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

Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton became, in Pat Buchanan’s words, “the coal miner’s daughter,” in an effort to win the votes of beer drinkers, hunters and bowlers. This hundred-million-dollar-plus populist, who opposed women on welfare continuing their college education, joined Senator McCain (who, with his hundred-million-dollar wife, owns eight homes), and a bunch of rich columnists, David Brooks, William Kristol, and confessed white supremacist George Will (FAIR), in criticizing Obama for his remark about people in small towns (The headline on Lou Dobbs’ show read “Obama slams small towns”) being bitter about government. Wall Street’s Lou Dobbs said that the remark was “ignorant.”

The media consensus was that Obama had insulted these god-fearing salt-of-the-earth types with his comment about their being bitter. How did the salt feel? Zogby Poll on April 17 reported that, “Pennsylvanians by a two-to-one margin (sixty percent to twenty-nine percent) are more likely to agree with supporters of Obama that voters in Pennsylvania are bitter about their economic situation than with Clinton and critics of Obama that he is an elitist who does not understand working people.” Yet, on April 28, big bucks reporter Andrea Mitchell, appearing on her MSNBC show, said that Barack’s remark constituted a “self-inflicted wound.” April 28 saw an all-day ignorant reply to a speech made by Rev. Wright at the National Press Club where he was subjected to a third- degree grilling by a woman who admitted that she hadn’t read Wright’s entire speech during which “controversial” remarks were made. Neither did the usual upscale entertainers posing as journalists. Though Rev. Wright said that his was not a “liberation theology” they kept referring to it as such. MSNBC’s Dan Abrams sicced some members of the black right on Rev. Wright: Michelle Bernard, and Rev. Sun Moon’s Tara Wall. Bush’s preacher, Rev. Eugene Rivers, was also brought in. Just as MSNBC didn’t check the connections of its military experts to defense contractors, apparently, Rivers’ background hasn’t been vetted. Joe Klein, who rose to power by dissing black culture, so much that FAIR dubbed him “a white militant,” harshly questioned Wright’s patriotism, as though Klein had a tiny flag waving from every orifice of his body. Tucker Carlson termed Obama’s remarks about Wright “pathetic.”

There’s something deranged about a corporate media that would engage in character assassination against Rev. Wright for his views, yet praise a man who tried to cover up the destruction of thousands of lives. But the people who own the media have found that character assassination and driving a wedge between different groups is a moneymaker. One is reminded that the introduction of the 1830s penny press featured sensational reporting of the autopsy of a black woman whom P.T. Barnum claimed was George Washington’s nurse. This was the O.J. story of the time. The modern media continues features that were perfected by the circus. Jonathan Klein told his token Latino commentator, right-wing Cuban Rick Sanchez, who wants New Orleans to become a Mexican-American city, that the issue of race was something that could make big bucks, according to The New York Observer .

When the primaries began to move west, the lead became something about the long-standing enmity between blacks and Latinos. It’s certainly there. Strife between blacks and Latinos on the school playgrounds and in prisons. (In California’s Central Valley there is conflict between Latinos and immigrants from South East Asia.) There are also tensions between Mexican immigrants and blacks, which is understandable since the Mexican media runs the kind of images of blacks that in the United States have been consigned to the Jim Crow museum at Ferris State University, except for the kind of materials that the Republican Party uses from time to time. But could Latino-black relations be more complex than a sensational cable news lead?

It took Gregory Rodriguez in Time and syndicated columnist Ruben Navarrette, Jr. to offer a perspective missing from cable. Navarrette pointed to the many instances where Latinos have supported a black candidate. Challenging some of the assumptions made by white commentators, who cited “a history of uneasy and competitive relations between blacks and Latinos in…Chicago, Los Angeles and New York,” Rodriguez wrote that “each of those cities have, in the past, elected black mayors who captured the majority of the Latino vote.”

Missing in most of these discussions was any reference to the African heritage of millions of Latinos, sometimes known as Hispanics, or indigenous people. If, using the standard established by slave traders, “one drop” of black blood makes you black, why aren’t they considered black?

Writing about the most recent mayoral race in Oakland, whose main competitors were a black and a Latino, I said that race wouldn’t be an issue because the Mexican-American candidate was darker than the black candidate. A month ago, when I was having dinner on the Lower East Side with a famous Puerto Rican poet and two Puerto Rican scholars, I repeated a joke that comedian Paul Mooney tells: Puerto Ricans and Cubans are “[Negroes] who can swim.” He didn’t say “Negroes.”

They said that whites in Pennsylvania wouldn’t vote for Obama because of his remarks about the white working class being bitter and clinging to guns, a line that was worked by the corporate media almost as much as the Rev. Wright film, which became sort of the Zapruder moment during the primary. Obama won Pennsylvania. They said that white women wouldn’t vote for Obama because of the way he treated Hillary Clinton (whom he praised during debates and on the stump) yet Obama won the white women’s votes. Their breaking ranks with Gloria Steinem shows that the elite elements in the feminist movement are not only out of touch with their followers but follow a double standard when judging white and black men, a tendency noted by feminist critic bell hooks. The low point in the primary came when these women supported Sarah Palin, one of the worst demagogues in American history and probably the tackiest.

In a novel, Reckless Eyeballing, that left me for literary road kill and caused at least one boycott of my appearance at Baton Rouge led by feminist Emily Toth (it fizzled when a professor challenged them; they hadn’t read my books), I had a feminist character in my book defend Eva Braun on the grounds that she was a woman. I was reminded of this on November 18 when Tina Brown, the publisher of a zine called The Daily Beast and MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski carried on about how unfair the media treated Sarah Palin. Not to compare Sarah Palin with Eva Braun. Ms. Palin is more dangerous. Yet Ms. Brown and Mika Brzezinski succumbed to the hockey mom presentation of this rabble rouser by McCain campaign manager Rick Davis showing her cooking dinner with Bush One caddy, Matt Lauer and such. Mika agreed with Tina Brown. She said “it was pretty ugly it got really vicious — while images of Obama were overwhelmingly positive.” Like when Sarah Palin told Gwen Ifill that she would select which questions she wanted to answer during her debate with Joe Biden? Was the media unfair to Mrs. Palin? While Rev. Jeremiah Wright was subjected to a massive form of character assassination the media made little notice of Mrs. Palin’s ties to groups led by kooks. One of which was The Third Wave Movement. Here is how the publication Enlightened Catholicism described that movement.

The Third Wave Movement is also known as the New Apostolic Reformation, Joel’s Army, and The Manifest Sons Of God. Essentially this movement believes we have entered the end times. Joel’s Army sees this as evidenced by the passing of Roe V Wade in 1973, and that those born after this year are part of that army. All these linked groups believe they have a Divine Mandate to clean up the world by taking over the “seven secular mountains,” as explained in this quote from Mary Glazier. Mary Glazier is the leader of Palin’s ‘spiritual warfare group,’ an admission Palin made when interviewed by Focus On The Family : “Glazier’s sermon, which featured her comments on Palin, was given at a conference Opening the Gate of Heaven on Earth that also featured a number of speeches and sermons on the plans of leaders of the New Apostolic Reformation to take control of the seven ‘kingdoms’ of society through their ‘Seven Mountains Strategy.’”