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

When I returned home, I returned to channel surfing. On Hard Ball Chris Matthews was allowing Jeff Davis and Robert E. Lee fan Pat Buchanan to carry on his on-going vendetta against the president (among the predictions that he made that didn’t come true, was that if Obama were nominated, the Republican Party would “rip him to pieces.” They lost!). During the first month or so of Obama’s administration Buchanan said that the troubled stock market was sending Obama a message. But on April 13, 2009, MSNBC financial reporter Erin Burnett announced that the stock market had had its best twenty-three-day rally since 1933. So protective of Buchanan, who is on camera for the purpose of selling white supremacy, the old 1830s media formula, that little mention was made of Buchanan’s support of the Nazi prison guard John Demjanjuk, who was deported in May. It’s not that Dan Abrams and the others who employ Buchanan are anti-Semites. Buchanan is a good salesman for racism, which is a big business. The rage he exhibited indicated that MSNBC’s Buchanan was clearly bothered by the election of a black president. He wasn’t the only one. That’s probably why Justice Roberts flubbed the oath. He probably couldn’t stand seeing a black man sworn in. Chris Wallace over at Rupert Murdoch’s big tent said that the fumbled oath meant that Obama wasn’t the president. While a clearly agitated Buchanan was carrying on, I had a vision of old Jeff Davis and Robert E. Lee looking up from hell and fulminating over this inauguration.

On April 12, Obama mojoed his critics again. Faced with his first foreign affairs crisis when some “pirates” off the coast of Somalia held an American captain, Newt Gingrich, who left Congress in disgrace, said that “this is an administration which keeps trying to find some kind of magical solution that doesn’t involve effort, doesn’t involve risk and doesn’t involve making hard decisions… nobody has the will to do anything.” A few hours later it was announced that under Obama’s direc-tions, the captain had been freed. On the morning shows, there was a consensus that this was a test for Obama. Yet the next morning Chuck Todd minimized Obama’s role and gave credit to other agencies and individuals.

The Morning Joe show became, during the campaign and afterwards, an adjunct to Sarah Palin’s campaign, yet because of a couple of token liberal and “progressive” programs, Imus Alumni Howard Kurtz was still describing MSNBC as pro-Obama on January 25, 2009.

Later Matthews dragged out this black preacher whom the right, without success, has been trying to install as a black leader since 2000 (but at least he doesn’t wear red shoes like America’s other favorite black preacher.) A Bush fan, his selling point for MSNBC is that he can always be relied upon to boost white moral superiority at the expense of blacks, the old journalistic shell game. This conniving tough-love entrepreneur and lard ball said that when Obama referred to putting away childish things during his address, he was addressing black people who were children and were like back seat drivers complaining all the time and not doing anything. Or, like the late Saul Bellow said, like teenagers begging Dad for the car keys.

My neighbors and I have been trying to rid our block of two criminal operations for four years. We succeeded in closing one but the other one is still in operation. An interracial gang (that’s right, in California the gangs tend to be as mixed as those who riot) is making our lives miserable. Engaging in shootouts, littering up the streets and bursting our eardrums with this dreadful noise from boom cars. Noise that they consider music.

We’ve tried everything. We’ve alerted the police, zoning authorities, the health department — they’re still operating. We’re doing something. Oscar Grant was also doing something. He was a butcher’s apprentice who was dragged off a train and murdered by a Bay Area Transit Policeman. The latest news of January 25, 2009, reports that he was beaten by the police before he was shot in the back by a policeman. A young black filmmaker, quoted in The New York Times , said that class has replaced race as the post-race paradigm. Apparently the police haven’t read that memo. Oscar Grant had class. He was a family man with one child, and a butcher’s apprentice with a job. It’s not class, its one’s black ass.

Over at CNN, Larry King brought in the kind of people who Jonathan Klein feels make whites comfortable to comment about the election: corporate Hip Hoppers, athletes and comedians. MSNBC thought it clever to solicit the views of a ten-year-old black who, in the old days of vaudeville, would be called a “pick.” His white teacher was clearly miffed that President Obama didn’t drop everything to give this journalist an interview.

(While great black journalists like Les Payne have lost their columns, CNN’s Jonathan Klein gave a black comedian a news show.)

Amy Goodman’s inaugural show had some excellent features. She invited a historian who provided some historical background about the building of the Capitol by African captives. I always thought that the figure atop the Capitol building was an Indian. The historian says that it was a slave and that originally the creator of the statue had to replace a cap that was made popular by the French as a symbol of liberty because Jeff Davis, a slaveowner, and a real character who tried to escape Union troops by getting up in drag, objected.

The show was marred by a weak poem by Alice Walker. She called it her inaugural poem. I’d call it Hallmark lite full of syrupy bland sentiments. The problem with Ms. Goodman and other white progressive feminists is that they are so desperate for the approval of black womanists, who smile at them when buying their books but secretly despise them, that they are responsible for promoting some of tritest of black literature none of which has the quality of Elizabeth Alexander’s inaugural poem, which, for me, was the best of the four inaugural poems that I have heard. While Barack Obama reached back to the eighteenth century for a George Washington quote, Ms. Alexander went back to Anne Bradstreet, in a poem that combined the rhetoric of the Puritans with the concerns of the proletariat writers of the 1930s while using the literary devices of the modernists.

Hats off to C-Span and MTV for providing, in my opinion, the best of the inaugural coverage. C-Span let its cameras roam without being interrupted by pundits who are wrong most of the time or who are there to deliver asinine and saleable tough-love lectures to blacks. While MSNBC has right-wing black global-warming denier Michelle Bernard, certainly more evidence that MSNBC is favorable to Obama, CNN uses Tara Wall from Rev. Moon’s paper. (Michelle Bernard asserts her right-wing leanings from time to time, interrupting her pasted on smile. She opposed the equal pay for women bill that Obama signed.) C-Span permitted one to snoop in on some interesting sights and sounds. Like when the Carters passed by the Clintons on the way to being introduced to the crowds. While they greeted the Bushes warmly they snubbed the Clintons. Maybe it’s because they know the extent of the Clintons’ vindictiveness, still sore at those who supported Obama. Maureen Dowd reported that they were responsible for derailing Caroline Kennedy’s Senate bid as payback for her and her uncle supporting Obama. Instead of patronizing those whom they view as their target audience with comments about the inaugural from athletes and comedians, etc. C-Span had a first-rate African-American historian Daryl Scott, Chair of Howard University’s history department, to act as its guide to the Inauguration.

The corporate media won’t give the new president a break, regardless of what himbo and Imus lover Howard Kurtz said about the media being one hundred percent behind Obama, one of those media hoaxes that’s been refuted by three studies. He wants to be beyond race but the TV producers won’t let him. He may have a rainbow cabinet and a rainbow following, but those who control the opinion industry don’t include a variety of colors. This not only applies to the corporate media but the progressive and liberal media as well. Their ridiculing the Republican Party as a white country club is a case of people living in glass houses. This media country club will pounce upon every Obama misstep.