by Ishmael Reed
We listened to each other and learned from each other. It was Callahan who selected some New York Irish-American intellectuals to lecture at the Studio Museum in Harlem.
Such inter-ethnic communication is far more useful than cable shows pitting one group against another in an effort to raise ratings. No one denies that a racial divide exists in the country; the media exacerbate it for money. That’s been the American media’s mission for over two hundred years. A number of those murderous riots during which the Irish and blacks clashed were inflamed by a yellow press.
Callahan taught me a lot about myself and about the history of white ethnics, something that my formal education neglected to cover. In the schoolbooks as well as in the media, we’re either blacks or whites. The whites are always San Antonio, and blacks are always the Knicks.
Callahan was a white man who listened, though he would object to such a designation. Callahan, editor of Callahan’s Irish Quarterly, and author of The Big Book Of Irish-American Culture, was most of all an Irish American.
We got along with Callahan because unlike many “whites,” he never forgot where he came from. He never forgot his roots.
Finally Came the Inaugural
The Inaugural And My Coffee Pot Search
(The relationship of blacks to Hollywood and the media is like that of mine to some of my neighbors. I pay for my garbage collection. For years a neighbor instead of paying for theirs dumped their garbage on top of mine. Blacks have to carry their garbage and everybody else’s. One of the recent big moneymakers for CNN was a stunt called Black In America. This was a profit-making enterprise that drew large numbers of viewers of the sort who gawked at P.T. Barnum’s fake black nurse’s autopsy. I wrote a satire about an imaginary behind-the-scenes discussion between CNN president Jonathan Klein and Soledad O’Brien, the show’s moderator. Though Mrs. O’Brien was the up front face for both Black In America and Latino In America, she relied on scripts that were created by whites, each one assigned to an aspect of black life. Black males were done by a blonde woman with predictable results.)
White in America
My overall grade for this documentary is incomplete and unsatisfactory. In fact, most of the recent endeavors by major networks on the subject of Latinos in America have failed. Latino in America is incomplete because it ignores major Latino socio-demographic dynamics. It’s unsatisfactory because it perpetuates a negative stereotypical depiction of Latinos in the U.S. While our (Latino) community is indeed troubled by many of the challenges Ms. O’Brien explores, it is unacceptable to paint that as the exclusive image of Latinos. Frankly, I expected better from Ms. O’Brien.
Victor Paredes, Advertising Age (October 27, 2009)
CNN reporter Soledad O’Brien should have her sisterhood card revoked immediately and never returned! She has damaged, betrayed, and disrespected the entire black female community with her negative, short-sighted, half-assed, stereotypical, and repetitive “investigative reporting” on black women in America.
Her program Black in America: The Black Woman And The Family was a complete and total fraud! This program did not address the lives and experiences of black women in America at all! It was two hours of the same negative racist and sexist stereotypes that the majority of white America believes about black people, particularly black women.
Professor Tracey, Aunt Jemima’s Revenge
Act 1
(Office of Jon Klein, president of CNN. He is a middle-aged white man whose attire is 50s. Dark blue business suit, striped tie. His hair is grey and white and he wears black-rimmed glasses.)
KLEIN: Yessir, I understand that the shareholders are putting pressure on you and you’re merely the bearer of bad news, but we have tried to improve our ratings.
(So loud and belligerent is the voice on the other end after his reply that KLEIN removes the phone a little distance from his ear and makes a painful expression.)
KLEIN: Won’t you give us some more time? (Pause) But sir, with all due respect, I would like to avoid more staff layoffs. Come up with some cost cutting measures? Yessir. Tell all of my friends at Time Warner.… Hell….He hung up.
(Outside, chants are heard: “Fire Lou Dobbs, Fire Lou Dobbs.” Goes over and shuts the window.)
KLEIN: How am I going to keep Lou from going to that three-ring circus at Fox? Wish we had their ratings though. (Returns to seat behind his desk. Lays his head on the desk.) If I don’t come through, I’ll end up doing weather in Boise.
(SOLEDAD O’BRIEN, CNN’s two-fer, three-fer and four-fer peeks in. Cheeky, a smile that nearly reaches her ears. Egg-shaped face. Dark shoulder length hair.)
SOLEDAD: Jon, may I have a word?
(KLEIN looks up.)
KLEIN: Sure Soledad, how may I help you?
(SHE enters the room.)
SOLEDAD: The memo, Jon. Requesting that CNN women wear more mascara like those over at Fox and MSNBC. Jon. Those Fox women look like Raccoons! Jon. Jon, are you listening to me? What’s wrong with you?
(KLEIN shoves the “Business Day” section of The New York Times, October 27, 2009, toward SOLEDAD. Right column reads, “CNN Last in TV News On Cable.” A hand goes to her mouth.)
SOLEDAD: This is terrible. What are we going to do?
KLEIN: How about doing a Black In America, 3 narrated by Michael Vick or Chris Brown or maybe we can get O.J. out on bail? Or what about Gabourey Sidibe, the star of Precious, you know, the three-hundred-fifty-pound black girl who plays an illiterate Harlem black girl who is impregnated by her father? Why she’s trampling from magazine cover to magazine cover and showing up at awards ceremonies like a baby elephant. She was even honored at the Mill Valley Film Festival. The only black person within five miles of the site.
SOLEDAD: (Thinking to herself) What is it with some of these white men and their fetish for overweight black women? Have to ask Paul Mooney next time I see him.
(Aloud to KLEIN) Er—good idea Jon but I think that we can get a bigger share of the market if we did White In America. We’ve already done two Black In America shows where we traced the problems of blacks to their making excuses instead of institutional and structural racism and we did Latino In America in which we concentrated on mostly illegal immigration, desperation, poverty and crime, grafting ideas from Cops and 48 Hours, which you used to produce, now maybe White In America. (SOELDAD Paces up and down the room.) The increase in the incarceration of white women, showing that Martha Stewart, Lindsay, Paris and the Barbie Bandits are not alone, the fact that California white women do more drugs than black and Latino teenagers, heroin overdoses and emergency room admissions on Long Island and the suburbs of Dallas, the thousands of rural white families destroyed by meth—not only poor people but upper class whites like Andre Agassi, hate crimes against blacks, gays and Hispanics committed by white male teenagers, Sam Roberts’ report that while two-parent households are on the rise among blacks, those among whites are on the decline, the rash of kidnapping and murders by white male pedophiles, the cover-up of child abuse cases committed by male members of the orthodox community, reported by The New York Times…
KLEIN: OK. OK. I get the picture. Let me think about it.
(SOLEDAD exits. KLEIN dials.)
KLEIN: Yessir, about our conversation earlier. I think that I have a cost-cutting idea. Fire Soledad O’Brien.
(Scene ends)[11]
* * *
Seeing that Jonathan Klein made money from his Black in America sideshow, NBC decided to do one. This time narrated by Al Roker, a black newsman. That way it won’t seem so racist.
Such projects are meant to draw advertisers and money by using the testimony or stories of individuals to defame all blacks as some used the Madoff scandal to raise classical stereotypes about Jews. These projects, according to The New York Times, provide the producers with a “gold mine of opportunity,” the words used by the head of one studio who was fighting with another over who would receive the profits from the movie Precious, a story about a black Harlem illitera
te girl impregnated by her father, one that will be used to cast collective blame on black men in the same manner as The Color Purple, which, the producers claim, is the model for this film and which provided men and women of other ethnic groups to use black men as substitutes for whatever resentment they might have for the men in their groups. Black men give them an opportunity to vent. Tradition dictates that they have to keep their abuse a secret. So much money is being made from books and television that present Nazi-like images of blacks that one of the black exploiters Richard Price is moving to Harlem, which is an improvement over his former strategy for making millions from such shoddy products as The Wire, that of making “brief forays into the ghetto.”
Obviously there are huge profits in blaming black men for social pathologies so much so that maybe the fellas should get a cut for serving this purpose. Not only from profit-minded producers (I wrote the Times blog, which held a discussion about the film Precious, asking when we were going to get a movie about how men who are members of the ethnic groups to which the producers belong treat women; it wasn’t printed), but even saintly Amy Goodman broadcast a commentary by a guy who does her annual year end summary, which supported the Cosby/Gates/McWhorter line that problems confronting African Americans are self-inflicted.
I’m reading a book about a newspaper tycoon who wants desperately to gain the approval of the old-money New York crowd. So one day reading the obituary pages he learns that the scion of an old family has died and his great apartment overlooking the Central Park Zoo is available and thinks that maybe if he buys this place (forty million), the old money folks will overlook the fact that he runs sleazy news products even sleazier than Tabloid Tina Brown’s and that he tells fart jokes and drinks a lot and though his newspapers preach family values to blacks, he’s working on his third wife who is forty years younger than he. In his seventies, he’s dyed his hair like a punk rocker and moved to a bohemian section of town. His hot young wife looks at the apartment and finds out that the old-money folks haven’t kept it up and that it needs repairs.
I was reminded of this story when watching the coverage of President Obama’s inauguration. The corporate media have hundreds of millions of dollars at their disposal but like the old scion with the great apartment who wasn’t interested in repairing his dwellings, they haven’t found the need to repair their operation. They annoy us with the same kind of structure they’ve been using since the 1830s. One writer says that the newspapers should get a bailout. He wrote the essay in The Nation which, if it were a black magazine, might be called White Nation.
Like National Public Radio and Pacifica Network, the majority of the contributors to The Nation are white men as are the authors of the majority of books reviewed. So if The Nation, The New York Times, The Washington Post and other publications receive bailouts, so should black, Hispanic and Asian-American publications. These white ethnic publications have always been aimed at a white market with blacks, Hispanics, Native Americans treated as foreign news. Athletes, Criminals, Entertainers. Especially entertainers. Even the Nazis liked black entertainers. Some of the Nazi generals loved jazz. They’d make the gypsies perform for them before putting them to death.
The Showman And The Slave, by Benjamin Reiss, traces the influence of P.T. Barnum’s use of stunts and hoaxes on the early mass media. Only the stunts and hoaxes have become more sophisticated. In comparison to Judith Miller’s hoax about Saddam Hussein’s fictional weapons of mass destruction, Barnum’s fake mermaid was harmless. Of the early mass media, “The standard picture,” Weiss writes, “… was one of whites watching in dismay as members of ‘savage’ races devoured the flesh of humans. Africans, after all, were widely assumed to be the most cannibalistic of races and this was a sign of their savagery, their moral inferiority to whites.”
Well, stories about African cannibalism are rare except for the neo-con New York Times Magazine section, which prints one from time to time about that subject and the periodic Times stories about people in Burundi hunting down Albinos under the belief that their body parts possess magical powers (but ignoring the fact that the economic growth rate on the African continent is five percent higher than that of the United States, whose is zero percent).
Selling the black “moral inferiority to whites” product has gone high tech. This accounts for big moneymakers like The Wire, a number of Clint Eastwood movies (who’s sort of like Hollywood’s Lee Atwater; he loves black music) plays like Spinning Into Butter, and stunts like CNN’s Black In America, where CNN’s lead bimbo, Soledad O’Brien, interrogated a black man about why he didn’t attend his daughter’s birthday party.
If this woman believes that the absentee father is a peculiarly black phenomenon she should listen to the hundreds of white students I’ve talked to over the last thirty-five years. One student told me that the parents of him and his friends leave them with hundreds of dollars with which they buy drugs (and so unlike some poor kids they don’t need to commit criminal acts to get the money). One memorable line from one of these students was about a father who was “a tourist in his own home.” According to one study, seventy-five percent of white children at some point in their lives will live in single-parent households.
O’Brien, following the lead of her boss, Jonathan Klein, also believes that crack is used by Harlem parents, exclusively, this comment following a report indicating soaring use of cocaine and crack among white students while that among black youth has leveled off. This is one of the frequent hoaxes that the media creates at the expense of blacks, like the yarn about how black voters passed Proposition 8, the measure that denied same-sex marriage to gay and lesbian couples, or the one about how affirmative action benefited blacks, exclusively. Hollywood and the media have found huge profits in promoting negative stereotypes and hoaxes about black Americans.
(What the black critics of Moynihan missed at the time was that the majority of white women on welfare were probably Celtic, members of his tribe, but in a shameless act of self-promotion he figured rightly that he would be more successful joining the Nixon administration by dumping on blacks, the route to power and wealth used by a number of individuals and groups.) Remember the “crack baby epidemic,” a rumor begun by Charles Krauthammer? A hoax.
Ronald Reagan’s welfare queen? A hoax. Affirmative action as benefiting blacks, exclusively? A hoax. Widespread mayhem and rioting after hurricane Katrina and the murder and rape of a seven year old? A hoax perpetrated by CNN who eventually fired the black correspondent responsible for the rumor after he made up stories while assigned to cover the entire African continent. Widespread rioting reported in Oakland after the shooting of Oscar Grant, one of forty-seven unarmed black men shot by Oakland police in recent years, a hoax perpetrated by Jesse McKinley, The New York Times’s invisible West Coast correspondent. The list is long.
The man who could be called the founder of the American mass media, P.T. Barnum, was a slave owner and a master of the hoax. He made money from exhibiting a black woman, Joice Heth, who claimed that she, after Barnum gave her some shots of whiskey, was 161 and nursed George Washington. When she died her autopsy fascinated readers and gave them something about black life to gawk at. Barnum even charged admission to those who wanted to witness this grisly undertaking. It was the O.J. story of the time and like the contemporary media have made millions from O.J. (his trial saved CNN), the penny press and its readers just couldn’t let this autopsy story go.
I began a novel about the O.J. phenomenon in 1994, and what I’ve noticed is that O.J. is dragged into stories that have little to do with the ex-football player and even President Obama was joined at the hip with O.J.
Barnum and James Gordon Bennett’s Herald, among the first of the penny presses, which debuted in 1835, made cash from Joice Heth’s story but I doubt whether they were as blatant about their aims as CNN’s Jonathan Klein who, according to The New York Observer, told Rick Sanchez, their right-wing Hispanic token, that money could be made from the race issue. Black In Americ
a, which was meant to make whites feel superior and humiliate blacks by proxy, made so much money that P.T. Barnum’s heir, Jonathan Klein, says he’s going to do another one in July 2009. People, whose interpretation of movies like The Crash and David Simon’s black products differ from mine, say, well, Ishmael, you have to agree that these products, no matter how ugly and cynical and racist, give black actors jobs. So did The Birth of a Nation. But at least the actors performing in these venues get paid. The black panelists who are brought on to dignify town halls like Black In America, produced on the cheap, do it for free. They do talk shows where commentators have to fill sometimes three hours at a time. This costs less than some real investigation or in-depth interviews. Whatever you might say about the BBC, you do get African leaders talking for themselves instead of a stateside classroom person posing as an expert.
The blacks on cable are either conservative or passive or both. Joe Watkins, a MSNBC regular, and Amy Holmes, a Zambia-born right-winger, even defended Cheney’s use of torture.
Therefore, I was really taken aback when Carlos Watson, the kind of mellow fellow who won’t get angry (while Scarborough and Buchanan can throw fits whenever they wish) challenged Joe Scarborough’s comment that the Obama stimulus plan was “a stinking pile of garbage” and charged that he and Limbaugh had gotten the Republicans to vote against the package. (On October 29, 2009, it was reported that the stimulus had created three hundred eighty thousand jobs.) Scarborough went apoplectic on the guy. Yelling. Screaming. And so I turned on the Morning Joe at 6:30 a.m. (Oakland time) the day of the inaugural and, you guessed it, I found Mark Whitaker, Washington Bureau Chief and Senior Vice President, NBC News, and the first African-American top editor of a national newsmagazine use the sales pitch that dates back to the 1830s. He was asking two panelists and a Scarborough host whether Obama should go into the ghettoes and get the savages to behave better. He didn’t say it that way. That’s my putting words into his mouth. The moral-superiority-of-whites sales pitch has become subtler. He asked whether the new president should go into neighborhoods like mine and preach personal responsibility. We’re like the unruly blacks who were always getting into trouble in the movie Cadillac Records. We need a white savior like Chess Records owner Leonard Chess to bail us out of our screwed up “dysfunctional” lives. The White Man’s Burden.
