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

The man who could be called the founder of the American mass media, P.T. Barnum, was a slave owner and a master of the hoax. He made money from exhibiting a black woman, Joice Heth, who claimed that she, after Barnum gave her some shots of whiskey, was 161 and nursed George Washington. When she died her autopsy fascinated readers and gave them something about black life to gawk at. Barnum even charged admission to those who wanted to witness this grisly undertaking. It was the O.J. story of the time and like the contemporary media have made millions from O.J. (his trial saved CNN), the penny press and its readers just couldn’t let this autopsy story go.

I began a novel about the O.J. phenomenon in 1994, and what I’ve noticed is that O.J. is dragged into stories that have little to do with the ex-football player and even President Obama was joined at the hip with O.J.

Barnum and James Gordon Bennett’s Herald , among the first of the penny presses, which debuted in 1835, made cash from Joice Heth’s story but I doubt whether they were as blatant about their aims as CNN’s Jonathan Klein who, according to The New York Observer , told Rick Sanchez, their right-wing Hispanic token, that money could be made from the race issue. Black In America , which was meant to make whites feel superior and humiliate blacks by proxy, made so much money that P.T. Barnum’s heir, Jonathan Klein, says he’s going to do another one in July 2009. People, whose interpretation of movies like The Crash and David Simon’s black products differ from mine, say, well, Ishmael, you have to agree that these products, no matter how ugly and cynical and racist, give black actors jobs. So did The Birth of a Nation . But at least the actors performing in these venues get paid. The black panelists who are brought on to dignify town halls like Black In America , produced on the cheap, do it for free. They do talk shows where commentators have to fill sometimes three hours at a time. This costs less than some real investigation or in-depth interviews. Whatever you might say about the BBC, you do get African leaders talking for themselves instead of a stateside classroom person posing as an expert.

The blacks on cable are either conservative or passive or both. Joe Watkins, a MSNBC regular, and Amy Holmes, a Zambia-born right-winger, even defended Cheney’s use of torture.

Therefore, I was really taken aback when Carlos Watson, the kind of mellow fellow who won’t get angry (while Scarborough and Buchanan can throw fits whenever they wish) challenged Joe Scarborough’s comment that the Obama stimulus plan was “a stinking pile of garbage” and charged that he and Limbaugh had gotten the Republicans to vote against the package. (On October 29, 2009, it was reported that the stimulus had created three hundred eighty thousand jobs.) Scarborough went apoplectic on the guy. Yelling. Screaming. And so I turned on the Morning Joe at 6:30 a.m. (Oakland time) the day of the inaugural and, you guessed it, I found Mark Whitaker, Washington Bureau Chief and Senior Vice President, NBC News, and the first African-American top editor of a national newsmagazine use the sales pitch that dates back to the 1830s. He was asking two panelists and a Scarborough host whether Obama should go into the ghettoes and get the savages to behave better. He didn’t say it that way. That’s my putting words into his mouth. The moral-superiority-of-whites sales pitch has become subtler. He asked whether the new president should go into neighborhoods like mine and preach personal responsibility. We’re like the unruly blacks who were always getting into trouble in the movie Cadillac Records . We need a white savior like Chess Records owner Leonard Chess to bail us out of our screwed up “dysfunctional” lives. The White Man’s Burden.

The two panelists to whom he directed the question included a former general who tried to cover up the massacre of Vietnamese civilians (and who lent his name and reputation to an enterprise) and the invasion of a country that posed no threat to the United States. The invasion has resulted in the murder of thousands of civilians and army personnel. The other panelist was a convicted plagiarist. The host had to resign from Congress abruptly because of a scandal in his personal life. Surely persons that my inner-city neighbors should look up to for moral guidance!

Over the last year, while there have been purges, buyouts, firings, of distinguished African-American journalists, even the women at National Public Radio who were hired to replace black men, who made their target audience uncomfortable, the black right-wing sock puppets have been kept on. They can always be summoned to engage in a finger wagging session aimed at black America. President Obama found it necessary to use this tactic when he did his Father’s Day speech in which he scolded black fathers for their wayfaring ways, and Jesse Jackson got into trouble for accusing him of “talking down to black people.” Obama was congratulated by some himbos who got their jobs the way the bimbos got theirs. Many find them pleasant to look at, but none of them has the kind of intellectual curiosity that is required of great journalists. They’re there to entertain. The women to reveal their knees. The kind of media people who thought the entrapment of Marion Barry was funny until Sam Donaldson let it slip that some of them were doing coke themselves.

Some of them are divorcees and have personal lives that are in shreds but there they were congratulating Obama for what they deemed his Sister Souljah moment. They also liked his race speech in which he sympathized with the resentment of Reagan Democrats for what the commentators said was their feeling that blacks were getting more of a lift from social programs than they. Considering that whites were receiving land subsidies when Indians were being driven from their lands and blacks were in chains, were receivers of the major benefits from federal housing programs (which discriminated against blacks), the FDR programs, the Great Society programs, federal highway subsidies, the G.I. Bill which relocated them from the cities to the suburbs, I’m wondering what on earth President Obama was talking about. What is the basis for this resentment?

Nevertheless, as the cameras roamed over the millions who turned out to watch Obama take his oath and deliver his speech one couldn’t help being infused with excitement and pride.

I thought of the six hundred years of resistance and agitation that led to this moment, and when he was introduced as president-elect with trumpets blaring like in the Gladiator movies, and walked down the steps toward his seat, I was really moved. This was not only a triumph for the persistence of the African-American movement, but even the intellectuals who’ve commented on this election have failed to mention that Obama is also a member of the Irish Diaspora. And that one of his ancestors fled Ireland during Ireland’s darkest period. A man who came to this country with few assets. For some reason, the guys on Morning Joe —Irish- American guys — can’t bring themselves to mention that Obama’s mother was an Irish American. Wonder why? Shouldn’t Buchanan, Scarborough, Matthews and the rest be proud of a home girl made good?

I thought that the speech was wonkish as well as Kennedyesque. “Let the word go forth to friend and foe alike.” But it was the kind of speech that the president of a country, whose economic system is a kind of welfare capitalism, had to make. As Kennedy said in a back channel exchange with Fidel Castro, he realized the oppression that Cubans suffered under Batista but he was the president of the United States, not a sociologist.

After Obama’s speech, I went out to buy a coffee pot, maybe one that would make both espresso and coffee, my drugs. There was a long line at Macy’s. Could Obama’s speech have spurred a shopping spree? No. They were giving away perfumes and colognes. A salesperson asked me whether I wanted to buy some cologne. The Krup coffee maker I wanted had been sold out. The Mr. Coffee maker at Walmart was too plastic. Carla didn’t even want to step into the place because of its labor policies. Once inside she walked about the place with her nose upturned. I did notice the tell-tale plastic odor of cheapness. I didn’t see any clerks. I figured that they were in the basement hiding from the immigration authorities. I finally ended up on Fourth Street, one of Berkeley’s white zones, like the ones that exist all over Obama’s post-race America. The kind of place frequented by young whites. The kind of people who, as Warren Hinckle said, hang around ice cream parlors all day. They offered this Krup coffee maker that looked like the ones they use in restaurants. Way over my budget. I finally settled on buying a larger version of the one we had at home. A Bodum, the kind of coffeemaker that they must have used in the Gold Rush days. With this machine it takes all morning to brew your coffee but the taste is superior to those of the other types.