How Ken Burns Could Do Better

The extremely white PBS documentarian is the best at African American history, so why shouldn't he specialize in culturally appropriating black history?

When you’ve been writing for as many decades as I have, topics tend to roll around back into the news, such as Ken Burns with his new PBS documentary on The American Revolution (or the wrap-up concluding part of 2024’s movie musical Wicked).

So, here’s my 2009 Taki’s Magazine essay on Burns:

The Unbearable Whiteness of Ken Burns

Steve Sailer

August 12, 2009

The publicity machine is now gearing up for documentarian Ken Burns’s twelve-hour extravaganza, The National Parks: America’s Best Idea, which will run for six straight nights on PBS starting September 27 [in 2009].

This being a Ken Burns series, the predominant theme of The National Parks will be “diversity.”

So, if you go camping in a national park this month, check out the diversity of your fellow visitors. You’ll likely notice tourists from all over the world, including busloads of punctual Germans and amenable Japanese.

But, foreign tourists aren’t the right kind of diversity for Burns.

Although Burns has spent his career explaining stuff, he’s never quite figured himself out. That’s why, judging from his documentary’s preview materials, The National Parks is shaping up, after six years of work, as Ken Burns’ Worst Idea.

Burns became famous in 1990 with his magnificent eleven-hour documentary The Civil War.

With thirty-five years of sobering hindsight, it’s hard to imagine just how great Burns’ Civil War turned out to be, or why he didn’t screw it up.

It was a different time, you understand. Hating white people just wasn’t as second nature to our cultural elites as it quickly became after 1990. Thus, The Civil War climaxes with the 1913 re-enactment on the 50th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg, with the doddering survivors of the Confederate and Union armies re-enacting Pickett’s Charge, with the old foes flinging themselves into each other’s arms when they finally stagger up to the high tide point of the Confederacy.

Nowadays, you’d have to follow that with Nikole Hannah-Jones lecturing for 10 minutes on how the wizened codgers in grey were The Bad Guys who should never be forgiven until the heat death of the universe. But, 1990 … It was a different time, you understand.

Could he top it? Anticipation in the press for his 18-hour Baseball series in 1994 was intense.

Well, it turned out Burns couldn’t top The Civil War. As Baseball slogged on, reaching some kind of apotheosis of pompous tedium when interviewee Stephen Jay Gould sang “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” all the way through a capella, my wife started asking unkind questions about why the media would never get so excited over a documentary of this numbing length on the history of, say, soap operas or some other feminine timewaster.

Still, adrift inside the vast hulk of Baseball was an excellent two-hour documentary on the one topic that truly engaged Burns: the Negro Leagues and the Jackie Robinson story.

As more Burns documentaries piled up, it became clear that what he cares most about is telling stories about African Americans. This was acidly pointed out in the famous parody, The Old Negro Space Program:

It was a different time, you understand. In 1957 or 1958, if you were black and you were an astronaut, you were outta work.

In 2007, Latino pressure groups successfully exploited Burns’ notorious lack of interest in nonblacks by raising a stink over the shortage of Hispanics in his WWII documentary The War. He ended up caving in and inserting an extra 28 minutes of Latino Lore, that, in the words of a New Yorker reviewer, felt “tacked-on.”

In a better world, Burns could devote himself solely to making documentaries about African American subjects. There is plenty of good material, and he’s the best at it.

What would be some good topics for African American history documentaries for Ken Burns to make?

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