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

Posted by Zoe on November 7th, 2009 under Girlville.

Bill Cosby has been very critical of young people and in my letter replying to him I said that he was acting like an old koot. I’m one too. In fact the title of my new novel is Koots , which my agent says that American publishers won’t touch because one or two of the characters present scientific evidence to support the acquittal of O.J. Simpson in the criminal trial.

But even I who have been called a “sourpuss” by one blogger felt good about what I had seen during my three-week visit to the East. A cooperation between young people of different backgrounds, working together to challenge those slanders pushed by the media and in Mamet’s case, by film and mainstream theater as well. I was feeling all gooey. Like what’s that line about lighting one little candle? These young people in Wajahat’s crew and Tennessee did much to shine a light on bigotry and ignorance and Bill Cosby should see this show and use his power to insist that it get a wider audience. I was impressed by the energy of those kids, South Asian, black and white, joining forces to invite an audience into the home of a South-Asian-American household, of a family beset by issues that we all have experienced. And a young writer who overcame a teacher’s diagnosis that she would never learn to read or write through a present from Beat poet Ted Joans who found her a Scholastic Records 45 rpm of Arthur Rubenstein’s orchestral composition to “Three Billy Goats’ Gruff” in a flea market. She had a book with almost the same text, so she figured out how to read along. That was the breakthrough. She knows that the kind of caring support system that was available to her, tutors, understanding teachers, is denied millions of the nation’s children, who are dumped into special education classes, misdiagnosed, and misunderstood. I remember all of the days that Tennessee came home in tears over the way she was treated by teachers and classmates who dismissed her as lazy, slow and difficult. This lazy, slow and difficult student had produced three books by the time she reached college, after we were told that her learning disability was so severe that she would never read nor write. Her book, Spell Alburquerque , published by AK Press, positions her to advocate for students like her.

And so as I sat there in the airport watching a woman present black Americans like one would present a carnival act I wasn’t fuming as usual. The airport was teeming with armed soldiers. Because, as I was to learn later, President Obama was about to visit New York.

Observing those soldiers, I thought that the tea-bagger nut who threatened to return to Washington, armed, would have a hard time getting next to the president.

The pilot said that we’d have to taxi out to a remote part of the airport because the airport had been shut down because the president’s plane was arriving. Shortly afterward, I saw out of the right window, Air Force One land. I regretted that my stepfather didn’t live to see this. He was the kind of black man who doesn’t show up on television or isn’t discussed by Michelle Bernard. Like millions of black men, Bennie S. Reed reported to the same job, Chevrolet plant in Buffalo, New York, for over thirty years. He swallowed his pride as the permanent affirmative action, which is awarded to white males, permitted those who were less qualified than he to become foremen. Toward the end of his working days, they finally offered him the job. “Give it to my sons,” he said, referring to my half brothers who followed him into the automobile industry. He would have been impressed by JFK being shut down because a black man was coming to town. I can see him now. Flashing that great grin of his.

Obama, Tiger, Vick, MJ, etc. Is There Any Cure for Negro Mania?

We may congratulate ourselves that this cruel war is nearing its end. It has cost a vast amount of treasure and blood. It has indeed been a trying hour for the Republic; but I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. As a result of the war, corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed. I feel at this moment more anxiety for the safety of my country than ever before, even in the midst of war. God grant that my suspicions may prove groundless.

This passage appears in a letter from Lincoln to (Col.) William F. Elkins, November 21, 1864

We’re also in the midst of a media feeding frenzy not seen since the height of O.J. Simpson mania.”

The Washington Post

When you say “Barack Obama,” Howard Kurtz thinks Tiger Woods.

December 23, 2009 10:55 am ET by Jamison Foser

At the end of 2009, the Jim Crow media, progressive as well as mainstream, graded African Americans and vied with each other over which African-American male celebrity symbolized the tawdry aspects of the year or even the decade. As usual the highest grade given to African Americans was a D.

Typical were two episodes of media critic Howard Kurtz’s program, Reliable Sources , carried on Jonathan Klein’s CNN. White men and women were invited to evaluate the presidency of Barack Obama on Sunday, December 20 and 27, 2009. The composition of the panels reflected the segregated media at the end of the decade. April, 2009, The American Society of News Editors reported: “In this decade, there has been a net increase of Latino, Asian and Native-American journalists and a net decline of black journalists,” meaning that the space for the points of view of black journalists was closing. I wrote about the decline of serious black fiction in The Wall Street Journal , a trend also noticed by Jabari Asim, editor of The Crisis Magazine , writing in Publisher’s Weekly , and so when Senator Harry Reid was reported in the book Game Change by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin to have made a remark about Barack Obama that for some contained a tint of racism, since race is seen as a moneymaking issue for the media and their advertisers, the discussion of Senator Reid’s remark was dominated by white opinion makers, much of the discussion ignorant, not only to blacks, but to a worldwide audience, for whom Hip Hop is a link between them and black Americans. He said in so many words that light-skinned people have an advantage over black-skinned people, which is true all over the hemisphere, as evidenced by the billion-dollar business in skin bleach.

Certainly, some immigrants view possessing light skin as a key to success according to The New York Times on January 28, 2007:

Light-skinned immigrants in the United States make more money on average than those with darker complexions, and the chief reason appears to be discrimination, a researcher says.

The scholar, Joni Hersch, a professor of law and economics at Vanderbilt University, looked at a government survey of 2,084 legal immigrants to the United States from around the world and found that those with the lightest skin earned an average of 8 percent to 15 percent more than similar immigrants with much darker skin.

“On average,” Dr. Hersch said, ‘’being one shade lighter has about the same effect as having an additional year of education.’’

Senator Reid indicated that for some white people “ebonics” or “the Negro dialect” is a source of ridicule unless they can make millions imitating “ebonics” in rock, rock and roll songs, novels, movies and television. He also used the term “negro,” which thousands of blacks and black institutions still use. One of the reasons that the word “black” became popular is because, according to Headlines and Deadlines: A Manual for Copy Editors by R.E. Garst and Theodore M. Bernstein, newspapers found “black” easier to set than “African American.” Senator Reid’s comment was fodder for news entertainment for weeks, a kind of racial “Jeopardy,” game shows and “town halls” that are cheap to produce and which distract from the real issues of race in American society like the apartheid criminal justice system, disparities in the healthcare industry, and red-lining.