Real Black People of Atlanta Versus the 'Reality Show' Images

"Will the Real Black People of Atlanta Please Stand up" was the title of a Huffington Post article featured on Thursday, June 20. 

The author Kelly Smith Beaty, who is from Atlanta but lives in LA, wrote the rhetorical statement after watching what I can only imagine was another frustratingly 'low-brow' episode of some Reality TV Show based in Atlanta.

In her article she speaks of how she watched the newest show with "chagrin" as TV Producers come to, "our city to create what inevitable amounts to the Jerry Springer equivalent," she writes.

The poignant question midway through Beaty's article states:

"How is it that a city which was once the crowning jewel in the story of black America has allowed itself to be positioned as the melting pot of black affliction?"

Indeed, I wonder the same thing.  Cascade Patch is out in the community every day and see stories of success, interview people of wealth, and talk to people who have even fallen on hard-times. Never do we see so much ignorance, that is portrayed on a weekly basis by the various Atlanta based reality shows.

Granted, yes ignorance exists in Atlanta. 

Fact is that ignorance exists everywhere, but as Beaty's article points out there are a number of stories and characters within the great Atlanta history and in its current incarnation, that (our city), "doesn't have to settle for being the butt of any reality franchise's humiliating and reputation-damaging joke."

Cascade was once the most affluent Black neighborhood in the U.S., and still remains to be quite a wealthy neighborhood for those that can afford it.

As Kelly Smith Beaty says, "that Georgia peach that appears at the end of these shows is rotten. It is time that we come together to throw it out."

What are your thoughts?  Are you addicted to the Atlanta so-called reality shows?  Is it part of your guilty pleasure? Do you think they hurt us as a city, as a people?

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