Contributor Carole McDonnell’s short stories and essays appear online and in print, in speculative fiction, ethnic, and Christian publications. She lives in New York with her husband, two sons, and their pets. Wind Follower, published by Juno Books, is Carole’s first novel. Her voice adds plenty to our discussion, so I welcome Carole and her column Faith in Color to Allaboutrace.com.

I don’t know why but I really like watching reality shows. My tastes are pretty eclectic. Whether it’s stuff like The Deadliest Catch which tells about the hard dangerous lives of Alaskan Fishermen or Ghosthunters or American Idol or I Love New York. If it’s not about movie stars, if it’s not overly-scripted by television screenwriters, I’ll be there in front of my television set marvelling at the intricacies of human nature, endurance, manipulation, and talent.

But I especially like crime shows. Give me The First 48, Cops, Forensic Files, Judge Judy, Judge Joe Brown, Wildest Police Videos, American Justice (Parole Board), and The New Detectives and I’m in heaven. Maybe it’s just that I like stories and I like real life and only documentaries, reality TV shows, news programs have that combination of never-before-seen-or-heard stories and real life.

What I’ve noticed is that since I’ve begun watching these shows, my attitude toward normal people has changed decidedly. For instance, in the last episode of Wildest Police Videos, I watched an innocent state trooper get killed before my eyes by some illegal immigrants who were trafficking in marijuana. I’m a real liberal and am pretty much against the death penalty, but when one sees that kind of thing captured by the trooper’s own car-camera, well one wants the baddies to fry, whether they are white, black, Hispanic, illegal or citizen. And after the eightieth episode of America’s Most Wanted, one really begins to believe in the concept of “pure human evil,” yep, even if one wants to blame nurturing, societal ills, upbringings, childhood abuses, etc.

I pretty much trust the edited videos floating before my terror-struck eyes. True, filmmakers can edit and re-edit but a cruel comment is a cruel comment and banging a store clerk’s head with a Louisville Slugger is still banging a store clerk’s head with a Louisville Slugger,

That said, I’m still finding something in my precious reality shows to be cynical about. And that is their class issue.

Sometimes we are so caught up with the race issue that we forget how elitist and classist the United States can be. The educated lord it over the uneducated. The professionals talk arrogantly to the unprofessionals. Recently I was watching Star Jones on CourtTv and the topic was the movie “Awake,” a story about someone who is given anesthesia but the anesthesia doesn’t quite work. She had on a woman who had experienced this unfortunate situation because the anesthesiologist was incompetent or lazy or otherwise pre-occupied. Joining her was an anesthesiologist who also happened to be the spokesman (excuse me, person) for various anesthesiology mistakes. What a smackdown that poor woman got! He kept saying that the woman’s situation was “anecdotal” and that anesthesia accidents happened only once every 90,000. When the woman reminded him that the AMA recently said it happened once in every 14,000 surgeries, the spokesman had to admit she was right but he insisted on making her look uneducated by talking about how educated he was. If I could have reached into the television and choked him I would have.

Well, this class thing happens all the time. Black rich people are treated one way and black poor people are treated another. Black rich people treat poor black people badly. Rich white people are treated one way and poor white people are treated another. We, the viewers, are often invited to believe that we are the rich white people, the judging herd. Here’s an instance: On the television show, Cops, the cameras often offer a feast of visual rebukes. They enter a house where some poor Hispanic family is living in a two room house. The house is “chuck-up chuck-up” as my Jamaican mother would say: clutter everywhere. The camera pans across the seven kids to the kitchen sink full of dishes and stops on a lone cockroach crawling across the counter. What really annoys me is when the cops, black or white, trade comments about the poverty of the place. As if the poor person’s apparent lack of a maid is to be equated with a tendency toward evil. Those subtle shakings of the head between middle-class cop guys as they look on the po folks only adds to my sense that television writers are way too distant from poor folks. The filmmaker need not tell us what we ought to think. He knows how these things work in our media-trained minds: the people are poor and ethnic and they have seven kids therefore they are evil.

If one is far from one’s roots, this kind of thing leaves one thinking: “Dang, can’t those illegals just stop breeding like that? They can’t even take care of the kids they have and look!”

That’s the kind of thing this bit of camerawork wants us to believe. But that’s often when I find myself pulling away. I will not equate poverty with evil. I will not assume child abuse simply because some poor woman’s house is messy. I refuse to be manipulated like that.

Jesus told us that we always have the poor with us. He didn’t tell us to equate them with evil, or to think of the poor as being “unlike us” and “below us.” That’s the world’s doing. Race is a problem in our country, yes. But not until we truly love and understand the poor will we understand that racism is not our only problem.

Lord, help us to love our poor neighbors as ourselves instead of judging them or lording it over them. Amen.