Ishmael Reed - Barack Obama and the Jim Crow Media - The Return of the Nigger Breakers

Buchanan has been awarded more time to discuss race and the bigotry of Rev. Wright than the scores of black intellectuals and scholars, who could provide some insight. According to U.S. News & World Report (January 16, 1992), Pat Buchanan said in 1977 that Hitler was “a political organizer of the first rank,” a man of “extraordinary gifts,” “great courage” and elements of “genius.” Yet there was his sister, Bay Buchanan, debating Roland Martin, one of a handful of token black commentators with any kind of bite. This was on CNN, March 21. She was in a tizzy about the Rev.’s anti-Americanism, yet Hitler, her brother’s hero, was responsible for the deaths of one hundred and twenty thousand Americans.

Why doesn’t Dan Abrams at MSNBC just go ahead and offer Minister Louis Farrakhan a commentary? Why aren’t the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Congress, so quick to pounce upon blacks who say silly anti-Semitic things, all over MSNBC for Buchanan’s position as Dan Abram’s resident authority on race.

Tim Russert, his colleague, was employed by the late Daniel Moynihan. Moynihan’s report on the black family has guided public policy and been cited in hundreds of Op-Eds and editorials. Black intellectuals who opposed Moynihan’s report have cited the fact that the majority of women on welfare at the time of the report were white women. In fact it was a Nazi, Tom Metzger, who told Larry King that the average welfare recipient was a white woman whose husband has left her, while neo-cons and black tough-lovers ignore this possibility. Isn’t it ironic that one can gain a more accurate picture of welfare in this country from a Nazi than a neo-con? Most of those white welfare recipients were probably Celtic, members of Moynihan’s tribe.

It was Daniel Moynihan who accused black women of “speciation,” of reproducing mutants, the kind of thing that the Nazis used to say about their victims. Did Russert disown the senator after this remark? Some of those in the media who are now criticizing senator Obama’s pastor are Irish Catholics. They dominate the panels on Morning Joe . (His token black guests are passive participants, grateful-to-be-on camera types.)

Have these panelists, who are so critical of Rev. Wright, disassociated themselves from a church that had to pay two billion dollars to people who’ve been sexually abused by priests? Both the last pope and the current one attempted to cover up the scandal. Would they fly to Rome to scold the pope, which is what they demanded of Obama who wasn’t even present when Rev. Wright preached about 9/11? Have they had a one-on-one with their priests during which they criticized the church’s cover-up of the epidemic of pedophilia infecting the church?

The classic indicator for racism has been the double standard applied to blacks and whites. This still exists for blacks in everyday life. In the criminal justice system, the mortgage lending industry, and the treatment of blacks by the medical industry, etc. Why is Rev. Wright crazy for citing racism in the criminal justice system? The infamous three strikes law where poor people might receive a life sentence for stealing a pizza pie? Even the Bush administration has documented racial profiling. MSNBC’s Tucker Carlson flew into a rage when Marc Morial of the Urban League mentioned racial disparities in the criminal justice system. I sent Carlson documentation, including data from the Sentencing Project. He still probably denies it, and his misrepresentations go out unchallenged to millions of viewers. It’s appropriate that he and his colleagues dance on variety shows. They’re entertainers, not news people. Could you imagine Edward R. Murrow appearing on Dancing With The Stars ?

When Rev. Wright talks about AIDS being an ethnic weapon, those critics who denounce him haven’t examined the speculation that it might have originated in the Koprowski’s polio vaccine experiment that was conducted out of Philadelphia. Those who embrace this theory might find some support in the book, The River: A Journey Back to The Source of HIV and AIDS by Edward Hooper (Penguin, 2000). A white man wrote this book.

I did a considerable amount of research for my recent off Broadway play, Body Parts , which was dismissed by The New York Times as “angry.” I found that the pharmaceutical companies use Africans to test drugs that might have bad side effects without the knowledge of those being tested. The Washington Post did a series about this scandal. A series written by whites. They mention the Tuskegee experiments. According to Harriet Washington in her book Medical Apartheid , such experiments that date back to the days of slavery continue. Tuskegee was just the tip of the iceberg. Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present was reviewed in The Washington Post on January 7, 2007 by Alondra Nelson under the title “Unequal Treatment: How African Americans have often been the unwitting victims of medical experiments.” She wrote:

J. Marion Sims, a leading nineteenth-century physician and former president of the American Medical Association, developed many of his gynecological treatments through experiments on slave women who were not granted the comfort of anesthesia. Sims’s legacy is Janus-faced; he was pitiless with non-consenting research subjects, yet he was among the first doctors of the modern era to emphasize women’s health. Other researchers were guiltier of blind ambition than racist intent. Several African Americans, such as Eunice Rivers, the nurse-steward of the Tuskegee study, served as liaisons between scientists and research subjects.

The infringement of black Americans’ rights to their own bodies in the name of medical science continued throughout the twentieth century. In 1945, Ebb Cade, an African-American trucker being treated for injuries received in an accident in Tennessee, was surreptitiously placed without his consent into a radiation experiment sponsored by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission. Black Floridians were deliberately exposed to swarms of mosquitoes carrying yellow fever and other diseases in experiments conducted by the Army and the CIA in the early 1950s. Throughout the 1950s and ’60s, black inmates at Philadelphia’s Holmesburg Prison were used as research subjects by a University of Pennsylvania dermatologist testing pharmaceuticals and personal hygiene products; some of these subjects report pain and disfiguration even now. During the 1960s and ’70s, black boys were subjected to sometimes paralyzing neurosurgery by a University of Mississippi researcher who believed brain pathology to be the root of the children’s supposed hyperactive behavior. In the 1990s, African-American youths in New York were injected with Fenfluramine — half of the deadly, discontinued weight loss drug Fen-Phen — by Columbia researchers investigating a hypothesis about the genetic origins of violence.

With this kind of record, is Rev. Wright paranoid when he speculates that AIDS might be the result of an experiment gone wrong or even, as some black intellectuals assert an ethnic weapon? Given these recorded instances of abuse by the government and private groups, would anybody put it past them? The New York Times has carried a series about Eli Lilly’s role in distributing a drug called Zyprexa. Seems that the company knew about the dangerous side effects of this drug before they put it on the market. “Eli Lilly, the drug maker, systematically hid the risks and side effects of Zyprexa, its best-selling schizophrenia medicine, a lawyer for the State of Alaska said Wednesday in opening arguments in a lawsuit that contends the drug caused many schizophrenic patients to develop diabetes.”