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

When my novel Flight To Canada was published in 1976, I could not have imagined that I would live to see the time when the points of view of African Americans in the media and elsewhere would be so marginalized that I would be in the position of the nineteenth-century fugitive slave orator. That I would have to take an intellectual Black Rock ferry across the river into Canada in order to make my case because, in the words of my agent, no American publisher would publish this book.

I’m among the lucky ones. Great African-American journalists, like Pulitzer Prize winner Les Payne, have lost their columns in major American newspapers, which have seen their news rooms emptied of the presence of black, Hispanic, Asian-American and Native-American journalists except for those who adhere to the line promoted by the multinationals, who control the American media, and right-wing and neo-conservative think tanks. That line is that the problems confronting black and other Americans are not structural and institutional but a result of their behavior, or as put by Jamaican American Orlando Patterson, one of the few African Americans invited to appear on the pages of The New York Times Op-Ed page, most of whom aim their “tough love” at blacks, exclusively, their lack of “internal cultural reformation.” This oversimplification is refuted by studies and reports printed in the Times showing, for example, bias toward blacks and Hispanics in the mortgage industry, which has cost black homeowners billions in home equity and denied millions of blacks home ownership, homes being the chief asset of white Americans, one that allows them to send their children to college and to open businesses. For a while, the press tried to blame the economic crisis on blacks, a claim refuted by Nobel Prize winning economist, Paul Krugman, appearing on C-Span’s The Washington Journal on June 26, 2009. Indeed, the state with the most mortgage foreclosures is Nevada, a state with a small black population.

Isn’t it ironic? A media that scolded the Jim Crow South in the 1960s now finds itself hosting the bird. Jim Crow in the South meant separate but unequal facilities. It meant that any white woman who accused a black man of rape was believed.

In the media it means that whites get the choice billion-dollar media equipment and the rest of us get the blogs. It means all-white media juries disguised as panels and debates evaluating the behavior of not only the blacks and Hispanics but also celebrities and the president of the United States. Not just cable television but web browsers like AOL and YAHOO peddle “news” almost daily about black celebrities, usually athletes, caught in scandals, an attempt to entertain their white subscribers. AOL’s expert on black culture and history is intellectual mercenary Dinesh D’Souza.

In terms of its attempt to build a media that “looks like America,” the media are as white as a KKK picnic. In terms of diversity, it’s fifty years behind Mississippi, that much maligned state that has a higher percentage of blacks with power than CBS. Mississippi is among five states with the highest number of black elected officials; Old Miss has a higher percentage of black enrollment than many northern and western colleges and universities.

Serious black intellectuals have vanished from publishing and a younger generation of black male authors has found greater success in Germany than in the United States. Hollywood, which has always poisoned American race relations, except for brief interludes, is producing movies like Precious , movies so foul in their representation of blacks they make D.W. Griffith seem like a progressive. As I write this, the motion picture academy, whose board of governors is entirely white, has nominated this foul project for six Oscars[1]. To add to this insult, The Wire , which portrays blacks as degenerates, produced by David Simon, a producer who has claimed the ghetto as his own private moneymaking reserve, is being taught in the African-American Studies department at Harvard. According to The New York Times , January 4, 2010, “For the 40th anniversary of the death of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., when Dr. Wilson gathered scholars, activists and the show’s creator to analyze the series’ impact, he did not mince words: ‘it has done more to enhance our understanding of the challenges of urban life and the problems of urban inequality than any other media event or scholarly publications, including studies by social scientists,’” which is like a Native-American scholar inviting a producer of one of John Wayne’s westerns and describing these westerns as having “done more to enhance our understanding,” of Native American life than any study offered by social scientists.

Ms. Laura Miller’s comment in Salon.com sums up the attitude of the establishment media, progressive, right, left and mainstream, toward the views of what might be regarded as rogue intellectuals or what Quincy Troupe calls “Unreconstructed Negroes” like me on a number of issues including the candidacy of Barack Obama. Reviewing my essay about Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn , Ms. Laura gave me a tongue lashing in the progressive Salon.com , whose editor, Joan Walsh, a guest on many all-white media panels, where she poses as a progressive, believes that the all-white jury, which acquitted four white policemen who murdered Amadou Diallo, was justified in reaching their decision.

Ms. Laura said that my essay style was “rowdy” and that my writings were “diatribes.” This is because I opposed the notion that there were no heroes or villains during the slavery period, the line that is being used to peddle post-race products like the work of Kara Walker. Post-racism is another mass delusion under which many Americans are laboring. If Ms. Laura were acquainted with the history of African-American literature she would know that black writers, especially the males, have been called “rowdy,” “bitter,” “paranoid” and accused of writing only diatribes for over one hundred years. Even elegant James Baldwin was called “antagonistic.” When it comes to black literature, Ms. Laura Miller and her friend Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times prefer melodramas in which angelic do-no-wrong black heroines are surrounded by cruel and “evil”—Alice Walker’s word for the brothers — black men. Ms. Kakutani is so eager to accept stereotypes about black life that she celebrated a fake black ghetto “memoir,” Love And Consequences, written by Margaret Jones, a white woman. Now even the black women who serve up this kind of writing are being challenged by white women writers like Kathryn Stockett who not only copycat this style, like Elvis copycatted James Brown, but make more money doing it. This has caused outrage among some black women writers one of whom called this style “Neo-Mammy.” Yet, some of these same writers made no protest when The Color Purple and What’s Love Got To Do With It were manhandled by white producers, directors and script writers resulting in the black male perpetrators being represented in a worse manner than in the original texts.

But even with the dismissal of my work by powerful critics like Ms. Laura Miller, unlike other black writers, I have not been silenced. I have my own zine, at IshmaelReedpub.com , and a blog at the San Francisco Chronicle . Lee Froehlich at Playboy has published a number of my essays and CounterPunch has been open to my views. In fact, many of the essays in this book were published originally at Counterpunch.org . They cover the candidacy of Barack Obama and the first year of his presidency.