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

The white progressives and liberals who had supported Obama in the beginning had begun sharing the right’s enthusiasm for assailing the president. For progressive Amy Goodman, he was uppity; she criticized his “swooping” into the scene of the Copenhagen climate change conference. On January 1, during her annual retrospective program, Obama was subjected to withering criticism by her guests and this was followed the next day on progressive Pacifica radio, by Doug Henwood, a Marxist economist, who was just as unrelenting in his criticism of Obama. Even while admitting on his Pacifica show, aired on January 9, that manufacturing jobs were beginning to return, he, using the kind of language that slave masters used when trapping the movements of a fugitive slave, referred to Obama as “slippery” and like some others who are treating nonwhite voters as invisible, noted that Obama was “losing his friends.”

Sam Roberts, who is a kind of Paul Revere for white nationalism, a man thrilled by the fact that whites with children are re-populating Manhattan and that Harlem no longer has a black majority, noted, maybe with alarm, that a coalition of nonwhites almost elected an obscure black politician over Mayor Bloomberg who spent over one hundred million during his campaign for Mayor of New York, yet white progressives still view themselves as Obama’s base ignoring the fact that Southern blacks provided him with his winning margins in the South and Hispanics in the West. Both the mainstream and progressive whites have ignored this harbinger of things to come.

As an example of hypocritical posturing of media, white males who scold black men, like the divorcees and adulterers who praised Obama’s lecturing black fathers, David Letterman poked fun at Tiger Woods’ problems in his Top Ten Text Messages sent by Tiger. David Letterman still has his sponsors, without any protest from the white feminists at Huffington Post and Salon.com , progressive sites that are outdoing The National Enquirer in their obsession with Tiger Woods. Among Letterman’s sponsors are Old Navy, Lipitor, H&R Block, Verizon, Direct TV and leading automobile and film companies.

The Kurtz panel decided that Letterman’s exploitation of the women working for him was different from Tiger’s relationship with women who were not employees of his, because Letterman confessed to his sexual transgression immediately, when some might argue that his extortionist forced him to do so.

When blacks complain that they are treated differently from whites, they might find confirmation during the last week in December. Charlie Sheen, a movie star whose face is recognized by millions the world over, was arrested for threatening his wife with a knife, an occurrence that wasn’t mentioned during The Reliable Sources program that was aired on December 27, nor was there any discussion about his possibly losing his advertising contract with an underwear manufacturer. They dropped him, but CBS doesn’t seem in a hurry to drop Two and a Half Men , starring Charlie Sheen, which, at the end of 2009, drew eleven million viewers.

In her autobiography, A Paper Life , Tatum O’Neal claims she was abused by her tennis-ace husband John McEnroe. She said that “the hot-headed sportsman regularly beat her up after his tantrums on the tennis court and claims he was a heavy cannabis smoker,” yet National Car Rental doesn’t seem eager to drop him as a spokesperson. If Tiger had threatened his wife with a knife as Charlie Sheen had done or beaten her as McEnroe beat Tatum O’Neal would he still have his advertisers? Or if he had confessed his dalliances with other women when threatened by an extortionist?

When The Wall Street Journal asked me to comment about Tiger’s situation I said that he should seek advice from Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Women who were employed by Hollywood chose to remain anonymous when complaining about sexual advances against them by movie star Arnold Schwarzenegger. Though sportscaster Stephen Smith said that through his “antics” Tiger had alienated women, none of the complaints from women who had been sexually harassed by Schwarzenegger (Tiger’s affairs were consensual), reported in a story from The Los Angeles Times , seemed to cause his alienation from women. On October 31, 2006, Uprisingradio.com reported:

During Arnold Schwarzenegger’s campaign for governor in the 2003 recall election, a number of women came forward to reveal their sexual harassment and assault by Arnold. The Los Angeles Times printed extensive reports just prior to that election. Now, just three years later, there is almost no mention of Arnold’s sexist escapades. But some women are refusing to remain silent. More than a hundred women from across California have signed a letter to remind voters of the seriousness of the accusations of sixteen women against Schwarzenegger that surfaced during the 2003 recall campaign, and those that have surfaced since then involving minors.

Nevertheless, in 2003, he carried the women’s vote and, after his election, family-values spokesperson Senator Orrin Hatch proposed that the laws be changed so that he could run for president.

Racists are identified as those who are unable to distinguish between members of one race from another. That certainly appeared to be the case of the media and the country’s spreading Negro mania, mania being the word used by The Philadelphia Inquirer , which observed that Tiger mania was the biggest story to inspire mania since O.J. Simpson. One wonders which black male celebrity caught in a scandal will define the end of this decade.

David Carr is hipper than most white journalists. He was probably amused when he read a clueless column written by his colleague Frank Rich in which Imus-defender Rich said that the media’s reaction to Tiger’s problems had nothing to do with race. Tell that to Vanity Fair magazine, which ran a half-naked photo of Tiger Woods taken by Annie Leibovitz, who drew criticism for a previous photo of LeBron James that was based upon a World War I propaganda poster of a gorilla carrying off a white woman. Joan Walsh wrote on Salon.com :

Vanity Fair should be ashamed of itself. The Thug Life photo of Tiger Woods that graces the magazine’s February cover will go down in history with Time ’s “darkened” O.J. Simpson cover and Vogue ’s portrait of a brutish LeBron James carrying off a blond princess two years ago. I’ve always defended Woods’ freedom to call himself Cablinasian, as befitting his mixed heritage. But Vanity Fair just proved the arguments of black people who dislike what they see as Woods’ racial dodge. He’ll always be black, but especially after he gets in trouble.

A black man exposed as a lover of Nordic-type white women has nothing to do with race? Rich hasn’t read the sick disgusting blogs about Tiger’s affairs written by white people who didn’t go to Harvard.

David Carr on the other hand has been around and knows the streets. He knows for example that the media’s description that crack is a black drug is false because he has smoked crack with white people (See: The Night of the Gun: A Reporter Investigates The Darkest Story of His Life ). He was among the first to identify the media stories about widespread looting, rape and mayhem among black Katrina victims as being based upon exaggerations and lies. While complaints by blacks, Hispanics and Native Americans about media coverage for over one hundred years have been ignored or patronized, Carr at least acknowledges that the mainstream media have been accused of “pathologizing” black men, yet his explanation was in my mind unsatisfactory. (He also ignored the growing anger among blacks about the film Precious , which he admires). He wrote: