Barack Obama and the Jim Crow Media

by Ishmael Reed

  The two panelists to whom he directed the question included a former general who tried to cover up the massacre of Vietnamese civilians (and who lent his name and reputation to an enterprise) and the invasion of a country that posed no threat to the United States. The invasion has resulted in the murder of thousands of civilians and army personnel. The other panelist was a convicted plagiarist. The host had to resign from Congress abruptly because of a scandal in his personal life. Surely persons that my inner-city neighbors should look up to for moral guidance!

  Over the last year, while there have been purges, buyouts, firings, of distinguished African-American journalists, even the women at National Public Radio who were hired to replace black men, who made their target audience uncomfortable, the black right-wing sock puppets have been kept on. They can always be summoned to engage in a finger wagging session aimed at black America. President Obama found it necessary to use this tactic when he did his Father’s Day speech in which he scolded black fathers for their wayfaring ways, and Jesse Jackson got into trouble for accusing him of “talking down to black people.” Obama was congratulated by some himbos who got their jobs the way the bimbos got theirs. Many find them pleasant to look at, but none of them has the kind of intellectual curiosity that is required of great journalists. They’re there to entertain. The women to reveal their knees. The kind of media people who thought the entrapment of Marion Barry was funny until Sam Donaldson let it slip that some of them were doing coke themselves.

  Some of them are divorcees and have personal lives that are in shreds but there they were congratulating Obama for what they deemed his Sister Souljah moment. They also liked his race speech in which he sympathized with the resentment of Reagan Democrats for what the commentators said was their feeling that blacks were getting more of a lift from social programs than they. Considering that whites were receiving land subsidies when Indians were being driven from their lands and blacks were in chains, were receivers of the major benefits from federal housing programs (which discriminated against blacks), the FDR programs, the Great Society programs, federal highway subsidies, the G.I. Bill which relocated them from the cities to the suburbs, I’m wondering what on earth President Obama was talking about. What is the basis for this resentment?

  Nevertheless, as the cameras roamed over the millions who turned out to watch Obama take his oath and deliver his speech one couldn’t help being infused with excitement and pride.

  I thought of the six hundred years of resistance and agitation that led to this moment, and when he was introduced as president-elect with trumpets blaring like in the Gladiator movies, and walked down the steps toward his seat, I was really moved. This was not only a triumph for the persistence of the African-American movement, but even the intellectuals who’ve commented on this election have failed to mention that Obama is also a member of the Irish Diaspora. And that one of his ancestors fled Ireland during Ireland’s darkest period. A man who came to this country with few assets. For some reason, the guys on Morning Joe—Irish- American guys—can’t bring themselves to mention that Obama’s mother was an Irish American. Wonder why? Shouldn’t Buchanan, Scarborough, Matthews and the rest be proud of a home girl made good?

  I thought that the speech was wonkish as well as Kennedyesque. “Let the word go forth to friend and foe alike.” But it was the kind of speech that the president of a country, whose economic system is a kind of welfare capitalism, had to make. As Kennedy said in a back channel exchange with Fidel Castro, he realized the oppression that Cubans suffered under Batista but he was the president of the United States, not a sociologist.

  After Obama’s speech, I went out to buy a coffee pot, maybe one that would make both espresso and coffee, my drugs. There was a long line at Macy’s. Could Obama’s speech have spurred a shopping spree? No. They were giving away perfumes and colognes. A salesperson asked me whether I wanted to buy some cologne. The Krup coffee maker I wanted had been sold out. The Mr. Coffee maker at Walmart was too plastic. Carla didn’t even want to step into the place because of its labor policies. Once inside she walked about the place with her nose upturned. I did notice the tell-tale plastic odor of cheapness. I didn’t see any clerks. I figured that they were in the basement hiding from the immigration authorities. I finally ended up on Fourth Street, one of Berkeley’s white zones, like the ones that exist all over Obama’s post-race America. The kind of place frequented by young whites. The kind of people who, as Warren Hinckle said, hang around ice cream parlors all day. They offered this Krup coffee maker that looked like the ones they use in restaurants. Way over my budget. I finally settled on buying a larger version of the one we had at home. A Bodum, the kind of coffeemaker that they must have used in the Gold Rush days. With this machine it takes all morning to brew your coffee but the taste is superior to those of the other types.

  When I returned home, I returned to channel surfing. On Hard Ball Chris Matthews was allowing Jeff Davis and Robert E. Lee fan Pat Buchanan to carry on his on-going vendetta against the president (among the predictions that he made that didn’t come true, was that if Obama were nominated, the Republican Party would “rip him to pieces.” They lost!). During the first month or so of Obama’s administration Buchanan said that the troubled stock market was sending Obama a message. But on April 13, 2009, MSNBC financial reporter Erin Burnett announced that the stock market had had its best twenty-three-day rally since 1933. So protective of Buchanan, who is on camera for the purpose of selling white supremacy, the old 1830s media formula, that little mention was made of Buchanan’s support of the Nazi prison guard John Demjanjuk, who was deported in May. It’s not that Dan Abrams and the others who employ Buchanan are anti-Semites. Buchanan is a good salesman for racism, which is a big business. The rage he exhibited indicated that MSNBC’s Buchanan was clearly bothered by the election of a black president. He wasn’t the only one. That’s probably why Justice Roberts flubbed the oath. He probably couldn’t stand seeing a black man sworn in. Chris Wallace over at Rupert Murdoch’s big tent said that the fumbled oath meant that Obama wasn’t the president. While a clearly agitated Buchanan was carrying on, I had a vision of old Jeff Davis and Robert E. Lee looking up from hell and fulminating over this inauguration.

  On April 12, Obama mojoed his critics again. Faced with his first foreign affairs crisis when some “pirates” off the coast of Somalia held an American captain, Newt Gingrich, who left Congress in disgrace, said that “this is an administration which keeps trying to find some kind of magical solution that doesn’t involve effort, doesn’t involve risk and doesn’t involve making hard decisions… nobody has the will to do anything.” A few hours later it was announced that under Obama’s direc-tions, the captain had been freed. On the morning shows, there was a consensus that this was a test for Obama. Yet the next morning Chuck Todd minimized Obama’s role and gave credit to other agencies and individuals.

  The Morning Joe show became, during the campaign and afterwards, an adjunct to Sarah Palin’s campaign, yet because of a couple of token liberal and “progressive” programs, Imus Alumni Howard Kurtz was still describing MSNBC as pro-Obama on January 25, 2009.

  Later Matthews dragged out this black preacher whom the right, without success, has been trying to install as a black leader since 2000 (but at least he doesn’t wear red shoes like America’s other favorite black preacher.) A Bush fan, his selling point for MSNBC is that he can always be relied upon to boost white moral superiority at the expense of blacks, the old journalistic shell game. This conniving tough-love entrepreneur and lard ball said that when Obama referred to putting away childish things during his address, he was addressing black people who were children and were like back seat drivers complaining all the time and not doing anything. Or, like the late Saul Bellow said, like teenagers begging Dad for the car keys.

  My neighbors and I have been trying to rid our block of two criminal operations for four years. We succeeded in closing one but the other one is still in operation. An interracia
l gang (that’s right, in California the gangs tend to be as mixed as those who riot) is making our lives miserable. Engaging in shootouts, littering up the streets and bursting our eardrums with this dreadful noise from boom cars. Noise that they consider music.

  We’ve tried everything. We’ve alerted the police, zoning authorities, the health department—they’re still operating. We’re doing something. Oscar Grant was also doing something. He was a butcher’s apprentice who was dragged off a train and murdered by a Bay Area Transit Policeman. The latest news of January 25, 2009, reports that he was beaten by the police before he was shot in the back by a policeman. A young black filmmaker, quoted in The New York Times, said that class has replaced race as the post-race paradigm. Apparently the police haven’t read that memo. Oscar Grant had class. He was a family man with one child, and a butcher’s apprentice with a job. It’s not class, its one’s black ass.

  Over at CNN, Larry King brought in the kind of people who Jonathan Klein feels make whites comfortable to comment about the election: corporate Hip Hoppers, athletes and comedians. MSNBC thought it clever to solicit the views of a ten-year-old black who, in the old days of vaudeville, would be called a “pick.” His white teacher was clearly miffed that President Obama didn’t drop everything to give this journalist an interview.

  (While great black journalists like Les Payne have lost their columns, CNN’s Jonathan Klein gave a black comedian a news show.)

  Amy Goodman’s inaugural show had some excellent features. She invited a historian who provided some historical background about the building of the Capitol by African captives. I always thought that the figure atop the Capitol building was an Indian. The historian says that it was a slave and that originally the creator of the statue had to replace a cap that was made popular by the French as a symbol of liberty because Jeff Davis, a slaveowner, and a real character who tried to escape Union troops by getting up in drag, objected.

  The show was marred by a weak poem by Alice Walker. She called it her inaugural poem. I’d call it Hallmark lite full of syrupy bland sentiments. The problem with Ms. Goodman and other white progressive feminists is that they are so desperate for the approval of black womanists, who smile at them when buying their books but secretly despise them, that they are responsible for promoting some of tritest of black literature none of which has the quality of Elizabeth Alexander’s inaugural poem, which, for me, was the best of the four inaugural poems that I have heard. While Barack Obama reached back to the eighteenth century for a George Washington quote, Ms. Alexander went back to Anne Bradstreet, in a poem that combined the rhetoric of the Puritans with the concerns of the proletariat writers of the 1930s while using the literary devices of the modernists.

  Hats off to C-Span and MTV for providing, in my opinion, the best of the inaugural coverage. C-Span let its cameras roam without being interrupted by pundits who are wrong most of the time or who are there to deliver asinine and saleable tough-love lectures to blacks. While MSNBC has right-wing black global-warming denier Michelle Bernard, certainly more evidence that MSNBC is favorable to Obama, CNN uses Tara Wall from Rev. Moon’s paper. (Michelle Bernard asserts her right-wing leanings from time to time, interrupting her pasted on smile. She opposed the equal pay for women bill that Obama signed.) C-Span permitted one to snoop in on some interesting sights and sounds. Like when the Carters passed by the Clintons on the way to being introduced to the crowds. While they greeted the Bushes warmly they snubbed the Clintons. Maybe it’s because they know the extent of the Clintons’ vindictiveness, still sore at those who supported Obama. Maureen Dowd reported that they were responsible for derailing Caroline Kennedy’s Senate bid as payback for her and her uncle supporting Obama. Instead of patronizing those whom they view as their target audience with comments about the inaugural from athletes and comedians, etc. C-Span had a first-rate African-American historian Daryl Scott, Chair of Howard University’s history department, to act as its guide to the Inauguration.

  The corporate media won’t give the new president a break, regardless of what himbo and Imus lover Howard Kurtz said about the media being one hundred percent behind Obama, one of those media hoaxes that’s been refuted by three studies. He wants to be beyond race but the TV producers won’t let him. He may have a rainbow cabinet and a rainbow following, but those who control the opinion industry don’t include a variety of colors. This not only applies to the corporate media but the progressive and liberal media as well. Their ridiculing the Republican Party as a white country club is a case of people living in glass houses. This media country club will pounce upon every Obama misstep.

  Though millions of people of different backgrounds, races and ethnic groups all over the world applauded, they view him still as the black president. Some might find this limiting. When they interviewed Obamakins in the crowd of two million, they focused on the views of blacks, (but in studio he was evaluated by mostly white panels and the right-wing black help). They won’t give the guy a break.

  When he gave speeches that were soaring in oratory and rhetoric they said that he was trying to be a rock star or, as Mrs. Clinton said, all he has is a speech. Then when he delivers a sober low-key recitation—a list of the crises faced by Americans—Jeffrey Toobin, who got his job as TV commentator for his comment that blacks shouldn’t be “patted on the head” because they supported the decision of the O.J. criminal trial, complained that the speech didn’t include flights of oratory.

  Other establishment elements are using his election to suggest that the fight for racial equality has been won. The New Yorker had a cartoon suggesting that blacks were “Free At Last.” They had a portrait of Martin Luther King, Jr. above an angry Bush leaving town. The Bush administration had a higher percentage of black contributors than The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, The Nation and other hip publications that supported Obama. In October 2009, Eric Alterman of The Nation commented on the decline of white American power. Not to worry. Whites still have The Nation where, like Pacifica, ninety percent of the commentary is by white males and an equal percentage of books reviewed by white male authors.

  That cartoon in The New Yorker reminded me of what the great Chester Himes once said. He said that if you made a black man a general in the army you could do anything you wanted with black enlistees.

  If, as The New Yorker and other publications have announced, we’ve reached King’s mountain top, I guess I’m a lousy mountain climber. I hear all of the shouting and cheering at the top as the Obamakins survey the Promised Land, but I’m down here struggling with these rocks. If I were a nineteenth-century cartoonist like Thomas Nast, I would label the rocks: discrimination against blacks and Hispanics by the mortgage industry; racial disparities in the health industry; racism in the criminal justice system, including prosecutorial and police misconduct; the flooding of the inner cities with illegal weapons.

  And while the media are heralding the election of Barack Obama as signaling the advent of a new post-race period, their own profession has seen a virtual purge of minority journalists, eight hundred and forty lost their jobs during the year of his campaigning. Moreover, if the visuals they chose during inauguration are any indication, Barack Obama is the post-race president whom they won’t allow to be post-race.

  Since then, millionaires and billionaires who own the media have used their talking heads to pounce upon any of Obama’s plans that are injurious to their interests. Already AOL news has shifted from presenting its daily black athlete in trouble to taking down Obama and while a first-rate writer and journalist like Amy Alexander is having trouble finding a place to place her copy, AOL employs the imported intellectual mercenary Dinesh D’Souza to write about black culture and politics which is like it would have been had Hollywood hired Strom Thurmond to write the screenplay for The Martin Luther King Story. MTV’s Youth Ball demonstrated that if the corporate media doesn’t repair its relying on the ancient carnie act, The Wedge, to raise ratings they will go the way of the Republican Party. Tennessee ident
ified some of the MTV performers for an old school person like me. She and I get into it about which period is the best. I say the 1940s, she says now and maybe the 1960s. When I saw the enthusiasm of these young people, black, white, brown and yellow, helping to build houses, repair schools and “all fired up and ready to go,” I, who have been critical of some of Obama’s cynical political moves, after all he’s a politician, thought that he might just bring it off his “Yes, We Can.”

  I was wrong about Obama’s being elected. I thought that Clinton would win. I voted for Cynthia McKinney because her political views are more compatible with mine. (One of Obama’s accomplishments was that up to now black men have been seen as evil; now maybe we’re the lesser of two evils?)

  But I wasn’t ready for the Obama phenomenon that swept over the land like the legendary Big Wave that surfers talk about. I should have known that something different was happening when I heard a black man call into C-Span’s Washington Journal. He said, “When I hear Obama speak, I feel like just getting up and doing something!”

  Finally, one hopes that no harm will come to this young president. Already he has challenged the United States intelligence community. The last president who did that was JFK.

  (The National Association of Black Journalists jointly sponsored poll of four hundred and sixty-two people attending the inauguration in Washington on Tuesday found that most said their primary source for news was cable television.)