Barack Obama and the Jim Crow Media

by Ishmael Reed

  Nor did he utter a word about Bank of America, another criminal operation and sponsor of Bill Cosby and Michelle Bernard’s entertainment, “that covered up 3.6 billion dollars paid out in bonuses when it purchased Merrill Lynch.” Unbridled capitalism and their media hirelings make chumps of millions of whites by entertaining them with the antics of O.J., Serena, Kanye West and Chris Brown, (the sole U.S. domestic abuser), and Michael Vick so as to divert attention from their crimes. Big business ought to put O.J. and them on salary. MSNBC’s criticism of Obama’s mild health reforms makes sense when you realize that General Electric, which owns NBC, sells health insurance and Joe Scarborough, one of Obama’s harshest critics, is just another salesman to them. During the same period that corporate criminality was unveiled, the media jumped on ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations of Reform Now, an organization that serves the poor and registers black and Hispanic voters to the consternation of the Republican Party and its media allies. ACORN warned of the foreclosure crisis.

  I listened to some ignorant poor and middle class whites call The Washington Journal to complain about ACORN, a few of whose workers were entrapped by a conservative sting operation. The employees who fell for this sting should have been fired for falling for the idea that a conservative nerd was a pimp. In the case of the woman, I would also have been duped. She carried on like someone who had been turning tricks for years, bringing to her role the kind of zeal we’ve come to expect from wingnuts. (I guess that Ann Coulter wasn’t available). The fact that ACORN lost over fifty million dollars as result of her performance makes her the most expensive play-acting whore in history.

  These whites complain about big government but toady for big business that treats them like dirt. Poisons their food, overmedicates their children, hypnotizes them with the Bernay’s principle so that they buy things that they don’t need, and sends their jobs abroad. Instead of fighting those who view them as serfs, they travel all the way to Washington from places like South Carolina to call Barack Obama a monkey. (If South Carolina secedes again, which it’s always threatening to do, would the country fight another war to persuade a state that still thinks of itself as Scotland to return to the fold? I don’t think so.) The Times’ ombudsman wrote a piece about how the liberal news media and his own newspaper were tardy in picking up on the ACORN scandal, which was uncovered by the vast right-wing media conspiracy, which was on ACORN like a bloodhound.[14]

  I’d like to see the ombudsman report on why the media both liberal and conservative almost hid another of Bank of America’s scandals. In December 2008, a federal jury in Manhattan found Bank of America liable in a securities fraud trial that centered on the sales of asset-backed securities and involved some of the biggest names on Wall Street.

  In a verdict delivered late Thursday after nearly six weeks of trial, the jury ordered Bank of America to pay more than 141 million dollars to a dozen institutional plaintiffs, including the American International Group, Allstate, Société Générale, Travelers, Bank Leumi, Bayerische Landesbank and the International Finance Corporation. The money includes interest that Bank of America, the nation’s largest bank, is obligated by law to pay on the 101 million dollar award, which did not include punitive damages.

  On September 29, 2009, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that Bank of America suspended its work with the ACORN group. Bank of America and ACORN had been working together on mortgage foreclosure issues. Bank of America severed ties with the group after GOP Reps. Spencer Bachus of Alabama, Darrell Issa of California and Lamar Smith of Texas sent a letter to fourteen banks requesting disclosure to the House Financial Services Committee of all financial arrangements with ACORN and its subsidiaries or affiliates.

  “The Republicans are trying to intimidate banks that have stepped up to help stop the foreclosure crisis,” said ACORN chief executive Bertha Lewis. “These same Republicans ignored ACORN’s warnings about predatory lending and the foreclosure crisis, then gave Wall Street free rein and are now obstructing efforts to help families.” You can’t make this stuff up, the stuff that Republicans make up. In this land of white supremacists make believe, where Ayn Rand, the crank addict, is a goddess and Sarah Palin is the Moose Queen, fifty percent of Republicans believe that ACORN stole the election for Obama!

  Yet, while I was sitting in the airport watching a newswoman dressed like a hooker by the sinister men who pay her bills, I wasn’t feeling as cranky as sometimes. As a matter of fact, I was optimistic for once. During the previous two weeks, I had just witnessed two young people, one of whom is my daughter, demonstrate that books and theater—the arts—are still effective means by which those who are excluded from the airwaves can respond to those who monopolize the airwaves and who wish to distract from the excesses and greed of their class by pitting group against group and race against race and parading people like Michael Vick, Chris Brown, Whitney Houston and O.J. before the cameras, your old Puritan ducking stools with lenses.

  While the news media define blacks with a series of hoaxes and stunts, their representations of Muslims are reminiscent of the early nineteenth-century Barbary Pirates days.

  So where does one find the point of view of those who are being discussed? How do they view themselves? Blacks, Latinos and others don’t have a Fairness Doctrine that would enable them to counter the 24/7 demagoguery aimed at raising anger (ratings) against their groups and even hate crimes.

  Playwright Wajahat Ali, a Pakistani-American playwright, with his play The Domestic Crusaders, offered audiences at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe a view of a Pakistani Muslim American family that challenges those by a media that portray Muslim men as terrorists and Muslim women as courtesans. One could witness the joy and relief of members of the South East Asian audience grown weary of such portrayals. They are attending sold-out performances and rewarding the playwright, director, Carla Blank, the actors and crew with standing ovations. With a tiny budget of no more than thirty thousand dollars we got to view South Asian life not from a hack television and/or Hollywood script writer or an interlocutor like David Mamet but from a brilliant writer whose play The Domestic Crusaders scores a direct hit on not only on the stereotypes accorded to Muslims by the media, but challenges the points of view of those tokens chosen to interpret Muslim life for “the mainstream.” Fareed Zakaria (who encouraged the Bush administration to attack Iraq) might be an expert on the Middle East for the men who own the media, but when some lines from the play described him as such, this audience made up mostly of young intellectual Southeast Asians, laughed. The play drew standing-room-only crowds and received standing ovations wherever it was performed on the West Coast. The same thing is happening at The Nuyorican where the play ran through October 11. Was the play’s appeal limited to an ethnic audience? Not hardly. Actress Vinnie Burrows the great African-American diva loved it. She said that it reminded her of Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, one of the dramas that inspired Ali, along with O’Neill’s play about an Irish-American family, A Long Day’s Journey Into Night as well as Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. Two black men, one of whom saw the play in the West and a Nuyorican audience member said that the family on the stage could be their families. The play was produced by two African Americans, Rome Neal and myself, directed by a Jewish American, Carla Blank, and performed at the landmark Puerto Rican theater. In addition, two members of American literature’s royal families are part of a crew filming the production for a forthcoming documentary. The documentary producer is Ford Morrison, Toni’s son, and James Baldwin’s nephew, Tejan Karefa-Smart, is operating First Camera. The director is a young black woman named Taneisha Berg. Watching these young people, South East Asian, Hispanic, black and a young white scenic artist, Rusty Zimmerman, collaborate on this project was refreshing. In the 1960s, Manhattan was black and white. The black artists and intellectuals weren’t speaking to whites and the whites were always scrambling around to include a token black on their guest lists.

  During her book tour
of the East, Tennessee Reed did not reach the thousands that Wajahat reached with his challenge to age-old myths about Muslims, ones not only encouraged by the media but by academia. The play was covered by Al Jazeera, MSNBC, The New York Times and The Today Show and The Wall Street Journal. (The only dissenter was The Village Voice’s neo-con critic, Alexis Soloski, who objected to lines that criticized the Bush Administration.) CounterPunch contributor, Wajahat Ali, has been at it longer and the effort he made to get his play done east of the Rockies took a lot of energy and resources. He doesn’t sleep and while writing plays he has to support himself part time as a lawyer.

  Nevertheless Tennessee’s East Coast bookstore appearances drew a lot of fans and one bookstore appearance was broadcast at a later date by C-Span. Those who showed up for her readings were startled by Tennessee’s inside look at how learning-disabled and black students are treated by American education. For example, I noticed some jaw dropping among some jaded New Yorkers when Tennessee recounted how the Oakland public school system and the University of California at Berkeley introduce students to African civilization by using Tarzan movies and how Reconstruction is taught from the point-of-view of Gone With The Wind. Heads also turned when she reported that some white teachers and professors award white students higher grades than blacks and Hispanics even though the quality of their work might be the same, or, in the case of whites, inferior to that of blacks and Hispanics. They seemed startled by stories about how some teachers humiliate learning-disabled students in front of their classmates. This information comes on the heels of a report that learning disabled are those who are most likely to receive punishment in the nation’s schools. Cuban, Puerto Rican and Peruvian-American students accorded her enthusiastic applause at Miami Dade College when it was reported that when she ran for Oakland school board she was the only candidate who insisted that black and Hispanic students receive the same treatment as those white students living in the affluent areas of Oakland. As a result of her visit to Miami she was invited to the Miami Book Fair and in October, she returned to New York to address The Girls’ Club and students at Brooklyn’s Boricua College. Her appearance prompted this poignant response from a young listener. Though her composition skills are flawed, her sentiment originates in the heart, and her paying attention to a young writer who shares her background and experience demonstrates once again that young people are inspired by such literature, which is still ignored, by the education establishment except for one or two tokens. The establishment’s idea of education is to convert students to the ways of the white man. Zoe’s letter:

  Howdy, this is Zoe coming to you from Girl’s Club. Today was really cool, as always. Yesterday Reene said that an author was coming to the club to talk about her book. I honestly didn’t care to attend and listen to a writer because I’m not much a reader. Actually I rarely read for fun. I tend to read only if it’s for school. But surprisingly I had a really good time and now this experience has changed my perspective on a lot of things. so who’s this author that blessed me with her presence? Tennessee Reed is her name and she is the author of her intriguing book entitled Spell Alburquerque: Memoir of a “Difficult” Student. While discussing her work of art, Ms. Reed was so lay back and relexed and it felt as if i was just talking to my friend. So what makes Ms. Reed and her book so special? Well at an early age she was diagnosed with serval language-based learning disorders. Thus one would believe that the odds are against her. how can an individual with so many disorders write an interesting book? Ms. Reed stated “it took a lot of support.” Her mother, Carla Blank, and her father and publisher, Ishmael Reed, were Ms. Reed’s rock. Like any caring parents, “they did their homework” as Ms. Reed likes to say, about to how care and support their comely child. School was difficult for Ms. Reed nevertheless she made it through gradschool and even fought an educational system that often defined her disabilities as “laziness or stupidity”. with all the negative things in her life, she still did what she loves to do. this leaves me with my final words: if you put your heart and mind to it, despite all odds, you can do ANYTHING. signing off”

  Posted by Zoe on November 7th, 2009 under Girlville.

  Bill Cosby has been very critical of young people and in my letter replying to him I said that he was acting like an old koot. I’m one too. In fact the title of my new novel is Koots, which my agent says that American publishers won’t touch because one or two of the characters present scientific evidence to support the acquittal of O.J. Simpson in the criminal trial.

  But even I who have been called a “sourpuss” by one blogger felt good about what I had seen during my three-week visit to the East. A cooperation between young people of different backgrounds, working together to challenge those slanders pushed by the media and in Mamet’s case, by film and mainstream theater as well. I was feeling all gooey. Like what’s that line about lighting one little candle? These young people in Wajahat’s crew and Tennessee did much to shine a light on bigotry and ignorance and Bill Cosby should see this show and use his power to insist that it get a wider audience. I was impressed by the energy of those kids, South Asian, black and white, joining forces to invite an audience into the home of a South-Asian-American household, of a family beset by issues that we all have experienced. And a young writer who overcame a teacher’s diagnosis that she would never learn to read or write through a present from Beat poet Ted Joans who found her a Scholastic Records 45 rpm of Arthur Rubenstein’s orchestral composition to “Three Billy Goats’ Gruff” in a flea market. She had a book with almost the same text, so she figured out how to read along. That was the breakthrough. She knows that the kind of caring support system that was available to her, tutors, understanding teachers, is denied millions of the nation’s children, who are dumped into special education classes, misdiagnosed, and misunderstood. I remember all of the days that Tennessee came home in tears over the way she was treated by teachers and classmates who dismissed her as lazy, slow and difficult. This lazy, slow and difficult student had produced three books by the time she reached college, after we were told that her learning disability was so severe that she would never read nor write. Her book, Spell Alburquerque, published by AK Press, positions her to advocate for students like her.

  And so as I sat there in the airport watching a woman present black Americans like one would present a carnival act I wasn’t fuming as usual. The airport was teeming with armed soldiers. Because, as I was to learn later, President Obama was about to visit New York.

  Observing those soldiers, I thought that the tea-bagger nut who threatened to return to Washington, armed, would have a hard time getting next to the president.

  The pilot said that we’d have to taxi out to a remote part of the airport because the airport had been shut down because the president’s plane was arriving. Shortly afterward, I saw out of the right window, Air Force One land. I regretted that my stepfather didn’t live to see this. He was the kind of black man who doesn’t show up on television or isn’t discussed by Michelle Bernard. Like millions of black men, Bennie S. Reed reported to the same job, Chevrolet plant in Buffalo, New York, for over thirty years. He swallowed his pride as the permanent affirmative action, which is awarded to white males, permitted those who were less qualified than he to become foremen. Toward the end of his working days, they finally offered him the job. “Give it to my sons,” he said, referring to my half brothers who followed him into the automobile industry. He would have been impressed by JFK being shut down because a black man was coming to town. I can see him now. Flashing that great grin of his.

  Afterword

  Obama, Tiger, Vick, MJ, etc. Is There Any Cure for Negro Mania?

  We may congratulate ourselves that this cruel war is nearing its end. It has cost a vast amount of treasure and blood. It has indeed been a trying hour for the Republic; but I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. As a result of the war, corporations have been enthroned and an era
of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed. I feel at this moment more anxiety for the safety of my country than ever before, even in the midst of war. God grant that my suspicions may prove groundless.

  This passage appears in a letter from Lincoln to (Col.) William F. Elkins, November 21, 1864

  We’re also in the midst of a media feeding frenzy not seen since the height of O.J. Simpson mania.”

  The Washington Post

  When you say “Barack Obama,” Howard Kurtz thinks Tiger Woods.

  December 23, 2009 10:55 am ET by Jamison Foser

  A

  t the end of 2009, the Jim Crow media, progressive as well as mainstream, graded African Americans and vied with each other over which African-American male celebrity symbolized the tawdry aspects of the year or even the decade. As usual the highest grade given to African Americans was a D.

  Typical were two episodes of media critic Howard Kurtz’s program, Reliable Sources, carried on Jonathan Klein’s CNN. White men and women were invited to evaluate the presidency of Barack Obama on Sunday, December 20 and 27, 2009. The composition of the panels reflected the segregated media at the end of the decade. April, 2009, The American Society of News Editors reported: “In this decade, there has been a net increase of Latino, Asian and Native-American journalists and a net decline of black journalists,” meaning that the space for the points of view of black journalists was closing. I wrote about the decline of serious black fiction in The Wall Street Journal, a trend also noticed by Jabari Asim, editor of The Crisis Magazine, writing in Publisher’s Weekly, and so when Senator Harry Reid was reported in the book Game Change by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin to have made a remark about Barack Obama that for some contained a tint of racism, since race is seen as a moneymaking issue for the media and their advertisers, the discussion of Senator Reid’s remark was dominated by white opinion makers, much of the discussion ignorant, not only to blacks, but to a worldwide audience, for whom Hip Hop is a link between them and black Americans. He said in so many words that light-skinned people have an advantage over black-skinned people, which is true all over the hemisphere, as evidenced by the billion-dollar business in skin bleach.