Barack Obama and the Jim Crow Media Page 3
This book ends however on an optimistic note, the author having witnessed the heroic efforts of members of a younger generation in their David versus Goliath effort, by using modern and ancient techniques to combat a corporate giant, the mainstream American media in decline and continuing to poison the American mind even amidst its death groans. Jackie Jones, a reporter for BlackAmericaWeb.com, was on point when she said: “Cyber-news is increasingly informing traditional media coverage and providing more lenses through which to view our world.”
Introduction
A niche market could be defined as a component that gives your business power. A niche market allows you to define whom you are marketing to. When you know who you are marketing to it’s easy to determine where your marketing energy and dollars should be spent.
Laura Lake
“Defining Your Niche Market
A Critical Step in Small Business Marketing”
M
any associate the term Nigger Breaker with the incidents recounted by Frederick Douglass in his autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, where he gives an account of his beatings by a professional Nigger Breaker named Edward Covey until he fought back. Yet Nigger Breakers were not an American invention. When I visited a famous slave fort in Ghana, I was shown a dungeon where rebellious blacks were held.
I was also informed by our guide that race mixing, the American practice that has, in the minds of some, led to the rise of a new race in America, began before the ships departed from this fort. The white crew helped themselves to the female prisoners at the slave castle and probably en route to the South as well.
Though thought of as a custom that perished with the “emancipation” of blacks, Nigger Breaking persists in subtler forms. The fact that black young people are punished by the criminal justice system for crimes that, if they were committed by white youth, would be considered pranks, in the opinion of Sheriff Michael Hennessey of San Francisco, can be seen as a form of Nigger Breaking. These youth not only supply the prison industrial complex with human merchandise but capricious incarceration is a manner by which the more assertive of these youth might be chastened. The fact that two hundred thousand inmates, probably a low number, are raped in the gulags that pass as prisons is ignored even by progressives who’ve spent thousands of hours of air time and print space complaining about the accommodations accorded members of bin Laden’s staff.
Another form of Nigger Breaking is to publicly humiliate a prominent black person as a way of sending a message to blacks, which was the assessment of MSNBC’s Ed Schultz about the ratings-boosting marathon coverage of the Michael Vick case, the football player who was convicted for his part in a dog-fighting operation. Schultz is one of a handful of white on-air commentators who speaks about race with anything approaching candor. There was more coverage by the corporate media of the Vick case than that accorded the millions of deaths resulting from the embargo of Iraq, and invasions of Middle East countries.
The pillorying of ex-Washington mayor, Marion Barry, is a good example of how a prominent black individual is used to cast collective ridicule on the black male population. When I suggested in my play Savage Wilds that the former black mayor of Washington had been singled out for his cocaine use because cocaine was the recreational drug of Washington’s political and media elite, I was called “paranoid” by Elizabeth Kastor of The Washington Post. Now that a number of prominent white politicians have admitted, even boasted, about their cocaine use, including two candidates for New York district attorney in the 2009 race, perhaps my diagnosis by the Post’s reporter was premature. On October 22, Steve Kastenbaum reported on CNN that it was “no secret that cocaine was rampant on Wall Street during the 1970s and 80s,” yet a member of their CNN panel of experts, William Bennett, then Drug Czar, presented drug use as primarily a black problem, which is how CNN treated it and continues treating it. White teenagers and middle class whites being admitted to emergency rooms and overdosing on cocaine are one or two-day stories relegated to a few columns in the rear of the newspaper, while the identities of black juveniles are often exposed on television whereas those of white juveniles are pixeled out. Here again, the double standard by which the criminal justice system judges white and black crime was exposed. Most incarcerated blacks are there because of non-violent drug crimes and some are doing long terms as a result of New York State’s Draconian Rockefeller drug laws.
Though, traditionally, Nigger Breakers have been white, with immigration, other groups have joined them. An example is the Mexican-American gangs who were recently busted for attempting to expel African Americans from a public housing project in Los Angeles.
And not all Nigger Breakers are thugs. Dinesh D’Souza came to prominence as one of former Treasury Secretary William Simon’s counter policy wonks. Simon believed that the public debate had been overrun by radicals and that it needed to be balanced by conservative voices. D’Souza was aligned with the right-wing The Dartmouth Review, which reveled in sophomoric racist hi-jinks with D’Souza often joining in, nothing original, just the old racist shenanigans like mocking the black dialect.
Both he and Simon were embarrassed about defending The Dartmouth Review when a former president of Dartmouth, American Book Awards winner James O. Freedman, leveled charges of anti-Semitism at it. Turned out that the Review was guilty. After the publication of his book The End of Racism, which was endorsed by The American Enterprise Institute, a far-right think tank that is awarded a hefty amount of airtime by cable, two black conservatives quit the institute, one calling him the Mark Fuhrman of public policy. Mark Fuhrman was the Los Angeles policeman whose racist views were exposed during the O.J. Simpson case.
D’Souza’s attacks on blacks were often silly and offensive but when he wrote a book accusing some white people of treason, some of those who had praised him greeted the book with ridicule. He’d forgotten his original assignment. Like many of those who’ve received good money to fault blacks for society’s woes, the Jewish commentators who are silent about the abuse of Jewish women here and abroad (On October 14, 2009, The New York Times ran a story about child abuse in the Orthodox community: said that it had been covered up), Dinesh D’ Souza has ignored the problems of those who share his ethnic background, for example, the million child prostitutes who walk the streets of Mumbai, the city of his birth. No money in it? His book, The End Of Racism is a blown-up scissors and paste job that is based on the idea that affirmative action is a black program, a false premise, and that blacks are at the bottom of the genetic tree, Asians and whites at the top branches, Hispanics in the middle, millions of whom are blacks, a fact about which he seems to be ignorant. And, oh yeah, there is no African Shakespeare. Well, people all over the world have story-telling traditions which include all of the techniques one associates with this art—metaphors, similes, irony, etc.—and if Dinesh wasn’t so bound to the idea that a superficial knowledge of a handful of European traditions makes one smart and if he were the least bit adventuresome, he might enjoy some of it. African stories were transmitted to this hemisphere, including forms that are ancestors of such popular styles as Hip Hop. I find these stories more interesting than the work of Saul Bellow.
Of course, without the Muslims, major parts of the European traditions might have been lost, including the novel. I once thought that there was such a thing as “Eurocentrism” until I traveled to Europe (West Asia) and found things to be more complicated than what D’Souza and his hero Allan Bloom make it out to be. (Bloom’s knowledge of “the ancients” was challenged by a real Greek Scholar, Martha Nussbaum, and Bloom himself was involved in a scandal involving blacks toward the end of his life. Regardless of his reckless moral behavior, exposed by his friend, Saul Bellow, in his novel Ravelstein, Gertrude Himmelfarb, a member of neo-con America’s first family, while critical of black morals, defended Bloom.)
The intellectual mercenary and Nigger Breaker like D’ Souza presents a greater danger to minorities than the street thugs
who commit hate crimes. Minorities have little capability to counter the propaganda and smears that emanate from think tanks and the media, and even academia. With the firing and buyouts of minority journalists, their access to the media has been diminished even more. Unlike the hoodlums who write swastikas on the doors of synagogues or the ruffians, usually young white males, who bash gays, kill Hispanics and are acquitted by white juries with nothing like the continuing outrage that accompanied the acquittal of O.J. Simpson, the ideas of Dinesh D’ Souza and Charles Murray, author of The Bell Curve, influence public policy. Murray is another example of a writer who redirects stereotypes from his group, in this case the Scots Irish, to blacks. When Vice President Cheney got into trouble for his joke about having Cheneys on both sides of the family and not even being from West Virginia, he was referring to the incest libel that’s been aimed at the Scots Irish. Sponsors of Murray, D’Souza and John McWhorter, front man for the eugenics-minded Manhattan Institute, are funded by, in some cases, billionaires, like William Scaife, the Pittsburgh billionaire who is helping to fund the “grass roots” tea-bagger spectacle, and along with the media, which have billions at their disposal, have formed the main opposition to President Obama. During August 2009, the power of these money people, who have been able to buy opinion, reached an influence way beyond the dreams of William Simon. They were able to design faux grass roots organizations and demonstrations using insurance industry-backed front organizations like Freedom Works and Americans for Prosperity.
Blacks have chosen many ways to fight back against the Nigger Breakers. From using the machete against whole families in Haiti or murdering a whole bunch of people like Nat Turner and his associates to using subtler ways. Barack Obama uses wit, wile and irony to embarrass the low-grade mentality of the 9/12 demonstrators, the tea baggers whose numbers have been magnified by 24/7 cable news because people yelling and screaming makes exciting television. Right-wing commentators at Fox gave those who rudely interrupted congresspersons at town halls during August of 2009 more strength than their actual numbers, and MSNBC, which is falsely cast as Fox’s liberal opposition, awarded them more exposure by denouncing the demonstrations. On October 14, when a spokesperson for tea-party demonstrators said that over a million people turned out to demonstrate against the polices of the Obama administration, he wasn’t challenged by Chris Matthews on whose show he appeared. The actual number was sixty thousand. While the media exaggerate the numbers of those who believe that the president was born in Kenya, Southerners mostly—while President Obama receives high favorability ratings in the rest of the country, his favorability percentage in the South is twenty-eight percent—the left has always protested the media’s tendency to undercount the numbers of their demonstrations, which have, in the case of the many anti-war demonstrations, drawn hundreds of thousands. While individual gun toters and deathers were interviewed on cable, rarely did one see someone as far left as these demonstrators are far right. Indeed, demonstrators who picketed insurance companies, whose opposition to a public option has created a situation where, according to a Harvard study, forty-five thousand Americans die each year because of a lack of coverage, have been ignored.
Some of the fiercest and most hostile and racist trash has been aimed at the young president, and not only by the usual suspects, those who view the president as a monkey, a witch doctor with a bone in his nose (an image created by neurosurgeon and Fox “expert” David McKalip), and someone who would paint the White House black, or use the White House lawn to grow watermelons, but also by prominent members of the Republican Party including Sarah Palin, who was the candidate who called the president, who is a centrist, a socialist, and was the person who referred to the health plan advocated by the White House as one that would include death panels.
So desperate are the cable networks for niche-market viewers that Sarah Palin is treated as a serious person even though her demagoguery increased the threats to the president’s life, and her support among the public is twenty-eight percent, a fact that seemed to have been ignored by prominent supporters of Mrs. Palin like Tina Brown and Mika Brzezinski. Sarah Palin was the designated Nigger Breaker of the McCain campaign. But as I point out in this book, during his campaign and during these months of his presidency Obama has had to maneuver through a gauntlet of Nigger Breakers—right, left, Republican and Democratic—who used the repertory of ancient stereotypes about black people against the president.
While ex-President Bush could always rely on the support of Fox and other right-wing commentators, Obama is getting it from both sides, some of his harshest criticism coming from the left, indeed the first attempt to break him came from his own party. In a manner similar to how Mary Matalin’s author, swift-boater Jerome Corsi, sought to portray Barack Obama, Mrs. Clinton’s campaign manager, Mark Penn, sought to portray him as a drug user and possibly a drug dealer. After the campaign, the Clinton strategy of depicting Obama as different as the Other, and even a possible secret Muslim, was exposed. When asked about Obama’s Muslim heritage during the campaign, Mrs. Clinton equivocated.
The McCain campaign dredged up the strategy that was used successfully against Michael Dukakis and Harold Ford, that of showing Obama as a threat to white women and white children. The New Jersey Republican Party even tried to tie him to O.J. Simpson. Not only did Obama become the forty-fifth president of the United States, but also the national psychiatrist or someone like Jesus expelling the demons from the mad man he had encountered at Gardarenes. It was as though some of his opponents were like some mentally disturbed person writing his sentiments on the walls of a padded cell with his feces.
As usual the corporate media was the mob leader. For the media, Obama can’t win for losing and often the right wing sets the agenda for the mainstream media.
Take the response to Barack Obama winning the Nobel Peace Prize. Media Matters wrote:
The volume emanating from the right quickly impacted more mainstream reporters. Time’s Simon Robinson penned an online piece explaining how the award could prove politically harmful to the president, and Nancy Gibbs wrote a widely circulated article for Time as well, this one explaining why the Nobel was “the last thing [Obama] needs.” She’s right… we all know the Nobel Prize is something that should be avoided, you know, like cancer. Sigh.
It wasn’t long before the calls started for Obama to turn down the award, from a variety of sources. Malkin, CBS’ Chip Reid, Time’s Mark Halperin, John Bolton, Slate.com’s Mickey Kaus, The Weekly Standard’s Mary Katherine Ham, and The Atlantic’s Jeffery Goldberg all echoed the theme, among others.
Can Nigger Breakers be black? I would consider right-wing blacks, who continue to be brought on by cable producers who choose black and Hispanic panelists, those least likely to offend their white audience, solely to defame Obama during his campaign and during his presidency, to be Nigger Breakers, especially those from Rev. Moon’s newspaper, The Washington Times, and Barack Obama became a Nigger Breaker himself when he singled out black men in the United States and Africa for scolding.
He was admired for his placing race in the background. The exception was when he criticized Rev. Wright, black fathers, African leaders and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Kanye West whom he called a jackass. He was applauded even by his critics for that one but when he said that the Boston police acted “stupidly” in the arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., he was met with a national uproar and had to modify his remarks.
(When appearing before a conference of policemen, the officer who violated Gates’ rights and lied on his report about the arrest was greeted with a standing ovation. The entire Gates episode was a blow to those who adhere to the fantasy of a post-race United States.)
The purpose of the corporate media, which serve as a sort of home base for the Nigger Breaking operation against Obama, regardless of the opinions of Don Imus Alumni Howard Kurtz and others who pretend that Obama has the media in his pocket, seems to be that of positing a right-of-center United Stat
es, while the public that elected a president who campaigned as a liberal and the poll numbers, that shows continued support for the president, presents a left-of-center country. Yet on a Sunday’s This Week, a Republican operative Nicolle Wallace was unopposed when she talked about Obama’s declining poll numbers. His poll numbers had decreased as a result of network television broadcasting attention-grabbing antics of the tea baggers, but on the date of the actual broadcast of ABC’s This Week, his poll numbers had rebounded to fifty-six percent. During the fourth week in November, Gallup and Public Policy released polls that offered a break down of Obama’s poll numbers along racial lines. While Public Policy found his support among whites to have fallen to forty-two percent, he still maintained high numbers among Hispanics and blacks, sixty-seven percent among Hispanics and seventy-seven percent among blacks. Gallup found seventy-three percent support among non-whites, their term, ninety-one percent and seventy percent among Hispanics. The Hispanics and blacks whom the Jim Crow media bring on camera to diss Obama don’t reflect these numbers. (Richard Prince of the Maynard Institute writes: “According to Election Day exit polls, whites preferred McCain to Obama fifty-five percent to forty-three percent. In exit polls dating to 1972, Democrats have never carried a majority of the white vote.”) What the discussion left out was the media’s role in Obama’s declining numbers by exaggerating the strength of the far-right demonstrators and even assisting them. A Fox News reporter was spotted at the 9/12 demonstration egging on the demonstrators (some of whom, when interviewed by Max Blumenthal, didn’t seem to know why they had come to Washington in the first place.)