Barack Obama and the Jim Crow Media (22 page)

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 Voic
e'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.

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.

Certainly, some immigrants view possessing light skin as a key to success according to
The New York Times
on January 28, 2007:

Light-skinned immigrants in the United States make more money on average than those with darker complexions, and the chief reason appears to be discrimination, a researcher says.

The scholar, Joni Hersch, a professor of law and economics at Vanderbilt University, looked at a government survey of 2,084 legal immigrants to the United States from around the world and found that those with the lightest skin earned an average of 8 percent to 15 percent more than similar immigrants with much darker skin.

“On average,” Dr. Hersch said, ‘'being one shade lighter has about the same effect as having an additional year of education.''

Senator Reid indicated that for some white people “ebonics” or “the Negro dialect” is a source of ridicule unless they can make millions imitating “ebonics” in rock, rock and roll songs, novels, movies and television. He also used the term “negro,” which thousands of blacks and black institutions still use. One of the reasons that the word “black” became popular is because, according to
Headlines and Deadlines: A Manual for Copy Editors
by R.E. Garst and Theodore M. Bernstein, newspapers found “black” easier to set than “African American.” Senator Reid's comment was fodder for news entertainment for weeks, a kind of racial “Jeopardy,” game shows and “town halls” that are cheap to produce and which distract from the real issues of race in American society like the apartheid criminal justice system, disparities in the healthcare industry, and red-lining.

During the final days of December 2009, Deborah Howell, former ombudswoman
for The Washington Post
, died. Her comment that the
Post
's Op-Ed page was “too white and too male,” could have been said of the rest of the media, even those headed by feminists, like
The Nation
magazine. A Christmas party photo reprinted by media hawk, Richard Prince, showed only one black staff member at the “progressive”
Huffington Post
, headed by the telegenic feminist and Obama critic, Arianna Huffington.

Despite the conclusion of several media studies that I cited in this book, Howard Kurtz, Imus buddy and supporter of National Public Radio's notorious black pathology show,
Ghetto 101
, continued to embrace the myth that the press coverage of Barack Obama had sent the presidency into the “stratosphere” only for him to “fall to earth.” What “stratosphere?” During the campaign it was noted that The Associated Press was in the pocket of Senator John McCain, and given the negative analysis of Obama's administration made by Ben Feller of that agency, printed in early January, they still were.

The coverage from the campaign through the first year of the administration hadn't changed at Fox News either. For these and other media organizations, Obama's position was always terrestrial, including his position at MSNBC, which, regardless of the presence of two progressives, Rachel Maddow and Keith Olbermann, allows conservatives like Joe Scarborough, and hard core white nationalist, Pat Buchanan, and Mika Brzezinski and their guests to denigrate the president for three hours at a time some mornings.

The idea that Obama had fallen from on high to earth was endorsed by the panelists, which included Bill Press, the media's idea of a “progressive.” This is the Bill Press, who, according to Lydia Chavez in her book
The Color Bind: California's Campaign to End Affirmative
Action
opposed Affirmative Action in California. After an exchange about Proposition 209, the proposition that ended Affirmative Action, with a representative from the NAACP, Press told her, “you're nothing,” according to the book.

Appearing on the December 27 program, Chris Stirewalt, a reporter for
The Washington Examiner
, said that in the conflict between the White House and Fox News, it was the White House “that got burned,” an opinion that was contradicted in a report from
Media Matters
.

He also joined the parade of white commentators who used scandals involving black celebrities to symbolize the end of an era or a decade. His nomination was Michael Jackson who, for him, “symbolized a decayed, corrupted society,” not the Army Corps of Engineers, whose negligence was cited by a judge during 2009 as being responsible for the flooding in the aftermath of Katrina, which caused widespread suffering, displacement, billions of dollars in property damage and the near extinction of the fabulous city of New Orleans. Not the large banks, and investment firms, whose crimes were tucked away on the business pages, or the drug companies who settled class action suits which held them responsible for putting toxic dangerous products on the market. Their profits exceeded the cost of the class action suits, so that poisoning people becomes just the cost of doing business. No, for this man, it was MJ, a performer who gave millions to charities located all over the world.

The rest of Kurtz's all-white media jury agreed with Stirewalt about Jackson, even though Jackson had been acquitted in a case where a child, who lied under oath in a previous case, was found to have been manipulated by his mother, who, in 2006, was convicted of welfare fraud, a story ignored by the media. The 2006 case was based upon a 1993 charge brought against Jackson by another child manipulated by a parent, whose mental problems were apparent to anybody who studied the case. In 2009, the year of Jackson's death, the parent committed suicide, another story ignored by the media.

Barack Obama gave his administration a B plus, a grade that some might consider modest, since it was the consensus among economists that his administration had saved the country from a depression. I'd give him an A minus because I understand the shackles placed upon him and his administration in a country where the most powerful weapons and the money are in the hands of whites. Though African-American celebrities and organizations might criticize him for ignoring the deepening depression now being experienced by African-American communities, where in some cities, the unemployment rate is at thirty-five percent, as a result of banks denying blacks access to capital, the decline of manufacturing jobs, as a result of the Bush-Clinton policies, and the swindling of black homeowners by criminal banks, whose crimes are ignored by a mainstream and progressive media that have gone bonkers over MJ, Tiger, Michael Vick, Chris Brown and O.J., whose case has led to mass hysteria, were Obama to behave like a black president, his doing so would expose him to more racist attacks than the ones he is now experiencing; it would cripple his administration. Though Obama sometimes reminds one of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X, he might resemble Booker T. Washington more than the other two. Wearing the mask. Scolding African officials for their corruption, following a meeting during which he was able to increase the commitment to Africa by five billion dollars. When he answers critics who question his commitment to black employment by suggesting that economic recovery for all will lead to black employment, he sounds like Booker T. Washington.

I am disturbed by the collateral damage that is occurring in Afghanistan, but I am convinced that were Al Qaeda to get a hold of Pakistan's nuclear weapons there would be massive casualties. This is a group that wishes to restrict the rights of women by using the most extreme measures and whose leader has made racist comments about blacks living in Africa, calling African women “prostitutes” according to Chinweizu, who, along with other important African intellectuals, is alarmed by the spreading influence of Islam on the continent. This is an anti-Art group that destroyed thousands of years of Buddhist art.

What is the attitude toward blacks held by Al Qaeda? They bombed the embassy in Kenya, causing hundreds of African casualties and really didn't care about anybody's race when they bombed the World Trade Center. If Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab had succeeded in blowing up a plane over Detroit there might have been a large number of African-American casualties, yet I'm aware that it was the disease of white supremacy, rampant among Western nations, that led to the creation of groups like Al Qaeda in the first place. How many more people will have to be humiliated, racially profiled, and murdered for the maintenance of white supremacy?

Obama as president has made another contribution. His presence as the leader of the executive department has smoked out the virulent racism that has been covered by euphemism and code words like “busing,” “political correctness,” “welfare” and “crime.” All one has to do is to read the vicious blogs about the president's family, the tea party signs, witness the joker who called Mr. Obama a liar during his address to Congress. He has ripped the mask off of “conservatism” and found the contorted ugly face of racism behind it. Even those who felt the sunrays of post-racism have been chilled by the president being likened to a witch doctor and a chimp (by Aussies at
The New York Post
who are referred to in a similar manner by the British) and his children being referred to as whores. When they refer to an African-American pioneer it's Jackie Robinson (but ignore the part where he used to beat up white officers who called him a “nigger”), but in comparison to the achievement of President Obama, who, according to one historian, might be the most powerful black person in history, regardless of the limitations placed upon his presidency by the Jim Crow media, and a Republican Party, whose members believe that cooperating with Obama might get them called “nigger lovers” back home, Robinson's integrating baseball seems modest.

My giving Obama an A minus isn't the grade awarded Obama by the media where Obama received a low or failing grade even though at the end of the year, holiday retail sales were up, stocks were healthy and unemployment had not exceeded ten percent, some of the banks that had received bailouts were repaying billions of dollars to the government and GM, which, in 2009, was on the verge of collapse, predicted profits in 2010. Yet, the white nationalist pundits both on the left and right continued to mock him.

The week before, Matthew Continetti, appearing on Howard Kurtz's
Reliable Sources
, December 20, gave Barack Obama a C. Mr. Continetti is the author of
The Persecution of Sarah Palin
. He's employed by
The Weekly Standard
, a publication that was recently purchased by a wealthy Christian fundamentalist. One panel member was media juror Diane Dimond, a sleazy tabloid wag, a Michael Jackson stalker and pal of Jackson's persecutor and prosecutor, District Attorney “Mad Dog” Sneddon. During the show, Dimond, one of the most repugnant of tabloid personalities, who had rented a boat to go out and snoop about Tiger Woods' dwellings, lectured the viewers about personal morality.

Years from now, when the corporate media is stored away in a print and electronic museum, mercifully, media historians will mark a phase of its final period as being dominated by tabloid types like Dimond. I believe that this began when respectable journalists began appearing with reporters from
The National Enquirer
during the O.J. trial. This tabloid infection has even influenced the progressive media with places like progressive Air America getting as down and dirty as the supermarket tabloids. Bill Press, Keith Olbermann, Ed Schultz and other progressives devoted considerable amount of time to Michael Jackson and Tiger.