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

On January 20, Andrea Mitchell, a wealthy woman who socializes with the people whom she covers, grilled Obama aide David Axelrod about whether Barack Obama’s health reform would fail as a result of the election of Scott Brown, who said he’d vote against it, even though he voted for similar legislation in Massachusetts. Left out of her exchange with Axelrod was any reference to the role her network played in spreading tea-bagger mis-information by endlessly featuring Sarah Palin’s remark that health reform included provisions for death panels, which was called by Politifact , “The lie of the year,” and although the media line was that Massachusetts voters were repudiating Barack Obama, a poll conducted by Republicans found him to be still popular in that state. Motor City Liberal reported: “Fabrizio, McLaughlin & Associates: Obama held a fifty-nine percent favorability mark and fifty-five percent job approval rating among MA voters. A January 20 Politico article reported that a Fabrizio, McLaughlin & Associates exit poll found that ‘Obama’s personal favorability remained high with voters.’ The poll found that ‘Obama boasted a fifty-nine percent favorability mark’ and ‘Obama’s job approval rating even stayed at a respectable fifty-five percent as voters trekked to the ballot box to oppose the candidate he campaigned for just two days earlier.’ The president even earned a passing mark on his handling of the economy (fifty percent approval) and received a clear majority’s support for his work on the war in Afghanistan (fifty-nine percent approval). Fabrizio, McLaughlin & Associates is a Republican polling firm.”

Andrea Mitchell, Chris Matthews and David Brooks have been given immense power to form public opinion, yet they don’t always feel the need to study the facts. Both Matthews and Mitchell said that the United States played no role in Haiti’s situation, a remark that many scholars and intellectuals would find laughable in light of a history of American-Haitian relations, which included invasions, a lengthy occupation under President Woodrow Wilson, a Klan admirer, and the recent abduction of an elected president and billions that Haitians had to pay to European nations that never forgave Haiti for ousting the colonialists. David Brooks, an Obama critic, was even more outrageous when he said of Haitians two days after the earthquake: “There is the influence of the voodoo religion, which spreads the message that life is capricious and planning futile.” For the stupidity of this remark Brooks was reproved by a number of bloggers from different parts of the world. I asked Robert Farris Thompson, Trumbull Professor of the History of Art at Yale University, to comment. He wrote:

I have worked for more than thirty years, doing, off and on, art historical research in Haiti. I have sat down with many priests and priestesses of vodun [not “voodoo” which to me is a Hollywood term, drenched with racism] during this period. And I never heard anything remotely matching the allegation that “life is capricious and planning futile.” Who are his sources? Which voduist said that when, where, why? His is an outsider’s assumption raised to the category of definition. In point of fact, to use an even deeper name for vodun in Haitian terms, sevi lwa [meaning the service of spirits under God} with its acts of charity and herbal healing, provides an island of art and caring within the larger world of Haiti. Wiser minds than mine have found this to be so, like the North American women scholars Maya Deren and Zora Neale Hurston, like the distinguished French ethnologist Alfred Metraux and more recently the Harvard-trained ethnologist Wade Davis. Vodun has inspired generations of superb painting. When Metraux said vodun was waiting for its Homer, Ishmael Reed responded to the challenge with a novel about the power and persistence and inherent beauty of vodun. All of the above distinguished researchers, not to mention the religious leaders and initiates of vodun themselves, are “called out of their name” by the false allegation that sevi lwa is essentially nihilistic. Things are bad enough in Haiti without maligning the national religion of the people. Gran Bois pa nan betise ave yo!

David Brooks found religion at the University of Chicago, a neo-con temple whose presiding deity is the late Ayn Rand, the Queen of Selfishness. His catechism includes slogans like “the free market,” and “cultural relativism.” The difficulties of other nations, whose traditions he doesn’t feel necessary to give even a cursory examination, are due to their culture. They should embrace the ways of the white man. His is the kind of smug closed mind that confronts Obama, the internationalist, as he starts his second year.

While white progressives and gays might lament the election of a tea bagger who doubts whether Barack Obama’s parents were married when he was born and a man who is opposed to gay marriage and supports water boarding, the constant carping against the president by both groups might have diminished the progressive and gay turnout of voters in Massachusetts. The white progressives spent the Wednesday after the Massachusetts election criticizing Obama and giving him advice.

Now look what they got. Since, for many white commentators, we live in a post-race period, they overlooked the money from racist groups that poured into the state from right-wing and racist sources. The total was thirteen million dollars. The insurance industry was there in the form of Freedom Works. Their goal, according to the January 21 Times was to “derail federal health care legislation.”

The other panelist, Alex Castellanos, was licking his chops. Though he confessed to his profitable ties to the insurance industry, CNN’s president Jonathan Klein has kept him on his job. That of criticizing President Obama.

Has President Obama been broken, which was the verdict of all-white panels appearing on January 19 and 20? Chris Matthews summed up the verdict of white progressives and their new buddies, the right, when he announced that President Obama’s first year “ended badly.” The next day, progressive radio talk-show host Thom Hartmann said that Obama had “pissed away a year.”

On the same day, it was announced that because of the stimulus plan, which expands earned-income credit for certain workers in construction, permits for future projects rose eleven percent, indicating that the housing crisis was coming to an end, the economy in the United States was rebounding better than the pace in Europe, an economist, writing in The New York Times was congratulating Obama’s proposed tax on big banks, and it was announced on January 21 that during December all economic indicators had surged: for the media, however, Obama’s bad week had become a bad year, without any acknowledgement that it would have been worse had a depression occurred. Little attention was devoted to the day’s economic news. Cable was fascinated with a rumor that Tiger had undergone sex therapy. Senator DeMint showed up to announce that Obama had been broken. He’d had his Waterloo, a reference that the younger generation of students would have missed. Again ignoring the sentiments of blacks and Latinos among whom Barack Obama’s numbers are high, progressives continued to assert, arrogantly, that Obama’s “base,” which by now has become a code word, had deserted Obama. That remains to be seen. As this book has shown, they’ve been wrong before about Barack Obama, but a speech he made at a black church on Sunday, January 17, revealed that the criticisms of the first African-American president, the racist bile that was being retched by segments of some of the backward segments of the American population, were beginning to ruffle his cool demeanor. He said that “the words hurt,” and “the barbs sting.” But his “faith” kept him going.