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

As for the white boy who murdered a Hispanic, The New York Times just about wrote his defense, a Times policy about which complaints were received. In 2000, the New York City Youth Media Study found that white youth guilty of crimes are shown in their yearbook pictures while youthful black and Hispanics are identified by mug shots. This is not only the policy of the Times but of cable networks like CNN, which conceals the identity of white youthful perps while exposing those of black or Hispanic youth.

Michelle Bernard, one of the few regular black talking heads on MSNBC and head of an organization that is funded by the far right, the Independent Women’s Forum, congratulated President Obama’s singling out blacks for tough-love lectures about “personal responsibility.” She said that “personal responsibility” was especially a problem in the black community, the kind of group libel that blacks are subjected to each day by the media. Wish she’d tell that to the parents of those Dallas white middle class teenagers who are overdosing on cheese heroin, a story that barely merited a crawl on CNN, which runs mug shots of blacks all day and designates its crew of female surrogates to lecture black men about their behavior. Bernard is another person whose point of view is restricted by her white employers. Were she to present commentaries with some heft, she’d meet the fate of George Curry, Jack White, Ed Gordon, and the scores of journalists who, according to media watcher Richard Prince, are being shown the door. Fired and bought out.

In their bogus Black In America special, an excuse by CNN head Jonathan Klein to draw ratings — he was successful—, Soledad O’Brien scolded a black man for not attending his daughter’s birthday party. Here again the old 1830s media strategy of boosting white morality by denigrating that of blacks is used by Jonathan Klein in the same manner that Buffalo Bill sought ticket sales by staging Indian attacks on cabins sheltering virtuous helpless white women.

On July 17, 2009, The New York Times pundit Sam Roberts, who once said that blacks are prone to violence, and when I reminded him, didn’t remember, quoted Census figures which showed a rise in two-parent households among blacks and a decline in two-parent households among whites, giving support to Andrew Hacker’s remark that were Daniel Moynihan around today he’d be writing about “the tangle of pathologies” in the white community. The Times also reported that while the rate of incarceration among black women has declined that of white women is on the rise. Obviously, the behaviors of Paris, Lindsay, Britney, the Barbie bandits, and the girls who beat up a schoolmate and broadcast it on You Tube are part of a trend.

Bush supporter Tara Wall, CNN’s regular black talking head and Rev. Moon’s employee (nothing like seeing Rev. Moon’s people on MSNBC and CNN hold forth on Rev. Jeremiah Wright), mentioned that seventy-three percent of black children have been born out of wedlock, a figure that the right has bandied about for decades despite figures from the Centers of Disease Prevention and Control that there’s been a significant decline in such births over the last decade. Charles Blow of The New York Times and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. on his blog, TheRoot , bankrolled by The Washington Post , used Obama’s election to excoriate blacks again for unmarried motherhood and drug addiction. Both Charles Blow and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. are also apparently unaware that black teenage pregnancy has declined significantly over the last ten years with only a slight up-tick last year. I reminded Blow that these statistics were printed in his newspaper!! The New York Times . He didn’t reply, which is how the black tough-lovers treat their critics even though some of the academics among them pretend to love the Socratic dialogue. Ninety percent of the white pundits whom I have questioned, including Frank Rich, Richard Lowry, Sam Roberts, Samuel Freedman, Andrew Sullivan — pundits of the right and left — have replied to my questions about their coverage of black issues, but Bob Herbert, Charles Blow and black pundits who soak all of the little opinion oxygen that the conservative media owners allot to blacks feel that they are above debate. The wealthy white men who promulgate their views shield them and the neo-liberals and neo-cons and plain pawns of the right like John McWhorter, Steele, and Connerley. Orlando Patterson, apparently the only African American on the rolodex of the Times Op-Ed page editor, hailed Obama’s election as a sign that the United States is the greatest democracy since the Greeks, which would probably come as a surprise to the thousands of Greek slaves. On the day after the election The New York Times announced in its headline that Obama’s election had broken a barrier, yet on the editorial page all of the poets who were invited to chime in were white. Some barriers remain.

Moreover, regardless of how professional tough-lover Juan Williams, a Caribbean American like Orlando Patterson, rates Hispanic behavior above that of blacks, there is a larger drug problem among Hispanics both in terms of addiction and distribution, and Blow and Gates, Jr. might want to know that there are more cases of unmarried motherhood among Hispanics, per thousand, than among blacks, yet President Obama, who uses personal responsibility as code words, told the council of La Raza that he shared the values of the Hispanics. This was a week after the president appeared before a black audience and read the required tough-love speech to black fathers for which he was congratulated by white divorced fathers like Joe Scarborough.

If he’d done the same before a Hispanic audience he would have lost the Hispanic vote. Hispanics are the country’s largest minority, yet the social pathologies of this group and of other ethnic groups are ignored by the media and the black tough-love entrepreneurs like Gates, Jr., Williams, Patterson, Michelle Bernard, CNN’s Tara Wall, who works for Rev. Moon’s far right The Washington Times, and President Obama, yet these people are promoted as those who place race in the background. As an example of The Washington Times ’ attitude toward Obama, on November 17, 2009, an opinion written by Wesley Pruden, editor emeritus, drew shock for its coarseness and hostility. Not only do Pruden and others desire to control the reproductive rights of American women, but whom they should date. “It’s no fault of the president that he has no natural instinct or blood impulse for what the America of ‘the 57 states’ is about. He was sired by a Kenyan father, born to a mother attracted to men of the Third World and reared by grandparents in Hawaii, a paradise far from the American mainstream.” (Don’t expect Tara Wall, Brian DeBose, Walter Williams, Tom Sowell and other Washington Times black columnists and reporters to object to such distasteful comments.)

In the language of recovery, don’t the objects of tough love get some positive behavior points or some positive reinforcement when they do something right? And if these commentators are truly beyond race why not extend their tough love to other ethnic communities. I once told Gates that some of the white men who sponsor him for his tough-love views have a worse record of treating women of their ethnic group than the brothers. He wasn’t aware. Marty Peretz, then editor of The New Republic , where a surrogate was hired to call me a misogynist, said that black women were “culturally deficient.” When FAIR asked Tabloid Tina Brown to condemn him the way that one of her surrogates did a hit job on Minister Louis Farrakhan, she refused. You won’t find a discussion of tensions between Jewish women and Jewish men in The New Republic, which are so strained that Katha Politt of The Nation accused Jewish men of having “anti-Semitic attitudes” toward Jewish women. Maybe Charles Blow should come up with a graph about this situation. David Simon, a television series. Steven Spielberg, a movie.