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

Finally, in his 2002 Jefferson lecture, delivered at the Library of Congress, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., during remarks about the eighteenth-century poet Phillis Wheatley in which he excoriated the attitudes of her critics in the Black Arts movement, one more time, ended his lecture with: “We can finally say: Welcome home, Phillis; welcome home.”

If Gates ceases his role as just another tough lover and an “intellectual entrepreneur,” and takes a role in ending racial traffic and retail profiling, and police home invasions, issues that have lingered since even before Chesnutt’s time, we can say, “Welcome home, Skip; welcome home.”

Let’s All Have a Beer13

It’s not surprising that some whites, who monopolize the means of expression both electronically and in print, mainstream and progressive, would automatically take Sgt. James M. Crowley’s word against Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s even though Crowley’s account of the Gates arrest has been disputed by both Gates and Lucia Whalen, the woman who called 911.

They also disapprove of President Obama calling the action “stupid.” According to a CNN poll, fifty-nine percent of blacks believe that Officer Crowley acted stupidly; twenty-nine percent of whites.

Whalen said nothing about “two black men with back packs,” during her 911 call as noted by The New York Times , the day after two of its reporters embraced Crowley’s version of the incident. She never used the word black. Crowley’s invisible “two black men with back packs” came from the same part of the American imagination as Susan Smith’s black man wearing a knitted cap, Bonnie Smith’s invisible car-jacking black men and Charles Stuart’s invisible black-male murderers. The same place as Barack Obama’s invisible Kenyan birth certificate, a hoax accepted by the Gothic South where the uniform of its homegrown terrorist movement is that of Casper the Friendly Ghost.

Even twelve-year-old Christopher Pittman got into the act. After blowing his grandparents to Kingdom Come with a shotgun, young Pittman blamed the murders on an invisible over-six-feet-tall black man.

Now that there are fears of black and brown uprisings, fears stoked by Rupert Murdoch and CNN’s Jonathan Klein, for ratings, the country is revisiting Cotton Mather, the real founding father, who wrote a book about his personal hallucinations called The Wonders of the Invisible World Being an Account of the Trials of Several Witches Lately Executed in New England . His Salem Woods were full of invisible black men. He was one of those nuts who sparked the witch hysteria, which has become the Obama hysteria, inflamed by Klein and Murdoch who go after eyeballs like vampires go after an exposed neck.

Birthers, the creator of Obama as the Joker, tea baggers and assorted anti-Obama nuts are always welcomed at birther-loving CNN, MSNBC and Fox. I don’t know what all of this is leading up to, but I hope that members of President Obama’s Secret Service detail have been rigorously screened. Abraham Bolden, author of The Echo from Dealey Plaza , writes about the racist attitudes of the men who “guarded” JFK. One of them said that he’d never take a bullet for a “nigger lover.”

One of those who is under the post-race spell is Stuart Taylor, senior columnist for National Journal . Appearing on the August 3 edition of the Washington Journal , Taylor said that the Gates arrest had nothing to do with race. When a black caller from Michigan accused Crowley of lying, Taylor said that “there was no proof of a significant misstate- ment” by Officer Crowley. He argued that we’ve entered a post-race period because of Obama’s election and that “there was not a single example of discrimination against Obama in his entire life,” even though Obama says that he experienced racial profiling while serving in the Illinois Legislature. Taylor also denied the existence of racial profiling saying that “a lot of white people get treated worse by the police” than blacks.

Taylor also said that whites don’t do crack, when studies I’ve read indicate that whites consume most of the crack; they just don’t get sentenced for its possession and sale. “Crack penalties appear to hit minorities harder,” was the headline of a Los Angeles Times story published in May 1995.

Despite evidence that large numbers of whites use and sell crack cocaine, federal law enforcement in Southern California has waged its war against crack almost exclusively in minority neighborhoods, exposing black and Latino offenders to the toughest drug penalties in the nation.

Not a single white, records show, has been convicted of a crack cocaine offense in federal courts serving Los Angeles and six Southern California counties since Congress enacted stiff mandatory sentences for crack dealers in 1986.

Yet Taylor attributed the obstacles facing black Americans to their personal behavior, which has been Skip Gates’ line up to now. Like “poor work habits,” which makes you wonder how over eighty percent of blacks manage to hold down jobs; given Stuart’s error-filled interview, who is he to complain about poor work habits?

Taylor’s main point was that “racial preferences pervade American society” when a number of studies, including one from the Department of Labor, describe affirmative action as benefiting white women the most. Taylor was interviewed by a white woman, Libby Casey, who neglected to point this out.

He said that a disproportionate number of blacks are incarcerated because they commit most of the crimes, another lie. They just get arrested more often. Seventy-five percent of blacks and Hispanics wouldn’t be in jail if they were white, and lies coming from Taylor and his colleague at the National Journal , Ron Brownstein, contribute to the climate that sends them there. Brownstein and Taylor make a living by ratcheting up white resentment against blacks, a job so easy that you can do it from the beach. All that is required is a laptop.

Bill Cosby is providing these opportunists with ammunition through his poor command of the facts. I love the guy, and will never forget the time when he flew me up to Harrah’s and provided me with accommodations that included a chef, and introduced me to Ray Charles, but his tough-love lectures are shaky.

Instead of lecturing “thirty-five-year-old grandmothers living in the projects,” wealthy black Americans like Bill Cosby and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., who view the “underclass” from first class seats, should establish a black version of the Anti-Defamation League that would challenge the 24/7 false reporting about minorities, who don’t have the media power to fight back.

I’d make a contribution and I know a number of people who’d do the same. For its part, the Anti-Defamation League exposes anti- Semites who are racists as well, some of them armed with deadly weapons.

Letters to the editor, like the one that NAACP president Julian Bond wrote to The New York Times , reminding them that affirmative action is preferential toward white women, don’t seem to have an impact. Bond disputed the paper’s recent right-wing hire, Op-Ed writer Ross Douthat, who, like a reporter for the Times , believes that affirmative action is primarily “race conscious.”

Stuart Taylor’s responses lacked the facts, yet he warned Gates that “he should be careful about what he says.”

The fact that men of Taylor’s background and prejudices dominate the discussion of race in the United States is just another bill that blacks have to pay, and you’d think that the media — both mainstream and progressive — would host white writers who weren’t so much in denial about race. Writers like Leo Litwack, David Zirin, James Lowen, Russell Banks, Tim Wise and Dalton Conley, and Jack Foley, an Irish American who is not trying to impress WASPs by playing Handel on the harpsichord.