Comedian D.L. Hughley has a new show on CNN.  When I first heard about it I was both curious and anxious.  It is a major coup for a black comedian to actually have a show on CNN.  CNN is seen all over the world.  I often marvel at how quickly my family in Nigeria get the US news, even before I do.  If there is a tornado somewhere in the midwest, my father-in-law calls from Nigeria to see if we are fine, ever before we hear the news.  So CNN has a major reach.  To my knowledge, since Bernard Shaw, this would be the first really major African American to host his own talk show on the channel.

The first thing that I wondered was why was this slot not given to a serious African American news/talk person like Tavis Smiley?  If you ever get a chance to listen to or watch Smiley on NPR or PBS, you know how seasoned and smooth he is as an interviewer.  And there are others like him, such as Gwen Ifill, who consistently does such a great job with the vice-presidential debates.  So why did CNN go with an African American comedian?  I suppose the success of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert may have something to do with it.  Another African American, David Greer, just premiered his own show, “Chocolate News,” on Comedy Central.  I haven’t seen it but I read a review that said it was funny, though not quite as funny as Stewart and Colbert.  Yet again, the standard has been set by the mainstream and African Americans are judged on those standards.  That notwithstanding, the relevant point here is that these are comedy shows. People watch them and know they are infused with a heavy dose of humor and sarcasm.

This brings me to the reason why I was anxious about Hughley’s CNN show.  The CNN audience is very different from the Comedy Central audience.  For the most part, people tune in to CNN for the news, which comes with a very occasional smattering of chuckles provided by the dry back-and-forth between the anchors at the tail end of a show.  I’m familiar with D.L. Hughley’s humor.  It is neither occasional nor dry.  It is sharp, direct, cynical, and often irreverent.  Unlike cross-over comedians like Bill Cosby or Eddie Murphy, you have to know Hughley’s frame of reference to get the hilarity of his jokes.  Would a general CNN audience be able to access the context that undergirds his work?

I came across the show, “D.L. Hughley Breaks the News,” over the weekend while I was flipping through channels.  There he was, with a look on his face that immediately tickled me, but I was nervous.  He had some serious guests, among them former Bush press secretary, Scott McClellan.  Hughley asked McClellan to explain something further because he – Hughley – only had a GED.  I laughed.  So did McClelan, but he seemed a little uncomfortable.  I’m sure he was wondering if it was “PC” for a white dude to be laughing with a black dude about his apparent lack of higher education.  Then Hughley made a joke to the effect that the country must be in really bad shape if they are getting ready to vote in a black president.  Again, this is funny; but for the straight-laced CNN audience, how literally would they take Hughley?  Most of them don’t know of the long history of black comedy where black folks can laugh at themselves.  I wondered, what if they take him literally?  Seriously, I know a lot of folks, both here and abroad, who don’t get African American humor.

So, in the end I am left still nervous about Hughely on CNN.  I’m glad he got a major show on a major network but I worry about how easily a mainstream audience will accept him.  Television shows come and go rather swiftly (just ask Arsenio Hall!).  So, regarding D.L. Hughley and CNN, we’ll just have to wait and see.

Everybody looks good in a black church.  Folks dress up and come out, everything ironed and polished.  Nails look shiny and colorful and hair is glossy and freshly done.  I appreciate the care that we give to our appearance.  I know that it is not a prerequisite to worshipping God in spirit and truth, but it does make me feel good to see us all dressed up.  It reminds me of church at home – Nigeria – where people dress up too.  So I sit in church every Sunday and enjoy the view.  But my eyes invariably shift to the heads in front of me.  My eyes go down one row and up another.  I try to calculate the percentage of women who “wear” their own hair.

These days, I am distracted by my hair calculations.  Why, I wonder, are there more black women with false hair than black women happy in their own hair?  I see long Pocahontas-like black hair, curly ringlets worthy of little Shirley Temple, short spiky bone-straight hair, horse-tail pony-tails – the variety is impressive.  But for me, they all say that we, as black women, are just not content with the hair we have.  The argument that we cannot do anything different with our hair does not hold water with me.  We can wear cornrows, afros, braids, afropuffs, dreadlocks, and we can even straighten and curl the hair we have (although this last option often takes one down a slippery road to baldness and then to wigs and weaves).  There seems to be some urgency out there that pushes us to cover our own hair up with synthetic adornments.  Are we chasing a secret fantasy?  In donning these wigs and weaves, what characteristics do we hope to portray?  Do we hope that people will suspect we have European blood somewhere in our family tree?  Have we bought into the global narrative that the beauty of other women is better than our own?  I only ask these questions because all the wigs and weaves out there are copies of European, Asian, and Latina women’s hair.  The texture of these wigs is never that of black folk.  If you see an afro wig out there, it is usually marketed to the Halloween crowd.

 And why is it that the East Asians (Chinese and Koreans) have the monopoly on this market? If you want to get the best variety of “hair”, you must find a beauty supply shop in a predominantly black neighborhood.  These shops are usually owned by Asians.  I know a black woman who tried to get into the market and could not compete with the Asians.  How did the Asians come to find out that black folk around the world would be ready to spend millions of dollars on this false hair stuff?  What does this tell them about the self-esteem of black women?  I sometimes wonder if they snigger when the black women come in stroking the sleek wigs and trying on pieces that look ridiculously unnatural. 

 And yes, this is a global market.  Shipments of wigs and weaves find their way from Asia to Africa too.  When I first started wearing my hair natural and then switched to locs, I got more grief from Africans than I did from Americans.  Recently, a Nigerian friend tossed her own long tresses and told me that if I was at home, they would have to send me to join a religious cult because my hairstyle is not worthy of a woman of high society.

 This hair issue is just a small part of a much bigger problem.  Last weekend, the 6 year-old daughter of some African friends of mine was watching “The Cheetah Girls” with my daughters.  She was excited about two of the three stars of the show.  When I asked her why she did not like the third character who is a black girl, this little African girl told me in a matter of fact way, “She is not pretty because she is not white.”  I rest my case.

Missionaries from my church are, once again, embarking on a mission trip to Haiti. They often go to Haiti and other parts of South and Central America, the Caribbean, Africa, and India. This seems to be the typical itinerary for missionary groups in many churches in the United States. In fact, two of my students went to Southern Africa last year with their respective church groups. American churches – whether denominational or non-denominational – regularly send eager Christians to these destinations as long or short-term missionaries.

I know that these “new millennium missionaries” usually take food, clothing, and other valuable supplies with them on their mission trips, and this is a blessing to the poor people they meet on the mission fields.

Yet, whenever I hear that groups are going on a mission trip to these parts of the world, I grow pensive. I keep thinking about the primary goal of a missionary – to share the Christian gospel. If this is so, why don’t American missionaries go to Western Europe with the same amount of dedication and consistency? I’ve heard that there are huge, beautiful churches and cathedrals in Europe that are quite empty. A friend went to Germany and told me about how attendance is rather low there – and that most of the congregants are immigrants. But I never hear of a group of missionaries heading to Germany, Switzerland, the Netherlands, or any of the other developed Western European countries.

Conversely, the people of Africa and the Americas have been spiritual and religious and faithful – whatever you want to call it – for centuries. Missionaries brought the gospel to Africans before colonization (See Things Fall Apart). Today the largest Catholic and Non-Denominational churches can be found in Africa and South America.

So what is it that pulls all these American churches to the so-called “Third World” if the goal is to spread the good news? Is it because these Western Christians feel they would have done their “Christian duty” by going to the perpetually poor world? Why not go to the developed world where the good news seems to have been discarded? Perhaps it is too much of a challenge to change the Western paternalistic mindset from a focus on the third world to a focus on the developed world. This might give the impression that “the first world” is in some way vulnerable and not so powerful after all. God forbid!