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

In his statement, Gates bonded with a man, who tried to justify his arrest with a false police report, which damaged both Gates’ and Lucia Whalen’s reputations. Gates called him a nice guy in The New York Times and said that the two might attend sports events together and have dinner. He even offered to get the officer’s kids into Harvard. Maybe the officer who killed a black man in Oakland the other night should send in her children’s application to Gates. Is Gates a candidate for the Stockholm Syndrome?

But Obama and Gates aren’t the only ones who are the targets of contempt from armed men. Such is the power that the white majority has granted the police that the California Corrections industry even turned Governor Schwarzenegger into a “girlie man.” After contract negotiations, they bragged that for every nickel offered by the state, they got a dime.

An editorial in the San Francisco Chronicle shows how costly it is for those who choose revenge over rehabilitation: “For decades, the corrections budget has swallowed more and more of the state’s general fund, starving priorities like higher education. But the political ramifications of looking ‘soft on crime’ cowed legislators and governors alike. So we built prison after prison and stuffed them all to overcapacity.”

Now Arnold is going along with a plan to build a showcase state-of-the-art Death Row that will cost the taxpayers three hundred and fifty-six million dollars with a thirty-five million dollar cost overrun.

These California suburbanites are the people who gave us the Three Strikes Law after the tragic murder of a suburban white girl, Polly Klaas, a law that is one of the reasons for California becoming a failed state. As The Wall Street Journal put it, writing about white suburbanites, “those who have the least to fear from crime are driving the issue.” The Wall Street Journal attributed their fear to watching images of blacks on TV. Maybe CNN’s Black In America .

Three beers aren’t going to do it. The only result will be a reality show about the event that will accrue more profits to Gates, the intellectual entrepreneur, perhaps co-hosted by his new pal, Sgt. Crowley, cable’s latest matinee idol. Already they’ve gotten an invitation from Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center and the Museum of Tolerance, to do a tag-team lecture. This is a road show that’s certain to entertain the media, one of whose best-selling products is the “racial divide.” I’ve heard through the grapevine that PBS is offering Gates millions of dollars to do a racial profiling special. Given PBS’s politics, maybe a musical comedy which would end with blacks and police locking arms in a chorus line singing the show’s hit song, We Both Over Reacted .

Racial profiling will continue and the attitude of most whites will continue to be: we don’t care what you do with blacks and Hispanics and Native Americans; just keep them out of our hair.

A better solution would be the one practiced by citizens of my North Oakland district, black, white, Asian and Hispanic. For over twenty years we’ve met with the police on a regular basis, without suds being consumed. Maybe some cake and potato chips. Sometimes we raise our voices at them, without being hauled out of Oakland’s Santa Fe School, where we meet, handcuffed and charged with disorderly conduct. But recently, when the police cracked down on a criminal operation that endangered the lives of residents of my block, I led the applause.

One of those who didn’t share in our victory was Sgt. Daniel Sakai. He was trying to help us with our main problem: a recalcitrant absentee landlord (from a two-family household, Bill) who has put our neighbors’ lives in jeopardy by allowing her abandoned property to be used by criminals, criminals who engaged in a full-scale shootout on our block one morning. She refuses to even put up a No Trespassing sign.

Sgt. Sakai was white. Some of our neighbors went to City Hall and signed the book to mourn his death. He was among four policemen who were murdered during an incident when the mean-spirited fear-inspired policies of three strikes, traffic profiling and the National Rifle Association collided.

Black Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums and Congressperson Barbara Lee showed up to join in the mourning during a televised funeral. As part of a calculated public insult, which offended Oakland’s black leaders, Mayor Dellums was not permitted to speak.

Let’s all have a beer.

Both the president’s July 2009 Ghana speech, which absolved Europeans of the blame for the problems on the African continent, and the blame-the-victim NAACP speech have sparked a rise of anger among off-camera black intellectuals. The kind whose presence is missing from such MSM faux “Black” blogs, TheRoot , and NBC’s Griot , and AOL’s Black Voices . (Predictably AOL was among the corporate media that highlighted the “tough love” portions of Obama’s speech. Like the other tough-lovers, Obama ignored the recent stories about gains that black students have made in closing the intelligence gap in the South and in New York. Obama feigned outrage about the media emphasizing the tough-love parts, but he, Rahm Emanuel and Axelrod knew the deal.)

Despite the monopoly that shareholder-driven market opinion might have over the public opinion, which includes the farcical sight of all-white panels discussing race, there is a movement on the Internet to make some space for nonwhites. A number of black intellectuals are using this space to challenge the mass delusion of a post-race America.

I asked three black intellectuals of the kind who wouldn’t pass a cable producer’s interview for an on-camera appearance their reactions to Obama’s Ghana speech and his NAACP speech. Prof. Pierre-Damien Mvuyekure is Professor of English and African-American literature at the University of Iowa. He said: “Regarding Obama’s comments, he seemed to rehash the words of another Kenyan, Prime Minister Raila Odinga. In his commencement address at the University of Buffalo Law School, Odinga said, ‘We cannot continue to blame colonialism for Africa’s problems’ and added, ‘I believe very strongly that it is because of poor leadership that Africa lags behind in development’”—I Googled it and AllAfrica.com came up. “While to some extent this may be true, we cannot ignore neo-colonialism whereby the former colonial masters and the United States continue to underdevelop Africa through the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.”

Pierre-Damien continued:

Yes, the French were arming the Rwandan Army, while the U.S. and Great Britain were arming the Rwandan Patriotic Front through Uganda. Last week, Rwanda gave medals to the Prime Minister of Ethiopia, President Yoweri Museveni, and the late Mwalimu Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, for their efforts in “liberating” Rwanda.

At the beginning of the 1990 war, Paul Kagame was training at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas as a Ugandan officer! Then he left to take over the war when three of his colleagues died within two weeks of the beginning of the war. Gerard Prunier’s new book Africa’s World War: Congo, The Rwandan Genocide, and the Making of a Continental Catastrophe documents some of this.

Justin Desmangles is the host for New Day Jazz broadcast over KDVS in Davis, California. He said:

He’s lying, and he knows it. To think that this man has the wherewithal to stand on the very ground where Nkrumah was murdered at the behest of United States’ interests. Even the choice of Ghana was a cynical ploy to further coerce leverage for AFRICOM, a plan initiated by Bush in 2007, to find a home. It is currently based, without irony, in Germany. Massive oil discoveries were recently made off Ghana’s coast as well.