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

The Cosby-Bernard show included a “town hall,” a cheap way to get ratings; a device which relies on panelists and audience members competing with each other over who can come up with the best applause lines. These verbal shootouts are guaranteed to raise the revenue of CNN and MSNBC, but I doubt whether the panelists get paid. They do it for free like in the old plantation days. It’s all about entertainment. Advertising to promote CNN’s second Black In America , Soledad O’Brien, in a carnival tone, like one of the guys whose job it is to stand outside of strip clubs on North Beach in San Francisco, attempting to lure tourists to sex shows, promised the viewers, “You won’t be able to tear yourself away from this one.”

On the morning of September 14, I was watching CNN’s Headline News version of attracting ratings near the AA gate at JFK airport in New York. In succession there were stories about Serena Williams’ tantrum at the US Open, Kanye West going off on Taylor Swift at an awards ceremony, and your obligatory black sexual predator, the usual sideshow manner by which blacks are shown on the tube. It’s fitting that white pundits and other writers consult comedians like Bill Cosby and Chris Rock for their insights about black culture because, traditionally, the media have treated blacks as comic relief. Hollywood, which in November presented blacks with yet another neo-Nazi incest film called Precious , has been in this business for over one hundred years. You would think that white American novelists and playwrights would oppose the current atmosphere that has raised fears that President Obama will meet the same fate as JFK, the details of whose murder are still being held a secret by the CIA. Instead, novelists like Tom Wolfe and Philip Roth promote images of blacks in their works that are no different from those promoted against minority men in Nazi Germany’s media and worse than that from Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh. Both Saul Bellow and Philip Roth have depicted black men as flashers, which was the common manner by which Jewish men in the Nazi press were shown.

David Mamet lent his name to a repellent racist movie called Edmund , in which two black sexual predators appear (the sexual predator being the typical manner by which the Nazi publications like Der Angriff portrayed minority males). His predators, one is a pimp, the other a rapist, are even worse than the ones served up by D.W. Griffith. (Whether Mamet knows it, in the late Andrew MacDonald’s The Turner Diaries , the ultra-right’s bible and the book that inspired Timothy McVeigh of the Oklahoma Federal building, Jewish men are the pimps, black men are the rapists. Another reader was Richard Poplawski, who murdered three Pittsburgh policemen last April 4, 2008.)

While cable uses Bill Cosby and Paul Rodriguez to comment on black and Hispanic issues, comedian Chris Rock is Mamet’s guide to black America and he quoted Chris Rock in his vapid self-serving Times ’ Op- Ed, an advertisement for his forthcoming play called Race . I’ve never seen an Op-Ed in the Times written by the great living black playwrights like Adrienne Kennedy, Amiri Baraka and Ed Bullins. In his Op-Ed, Mamet quoted Chris Rock’s comment on Rev. Jeremiah Wright. He said “You cannot find a seventy-year-old black man who does not hate the whites.” If Rock said that, he is ignorant and is susceptible to the cartoonish view of Rev. Jeremiah Wright offered by the media. Do you think that Rev. Wright hated the white members of his congregation? Of Rock’s silly observation, Mamet wrote, “This made sense to me.”

It only made sense to Mamet because he wanted it to make sense. Even given the hard time that whites have been giving the Jews since ancient times, does Mamet believe that all Jewish seventy-year-old men hate Gentiles? Or is it just seventy-year-old black men who hate whites, uniformly? Who all think the same way?

Mamet also wrote “Most contemporary debate on race is nothing but sanctimony — efforts at exploitation and efforts at restitution seeking, equally, to enlarge and prolong dissent and rancor.”

Mamet doesn’t know anything about most contemporary debates on race, because the hundreds of black intellectuals, scholars, writers, poets, etc. who know something about the topic are kept off stage by a media that has a thing about cerebral blacks and offers only those who serve the interests of the media owners like Ms. Bernard, Larry Elder, Joe Watkins, Amy Holmes, Bob Christie and John McWhorter, a puppet for The Manhattan Institute, which supports eugenics “research.” Such is the power of the Institute, which gets money from places like Chase Manhattan Bank, that on Sunday, September 20, the Associated Press gave McWhorter the lead in an article about President Carter’s accusation that some of the vitriol aimed at President Obama is based upon race, another way that the far right manipulates public discussions affecting blacks through puppets like McWhorter and Bernard.

Does Mamet read Panopticon Review , or Black Renaissance Noire , or The Black Agenda or The Final Call or even Ebony and Essence, TheRoot, Black Scholar or The Amsterdam News ? Has he ever heard of bell hooks, Michele Wallace, Adolph Reed, Jr., Gerald Early, Darryl Pinckney, Cecil Brown, Sonia Sanchez, J.J. Phillips, Bob Steptoe, Katherine Takara, Jill Nelson, Elizabeth Nunez, Thulani Davis, Quincy Troupe, Eugene Redmond, Adrienne Kennedy, Herb Boyd, Ed Bullins, Jerry Ward, Houston Baker, Jr., Ethelbert Miller, Askia Toure, Askia Muhammad, Keith Gilyard, Bernard Bell, Greg Tate, Justin Desmangles, Tricia Rose, Clyde Taylor, Kalamu ya Salaam, Joyce Joyce, Eugene Redmond, Reginald Martin, Al Young, etc.?

And as an example of how ignorance reaches the highest segments of American intellectual life in a racist society, Mamet has fallen for the media hoax that affirmative action is a black program, when, for Rabbi Michael Lerner, quoted in Time and the late Seymour Lipset, quoted in a book called, The Broken Alliance: The Turbulent Times Between Blacks and Jews in America by Jonathan Kaufman, it benefits Jewish women the most. Kaufman writes: “…he predicted that the great beneficiaries of affirmative action would be Jewish women. In fact, Lipset turned out to be right.” (Pg.224) My view is that the purpose of Mamet’s Op-Ed was an attempt to do a pre-emptive strike on black critics who will probably find his play Race as racist as the piece of dreck to which he lent his name, Edmund , which, as it turned out, closed soon after it opened.

Langston Hughes complained that most of the plays written about black life during the 1930s were written by whites.

Nothing has changed. Richard Price has made so much money creating blackface dialogue that he is moving to Harlem. Jimmy Carter doesn’t have to undergo an identity makeover like Price in order to know about blacks, nor does he have to make “brief forays into the ghetto,” which is how Price says that he gathered his material, like someone on a safari. Carter is a Southerner.

After Jimmy Carter made an accurate assessment of the racist response to the election of a black president, all-day cable shows featuring mostly all-white panels weighed in on the former president’s remarks. Predictably, many dismissed him as a doddering fool. Except for Roland Martin, most of the black faces had to tone down their comments. Only Larry Elder, of the black right was allowed to get livid over Carter’s remarks. Later, they jumped on Nancy Pelosi for telling it like it is. She said that the current atmosphere of political pornography drummed up by people like Glenn Beck’s boss Rupert Murdoch and his Beelzebub, Willie Horton mastermind Roger Ailes, reminded her of the hateful atmosphere that led to the assassinations of Harvey Milk and George Moscone, a liberal who was on his way to becoming governor of California. The others were too timid to call a viral white supremacy that has infected thousands of birthers, deathers, tea baggers and armed miscellaneous crazies, as a result of Barack Obama’s election, for what it is. A public mental health crisis. The fact that many educated whites in the media deny Carter’s claim might be seen as part of the crisis. Talking about inmates running the asylum. George Wills, appearing on This Week , said that those who saw racism in the nutty 9/12 demonstrations were guilty of “liberal McCarthyism.” Will once said, following the line promoted by McWhorter’s Manhattan Institute, that blacks were intellectually inferior to whites. (As usual, Irish Americans were represented on this panel by a right-winger. This time, Peggy Noonan, a woman with, as a bluesman might say, ice water for blood. She doesn’t seem to mind that forty-five thousand people will die each year from lack of health care, according to a Harvard study. She’s against big government. Without big government, millions of Irish Americans would never have entered the middle class.)