EXAMINING ‘THE VANISHING FAMILY’

This is not “The Cosby Show.”

Bill Moyers, a bespectacled white journalist who resembles a teacher’s pet even in middle age, is interviewing young black mothers in a Newark, N.J., ghetto. “Tell me, raise your hand if you’re married,” he begins.

No hands.

“Raise your hand if you would like to be married to your baby’s father.”

One hand.

The others laugh. “The rest of you don’t plan to get married,” Moyers continues. “Why don’t you plan to get married? I’d like to know that.”

Clarinda, 17, answers. “I don’t want no man holding me down, because I think I could make it as a single parent.”

Moyers is puzzled. “But don’t you think you might need help (from a man) in raising that baby . . . ?”

Another teen mother replies. “Not really. I didn’t have a father. My father wasn’t in the home. . . . Male figures are not substantially important in the family.”

Ka-boom ! There it is right up front, a simple dialogue illustrating the controversial thesis of “The Vanishing Family--Crisis in Black America,” an important and boldly executed “CBS Reports” airing at 9 p.m. Saturday on KCBS Channel 2.

Many documentaries are either dull or irrelevant or both. This one--though nailed to a coffin time slot instead of being showcased and given a powerful lead-in--is a provocative stunner with all the goods.

There is great peril here, for Moyers is a white reporter bearing a message that could become racist fodder. So, Moyers and CBS expect to catch it for this 90-minute powerhouse just as Daniel Patrick Moynihan was wrongly called racist in 1965 when a Department of Labor report under his name depicted black inner-city families as being in advanced erosion. The publicity faded, but the alleged problem didn’t.

Consider the clashing TV images as the nation dwells this week on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

On the one hand, America’s favorite TV show is a wonderfully cosy and funny NBC comedy starring Bill Cosby as head of a well-to-do, loving and unified black family living in a fashionable New York brownstone. The Huxtables of “The Cosby Show” have become the nation’s First Family, reflecting traditional American values. They are not the definitive black family, but a family that happens to be black.

At NBC, “The Cosby Show” is close to being the franchise. Here are blacks that even Bull Connor would have difficulty disliking. The parents are imperfect, but firm and fair. The kids are trouble, but not too much trouble. They do dopey things, but not dope. You’d kill to be a part of this family, which rebuts the negative portrayals of blacks that prevailed on TV for so many years.

On the other hand, here are some of the grim statistics (unattributed on the air, by the way) that Moyers asserts Saturday:

--”Half of all black (female) teen-agers become pregnant. . . . In the black inner city practically no teen-age mother gets married.” That’s what happened to unwed Clarinda, pregnant at 15, and now raising her daughter at home with her mother while the child’s father is on the streets spending “most of my time listening to the radio.”

--”The leading cause of death for young black men is murder. One in 21 will be killed before the age of 25. . . . Nearly half of young men in the inner city are arrested before they reach 18.” Devastating!

America’s white families face critical family problems, too, Moyers notes. “But for the majority of white children, ‘family’ still means a father and a mother. This is not true for most black children.”

Three generations of unwed mothers and other inhabitants of Newark’s black inner city tell Moyers “what happens to family when mothers are children, fathers don’t count and the street is the strongest tool.”

Like most documentaries, “The Vanishing Family” is the sum of many contributions. Perry Wolff is executive producer and Ruth Streeter producer of the documentary, which will be followed by a panel discussion with black Americans, including the Rev. Jesse Jackson.

Beyond that, “The Vanishing Family” reconfirms Moyers as a journalist extraordinaire with a remarkable ability to find common denominators and narrow the gap between reporter and subject.

Just look at him on the screen, resembling yet another transient correspondent popping in for a quick TV fix. ET would have an easier time blending into a Newark ghetto than would former Texan Bill Moyers with a TV crew. You’d think they would throw or laugh him out.

As he has so many times previously, though, Moyers really connects and he really listens . The power of this program is people, not statistics or narration. Many of the dialogues are striking for their street candor. The interview process itself is integral, for many of the exchanges come not in response to a field producer’s unheard questions but in direct response to Moyers.

Alice Sandra, who heard that birth control “give you cancer and all that stuff,” is 23, the mother of three, all fathered by Timothy. He is a jobless 26-year-old who has also fathered three other children.

Timothy would marry Alice Sandra, but says, “I’m old-fashioned. I want a big wedding.” Meanwhile, Brenda gave birth to Bernard 15 years ago when she was 15. She has four children by three men, none of whom help her financially.

Moyers: Do you want your kids to get married?

Brenda: Sure, especially my daughter. My boys, they’ll probably be--whatcha call it--free-lancers.

Moyers: Free-lancers? Like their fathers?

Brenda: Yeah. Maybe, I don’t know.

Moyers: That does seem to be the pattern.

Brenda still has strong ties to her family in North Carolina. And just as he previously returned to his own hometown of Marshall, Tex., and helped Maya Angelou relive her childhood in Stamps, Ark., for programs on PBS, Moyers the populist accompanies Brenda and Bernard back to North Carlina.

To Brenda, this is still home. But Bernard’s extended family remains behind, on the streets of Newark.

“All our young men are out on the corner--just absolutely doing nothing,” Moyers hears from Carolyn Wallace, a black woman who with her husband runs a Newark community center for kids. She links the runaway black pregnancies to a moral breakdown in recent years.

Moyers: What I hear you saying is that even though racism may have brought about these circumstances, even though society may have created conditions that are terrible, you’re saying you have to be responsible, you have to practice discipline and self-restraint?

Wallace: That’s right. We are destroying ourselves. . . .

Moyers tells her that “a white man like Moyers cannot step in and say to young black kids, ‘It’s not right to have children out of wedlock. Welfare needs to be changed. You’ve got to take responsibility.’ ”

Wallace: Why can’t you say it?

Moyers: They won’t listen to me.

Wallace: It doesn’t make any difference; you’ve got to say it anyway. They may not listen to me either. But I’m saying if you say it in your corner and I say it in my corner, and everybody’s saying it, it’s going to be like a drum beat. And sooner or later it will sound. . . .

Meanwhile, you think about the children of Clarinda, Alice Sandra and Brenda, and you wonder if the drum beat will sound too late for them.

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