Barack Obama and the Jim Crow Media

by Ishmael Reed

  Blaming the victim is nothing new in American history. Francis Parkman, who has been called the greatest of American historians, blamed the seizure of Indian lands and the extermination of some Indian tribes on the Indians. He said “the Indians melted away, not because civilization destroyed them, but because their own ferocity and intractable indolence made it impossible that they should exist in its presence.” Sound familiar? The cynical minds who serve the shareholders of NBC, CNN and Fox have used this explanation to make big bucks with little investment on their part, only the Indians have become blacks and Latinos. Noticing that CNN got high ratings from its blame-the-victim stunt, Black In America, MSNBC teamed Bill Cosby up with Michelle Bernard, a hired black mouth for the far right, who, following the neo-con line, and prompted by her funders, says that personal responsibility is a problem peculiar to black men. She’s also a global-warming denier, and believes that we should go easy on the rich because after all they are creating all of the wealth, according to her. She is one of those who are spreading lies about Obama’s health proposals. Bernard, president and CEO of the far- right funded Independent Women’s Forum, has written:

  More American women are going to die of breast cancer if you and I surrender to President Obama’s nationalized healthcare onslaught.

  According to the site SmackDown:

  The Independent Women’s Forum is the organization that has been running a malicious ad that focuses on scaring breast cancer victims into rejecting any of President Obama’s reform initiatives. The Independent Women’s Forum shares its premises and resources with Americans for Prosperity. Americans for Prosperity is the organization that created Patients First and Patients United Now, groups that have been critical to disrupting the health care debate in an effort to sidetrack the entire process.

  She is a black Tokyo Rose making broadcasts on behalf of the enemy, without even using big band swing music as part of her appeal. That Cosby would enter into an alliance with this woman is another example of how the once-brilliant and trail-blazing comedian is spending his twilight years as a sad clown.

  MSNBC’s version of Black In America was something called About Our Children, an entertainment which featured some lines from Cosby aimed at getting laughs from the audience. He revived his Jello act in a discussion with some children. The Latino community was also represented by a comedian, Paul Rodriguez, who got on not only to entertain, but because he opposes bilingual education. Cosby and Rodriguez couldn’t probe too deeply into the causes of American poverty because the entertainment was sponsored by one of the largest criminal operations in the country, the Bank of America. Also Wells Fargo, which is being sued by the city of Baltimore for aiming toxic loans at black neighborhoods. As The Washington Independent noted, “lawsuits over racial discrimination in sub prime lending are winding their way through the court system. Some of the allegations are nothing short of shocking; in one suit recently classified as a class action case, Wells Fargo is accused of using loan software with discounts on rates and fees in white communities, but forbidding loan officers in minority communities from access to it.” Wells Fargo received billions of dollars in taxpayers’ bailout and in October of 2009, announced a three billion dollar profit, yet the crime that the corporate-owned media concentrate on is street crime. Wonder why? Host Tavis Smiley is under attack for aiding Wells Fargo in peddling these loans that have cost black homeowners billions in lost equity.

  Now, Cosby lends his name to this operation by appearing on a show that is sponsored by Wells Fargo. If Bernard accused Wells Fargo and Bank of America both, technically, individuals, of lacking personal responsibility her face would disappear from the tube forever. Obviously, Michelle Bernard, who, following her backers’ script, is trying to blame black men for the country’s social ills, isn’t too choosey about who sponsors her, but Cosby ought to know better. Cosby wrote CounterPunch expressing annoyance with me after I wrote that he and Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. were viewing the underclass from first class.

  I live in the ghetto and I can assure you that the rich Negroes who get on television don’t know the half of it. Many of them are professors who live all of their lives in college towns and when they travel, it’s usually to visit another college town.

  I invited Bill Cosby to come to Oakland and sit in on one of our neighborhood meetings. We finally got a period of peace on our block because one of the gang members who were terrorizing our neighbors for at least four years was murdered around the corner and his brother seriously wounded.

  They were Asian Americans, but I doubt whether CNN or MSNBC will do South Asian in America, a show devoted to the social pathologies of this growing community. Asian Americans must be cast as the model minority.

  The purpose of this, according to the great Chinese-American writer, Frank Chin, is to embarrass blacks. But a toxic house, a criminal operation still flourishes in the neighborhood because of the power of a landlord, an absentee landlord, who has defied the city’s attempt to shut down her property. The police tell us that because of the power of landlords who rent their property or allow their abandoned property to fester with criminal operations, they are helpless to do anything about the problem. Skip and Coz. These landlords who are aiding and abetting criminal operations in neighborhoods like mine are probably from two-parent households and won’t be covered by The Discovery Channel’s upcoming smear of the city. An entertainment all about Oakland’s gang violence without acknowledging that under Ron Dellums, a black mayor and a new black police chief, crime is down.

  The Cosby-Bernard show included a “town hall,” a cheap way to get ratings; a device which relies on panelists and audience members competing with each other over who can come up with the best applause lines. These verbal shootouts are guaranteed to raise the revenue of CNN and MSNBC, but I doubt whether the panelists get paid. They do it for free like in the old plantation days. It’s all about entertainment. Advertising to promote CNN’s second Black In America, Soledad O’Brien, in a carnival tone, like one of the guys whose job it is to stand outside of strip clubs on North Beach in San Francisco, attempting to lure tourists to sex shows, promised the viewers, “You won’t be able to tear yourself away from this one.”

  On the morning of September 14, I was watching CNN’s Headline News version of attracting ratings near the AA gate at JFK airport in New York. In succession there were stories about Serena Williams’ tantrum at the US Open, Kanye West going off on Taylor Swift at an awards ceremony, and your obligatory black sexual predator, the usual sideshow manner by which blacks are shown on the tube. It’s fitting that white pundits and other writers consult comedians like Bill Cosby and Chris Rock for their insights about black culture because, traditionally, the media have treated blacks as comic relief. Hollywood, which in November presented blacks with yet another neo-Nazi incest film called Precious, has been in this business for over one hundred years. You would think that white American novelists and playwrights would oppose the current atmosphere that has raised fears that President Obama will meet the same fate as JFK, the details of whose murder are still being held a secret by the CIA. Instead, novelists like Tom Wolfe and Philip Roth promote images of blacks in their works that are no different from those promoted against minority men in Nazi Germany’s media and worse than that from Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh. Both Saul Bellow and Philip Roth have depicted black men as flashers, which was the common manner by which Jewish men in the Nazi press were shown.

  David Mamet lent his name to a repellent racist movie called Edmund, in which two black sexual predators appear (the sexual predator being the typical manner by which the Nazi publications like Der Angriff portrayed minority males). His predators, one is a pimp, the other a rapist, are even worse than the ones served up by D.W. Griffith. (Whether Mamet knows it, in the late Andrew MacDonald’s The Turner Diaries, the ultra-right’s bible and the book that inspired Timothy McVeigh of the Oklahoma Federal building, Jewish men are the pimps, black men are the rapists. Another read
er was Richard Poplawski, who murdered three Pittsburgh policemen last April 4, 2008.)

  While cable uses Bill Cosby and Paul Rodriguez to comment on black and Hispanic issues, comedian Chris Rock is Mamet’s guide to black America and he quoted Chris Rock in his vapid self-serving Times’ Op- Ed, an advertisement for his forthcoming play called Race. I’ve never seen an Op-Ed in the Times written by the great living black playwrights like Adrienne Kennedy, Amiri Baraka and Ed Bullins. In his Op-Ed, Mamet quoted Chris Rock’s comment on Rev. Jeremiah Wright. He said “You cannot find a seventy-year-old black man who does not hate the whites.” If Rock said that, he is ignorant and is susceptible to the cartoonish view of Rev. Jeremiah Wright offered by the media. Do you think that Rev. Wright hated the white members of his congregation? Of Rock’s silly observation, Mamet wrote, “This made sense to me.”

  It only made sense to Mamet because he wanted it to make sense. Even given the hard time that whites have been giving the Jews since ancient times, does Mamet believe that all Jewish seventy-year-old men hate Gentiles? Or is it just seventy-year-old black men who hate whites, uniformly? Who all think the same way?

  Mamet also wrote “Most contemporary debate on race is nothing but sanctimony—efforts at exploitation and efforts at restitution seeking, equally, to enlarge and prolong dissent and rancor.”

  Mamet doesn’t know anything about most contemporary debates on race, because the hundreds of black intellectuals, scholars, writers, poets, etc. who know something about the topic are kept off stage by a media that has a thing about cerebral blacks and offers only those who serve the interests of the media owners like Ms. Bernard, Larry Elder, Joe Watkins, Amy Holmes, Bob Christie and John McWhorter, a puppet for The Manhattan Institute, which supports eugenics “research.” Such is the power of the Institute, which gets money from places like Chase Manhattan Bank, that on Sunday, September 20, the Associated Press gave McWhorter the lead in an article about President Carter’s accusation that some of the vitriol aimed at President Obama is based upon race, another way that the far right manipulates public discussions affecting blacks through puppets like McWhorter and Bernard.

  Does Mamet read Panopticon Review, or Black Renaissance Noire, or The Black Agenda or The Final Call or even Ebony and Essence, TheRoot, Black Scholar or The Amsterdam News? Has he ever heard of bell hooks, Michele Wallace, Adolph Reed, Jr., Gerald Early, Darryl Pinckney, Cecil Brown, Sonia Sanchez, J.J. Phillips, Bob Steptoe, Katherine Takara, Jill Nelson, Elizabeth Nunez, Thulani Davis, Quincy Troupe, Eugene Redmond, Adrienne Kennedy, Herb Boyd, Ed Bullins, Jerry Ward, Houston Baker, Jr., Ethelbert Miller, Askia Toure, Askia Muhammad, Keith Gilyard, Bernard Bell, Greg Tate, Justin Desmangles, Tricia Rose, Clyde Taylor, Kalamu ya Salaam, Joyce Joyce, Eugene Redmond, Reginald Martin, Al Young, etc.?

  And as an example of how ignorance reaches the highest segments of American intellectual life in a racist society, Mamet has fallen for the media hoax that affirmative action is a black program, when, for Rabbi Michael Lerner, quoted in Time and the late Seymour Lipset, quoted in a book called, The Broken Alliance: The Turbulent Times Between Blacks and Jews in America by Jonathan Kaufman, it benefits Jewish women the most. Kaufman writes: “…he predicted that the great beneficiaries of affirmative action would be Jewish women. In fact, Lipset turned out to be right.” (Pg.224) My view is that the purpose of Mamet’s Op-Ed was an attempt to do a pre-emptive strike on black critics who will probably find his play Race as racist as the piece of dreck to which he lent his name, Edmund, which, as it turned out, closed soon after it opened.

  Langston Hughes complained that most of the plays written about black life during the 1930s were written by whites.

  Nothing has changed. Richard Price has made so much money creating blackface dialogue that he is moving to Harlem. Jimmy Carter doesn’t have to undergo an identity makeover like Price in order to know about blacks, nor does he have to make “brief forays into the ghetto,” which is how Price says that he gathered his material, like someone on a safari. Carter is a Southerner.

  After Jimmy Carter made an accurate assessment of the racist response to the election of a black president, all-day cable shows featuring mostly all-white panels weighed in on the former president’s remarks. Predictably, many dismissed him as a doddering fool. Except for Roland Martin, most of the black faces had to tone down their comments. Only Larry Elder, of the black right was allowed to get livid over Carter’s remarks. Later, they jumped on Nancy Pelosi for telling it like it is. She said that the current atmosphere of political pornography drummed up by people like Glenn Beck’s boss Rupert Murdoch and his Beelzebub, Willie Horton mastermind Roger Ailes, reminded her of the hateful atmosphere that led to the assassinations of Harvey Milk and George Moscone, a liberal who was on his way to becoming governor of California. The others were too timid to call a viral white supremacy that has infected thousands of birthers, deathers, tea baggers and armed miscellaneous crazies, as a result of Barack Obama’s election, for what it is. A public mental health crisis. The fact that many educated whites in the media deny Carter’s claim might be seen as part of the crisis. Talking about inmates running the asylum. George Wills, appearing on This Week, said that those who saw racism in the nutty 9/12 demonstrations were guilty of “liberal McCarthyism.” Will once said, following the line promoted by McWhorter’s Manhattan Institute, that blacks were intellectually inferior to whites. (As usual, Irish Americans were represented on this panel by a right-winger. This time, Peggy Noonan, a woman with, as a bluesman might say, ice water for blood. She doesn’t seem to mind that forty-five thousand people will die each year from lack of health care, according to a Harvard study. She’s against big government. Without big government, millions of Irish Americans would never have entered the middle class.)

  Despite the ugly racist mood of the crowd that came to Washington on September 12, 2009, some of them displaying signs that depicted Obama as a communist, a witch doctor with a bone in his nose, designed by Fox news expert Dr. David McKalip, or as someone who belongs in a zoo, as a monkey or as someone who should be killed, David Brooks said that the demonstration had nothing to do with race, yet they’re always criticizing Iranians for ignoring facts. Here’s a man who gets quoted as though he is Solomon. He wasn’t the only one. A steady stream of white politicians, pundits and their African-American tokens like Zambia-born Amy Holmes denied that race had anything to do with the ugly display against President Obama during the Fox and insurance industry sponsored 9/12 march on Washington. Neo-con David Brooks doesn’t understand why many blacks won’t assimilate, a process that has worked for him. His mentor is the late Irving Kristol who rose to power by scapegoating blacks for all of the country’s social ills and associating them with welfare, the Great Society programs, and affirmative action when the largest group to receive the advantages of these programs have been whites.

  Kristol became a consultant for the Bradley Foundation, one of those think tanks that finances quack studies about black inferiority. He even got all cozy with backwoods Christian fundamentalists, even though they believe that the Jews must convert before Jesus comes down from out of the sky. His friend Norman Podhoretz also used this formula to make it. Criticizing black family values. A hypocrite. According to Theodore Solotaroff, Podhoretz’s colleague at Commentary, Podhoretz was a real party animal: “He was no longer the spokesman of our sober, mature look, whose wistful suggestion for acting up was a midnight plunge in the Plaza Hotel fountain. No, that Norman was history. In the past year or two he had teamed up with Norman Mailer, the lead rebel, iconoclast and sensualist of the New York scene. The result was a hard-drinking, sexually liberated Norman who didn’t seem to spend many evenings at home.” Solotaroff says that Podhoretz’s wife Midge Decter, a woman who has spent years making a career of criticizing unmarried black mothers, made a pass at him. Like Michelle Bernard chastising black males instead of some of the corporate malefactors who sponsor her shows, the neo-con operation founded by Podhoretz and other
s served the purpose of redirecting attention from the criminal behavior of corporations, the money behind the neo-cons, to the bad habits of the so-called black underclass. The corporate-owned media use the same strategy.

  The news media spent a week running footage showing a black student beating up a white student on a school bus, but three recent cases where white thugs murdered Hispanics and got off were virtually ignored. During the same period the police, and the media, which always take their side, accused some black and Hispanic youth of a gang rape. Later it was discovered that the rape victim had lied and that the police had jumped the gun, which is typical of how the police treat black and brown suspects. In the same week a white man suspected of killing an Asian- American woman at Yale was permitted to go home and after he was arrested the media showed pictures of him behaving like an altar boy and brought on friends of his who vouched for his character.

  Howard Kurtz, a so called media critic, and an Imus Alumni, who has had it in for Obama ever since he announced his candidacy, spent Sunday, September 20 on Serena and Kanye for laughs, but hasn’t commented about the media silence regarding the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer “which agreed to pay 2.3 billion dollars to settle civil and criminal allegations that it had illegally marketed its painkiller Bextra, which has been withdrawn.” It was the largest health care fraud settlement and the largest criminal fine of any kind ever. So restrictive is the latitude accorded David Gregory by his corporate bosses that when Senator Joseph Lieberman appeared on Meet The Press, November 22, he failed to point out that Lieberman, who was on the show to oppose the health bill, receives millions from the insurance industry.