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

Though, traditionally, Nigger Breakers have been white, with immigration, other groups have joined them. An example is the Mexican-American gangs who were recently busted for attempting to expel African Americans from a public housing project in Los Angeles.

And not all Nigger Breakers are thugs. Dinesh D’Souza came to prominence as one of former Treasury Secretary William Simon’s counter policy wonks. Simon believed that the public debate had been overrun by radicals and that it needed to be balanced by conservative voices. D’Souza was aligned with the right-wing The Dartmouth Review , which reveled in sophomoric racist hi-jinks with D’Souza often joining in, nothing original, just the old racist shenanigans like mocking the black dialect.

Both he and Simon were embarrassed about defending The Dartmouth Review when a former president of Dartmouth, American Book Awards winner James O. Freedman, leveled charges of anti-Semitism at it. Turned out that the Review was guilty. After the publication of his book The End of Racism , which was endorsed by The American Enterprise Institute, a far-right think tank that is awarded a hefty amount of airtime by cable, two black conservatives quit the institute, one calling him the Mark Fuhrman of public policy. Mark Fuhrman was the Los Angeles policeman whose racist views were exposed during the O.J. Simpson case.

D’Souza’s attacks on blacks were often silly and offensive but when he wrote a book accusing some white people of treason, some of those who had praised him greeted the book with ridicule. He’d forgotten his original assignment. Like many of those who’ve received good money to fault blacks for society’s woes, the Jewish commentators who are silent about the abuse of Jewish women here and abroad (On October 14, 2009, The New York Times ran a story about child abuse in the Orthodox community: said that it had been covered up), Dinesh D’ Souza has ignored the problems of those who share his ethnic background, for example, the million child prostitutes who walk the streets of Mumbai, the city of his birth. No money in it? His book, The End Of Racism is a blown-up scissors and paste job that is based on the idea that affirmative action is a black program, a false premise, and that blacks are at the bottom of the genetic tree, Asians and whites at the top branches, Hispanics in the middle, millions of whom are blacks, a fact about which he seems to be ignorant. And, oh yeah, there is no African Shakespeare. Well, people all over the world have story-telling traditions which include all of the techniques one associates with this art — metaphors, similes, irony, etc. — and if Dinesh wasn’t so bound to the idea that a superficial knowledge of a handful of European traditions makes one smart and if he were the least bit adventuresome, he might enjoy some of it. African stories were transmitted to this hemisphere, including forms that are ancestors of such popular styles as Hip Hop. I find these stories more interesting than the work of Saul Bellow.

Of course, without the Muslims, major parts of the European traditions might have been lost, including the novel. I once thought that there was such a thing as “Eurocentrism” until I traveled to Europe (West Asia) and found things to be more complicated than what D’Souza and his hero Allan Bloom make it out to be. (Bloom’s knowledge of “the ancients” was challenged by a real Greek Scholar, Martha Nussbaum, and Bloom himself was involved in a scandal involving blacks toward the end of his life. Regardless of his reckless moral behavior, exposed by his friend, Saul Bellow, in his novel Ravelstein , Gertrude Himmelfarb, a member of neo-con America’s first family, while critical of black morals, defended Bloom.)

The intellectual mercenary and Nigger Breaker like D’ Souza presents a greater danger to minorities than the street thugs who commit hate crimes. Minorities have little capability to counter the propaganda and smears that emanate from think tanks and the media, and even academia. With the firing and buyouts of minority journalists, their access to the media has been diminished even more. Unlike the hoodlums who write swastikas on the doors of synagogues or the ruffians, usually young white males, who bash gays, kill Hispanics and are acquitted by white juries with nothing like the continuing outrage that accompanied the acquittal of O.J. Simpson, the ideas of Dinesh D’ Souza and Charles Murray, author of The Bell Curve , influence public policy. Murray is another example of a writer who redirects stereotypes from his group, in this case the Scots Irish, to blacks. When Vice President Cheney got into trouble for his joke about having Cheneys on both sides of the family and not even being from West Virginia, he was referring to the incest libel that’s been aimed at the Scots Irish. Sponsors of Murray, D’Souza and John McWhorter, front man for the eugenics-minded Manhattan Institute, are funded by, in some cases, billionaires, like William Scaife, the Pittsburgh billionaire who is helping to fund the “grass roots” tea-bagger spectacle, and along with the media, which have billions at their disposal, have formed the main opposition to President Obama. During August 2009, the power of these money people, who have been able to buy opinion, reached an influence way beyond the dreams of William Simon. They were able to design faux grass roots organizations and demonstrations using insurance industry-backed front organizations like Freedom Works and Americans for Prosperity.

Blacks have chosen many ways to fight back against the Nigger Breakers. From using the machete against whole families in Haiti or murdering a whole bunch of people like Nat Turner and his associates to using subtler ways. Barack Obama uses wit, wile and irony to embarrass the low-grade mentality of the 9/12 demonstrators, the tea baggers whose numbers have been magnified by 24/7 cable news because people yelling and screaming makes exciting television. Right-wing commentators at Fox gave those who rudely interrupted congresspersons at town halls during August of 2009 more strength than their actual numbers, and MSNBC, which is falsely cast as Fox’s liberal opposition, awarded them more exposure by denouncing the demonstrations. On October 14, when a spokesperson for tea-party demonstrators said that over a million people turned out to demonstrate against the polices of the Obama administration, he wasn’t challenged by Chris Matthews on whose show he appeared. The actual number was sixty thousand. While the media exaggerate the numbers of those who believe that the president was born in Kenya, Southerners mostly — while President Obama receives high favorability ratings in the rest of the country, his favorability percentage in the South is twenty-eight percent — the left has always protested the media’s tendency to undercount the numbers of their demonstrations, which have, in the case of the many anti-war demonstrations, drawn hundreds of thousands. While individual gun toters and deathers were interviewed on cable, rarely did one see someone as far left as these demonstrators are far right. Indeed, demonstrators who picketed insurance companies, whose opposition to a public option has created a situation where, according to a Harvard study, forty-five thousand Americans die each year because of a lack of coverage, have been ignored.

Some of the fiercest and most hostile and racist trash has been aimed at the young president, and not only by the usual suspects, those who view the president as a monkey, a witch doctor with a bone in his nose (an image created by neurosurgeon and Fox “expert” David McKalip), and someone who would paint the White House black, or use the White House lawn to grow watermelons, but also by prominent members of the Republican Party including Sarah Palin, who was the candidate who called the president, who is a centrist, a socialist, and was the person who referred to the health plan advocated by the White House as one that would include death panels.