what they’ve done in the past.

You’d learn a lot.

-Sarah

PS: Go here and watch the Mountaintop speech. Or I’ve got audio of it here.