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

To Cries of Kill Him

(AOL September 30, 2009. “White supremacists and neo-Nazis have committed violence against African Americans around the country and fomented hate online for years. But in recent weeks, anti-Obama speech and behavior hinting at or advocating violence has surfaced at so-called town hall meetings and demonstrations against Obama’s health-care plan and other policies. The same has happened at forums frequented by fringe groups, including ‘birthers,’ who dispute Obama’s U.S. citizenship.

In August, the Secret Service investigated a man who displayed a sign reading ‘Death to Obama’ and ‘Death to Michelle and her two stupid kids’ outside a town hall meeting in Maryland. And in New Hampshire, a man brought a holstered gun and stood across the street from a presidential town hall with his weapon on full display, according to ABC News. And just last month, a North Carolina man pleaded guilty to threatening the president after he called 911 twice from his trailer just south of the Virginia border, saying he was going to assassinate the president, the AP reported .” )

The election of Barack Obama was a cause for celebration in November but by September 2009 there was real worry in the country about whether the president would live out his term. The Boston Globe pointed to the media’s role in creating the atmosphere in which the assassination of the president might be committed by a deranged individual or as in the case of JFK and MLK, a conspiracy.

September 2009 was typical. A poll conducted by a “juvenile,” appearing on Facebook, asked whether Obama should be killed. A writer for Newsmax.com , a site with connections with the Republican Party, called for a military coup against the president. Newsmax also distributed Sarah Palin’s Going Rogue , a book that received almost round-the-clock coverage by the media beginning on November 15. On John King’s State of the Union , from CNN where the ex-vice-presidential candidate, Sarah Palin, was treated as a serious candidate for president come 2012, Barack Obama was ridiculed for bowing before the Emperor of Japan, with William Bennett leading the panel’s condemnation, without mentioning that President Eisenhower had bowed before General De Gaulle and that Richard Nixon had shown the same expression before Emperor Hirohito, who was the Emperor of Japan when Japan was regarded as an enemy nation! During the week film and photos surfaced showing George Bush Two holding hands with Saudi princes. Why didn’t John King mention these other bows when moderating a discussion about Obama’s bow before the Emperor of Japan? I run a zine that sometimes might receive one thousand hits in a day if we’re lucky. It’s managed by my youngest daughter. I sometimes fantasize about how formidable an outfit I would have were I to own the same kind of resources as the mainstream media. I would ask a member of my large staff — no intern could do the job — before going on to lead a discussion about Obama’s bowing before the Japanese Emperor, hey go and find whether any other president has bowed before a head of state or royalty and while you’re at it get me a cup of coffee at Starbucks. Was King lazy or was he instructed to treat Obama’s bowing as entertainment? I watched John King asking a panel about Barack Obama while waiting for a plane at the airport in Minneapolis.

Some white hunters of the sort who journey into Minnesota during deer season were also watching. I could tell what they were thinking. Even though the majority of the public, sixty-seven percent, including the majority of Republicans saw nothing wrong with the president’s bowing, the media carried the controversy into the last week of November.

Other shows also took up Obama’s bowing while treating Sarah Palin as a serious person. Mike Malloy was right when he said that while only nine percent of the public said that they’d vote for Palin, if she ran for president, she has a powerful constituency: the media. Malloy said that Palin’s appeal was her “hot ass” (Air America, November 19) and Jessica Yellin, one of King’s panelists called her a sex pot. And as if to prove their descriptions, Palin appeared on the cover of Newsweek as a sort of Playboy centerfold model with clothes. This cheesy flesh shot caused outrage among her followers who would be at a loss if you were to ask them to spell one of their buzzwords like “Constitution,” yet she posed for the photo. None of the cable networks, who reduced the president’s historic trip to China and Japan to a photo to prove that he wasn’t as manly as five-deferment and two-DUI Cheney, reported the career of Sarah Palin’s ghost writer. Gawker did:

Lynn Vincent, the woman who is writing a book called Going Rogue “by” Sarah Palin, sure can pick her co-writers. She’s written books before with a general who kills “demons” for God and a guy who finds interracial dating “revolting.” As Charles Johnson — whose ongoing reformation from Muslim-hating wacko to right-wing apostate continues to puzzle and delight us — points out, Palin’s ghostwriter’s previous work includes Donkey Cons , a thoughtful investigative look at the Democratic Party’s criminality that blows the lid off that “killer and traitor Aaron Burr.” Vincent’s co-writer on Donkey Cons was Robert Stacy McCain, a former Washington Times editor who writes things like this:

“[T]he media now force interracial images into the public mind and a number of perfectly rational people react to these images with an altogether natural revulsion. The white person who does not mind transacting business with a black bank clerk may yet be averse to accepting the clerk as his sister-in-law, and THIS IS NOT RACISM, no matter what Madison Avenue, Hollywood and Washington tell us.”

That was from a private email McCain once wrote that a recipient posted online, so in his defense, McCain (no relation to Palin’s running mate) wouldn’t write something like that in public. In public, he says things like slaves and whites in the Old South had “cordial and affectionate relations,” and is a member of the League of the South, which wants to secede from the Union (again!), and writes for a web site called VDare , which proudly publishes the work of “rational and civil… white nationalists” who “unashamedly work for their people.”

While playing down Federal Reserve Ben Bernanke’s claim, issued during the week, that Obama and his team had helped the country to avoid depression, cable continued to cover a candidate whose dangerous rhetoric continues to ramp up death threats against the president.

On November 16, 2009, The Christian Science Monitor reported an escalation of threats against the president’s life:

There’s a new slogan making its way onto car bumpers and across the Internet. It reads simply: “Pray for Obama: Psalm 109:8”

A nice sentiment? Maybe not. The psalm reads: “Let his days be few; and let another take his office.”

Presidential criticism through witty slogans is nothing new. Bumper stickers, t-shirts, and hats with “1/20/09” commemorated President Bush’s last day in office.

But the verse immediately following the psalm referenced is a bit more ominous: “Let his children be fatherless, and his wife a widow.”

By the beginning of winter, it was obvious that the media had become a sort of white power government in exile ready to pounce upon any of the young black president’s missteps. Not only predictable outlets like Fox News, which Obama’s advisor David Axelrod, on Sunday, October 18, 2009, defined as less a news organization than an arm of the Republican Party, but from “progressive” outlets like Pacifica, which had begun to view gay marriage as the civil rights issue of this period, thereby accepting the post-race thinking that racism was no longer an issue in American life and when blacks suggested that it was, they were playing “the race card,” or making excuses which was the line promoted by entertainment sideshows like CNN’s Black in America , or Saving Our Children . So powerful was the media that the titular head of the Republican Party was not a politician but a talk show host with a history of drug abuse and making outlandish and racially tinged remarks about the president.